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What If Humans Really Could Fly?

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 19:27:11 GMT

Since hindsight is always 20/20, and now we thankfully have 2020 in hindsight, it’s time to celebrate. In particular, to celebrate a commercially irrelevant but wondrous technology that might allow humans to fly through the air under our own power, like birds. This is the stuff of dreams.

One of the few virtues of the “Wonder Woman 1984” film I saw recently is that it shows a woman flying up in the air like a bird or a plane, just like 50 years ago we saw Superman fly through the air. Last month, I saw dozens of real human beings fly many stories into the air, lifted aloft from their surfboards by airfoil-kites powered by wind. Amazing to see and, I imagine, amazing to experience. But the age-old dream of human flight is simpler: Can people fly in calm air, using their own power?

Like a Bird

The fact that birds fly shows that we might be able to, too. We’re just heavier, so it’s harder, which is in fact a very general rule. Insects can fly with wings even tinier than their tiny bodies, but big birds like albatrosses and condors need wings way bigger than their bodies. Fortunately, that relation is such a simple, universal concept — weight per unit area — that with a little physics, we can calculate how much harder it might be for people to fly than condors. Then maybe, with some clever materials and design, we might bridge the gap. We might redo the Icarus story, using carbon fiber instead of wax and feathers.

Let’s say a condor weighs roughly 15 kilograms and a human 60, making a nice round ratio of 1:4 in weight. The heavier-is-harder principle, called wing-loading, is based on body area. It says it will be twice as hard (square root of four) for us to fly, all else remaining equal.

So before getting to new stuff, let’s see what might actually remain equal. Condors and humans are both warm-blooded vertebrates, so it’s a good guess human muscles can generate as much average power-per-weight as condor muscles. And given the aerodynamic elegance that nature has evolved into soaring birds’ wings and feathers, it’s unlikely we humans could do much better than them for either lift or propulsion. So the shape of the next Icarus will have an aerodynamic efficiency at best as good as that of birds. What might be improved by a factor of two?

Birds are made of meat, bones and feathers. Not Kevlar (stronger than tendon), carbon fiber (stiffer than bone) or plastic like Mylar (smoother and lighter than feathers). And they can’t inflate themselves like a balloon to the size of an airplane. So let’s imagine using our fanciest modern materials to build an ultralight mechanical “bird.” The size of an airplane, smooth and tightly-inflated, containing an ultra-light lattice woven entirely and seamlessly from carbon fiber. This wing’s stiffness would mostly come from inflating the plastic.

That would leave the carbon-fiber lattice to accomplish four other goals: deforming in response to wind, to keep the wing from crinkling when bent; stiffening thin parts of the wing which pressurization can’t stiffen; “flapping” and “banking” the wings using human power; and carrying micro-vibrations from wing surfaces into the fingers and toes of the pilot, who would then “feel” the wings’ airflow much like birds do, using nerves in skin and bone.

Designing and building such an intricate, delicate airfoil would be expensive and unprofitable. Clearly, it would only hold its shape on calm days. But it could be built — and it would work. And when that mystical structure exists and is hooked up just right to a strong person pulling and pushing, it will fly like a bird, not a plane. That person will swim through the air.

Gossamer Albatross

We know something like that can work because a simpler, clunkier version was done decades ago, on a shoestring no less. In 1979, professional cyclist Bryan Allen piloted the flimsiest and best-designed airplane ever, the Gossamer Albatross, across the English Channel, to win the famous Kremer Prize, barely, on the first try.

He sat inside on a bike-frame, his legs pedaling the propeller. The whole plane weighed half as much as the pilot. It had been designed by aerodynamics genius Dr. Paul MacCready and a dozen crack engineers, one of whom (Stanford professor and venture capitalist Dr. Morton Grosser) wrote the book, “Gossamer Odyssey,” about the project. That plane was constructed like a regular plane, by stretching skin tight over flimsy compressible struts. A tiny breeze could snap it in half.

That single historic episode from four decades ago gives us a crucial data-point. It gives an example of a structure which, just barely, humans can fly for a while on their own. Presumably, every improvement on that structure would translate to less pilot effort. Twice the efficiency would mean half the pilot power, which would mean athletes of normal strength might fly it. Below, I propose four technical innovations that together could provide that improvement in efficiency, so humans might fly.

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First, skip the propeller. Propellers spin, which is convenient for motors and drive-shafts. But spinning wastes energy because it moves a little air fast, rather than a lot of air slowly, much like flapping does.

Then, match the drive-train to the human. The drive-train on a bicycle, from foot through shoe through pedal through chain to wheel, is a wonderful way to power spinning wheels. But it isn’t designed to extract the most consistent, stable power from a human body, spread equally over all the muscles. Rowing machines do that better by using the back and arms, but even they still don’t take advantage of the original vertebrate power stroke — spinal twisting. Worse, when rowing, the rower has to clench the fists full-time to grab the oars. An optimum full-body power stroke would open and close the hands in concert with spinal extension and breath.

Let the human feel the airflow. Birds can take advantage of updrafts because they can feel the wind whispering on their feathers. If there were a sensitive vibrational conduit from wing skin to human skin (or fingernail), like thin carbon fibers, our nervous systems could learn to fly by feel.

Finally, gain tension from pressure, not compression. The Gossamer Condor, MacCready’s first attempt at man-powered aircraft that won him his first Kramer Prize in 1977, was built like an old-fashioned plane, with a thin film (plastic) stretched over spars and ribs, which could snap. The more of the film’s tension can be supported by pressurized gas rather than compressed shafts, the lighter and less breakable the structure will be.

I’m a physicist, not a fundraiser. I can’t make the project happen, but I know many innovators could. And I do know I might, just barely, be able to fly in my lifetime if I keep strong and healthy. But someone else will have to take the lead. Any takers?

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

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Corporations Step Up to Punish Republicans

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 19:25:44 GMT

Perhaps the most surprising outcome of the Capitol riots has been the reaction of corporate donors to the funding of political campaigns. These locomotives of democracy are suddenly unhappy. The shame that now stains the doubly impeached Donald Trump has shaken and apparently cracked what had become the main pillar of electoral politics in the US: corporate money.

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One commentator states it in these terms: “Big corporations are deciding they don’t want their campaign contributions being linked to violent insurrections.” This has turned out to be particularly problematic for Republican lawmakers after the scandalous raid on Capitol Hill on January 6. The Washington Post reports that “Several major companies on Monday said they planned to cut off political donations to the 147 members of Congress who last week voted against certifying the results of the presidential election.” Yahoo Finance notes what may become a long-term trend as “companies are just beginning to recognize that ‘political spending today poses a really broad risk and a deep risk that they need to manage.’”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Broad risk:

Risk related to the level of awareness of an entire population, as opposed to deep risk that concerns the legal and commercial status of a monopoly or privileged economic position.

Contextual Note

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, a provider of health insurance to over 100 million people, has now pledged to stop its contributions “to those lawmakers who voted to undermine our democracy.” Critics might point out that health insurance providers have been undermining democracy for decades. They literally control Congress thanks not only to their lobbying efforts but also to the direct campaign contributions needed to obtain the legislation their lobbyists push through Congress.

Will pulling back weaken their chances of getting privileged treatment in the future? The risk is real. But health insurance providers are experts in evaluating risk. They realize that the public’s growing preference for a national single-payer system means they desperately need to improve their moral profile. What better way than to express their indignation at the immorality of politicians?

Yahoo Finance interviewed Bruce Freed, the president of the Center for Political Accountability. Freed asks the fundamental question about what Donald Trump, in his original presidential campaign, referred to as the DC “swamp” that needed draining. “Does this really lead to a fundamental change in the way companies approach their political spending?” Freed calls the recent announcements a “reaction of the moment.” He nevertheless thinks this could be the beginning of a trend. It all depends on how long the public’s indignation lasts as well as how consistently the media give it play.

Wall Street banks have taken the most radical position. Rather than punishing Republicans for their lack of civism, some “have announced steps to back away from giving money to all lawmakers — both Democrats and Republicans — at least for now.” This is undoubtedly an act of pure PR calculation. They must at all costs avoid singling out Republicans for punishment, who have always been the first to do their bidding. Yahoo judges that this “appears to be temporary and could expire before fundraising for the 2022 midterm elections begins in earnest.” In other words, this clearly is PR. It sounds more like a vacation than a strike. Basically, these companies will save some money in the short term, take the time to observe the drift of opinion and think out their strategy just in time for the next midterms.

This entire episode demonstrates how radical Trump’s impact on US institutions has been. The Republican Party has become the principal victim. When Republican elected officials in their majority made the choice of remaining loyal to Trump, they painted themselves into a corner. They accepted Trump’s strategy of polarizing the electorate beyond possible reconciliation. For the past four years, public debate has consistently turned around the extreme positions Trump tweeted on a daily basis. The media lost all interest in rational debate about real political issues. It doesn’t attract eyeballs.

It wasn’t always like this. In the lead-up to the 2016 Republican National Convention, the GOP establishment massively opposed Trump. At the time, commentators speculated about a possible revolt within the party against Trump’s nomination. Party stalwarts even seemed to count on his defeat in the November election to rid the party of its troublemaker. In vain.

When, to Trump’s own surprise, he won against Hillary Clinton, the designated dynastic heiress to the imperial throne as defined by the Democrats, establishment Republicans employed a strategy that consisted of accommodating Trump’s idiosyncrasies while pursuing their traditional goals: tax cuts, militarism and transforming the judiciary. The strategy worked well, indeed too well for the taste of many Republicans. They realized that Trump had become the key to the party’s winning of elections, and they knew for a fact that politics today is about nothing other than winning elections.

Historical Note

This story highlights not just the importance of corporate financing in political campaigns but also the emergence of a culture focused exclusively on electoral success. If the US is still a democracy, it has become literally a democracy of beggars. The needs of the citizens and the methods of good government have taken a back seat to the perennial quest for campaign funding. Members of Congress now spend 67% of their time on fundraising. Not only does that mean that they have limited time to do their job as legislators — it also means that their fundraising needs redefine and inevitably pervert their official role in government: representing their constituents.

At best, in their interactions with lobbyists, lawmakers can resist specific demands of their donors on the grounds that what they are requesting would be unacceptable to their voters. What happens then is that, instead of refusing, they will more likely work on the window-dressing that makes policies inimical to their constituents’ interests seem logical, acceptable or simply inevitable.

This type of beggars’ democracy becomes palatable to many because society itself has become a civilization of beggars fighting for survival in an economy of beggars. Lobbyists themselves are professional beggars, but with clout. The rest of the population has increasingly adapted to the gig economy, which sums up what democratic politics has become.

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Traditional economies owed their stability to a somewhat sclerotic continuity of gainful economic activity. Successive generations in the same family exercised identical vocations. With the advent of the industrial revolution, capitalism worked on the basis of creating a pool of largely uprooted workers begging for a job that had nothing to do with inherited skills. This brought the advantage of flexibility and the capacity of manufacturing to produce more efficiently what generations of artisans could only create on a limited scale. The enclosure system in England forced peasants to towns where manufacturing, exploiting the resources made available through colonial conquest, offered the possibility of employment. The poor of the countryside became the beggars of the town.

The Industrial Revolution created a society that depended on the notion of mass anonymity. It required pools of potential workers who could be available for employment to meet the growing needs of industry. The anonymous masses then had the choice of selecting to invest personally in skill sets that promised possible employment. This relationship has defined the economic system that has prevailed for the past two centuries in the West and now in most of the global economy.

Because anonymity and fluctuations in every marketplace lead to instability, the latest permutation of this model has been the evolution toward the gig economy. Paradoxically, it represents a return to the logic of early capitalism and the policy of subsistence wages. Employers needed simply to ensure that the pool of workers could be physically maintained to continue to meet the needs of production. The policy of subsistence gradually evolved to include cultural factors that contributed to a notion of prosperous and stable subsistence. This permitted the creation of the modern welfare state. But the aggravation of competition and the financialization of the economy ultimately led to the gig society where people sell their time on a piecemeal basis.

Millions of people make their living online. Increasingly, they do it as beggars, offering their services in the hope someone will need them enough to pay. A beggar’s democracy requires a beggar’s economy.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

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

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America: Motherhood, Apple Pie and the Mob

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 12:03:48 GMT

The United States began as a glint in the eyes of an English mob of oddballs, dissenters and criminals let loose on what they considered virgin territory. Once secure in their new digs, they administered rough justice to the original Americans and any colonist who fell afoul of community rules. Eventually, casting aside their imperial British overlords, the rabble achieved a measure of respectability by creating an independent state.

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Even as the United States fashioned an army, a constabulary and an evolving rule of law, the mob continued to define what it meant to be an American. It policed the slave economy. It helped push the borders westward. It formed the shock troops that rolled back Reconstruction. A 20^th-century version of this mob rampaged during the long Red Summer of violence that stretched from 1917 to 1923. It mobilized against the civil rights movement. And during the Trump era, it has reared its ugly head in Charlottesville, Portland and, last week, on Capitol Hill. America is motherhood, apple pie … and the mob.

Un-American

Last week, many a politician decried the mob violence at the US Capitol as “un-American.” Consider, for instance, the words of Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader: “This is so un-American. I condemn any of this violence. I could not be sadder or more disappointed with the way our country looks right now. People are getting hurt. Anyone involved in this, if you’re hearing me, hear me loud and clear: This is not the American way.”

McCarthy was not on the same podium with Donald Trump earlier in the day urging on the mob. But he and the president were on the same page between November 3 and January 6. Two days after the election, the California Republican announced that Trump had won. Later, he supported the outlandish Texas lawsuit to overturn the election results, refused to acknowledge Biden’s win well into 2021, and stood up in the House last week even after the mob retreated to challenge the Electoral College results.

After January 6, McCarthy has tried to put some distance between himself and the rabble. He has been willing to consider an official censure of the president and has also indicated that he won’t try to enforce party unity against an impeachment vote. No doubt McCarthy has shifted his stance because he feared for his own life when the insurrectionists stormed the barricades and invaded his sanctum. Trump, enjoying the images on TV, refused McCarthy’s plea to issue a statement calling off his attack dogs. It’s enough to make even the most loyal lapdog bark a different tune.

None of this detracts from the fact that McCarthy, since the election, was the elected representative not of his California district but of the mob. He was their cheerleader, their mouthpiece on the Hill, one of the many suits over the ages who have translated the “will of the people” into official-sounding acts and bills that attempt to preserve the privileges of white people at the expense of everyone else. For that is the beating heart of Trumpism: the Confederate flag, the noose, the closed polling booth, the knee on the neck of non-white America.

The word “mob” makes it sounds as though the violence was perpetrated by a group of mindless rowdies. But there has always been a method to the madness of this particular crowd. Let’s take a closer look at what the latest incarnation of the American mob wants, how it connects to like-minded groups overseas, and what to expect over the next weeks, months and years.

Against the Globalists

At first glance, the people who descended upon Washington to disrupt Congress on January 6 are almost obsessively focused on domestic issues. They’re not so much America First as Trump First. They have turned against anyone in the Republican Party who has abandoned the soon-to-be-ex-president, and that includes the vice president. They are nationalist and parochial. They are also anti-globalist, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t global in their strategizing, their connections and their aspirations.

One of the core components of the Stop the Steal coalition is QAnon, an amorphous global network that believes that another amorphous global network — of Satanic child molesters — somehow controls the levers of international power. What started out as a conspiracy theory centered on Donald Trump as a St. George figure battling a devilish dragon went global in 2020, attracting adherents in 71 countries by August. One German QAnon group counts 120,000 members in its Telegram account.

Another key member of the coalition is a bloc of white nationalists and militia members that encompasses accelerationists like the Boogaloo Bois, who want to spur a race war to bring down the liberal status quo, and organizations like the Proud Boys that emphasize male supremacy. These groups have forged global links over the last decade in Canada, Europe, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.

Prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, these chauvinists united around a “great replacement” narrative according to which immigrants and people of color are determined to “replace” white people through migration, higher birthrates or sheer pushiness. When the border closures around the pandemic reduced the salience of the immigration issue, the great replacement became a less useful organizing tool.

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It was into this vacuum that QAnon became the conspiracy theory de jour. Meanwhile, the far right shifted its discourse on “globalists” to challenge their approach to COVID-19, their deference to the Chinese and their proposed “reset” of the global economy — anything to deflect attention from the obvious failures of the nationalist populists who headed up the countries with the highest number of infections and deaths: the United States, Brazil, India, Russia and the United Kingdom.

Although they often disagree about particulars, this array of groups is united by an animus against government. They supported Trump not as the head of government but as someone opposed to government. And they adored him because he didn’t just hate the US government and the elites that staff it, but global governance as well. The “deep state” was always a canard. The far right despised the liberal state, full stop. Trump attracted an even wider following by squaring off against the expert class: the uppity journalists and fact-bound scientists and Hollywood liberals and hand-wringing academics. Burn it all down, Trump’s followers demanded.

Inside-Outside Game

Trump in government, however, represented a certain check on the most ambitious impulses of the far right. True, during his reign, extremists have come out into the streets to protest economic shutdowns, masking ordinances and Black Lives Matter mobilizations. Some extremists planned more violent interventions, like kidnapping the governor of Michigan. But with the administration on its side, with the Senate in Republican hands and with Republicans controlling the vast majority of state legislatures, the far right focused its wrath selectively. It played the ultimate inside-outside game.

After the November election, with Trump on his way out of power, the far right no longer has to place any caveats on its anti-government impulses. First came an attack on Congress, not coincidentally on the very day that the Republicans lost their Senate majority. Next, the far right is planning an armed march on Washington and all 50 state capitols on January 17. To cap it off, a Million Militia March is planned for Inauguration Day.

What happened on January 6 was, despite some prior planning, a disorganized coup attempt. What comes next may well be more precisely planned, which may result in a focus on the weakest links rather than the most potent symbols, just as the Oregon extremists chose the easily occupied Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January 2016 rather than the heavily guarded state capitol building.

The storming of the US Capitol, meanwhile, has proven to be a great winnower. The fainthearted, like Kevin McCarthy, have proven to be chaff, as has a number of previously ardent Trump supporters. According to polling conducted after the attack, “a quarter of Trump voters agree that actions should be taken to immediately remove him from office. Further, 41% of Trump voters believe he has ‘betrayed the values and interests of the Republican Party.’” This is an extraordinarily rapid fissure in what had hitherto been an impregnable base of support for Trump.

What remains is a revolutionary core. They won’t muster enough force to make a difference over the next two weeks, not against the 15,000 National Guards likely to be deployed to Washington, DC, for Joe Biden’s inauguration. After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, the far right couldn’t handle the avalanche of criticism and could barely muster a couple of dozen extremists for a rally one year later in DC. But it has since altered its messaging and its strategy. Expect even more adaptation over the next months and years.

What Comes Next

The idea that the Civil War was a “war of Northern aggression” has survived 150 years of civic, political and media education to the contrary. A large section of white Southerners, and even a few folks outside the region, cling to their “lost cause” much as Serbian nationalists mourn their defeat on the plain of Kosovo in 1389, Hungarians rail against the loss of territory after the Trianon Treaty of 1920, and the Japanese and German far right has bridled at the “outside interference” that robbed their nations of a measure of sovereignty after World War II.

Prepare for the “stolen election” narrative to serve a similar function for the Forever Trumpers. This narrative of an unfair political system ties together many of the far right’s themes: liberal institutions are fundamentally broken and corrupted, the mainstream media is compliant in tilting the playing field, and the globalists will do anything to regain power from “the people.” Note, too, how these messages can appeal to a left also angry at the status quo, and you can understand why so many people who voted for Bernie Sanders switched to Trump and why the European far right have harvested votes from previous bastions of the communist parties.

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Such appeals to fairness — a stolen election is above all unfair — conceal the racist, sexist and otherwise exclusionary content of the far right’s agenda. An explicitly fascist platform has considerably less broad-based appeal than a cry to right a wrong. Over the next four years, the far right will beat this drum of political illegitimacy. It will claim that nothing the Biden administration does will be legal or constitutional because of its original sin of ascension via a stolen election.

The fallout from January 6 will continue to divide the Republican Party. But the opportunity to brand the Democrats as illegitimate will prove just too addictive to be ignored. Consider the attacks on Obamacare or the successful effort to block Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Even in the face of overwhelming counterevidence, the Republicans hammered on the illegitimacy of the Democratic initiatives. A “stolen election” caucus, composed of the congressional members who survive a corporate and fundraiser boycott, will attempt to pull the Republican Party further to the right, just as the Tea Party did during the Obama era.

The international ramifications of this strategy are equally worrisome. The far right attacks governments not only because they are liberal in the sense of providing government “handouts,” but because they follow liberal principles of governance — checks and balances, free press, rights to gather and express dissent. Trump’s attacks on January 6 were not just seditious. They were designed to transform his position and that of the GOP into something resembling the United Russia party and Vladimir Putin’s leadership for life. Trump has always wanted to build a Moscow or a Budapest or an Ankara or a Managua on the Potomac: iron-fisted leadership, no serious political opposition, a cowering press, a cult of personality. He thought he saw his opportunity on January 6.

This is also the ultimate goal of the mob. It doesn’t want anarchy, except as an interim strategy. It wants a strong hand on the tiller, as if Trump were the Great Helmsman guiding the country in a Great Leap Forward (or backward, given that a mob’s sense of direction is never very precise). Trump’s hands, however, are being wrenched from the tiller. Even better, he is being abandoned by leading members of his party, his social media enablers, his financial backers and his corporate sponsors. His ambition having overleapt itself, Trump has stumbled, irrevocably. The mob is taking note, even as it falls back to protect its wounded leader.

For the next four years, prepare for the mob and its political representatives to rely on street power to identify, campaign for and put into office their next Great White Hope. What’s more quintessentially American than that?

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

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

The post America: Motherhood, Apple Pie and the Mob appeared first on Fair Observer.

Who Owns Susan Collins’ Brain?

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 18:29:54 GMT

As a senator from the state of Maine with a college education (though not Ivy League), Susan Collins must be considered an intelligent woman. She’s also a Republican. When an intelligent and responsible public figure writes an op-ed recounting an important event, we might suppose she would seek to show off her intelligence rather than the opposite. Not Susan Collins, who included this statement in her op-ed for the Bangor Daily News: “My first thought was that the Iranians had followed through on their threat to strike the Capitol.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

First thought:

Often the most pertinent idea resulting from strong intuition, but sometimes exactly the kind of misguided musing no serious person would ever want to admit having allowed to cross their mind unless their aim was to cast doubt on the idea that they even possess a mind.

Contextual Note

Susan Collins may be spending too much time listening to recent speeches by Mike Pompeo or remembering past pronouncements of John Bolton. In her op-ed, she claims that she was “well aware that emotions were running high because of the president’s repeated claims that the election was ‘stolen,’ despite the fact that approximately 90 judges, including the Supreme Court justices, had ruled otherwise.” That would be enough of a clue for most intelligent people when the rumbling of mutiny began to become audible inside the Capitol on January 6.

Even with that knowledge, the only credible explanation that popped into Collins’s brain was that it was an attack by Iran. Had she been a Democrat, she probably would have assumed that it was Vladimir Putin in person trying to break down the doors, armed, of course with a hammer, and sickle. But Collins is a Republican. Each party sees its own preferred goblins under the stairs.

Cody Fenwick, writing for Alternet, judges that Collins “underestimated the true threat of Trump’s radicalism and right-wing extremism, and she is likely overestimating the threat posed from countries like Iran.” But it wasn’t about rational risk assessment. Collins’ comment tells us something deeper about how politicians think. First thoughts belong to the same family of mental events as Freudian slips.

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They reveal processes that are anchored in a region of impulses and automatic reflexes that sits below the faculty of reasoning and decision-making. Politicians possess a Freudian unconscious meticulously programmed by their party’s ideology and propaganda. It can even prevent them from seeing or seeking to understand what is happening around them.

Collins knew on that day that thousands of members of her own party were mobilizing to protest Trump’s electoral defeat. Unless she exists in a different universe, she knew something about who they were and how MAGA crowds and the adepts of QAnon typically behave. In her eyes, they were known to be rowdy, but they weren’t evil. As Trump himself had said concerning the events in Charlottesville: “There were good people on both sides.”

Despite that knowledge, her programmed logic assumed that an assault on the US government could only be attributable to a force officially classified as “evil.” It’s a time-honored Republican tradition. Reagan programmed the nation to fear the “empire of evil.” George W. Bush called it an “axis of evil.” And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who now baselessly claims that “al-Qaeda has a new home base in Iran,” has been pushing the idea that Iran is the center of the axis. He added a more sinister commentary: “I would say Iran is indeed the new Afghanistan.” Afghanistan is a code word for “justified war.”

Since the Cold War, US foreign policy requires the inculcation of a Manichaean mythology that fixes in people’s brains the idea of a metaphysical combat between pure existential good (the US and at least one of its allies, Israel) and pure existential evil. Iran has been at the top of the rankings for the Trump administration, if only because of Obama’s shameful “Iran deal.” Al-Qaeda, of course, has remained the symbol of absolute evil since 9/11. This is true even when the US provides al-Qaeda’s affiliates with weapons in Syria, because Bashar-al-Assad, as the head of state, is even more evil.

Balance is always important. Giving all the publicity to evil would be wrong. In her breathtaking account of the Senators’ daring escape from imagined Iranians, Collins also finds a way of highlighting the existence of pure existential good. She recounts the charming story of how Senator Todd Young, a Marines veteran, “moved over near Sen. Lisa Murkowski and me. Only later did I learn that he was positioning himself to repel the rioters and defend us.”

As Joe Biden would say, God bless the troops. America’s military heroes, even after choosing a political career, are always ready to act when an evil enemy is at the door. This may help to explain why an overwhelming majority in Congress voted to override Donald Trump’s veto and approve the $740-billion Defense Authorization Act in December. After all, without that bloated expenditure, it is likely that there would be fewer well-trained warriors in the Senate to protect defenseless damsels in distress.

In the end, the Iranians hadn’t mounted the nuclear attack all Americans (and Israelis) fear, or even a non-nuclear attack. The MAGA fanatics never managed to reach a single lawmaker. All was well that ended well, or at least not too badly, with only a handful of fatalities of unimportant people. It gave Collins the opportunity to vaunt her own bravery. She and her colleagues courageously stayed on to finish the job and defend the Constitution. As she proudly announces, “There was no way I was going to let these thugs succeed in their attempt to disrupt the constitutional process and undermine our democracy.”

Historical Note

Collins never tells us whether the heroic Senator Young also believed it was the Iranians pounding on the doors of the Capitol. Her harrowing tale is nevertheless worth reading. It evokes the atmosphere of the Viking siege of Paris in 885, when the monks at the Abbey of St. Germain des Pres woke up to discover a host of marauding Norsemen. Collins’ account may not be the equal of the lengthy poem by the Benedictine monk, Abbo Cernuus, “Bella Parisiacae Urbis,” but it does give an idea of the frightening unexpectedness of the threat.

Senator Young never had to step up to play the role of Count Odo or Bishop Gauzlin, two heroes who had some initial success displaying their prowess to fend off the invaders. The Viking siege lasted for nearly two years before the Holy Roman emperor, Charles le Gros (Charles the Fat), intervened and bought them off with £700 of silver — an astronomical sum at the time — complemented by a land grant at Rouen, on the condition that they leave Paris to the Parisians.

When the Vikings arrived in Paris with an estimated 12,000 men on 300 ships, they simply requested free passage to sail further up the Seine. The authorities refused, and, for the following two years, mayhem and slaughter became the norm in and around Paris. When the dust finally settled, the Norseman appeared pleased with the gift of what would become the Duchy of Normandy. The Norman nation quickly prospered. Within two generations, all Normans spoke French and, a century later, in 1066, they conquered England, a nation whose people never managed to master French grammar. Nevertheless, centuries later, the British, possibly inspired by William the Conqueror, used their own ships to subject much of the world, including the Indian subcontinent and the east coast of North America, to their rule and their language.

One protester who penetrated the Senate chambers donned an impressive costume inspired by Viking mythology. He sat down in the vice president’s chair. The latter-day Viking provided the imagery to make the event legitimately hyperreal. Whether last week’s assault turns into the equivalent of the Viking siege of Paris over the next two years remains to be seen. For one thing, we are all wondering what Donald the Fat will do after being released from the White House. Will his Vikings offer us a new episode of hyperreality TV or even a lambent civil war? Will Joe Biden befriend the evil Iranians? The world is waiting for the next episode.

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

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Navigating the Minefield of Arab Politics

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 16:25:22 GMT

In November 2020, the Saudi Association of Senior Scholars, a government-directed mouthpiece on religious affairs, issued a fatwa (religious edict) declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. In the fatwa, the scholars stated, among other reasons, that the Brotherhood seeks to “contest the ruler and deviate from the ruler” — a crime punishable by death in Saudi Arabia. The scholars’ edict, however, ignored the right of people, under Islamic law, to stand up against an unjust ruler.

In 2013, Egypt’s first and only democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, a card-carrying member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was overthrown by a coup that reinstated the military junta. In the days that followed, Egypt saw a bloody purge of the Muslim Brotherhood, with thousands of its members killed. Today, tens of thousands continue to languish in jail without trial.

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In 2015, the United Arab Emirates declared the Brotherhood a terrorist organization, jailing without trial anyone suspected of membership or having sympathies with the Muslim Brothers. According to Wikileaks, Frances Fragos Townsend, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, reported that during a 2006 meeting, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed “claimed that if elections were held in Dubai ‘tomorrow’ he thought the Muslim Brotherhood would win.”

Accusing Doha of giving asylum to and funding the Muslim Brotherhood, in 2017, Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, together with Bahrain, broke diplomatic relations. The so-called quartet then imposed a blockade on Qatar and even attempted a military invasion, which was only halted when Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan rapidly deployed a military force to Qatar.

Incoherence of the Incoherent

The Muslim Brotherhood, established in 1928, is older than all of the regimes fighting over it. It had reached power in Tunis, Egypt and elsewhere only through the ballot box. Like most political parties that mix their political ideology with religion, it has lost the support, if not the respect, of those who, like this author, believe the two don’t mix.

But here is the mother of all Arab political ironies. For example, in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been carrying out brutal airstrikes for the past six years that have killed more than 200,000 people, ostensibly to reinstate the “internationally recognized” president overthrown by Ansar Allah (Partisans of God, as the Houthi rebels are officially known). The Muslim Brotherhood is not only an active member of the Saudi-UAE military campaign, but also part of the internationally recognized Yemeni government that the Saudi and UAE alliance is bombing Yemen in order to reinstate. Did you get that? Ibn Rushd (or Averroes, as he is known by his Latin name) would have called this murkiness the “incoherence of the incoherent.”

If that is not bizarre enough for you, here is another one. The Muslim Brothers, recently outlawed as terrorists in Saudi Arabia, are still given political asylum, protection and funding by Riyadh as allies in the war in Yemen. Many of their leaders live in Saudi Arabia. You couldn’t make this up if you were the greatest fiction writer.

But the anti-Muslim Brotherhood, anti-Qatar and anti-Turkey brigade is crumbling. The Arab quartet is losing its American ally in the face of President Donald Trump and is not sure what to expect from the incoming Biden administration. Meanwhile, Iran continues to be as formidable and as unyielding as ever. And so, in true Arab form, alliances must change — again.

The UAE and Bahrain recently formalized and made public their long-standing secret relations with Israel, seeking to create a protective buffer against Iran and any potential challenges from the new administration in Washington. Alas, Saudi Arabia, a self-proclaimed custodian of the Muslim holy sites, cannot be so open about its own secret relations with Israel and is even less confident about the changes afoot the United States. Instead, it called for reconciliation with the other side, Qatar, and made similar moves toward Turkey — both supporters of the Muslim Brothers and vehemently at odds with the UAE, Saudi Arabia’s ally against the Brothers.

Hasty Reconciliation

In a recent hastily-called reconciliation summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), under the watchful eyes of President Trump’s trusted son-in-law Jared Kushner (in typical monarchial style), the anti-Qatar coalition signed an agreement that said, “let bygones be bygones.” The Saudi foreign minister described the reconciliation as “due to the wisdom of the GCC rulers and Egypt, it is a complete turn of the page on all points of dispute.” So, the 13 points brought against Qatar as non-negotiable conditions for reconciliation have been turned.

In fact, to indicate the uncompromising nature of the quartet’s demands, the UAE’s foreign minister, Anwar Mohammed Gargash, on May 1, 2018, tweeted: “A sincere advice intended to bring Qatar out of her crisis. There will be no gulf mediation. No pressures will be beneficial. And your media will not change your status. Go back to your wisdom, for your crisis continues. Manage your affairs from today with wisdom. And negotiate within the perimeters of your neighbors who express real concerns.” No wonder that, commenting on the reconciliation agreement, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was quick to congratulate Qatar for “the success of its brave resistance to pressure & extortion.”

Despite the dramatic welcome that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman gave to the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim ibn Hamad Al Thani, followed by a tour of the desert driven by the crown prince himself, the summit spoke more of divergence than unity. It left no doubt about its real purpose, at least from the Saudi and American perspectives. Bin Salman lost no time bringing to focus the elephant in the room, Iran. His message was clear: This is a reconciliation between brothers to wage war on a neighbor. The summit’s fault lines have been widened.

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Qatar still maintains strong relations with Iran. While it seems highly unlikely that even the Trump administration, with all its faults, will be crazy enough to attack Iran and start a regional war that will make the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq pale by comparison, the fear is that Israel might do so and force Washington’s hand. Should that happen, any future US attack on Iran using its Qatar-based Al Udeid Air Base will result in destructive retaliation on Qatar. Iran had strongly warned all its neighbors that attacks carried out from their soil will be retaliated against (on their soil). The Iranian foreign minister described it as “an all-out war.”

Qatar’s vulnerability is made worse by its break with its neighbors, leaving it to face any possible Iranian retaliation alone. Whether the reconciliation summit is intended to assure or to fool Qatar into breaking away from Tehran, despite Iran’s support during the quartet’s blockade, is an open question. Whether Qatar will fall for that is also an open question. The Prophet Muhammad had warned that “A faithful is not stung twice from the same burrow.”

On a visit to Doha during the blockade, a Qatari official told me that in his view, reconciliation will ultimately happen. Pointing out the foolishness of the ongoing blockade, he insisted that Doha will not be imprudent enough to trust the quartet with its fate. Having opened new pathways beyond the GCC, he saw this crisis as an important lesson — never again.

Old Rivalries

The above view is supported by regional history, of which the Qataris are mindful. In ancient times, the desert tribes of Arabia fought over water wells. While water scarcity will continue to be a cause of wars in the region, the GCC has now moved on to geopolitical fights reflecting the skyscraper nation-states mushrooming out of the desert oil wealth.

However, despite modern geopolitical realities, changing alliances and desert reconciliation summits, the real underlying reasons for the dispute between Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain — old tribal rivalries — have not yet been resolved. In fact, these are virtually impossible to resolve without dismantling the monarchies. The Nahyans of Abu Dhabi, now led by Mohammed bin Zayed, see mainly Qatar, but also Bahrain, as mini-states that escaped the UAE federation and must be brought in, willingly or by force. As far back as 1867, Bahrain’s Al Khalifa rulers and the Abu Dhabi Nahyan tribe allied to attack Qatar’s Al Thani tribe to undo its newly formed state.

Even the GCC, which was created as an organization of independent sovereign states, has not removed the old tribal mentalities among its members. The Al Khalifas of Bahrain — from whom the Saudis forcefully took the whole of its oil-rich Shia-populated eastern region, historically part of Greater Bahrain — reject Qatar’s legitimacy. The Al Khalifas ruled Qatar before the Al Thani tribe broke away from the territory that is now Saudi Arabia and created its own state. The Saudis see Qatar as a wayward artificial state that should have never existed in the first place. They consider it part of Saudi Arabia. These underlying tribal rivalries endure and play a major role in how current relations are managed, becoming even more prominent since the Arab Spring.

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Qatar, together with Turkey, supported the uprisings against the military dictatorships that ruled Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Syria. Qatar’s very vocal Al Jazeera news network was the voice of Arab Street during the uprisings. Qatar funded a lot of the youth programs, many of which were either led or at least infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, fearing that a successful Arab Spring revolution that brings an accountable transparent political process will infect their own populations, took the opposing side, spending billions to arm and support the military dictatorships against the uprising.

Having given up on the UAE and bin Zayed personally (who is seen in the West as an Arab visionary despite the failures of all his costly foreign adventures), Saudi Arabia and Egypt have started to make overtures to Turkey, the regional power that has defeated Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE — plus Russia and France — in Libya and then also defeated the latter two in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh at the end of last year.

Reconciling with Qatar leaves the UAE and Bahrain isolated. However, the extent to which Mohammed bin Zayed can rely on Bahrain, effectively ruled and kept alive by the Saudis, is highly debatable. Debatable too is how useful Bahrain can be for the crown prince, beyond sharing a table to sign a “normalization” deal with Israel.

In Yemen, the UAE escaped Ansar Allah’s retaliatory missiles that hit Saudi Arabia, mainly as a result of shaky deals it has made with the rebels. A live-and-let-live policy accompanied by ransom payments has enabled the UAE-Israeli alliance to focus attention on Yemen’s southern ports. There’s virtually no military confrontation between Sanaa and Abu Dhabi. A similar shaky deal exists with Iran, Dubai’s major trading partner. However, if indeed there is a regional war, all bets are off. The shaky friendships in Yemen will transform into deadly hostilities in the Persian Gulf. No amount of double or triple play will save Mohammed bin Zayed.

Meanwhile, Iran continues to observe the changing loyalties across the waters. Iran knows how it starts among us Arabs, how it proceeds and where it ends. It’s all déjà vu. The GCC is made up of the same Arabs who first financed Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iran, then opened the gates for the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq itself. And all that smoke you see above Arab skies — in Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq, in Egypt, in Libya — comes from the guns with GCC petrodollars signs all over them.

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

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Trump’s Impeachment Should Be Just the Beginning

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 13:40:49 GMT

Let’s start with a little good news. It appears that a new US president will be inaugurated on January 20, and, when the Congress convenes for the first time after that, there will be a thin Democratic majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Given what has transpired in America over the last four years and the desperate and violent acts at the US Capitol on January 6, this transfer of power may be enough to allow celebration for a moment that a majority of those who voted in the recent elections gave the nation a chance at governance.

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However, neither a good government nor actual good governance is even close to being assured. First, there will be those, maybe President Biden himself, who will speak to a moderate response to what we have witnessed over the last days and years, and the terrible toll it has taken on so many people. I hope that voices of immoderation prevail when order is restored, at least until the seeds of public accountability have taken root. The good news will not last beyond the virtual inauguration parade unless the new president has nerves of steel and no, I repeat, no illusions about governing in partnership with Republicans in some faux display of “unity.”

Immoderate Actions

Moderated responses to immoderate actions are doomed to fail and serve only to further enable those willing to destroy to achieve their ends. In the instant case, there must be a quick and decisive immoderate response, albeit a non-violent response freed from revenge as its motive. That response must be seen as urgent and restorative. If not, this moment will be lost, and the nation will again descend into governmental dysfunction in the face of the multiple challenges of the pandemic, economic disarray, systemic racism and social injustice.

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As we anticipate a new day dawning, one of the vestiges of days past should disappear from our discourse — the notion of alternate reality. Not only is there no such thing, but there cannot be such a thing, unless there are also alternate facts. There is reality and there is fantasy. When willful ingestion of fantasy overwhelms reality to drive political agendas and actions, you get the United States of America. It is simply time for this to end.

The nation cannot expect to move forward while treading water beneath the surface. We must find a way to rescue those souls drowning in a sea of fantasy largely of their own making. I love the First Amendment, but this crucial foundation of America’s constitutional democracy was adopted in 1791. Other than falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, there is little public knowledge about the limitations of free speech, including the extent to which provoking insurrection in a crowded city is protected by the First Amendment. Further, it bears noting that neither the internet nor social media was around in 1791, and that the First Amendment is a prohibition only of governmental activity even in its broadest reading.

Without attempting a First Amendment primer, it is safe to say that a great many people in America’s delusional home of free speech believe that the right to freedom of speech is some kind of absolute. Since it is not an absolute and has next to nothing to do with private action, it should be safe to note that there is a lot of room to debate the extent to which America’s vile social media cesspool can be subject to limitation and control. Whatever else can be said, the First Amendment is not a license to monetize “free” speech, nor is it a shield that amoral peddlers of snake oil can use to avoid responsibility for the damage caused by their wares.

Postmortem

Since much of the fantasy at large in the land, including the fantasies that brought armed thugs to the US Capitol, has been well documented for quite some time, the postmortem review should take a hard look at why it took an armed insurrection to expose a fundamental flaw in the notion that “moderation” can be an effective response to venal delusion when that delusion takes hold in the body politic. And, further, it should consider why it took an armed insurrection to finally raise the stakes on those who generate, spread, consume and defend the fantasies.

Then there is the tactical disconnect apparent in law enforcement planning and the initial response to what readily should have been seen as a clear and present threat of violence. A mob of white insurrectionists storms the Capitol, with little to no resistance. Meanwhile, pleas for assistance are slow-walked, and the insurrectionists are allowed to calmly walk away from the battered scene of their crime carrying their spoils of war. The inciter-in-chief is absent from the fray, watching it all on television, while his Marie Antoinette seem-a-like is finishing a White House furnishings photo shoot.

So it goes in benighted America. I can hardly wait for the next Black Lives Matter protest that threatens prompt service at a coffee shop where the police move in to forcefully restore “law and order” at a point of a gun and arrest everyone who is black or cares about pervasive racism. Being a black protester in America just got even more perplexing. Perhaps the key to “peaceful” protest is to wrap yourself and your cause in the American flag or some flag-branded garb that says you and your cause are not a threat to law enforcement or to its cause.

There finally may be enough palpable outrage among some in the nation’s political class, maybe enough to ensure the security of the presidential inauguration. Meanwhile, the scum is fleeing from Trump’s orbit, leaving in their wake a dysfunctional national government, over 380,000 coronavirus deaths, a vaccination free-for-all and ever-lengthening food lines. I hope that all will be investigated, their professional lives ruined and the guilty eventually charged. That is what accountability looks like to me.

However, accountability cannot be complete until Donald Trump, his grifter family and his acolytes are driven from our midst, charged with crimes where applicable and shamed into irrelevance. Trump’s second impeachment should be just the beginning. That may seem immoderate, but so be it.

*[This article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

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

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The Line: Mohammed bin Salman’s Green Blockbuster

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 11:44:13 GMT

It’s called The Line, a spanking new AI city to be built in the northwest of Saudi Arabia as part of the kingdom’s $500-billion NEOM project. The Line will be a “carbon-positive” community “powered by 100 per cent clean energy” strung, yes in a line, from the Red Sea coast into the interior for 170 kilometers. As enthusiastically reported by Arab News, there will be no need for cars or streets because “walkability will define life in The Line and essential services such as schools, medical clinics, leisure facilities, as well as green spaces, will be within a five-minute walk.”

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Should your place of work be a little further away, that will be taken care of too as “high-speed transit and autonomous mobility solutions will ensure that no journey will be longer than 20 minutes.” A glossy video details the glories of The Line.

Walk The Line

In his January 10 announcement of the megaproject, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman declared, “We need to transform the concept of a conventional city into that of a futuristic one.” The Line is the vision of NEOM taking shape, itself the brainchild of the crown prince, a centerpiece of Vision 2030 — his ambitious restructuring of Saudi society and the economy. The city will be home to 1 million people and, according to the crown prince, will create 380,000 jobs and add $48 billion to the kingdom’s GDP.

And if The Line sounds like a title to a Hollywood blockbuster, one starring a dashing young prince who pursues with vigor, courage and insight a vision for a future that will benefit his people and indeed all of humankind, well, that’s the storyline that his pricey PR advisers hope the world will buy. Every blockbuster requires a villain, and Mohammed bin Salman has found his in the global threats caused by climate change, stressing that “By 2050, one billion people will have to relocate due to rising CO2 emissions and sea levels. 90 per cent of people breathe polluted air.”

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The man who charged headlong into war in Yemen, who seized the Lebanese prime minister and forced him to resign live on live TV, who arrested senior royals and members of the Saudi business elite in a classic shakedown masquerading as a corruption investigation, who ordered the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the imprisonment and torture of women activists has a new line in the works. No longer the warrior prince who thought he would have a quick win against the Houthis, nor the mafia don presiding over murder and protection rackets, nor the tough guy cracking down hard on anyone who stood in his way: No, the new Mohammed bin Salman is a thoughtful environmental visionary.

He now asks all the right questions: “Why should we sacrifice nature for the sake of development? Why should seven million people die every year because of pollution? Why should we lose one million people every year due to traffic accidents? And why should we accept wasting years of our lives commuting.” The Line, intones the prince “is a civilizational revolution that puts humans first.” This recasting as a green warrior comes at a useful time. Bin Salman is keen to get out of President-elect Joe Biden’s bad books. And Biden, unlike the current inhabitant of the White House, does take the threat of climate change seriously.

With the next edition of the Future Investment Initiative, the crown prince’s effort to encourage foreign direct investment into the kingdom — happening in Riyadh in two weeks’ time and coming hard on the heels of the resolution of the Gulf feud, perfectly captured by the warm embrace bin Salman gave the Qatari emir — the makeover would seem to be moving along very nicely indeed.

Green Blockbuster

Skeptics will note that the figures blithely thrown about by the prince may or may not be rooted in reality or hard data; a quick Google search throws up the figure of 7 million (if not more) deaths from pollution each year, but 380,000 jobs sounds like something of a stretch. The war in Yemen grinds on, and the Democrats, who now control all three branches of government in the United States, have made it clear they intend to hold the Saudis responsible for the many atrocities inflicted on civilians in their air war against the Houthis in Yemen.

Several senators and members of Congress from both sides are determined not to let the murder of Jamal Khashoggi simply slip out of sight. And, to the outrage of people everywhere, Loujain al Hathloul, whose only crime was to pursue the rights of women, was sentenced to six years in jail, with her allegations of torture in detention ignored by the court that sentenced her. It seems that the plotline of Mohammed bin Salman as a green warrior still has some serious question marks hanging over it.

Returning to the movie theme, these days, an average blockbuster is defined as anything above $100 million. The crown prince is going to sink between $100 billion and $200 billion from the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund into building The Line. It’s his proof of commitment to the war on climate change, a war in which he casts himself in a leading role. As far as blockbusters go, that’s a lot of dosh by anybody’s measure. The critics will have to wait and see whether or not it is money well spent.

*[This article was originally published by Arab Digest.]

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

The post The Line: Mohammed bin Salman’s Green Blockbuster appeared first on Fair Observer.

Recruiting an Army for a Civil War

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 20:02:21 GMT

Last week’s storming of the Capitol has already achieved the traumatic status of only a few other events in recent US history: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and 9/11. Its historical consequences will play out for years if not decades.

Pearl Harbor allowed the United States into what until then had been largely a European conflict. The US subsequently became the dominant force in the Second World War and then the world, after ushering in the nuclear age with a shocking and scientifically sadistic attack on the civilian populations of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The JFK assassination cleared the path for two other game-changing events: Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam and the flowering of the hippie movement. Combined, these marked an important stage in shattering the trust Americans formerly had in their institutions, a trend that has continued ever since.

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The attacks of 9/11 provided the scheming neocons and their pliant president, George W. Bush, with the pretext for spreading endless wars across the Middle East. It was designed as an intended display of virile might but turned into a failed and futile melodrama that, in the eyes of most of humanity, seriously undermined the vaunted moral authority of a nation that for two centuries had claimed to be the “beacon of democracy.”

An article by Emma Grey Ellis in Wired, “The DC Mobs Could Become a Mythologized Recruitment Tool,” points to one of the possible long-term consequences of last week’s event. Ellis cites Shannon Reid, a researcher of the phenomenon of street gangs and white power at UNC Charlotte: “My fear is that this moment will die down and everyone will think we’re OK. Really this [riot] was a recruitment tool, a part of a mythology that is going to grow.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Recruitment:

Conversion to an extreme, violent ideology of people who realize — though with limited understanding — that the respectable institutions controlling their lives and to which they are expected to pledge allegiance have no interest in their well-being, and even less in recruiting them for gainful employment.

Contextual Note

One commentator cited in the article notes how an event that achieved nothing evokes a positive reaction from the extreme right, suggesting that “The hardened neo-Nazis on Telegram are over the moon that this all happened. They feel like it’s going to radicalize millions of boomer-tier people. They’re kind of scolding the boomers: ‘You tried to work through the system, but now you’re radicalized along with us.’”

The FBI has now warned that thousands of Trump supporters and election deniers are currently organizing armed protests across the nation, seeking to make a furious show of force before Joe Biden’s inauguration. But they don’t see it as a one-time event. The movement will continue and possibly grow in the coming months. Its participants share a mentality of civil war. After four years of Trumpian fireworks in the media, these rebels — many of them well-trained war veterans inured to righteous violence — simply cannot imagine the nation in the hands of someone other than The Donald, who in their eyes has become the symbol of American assertiveness.

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Sociologist Cynthia Miller-Idriss sees this event as confirming “a swing back toward anti-government extremism.” She believes it is “creating odd coalitions.” With his usual reflexive mendacity, when Trump sought to blame antifa for the storming of the Capitol, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy immediately contradicted him. Nevertheless, while it is unlikely that antifa and the MAGA crowd could ever agree on coordinating their studied nihilism, a certain convergence in their mutual capacity for discord seems possible.

The main victims of the growing disorder will be the vast majority of Americans and, more particularly, the significant swaths of the population who are seriously interested in reforming, if not transforming, a system whose injustices seem patent and the indifference of the moneyed elites only too evident. The entire black and Hispanic communities will be the first to suffer since the most likely immediate response will be to impose heightened surveillance and more aggressive policing in the name of national security, following the precedent of 9/11.

The hopes that were awakened last year with the popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement following the death of George Floyd will be dashed by the combined force of COVID-19, tightened security and official suspicion of anything that isn’t resolutely middle-of-the-road during the Biden presidency.

Racial injustice and wealth inequality will be put on the back burner. That should surprise no one, but the coronavirus crisis and the George Floyd protests led many to believe that some form of positive change was about to emerge. For once, the government seemed to show awareness of the needs of a population that the pandemic had cast into the gulf of uncertainty created by unbridled free market capitalism.

The Biden administration will immediately focus on the evident danger of right-wing radicalism that drew its energy from the personality of Donald Trump but has now achieved a life of its own. But an aggressive attempt to throttle it may aggravate its attraction. Right-wing militias are more the symptom than the problem. The deeper issue lies in the fact that a significant portion of the population places more of its hope in hard drugs, opioids, suicide missions and the rage of the mob than it does in government reforms.

Historical Note

Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the 9/11 attacks 60 years later had the effect of immediately designating an enemy Americans felt must be countered with force. The Japanese attack provided the US with a ticket to a world war that had started in Europe. From then on, it concerned the entire Northern Hemisphere. In a similar fashion, 9/11 provided the pretext for an undefined global war on terror that has prolonged its effects in both violent and profoundly insidious ways ever since, sapping the nation’s morale.

The JFK assassination is the outlier in that series of traumatic events. What happened in Dallas in November 1963 was engineered to appear as a purely domestic murder mystery. By focusing on a single designated killer, it succeeded in masking its true historical significance. Nevertheless, the Kennedy assassination produced a powerful effect on the international as well as the domestic front. It cleared the path for the Vietnam War. The combined force of the assassination and the war stimulated the creation of counterculture that turned many of the reigning values in US society on their head.

As the year 2021 begins, marked by nervous anticipation of Joe Biden’s arrival at the White House, the consequences and eventual lessons of last week’s insurrection will begin to emerge. At the time of this writing, the FBI is anticipating violence in all 50 states. Where that will lead, nobody knows. At the same time, the stability of both political parties appears to be seriously compromised. It will take months and perhaps years to assess the consequences of what may become known as Trump’s last stand.

Commentators, even those favorable to the Republicans, admit that this is the one event history is likely to associate with Donald Trump’s presidency. Others fear that the events of January 6 were simply the initial skirmish of a struggle that will play out with growing anarchy over the months and even years to come, in what may be a muted civil war.

Some specific issues related to the riot will undoubtedly be addressed. Action will be taken to strengthen the protocols for the protection of public sites. The behavior and training of law enforcement and security personnel will be reviewed once again. But any of the specific issues will pale in significance to the growing awareness of the studied indifference to the concerns of the people on the part of those who make the laws, to say nothing of their corrupt complicity with the moneyed interests that have the means to influence, if not dictate, the laws. Given their level of education, the team Joe Biden has recruited should have the intellectual capacity to grasp these issues. Will it be able to summon the resolve to deal with them?

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

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Flashpoint America: What the Hell Is Happening?

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 17:59:13 GMT

What the hell is happening in the US? Let’s rattle off some of the obvious: political intractability, sectarian entrenchment, tribal mentality, partisan violence, radicalization, conspiracy theories, reality deficits and even an attempted coup d’état. As strategic intelligence and foreign policy professionals, most of us have spent our careers assessing conditions abroad. What we commonly look to identify are the political, security and economic environment that allows us to measure the relative stability of a specific country or region.

From there, we develop baselines that hypothetically stress these conditions, indicating the potential for instability. When these conditions exist in prolonged disparity, indicators and warnings start to present themselves. Sometimes, they are glaring and obvious; other times, they are subtle and nuanced. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that the indicators and warnings have been flashing red for some time in the United States.

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This is not to say that domestic intelligence and policy professionals spread across federal and local law enforcement were completely oblivious to them but rather that self-assessment is the hardest form of assessment. Americans typically lack the ability to reflect inward and analyze their own biases, prejudices and subjectivity against the prevailing political, security and economic conditions, especially at home. The January 6 attack on the US Capitol proved this.

Knowing this — even when we won’t admit it — what are we looking for as we assess this new political and security reality? Nothing has changed the underlying conditions between the storming of US Congress and today, and with a third of Trump voters claiming sympathy with the attempted coup, we’re in for a rough road ahead. Assessing this situation as strategic intelligence and foreign policy professionals, however, gives us some insight to help structure our thinking for what might come next.

Political Intractability

Countries manifesting instability have moved past the point of political entrenchment into the realm of political intractability. The former is used by politicians seeking to legislate by obstruction, while the latter is driven by underlying grievances that have become too extreme to resolve. With millions of Trump loyalists and Republican lawmakers still beholden to a president who refuses to concede his defeat in a fair election, there are not many opportunities to seek effective political resolution — especially when one side refuses to accept the legitimacy of the incoming administration.

Democrats, on the other hand, are completely resolute in their plans to impeach Trump and remove him from office with little more than a week to go before his term officially ends. Neither party is willing to back down, and there is no mechanism at any level seeking meaningful de-escalation. This means tensions will remain elevated, grievances solidified and positions hardened, giving leaders on both sides an inordinate amount of power to antagonize around their own political goals and objectives. As we saw last week, the destructive power of this can be harnessed and directed with relative ease.

Law Enforcement Failures

One of the measurements we always gauge stability against is the competency of the security forces, including law enforcement and the military. There were so many law-enforcement and intelligence failures last week, that it is almost impossible to pick a starting point. In fact, one could make the argument that the failures were so extreme as to suggest complicity, which might prove true in time.

As we now know, intelligence was discarded and ignored. In just one example, an FBI field office in Virginia issued an internal memo on January 5, warning that radicalized extremists were headed to the capital to commit “war.” As The Washington Post reported, “Yet even with that information in hand, the report’s unidentified author expressed concern that the FBI might be encroaching on free speech rights.” The shocking implicit bias inherent in the author’s assessment points to the absolute failure in accurately identifying contemporary threats of this nature.

In addition, there are now currently two Capitol Police officers suspended and 10 more under investigation. We have all seen the videos of cops taking selfies with the rioters, opening gates and providing assistance in the halls of Congress. This failure is not just tactical. It would be naive to believe that the same politics that powered the events of January 6 are not working their way through law enforcement agencies across the country — more so since Trump has unreservedly backed the police during the Black Lives Matter protests this summer. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that cops from Virginia, Washington and Pennsylvania are currently under investigation for being part of the Capitol Hill insurrection.

Reality Deficits

Communications and the media, especially when it comes to social networking platforms, are the forward edge of all modern conflict dynamics and play a key role in the stability of a nation in crisis, either reassuring anxious citizens or agitating the same population into action. We are now locked into an endless cycle of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda, pushed by media channels and social networks that are fueling vast conspiracy theories such as QAnon. These so-called filter bubbles have become so extreme that they have distorted reality, compelled radicalization and created an echo-chamber lifestyle for those who feel politically disposed of.

Politicians openly supporting QAnon have been voted into office. One such politician has even been accused of tweeting the exact location of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the storming of Congress. Unfortunately, as we learned during the propaganda war with the Islamic State, the advantage is always with the home team. While shutting down social media channels is a temporary solution, it does not address the root causes of radicalization and only increases the sense of grievance, forcing these networks into new digital spaces that are harder to monitor. Indeed, since last Wednesday, extremists have already moved to encrypted messaging apps like Telegram to plan new actions ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration next week.

White Supremacy

Assessing ideologies unique to specific countries and regions is an important tool in measuring stability. Here in the US, there is no more malignant and pervasive ideology than white supremacy. There is a reason why newly elected Republican Representative Mary Miller, one day before the coup, felt comfortable giving a speech on the steps of Congress positively referencing Adolf Hitler.

Everything that cascades from white supremacy, including white grievance, remains the single largest threat the US currently faces. In a report from October, the Department of Homeland Security said that white supremacists “remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland.” In November, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published a report identifying that 41 of 61 terrorist plots and attacks recorded in the first eight months of this year were perpetrated by white supremacists. All of this indicates that right-wing extremists continue to have the motivation to plan and execute acts of violence.

Since President Donald Trump is heavily invested in the politics of white supremacy and, given the intersection it shares with conspiracy theories over his election loss, there is nothing to suggest that this kind of extremist violence will abate any time soon. Furthermore, law enforcement does not have a particularly strong track record in disrupting threats that originate with white supremacist groups, even going back to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. This is in stark contrast to the nearly 1,000 recorded incidents of police violence against the Black Lives Matter protesters just last summer, indicating a heavy bias in assessing threats from groups such as these.

Economic Hardship

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Economic anxiety is a potent motivator in driving instability, if not its single most important indicator. It is important to remember that the events on Capitol Hill took place against the backdrop of the pandemic, economic hardship and a government paralyzed by intractability. Almost 22 million Americans have lost their jobs due to COVID-19, and the Pew Research Center found at the end of September that half of those people still remain unemployed.

While the coronavirus remains politically neutral, the economic messaging between the two sides has been deeply partisan and tribal, casting both as victims of the other. Nothing raises the stakes for instability like people believing their lost livelihood is the fault of another group. Combine this with the government’s horrifying mismanagement of the pandemic, a nonsensical economic assistance package and ongoing conspiracies surrounding the virus, and you have all of the ingredients for continued tensions and hostility among different factions of the political spectrum.

There are traditions and customs that have proven effective against future instability. These include the military acknowledging the rightful transition of power, the courts upholding the rule of law and election officials not succumbing to executive pressure to alter election results. But these safeguards are only as good as the people behind them, and without any national platform to de-escalate and with tensions at this level, the potential for overreach and miscalculation is unavoidable. Should there be another spectacular event like the coup attempt of January 6, then groups on both sides will retreat deeper into fringe positions where their only recourse will be more violence as a means of perceived self-protection.

Each of these indicators and their subsequent warnings alone would be enough to raise the worry levels of a strategic intelligence or foreign policy professional assessing a volatile situation abroad. Unfortunately for us, this time, the turbulence is not in some faraway place, but at home.

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

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Brexit Trade Deal Brings Temporary, If Not Lasting, Relief

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 14:23:24 GMT

“What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning.” So said Ursula van der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, announcing the completion of Brexit negotiations on Christmas Eve, quoting from T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” the final quartet of his last great poem. Van der Leyen’s words perfectly capture the defining trait of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA): It is a platform for further ambition in cross-border partnership between the UK and EU rather than a ceiling on current ambitions.

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Relief was the predominant emotion amongst the business community on both sides of the Channel before the New Year. Now that the dust has settled and attention has turned to the detail of the deal reached, there should be no illusions that the TCA ends EU-UK negotiations. We set out below what, in high-level terms, the TCA means for EU-UK trade in goods and services, and where there are gaps to fill and questions to still be answered over the coming months and years.

What Does the TCA Mean for Trade in Goods?

Firstly, the good news. Under the TCA, there are no tariffs or quotas on cross-border trade in qualifying goods between the United Kingdom and the European Union. In this regard, the TCA goes further than any EU trade agreement negotiated with a third country. This is a hugely positive outcome for businesses with UK and EU supply chains, particularly in sectors such as the automotive and agri-food industries, where tariffs imposed on so-called World Trade Organization terms under a no-deal Brexit would have been high.

However, it is crucial for those involved in cross-border trade to appreciate that only goods that are of EU or UK origin benefit from zero tariffs and zero quotas under the TCA. Rules of origin are a key component of every trade agreement and determine the “economic nationality” of products. Under the TCA, a product will attract a tariff if a certain percentage (beyond a “tolerance level”) of its pre-finished value or components are not of either UK or EU origin. The tolerance levels vary from product to product and require careful analysis. Therefore, businesses will need to understand the originating status of all the goods they trade between the UK and the EU to ensure they benefit from the zero tariffs and quotas under the agreement. Businesses will also need to ensure that their supply chains understand the new self-certification procedures to prove the origin of goods.

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Beyond the qualified good news on tariffs and quotas, the deal is less helpful in that full regulatory approvals are required for goods being imported into the EU from the UK and vice versa. While in certain important sectors (automotive, chemicals and pharmaceuticals) the UK and the EU agreed on specific rules to reduce technical barriers to trade, the UK government did not achieve its longstanding negotiating objective of securing broad mutual recognition on product standards.

Therefore, from January 1, 2021, all products exported from the EU to the UK will have to comply with the UK’s technical regulations and will be subject to any applicable regulatory compliance checks and controls. Similarly, all products imported from the UK to the EU will need to comply with EU technical regulations and will be subject to all applicable regulatory compliance obligations, checks and controls.

There will also be specific changes to food and plant safety standards under the TCA. UK agri-food exporters will have to meet all EU sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) import requirements with immediate effect. In this sector, UK exports will be subject to official controls carried out by member state authorities at border control posts. Similarly, EU agri-food exporters will have to meet all UK SPS import requirements, following certain phase-in periods the UK government has provided.

Far from being a “bonfire of red tape” promised by certain advocates of Brexit before the 2016 referendum, the TCA introduces a “bonanza of new red tape” for businesses who wish to sell their products in both UK and EU markets. On January 8, UK Cabinet Office minister, Michael Gove, acknowledged that there would be “significant additional disruption” at UK borders over the coming weeks as a result of customs changes and regulatory checks.

What Does the TCA Mean for Trade in Services?

As has been widely noted by commentators, the deal on services is far thinner than on goods. More than 40% of the UK’s exports to the EU are services, and the sector accounts for around 80% of the UK’s economic activity. As an inevitable consequence of leaving the EU single market, UK service suppliers will lose their automatic right to offer services across the union. UK business will have to comply with a patchwork of complex host-country rules which vary from country to country and may need to establish themselves in the EU to continue operating. Many have already done so.

The level of market access will also depend on the way the service is supplied. There are four “modes” for this. Services can be supplied on a cross-border basis from the home country of the supplier, for example over the internet; to the consumer in the country of the supplier, such as a tourist traveling abroad and purchasing services; via a locally-established enterprise owned by the foreign service supplier; or through the temporary presence in the territory of another country by a service supplier who is a natural person.

All of this means that UK-established businesses will need to look at domestic regulations on service access in each EU member state in which they seek to operate, and vice versa for EU-established businesses seeking market access in the UK.

A Basis for Ongoing Negotiations

The TCA does not mark the end of EU-UK negotiations, and in some areas these discussions start immediately. For example, the agreement has provided an end to so-called passporting of financial services under which banks, insurers and other financial service firms authorized in the UK had automatic right to access EU markets and vice versa.

The EU and the UK have committed to agree on a memorandum of understanding that will establish a framework of regulatory cooperation in financial services by March this year. With an end to passporting, it is likely that there will be more friction in cross-border financial services, but the extent of that friction depends on the outcome of future negotiations between EU and UK governments and regulators.

To take another example of importance to the UK economy, the TCA does not provide for the automatic mutual recognition of professional qualifications. As of January 1, UK nationals, irrespective of where they acquired their qualifications, and EU citizens with qualifications acquired in the UK, will need to have their qualifications recognized in the relevant EU member state on the basis of that state’s domestic rules. However, the TCA leaves the door open for the EU and the UK to agree on additional arrangements in the future for the mutual recognition of qualifications, something that professional bodies will be pushing for immediately.

Whilst there has been understandable relief from politicians, businesses and populations on both sides of the Channel suffering from Brexit fatigue that a deal — any deal — has been reached, the sheer extent to which the TCA envisages ongoing negotiations between the UK and the EU on issues both large and small over the months and years ahead has not been widely appreciated.

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

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Who Is Nancy Pelosi Enabling?

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 19:48:34 GMT

Along with Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was one of the politicians most directly concerned by last week’s assault on Congress. Her own office was ravaged. The marauders sought her whereabouts as she was being evacuated. Assessing the damage in the aftermath of the mayhem, Pelosi could begin to comprehend the truly evil intent of the insurrectionists. On Sunday, she described the invasion of the Capitol as the work of “a well-planned, organized group with leadership and guidance and direction. And the direction was to go get people.”

We now know that she was a prime target alongside Pence, whom the crowd was seeking to lynch. In other words, it wasn’t a protest or an occupation, but a potentially murderous assault on lawmakers.

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Most analysts focused on the rioters themselves and the link with President Donald Trump, who commanded the crowd to gather at the Capitol and prepare for a fight. Pelosi peered further into the evil plot, demonstrating an investigative acuity worthy of Sherlock Holmes. Not only did she connect the threads dangling for the past four years inside the brains of prominent Democrats — a list that includes Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer and herself — her far-sighted global perspicacity bore its most compelling fruit when she identified the Moriarty of the tale, the hidden ringleader no one in Washington or the media dared mention, but only she could suspect: Vladimir Putin.

On her congressional website, Pelosi laid out in detail her impeccable logic: “And the message that it sent to the world, a complete tool of Putin, this President is. Putin’s goal was to diminish the role of — the view of democracy in the world. That’s what he has been about. And, again, his enabler has been Donald Trump for a long time.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Enabler:

A useful idiot who only exists to do the bidding of the true puppet master responsible (in a paranoid person’s imagination) for everything considered wrong with the world.

Contextual Note

On her website, Pelosi added a few more details to cement her claim: “That’s why I said in that photo when I’m leaving his meeting, ‘With you, Mr. President, all roads lead to Putin.’ Putin wants to undermine democracy. That’s what he’s about domestically and internationally. And the President gave him the biggest of all of his many gifts to Putin, the biggest gift, yesterday.”

If politics, especially in Washington, has become incorrigibly hyperreal, there are times when, thanks to voices like Pelosi’s, it also becomes surreal. Many members of last week’s mob were agitated by their quasi-religious belief in the conspiratorial ravings of QAnon. All were motivated by the belief that President Trump had charged them with a mission to restore order (by creating disorder). Inside the building were people like Pelosi, Schiff and Schumer, who have long been entertaining their own conspiracy theory. Four years on, that repeated mantra known as Russiagate has come to resemble a mental disorder.

As a significant segment of the American population was intent on demonstrating not just “who we are” (Joe Biden’s expressed concern) but “how we think” (irrationally) and “how we behave” (rowdily), Pelosi was turning the investigation of a crime into a casus belli, a call for war with Russia. This suggests that the soon-to-be-enthroned Biden administration, well stocked with militaristic hawks, may be tempted to be the tail that wags the dog, promoting a costly and risky new Cold War leveled not against Trump’s declared enemies, Iran and Venezuela, but against the nation whose economy and system of oligarchy was put in place and managed by American advisers, consultants and spies.

Donald Trump’s seditious criminal actions last week should not be understated. Though Republicans deny the gravity of Trump’s role, AP correctly describes it in these terms: “The mob got explicit marching orders from Trump and still more encouragement from the president’s men.” The article quotes Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s exhortation, “Let’s have trial by combat.” It mentions the active role former Trump associate Roger Stone and National Security Adviser Michael Flynn played in instructing the crowds to fight “a battle between good and evil.”

Pelosi’s fantasy that Donald Trump’s motives boiled down to fulfilling Putin’s designs clearly belongs to the realm of conspiracy theories. That Russian or Chinese leaders might have a feeling of schadenfreude as they watched the events unfold would surprise no one. But hinting at a causal connection is not just irresponsible but a symptom of psychosis. Does the 25^th Amendment apply to the speaker of the House? If American voters are condemned to selecting which of the two parties’ conspiracy theories they prefer as the basis of the policy they will be governed by, it is fair to say that the decline of US democracy is nearly complete.

Historical Note

The richly diplomaed Democrats at the highest level of national politics know for a fact that Russia is no longer the communist Soviet Union. But they also appear to believe that the Americans who vote for them haven’t yet caught up with the news. The occasional Freudian slip made even by people in the intelligence community reveals that Americans are still prone to categorizing Russia as the ideological enemy of the US. The reflexes spread through the media for half a century during the Cold War still exist. Politicians who see the advantage of appealing to those reflexes will not hesitate to do so.

Every administration since the end of World War II has required the existence of a stable enemy that the media could highlight and instill in people’s minds as the principal threat to the integrity of US democracy, if only to justify the increasingly bloated military budget. This has never been more true than over the past two decades, in which the amount spent by the Pentagon has in reality — when something called “adjustments” are taken into account — consistently exceeded by as much as a multiple of three the allocated budget.

This week, in an interview with Lee Camp, the economist Mark Skidmore explained how the audit he conducted with Laurence Kotlikoff revealed that over a 15-year period, the Defense Department had effectively spent $21 trillion that appeared in its accounts in the category of adjustments.

Kotlikoff admitted that the team of auditors was “left with having to decide whether or not we ‘trust’ that government authorities are sharing accurate information.” He added that “Greater transparency is needed to re-establish public trust. Instead, we are blocked from accessing any further information.”

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Given this betrayal of trust, should anyone be surprised that large segments of the US population refuse to believe the statistics presented to them by the government and the media? The rioters on Capitol Hill knew nothing about the scandal of the Pentagon’s true budget. They believed, thanks to Trump’s lies, that the election had been rigged. But their action reflects a more general breakdown in the trust Americans now have in their institutions.

If the real budget of the Pentagon is closer to $2 trillion than to the $740 billion voted on at the end of December, it would be true to say that Congress and the House majority leader, Nancy Pelosi, have been playing the role of “enabler” of a monumental fraud that has consequences far beyond the dickering of the two parties over fictional budgets. The true accounting gives us an idea of the real cost of a military presence across the entire globe. The Pentagon’s figures dwarf the amounts allocated to social needs. It isn’t only about dollars, but about trust. The US now has no choice but to see enemies everywhere, which means paranoia has become the norm.

As the Trump White House gives way to the Biden regime and new questions of how many trillions of dollars will be required for a new stimulus, the population will be expecting a new transparency based on something that reflects tangible reality rather than fictional plots. Every new administration promises to rebuild public trust. Trump said he would clear the swamp but simply made the air around it poisonous. Building trust is easier to accomplish when leaders agree to rid themselves of their dependence on paranoid delusions.

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

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2021 Is the Year to Make Peace With Our Planet

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 15:54:59 GMT

It’s time we all make peace with our planet — you and me, parents, professionals, leaders and the upcoming generation. All of us have to make 2021 the Year of Peace. Here’s why: We’re at war with our planet. Even if we declare a truce today and start to live more sustainably, it will take decades, if not centuries, for Earth to recover.

COVID-19, now responsible for nearly 2 million deaths worldwide, emerged because of habitat encroachment and destruction. Meanwhile, the last decade was the hottest on record, while events like hurricanes and raging wildfires increased in frequency and intensity because of climate change. Air pollution now kills 9 million people every year. The concrete, metal, plastic, bricks and asphalt we produce now weighs more than all living things on our planet.

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In our oceans, two-thirds of commercially harvested fish species are overexploited. By 2030, there will be more plastic than fish in the sea. Coastlines are eroding, and cities are sinking as sea levels rise. Mangroves and reefs that ordinarily protect them are either being cut down or are dying from climate-induced changes like rising sea temperatures. Because of the greenhouse gasses pouring into the atmosphere every day, our planet is heading for a 3˚C to 5˚C rise in global temperatures that will wreak havoc on our health, wealth and world.

Living out of balance with the environment is culminating in a pressing existential crisis. Instead, imagine waking up every morning in 2021 with the intention to make peace with the planet. Each of us can be the change we need by pushing our leaders in the public and private sectors to be better stewards of the Earth. With that in mind, here’s my New Year’s resolution. These are the four actions I will ardently advocate leaders take to help us all make peace.

Go Green

Investing in green infrastructure can solve our energy and infrastructure needs while restoring biodiversity, which has suffered over recent decades. Nature-based solutions such as using dunes and marshes to protect our coastlines shield us equally or better than sea walls. Simultaneously, these can help us meet Paris Climate Agreement targets by reducing global atmospheric carbon emissions by up to one-third. It is cheaper to build a renewable energy power plant than it is to operate an old coal one. We won’t just see benefits for our health and environment. Such investments come with substantial financial opportunities. The UN estimates that green technologies can create at least 18 million jobs worldwide.

Pay Your Fair Share

We need to connect global finance with climate risks. 2021 will be an excellent year for financial markets to finally start aligning investments with their actual costs and benefits to people and the planet. Companies across the globe will soon be required to disclose their climate risks to the public. It starts on the London Stock Exchange in January 2021. In March, the EU’s new disclosure regulations on sustainability come into force. The incoming US administration is heading in the same direction.

I say put the costs of planetary destruction and pollution where it belongs — on those who cause it. To get out ahead of what’s assuredly coming, companies should start the new year by investing in climate risk disclosures and environmental, social and corporate governance actions. For those who don’t proactively get on board with this movement, 2021 and 2022 could prove to be a tougher slog than it needs to be.

Be Nicer to Your Neighbors

We share this planet with a rich tapestry of wildlife. But biodiversity is in crisis, and we need to help. We can do this by increasing the number and size of nature reserves, helping endangered species recover and by supporting sustainable nature-based livelihoods like fishing and forestry. The good news is that these kinds of investments do double duty by combating climate change while bolstering species. For instance, forest restoration helps reduce carbon emissions: A single tree can sequester 4 kilograms of carbon annually.

Our human neighbors could use some similar kindness. Low-lying island nations are bearing the brunt of climate change, and some are sinking before our eyes. Yet less developed countries have few resources to meet these challenges, and adaptation funding only makes up 20% of all climate funding. Even in the most advanced nations, we choose to leave many communities behind. Social equity and environmental justice must be part of our New Year’s resolution.

Lose the Excess Carbon Weight

2021 is an ideal year to lose those atmospheric carbon dioxide love handles. To get on that diet, nations must agree on a timeframe and plan to become carbon neutral. The UK, China and several other countries have already made the pledge, but this has to be an all-in agreement. Our ability to create viable COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year should give us confidence that, once we put our minds to it, we can find workable solutions to our energy and societal needs that don’t require us to burden the planet with more CO2 pollution.

There are many ways business leaders and governments can make peace with the planet in 2021. But there’s also plenty we can do as individuals. I intend to make peace with the planet by choosing wise and compassionate actions, from how I spend money to which places I visit and what leaders and causes I support. Aligning action with intent will build inner peace and a better world. Peace, after all, comes with choosing to do what is right.

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

The post 2021 Is the Year to Make Peace With Our Planet appeared first on Fair Observer.

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

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 12:30:45 GMT

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

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

Policies, Principles, People

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

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

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

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

Product and Place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*[Fair Observer is a media partner of Young Professionals in Foreign Policy.]

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

The post In China’s Net City, Opportunity Comes at Uncertain Costs appeared first on Fair Observer.

Death of an Insurrection Salesman

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 17:34:31 GMT

Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, formerly a rising star in his party, gambled dangerously with what he believed was the considerable political capital he had accumulated thanks to his image of a populist — a conservative fighting for the cause of the people. In recent weeks, Hawley even teamed up with Bernie Sanders in his crusade to get Congress to issue a $1,200 check to every American. Hawley’s strategy was clear: He was positioned as the youthful heir to Donald Trump’s legacy, a more serious privileged Republican capable of resonating with the vibes of the working class.

What better way to consolidate his image than to demonstrate his unbending loyalty to a waning and helpless Donald Trump? The calculation made sense on the purely strategic level. But the son of a banker who launched his career as a lawyer thanks to diplomas from Stanford and Yale will always be unlikely to break free from his status as a captive of the cultural elite he hails from. Like Trump, though clearly better educated, Hawley is a calculating egoist and a faux populist.

To bridge the gap between the elite he represents and the working class he hoped to seduce, Hawley made one gamble too many. He earned quite a few brownie points with the working class when he challenged some of the monopolies that dominate not just the US and international economy, but also its political culture. But when he decided to prove his commitment to the enthusiasts who regard Trump as the messiah by backing and actively promoting Trump’s refusal to concede the election, his misunderstanding of the movement he was hoping to seduce caused his strategy to explode in his face.

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NBC summed it up with this headline: “Sen. Josh Hawley becomes a pariah on Capitol Hill.” Things quickly got worse. The publisher Simon and Schuster has canceled the publication of Hawley’s book, “The Tyranny of Big Tech,” which was intended to bolster his position as a bold reformer. Hawley, a constitutional lawyer and former attorney general of Missouri, feels morally offended. He has promised to take this profound injustice to court. He sees it not only as a violation of his constitutional rights under the First Amendment but also as proof that the nation has succumbed to the forces of evil and become the dystopia described by George Orwell in his 1949 novel, “1984.”

In his tweet denouncing Simon and Schuster Hawley complained: “This could not be more Orwellian. I was representing my constituents, leading a debate on the Senate floor on voter integrity, which they have now decided to rebrand as sedition.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Voter integrity:

The sacred principle at the core of a democracy that the manipulation of elections is only legitimate when the party that stands for the true values of the nation conducts that manipulation.

Contextual Note

Hawley’s crime was unquestionably gross. He intended to use supposedly serious constitutional reasoning to justify a thesis that was nothing more than a conspiracy theory spread by a narcissist to whom a lot of people had vowed their loyalty. Worse, the entire nation was by then aware that the Barnumesque charade led by Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani since the November election had seriously compromised a transition that every sane person knew was necessary for the stability of the government and political continuity. Most Trump supporters were resigned to seeing Biden take over while maintaining the hope that Trump might run again in 2024.

But Hawley was so committed to his own cause that he failed to see how it would inevitably and tragically spin out of control. And when the tragedy unfolded, all he could offer was the absurdly comic show of indignation that has so often been used in the past by conservative Republicans. He complained that he was being deprived of his First Amendment rights. Because Hawley’s complaint was about a book, he could at least demonstrate that he knew something about books by qualifying his publisher’s crime as Orwellian.

Hawley has now been hauled over the coals on Twitter by commentators who point out that as a constitutional lawyer, he appears ignorant of the meaning of the First Amendment. It restricts governments from suppressing citizens’ expression, but not private enterprises from making business decisions. The moral of the story: Every tragic moment in US politics has its moment of comic relief.

Historical Note

In the wake of what is now referred to as the Capitol Hill insurrection, The New York Times highlights the dilemma of the post-Trump Republican Party. The Times cites Republican Senator John Thune of South Dakota: “The gulf between Republican leaders and their grass-roots activists has never been wider since the start of the Trump era.”

Hawley was hoping to bridge that gap, as have many of the younger “populist Republicans,” including serious media commentators such as Saagar Enjeti and Rachel Bovard. At the core of their ideology was the hope that the party that had always represented the financial and business elite could, thanks to Trump’s success in 2016, convince the working class that the party had their concerns at heart.

What the articulate theoreticians of the new populist Republican Party had not realized is that the basis for Trump’s seduction of the working class was little more than its blatant anti-intellectualism. Reminding us today of what he demonstrated in his book, “Democracy and Ideology,” Thomas Piketty points to the historical trend that has seen left-wing parties of the past, representing the working class, lose all connection with their former constituency. Today’s Democratic voters are, in their majority, well-educated suburbanites. Piketty has noted the same trends in the UK, France and elsewhere.

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Hawley and populist Republicans like Enjeti, Bovard and Marshall Kosloff believe that their party, long identified with free market capitalism, can simply morph into the political force that will support small business by steadfastly opposing big business. Somewhat romantically, they see that as the ultimate goal of the working class. The reasoning, like Hawley’s, is strategic. After all, if the Democratic Party could shift from being Franklin Roosevelt’s radical reform movement to becoming the respectful partner of Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Oil and all the monopolistic enterprises that have become the core of the US economy, why shouldn’t the Republican Party take up the slack and win elections by promising to improve the lives of the working class? The problem is that, whether it’s Trump, Hawley or Ted Cruz, the elite culture of their proponents has never been one that delivers on its promises.

The Times highlights the splintering of the Republican Party as Trump prepares to leave the White House. The Gray Lady doesn’t appear as willing to recognize a similar truth about the Democratic Party. Both parties have historically neglected the working class. Trump was a Republican outlier, a TV celebrity who got the attention of the working class and created the hope among party stalwarts that his voters would become loyal to the Republican Party. Bernie Sanders had demonstrated that it was possible for the Democrats, but the party’s core of corporate loyalists made sure that couldn’t happen.

And yet that opportunity for the Democratic Party is far more credible than the idea that a Trump, Cruz or Hawley can turn the GOP into the haven of the working class. The vast majority of Democratic voters support single-payer health care, ending the forever wars and taking radical action to reduce wealth and income inequality. They scoff at the presumption of Nancy Pelosi, who says, “We’re capitalists and that’s the way it is.” Pelosi is undoubtedly a capitalist in her thinking and in her lifestyle, but who is she referring to as “we?” All Americans? All Democrats? Or is she thinking of the members of Congress, who, in effect, can only run and win a political campaign by appealing to real capitalists for money?

2021 will be year two of the reign of COVID-19, which may eventually be defeated by vaccine. It will most likely also be the year when the twin towers known as the Republican and Democratic parties reveal the extent of the damage done through acts committed by their own overly strategic and insufficiently observant politicians.

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

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A Perspective on America’s Imperfect Democracy

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 15:15:49 GMT

It is a well-established fact that America, as it approaches its 245^th birthday, is a divided nation. Red versus blue, conservative versus liberal, right versus left, black versus white, rich versus (a growing number of) poor, urban versus rural. Further divisions may be drawn along education, religion, class, gender identity, ethnicity, language of origin and other descriptors.

It was all on technicolor display on January 6, the day when both the US Senate and the House of Representatives were due to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election as required under the US Constitution. The world watched as Americans, so passionately aligned with President Donald Trump and so convinced that the election had been stolen from him, determined to disrupt, if not destroy, the most sacred core of the country’s democratic system, the Congress.

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It was a horrifying and tragic example of democracy run amuck. What took place on Capitol Hill that day was everything the framers of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers sought to prevent. In fact, the rioters’ actions by no definition can be remotely described as democratic. They were purposefully dangerous and, as facts come to light, intended to inflict violence. It was mob rule. Insurrection. Rebellion. Sedition. It represented the abandonment of democracy and descent into anarchy.

Compared to What?

But before America’s critics, doubters, adversaries and enemies pronounce the country’s or its democracy’s last rites, they may wish to consult history. They may wish to reflect on the many other occasions when the world’s oldest democracy turned away from its constitution, its values, principles and its own laws. How does January 6 then compare?

How does it compare with more than 250 years of legalized slavery that only a bloody, four-year civil war could end? Or to another 150 years of Jim Crow and segregation? Of course, there were also the more than 120 unspeakable incidents of mass violence committed against the country’s black citizens, including the Slave Revolt in the Cherokee Nation of 1842, the New York Draft Riots of 1863, Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, Rosewood Massacre of 1923, Charlestown Church Massacre of 2015 and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of last summer, on top of the 3,400-plus lynchings of black Americans in the period after the Civil War until well into the civil rights era.

And would January 6 look more uncivil and unconstitutional than the systematic theft of Native American lands in violation of all the treaties signed by them with the US government and often their forced removal from those lands? These date back to the nation’s independence and continue to this day.

To add tragic irony to those two sets of gross injustice, consider that substantial numbers of black and Native Americans fought valiantly to defend the very country and democracy that treated them as second-class citizens and often worse. At the start of World War II, the US government ordered Japanese Americans rounded up and confined in internment camps for the duration of the war. They committed no crime. They were given no trial. Yet despite the violation of their constitutional rights, 33,000 of the sons, husbands and brothers of those held in the internment camps volunteered to fight for the United States in the war, including 18,000 in the famed 442^nd Regimental Combat Team, a highly decorated all-Japanese-American Army unit led by white officers.

There is also the country’s long history of denial of rights to and prejudice against other ethnic and religious groups, including Irish, Germans, Italians, Jews, Catholics, Chinese, Vietnamese, Muslims, Hispanics and other people of color. They learned that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights did not always apply to them. Furthermore, when they may have belatedly come to be accepted, restitution has rarely been offered.

How does all this compare with January 6, however despicable and detestable that event may have been? In view of these and so many other imperfections manifested throughout its history, America looks less like the “shining city on a hill” than a shadowy ghetto of hypocrisy. January 6 is just one more example and maybe not the most egregious.

No Auto-Pilot in Democracy

Yet the nation’s founders understood that the republic they were creating was an experiment. It was one based on the consent of the governed, a novel concept for the mid-18^th century. They likely saw that a nation as large and diverse as it was in 1776 would only become larger and more diverse with time. The truly remarkable risk they took, however, was betting on the idea that the Constitution and a set of laws could define and unify a nation, as opposed to race, religion or language — another first in human history.

Since then, tens of millions of immigrants have risked their lives and futures, and those of their descendants, on the same idea. And new risk-takers continue to do so today. Last Wednesday and the annals of American history suggest that that idea is sometimes a mere aspiration. But it appears to be one with an irresistible attraction.

It should be no surprise that a man-made system, whatever its noble aspirations and claims to righteousness, might fall short from time to time, or even a lot. It is, after all, a nation of human beings prone to imperfection, individually and collectively. America has no special claim on perfection.

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Moreover, a system as fragile as democracy requires constant maintenance and vigilance. It is never self-sustaining. Institutions and, most importantly, the people must attend, defend, revise, perfect and strengthen it continually. Citizens of courage may be called upon from time to time to make heroic acts and sacrifice to defend it. There is no auto-pilot in a democracy.

Those who participated in last week’s anarchy lost sight of America’s democracy. They cast aside a system purposely designed, however imperfectly, to allow for change, in exchange for change by violence. They failed. Despite the mob’s violent rampage, the House and the Senate returned to their chambers that same evening and proceeded to exercise their constitutional duty to certify the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the next president and vice-president of the United States. There would be no Reichstag fire in the United States in 2021.

Moreover, almost lost amidst all the noise of these events, just one day before, voters in Georgia, the heartland of the old Confederacy, elected, for the first time, a black man and a Jew to represent the state in the US Senate. Georgians showed up in record numbers at the polls or through mail-in ballots to express the “consent of the governed.” Voting officials and volunteers diligently managed the entire process without incident so that the voices of the people of Georgia would be heard and counted. The quiet courage of citizens attending to their democracy stifled the mob violence at the US Capitol.

January 6 surely should be a day that no American or citizen of any democracy should ever forget. It is a starkly painful reminder of human weakness and the fragility of democracy. Clearly, Americans should consider speaking more humbly of their “model” democracy. Their country is living proof that even after nearly 250 years, their experiment is still very much a work in progress.

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

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Is There a Path to Redemption for Mitch McConnell?

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 20:18:12 GMT

Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is famously a man of institutions. Even a brief stint of four years as a resident of Kentucky was enough for me to learn how well he knows the levers of power. Outsiders wondering why Kentucky reelects him by double-digit margins need to study the way he maneuvers bills through Congress to bring billions of tax dollars back home. Even if you disagree with his politics, you cannot help but admire his genius in managing his caucus to push a conservative agenda by staying within the bounds of the Constitution. He knows that the gall of Trump supporters storming the Capitol this week is an indelible blot on his illustrious career.

This is one for the history books. The only other time US Congress has been attacked since independence was in 1814, by the British. A student of history and acutely self-aware, McConnell imbibed the gravitas of his office, aware that, perhaps because of his lack of charisma, Senate majority leadership was his calling. After he won his long-coveted prize in 2015, he made it count. In addition to making Bush-era tax cuts permanent and reducing corporate tax cuts, he remade the federal judiciary in his own image. Most famously, through unsavory yet constitutional means, he thwarted President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland’s to the Supreme Court and got three nominees sworn in to tighten conservative grip on the highest court of the land.

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On the one hand, McConnell cast the deciding vote and spoke eloquently to uphold Americans’ right to burn the national flag under the First Amendment. On the other, he cynically exploited Donald Trump as a useful idiot for four years, willfully ignoring the president’s majoritarian rhetoric and race-baiting. One could grudgingly admit that there was nothing wrong in McConnell supporting Trump’s constitutional right to challenge vote counts and electoral procedures in various states. As a true originalist, he finally stood on the Senate floor on January 6 to declare that “The framers built the Senate to stop short-term passions from boiling over and melting the foundations of our republic.” Little did he know that those same passions were boiling over just outside his chamber and were about to interrupt one of those foundations — the peaceful transfer of power.

As an Indian-American who spent most of his childhood in the 1980s and 1990s India, I grew up seeing political violence around me. While the peaceful transfer of power remains a remarkable and admirable anomaly, election campaigns were often marred by members of opposing parties clashing in the streets. On election days, thugs would occasionally capture voting booths by force to stuff ballot boxes. The state of Punjab, followed by Jammu and Kashmir, witnessed bloody Pakistan-backed insurgencies. Terrorist attacks around the country would often lead to Hindu-Muslim violence. Unruly behavior in state legislatures, often by elected representatives, was not uncommon.

One could countenance these as baby steps of a fledgling republic. An inefficient and corrupt judiciary allows some to break laws with impunity while it pushes the disadvantaged to employ desperate measures for justice. Weak democratic institutions, lack of awareness about their importance due to dismal quality of education, colonial-era sociopolitical wounds — the underlying causes were a dime a dozen in India. With a long tradition of independent institutions, it was assumed that the United States had grown out of its anything-goes Wild West days.

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My initial fascination with America was limited to academic opportunities, infrastructure and prosperity the country offered. It didn’t take long to realize the bedrock constitutional principles that enabled it all. Many at the top of the power hierarchy still enjoy impunity, and racism is a long-festering wound, but the rule of law seems well established for those in the middle. On college campuses, in city halls and in state and national legislatures, I could see people passionately debate their rights and duties. Despite the bitter divisions following the contentious 2000 election, I saw the country rally behind George W. Bush after 9/11. The 2008-09 economic collapse brought the nation together again to rebuild with a shared sense of purpose.

That stable system was a source of inspiration. This was a forward-thinking country. By refusing to get bogged down by religious prejudices or historical baggage, Americans believed in writing their own destiny. Or so we thought, until Donald Trump brought it all to the brink of collapse. The scenes inside and outside the Capitol this week made the United States look like a banana republic.

In a country that prides itself on pioneering the separation of church and state, the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court are the only real temples. While President Trump has permanently besmirched the White House — and will most likely damage it even further in his remaining days in office — the Supreme Court has admirably protected its hallowed turf. Congress has repeatedly been found wanting. With his stint as Senate majority leader winding down, McConnell has earned an abominable asterisk: the only time in history when his fellow Americans, people of his own party, desecrated the temple he presided over.

We can only hope that Mitch McConnell realizes the price the republic is paying for his silence, not just domestically, but also on the international stage. Starting a new conservative political party that unequivocally condemns the behavior of President Trump and his supporters should be the first step on McConnell’s path to redemption.

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

The post Is There a Path to Redemption for Mitch McConnell? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Visible Cracks in the New American Order

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 18:46:03 GMT

Joe Biden has now officially been designated the 46^th president of the United States. He dislodged the quintessential political misfit, Donald Trump, who, before belatedly agreeing to “an orderly transition,” had engaged in a truly Satanic battle to overpower the institutions he was elected to defend as he attempted to install a regime of permanent chaos.

Biden is a skilled 20^th-century politician who, two decades into the 21^st century, follows the rules of the previous one. His public discourse never fails to remind us of the decorum affected by politicians in former times. Many Americans find Biden’s adherence to the values of a bygone era reassuring. But the dramatic events that took place on Capitol Hill on Wednesday demonstrate that, in today’s political card game, chaos still has a trump card to play and may even have the upper hand.

As the panic was raging, Biden stepped up to deliver a calm, realistic and responsible address to the nation. At the same moment, Trump, bunkered in the White House, was deviously maneuvering the forces of darkness while appearing to call for calm.

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Biden’s performance was credible, but just a bit too Bidenesque. After an effective litany of the noble targets victimized by the ongoing assault, the president-elect resorted to stale rhetorical clichés. He immediately deployed the standard expression Americans trot out whenever something shameful occurs: “That’s not who I am.” (We heard it only last week, when the latest “Karen” made headlines by falsely claiming that a black teenager had stolen her iPhone. Accused of racism, she countered: “That’s not who I am.”)

Wishing to defend the now sullied character of the nation, Biden reached for the same cliché: “The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect the true America, do not represent who we are.” He followed this up with his idealized vision of the nation’s identity: “America’s about honor, decency, respect, tolerance. That’s who we are. That’s who we’ve always been.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Who we are:

The imaginary self-image or ideal ego that Americans believe they must affirm when their actions reveal the true ambiguity of their character.

Contextual Note

Joe Biden’s public discourse has always been fraught with problems. He sounds reassuring but rarely convincingly sincere. In the past, he has been guilty of flagrant plagiarism. The young man who overcame his stutter may have perceived the risk of launching into unprepared discourse. He eventually learned to avoid danger by limiting his plagiarism to one of two things: either resorting to anonymously source and generally meaningless ideas, like “that’s not who we are,” or plagiarizing himself by obsessively repeating what he deems his wisest and sincerest sounding pronouncements.

In his speech on Wednesday, Biden predictably signaled the denouement of the drama on Capitol Hill with his now inevitable self-quotation: “There’s never been anything we can’t do, when we do it together.” This has been going on for at least two years, inciting us to mention this rhetorical tic in several columns starting in October 2019, then in August and November this year. On Wednesday, he even insisted on repeating it a second time, with added emphasis, only a few seconds after his first self-citation: “There’s never, ever, ever, ever, ever been a thing we’ve tried to do that when we’ve done it together, we’ve not been able to do it.”

The first problem with this supposedly profound thought is that it is demonstrably false. For example, the US hasn’t managed to win a war in many decades, though not for lack of trying (and producing millions of victims). The nation hasn’t managed to eradicate racism or slow down growing wealth and income inequality, but that may be because it has never really tried. Those familiar with any of Biden’s speeches expect it to end with another predictable locution: “God bless America. God protect our troops.” Why this insistence? Does Biden really think that militarism defines the nation? It’s as if his message is, “The troops are who we are.”

As president, if Biden really wishes to protect the troops, he could simply decide to bring them back from places like Iraq and Syria, where they have accomplished nothing, even while “doing it together.” In the meantime, the locals have requested repeatedly that those troops return home. But as an establishment Democrat, Biden prefers to delegate to God the task of protecting the soldiers’ lives because his task is to put them in harm’s way. In her failed primary campaign, Tulsi Gabbard, who served in the Middle East, made that point repeatedly. It led to Hillary Clinton accusing her of being a Russian tool.

Historical Note

American history tells a story somewhat different from Biden’s about “who we are.” To defend their aggression, some of the protesters remembered their school history lessons about the Boston Tea Party and the Revolutionary War. They could have reasonably countered with “This is who we are and always have been.”

Biden believes he can return the nation to its true identity, as a nation of decency, order and peace. In reality, the US has never sought stability, order and peace. Throughout its history, it has used disorder and “creative destruction” for the purpose of conquest and growth. Whether it was the capture of Africans to serve as slaves, the genocide of Native Americans or the more recent implanting of hundreds of military bases across the globe, the essential ingredient of order, as applied by American governments, has always been founded on the assertive use of force.

Militaristic empires have been known to prosper for centuries. The US empire is facing a different problem today. The political values that ensure the kind of unity Biden wishes to restore — “honor, decency, respect, tolerance” — are simply no longer shared by the people and no longer promoted by the media. Because of this confusion of values, the nation has become fragmented, perhaps not beyond repair, but definitely beyond the capacity of a politician who doesn’t dare to present a vision or a project of society capable of mobilizing the population to participate in. Lyndon Johnson’s “great society” and the social programs that accompanied it had a real impact. Johnson’s commitment to war undermined it.

One thing that has changed since Johnson is the rise of radical individualism, an inevitable consequence of the culture of the consumer society that was already well advanced. Consumer society logic has now infected politics. Voters are now treated by professional politicians as consumers rather than engaged citizens. Political parties have become mass marketing enterprises. In the voting booth, consumers select the merchandise that most appeals to them on the basis of the advertising they have been exposed to.

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Parties have become brands rather than vectors of political thought or even an ideology. This approach might work reasonably well if politics wasn’t also about the way power is distributed in society. People remain aware of power even when they don’t understand how it is structured. One reason for popular discontent is that having made their choice and finding that the product doesn’t meet their needs, they can’t just throw it away and buy something else.

The conjunction of an individualist culture and the structures of self-interested but well-organized economic and political power inevitably produced utterly unpredictable patterns of consumer behavior. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 proved to be one of those unpredictable outcomes. It revealed that society had reached a tipping point. Unpredictable outcomes had become the norm.

Observers are now mulling over the fate of the Republican Party after this week’s events. The GOP may be shattered to the core. The Democrats are just as profoundly fragmented, though that will become visible only in the coming months. And American society itself is much more fragmented than both parties. Trust in the parties — but also in the media, law enforcement, the electoral system and education — has withered. Republicans and Democrats get votes simply because there are no other choices. Politicians’ appeals to decency have become meaningless in an era of consumer narcissism fueled by commercial interests. The harsh reality is this: No one today is in a position to affirm “who we are.”

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

The post Visible Cracks in the New American Order appeared first on Fair Observer.

It’s Time to Put Guardrails in Place in Washington

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 17:23:09 GMT

Americans have historically been fond of pounding their chests when proclaiming US “exceptionalism,” believing that what happens elsewhere in the world doesn’t happen here. That was until Donald Trump came steamrolling in. His supporters’ storming of the US Capitol on Wednesday was a perfect capstone to his tumultuous and torturous presidency. At his direction, the insurrectionists briefly had their way with a legislative body woefully unprepared to be physically attacked.

Mind you, when the Black Lives Matter movement came to town some months ago, legions of police and national guardsmen dressed in full battle gear lined the streets and monuments of Washington. This time, for some unknown reason (perhaps because of the skin color of most Trump supporters?), all the guardsmen seemed prepared to do was direct traffic, as they were purposely left unarmed. If the Black Lives Matter protesters had attempted to do what the Trump mob did, no doubt many of them would have been shot on sight. Instead, most of Trump’s supporters walked casually back to their hotels without being touched by law enforcement, even though their assault on American democracy is unprecedented in our modern history.

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It should therefore come as no surprise that much of the rest of the world has reacted with a combination of shock, horror and laughter. Indeed, such things are not supposed to happen in America. Could anyone blame the rest of the world for now referring to the United States as a banana republic? Over the past four years, US polity has exhibited many of the behavioral qualities of such a republic, including blatant tribalism, extreme partisanship and unbridled corruption. Trump has ensured that its electoral process has been reduced to a litany of lies, name-calling, finger-pointing and endless spinning. He has proven that he will literally do anything to remain in power — a true sign of a dictator in the making.

Such behavior has for many years been within the cone of possibility, given the depths of partisanship that has come to define the American political process. It just never descended to the levels it has during the Trump era. Now that most Americans have been well and truly shocked at the result and realize that it really can — and now does — happen here, it is time to put some guardrails in place to help ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. That will, however, require meaningful action on the part of lawmakers. Fortunately, since the Democrats now control the White House and the Congress, it may actually be possible.

It is up to them to do something about it. As a start, pass laws making it illegal for any member of the US government to brazenly lie, publicly incite agitation or promote violence. When it happens in the future, prosecute them. Approve laws that require every presidential candidate to disclose their tax returns and strip presidents of immunity from prosecution while they are in office. Place greater limits on what lobbyists and special interest groups can do in the halls of Congress. Only time will tell whether the Democrats have the courage to pass and enforce laws that prevent those promoting the enabling environment to continue to run amok without penalty.

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America has dug itself into a very deep hole that will take many years, perhaps decades, to get out of. The question is, is it actually capable of doing so? One can now envision two terms to pass with a Democrat in the White House, but because the new Congress may squander the opportunity to do something truly meaningful, any good intentions may get lost in the ambitious legislative agenda Biden has in store.

But is there anything more important than preserving American nobility in the face of a crisis of confidence? The world needs an America it can believe in. America needs to invest real time, energy and resources in reestablishing the preeminence of truth and trust. It took generations to build it but just four years to destroy it.

Donald Trump’s tenure has proven just how low America can go, but it has also awakened the nation to the fact that if it veers just a little bit off course, the margins of error permit it to become just like so many other countries that never had the ability to proclaim exceptionalism in any form. If it can happen in America, it can certainly happen anywhere else. America must now prove to the world that it can pick itself up, dust itself off and stay on a path so many people in the world aspire to be on. It will take a Herculean effort on the part of President-elect Biden and the Democrats to do so. If they fail, it is arguable whether America can ever again claim to be exceptional.

*[Daniel Wagner is the author of “The Chinese Vortex: The Belt and Road Initiative and its Impact on the World.”]

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

The post It’s Time to Put Guardrails in Place in Washington appeared first on Fair Observer.

For the US, Right-Wing Extremism Is Here to Stay

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 12:29:27 GMT

Over the last three decades, globalization, ethnic diversity and social inclusion have become forefront issues in American political discourse. However, this spotlight has not come without consequence. Finding historical precedents in the Civil War and civil rights eras, today’s new progressive wave has been met with backlash from conservative and reactionary sociopolitical milieus that see threats in a changing social fabric.

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With echoes in Europe, Asia and Latin America, right-wing movements in the United States have organized and mobilized with great discipline. While right-wing extremism typically rises under progressive presidents, as seen during the Obama and the Clinton administrations, the discourse of outgoing President Donald Trump has given these movements an unprecedented level of oxygen for the modern era.

Actions and Recruitment

Historically, right-wing reactionary elements spread throughout the vast geographic expanse of the United States had a harder task in communicating and coordinating than they do today. Moreover, these groups and individuals were previously more frequently confronted with divergent points of view in their social circles and communities. In our digital age, however, heightened use of social media creates networks out of formerly atomized elements, which is a phenomenon that is not only limited to the far right. These networks, in turn, create echo chambers of misinformation and vitriol, which the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Parler and Gabfiscalize push back against too loosely, if at all.

Just as radical right-wing groups utilize social media to spread misinformation, these groups also work to expand membership by recruiting new members through social media platforms. For example, the Boogaloo movement, an extremist anti-government network in the US, uses Facebook groups and targeted advertisements to spread its message and recruit followers. The Boogaloo Boys use memes and digital humor tools in their targeted posts, often with links to purchase their merchandise and to generate a sense of community while increasing group membership and funding.

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Other right-wing groups, such as the Proud Boys, operate several Facebook pages situated in different regions of the US to encourage individuals throughout the country to join their movement. However, efforts to recruit new members are not limited to Facebook; instead, right-wing groups, by way of e-flyers, online chat rooms and more niche social media platforms like Parler and Gabfiscalize, work to expand group membership by appealing to individuals with similar sociopolitical ideals as well as populations discontented with the status quo.

Over the last two years, as a result of the rise of leftist movements, both fringe and mainstream, and in response to COVID-19 restrictions, violent actions taken by extremist right-wing groups increased substantially. Throughout 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes, recorded 2,421 flyering incidents perpetrated by 940 extremist groups across the US. In June 2020, a now-convicted man with ties to right-wing extremism drove his vehicle into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters outside of Richmond, Virginia.

In October 2020, the Wolverine Watchmen, a US militia group, planned to kidnap Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer in an alleged domestic terrorism plot. The federal government charged eight Wolverine Watchmen members with conspiracy to kidnap Whitmer, along with other charges such as providing material support for terrorist activities, gang membership and the use of firearms to commit felonies.

The Wolverine Watchmen wanted to “unite others” to “take violent action” against state governments that, in their view, violated the US Constitution in enforcing COVID-19 lockdown measures. Although the plot against Governor Whitmer was thwarted, the event showcases how extremist right-wing groups are organizing to take more aggressive actions against the authorities.

Earlier this week, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in an unprecedented attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, spurred on by the president’s insistence that the vote was fraudulent. The rioters managed to disrupt the legislative certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, which resumed after the deployment of the National Guard. With the Congress ransacked and five people dead, the events showed that these extremist factions are organized, militant and bold.

What’s Next?

As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its most critical phase before we can expect to achieve herd immunity promised by mass vaccination, the threat posed by right-wing groups in the US continues to escalate while lockdowns persist and the transition to the incoming Biden administration is imminent. With a November poll from Reuters suggesting around 68% of Republicans believe the election was rigged, President-elect Biden’s transition has been anything but smooth, and there is no reason to expect his first year in office to be any different.

Passionate support for President Trump by right-wing groups, such as the Proud Boys who vowed to “stand back and stand by,” creates the alarming prospect of continued and intensifying public safety incidents around protests and rallies. Unfortunately, we have seen this trend toward tensions and clashes accentuated by the increased oxygen provided by both elected officials as well as activism by left-wing groups, such as antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Over the next 12 months, it can be expected that militant groups in the US will continue their activities as the Biden administration seeks to chart a new course for the country through the choppy waters left behind after four years under Donald Trump’s divisive presidency. With the US fractured along sociopolitical lines, the key actors of the Trump administration seeking to remain relevant on the national stage, and with the 2024 election already on the horizon, extremist and militant groups will remain key actors, engaged in public demonstrations and rallies as well as social media recruitment and activism aimed at increasing membership.

Depending on the breadth and scope of the progressive political agenda advanced over the coming years, violent actions could become commonplace for extremist groups throughout the country. To address this mounting challenge, legislators and regulators worldwide should act quickly in order to empower and co-opt tech giants into supervising social media activity by extremist groups. Simultaneously, more nuanced and targeted economic policies, as well as a transparent yet conciliatory sociopolitical discourse, will go a long way in healing society and fostering prosperous inclusion across the ideological spectrum as well as the rural-urban divide.

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

The post For the US, Right-Wing Extremism Is Here to Stay appeared first on Fair Observer.

Saudi-Qatar Reconciliation Provides New Opportunities for the Biden Administration

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 18:41:45 GMT

The incoming Biden administration was presented with a most welcome development when it was announced on January 4 that an agreement has been reached to end the three-year rift between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. On November 27, the Financial Times carried a long report headlined “Saudi Arabia seeks to resolve Qatar crisis as a ‘gift’ to Joe Biden.” Essentially, the newly announced rapprochement has the potential to enable the Biden administration to accomplish major goals in the Gulf region as well as in the overall Middle East.

A good deal of credit for the breakthrough goes to Kuwait’s ruler, Emir Sheikh Nawaf. Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Ahmad Nasser al Sabah explained that “Based on Sheikh Nawaf’s proposal, it was agreed to open the airspace and land and sea borders between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the State of Qatar.” Al Sabah added that Sheikh Nawaf had spoken with Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. According to AP, “The conversations ‘emphasized that everyone was keen on reunification,’ and would gather in Al-Ula to sign a statement that promises to ‘usher in a bright page of brotherly relations.’”

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By way of background, on June 5, 2017, the Arab quartet severed diplomatic relations with Doha and imposed a land, sea and air blockade based upon contested accusations that Qatar supported Islamist extremist groups. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain also objected to Qatar’s relations with Iran. As a result, with some exceptions, notably to allow Qataris into Saudi Arabia to perform the Islamic hajj pilgrimage, Qatar’s only land border has remained closed, thus denying the import of products ranging from food to medical supplies to construction materials.

The rift with Qatar also resulted in the separation of families, especially those who had intermarried on both sides of the border. In addition, Saudi Arabia prohibited Qatari planes from flying over its airspace, which forced its national airline to take longer and more costly routes. It has been estimated that Qatar pays up to $100 million in annual fees to fly over Iran.

The Saudi decision to end the embargo is a major step forward, but it must be followed by additional initiatives by the other nations that had backed the boycott of Qatar. This was acknowledged by the UAE’s minister of state for foreign affairs, Anwar Gargash, who tweeted that while Abu Dhabi hopes to restore Gulf unity, “We have more work to do and we are in the right direction.”

Essentially, while ending the rift among the Gulf nations is important for the region, it also establishes new realities and opportunities for the Biden administration. It will enable the new administration to develop even closer relations with Qatar and set the tone for warmer than previously predicted relations with Saudi Arabia.

Beginning in 1992, Qatar has developed close military ties with the United States and is now the location of US Central Command’s Forward Headquarters and the Combined Air Operations Center. Qatar hosts the strategically important Al Udeid Air Base, which is staffed by more than 10,000 American service personnel and strike force aircraft used in campaigns against the Islamic State. Improved US-Qatari relations will enable the two nations to build upon their efforts against terrorism. In fact, as the White House website points out, President Donald Trump thanked Emir Tamim in January 2018 for efforts “to counter terrorism and extremism in all its forms.” Washington is also grateful to Doha for hosting a Taliban mission, thereby facilitating the Afghan peace talks. The Biden administration may also work with Qatar in at least four additional areas.

Embed from Getty Images

Following up on the UAE and Bahrain reaching normalization deals with Israel sets the stage for Qatar to play a larger role in pursuing Israeli-Palestinian peace. Qatar is quietly providing humanitarian support for Palestinians in Gaza, which helps in keeping that conflict more manageable and could enable Doha to serve as an intermediary to deal with the wider conflict.

Similarly, Qatar maintains good relations with both the United States and Iran. President-elect Biden and his top foreign policy officials have stated their hope that a new treaty can be worked out with Iran, one that builds on the nuclear pact negotiated by the Obama administration and then rejected by the Trump White House. Qatar is in a unique position to facilitate these diplomatic efforts. Significantly, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted that he hopes reconciliation in the Gulf “contributes to the stability and political and economic development for all peoples of our region.”

Qatar has also expressed its support for a number of other top priorities enunciated by the Biden administration, including dealing aggressively with climate change and distributing vaccinations to get the COVID-19 pandemic under control. Improved Gulf relations can also help Saudi Arabia to build warmer ties with the Biden administration than might otherwise have been the case.

Joe Biden has called for a reevaluation of US relations with Riyadh during the Trump administration, which began when Donald Trump chose to visit Saudi Arabia as his first overseas destination as president and then extended to arms sales, a lax view of the war in Yemen and virtually excusing Saudi leaders for their role in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. In sum, while the final details of the deal that has been under discussion for several months is still in flux, it has the potential to shape a more positive agenda for the Biden administration.

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

The post Saudi-Qatar Reconciliation Provides New Opportunities for the Biden Administration appeared first on Fair Observer.

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