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Tag: Elections

  • Crashing Out in Hartlepool: Labour Ills and Teflon Boris

    By-election results make poor predictors.  The government of the day can often count on a swing against it by irritated voters keen to remind it they exist.  It’s an opportunity to mete out mild punishment.  But the loss of the seat in Hartlepool by the British Labour party is ominous for party apparatchiks.  For the first time in 62 years, the Conservatives won the traditional heartland Labour seat, netting 15,529 votes.  Labour’s tally: 8,589.  The swing against Labour had been a devastating 16%.

    The scene of Hartlepool is one of profound, social decay.  Its decline, wrote Tanya Gold on the eve of the by-election, “meets you like a wall of heat.”  She noted an era lost, the trace of lingering memories.  Hartlepool was once known for making ships.  “Now it makes ennui.”  Male unemployment is a touch under 10%. Rates of child poverty are some of the highest in the country.  Services have been withdrawn; the once fine Georgian and Victorian houses are mouldering.

    The seat presented the Conservatives an opportunity to take yet another brick out of Labour’s crumbling red wall.  Prime Minister Boris Johnson made visits to back his candidate, Jill Mortimer, hardly a stellar recruit.  Labour was suffering establishment blues.  They struggled to find a pro-Brexit candidate.  Their choice – Paul Williams – was a Remainer who formerly represented the seat of Stockton, which returned a leave vote of 69.6%.  It was a statement of London-centric politics, the Labour of the city rather than the locality; the Labour of university education rather than the labour of regional working class.

    Birmingham Labour MP Khalid Mahmood, formerly shadow defence secretary, is bitter about the estrangement and emergence of what are effectively two parties.  “A London-based bourgeoisie, with the support of the brigades of woke social media warriors, has effectively captured the party,” he lamented in an article for the conservative think tank Policy Exchange.  “They mean well, of course, but their politics – obsessed with identity, division and even tech utopianism – have more in common with those of Californian high society than the kind of people who voted in Hartlepool yesterday.”

    Energy had been expended on such causes as trying to pull down Churchill’s statue rather than “helping people pull themselves up in the world.”  The patriotism of the voters had not been taken seriously enough.  “They are more alert to rebranding exercises than spin doctors give them credit for.”

    Labour’s campaign in Hartlepool was not so much off-message as lacking one.  “Today,” penned progressive columnist and Labour Party supporter Owen Jones, “we saw the fruits of a truly fascinating experiment”.  It was one featuring a political party going to an election “without a vision or a coherent message against a government that has both in spades.”

    The tendency was repeated in local elections, with ballots being conducted across Wales, England and Scotland in what was called “Super Thursday”.  The Teesside mayoralty was regained by Ben Houchen for the Conservatives by a convincingly crushing 72.7%, three times that of Labour, prompting Will Hutton to see a new ideology of interventionist conservatism.  Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer could do little other than call the results “bitterly disappointing” and sack the party’s chair and national campaign coordinator, Angela Rayner.  He is chewing over the idea of moving his party’s headquarters out of London. The feeling of panic is unmistakable.

    What is even more startling is the enormous latitude that has been given to Johnson.  Despite bungling the response to the initial phases of the pandemic, an insatiable appetite for scandals and a seedy, authoritarian approach to power, Labor voters have not turned away, let alone had second thoughts about this Tory.  His mendacity and pure fibbing is not something that turns people off him; the stream of Daily Telegraph confections from the 1990s on what those supposedly nasty bureaucrats in Brussels were up to had a lasting effect on Britain’s relations with Europe.  Mendacity can work.

    Last April, Jonathan Freedland examined the prime minister’s resume of scandals and found it heaving.  He shifted the cost of removing dangerous cladding in the wake of the Grenfell fire, along with other hazards, to ordinary leaseholders.  He slashed the UK aid budget and reduced contributions to the UN family planning program.  He delayed lockdowns in March, September and the winter in 2020, moves that aided Britain lead Europe’s coronavirus death toll.  There were the contracts to supply personal protective equipment to Tory donors and the frittering away of £37 billion on a test-and-trace programme “that never really worked.”  And that was just a modest sampling.

    The refurbishment scandal is particularly rich, given the bundle Johnson and his fiancée Carrie Symonds have spent on their private residence.  The public purse will foot the bill to the value of £30,000, but the amount spent was more in the order of £200,000.  With a very heavy axe to grind, Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former advisor and confidant turned blogging snitch, suggested that the PM’s grand plan was to have that inflated amount covered by donors.   “The PM stopped speaking to me about this matter in 2020 as I told him I thought his plans to have donors secretly pay for the renovation were unethical, foolish, possibly illegal and almost certainly broke the rules on proper disclosure of political donations if conducted in the way he intended.”

    Johnson, for his part, claims that he covered the costs himself, though he refuses to answer questions put to him on whether Lord David Brownlow initially covered it, and was then repaid.  Not declaring this transaction would have broken electoral law.  The Electoral Commission has not found the affair particularly amusing, and is investigating the refurbishment transactions.

    The disaster that befell Labour in the 2019 general election sees little prospect of being reversed.  Starmer, generally seen as the more decent chap, is rapidly diminishing as a chance for Downing Street honours.  As for Johnson, Freedland suggests that the good fortune of the scandal ridden PM reveals an electorate “still seduced by a tousled-hair rebel shtick and faux bonhomie that should have palled years ago.”

    This article was posted on Saturday, May 8th, 2021 at 10:08pm and is filed under Boris Johnson, Elections, Keir Starmer, UK Labour Party, UK Politics, United Kingdom.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Gustavo Petro Represents a Progressive Alternative in Colombia

    Gustavo Petro is a force to be reckoned with in Colombian politics.  The senator – once a member of the M-19 guerilla group, later elected to the House of Representations in the 1990s and then the mayorship of Bogotá (2012-2016) – has become the candidate to beat in next year’s presidential election.  He is such a prominent opponent of right-wing politics in the country that while Donald Trump was campaigning in Florida in 2020 he included Petro in one of his anti-socialist diatribes, tweeting that “Biden is supported by socialist Gustavo Petro, a major LOSER and former M-19 guerrilla leader. Biden is weak on socialism and will betray Colombia. I stand with you!”

    Petro previously ran for president in 2018 and made a strong showing, but ultimately lost to the far-right Iván Duque of the Democratic Center party by approximately 12%.  It is worth noting that leaked recordings pertaining to the 2018 election contain evidence that Duque’s party conspired with individuals linked to narcotraffickers to commit electoral fraud, and subsequent investigations have uncovered at least six cases of fraud in both the House and the Senate.

    Since 2018, Petro’s grassroots appeal has only grown.  Polls for the upcoming 2022 election consistently place him in first place, and a survey conducted by pollster Invamer in April 2021 shows that “if elections were held tomorrow, no candidate would stand a chance against Petro.”  Nestor Morales of the Mañanas Blu radio program remarked:

    Petro is right to be celebrating, because [this survey] is well above its historical averages… what is impressive is that Petro is winning in absolutely everything…He has votes in sectors that were not related to him; for example, the upper strata, the old men who were so anti-petrist. There is a change, a transformation of public opinion.

    The discrediting of Duque and Uribismo, the far-right political project of his mentor former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), has contributed to Petro’s rise in popularity.  His already solid base has been supplemented by those disillusioned by Duque’s failed COVID response and the brutal continuation of Uribista violence against former guerilla fighters and social activists, in contravention of the previous government’s peace deal with the FARC.  Furthermore, the Duque government’s recent decision to introduce a regressive tax reform that exempted the oligarchy while punishing ordinary workers has led to massive protests across Colombia.  Government forces have responded brutally, causing multiple deaths and leading the UN rights office to condemn their “excessive use of force.”  These protests have produced two general strikes thus far – one on April 28 and another on May 5 – and resistance to the austerity measures have grown to dominate the political discourse in the country, similar to how the 2019-2021 protests in Chile, which began due to a transit fare increase, soon snowballed into a nationwide indictment of neoliberal governance as a whole.

    Gustavo Petro represents an alternative.  Despite his association with Latin American socialism, however, Petro’s political views have evolved greatly over time.  No longer an adherent of M-19’s revolutionary leftism, he now advocates a more moderate social-democratic model.  In interviews, he is quick to distance his favored politics from those introduced in Cuba and Venezuela – policies which, in addition to angering domestic elites, inevitably leads to aggression from Washington as well.  Instead, he compares himself to more gradualist figures, once stating that “I have more in common with Pepe Mujica [than Castro or Chávez],” referring to Uruguay’s famously modest left-wing president who served from 2010 to 2015 and oversaw notable macroeconomic growth as well as the legalization of marijuana and same-sex marriage.

    Despite the softening of his views, Petro remains a target of the Colombian right and has received constant death threats during his public career.  He claims to have slept with an assault rifle over the course of the “parapolitics” scandal, during which dozens of politicians (many with links to the Uribe administration) were investigated and convicted for illegal ties to paramilitary groups with evidence that he helped present to Congress.  His brother was allegedly threatened with assassination (certainly no idle threat in Colombia), and his son Andrés is currently in exile, having been granted asylum by the Canadian government due to threats and political harassment from right-wing groups.  Furthermore, in March 2018 a Cuban man named Raul Gutierrez was arrested in Bogotá for plotting to bomb the Cuban embassy and assassinate both Petro and FARC leader Rodrigo “Timochenko” Londoño.  While imprisoned, he claimed that a right-wing Colombian group based out of Florida hired him to commit the attacks.

    Leftism and social activism are dangerous business in Colombia.  In the first three months of 2021 alone, 40 activists were murdered and there were 23 massacres of predominantly poor and Indigenous peoples by paramilitary groups.  The impunity rate for the murder of trade unionists is approximately 87% and, as COVID-19 wracks the country, the Duque administration has continuously ramped up violence against areas which contain former FARC fighters.

    One of the most horrific incidents so far this year was the murder of twelve children and two nineteen-year-olds in a bombing raid against an alleged armed group in Guaviare.  Petro commented publicly on the massacre, posting a list of the children’s names on Twitter and writing “14 children killed [including the two 19-year-olds] in a bombardment ordered by the Minister of Defence. These are their names. End the war, end the genocide of children in our country.”

    Marcha Patriotica, a progressive umbrella organization that brings together historically marginalized groups within Colombia including peasants, people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community, has also faced persecution.  Almost two hundred of its members have been murdered since its founding in 2011, while an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights resolution from 2017 claimed that hundreds more are living under severe risks and that the government could protect them if it chose to act.

    The Colombian right-wing has historically lumped together unionists, social activists, and left-wing figures with the longstanding peasant-led insurgencies in the countryside, labelling them “Castro-Chavistas,” “terrorists,” and “guerrillas posing as human rights defenders.”  These are extremely serious threats in Colombia, and not just due to ongoing atrocities.  One must also take into account the “political genocide” against the Patriotic Union (UP) in the 1980s and 1990s.

    The UP was formed in 1985 during peace negotiations between the FARC and the Belisario Betancur administration.  Its purpose was to allow the FARC to participate in the electoral system in exchange for a ceasefire.  What followed, however, was a massacre: the party’s members were relentlessly attacked by paramilitaries and drug cartels and over 3000 of its members, including elected officials and presidential candidates, were murdered.  This led to a resumption of overt hostilities and proved to the guerillas that the Colombian state was an inherently oppressive, right-wing organization that would not allow fair elections to weaken its hold on power.

    The US-backed military has historically been the arbiter of the political realm in Colombia, backing conservative figures and using paramilitaries to kill or intimidate those who organize for social change.  Their brutal acts have not shaken America’s diplomatic and material support or its military cooperation – as Joe Biden wrote during the 2020 election, it is the “keystone” of US policy in Latin America and has served as an indispensable ally in the region-wide imposition of a free-trade model vulnerable to American capital.  Scandals like the extermination of the UP, the murder of over 6000 civilians in the 2000s as a way of boosting the army’s kill-count against the insurgencies, and the almost universal impunity for the killing of trade union activists have not lessened America’s support in the slightest.

    Nor have recent atrocities weakened Canada’s support for the Colombian government.  Stephen Harper made a point of deepening Canada’s ties to right-wing governments across the region, and Justin Trudeau has likewise taken a very active role in supporting the Latin American right against progressive movements.  Yves Engler writes that, in regard to Colombia, Ottawa quickly congratulated Duque after his fraud-riddled election win, refused to criticize the attempted overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro that was launched from Colombia in May 2020, and has consistently failed to draw attention to the ongoing injustices in the country.

    This is the political climate – one of violent repression that receives the tacit or outright support of imperialist countries – in which Gustavo Petro has fought to present an alternative.  Although the presidential election will not be held for over a year, Petro’s dramatic rise in popularity is evidence that the Colombian people are seeking a break from the status quo, and that he may represent their best chance to achieve this.

    Owen Schalk is a writer based in Winnipeg. His areas of interest include post-colonialism and the human impact of the global neoliberal economy. Read other articles by Owen.

    This article was posted on Friday, May 7th, 2021 at 10:32pm and is filed under Colombia, Elections, Opinion, President Iván Duque, Senator Gustavo Petro, Terrorism (state and retail).

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Palestine’s Moment of Reckoning: On Abbas’ Dangerous Decision to ‘Postpone’ Elections  

    The decision on April 30 by Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, to ‘postpone’ Palestinian elections, which would have been the first in 15 years, will deepen Palestinian division and could, potentially, signal the collapse of the Fatah Movement, at least in its current form.

    Unlike the last Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, the big story this time was not the Fatah-Hamas rivalry. Many rounds of talks in recent months between representatives of Palestine’s two largest political parties had already sorted out much of the details regarding the now-canceled elections, which were scheduled to begin on May 22.

    Both Fatah and Hamas have much to gain from the elections; the former relished the opportunity to restore its long-dissipated legitimacy as it has ruled over occupied Palestinians, through its dominance of the Palestinian Authority, with no democratic mandate whatsoever; Hamas, on the other hand, was desperate to break away from its long and painful isolation as exemplified in the Israeli siege on Gaza, which ironically resulted from its victory in the 2006 elections.

    It was not Israeli and American pressure, either, that made Abbas betray the collective wishes of a whole nation. This pressure coming from Tel Aviv and Washington was real and widely reported, but must have also been expected. Moreover, Abbas could have easily circumvented them as his election decree, announced last January, was welcomed by Palestinians and praised by much of the international community.

    Abbas’ unfortunate but, frankly, expected decision was justified by the 86-year-old leader as one which is compelled by Israel’s refusal to allow Palestinians in Jerusalem from taking part in the elections. Abbas’ explanation, however, is a mere fig leaf aimed at masking his fear of losing power with Israel’s routine obstinacy. But since when do occupied people beg their occupiers to practice their democratic rights? Since when have Palestinians sought permission from Israel to assert any form of political sovereignty in occupied East Jerusalem?

    Indeed, the battle for Palestinian rights in Jerusalem takes place on a daily basis in the alleyways of the captive city. Jerusalemites are targeted in every facet of their existence, as Israeli restrictions make it nearly impossible for them to live a normal life, neither in the way they build, work, study and travel nor even marry and worship. So it would be mind-boggling if Abbas was truly sincere that he had, indeed, expected Israeli authorities to allow Palestinians in the occupied city easy access to polling stations and to exercise their political right, while those same authorities labor to erase any semblance of Palestinian political life, even mere physical presence, in Jerusalem.

    The truth is Abbas canceled the elections because all credible public opinion polls showed that the May vote would have decimated the ruling clique of his Fatah party, and would have ushered in a whole new political configuration, one in which his Fatah rivals, Marwan Barghouti and Nasser al-Qudwa would have emerged as the new leaders of Fatah. If this scenario were to occur, a whole class of Palestinian millionaires who turned the Palestinian struggle into a lucrative industry, generously financed by ‘donor countries’, risk losing everything, in favor of uncharted political territories, controlled by a Palestinian prisoner, Marwan Barghouti, from his Israeli prison cell.

    Worse for Abbas, Barghouti could have potentially become the new Palestinian president, as he was expected to compete in the July presidential elections. Bad for Abbas, but good for Palestinians, as Barghouti’s presidency would have proven crucial for Palestinian national unity and even international solidarity. An imprisoned Palestinian president would have been a PR disaster for Israel. Equally, it would have confronted the low-profile American diplomacy under Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, with an unprecedented challenge: How could Washington continue to preach a ‘peace process’ between Israel and the Palestinians, when the latter’s president languishes in solitary confinement, as he has since 2002?

    By effectively canceling the elections, Abbas, his benefactors and supporters were hoping to delay a moment of reckoning within the Fatah Movement – in fact, within the Palestinian body politic as a whole. However, the decision is likely to have far more serious repercussions on Fatah and Palestinian politics than if the elections took place. Why?

    Since Abbas’ election decree earlier this year, 36 lists have registered with the Palestinian Central Elections Commission. While Islamist and socialist parties prepared to run with unified lists, Fatah disintegrated. Aside from the official Fatah list, which is close to Abbas, two other non-official lists, ‘Freedom’ and ‘Future’, planned to compete. Various polls showed that the ‘Freedom’ list, led by late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s nephew, Nasser al-Qudwa, and Marwan Barghouti’s wife, Fadwa, headed for an election upset, and were on their way to ousting Abbas and his shrinking, though influential, circle.

    Yet, none of this is likely to go away simply because Abbas reneged on his commitment to restoring a semblance of Palestinian democracy. A whole new political class in Palestine is now defining itself through its allegiances to various lists, parties and leaders. The mass of Fatah supporters that were mentally ready to break away from the dominance of Abbas will not relent easily, simply because the aging leader has changed his mind. In fact, throughout Palestine, an unparalleled discussion on democracy, representation and the need to move forward beyond Abbas and his haphazard, self-serving politics is currently taking place and is impossible to contain. For the first time in many years, the conversation is no longer confined to Hamas vs. Fatah, Ramallah vs. Gaza or any other such demoralizing classifications. This is a major step in the right direction.

    There is nothing that Abbas can say or do at this point to restore the people’s confidence in his authority. Arguably, he never had their confidence in the first place. By canceling the elections, he has crossed a red line that should have never been crossed, thus placing himself and few others around him as enemies of the Palestinian people, their democratic aspirations and their hope for a better future.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2021 at 8:52pm and is filed under Elections, Fatah, Gaza, Hamas, Israel/Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, Occupation, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Politics, Transparency/Secrecy, United States, Voter Suppression.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • US Role Behind the Defeat of Ecuador’s Leftist Presidential Candidate

    by Roger D. Harris / April 26th, 2021

    The US role in the defeat of leftist Andrés Arauz in Ecuador’s presidential contest on April 11 was not overt because it did not need to be, according to a high-ranking Latin American diplomat. We met with the diplomat and others on an official election observation delegation with CODEPINK. Names of some sources remain anonymous due to a hostile political environment towards progressives.

    This setback for the Citizens Revolution movement, founded by Rafael Correa, will have profound implications for Ecuador and beyond, fortifying the US-allied reactionary bloc in Latin America.

    Former President Correa left office with a 60% approval rating. He had been twice elected president on the first round; unprecedented for Ecuador, which had a turnover of seven presidents in the previous decade. His Alianza País party had won fourteen elections, reflecting the popularity of their wealth redistributive programs, including reducing extreme poverty in half.

    His chosen successor, Lenín Moreno, will exit on May 24 with a single-digit approval rating. Much happened in the ensuing four years. Correa went from being the most popular democratically elected president in the country’s history to having his party rejected by an electoral majority.

    ¿Qué pasó? – What happened?

    In 2017, Correa had campaigned for his former vice president to carry on their Citizens Revolution. However, once in office, sitting President Moreno turned sharply right against his former colleagues, employing lawfare to decapitate the leadership of the Citizens Revolution. His own vice-president, Jorge Glas, is now in prison and other top officials have been forced to flee Ecuador. Correa, accused of using “psychic influence,” was convicted in absentia in an evidence-weak corruption trial that prevented him from returning to Ecuador.

    According to Correa’s attorney, Fausto Jarrín, Moreno was assisted by the US in this legal dismantling of his own party. Casting pretenses aside, Moreno was in Washington on the day of the first round of the Ecuadorian presidential elections. Just before the second round, Moreno and his top officials flew to the Galapagos to meet with the US ambassador.

    Moreno handed the shop over to the US.  He revoked Julian Assange’s Ecuadorian citizenship, allowing Assange to be arrested in the UK. He recognized Juan Guaidó’s bogus claim to the presidency of Venezuela. After US Vice President Pence visited Ecuador, the FBI was welcomed back. Even a US military base in the Galapagos (part of Ecuador) was gifted to Washington.

    Moreno expelled the Cuban doctors and withdrew from key regional alliances: UNASUR, CELAC, and ALBA. At a time of COVID, these actions had lethal consequences. Had Ecuador instead maintained its membership in the regional organizations, their collective power could have been used to obtain vaccines and other resources to fight the pandemic.

    Moreno imposed an IMF austerity package on Ecuador, only to be partly withdrawn in the face of a massive indigenous-led protest in October 2019. Then under the cover of the presidential election campaign and pandemic, Moreno reinstated the unpopular measures.

    The turncoat Moreno adopted a full-throated neoliberal program and is scrambling to enact additional “economic reforms” before his term is over to prevent the next administration from “putting the toothpaste back in the tube.” But he needn’t worry. Incoming President Guillermo Lasso not only shares the same neoliberal program, but members of Lasso’s right wing political party collaborated with Moreno in the National Assembly.

    This has been a brilliant strategy for the right. Ecuador is in economic crisis with the impacts of austerity measures exacerbated by the pandemic. By putting in place a full neoliberal program before leaving office, Moreno spares Lasso the onus of the unpopular measures while serving international finance represented by Lasso and the US.

    Lawfare used to rig the electoral playing field

    Ecuador’s electoral authority, the CNE, did not recognize the Arauz campaign until December for a February 7 first-round election. Arauz, who was sick with COVID in December, had spent the last four months battling for party certification while the other campaigns were gaining momentum.

    Unlike their rich banker opponent, the Arauz campaign was strapped for funds to build an on-the-ground campaign infrastructure. More importantly, lawfare measures prevented them from even using their party’s name, forcing them to cobble together UNES as their new party.

    Further, Correa with his considerable name recognition and popularity was banned from running as Arauz’s vice president. Worse, the party was prohibited from using Correa’s image, name, or voice in their campaign materials. Yet other parties could invoke Correa to smear the Arauz campaign by falsely accusing Correa of corruption and associating Arauz with Correa as also corrupt.

    Despite all these hurdles, Arauz won the first-round election with a 32% vote, giving him a 13-point lead over second-place Lasso, but short of the 40% or more needed to avoid a second-round contest. Arauz also was leading in the polls, but that was to change with a massive disinformation campaign.

    Right-wing propaganda campaign

    The right-wing mobilized its near monopoly of mass media to spin sworn enemies Moreno and the Citizens Revolution as allied, in what an Arauz campaign leader characterized as the “TikTok and meme-ification” of political discourse.

    Arauz, an energetic 36-year-old economic wiz, was portrayed as stupid and lethargic. In contrast, the 65-year-old conservative Lasso put on a pair of red shoes and was marketed as hip.

    A four-year rightist media campaign portrayed Correa and associates as corrupt.  A Citizens Revolution militant explained, “if you repeat a lie ten times, it becomes a truth.” The “NGO left,” funded by the US and its European allies, contributed to this inversion of reality.

    Struggle ahead in Ecuador

    Guillermo Lasso, owner of the second largest bank in Ecuador, won with a 5-point lead. Arauz said in his concession speech: “This is an electoral setback but by no means a political or moral defeat.”

    With 49 out of 137 seats in the National Assembly, his party remains the single largest bloc. The task of the Citizens Revolution politicians, according to party leaders, will be to maintain unity within their own ranks while forging coalitions with potential allies.

    Meanwhile, they will have to fend off continued lawfare attacks and repression from the right. Some militants have already left the country.

    The second largest bloc in the assembly with 27 seats is the ideologically diverse and indigenous Pachakutik. The Citizens Revolution’s relationships with the leadership of some indigenous organizations and, for that matter, certain labor unions have at times been contentious.

    Correa opposed the clientelism of the past and shunned “selling” ministries and other positions to politically influential leaders in return for their support. Correa concentrated instead on serving the interests of their constituents with infrastructure projects for underserved indigenous regions, granting water rights, and promoting multi-cultural education and health policies. Likewise, workers got wage gains.

    In retrospect, the Citizens Revolution is now openly self-critical about running roughshod over some indigenous and labor leaders. Amends will have to be made, according to a former Correa minister.

    “Promoting democracy” in service of the US empire

    Ruling elites hold elections to legitimize their rule, not because they believe in democracy. By the time of the 2021 presidential election in Ecuador, the playing field had been rendered so precipitously unlevel that the US had little need to overtly intervene as it did in Bolivia in 2019.

    But that did not mean that the US was not actively intervening. The websites of USAID, NED, NDI, and IRI make no secret of the imperial hubris of pretending to “promote democracy” in Ecuador. The US laid the groundwork, according to a high-level diplomat, to unify the right and rig the contest against the left.

    As William Blum revealed, US intelligence had prior to Correa and likely since, “infiltrated, often at the highest levels, almost all political organizations of significance, from the far left to the far right…In virtually every department of the Ecuadorian government could be found men occupying positions high and low who collaborated with the CIA for money.”

    Commenting on the new Biden administration, Correa’s former Ambassador Ricardo Ulcuango observed that US foreign policy is the same with Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats, he added, are more dangerous because they are better at speaking about cooperation when they are, in fact, intervening.

    This article was posted on Monday, April 26th, 2021 at 7:21am and is filed under Ecuador, Elections, Lenin Moreno, Media, The “Right”, United States.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Recognition of Palestine is ‘Symbolic’ but also Critical: The Australian Case

    Australia’s Labor Party’s recognition of Palestine as a State on March 30 is a welcomed position, though it comes with many caveats.

    Pro-Palestinian activists are justified to question the sincerity of the ALP’s stance and whether Australia’s Labor is genuinely prepared to fully adopt this position should they form a government following the 2022 elections.

    The language of the amendment regarding the recognition of Palestine is quite indecisive. While it commits the ALP to recognize Palestine as a State, it “expects that this issue will be an important priority for the next Labor government”. ‘Expecting’ that the issue would be made an ‘important priority’ is not the same as confirming that the recognition of Palestine is resolved, should Labor take office.

    Moreover, the matter has been an ‘important priority’ for the ALP for years. In fact, similar language was adopted in the closing session of the Labor conference in December 2018, which supported “the recognition and right of Israel and Palestine to exist as two states within secure and recognized borders,” while adding this important clause: The ALP “calls on the next Labor government to recognize Palestine as a State”.

    Unfortunately for Labor, they lost the May 2019 elections, where the Liberal Party maintained the majority, again forming a government under the leadership of Scott Morrison.

    Morrison was the Prime Minister of Australia when, in 2018, the ALP adopted what was clearly a policy shift on Palestine. In fact, it was Morrison’s regressive position on Israel that supposedly compelled Labor to develop a seemingly progressive position on Palestine. Nine days after former US President, Donald Trump, defied international law by officially recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – and subsequently relocating the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – Morrison flirted with the idea as well, hoping to enlist the support of the pro-Israel lobbies in Australia prior to the elections.

    However, Morrison did not go as far as Trump, by refraining from moving his country’s embassy to the occupied city. Instead, he developed a precarious – albeit still illegal – position where he recognized West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, promising to move his country’s “embassy to West Jerusalem when practical, in support of, and after, final-status determination.”

    Canberra, however, did take ‘practical’ steps, including a decision to establish a defense and trade office in Jerusalem and proceeded to look for a site for its future embassy.

    Morrison’s self-serving strategy remains a political embarrassment for Australia, as it drew the country closer to Trump’s illegal, anti-Palestinian stance. While the vast majority of United Nations member states maintained a unified position regarding the illegality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, asserting that the status of Jerusalem can only be determined based on a negotiated agreement, the Australian government thought otherwise.

    As Palestinians, Arabs and other nations mobilized against Australia’s new position, the ALP came under pressure to balance out the Liberal party’s agenda, seen as blindly supportive of military occupation and apartheid.

    Since the ALP lost the elections, their new policy on Palestine could not be evaluated. Now, according to their latest policy conference conclusion, this same position has been reiterated, although with some leeway, that could potentially allow Labor to reverse or delay that position, once they are in power.

    Nonetheless, the Labor position is an important step for Palestinians in their ‘legitimacy war’ against the Israeli occupation.

    In a recent interview with Professor Richard Falk, former UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, the international law expert explained the need to “distinguish symbolic politics from substantive politics”.

    “In the colonial wars that were fought after 1945, the side that won usually was the side that won what I call the legitimacy war, which is the ‘symbolic battlefield’, so to speak, and maintain the principled position that was in accord with the anti-colonial flow of history,” Falk said.

    Practically, this means that, often, the militarily weaker side which may lose numerous military battles could ultimately win the war. This was as true in the case of Vietnam in 1975 as it was in South Africa in 1994. It should also be true in the case of Palestine.

    This is precisely why pro-Israeli politicians, media pundits and organizations are fuming in response to the ALP’s recognition of Palestine. Among the numerous angry responses, the most expressive is the position of Michael Danby. He was quoted by Australian Jewish News website as saying that ALP leaders, Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles, have done more than adopting the pro-Palestinian position of former British Labor leader, Jeremy Corbyn, by also adopting “his Stalinist methods by suppressing debate on the foreign policy motions”.

    Israel and its supporters fully understand the significance of Falk’s ‘legitimacy war’. Indeed, Israel’s military superiority and complete dominance over occupied Palestinians may allow it to sustain its military occupation on the ground a while longer, but it does very little to advance its moral position, reputation and legitimacy.

    The fact that ALP’s position advocates a two-state solution – which is neither just nor practical – should not detract from the fact that the recognition of Palestine is still a stance that can be utilized in the Palestinian quest for legitimizing their struggle and delegitimizing Israel’s apartheid.

    Falk’s theory on ‘substantive politics’ and ‘symbolic politics’ applies here, too. While calling for defunct two-states is part of the substantive politics that is necessitated by international consensus, the symbolism of recognizing Palestine is a crucial step in dismantling Israel’s monopoly over the agenda of the West’s political elites. It is an outright defeat of the efforts of pro-Israeli lobbies.

    Politicians, anywhere, cannot possibly win the legitimacy war for Palestinians, or any other oppressed nation. It is the responsibility of the Palestinians and their supporters to impose their moral agenda on the often self-serving politicians so that the symbolic politics may someday become substantive. The ALP recognition of Palestine is, for now, mere symbolism. If utilized correctly, through pressure, advocacy and mobilization, it could turn into something meaningful in the future.  This is not the responsibility of Labor, but of Palestinians themselves.

    This article was posted on Friday, April 16th, 2021 at 1:09pm and is filed under Apartheid, Australia, Diplomacy, Donald Trump, Elections, Israel/Palestine, Jerusalem, Land Theft, Occupation, Palestine, Politics, Zionism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • From His Solitary Confinement, Marwan Barghouti Holds the Key to Fatah’s Future  

    If imprisoned Palestinian leader, Marwan Barghouti, becomes the President of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the status quo will change substantially. For Israel, as well as for the current PA President, Mahmoud Abbas, such a scenario is more dangerous than another strong Hamas showing in the upcoming Palestinian parliamentary elections.

    The long-delayed elections, now scheduled for May 22 and July 31 respectively, will not only represent a watershed moment for the fractured Palestinian body politic, but also for the Fatah Movement which has dominated the PA since its inception in 1994. The once revolutionary Movement has become a shell of its former self under the leadership of Abbas, whose only claim to legitimacy was a poorly contested election in January 2005, following the death of former Fatah leader and PA President, Yasser Arafat.

    Though his mandate expired in January 2009, Abbas continued to ‘lead’ Palestinians. Corruption and nepotism increased significantly during his tenure and, not only did he fail to secure an independent Palestinian State, but the Israeli military occupation and illegal settlements have deepened and grown exponentially.

    Abbas’ rivals from within the Fatah Movement were sidelined, imprisoned or exiled. A far more popular Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti, was silenced by Israel as he was thrown into an Israeli prison in April 2002, after a military court found him guilty of involvement in Palestinian resistance operations during the uprising of 2000. This arrangement suited Abbas, for he continued to doubly benefit: from Barghouti’s popularity, on the one hand, and his absence, on the other.

    When, in January, Abbas declared that he would hold three successive rounds of elections – legislative elections on May 22, presidential elections on July 31 and Palestinian National Council (PNC) elections on August 31 – he could not have anticipated that his decree, which followed intense Fatah-Hamas talks, could potentially trigger the implosion of his own party.

    Fatah-Hamas rivalry has been decades’ long, but intensified in January 2006 when the latter won the legislative elections in the Occupied Territories. Hamas’ victory was partly attributed to Fatah’s own corruption, but internal rivalry also splintered Fatah’s vote.

    Although it was Fatah’s structural weaknesses that partly boosted Hamas’ popularity, it was, oddly, the subsequent rivalry with Hamas that kept Fatah somehow limping forward. Indeed, the anti-Hamas sentiment served as a point of unity among the various Fatah branches. With money pouring in from donor countries, Fatah used its largesse to keep dissent at minimum and, when necessary, to punish those who refused to toe the pro-Abbas line. This strategy was successfully put to the test in 2010 when Mohammed Dahlan, Fatah’s ‘strong man’ in Gaza prior to 2006, was dismissed from Fatah’s central committee and banished from the West Bank, as he was banished from Gaza four years earlier.

    But that convenient paradigm could not be sustained. Israel is entrenching its military occupation, increasing its illegal settlement activities and is rapidly annexing Palestinian land in the West Bank and Jerusalem. The Gaza siege, though deadly and tragic, has become routine and no longer an international priority. A new Palestinian generation in the Occupied Territories cannot relate to Abbas and his old guard, and is openly dissatisfied with the tribal, regional politics through which the PA, under Abbas, continues to govern occupied and oppressed Palestinians.

    Possessing no strategies or answers, Abbas is now left with no more political lifelines and few allies.

    With dwindling financial resources and faced by the inescapable fact that 85-year-old Abbas must engineer a transition within the movement to prevent its collapse in case of his death, Fatah was forced to contend with an unpleasant reality: without new elections the PA would lose the little political legitimacy with which it ruled over Palestinians.

    Abbas was not worried about another setback, as that of 2006, when Hamas won majority of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC)’s seats. Until recently, most opinion polls indicated that the pro-Abbas Fatah list would lead by a comfortable margin in May, and that Abbas would be re-elected President in July. With his powers intact, Abbas could then expand his legitimacy by allowing Hamas and others into the PLO’s Palestinian National Council – Palestine’s parliament in the Diaspora. Not only would Abbas renew faith in his Authority, but he could also go down in history as the man who united Palestinians.

    But things didn’t go as planned and the problem, this time, did not come from Hamas, but from Fatah itself – although Abbas did anticipate internal challenges. However, the removal of Dahlan, the repeated purges of the party’s influential committees and the marginalization of any dissenting Fatah members throughout the years must have infused Abbas with confidence to advance with his plans.

    The first challenge emerged on March 11, when Nasser al-Qidwa, a well-respected former diplomat and a nephew of Yasser Arafat, was expelled from the movement’s Central Committee for daring to challenge Abbas’ dominance. On March 4, Qidwa decided to lock horns with Abbas by running in the elections in a separate list.

    The second and bigger surprise came on March 31, just one hour before the closing of the Central Election Commission’s registration deadline, when Qidwa’s list was expanded to include supporters of Marwan Barghouti, under the leadership of his wife, Fadwa.

    Opinion polls are now suggesting that a Barghouti-Qidwa list, not only would divide the Fatah Movement but would actually win more seats, defeating both the traditional Fatah list and even Hamas. If this happens, Palestinian politics would turn on its head.

    Moreover, the fact that Marwan Barghouti’s name was not on the list keeps alive the possibility that the imprisoned Fatah leader could still contest in the presidential elections in July. If that, too, transpires, Barghouti will effortlessly beat and oust Abbas.

    The PA President is now in an unenviable position. Canceling the elections would lead to strife, if not violence. Moving forward means the imminent demise of Abbas and his small but powerful clique of Palestinians who benefited greatly from the cozy political arrangement they created for themselves.

    As it stands, the key to the future of Fatah is now held by a Palestinian prisoner, Marwan Barghouti, who has been kept by Israel, largely in solitary confinement, since 2002.

    This article was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2021 at 5:05pm and is filed under Elections, Fatah, Gaza, Hamas, Israel/Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, Occupation, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Political Prisoners, Politics, West Bank.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Kafkaesque Politics: The Missing Lessons from Israel’s Latest Elections

    A ‘major setback’ was the recurring term in many news headlines reporting on the outcome of Israel’s general elections of March 23. While this depiction specifically referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to secure a decisive victory in the country’s fourth elections in two years, this is only part of the narrative.

    Certainly, it was a setback for Netanyahu, who has repeatedly resorted to Israeli voters as a final lifeline in the hope of escaping his ever-growing list of problems – splits within his Likud Party, the constant plotting of his former right coalition partners, his own corruption trials and his lack of political vision that does not cater to his and his family’s interests.

    Yet, as was the case in three previous elections, the outcome of the fourth was the same. This time, Netanyahu’s right-wing camp, thus potential government coalition partners, consists of even more ardent right-wing parties, including, aside from the ‘Likud’, which won 30 Knesset seats, ‘Shas’, with 9 seats, ‘United Torah Judaism’ with 7, and ‘Religious Zionism’ with 6. At 52 seats only, Netanyahu’s base is more vulnerable and more extreme than ever before.

    ‘Yamina’, on the other hand, which emerged with 7 seats, is a logical partner in Netanyahu’s possible coalition. Headed by an ardent right-wing politician, Naftali Bennett, who assumed the role of minister in various Netanyahu-led right-wing coalitions, sits, ideologically speaking, on the right of Netanyahu. A keen politician, Bennett has, for years, tried to escape Netanyahu’s dominance and to eventually claim the leadership of the right. While joining another right-wing coalition, again headed by Netanyahu, is hardly a best-case scenario, Bennett might reluctantly return to the Netanyahu camp for now, because he has no option.

    Bennett could, however,  take another radical path, like that taken by former Likudist, Gideon Sa’ar of ‘New Hope’ and Avigdor Lieberman of ‘Yisrael Beiteinu’, ousting Netanyahu, even if the alternative means forming a shaky, short-lived coalition.

    Indeed, the anti-Netanyahu camp does not seem to have much in common, neither in terms of politics, ideology nor ethnicity – a crucial component in Israeli politics – than their collective desire to dispose of Netanyahu. If an anti-Netanyahu coalition is, somehow cobbled together – uniting ‘Yesh Atid’ (17 seats), ‘Kahol Lavan’ (8), ‘Yisrael Beiteinu’ (7), ‘Labor’ (7), ‘New Hope’ (6), the Arab ‘Joint List’ (6), ‘Meretz’ (6) – the coalition would still fail to reach the required threshold of 61.

    To avoid returning to the polls for the fifth time within approximately two years, the anti-Netanyahu coalition would be forced to cross many political red lines. For example, former Netanyahu’s anti-Arab allies, namely Lieberman and Sa’ar, would have to accept joining a coalition that includes the Arab ‘Joint List’. The latter would have to do the same thing, cooperating with political parties with avowedly racist, chauvinistic and anti-peace agendas.

    Despite this, the anti-Netanyahu coalition would still fail to secure the needed numbers. At 57 seats, they still need a push either from Bennet’s ‘Yamina’ or Mansour Abbas’ ‘United Arab List (Ra’am)’.

    Bennett, known for his ideological rigidity, understands that a coalition with the Arabs and the left could jeopardize his position within his ideological base: the right and the far-right. If he is to join an anti-Netanyahu coalition, it would be for the sole purpose of passing legislation at the Knesset that prevents politicians on trial from participating in elections. This has been Lieberman’s main strategy for quite some time. Once this mission is achieved, these odd coalition partners would pounce on each other to claim Netanyahu’s position at the helm of the right.

    For Mansour Abbas’ ‘Ra’am’, however, the story is quite different. Not only did Abbas betray desperately needed Arab unity in the face of an existential threat posed by Israel’s growing anti-Arab politics, he went on to suggest his willingness to join a Netanyahu-led coalition.

    However, even for opportunistic Abbas, joining a right-wing coalition with groups that champion such slogans as “Death to the Arabs” can be extremely dangerous. From the perspective of Arabs in Israel, Abbas’ politics already borders on treason. Joining the chauvinistic, violent Kahanists – who ran as part of the ‘Religious Zionism’ list – to form a government that aims at saving Netanyahu’s political career, would place this inexperienced and foolhardy politician in direct confrontation with his own Palestinian Arab community.

    Alternatively, Abbas may wish to vote in favor of the anti-Netanyahu coalition as a direct partner, or from the outside. Similar to Bennett, both options would make Abbas a potential kingmaker, an ideal scenario from his point of view and less than ideal from the point of view of a coalition that, if formed, would be unstable.

    Consequently, it is hardly sufficient to categorize the outcome of the latest Israeli elections as a ‘setback’ for Netanyahu alone. While that is true, it is also a setback for everyone else. Netanyahu failed to achieve a clear majority, but his enemies, too, failed to make a case to Israeli voters of why Netanyahu should be shunned from politics altogether. The latter remains the uncontested leader of the Israeli right and his Likud party still leads with a 13 seats difference from his closest rival.

    Though the center temporarily unified in previous elections in the form of Kahol Lavan (‘Blue and White’), it quickly disintegrated, and this is equally true for the once unified Arab parties. Disuniting just before the fourth elections, these parties squandered Arab votes and, with it, any hope that racist, militaristic and religiously zealot Israeli politics could possibly be fixed from within.

    This means that, whether Netanyahu goes or stays, the next Israeli government is likely to remain firmly within the right. Moreover, with or without Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Israel is unlikely to produce a politically unifying figure, one who is capable of redefining the country beyond Netanyahu-style cult of personality.

    As for ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine, dismantling apartheid and, with it, the illegal Jewish settlements, these remain a distant hope, as these subjects were hardly part of the conversation that preceded the last elections.

    This article was posted on Thursday, April 1st, 2021 at 11:30pm and is filed under Benjamin Netanyahu, Elections, Israel/Palestine, The “Right”, The Joint List.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Israel election: The Far-right is Triumphant: The Only Obstacle Left is Netanyahu

    Extreme religious and settler parties are a firm majority in Israel’s new parliament. Now they want a leader truly committed to their cause

    As 13 parties struggle with Israel’s complex post-election maths, seeking alliances that can assure them power, the most significant outcome of the vote is easily missed. The religious fundamentalists and settler parties – Israel’s far right – won an unprecedented and clear-cut victory last week.

    Even on the most cautious assessment, these parties together hold 72 seats in the 120-member parliament. For more than a decade they have underwritten Benjamin Netanyahu’s uninterrupted rule. That is why all the current talk in Israel and the western media about two equal camps, right and left, pitted against each other – implacably hostile and unable to build a majority – is patent nonsense.

    The far right has a large majority. It could easily form a government – if it wasn’t mired in a now seemingly permanent crisis over the figure of Netanyahu.

    Standing against the far right are what are loosely termed the “centrists”, equally committed to the takeover of swaths of the occupied territories, if in their case more by stealth.

    There are two parties on the “centre-right” – Yesh Atid and Blue and White – that won between them 25 seats. The “centre-left”, represented by the Labor party and Meretz, still struggling to maintain the pretence that they comprise a “peace camp”, secured 13 seats. A final 10 seats went to the various parties representing Israel’s large minority of Palestinian citizens.

    Both the far right and the “centrists” subscribe to versions of the settler-colonial ideology of Zionism. To outsiders, the similarities between the two camps can sometimes look stronger than the differences. Ultimately, with the possible exception of Meretz, both want the Palestinians subjugated and removed.

    The “centrists” may best be understood as the apologetic wing of Zionism. They worry about Israel’s image abroad. And that means they have, at least ostensibly, emphasised dividing territory between Jews and Palestinians – as the Oslo accords proposed – rather than visibly dividing rights. The centrists’ great fear is that they will be seen as presiding over a single apartheid state.

    Jewish Supremacy

    The 60 percent of the parliament now in the hands of extreme religious and settler parties takes the opposite view. They prefer to divide rights – to create an explicit apartheid system – if they can thereby avoid dividing the territory. They want all of the region, and ideally only for Jews.

    They care little what others think. All subscribe to an ideology of Jewish supremacy, even if they differ on whether “Jewish” is defined in religious or ethnic-nationalist terms. In 2018 Netanyahu’s government began the process of legislating this worldview through the Jewish Nation State Law.

    The far right explicitly views Palestinians, the native people whose homeland the European-led Zionist movement has been colonising for the past 100 years, as interlopers or unwelcome guests.

    Unlike the centrists, the far right places little weight on the distinction between Palestinians under occupation and the fifth of Israel’s population who are Palestinian and have degraded citizenship. All Palestinians, wherever they live and whatever their status, are seen as an enemy that needs to be subdued.

    Allying with Centrists

    So why, given the far right’s incontestible triumph last week, are the media filled with analyses about Israel’s continuing political impasse and the likelihood of a fifth election in a few months’ time?

    Why, if a clear majority of legislators are unapologetic Jewish supremacists, has Netanyahu kept courting centrists to stay in power – as he did after the last election, when he ensnared battle-hardened general Benny Gantz into his coalition? And why after this election is he reported to be reaching out for the first time to a Palestinian party for support?

    Part of the answer lies in a deep disagreement within the far right, between religious fundamentalists and its more secular components, on what “Jewish rule” means. Both sides focus on the supremacy of Jews over Palestinians and refuse to make a meaningful distinction between the occupied territories and Israel. But they have entirely different conceptions of Jewish sovereignty. One faction thinks Jews should take their orders from God, while the other looks to a Jewish state.

    Further, they disagree on who counts as a Jew.

    It is hard, for example, for Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of Yisrael Beiteinu, to break bread with the extremist rabbis of Shas and United Torah Judaism, when those rabbis don’t regard many of his supporters – immigrants from the former Soviet Union – as real Jews. To them, “Russians” no more belong to the Jewish collective than Palestinians.

    Oppressive Shadow

    But an even bigger obstacle is to be found in the figure of Netanyahu himself, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.

    The far-right is largely unperturbed by Netanyahu’s trial on multiple corruption charges. Israel’s short history is full of major crimes: wars of aggression, forcible population transfer, executions and looting, land theft and settlement building. All Israeli leaders, Netanyahu included, have had a hand in these atrocities. The current focus on allegations against him of fraud and acceptance of bribes looks trivial in comparison.

    The far right’s problem with Netanyahu is more complex.

    He has been presiding over this bloc, relatively unchallenged, since the early 1990s. He has become by far the most skilled, experienced and charismatic politician in Israel. And for that reason, no other far right leader has been able to emerge from under his oppressive shadow.

    He may be King Bibi – his nickname – but the far right’s more ambitious princes are getting increasingly restless. They are eager to fill his shoes. Their knives are out. Gideon Saar, his Likud protege, created a party, New Hope, to run in last week’s election precisely in the hope of ousting his old boss. But equally, Netanyahu is so wily and experienced that he keeps outsmarting his rivals. He has managed to avoid any of his opponent’s lethal lunges by exploiting the far right’s weaknesses.

    Netanyahu has employed a twofold strategy. Despite perceptions abroad, he is actually one of the more moderate figures in the extreme religious and settler bloc. He is closer ideologically to Benny Gantz of Blue and White than he is either to the rabbis who dictate the policies of the religious parties or to the settler extremists – or even to the bulk of his own Likud party.

    Netanyahu has become a bogeyman abroad chiefly because he is so adept at harnessing the energy of the religious and settler parties and mobilising it to his own political and personal advantage. Israeli society grows ever more extreme because Netanyahu has for decades provided an aura of respectability, statesmanship and intellectual heft to the rhetoric surrounding the far right’s most noxious positions.

    In this election he even brokered a deal helping to bring Jewish Power – Israel’s most fascistic party – into parliament. If he has to, he will welcome them into the government he hopes to build.

    Wearing Thin

    But Netanyahu’s relative moderation – by Israel’s standards – means that he has, at least until recently, preferred to include centrists in his coalitions. That has helped to curb the excesses of a purely far right government that might antagonise the Europeans and embarrass Washington. And equally, it has kept the extreme right divided and dependent on him, as he plays its parties off against the centrists.

    If the princes of the settlements push him too hard, he can always tempt in a Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid), or a Gantz (Blue and White), or an Ehud Barak (Labor) to replace them.

    He has been loyal to no one but himself.

    Now that strategy is wearing thin. His corruption trial and the resulting campaign he has waged to weaken Israel’s legal and judicial systems to keep himself out of jail has left a sour taste with the centrists. They are now much warier of allying with him.

    After last year’s election, Gantz only dared join a Netanyahu government after citing exceptional grounds: the urgent need to fight the pandemic in an emergency government. Even so, he destroyed his party in the process. Now, it seems, only a rookie, conservative Islamist leader like Mansour Abbas may be willing to fall for Netanyahu’s trickery.

    Sensing Netanyahu’s weakness and his loss of alternative partners, parts of the far right have grown unruly and fractious.

    Netanyahu has kept the extreme religious parties on board – but at a steep cost. He has given them what they demand above all else: autonomy for their community. That is why Israeli police have turned a blind eye throughout the pandemic as the ultra-Orthodox have refused to close their schools during lockdowns and turned out in enormous numbers – usually without masks – for rabbis’ funerals.

    But Netanyahu’s endless indulgence of the ultra-Orthodox has served only to alienate the more secular parts of the far right.

    Betrayed on Annexation

    Worse, as Netanyahu has focused his energies on ways to draw attention away from his corruption trial, he has chosen to play fast and loose with the far right’s political and emotional priorities – most especially on annexation. In the recent, back-to-back election campaigns he has made increasingly earnest promises to formally annex swaths of the West Bank.

    But he has repeatedly failed to make good on his pledge.

    The betrayal hit hardest after the election a year ago. With then-President Donald Trump’s blessing, Netanyahu vowed to quickly begin annexation of large sections of the West Bank. But in the end Netanyahu ducked out, preferring to sign a “peace deal” with Gulf states on the confected condition that annexation be delayed.

    The move clearly indicated that, if it aided his political survival, Netanyahu would placate foreign capitals – behaviour reminiscent of the centrists – rather than advance the core goals of the far right. As a result, there is a growing exasperation with Netanyahu. Sections of the far right want someone new, someone invested in their cause – not in his own political and personal manoeuvrings.

    In the fashion of Middle Eastern dictators, Netanyahu has groomed no successor. He has cultivated a learnt helplessness in his own ideological camp, and the princes of the settlements are fearful of how they will cope without him. He has been their nursemaid for too long.

    But like rebellious teenagers, they want a taste of freedom – and to wreak more havoc than Netanyahu has ever allowed.

    They hope to break free of the political centre of gravity he has engineered for himself. If they finally manage it, we may yet look back on the Netanyahu era as a time of relative moderation and calm.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    This article was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2021 at 10:01pm and is filed under Annexation, Apartheid, Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Elections, Ethnic Cleansing, Hypocrisy, Israel/Palestine, Land Theft, Media, Media Bias, Occupation, Oslo Accords, Politics, Propaganda, The “Right”.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Israel’s KKK on the way to government?

    Party pushing for expulsion of Palestinians forms election pact with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has brokered an electoral alliance that is almost certain to bring Israel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan into the Israeli parliament when elections are held later this month.

    Netanyahu’s primary aim is to make sure he wins a decisive majority by shoring up the far-right bloc so that he can pass an immunity law to neutralize his current corruption trial.

    Enter Otzma Yehudit, or the Jewish Power party.

    Otzma Yehudit is strongly influenced by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose virulently anti-Palestinian Kach party was barred from Israeli elections more than 30 years ago.

    Since being proscribed, Kach has been declared a terrorist organisation in most western countries, including the United States, Canada and the European Union.

    Most of the leadership of Jewish Power had previously been involved with Kach, including its current leader, Itamar Ben Gvir, who held a position in Kahane’s movement in his student days.

    Jewish Power’s former leader and current chair, Michael Ben Ari, has been banned from entering the US because of his links to Jewish terrorism.

    Nonetheless, Netanyahu is widely reported to have offered sweeteners to get Jewish Power and two other extreme right parties to establish a new alliance called Religious Zionism.

    And despite claims by Netanyahu that Ben Gvir will not be given a ministerial post in his government after the 23 March election, Netanyahu may have to capitulate if his far-right and religious coalition needs Jewish Power to secure a majority of seats.

    Polls currently suggest no one commands a clear majority.

    ‘Kosher certificate’

    Since its formation in 2012, Jewish Power has not managed on its own to pass the electoral threshold of 3.25 percent of votes cast – the equivalent of about four seats in the 120-member Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

    Last month, however, Netanyahu’s Likud party signed a surplus vote-sharing agreement with Religious Zionism.

    Netanyahu’s move in part reflects his desperation to win a decisive victory on 23 March after three stalemated elections over the past two years.

    Without a clear parliamentary majority, he cannot pass an immunity law that will block his current trial on several charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust. So far he has successfully dragged out the proceedings, using Covid-19 restrictions as the pretext.

    After Netanyahu’s intervention, the electoral pact with Jewish Power is almost certain to ensure Ben Gvir makes it into the next parliament.

    He has the third slot on Religious Zionism’s candidate list and current polls suggest the group will win between four and five seats.

    Criticizing Netanyahu’s role as matchmaker, the Haaretz daily accused him of awarding “a kashrut [kosher] certificate to Kahanism” – the racist ideology that underpins Jewish Power.

    Maximizing seats

    Netanyahu’s aim is to ensure that the most extreme, small right-wing religious parties combine to pass the threshold and don’t waste votes that could be the difference between victory for his ultra-nationalist bloc and a win for his opponents.

    As one Israeli analyst noted, Netanyahu’s dependence on Religious Zionism maximizing its seat count means he will be committed to doing everything possible to push the “ticket over the threshold” in the final stages of the campaign.

    At the same time as aiding the extreme right, Netanyahu has also worked hard to break up the Joint List, a faction representing Israel’s large minority of Palestinian citizens.

    He is not only trying to maximize seats in his favor, he is trying to weaken the coalition of parties ranged against him.

    It is not the first time Netanyahu has sought to bring Jewish Power into the parliament, despite its overt Jewish supremacist politics. He brokered a similar deal in time for the April 2019 election, though Ben Gvir was not placed high enough to win a seat.

    On that occasion, leading Jewish American organisations including AIPAC voiced their opposition, calling Jewish Power a “racist and reprehensible party.”

    It has been notable that on this occasion there has been much less of a backlash.

    In the new deal, Ben Gvir has a far more prominent place alongside Bezalel Smotrich’s National Union party, which has joined Netanyahu’s governments in the past. The third partner is Noam, another religious far-right party in a crowded field whose distinguishing feature is its venomous homophobia.

    This has brought vocal opposition from other quarters. Ohad Hizki, head of an Israeli LGBT task force, responded: “Netanyahu has violated his promises to the gay community time and again, but this time a red line has been crossed that cannot be silently accepted.”

    Banned from running

    Previous Jewish Power leaders have been banned from standing by a judge-led Central Election Committee, comprising representatives from the major parties. However, Ben Gvir has faced no challenge.

    Rather, he went on the offensive himself, petitioning the committee for a blanket ban on candidates who are Palestinian citizens of Israel, claiming they were all “terrorist supporters.”

    Jewish Power’s electoral weakness since its founding reflects in part the fact that it has had difficulty differentiating itself ideologically from the larger mainstream parties as they move ever further rightwards.

    It has also been stymied by the constraint that its platform must remain ostensibly within the law. Its vulgarity rather than its policies appears to put off many voters on the right.

    Avigdor Lieberman, who heads the Yisrael Beiteinu party, is a former Kach member who has served in governments with Netanyahu as defense and foreign minister.

    Lieberman has long promoted one of Jewish Power’s signature policies: that Israel’s 1.8 million Palestinian citizens be expelled unless they declare loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state.

    Lieberman has even called for “disloyal” Palestinian citizens to be “beheaded.”

    No miscegenation

    Other Jewish Power policies overlap with prevailing views in Netanyahu’s Likud party, including the rejection of Palestinian statehood; support for the formal annexation of all or much of the West Bank; the imposition of Israeli sovereignty over al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem; and vehement opposition to miscegenation, or relationships between Jews and Palestinians.

    Smotrich, Jewish Power’s main partner in Religious Zionism, shares many of its anti-Palestinian views but has previously served as Netanyahu’s transport minister. He has called for Palestinian citizens to be denied housing and for Jewish-only maternity wards.

    Jewish Power’s leader, Ben Gvir is also a prominent activist in the violent settler enclave established in the Palestinian city of Hebron with Israeli state support.

    In 2007, he was convicted of inciting racism and supporting a terror group after holding up signs reading, “Expel the Arab enemy” and “Rabbi Kahane was right: The Arab MKs [members of Knesset] are a fifth column.”

    He once prominently displayed in his home a photo of Baruch Goldstein, an extremist who killed 29 and wounded 125 Muslims at worship in Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque in 1994, in an effort to derail the Oslo accords.

    As The Electronic Intifada has reported, a recently unearthed clip from 1995 of Ben Gvir shows him dressed as Goldstein for the Jewish holiday of Purim sayin: “He is my hero.”

    Burn down churches

    Trained as a lawyer, Ben Gvir has defended a series of far-right suspects in high-profile terrorism and hate-crime cases. Such work included two settlers who were charged with an arson attack on a Palestinian family in the village of Duma in 2015.

    An 18-month-old baby was among the victims burnt to death.

    Ben Gvir has also served as the lawyer for Lehava, an anti-miscegenation group whose members physically assault Palestinians they suspect of dating Jewish women.

    Lehava’s leader, Bentzi Gopstein, has also expressed support for burning down churches.

    Netanyahu has promised the Religious Zionism alliance a seat on the Judicial Appointments Committee. Ben Gvir will hope to use that position to bring yet more settlers into the courts as judges.

    At least two judges on Israel’s high court – Noam Sohlberg and David Mintz – are known to live in the settlements.

    Haaretz observed of the deal: “Netanyahu’s actions are an admission that Kahanism is an ally, a frequent visitor and practically a member of the Likud family.”

    •  First published in The Electronic Intifada

    This article was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2021 at 7:36pm and is filed under Benjamin Netanyahu, Elections, Israel, Politics, Racism, Settler Colonialism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Elections under Fire: Palestine’s Impossible Democracy Dilemma  

    Many Palestinian intellectuals and political analysts find themselves in the unenviable position of having to declare a stance on whether they support or reject upcoming Palestinian elections which are scheduled for May 22 and July 30. But there are no easy answers.

    The long-awaited decree by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas last January to hold legislative and presidential elections in the coming months was widely welcomed,  not as a triumph for democracy but as the first tangible positive outcome of dialogue between rival Palestinian factions, mainly Abbas’ Fatah party and Hamas.

    As far as inner Palestinian dialogue is concerned, the elections, if held unobstructed, could present a ray of hope that, finally, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories will enjoy a degree of democratic representation, a first step towards a more comprehensive representation that could include millions of Palestinians outside the Occupied Territories.

    But even such humble expectations are conditioned on many “ifs”: only if Palestinian factions honor their commitments to the Istanbul Agreement of September 24; only if Israel allows Palestinians, including Jerusalemites, to vote unhindered and refrains from arresting Palestinian candidates; only if the US-led international community accepts the outcome of the democratic elections without punishing victorious parties and candidates; only if the legislative and presidential elections are followed by the more consequential and substantive elections in the Palestinian National Council (PNC) – the Palestinian Parliament in exile – and so on.

    If any of these conditions is unsatisfactory, the May elections are likely to serve no practical purpose, aside from giving Abbas and his rivals the veneer of legitimacy, thus allowing them to buy yet more time and acquire yet more funds from their financial benefactors.

    All of this compels us to consider the following question: is democracy possible under military occupation?

    Almost immediately following the last democratic Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, the outcome of which displeased Israel, 62 Palestinian ministers and members of the new parliament were thrown into prison, with many still imprisoned.

    History is repeating itself as Israel has already begun its arrest campaigns of Hamas leaders and members in the West Bank. On February 22, over 20 Palestinian activists, including Hamas officials, were detained as a clear message from the Israeli occupation to Palestinians that Israel does not recognize their dialogue, their unity agreements or their democracy.

    Two days later, 67-year-old Hamas leader, Omar Barghouti, was summoned by the Israeli military intelligence in the occupied West Bank and warned against running in the upcoming May elections. “The Israeli officer warned me not to run in the upcoming elections and threatened me with imprisonment if I did,” Barghouti was quoted by Al-Monitor.

    The Palestinian Basic Law allows prisoners to run for elections, whether legislative or presidential, simply because the most popular among Palestinian leaders are often behind bars. Marwan Barghouti is one.

    Imprisoned since 2002, Barghouti remains Fatah’s most popular leader, though appreciated more by the movement’s young cadre, as opposed to Abbas’ old guard. The latter group has immensely benefited from the corrupt system of political patronage upon which the 85-year-old president has constructed his Authority.

    To sustain this corrupt system, Abbas and his clique labored to marginalize Barghouti, leading to the suggestion that Israel’s imprisonment of Fatah’s vibrant leader serves the interests of the current Palestinian President.

    This claim has much substance, not only because Abbas has done little to pressure Israel to release Barghouti but also because all credible public opinion polls suggest that Barghouti is far more popular among Fatah’s supporters – in fact all Palestinians – than Abbas.

    On February 11, Abbas dispatched Hussein al-Sheikh, the Minister of Civilian Affairs and a member of Fatah’s Central Committee, to dissuade Barghouti from running in the upcoming presidential elections. An ideal scenario for the Palestinian President would be to take advantage of Barghouti’s popularity by having him lead the Fatah list in the contest for the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). Hence, Abbas could ensure a strong turnout by Fatah supporters, while securing the chair of presidency for himself.

    Barghouti vehemently rejected Abbas’ request, thus raising an unexpected challenge to Abbas, who now risks dividing the Fatah vote, losing the PLC elections, again, to Hamas and losing the presidential elections to Barghouti.

    Between the nightly raids and crackdowns by the Israeli military and the political intrigues within the divided Fatah movement, one wonders if the elections, if they take place, will finally allow Palestinians to mount a united front in the struggle against Israeli occupation and for Palestinian freedom.

    Then, there is the issue of the possible position of the ‘international community’ regarding the outcome of the elections. News reports speak of efforts made by Hamas to seek guarantees from Qatar and Egypt “to ensure Israel will not pursue its representatives and candidates in the upcoming elections,” Al-Monitor also reported.

    But what kind of guarantees can Arab countries obtain from Tel Aviv, and what kind of leverage can Doha and Cairo have when Israel continues to disregard the United Nations, international law, the International Criminal Court, and so on?

    Nevertheless, can Palestinian democracy afford to subsist in its state of inertia? Abbas’ mandate as president expired in 2009, the PLC’s mandate expired in 2010 and, in fact, the Palestinian Authority was set up as an interim political body, whose function should have ceased in 1999. Since then, the ‘Palestinian leadership’ has not enjoyed legitimacy among Palestinians, deriving its relevance, instead, from the support of its benefactors, who are rarely interested in supporting democracy in Palestine.

    The only silver lining in the story is that Fatah and Hamas have also agreed on the restructuring of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which is now largely monopolized by Abbas’ Fatah movement. Whether the democratic revamping of the PLO takes place or not, largely depends on the outcome of the May and July elections.

    Palestine, like other Middle Eastern countries, including Israel, does have a crisis of political legitimacy. Since Palestine is an occupied land with little or no freedom, one is justified to argue that true democracy under these horrific conditions cannot possibly be achieved.

    This article was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2021 at 8:36pm and is filed under Elections, Fatah, Hamas, Incarceration, International Criminal Court, Israel/Palestine, Israeli Defence Force (IDF), Mahmoud Abbas, Occupation, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), Political Prisoners, Politics, United Nations, West Bank, Zionism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Ready to Work with Netanyahu: Mansour Abbas Splinters Arab Vote in Israel

    At a glance, it may appear that the split of Arab political parties in Israel is consistent with a typical pattern of political and ideological divisions which have afflicted the Arab body politic for many years. This time, however, the reasons behind the split are quite different.

    As Israel readies for its fourth general elections within two years,  scheduled for March 23, Israel’s Palestinian Arab voters seem to be in a position of power, slated to become the kingmaker in the country’s future coalition government. But something peculiar has happened. The Joint List, which has successfully united the Arab vote in Israel in previous elections, suffered a major setback with the split of the United Arab List (Raam) on February 4.

    Raam is the political arm of the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel. In April 2019, it entered the elections in a joint coalition with the National Democratic Alliance (Balad) Party. In September 2019 and, again, in March 2020, it contested in the general elections as part of the Joint List, an Arab alliance, which, in addition to al-Balad, included the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash) and the Arab Movement for Renewal (Ta’al).

    Despite their ideological divides and different socio-economic visions, Arab parties in Israel have felt that their unity is more urgent than ever before. There are reasons for this.

    Israel has been rapidly moving to the right, where ultra-nationalist and religious groups now represent mainstream Israeli politics. The center, which temporarily unified under the banner of Kahol Lavan (Blue and White), has actively promoted a similar discourse to Israel’s traditional right of yesteryears.  Finally, the left has disintegrated, to play an unprecedentedly marginal role with little or no impact on Israeli politics.

    As the Israeli right has grown emboldened in recent years, various anti-Arab legislations were passed by the right-dominated Knesset (Parliament). The most obvious example is the ‘Nation-State Law’, which elevated the exclusive identity of Israel as a Jewish State, while devaluing Palestinian Arab rights, religions and language.

    In the September 2019 elections, Arab unity finally paid dividends, as the Joint List won 13 of the Knesset’s 120 contested seats. In April 2020, united Arab parties performed even better, emerging, for the first time in Israel’s history, as the country’s third-largest political bloc after Likud and Kahol Lavan.

    Clearly, Arab parties were ready to engage in the political process, not as marginal forces but active participants. Ayman Odeh, the head of the Joint List, had made several overtures to Benny Gantz, leader of the centrist Kahol Lavan. Odeh had reasoned that, with the help of the Joint List, a centrist-led coalition would finally be ready to dislodge right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, from power.

    Gantz refused to allow Arab parties into his government coalition, preferring instead to seek common ground with his archenemy, Netanyahu. Both formed a unity government in May 2020, which only lasted for seven months.

    By refusing to incorporate the Joint List, Gantz took the first step in destroying his own promising centrist coalition, which then included Yesh Atid and Telem. Leaders of the latter two factions officially split soon after Gantz agreed to the Netanyahu union. In the coming March elections, Yesh Atid will be contesting independently, while Telem decided to refrain from entering the election fray altogether so as, reportedly, not to further splinter the opposition’s votes.

    From a strategic point of view, this would have been the most opportune moment for the Arab Joint List to finally translate its electoral victories into political success. There is a growing realization that a coalition government in Israel, even if formed, would remain unsustainable without Arab support. Consequently, the country’s leading political camps are openly jockeying to court the Arab vote.

    Indeed, Netanyahu, who, in 2015 used fear mongering to rally the right behind him by saying that Arab voters were “heading to the polling stations in droves,’ is now turning around. During a visit to the Arab city of Nazareth on January 13, he claimed that his previous comments were misinterpreted. In other Arab towns, he boasted about his record in support of Arab communities and in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. His anti-Arab rhetoric is currently at an all-time low.

    The centrist, Yair Lapid, of Yesh Atid has also shown willingness to work with Arab politicians, stating on January 17 that “It was a loss that we did not do it in the current Knesset,” referring to Gantz’s rejection of Arab endorsement and exclusion of Arabs from the coalition government.

    Yet, instead of taking advantage of their electoral success, the Joint List, once again, splintered, or precisely, an important party, Raam, has exited the coalition. This time, however, the fragmentation was not an outcome of ideological differences but the result of the bewildering position of Raam’s leader, Mansour Abbas.

    In February, Abbas had indicated his willingness to join a Netanyahu-led coalition. He justified his shocking turnabout with unconvincing political platitudes as one “needs to be able to look to the future, and to build a better future for everyone,” and so on.

    The fact that Netanyahu is largely responsible for the despairing outlook of Israel’s Arabs’ future seems entirely irrelevant to Abbas, who is inexplicably keen on joining any future political alliance even if it includes Israel’s most chauvinistic political actors.

    Israeli right-wing newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, sums up Abbas’ devastating blow to Arab unity just before the elections, with this headline, “Meet Mansour Abbas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unlikely ally”.

    According to a recent poll conducted by Israel’s Channel 13, Abbas’ Raam party could potentially control 4 Knesset seats following the March elections. Also plausible, Raam might fail to achieve the required 3.25 percent threshold, thus receiving no political representation whatsoever. Either way, Abbas’ obvious self-serving folly could cost Arab parties a historic and unmatched opportunity to assert themselves as a decisive political force that could challenge Israeli racism and Palestinian Arab marginalization.

    Now that all electoral alliances have been finalized, Mansour Abbas has clearly made the wrong choice and, no matter the outcome, he has already lost.

    This article was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2021 at 7:12pm and is filed under Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Disinformation, Elections, Fearmongering, Hypocrisy, Israel, Palestine, The “Right”, The Joint List, Transparency/Secrecy.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Coup Leaders, Aung San Suu Kyi Betrayed Democracy in Burma

    What is taking place in Burma right now is a military coup. There can be no other description for such an unwarranted action as the dismissal of the government by military decree and the imposition of Min Aung Hlaing, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, as an unelected ruler.

    However, despite the endless talk about democratization, Burma was, in the years leading up to the coup, far from being a true democracy.

    Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the country’s erstwhile ruling party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), has done very little to bring about meaningful change since she was designated State Counselor.

    Since her return to Rangoon in 1989 and placement under house arrest for many years, Suu Kyi was transformed from an activist making the case for democracy in her country, into a ‘democracy icon’ and, eventually, into an untouchable cult personality. The title, ‘State Counselor’, invented by NDL following the 2016 elections, was meant to place her authority above all others in government.

    The justification for this special status is that the military, which continued to have substantial sway over the government, would not allow Suu Kyi to serve as the Prime Minister, because her husband and children are British. But there is more to the story. On her relationship with her party, Richard C. Paddock recently wrote in the New York Times that Suu Kyi has controlled her party in a style that is similar to the previous military control of the country.

    “Critics began calling the party a cult of personality,” Paddock wrote, adding, “Often criticized for her stubbornness and imperious style, she has kept the party firmly under her command and is known to demand loyalty and obedience from her followers.”

    Those who have celebrated the ‘Lady’s’ legacy of yesteryear, were disappointed when the supposed human rights champion agreed to participate in the 2016 elections, despite the fact that millions of Burmese who belong to marginalized ethnic groups – like the country’s persecuted Rohingya – were excluded from the ballot box.

    Faint and bashful criticism was overpowered by the global celebration of Burma’s fledgling democracy. No sooner had Suu Kyi been made the de facto leader, although with direct alliance with the country’s former junta, than international conglomerates – mostly Western – rushed to Rangoon to capitalize on Burma’s largesse of natural resources, left unexploited because of economic sanctions imposed on the country.

    Many legitimate questions were brushed aside, so as not to blemish what was dubbed as a victory for democracy in Burma, miraculously won from a cruel military by a single woman who symbolized the determination and the decades-long struggle of her people. However, behind this carefully choreographed and romanticized veneer was a genocidal reality.

    The genocide of the Rohingya, a pogrom of murder, rape and ethnic cleansing, goes back many decades in Burma. When the Burmese junta carried out their ‘cleansing’ operations of Rohingya Muslims in the past, their violent campaigns were either entirely overlooked or conveniently classified under the encompassing discourse of human rights violations in that country.

    When the genocide intensified in 2016-17, and continued unabated, many legitimate questions arose about the culpability of Burma’s ruling NLD party and of Suu Kyi, personally.

    In the early months of the most recent episodes of the Rohingya genocide at the hands of government forces and local militias, Suu Kyi and her party behaved as if the country was gripped by mere communal violence and that, ultimately, blame was to be shared by all of those involved. That discourse proved unsustainable.

    Internationally, the Rohingya became a recurring theme in the media as hundreds of thousands of refugees were forced to flee, mostly into Bangladesh. The magnitude of their misery became daily and horrific headlines. Stories of rape and murder were documented by the United Nations and other international rights groups. As a result, thanks to efforts championed by a group of 57 Muslim countries, a landmark lawsuit, accusing Burma of genocide, was filed at the UN International Court of Justice in the Hague in 2019.

    For Suu Kyi and her party, ethnic allegiances and realpolitik superseded any platitudes about democracy and human rights, as she defiantly objected to international criticism and openly defended her government and military. In her testimony at the UN Court in December, Suu Kyi described the genocidal violence of the Rohingya as “cycles of inter-communal violence going back to the 1940s”.  Moreover, she harangued the ‘impatience’ of international investigators and human rights groups, blaming them for rushing to judgment.

    By dismissing what “many human rights experts have called some of the worst pogroms of this century,” Suu Kyi turned from “champion of human rights and democracy to apparent apologist for brutality,” NYT reported.

    Though we must insist that the return to rule by the military in Burma is unacceptable, we must equally demand that Burma embraces true democracy for all of its citizens, regardless of race, ethnicity or religion. A good start would be to disassociate Aung San Suu Kyi from any inclusive democratic movement in this country. The Lady of Burma had her opportunity but, sadly, failed.

    This article was posted on Sunday, February 28th, 2021 at 6:27pm and is filed under Aung San Suu Kyi, Authoritarianism, Burma, Coup, Crimes against Humanity, Democracy, Disinformation, Elections, Genocide, Human Rights, Hypocrisy, International Court of Justice, Militarism, Propaganda, Rohingya, Totalitarianism, Transparency/Secrecy, United Nations.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Failure of Trump’s “Coup”: A Victory for the US Empire

    The Democrats’ second trial of Trump ends like the first: the outcome known in advance, the entire process designed to sell to the anti-Trump masses that the Democrats were leading some progressive counter-attack. Both impeachments enabled these politicians to present a national diversion to avoid addressing real issues the US people suffer from: the pandemic, lack of vaccines, no national health care program, increasing homelessness, closed schools.

    The Democrats’ first impeachment over Trump’s phone call to Ukraine aimed to sully his name for the benefit of the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.  They purposely did not address Trump’s actual crimes: his cruelty to Latino immigrants on the border, his indifference to  police abuse of Blacks and Latinos, his racist attacks on non-white US citizens and residents, his neglect of the threat of global warming, funding the genocidal war against Yemen, bombing other countries, such as Syria, illegal and cruel sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela.

    The second impeachment, for the vague charge of “incitement of insurrection” sought to permanently ban Trump from “holding any office,” removing him as an election opponent in 2024. The Democrats reduced themselves to presenting as “evidence” of inciting insurrection Trump’s statement “’if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” However, this insubstantial statement could easily be used to indict any progressive social change movement, much as the Smith Act of 1940 had been used against leftists. The Democrats conveniently avoided mention that Trump in his January 6 speech explicitly told protesters to “peacefully march to the Capitol.”

    The second impeachment also charged Trump with refusing to accept the November 2020 election results. However, the Constitution states Congress must officially certify the Electoral College votes and the presidential victor, giving Trump the constitutional right to challenge these votes in Congress. The articles of impeachment concluded “Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution”. Whatever our opinion of the man, this only continues the Democratic Party-national security state McCarthyite campaign against Trump begun in earnest in 2016. Trump’s second acquittal marked a setback for this McCarthyism the Democrats have been pushing.

    Trump’s “coup” and the Democrats’ “coup”

    Trump’s attempt on January 6 pales in comparison to the Democrats’ well-orchestrated lawfare coup operation set in motion in 2016. As Consortium News, The Grayzone, Stephen Cohen, Glenn Greenwald have documented,  by late 2015 the Democrats were working with national security state officials to paint Trump as beholden to Putin – including stories of Putin’s alleged ownership of “pee tapes” of Trump with prostitutes in Moscow hotels. The Democrats funded the Steele Dossier fabrication, beginning a years-long fact-free story of Trump collusion with Russia to steal the election.

    While Democrats charge Trump with propagating his Stop the Steal story, they have not renounced their own fake Trump-Putin collusion story. In fact, it set the stage for their first impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even tweeted – after Congress certified the 2016 Electoral College vote “Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.”

    The continuous Democratic Party double standard and hypocrisy in relation to Trump explains a great deal of his supporters’ anger. As Scott Ritter noted, “For the supporters of Donald Trump, the events of Jan. 6 did not occur in a vacuum but were rather the culmination of what they believed to be a four-year campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the president they voted for and, by doing so, disenfranchising not only their vote, but by extension their role as citizens.”

    The second impeachment show intended to divert the 81 million Biden voters from their expectations and demands for progressive change, given the Democrats have won the presidency and both houses of Congress. It stifled any budding movement demanding the Democrats take action for a national health care program, a bailout for the people, a jobs program, a Green New Deal, etc. Their impeachment spectacle sought to vilify Trump and his supporters, as well as solidify what Glenn Greenwald describes as the new alliance of the national security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Bush era neo-cons, and mainstream corporate media with the neoliberal Democratic Party.

    Who were the Trump voters

    Central to the Democratic Party – and even leftist – spin is that Trump supporters are racist, sexist white men, the “deplorables.” This prejudiced stereotype hardly explains why 9 million Obama voters switched to Trump in 2016. Nor explain why, after four years of hostile mainstream media coverage, he won 10.5 million more votes in 2020.  A look at the 2020 election voter breakdown contradicts their condescending stereotype.

    In 2016, Trump won the white women vote by a margin of 9%, even though his opponent would have been the first woman president. In 2020 this vote margin increased to an 11% margin. In 2016, Trump won 28% of the Latina vote; in 2020, 31%. In 2016, Trump won 5% of the Black women vote; in 2020, 9%, despite Kamala Harris being on the Democratic ticket.  In 2016, he won 13% of the Black male vote; in 2020 it rose to 19%. Overall, comparing 2016 and 2020, Trump’s vote share rose 4% with Blacks, 3% with Latinos, and 5% with Asian Americans. Of the LGBT community, Trump was said to have won 28% of the vote, double his 2016 percent. In sum, people of color, LGBTs  the very ones said to be central to the Democratic coalition, shifted toward Trump.

    The group where Trump lost vote share involved white men, even though he won 35% more of the white working class vote than Biden. In 2016, Trump won 65% of the white men vote; in 2020 it fell to 61%. This hardly squares with liberal and pro-Democrat mythology that a Trump supporter is a racist white man.

    The US leftist movement co-opted by the Democratic Party

    Despite the November election choice coming down to two corporate neoliberals disliked by the great majority of the US population, more than 159.6 million Americans turned out to vote. The corporate rulers’ effort to neutralize popular opposition to their two parties and lure in social movements was so successful that the election turnout marked the highest percent of  voter population in 120 years, 66.7%. Even leftist groups capitulated, dressing this up as “fighting fascism” as they climbed aboard the two corporate party bandwagon.

    Typically, every four years the liberal-left, in order to justify a vote for the corporate Democrat presidential candidate, tries to paint the Republican candidate as a herald of fascism. In Fascism? First Two Months in Power: Hitler vs. Trump, I wrote:

    Leftists recognize corporate America owns the two parties, yet many still vote Democrat. Every four years, we must first defeat the fascist, then build our movement. So is the story we are told. This has been an effective strategy to trap us in the Democratic Party. It has worked for generations. Not only does it reinforce our domination by corporate America, but it seriously miseducates people about fascism.

    Needless to say, so long as corporate America has the liberal-left tied to their two party system, they have no need for fascism. They need fascism only when their customary method of rule breaks down and they face a very direct threat of losing control to revolutionary forces. The historic function of fascism is to smash the radicalized working class and its allies, destroy their organizations, and shut down political liberties when the corporate rulers find themselves unable to govern through their charade of democracy.  No such problem here.

    This capitulation to the corporate Democrats, including by self-described leftist groups, was hard to imagine just earlier in 2020, with the massive Black Lives Matter protests and the anti-neoliberal Bernie Sanders movement.

    While the vast majority of voters for both parties voted for their version of the “lesser evil,” the record election turnout for this charade was a great victory for corporate America irrespective of who won.

    A successful Trump coup would be a worse outcome for the corporate rulers

    The Democratic Party, liberals and leftists claimed Trump was planning a coup, a fascist coup even, on January 6. We are supposed to be grateful this alleged fascist insurrection was put down. But to play along with this coup story, if it were successful, the result would ignite massive nationwide protests by anti-Trump voters. After Trump’s election in November 2016, there were large “Not My President” protests in over 20 cities and many universities around the country. In 2020 between 15-26 million are said to have mobilized in Black Lives Matter rallies. Between 3-5 million participated in the anti-Trump Women’s Marches in 2017. Trump and his supporters have also shown they can turn out their base not only in large rallies but in armed protests.

    Murders by individuals in both camps have already occurred in Charlottesville, Portland and Kenosha. Both anti-Trump and pro-Trump protesters firmly believe they are the ones defending US democracy and freedom against their opponents, that their own candidate legitimately won the presidential election. Right wing Trumpers fear socialists will take over the US, while the anti-Trump left fear fascists will.

    Nationwide confrontations and mobilizations by these opposing forces following a successful Trump coup could seriously damage the overall political stability of the US system for some time. This would weaken the US empire’s ability to sell its “freedom and democracy” image and political leadership role abroad. It would undermine US capacity to assert its military and world cop ideological power around the world.

    Consequently, the best result for the US empire would be for Trump to lose the election, his “coup” to fail, and he be banned from running for political office. The US rulers achieved almost all that agenda. US leftists, declared opponents of the empire, must ask themselves why this very agenda was also their own agenda.

    Stansfield Smith, Chicago ALBA Solidarity, is a long time Latin America solidarity activist, and presently puts out the AFGJ Venezuela Weekly. He is also the Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Read other articles by Stansfield.

    This article was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2021 at 3:34pm and is filed under Coup, Democrats, Disinformation, Donald Trump, Elections, Electoral College, Hillary Clinton, Hypocrisy, Joe Biden, Lesser Evilism, Media, Neoliberalism, Politics, President Vladimir Putin, Propaganda, Protests, Racism, Republicans, Russia, The “Left”, US Congress, US Corporations, Vote.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How Israel’s Netanyahu helped break apart the Joint List

    Rifts in the Palestinian coalition party in Israel have helped further the prime minister’s agenda, and may yet foil his corruption trial

    For six years the Joint List had served as a beacon of political hope. Not just for the large Palestinian minority in Israel it represented, but also for a global Palestinian audience disillusioned by years of infighting between Fatah and Hamas that has sidelined the national cause.

    But last week, the Joint List’s coalition of four Palestinian parties split asunder, weeks ahead of an Israeli general election that will focus on the fate of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

    The List’s component parties, representing a fifth of the Israeli population, had found it impossible to set aside their long-running ideological and tactical differences.

    The coalition that broke the mould of Palestinian politics has now broken apart itself, and, according to analysts, the toll is likely to be severe.

    Netanyahu’s manipulations

    There are at least superficial parallels between the Joint List’s breakup and the ongoing hostility between Fatah and Hamas. On one side, three largely secular parties – Hadash, Taal and Balad – have remained in the List, while the fourth, the United Arab List (UAL), a conservative Islamic party led by Mansour Abbas, is going it alone.

    Once again, Israeli actors have played a decisive role in manipulating internal Palestinian divisions. Netanyahu has been widely credited with offering incentives to encourage Abbas to quit the Joint List and form a rival political coalition, one bolstered by the support of popular local politicians.

    The rupture in the Joint List, Netanyahu appears to hope, will change the electoral maths in the Israeli parliament and help him foil his corruption trial.

    And as Awad Abdelfattah, a former secretary-general of Balad, observed to Middle East Eye, Israel’s four main Palestinian parties – like Fatah and Hamas in the occupied territories – have been unable to find a unifying vision of where Palestinian politics is heading next.

    In an era when neither Washington, the Europeans or Arab states are showing the slightest interest in pushing for Palestinian statehood, the Joint List has found itself forced to concentrate on domestic issues. But those have proved far more divisive.

    Victim of own success

    The Joint List has in many ways been a victim of its own success.

    It was born in early 2015 out of crisis. The Netanyahu government had passed legislation raising the electoral threshold specifically to prevent the four Palestinian parties in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, from winning seats individually.

    Out of necessity, these very different factions, representing 1.8 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, were forced to sit together.

    Until the arrival of the List, voter turnout among Palestinian citizens had been in terminal decline. The minority had grown ever-more disenchanted with an Israeli political scene over which its elected representatives had zero influence.

    The Joint List instantly reversed that trend.

    In the 2015 election it became the third largest party, offering a greater political visibility to the Palestinian minority than ever before. And the List’s personable, conciliatory leader, Ayman Odeh, of the socialist Hadash party, was soon being feted abroad.

    But the rapid growth of the Joint List – it won a record 15 seats in the 120-seat Knesset in the last election a year ago – was also its undoing.

    Netanyahu has spent the last two years desperately trying, and failing, to cobble together a decisive majority government after a series of inconclusive elections. His goal is to pass legislation to block his trial on multiple corruption charges. The Joint List’s sizeable bloc in the Knesset is one significant reason for why success has constantly eluded him.

    Netanyahu’s initial instinct was to follow a well-trodden path: incite against the Palestinian minority and their representatives in the hope of dissuading them from voting. He questioned Palestinian citizens’ right to vote, implied that they were stealing the election, and declared that they belonged to a terrorist population. None of it worked.

    Instead, Netanyahu inadvertently fired up the Palestinian minority to turn out in ever larger numbers, making it even harder for him to secure a Jewish majority.

    Rise in crime

    At the same time, however, Palestinians were not just voting against Netanyahu. As Asad Ghanem, a political scientist at Haifa University, noted to MEE, voters wanted the Joint List to use its increased size to elbow its way into an Israeli political arena that had always ignored the Palestinian parties.

    Palestinian voters in Israel have highlighted two key, festering issues they expected action on.

    One is the refusal by the Israeli authorities to designate public land to Palestinian communities or issue building permits. Both factors have led to massive overcrowding for Palestinian citizens and a plague of illegal building under threat of demolition.

    And the other is a rapid growth in criminal gangs in Israel’s Palestinian towns and villages that were sucked into the void left by a mix of negligent and hostile policing. Shootings and murders have rocketed in Palestinian communities, stripping residents of any sense of personal security.

    Toxic politics

    It was these pressures from their own voters that encouraged the Joint List to abandon its traditional unwillingness to get involved in the political horse-trading between the Jewish parties that follow each election, as the largest factions try to build a government.

    After the election last year, the Joint List parties reluctantly backed Benny Gantz, the former military general who oversaw the destruction of Gaza in the 2014 war, because his Blue and White party was the best hope of ousting Netanyahu.

    But Netanyahu had used the campaign to make the Joint List toxic for most Jewish voters. He once again incited against the Palestinian minority, arguing that Gantz would form a government by relying on “supporters of terror”, in reference to the List.

    The Blue and White leader balked at the Joint List’s support and headed into a coalition with Netanyahu instead.

    It is hard to underestimate the damage Gantz’s decision did to the List. Last week’s breakup is its most poisoned fruit – and Netanayhu’s big electoral achievement.

    Gantz’s rebuff was especially a slap in the face to Odeh, the secular leader of the Joint List who had pushed the hardest for supporting a Blue and White government. His socialist Hadash party has always prized the idea of Arab-Jewish solidarity and cooperation.

    Gantz’s rejection offered an opening to Netanyahu to change his approach to the List. He would now try to kill it through selective kindness.

    He drew on his favourite policy to win over Palestinians, whether in Israel or the occupied territories: what he terms “economic peace”. The transactional idea is that he offers small economic incentives in return for political quiescence from Palestinians.

    The Nazareth model

    Netanyahu’s test bed in Israel for this old-style, patronage politics was Nazareth, where a new mayor, Ali Salam, was elected in 2014 – a break with decades of rule by the socialist Hadash party.

    Salam was part of a new wave of populist politicians emerging around the world. Immediately following the US election of 2016, Salam credited himself with being a political mentor to Donald Trump, whom he never met.

    Salam sidelined the Palestinian national cause, even rhetorically, and focused on a narrow agenda of cosying up to the Israeli government in the hope of winning favours for his city and prolonging his personal rule.

    Netanyahu was keen to win a political ally in Nazareth, the effective capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel, and especially one as divisive as Salam. The two were soon flaunting a relationship of mutual convenience.

    This, it seems, did not go unnoticed by Abbas, leader of the outgoing UAL party in the Joint List. After Gantz’s rebuff, Abbas began to replicate, on the national stage, the political alliance with Netanyahu fostered locally by Salam in Nazareth.

    Odeh, the Joint List’s leader, had accepted the need to make an alliance with Gantz in the hope of gaining political influence, but was rejected.

    Abbas pursued a similar logic. As Abdelfattah put it: “His view was, why can’t I do the same and make a deal with Netanyahu? As prime minister, Netanyahu is better placed to deliver than Gantz and needs support to avoid his corruption trial.”

    Last October, Abbas revealed how this would work in practice. He used his powers as a deputy Knesset speaker to void a parliamentary vote that had approved a commission of inquiry into Netanyahu over highly damaging allegations in what is known as the “submarine affair”.

    Netanyahu is suspected of profiting from a deal for German submarines in defiance of advice from the military. The “submarine affair” has been the main spark for more than a year of anti-Netanyahu protests across Israel.

    Behind the scenes, it emerged, Abbas had been cultivating ties with Netanyahu and his advisers. He has repeatedly hinted that he may be willing to vote in favour of an immunity law that would scotch Netanyahu’s trial.

    The key reason cited for the collapse of the Joint List negotiations last week was Abbas’ insistence to his coalition partners that they agree to impossible conditions before he would rule out recommending Netanyahu as prime minister.

    In return, Netanyahu has built up Abbas as the man he can work with to staunch the crime wave and overcrowding in Palestinian communities.

    Additionally, Netanyahu has implied that Abbas is the politician who can cash in on the peace dividend Palestinian citizens will supposedly enjoy as a result of Israel’s warming ties with Arab states through the so-called Abraham Accords.

    Unreliable partner

    Abbas’ former allies in the Joint List understand that Netanyahu is an entirely unreliable political partner, as he has demonstrated throughout his career and repeatedly in his dealings with Gantz.

    Nonetheless, Abbas appears to believe that, on the back of Netanyahu’s implied endorsement, he can build a new conservative, largely Islamic political coalition to rival the Joint List.

    His ambition, it seems, is to become an Islamic version of Shas, the Jewish religious party that has long allied with Netanyahu in return for regular concessions on narrow religious interests and socially conservative policies.

    Abbas is wooing prominent local politicians, including Nazareth’s Salam, to build up the party’s popular base.

    In a move to sow further division and drive a wedge in the Joint List, Netanyahu made a high-profile visit to Nazareth last month that was greeted with large protests. The prime minister declared a “new era in relations between Jews and Arabs”, adding that “Arab citizens should fully be a part of Israeli society.”

    Attacking the Joint List, he said: “I am excited to see the huge change that is taking place in the Arab society towards me and the Likud [party] under my leadership. The Arab citizens of Israel, you join the Likud because you want to finally join the ruling party.”

    Salam further twisted the knife into the Joint List as he praised Netanyahu: “The entire Arab society is disappointed over what they have given, and about their work and attitude toward their electorate.”

    Despite Netanyahu’s promises of greater investment, violence has continued to rip through Palestinian communities during the election campaign. A 22-year-old nursing student was the latest victim last week, shot dead in the crossfire between a local gang and the police in the Palestinian town of Tamra.

    Abbas will hope to exploit such violence as further evidence that he will be able to exert real pressure on Netanyahu if the prime minister is politically dependent on a strong Abbas-led party for support.

    Duplicitous courtship

    Netanyahu has little to lose from a political courtship of Abbas, however duplicitous.

    As Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Knesset member, observed to MEE, the split risks damaging all Palestinian politicians. “We promised to fight the Israeli right. If we can’t do that, then why vote for us? Our electorate will head towards the Zionist parties,” she said.

    Ghanem, the political analyst, agreed: “Netanyahu is telling the Palestinian public that they don’t need the Arab parties, that they are better off dealing directly with him.”

    A recent poll suggested that Netanyahu’s new conciliatory approach might win his Likud up to two extra seats from Palestinian citizens, especially in more marginalised communities in the Negev.

    Good vs bad Arabs

    But Netanyahu stands to gain, however the Palestinian public in Israel responds.

    If it punishes its parties over the split by failing to turn out to vote, the prime minister will benefit from the larger share of ballots cast for Jewish parties.

    And if Abbas convinces enough Palestinian citizens that he has the key to unlock Netanyahu’s favours, his party may win a handful of seats – enough to enable Netanyahu to pass an immunity law to stymie his trial.

    Last month, Odeh said in a tweet that Netanyahu “will not succeed in dividing us into good and bad Arabs”. And yet, having subverted the Joint List, that is exactly what Netanyahu has already achieved.

    Now there are bad Arabs like Odeh and good, responsible ones like Abbas. And Netanyahu will hope to play them off against each other to keep himself in power.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    This article was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2021 at 9:33pm and is filed under Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Elections, Politics, The Joint List.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Election Politics and Cybersecurity: What’s the Connection?

    Image Source: Pexels

    2020 may have been the most tumultuous election year in United States history. With the coronavirus pandemic complicating traditional election processes, we had to rely on alternative voting methods such as mail-in ballots to secure the ability for many to vote. Yet these methods were besieged by doubts encouraged by former President Trump and others in powerful positions.

    Among many allegations of voter fraud and interference were the claims that electronic voting platforms were vulnerable to cyber-attacks. These claims warrant a closer look.

    What role does cybersecurity play in electoral politics? Is there any truth to digital voting representing a threat to election security? What are the concerns and what are the solutions?

    Exploring the connection between electoral politics and cybersecurity can provide these answers and help clarify the status of election security.

    A Phantom Menace

    When the election recount of 2000 was prompted by questions around paper ballots and hanging chads, legislatures acted to bring the voting process into the new millennia. Ultimately, this created the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) which mandated upgraded voting systems federally. Now, 99% of our voting involves a computerized process.

    Unfortunately, however, these processes have been under attack. The Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election found that attacks were made against election infrastructure and voting systems. Luckily, though, the report turned up no evidence of changed votes or manipulated voting machines.

    Even so, the threat prompted a re-evaluation of systems. As a result, election infrastructure assistance was made available to state and local governments to better protect election integrity. Yet there are still issues and concerns for the cyber safety of our election process.

    Before a vote even hits the ballot box, there is the threat of voter suppression through manipulation of electronic systems and people throughout the internet. One example of this was the hack job that changed the address of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the voter database before he arrived at the polls, forcing him to correct the error before he could vote.

    Then, there is the threat to voting systems themselves. All kinds of cyberattacks could exploit vulnerabilities in potentially outdated voting machinery and software, including:

    • Malware
    • Ransomware
    • Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks
    • Fraud

    These are threats far from unique to voting systems in the U.S. Wherever a networked device exists, there will be some risk of a bad actor infiltrating and disrupting processes. Vulnerabilities hang over the modernization of our election procedures like a looming shadow.

    This is where cybersecurity comes in.

    Fighting the Threat

    Mr. Trump and a smattering of other voices from the Republican party have claimed that the 2020 election was rigged by cyberattacks like those listed above making a difference in the vote tally. However, not even the top cybersecurity official in the Department of Homeland security found any evidence of voting systems being tampered with at any scale that would make a difference in the election.

    These claims, however, have already led to civil unrest and several deaths. With this direct look into the impact of a contested election process, it is paramount that we shore up computerized voting systems to avoid any question of a compromised system. Comprehensive security measures are the only way to protect computerized voting from the kind of fraud for which they’ve already been accused.

    Fortunately, there are ways we can streamline security and provide safer options for voters. These methods include:

    • Updating election infrastructure. Everything from machines to the databases we use for elections should be updated with the latest in cybersecurity innovation. Voting machines that provide paper back-up records of the vote are one necessary aspect of this upgrade. Digital systems can only be protected to a point; having a paper back-up ensures we can validate all elections.
    • Adding verification measures. It would benefit both security systems and voter faith in the system to have a multi-factor authorization process for voting. For example, e-signatures can provide another level to voter authorization that can aid in the auditing process. As AI and machine learning systems improve, verifying these votes with signatures and identification records could make for a simpler, safer process.
    • Implementing better auditing. Virginia and Pennsylvania have already begun piloting programs to secure voting systems in the post-vote auditing process. These programs, dubbed risk-limiting audits (RLAs), use statistical modeling to better predict instances of intentional or accidental interference. In combination with paper back-ups, a verification system can put to rest most conspiratorial fraud claims.

    With the doubt imposed on our election processes, securing computerized voting processes is the least we can do in restoring the integrity of elections. Greater technological innovations make this increasingly possible. In the meantime, lawmakers should come together to provide funding for better and safer voting equipment in every region of the country.

    The Future of Electronic Voting

    The challenges to election legitimacy that plagued 2020 and will undoubtedly continue into the near future are problems that have to be dealt with for the sake of our democracy. Cybersecurity can play a key role in this.

    While many hurdles will have to be cleared before safety innovations emerge in widespread voting practices, the challenges of recent elections demand these innovations take place soon. Better machines, verification measures, and auditing can all play a role. For now, the groundwork must be laid to restore American faith in free and fair election.

    Beau Peters is a freelance writer based out of Portland, OR. He has a particular interest in covering workers’ rights, social justice, and workplace issues and solutions. Read other articles by Beau.

    This article was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2021 at 5:42pm and is filed under Cybersecurity, Elections, Electronic Voting, Politics, Vote.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Neo-fascist Legacy of Donald Trump

    After the US Capitol was attacked by his supporters, Donald Trump has become the first president of America to be impeached twice. Regardless of how he leaves the White House – the Senate won’t act on the impeachment before Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021 – the neo-fascist seeds he has sown won’t stop germinating.

    Even after the brazen attempt to overturn election results, there is ambiguity among Americans on Trump’s impeachment – 38% oppose his impeachment and 15% have no opinion. These percentages are in line with the support enjoyed by him for false claims regarding rigged elections.  Polls carried out December 2020 showed that almost 40% of Americans, including 72% of Republicans believed that the November election was rigged against Trump. The acceptance of these allegations came in the backdrop of overtly anti-democratic efforts to overturn the results of a contested election.

    Trump put 234 federal judges into office, hand-picked according to ideological leanings. He appointed three Supreme Court justices, with his party taking unparalleled measures to push them through against popular mandate and in violation of certain procedures.

    Republican Realignments

    After the spectacle at the Capitol, the Republican Party has split into True Trumpists and Back-to-Businessers. Mike Pence, Tom Cotton, Chuck Grassley, Mike Lee, Ben Sasse, Jim Lankford and even Kelly Loeffler have sided against Trump. According to Mike Davis, this split reflects “a realignment of power within the Party with more traditional capitalist interest groups like NAM [National Association of Manufactures] and the Business Roundtable as well as with the Koch family, long uncomfortable with Trump. There should be no illusion that ‘moderate Republicans’ have suddenly been raised from the grave; the emerging project will preserve the core alliance between Christian evangelicals and economic conservatives and presumably defend most of the Trump-era legislation.”

    For Post-Trump Republicans, the lucrative potentials of Trumpism have been exhausted: they’ve already extracted their justices, their tax cuts, and their anti-immigration credentials. Now, they have got the perfect excuse to step off from the Trumpist bandwagon. True Trumpists, led by Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, find themselves in another political space – captains of a de facto third party that is mostly concentrated in the House of Representatives and state legislatures. Already, Trump lackeys are trying to redirect the frenzy of the fascist mob into a crusade against Big Tech which – to their chagrin – has banned Trump from almost all platforms. For instance, Rep. Jim Jordan defended Trump with the farcical claim that impeaching him was simply an expression of “cancel culture” and a further attempt to silence conservatives.

    The Spread of Neo-fascism

    As is evident from the Republican split, an alt-right political faction will ensure that Trumpism does not wither away. At this point, it is necessary to ask how neo-fascism percolated through the pores of American society. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies reported that far-Right and White supremacist terrorist attacks in the US increased dramatically in 2017 (one year after Trump’s Election win) to 53 attacks and another 44 in 2019 – an evidence of the cultural rootedness of neo-fascism.

    In the Terror of the Unforeseen, Henry Giroux neatly lists all the elements comprising Trumpism: “the cult of the leader, the discourse of the savior, white nationalism, a narrative of decline, unchecked casino capitalism, systemic racism, silence in the face of a growing police state, the encouragement of state endorsed violence, the hallowing out of democracy by corporate power, a grotesque celebration of greed, a massive growth in the inequality of wealth, power and resources, a brutal politics of disposability, an expanding culture of cruelty, and a disdain for public virtues”. From this compendium, we can observe that it was neoliberalism combined with violent xenophobia and anti-intellectualism which created a fertile ground for Trump’s political hegemony.

    In the age of Trump, Giroux sees the emergence of neo-fascism in “an unceasing stream of racism, demonizing insults, lies, and militarized rhetoric, serving as emotional appeals that are endlessly circulated and reproduced at the highest levels of government and the media.”  “The United States has a long history of racist language leading to cruel and harmful practices and, in some cases, violence aimed at groups targeted by such language.” Giroux says that “the language of white nationalism and racial resentment” creates “a discourse that annihilates social codes and restrains political behavior and undermines the rule of law.”

    Trump’s public pedagogy does not operate just through his tweets or statements but also through his performative silences. This was clear in the case of the 2017 Charlottesville rally where White supremacists gathered in opposition to the removal of a US Civil War statue. During the rally, a White supremacist killed the anti-fascist activist Heather Heyer. This act was heavily condemned across a broad political spectrum within the US. However, the Charlottesville rally and the killing of Heyer were initially met with silence from Trump, who otherwise is quick to tweet his opinions on similar situations. When he broke the silence with a press conference, he said that “there are two sides to a story” and asked “what about the alt left?” Even though he later condemned the racist elements in the Charlottesville rally, the initial silence and the narrative of “both sides” had already impacted the public discourse.

    Ultimately, Trump’s entire political project rests on irrationality. Only in this way can he simultaneously further the capitalist class’ agenda. “The bourgeoisie,” Henry Lefebvre says in Mystified Consciousness, “doesn’t need ideas too refined and metaphysical. Carefully instigated banalities are usually more useful than metaphysics. It needs only to utilize old everyday sentiments, sentiments whose fragrance is ‘all natural’ and ‘simply itself’: faith, hearth, race, heroism, purity, duty – banalities inscribed in all our hearts.” These emotionally powerful banalities serve to craft a false sense of collective identity in a neoliberal environment of hyper-individualization. As Hannah Arendt writes in Origins of Totalitarianism, “men in the midst of social disintegration and atomization will do anything to belong”.

    A Socialist Response

    Neo-fascism in USA can be eliminated only through socialism. As long as neoliberal capitalism reigns supreme, potentialities for a project like Trumpism will continue to abound. Therefore, a socialist response needs to be carefully constructed. Socialist political praxis needs to emphasize protecting the population in the immediate present while working toward the long-run revolutionary reconstitution of society at large. Such a multi-temporal dynamic will allow the Left to ideologically defeat the Right on the terrain of hegemony.

    This article was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2021 at 6:31pm and is filed under Capitalism, Courts and Judges, Donald Trump, Elections, Fascism, Fearmongering, Nationalism, Neoliberalism, Republicans, The “Left”, The “Right”.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • By “Force and Fraud”: Is This the End of the US Democracy Doctrine?   

    In an interview with the British newspaper, The Times, in 2015, former US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, vehemently denied that exporting democracy to Iraq was the main motive behind the US invasion of that Arab country 12 years earlier.

    Rumsfeld further alleged that “the idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed to me unrealistic.” But the US’ top military chief was being dishonest. Writing in Mother Jones, Miles E. Johnson responded to Rumsfeld’s claim by quoting some of his previous statements where he, repeatedly, cited democracy as the main reason behind the US invasion, a war that was one of the most destructive since Vietnam.

    Certainly, it was not Rumsfeld alone who brazenly promoted the democracy pretense. Indeed, ‘democracy’ was the buzzword, parroted by thousands of Americans: in government, the military, mainstream media, and the numerous think-tanks that dotted the intellectual and political landscape of Washington.

    One could not help but reflect on the subject when, on January 6, thousands of Americans stormed the Washington Plaza, climbing the walls of Capitol Hill and taking over the US Congress. A country that has assigned itself the role of the defender of democracy worldwide, now stands unable to defend its own democracy at home.

    In the case of Iraq, as soon as US soldiers stormed into Baghdad, they hurriedly occupied all government buildings and every symbol of Iraqi sovereignty. Triumphant soldiers were filmed rampaging through the offices of former Iraqi ministers, smoking their cigars, while placing their dirty boots on top of their desks. Bizarrely, similar scenes were repeated in Washington 17 years later, this time in the offices of top US legislators, including the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi.

    In Iraq, from March 2003, ministers were hunted down, as their photos and names were circulated through what the US military referred to as Iraq’s ‘most wanted deck of cards’. In the American scenario, US Congressmen and women were forced to cower under their desks or to run for their lives.

    The violent events in Washington have been depicted by US mainstream media as if a temporary crisis, instigated by a president who refuses to concede power peacefully and democratically. The truth, however, is far more complex. There is nothing transitory about any of this and, while Donald Trump is largely to blame for the bloody events of this day, the man is a symptom of America’s rooted democracy crisis, which is likely to worsen in the future.

    Famed American linguist and historian, Noam Chomsky, has long argued that the US is not a democracy but a plutocracy, a country that is governed by the interests of the powerful few. He also argued that, while the US does operate based on formal democratic structures, these are largely dysfunctional. In an interview with Global Policy Journal in 2019, Chomsky further asserted that the “US Constitution was framed to thwart the democratic aspirations of most of the public.”

    This has been evident for many years. Long before Trump became President, the dichotomy of American democracy has expressed itself in the way that the American people interact with their supposedly democratic institutions. For example, merely 20% of US adults trust their government, according to a Pew Research Center poll published last September. This number has remained relatively unchanged under previous administrations.

    With the US economy rapidly sinking due to various factors, including the government’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the people’s distrust in government is now manifesting itself in new ways, including mass violence. The fact that 77% of those who voted for Trump in the November elections believe that Joe Biden’s win was due to fraud, suggests that a sizable percentage of Americans have little faith in their country’s democracy. The consequences of this realization will surely be dire.

    America’s constitutional crisis, which is unlikely to be resolved in the current atmosphere of polarization, is compounded by an external political crisis. Historically, the US has defined and redefined its mission in the world based on lofty spiritual, moral and political maxims, starting with ‘Manifest Destiny’, to fighting communism, to eventually serving as the defender of human rights and democracy around the world. The latter was merely a pretense used to provide a moral cover that would allow the US to reorder the world for the sake of expanding its market and ensuring its economic dominance.

    Thomas Paine, whose influence on US ideals of liberty and democracy is arguably unmatched, warned, in “Common Sense” in 1776, against the potential tyranny of those who “attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools.”

    Alas, Paine’s warning went unheeded. Indeed, the democracy ‘fraud’ that Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, et al carried out in Iraq in 2003, was a mere repetition of numerous other fraudulent military campaigns carried out around the world. The ‘protectors of democracy’ became the very men responsible for its undoing.

    Unquestionably, the storming of US Congress will have global repercussions, not least among them the weakening of US hegemonic and self-serving definition of what constitutes a democracy. Is it possible that the US democracy doctrine could soon cease to be relevant in the lexicon of US foreign policy conduct, one that is predicated, per Paine’s logic, on “force and fraud”?

    This article was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2021 at 5:47pm and is filed under Democracy, Donald Trump, Elections, Iraq, Media Bias, Plutocracy, Propaganda, US Congress, US Media, US Military, US War Crimes.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Who to believe about Venezuela’s election? Firsthand observation or PBS Newshour?

    In early December I travelled to Venezuela to be an election observer at their national assembly election. I was part of a group of eight persons from Canada and US organized by CodePink. There were about two hundred international observers in total, including the Latin American Council of Electoral Experts.  I have previously been an official election observer in Honduras and was an unofficial observer at the 2015 Venezuela national assembly election.

    Meeting Opposition Leaders

    Before the election, our small group met eight leaders of the Democratic Alliance. This is the major opposition coalition. Pedro Jose Rojas of Accion Democratica said the US sanctions are not doing what is claimed; they are hurting average citizens. Bruno Gallo of Avanca Progressista said Venezuela needs negotiation not confrontation. Juan Carlos Alvarado of the Christian Democratic Party said Venezuelans have been “victims of politics” and that dialogue and flexibility are needed. Several leaders spoke about the importance of the national assembly and the road to change is through voting not violence. Several leaders expressed the wish for better relations with the US; another one said Venezuelan sovereignty needs to be respected.  The common request was to end US sanctions and interference in Venezuelan politics.

    We visited the factory where voting machines were assembled, tested and certified. The staff was openly proud of their work. In March this year, nearly all the pre-existing voting computers were destroyed in a massive fire at the main election warehouse. There were calls to delay the December election. But in six months, forty thousand new computers were ordered, built, assembled, tested and certified for the December election.

    The Election Process

    On election day, Sunday December 6, we visited many different elections sites. Typically, the election voting takes place at a school, with five or ten classrooms designated as “mesas”.  Each voter goes to his or her designated classroom/“mesa”.

    The voting process was quick and efficient, with bio-safety sanitation at each step. The first step is to show your identity card and prove your identity with fingerprint recognition. Step 2 was to make your voting choices at the touchscreen computer and receive a paper receipt. Step 3 is to verify the receipt matches your voting choice and deposit the receipt in a ballot box. The fourth and final step is to sign and put your fingerprint on the voting registry.  The entire voting process took about 3 minutes.

    At the end of the voting day, we observed the process of tabulating the votes. At each “mesa”, with observers from other parties present,  the paper receipts were recorded one by one. At the end, the results were compared to the digital count.  Voting results were then transmitted to the headquarters for overall tabulation.

    Election results were announced by the Council for National Election (CNE) which manages the entire process.  CNE leaders are not permitted to be members of any party and the CNE leadership was recently changed at the request of the opposition.  In our discussion with leading opposition members, they complained about incumbent party advantages but acknowledged the election process is free, fair and honest.

    PBS Newshour Special

    With this firsthand experience, on December 29 I watched a PBS Newshour segment about the Venezuela election and overall situation.   PBS reporter Marcia Biggs said, “Maduro’s party essentially ran unopposed in this month’s election.”   As noted above, this is untrue.

    In fact, there were 107 parties and over 14,000 individuals competing in the December 6 election for 277 national assembly seats. While 8 parties were in alliance with the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), there were over 90 opposition parties. The strongest opposition coalition was the Democratic Alliance comprising 7 opposition parties.  The Democratic Alliance won 1.1 million votes or 18% of the vote. The LEFT opposition to the PSUV, under the banner of the Communist Party of Venezuela, received 168 thousand votes.

    Reporter Marcia Biggs claimed that “politics permeates everything in Venezuela and can determine whether you support Maduro and eat or go hungry.” This claim is based on a campaign statement by PSUV Vice President Diosdado Cabello encouraging people to vote. He jokingly said that women are in the forefront and can say to their family, “No vote, no food.” Video of him making the statement is here.  This statement has been distorted out of all meaning and context.

    The PBS story showed a fistfight in the national assembly, implying that it was the Venezuelan government.  But, as reported in the “Juan Guaido surreal regime change reality show“,  the fight was between competing factions of the Venezuelan opposition.

    When they showed Juan Guaido climbing over a fence, that was a publicity stunt to distract from the important news that Luis Parra was elected Speaker of the national assembly one year ago.  That was embarrassing because Guaido’s claim to be “interim president” was based on his being Speaker.

    Election turnout was lower than usual at 31% but one needs to account for the election taking place despite covid-19 with no mail-in voting. Also, millions of registered voters have had to leave the country due to economic hardship. Also, transportation is difficult due to gasoline scarcity. This was a national assembly election, equivalent to a US mid-term election, which gets lower turnout. Note that 95% of voting eligible Venezuelans are registered voters compared to just 67% in the USA.  Thus a turnout of 50% registered voters in the US equates to 33% of eligible voters.

    US Meddling in Venezuela

    The star of the 7-minute PBS story is Roberto Patino, the Venezuelan director of a food distribution charity. The report neglects to mention that Patino is associated with a major US foreign policy institution. He is a Millennium Leadership fellow and  “expert” at the neoliberal Atlantic Council where the “regime change” goals against Venezuela are  clear.  His food charity “Alimenta la Solidaridad” is allied with the “Rescue Venezuela” funded by the US with the apparent goal of undermining the Venezuelan government and promoting “interim president Juan Guaido”.

    Roberto Patino says the Venezuelan government is “very paranoid and they see conspiracies all over.” Paranoia is a mental condition where there is fear of imaginary threats.  But US threats and aggression against Venezuela are not imaginary; they are very real:

    In 2002 the US supported the kidnapping and coup against the popular and elected President Hugo Chavez. The years have gone by but US hostility persists.

    * In August 2018 there was a drone assassination attempt on the Venezuelan President.

    * In January 2019 the US declared that it would not recognize the elected President Maduro and instead recognized Juan Guaido as “interim president”.  His background is described in the article “The Making of Juan Guaido: How the US regime change laboratory created Venezuela’s coup leader“.

    * In February 2019 President Trump threatened military intervention against Venezuela.

    * In March 2019, there was massive power blackout caused by sabotage of the electrical grid, with probable US involvement.

    *In May 2020, two former US Special Forces soldiers and other mercenaries were arrested  in a failed attempt to overthrow President Maduro.

    * In June 2020, the US Navy warship Nitze began provocative “freedom of navigation” patrols along the Venezuelan coast.

    * In August 2020, the US seized four ships carrying much needed gasoline to Venezuela.

    * In September 2020, in a attempt to undermine the Venezuelan election, the US imposed sanctions on political leaders who planned to participate.

    * The US 2021 stimulus bill includes $33Million for “democracy programs for Venezuela”.

    Based on the past twenty years, Venezuela’s government has good reason to be on guard against US threats, meddling and intervention. The PBS program ignores this history.

    Another hero of the show is the exiled politician Leopoldo Lopez. He was imprisoned in 2014 for instigating street violence known as “guarimbas” which led to the deaths of 43 people.

    Like Patino, Lopez is from the Venezuelan elite, studied in the US and has major public relations support in the US. Like Guaido, Leopoldo Lopez is more popular in Washington than his home country.

    Will the US respect Venezuelan sovereignty?

    If the PBS Newshour reporters had not been so biased, they would have interviewed members of the moderate opposition in Venezuela. Viewers could have heard Democratic Alliance leaders explain why they participated in the election, why they are critical of US economic sanctions and US interference in their domestic affairs. That would have been educational for viewers.

    On January 5, the newly elected national assembly will commence in Venezuela.  The fig leaf pretense of Juan Guaido as “interim president” of Venezuela will be removed because he is no longer in the national assembly.  In fact, he was removed as speaker of the national assembly one year ago.

    But viewers of the PBS special did not learn this. Instead, they received a biased report ignoring the moderate opposition and promoting a few US supported elites.  The report ignores or denigrates the efforts of millions of Venezuelans who carried out and participated in an election which compares favorably with the election process in the US.  You would never know it from PBS, and you might not believe it, unless you saw it with your own eyes.

    Voters looking to find their voting “mesa”

    Voter putting receipt in the ballot box

    PSUV Rally (Note: This is a photo that I did not take)

    Voting computer screen with multiple competing parties

    • Photos 1, 2, and 4 were taken by Rick Sterling

    This article was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2021 at 10:20pm and is filed under Elections, Juan Guaidó, Lies, President Nicolas Maduro, Sanctions, US Media, Venezuela.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Stealing Georgia: Raffensperger is No Hero

    by Greg Palast / January 4th, 2021

    Despite the hype, an investigative report released today reveals Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is no hero defending democracy from Trump. Rather, in this investigative film (produced by George and Peggy DiCaprio, and Rosario Dawson, and narrated by Debra Messing), Raffensperger is exposed for using vote suppression Jim Crow tactics — even misleading a federal court to keep 198,000 Georgians from voting in Tuesday’s Senate runoff race.

    Greg Palast studied healthcare economics at the Center for Hospital Administration Studies at the University of Chicago. His investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television’s Newsnight. Read other articles by Greg, or visit Greg’s website.

    This article was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2021 at 5:17pm and is filed under Elections, Video, Voter Suppression.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Country in Turmoil: Why Netanyahu is a Symptom, Not Cause of Israel’s Political Crisis

    It is convenient to surmise that Israel’s current political crisis is consistent with the country’s unfailing trajectory of short-lived governments and fractious ruling coalitions. While this view is somewhat defensible, it is also hasty.

    Israel is currently at the cusp of a fourth general election in less than two years. Even by Israel’s political standards, this phenomenon is unprecedented, not only in terms of the frequency of how often Israelis vote, but also of the constant shifting in possible coalitions and seemingly strange alliances.

    It seems that the only constant in the process of forming coalitions following each election is that Arab parties must not, under any circumstances, be allowed into a future government. Decision-making in Israel has historically been reserved for the country’s Jewish elites. This is unlikely to change anytime soon.

    Even when the Arab parties’ coalition, the Joint List, imposed itself as a possible kingmaker following the September 2019 elections, the centrist Kahol Lavan (Blue and White) list refused to join forces with Arab politicians to oust Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Kahol Lavan’s leader, Benny Gantz, preferred to go back to the polls on March 2 and eventually join forces with his arch-enemy, Netanyahu, than make a single concession to the Joint List.

    Gantz’s decision did not only expose how racism occupies a central role in Israeli politics, but also illustrated Gantz’s own foolishness. In rejecting the Joint List, he committed an act akin to political suicide. On the very day, March 26, that he joined a Netanyahu-led coalition, his own Blue and White alliance collapsed, with Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid and Moshe Ya’alon of Telem breaking away immediately from the once-dominant coalition.

    Worse, Gantz lost not just the respect of his own political constituency, but of the Israeli public as well. According to an opinion poll released by Israel’s Channel 12 News on December 15, if elections were to be held on that day, Gantz’s Blue and White would receive only 6 seats out of 120 seats available in the Israeli Knesset. Gantz’s former coalition partner, Yesh Atid, according to the same poll, would obtain an impressive 14 seats.

    While Netanyahu’s Likud Party will remain on top with 27 seats, Gideon Sa’ar’s “New Hope – Unity for Israel,” would come a close second with 21 seats. Sa’ar’s is a brand new party, which represents the first major split from the Likud since the late Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, formed the offshoot Kadima party in 2005.

    Netanyahu and Sa’ar have a long history of bad blood between them, and although anything is possible in the formation of Israel’s political alliances, a future right-wing coalition that brings them both together is a dim possibility. If Sa’ar has learned anything from Gantz’s act of political self-mutilation, it is that any coalition with Netanyahu is a grave and costly mistake.

    Ideological differences between Netanyahu and Sa’ar are quite minimal. In fact, both are fighting to obtain the vote of essentially the same constituency – although Sa’ar is hoping to extend his appeal to the disgruntled and betrayed Blue and White voters, who are eager to see someone – anyone – oust Netanyahu.

    Never in the history of Israel, spanning seven decades, had a single individual served as the focal point of the country’s many political currents. While beloved by some, Netanyahu is much loathed by many, to the extent that entire parties or whole coalitions are formed simply to remove him from politics. That in mind, the majority of Israelis agree that the man is corrupt, as he has been indicted in three separate criminal cases.

    However, if this is the case, how is a politically controversial and corrupt leader able to remain at the helm of Israeli politics for over 14 years? The typical answer often alludes to the man’s unmatched skills of manipulation and backdoor shady dealings. In the words of Yossi Verter, writing in the daily Haaretz, Netanyahu is “a first-class master swindler”.

    This analysis alone, however, is not enough to explain Netanyahu’s durability as the longest-serving Israeli Prime Minister. There is an alternative reading, however, one that is predicated on the fact that Israel has been, for quite some time, navigating uncharted political territories without a specific destination in mind.

    Prior to the inception of Israel on the ruins of historic Palestine in 1948, Israel’s Jewish political elites clashed quite often over the best way to colonize Palestine, how to deal with the British Mandate over the country, among other weighty subjects. These differences, however, largely faded away in 1948, when the newly-founded country unified under the banner of Mapai – the predecessor to Israel’s current Labor party – which dominated Israeli politics for decades.

    Mapai’s dominance received a major boost after the Israeli occupation of the remainder of Palestine in 1967. The building and expansion of more Jewish colonies in the newly-acquired territories breathed life into the mission of Israel’s founding fathers. It was as if Zionism, the founding ideology of Israel, was rediscovered once more.

    It was not until 1977 that the erstwhile negligible Israeli right formed a government for the first time in the country’s history. That date also ushered in a new age of political instability, which worsened with time. Still, Israeli politicians remained largely committed to three main causes in this specific order: the Zionist ideology, the party and the politicians’ own interests.

    The assassination of the Labor Party leader, Yitzhak Rabin, at the hands of a right-wing Israeli zealot in 1995, was a bloody manifestation of the new era of unprecedented fragmentation that followed. A decade later, when Sharon declared the ‘Disengagement from Gaza’ plan of 2005, he further upset a barely functioning political balance, leading to the formation of Kadima, which threatened to erase the Likud from the political map.

    Throughout these turbulent times, Netanyahu was always present, playing the same divisive role, as usual. He led the incitement against Rabin and, later, challenged Sharon over the leadership of the Likud. On the other hand, he was also responsible for resurrecting the Likud and he kept it alive notwithstanding its many ideological, political and leadership crises. The latter fact explains Likud’s loyalty to Netanyahu, despite his corruption, nepotism and dirty politics. They feel that, without Netanyahu’s leadership, the Likud could easily follow the same path of irrelevance or total demise as was the case with the Labor and Kadima parties, respectively.

    With none of Israel’s founding fathers alive or relevant in the political arena, it is hard to imagine what course Israel’s future politics will follow. Certainly, the love affair with the settlement enterprise, ‘security’ and war is likely to carry on unhindered, as they are the bread and butter of Israeli politics. Yet, without a clear ideology, especially when combined with the lack of a written Constitution, Israeli politics will remain hostage to the whims of politicians and their personal interests, if not that of Netanyahu, then of someone else.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2020 at 10:38pm and is filed under Annexation, Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Corruption, Disinformation, Elections, Gaza, Israel, Israel/Palestine, Language, Lies, Occupation, Politics, Power, The “Right”, The Joint List, Zionism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • What Does the Esau Revolution Despise?

    And Esau said to Jacob, Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage; for I am faint;
    And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright.
    And Esau said, Behold, I am at the point to die: and what profits shall this birthright do me?
    And Jacob said, Swear to me this day; and he sware unto him: and he sold his birthright unto Jacob.”

    — Genesis 25: 30-33

    Despite the bizarre fantasy by Trump supporters that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, there was, in fact, genuine electoral fraud in the US. This fraud was more intense and blatant than any unproven claims of election meddling by Russians, Chinese, Syrians or Iranians. It was an all-out attack on political rights not seen since Joseph McCarthy era. Yet, this time, it was inspired not by Republicans but by Democrats and their liberal allies.

    Despite the bizarre fantasy by Trump supporters that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, there was, in fact, genuine electoral fraud in the US.  This fraud was more intense and blatant than any unproven claims of election meddling by Russians, Chinese, Syrians or Iranians.  It was an all-out attack on political rights not seen since Joseph McCarthy era.  Yet, this time, it was inspired not by Republicans but by Democrats and their liberal allies.

    If manipulation of information from Russia via social networking is “vote tampering”, then how much more vote tampering is elimination of an entire party from news stories and even from the ballot so that many voters are not aware of its existence?  In all likelihood, efforts by the Democratic Party (DP) affected the mind-set of more voters than all the right-wing howls put together.

    Ballot Manipulation: Imagined and Real

    Attempts by the DP to destroy the Green Party (GP) date back to at least 2000 when it screamed that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the election.  There are too many reasons that this was false to list, but clearly the DP created its own demise by losing massive numbers of black voters via the Clinton-Gore-Biden scheme of “mass incarceration.”  Rather telling is the fact that then vice-president Gore gaveled down House of Representative Democrats who raised objections to the supposed win of George W. Bush.

    The DP is infamous for the way it has openly collaborated with the Republican Party (RP) to eliminate small parties from nationally publicized debates.  Along with reports in the corporate press which only covers parties made “viable” by big money, the debates unambiguously manipulate elections by shielding voters from hearing candidates who often reflect their views more closely.

    Presidential debates demonstrate one of the many ways big money controls US elections. Critical for putting John Kennedy in the White House, the first televised debate in 1960 was followed by refusals of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to participate in debates.  Debates did not reappear until 1976 when the League of Women Voters (LWV) sponsored debates which Jimmy Carter used to oust president Gerald Ford.

    In 1980, the LWV announced that the debates would include independent candidate John Anderson along with Carter and Ronald Reagan.  Carter demanded LWV eliminate Anderson.  But the League held firm; the debates were between Reagan and Anderson; and Reagan won the election.

    The LWV hosted its last debate in 1984, between Reagan and Walter Mondale.  In 1987 the DP and RP created the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), with Democratic and Republican chairmen serving as the organization’s co-chairs.  Apparently, “the Democratic and Republican parties decided that the group [LWV] was a little too independent for their tastes.”

    The CPD next decided that the 1988 debates would be restricted to Republican George Bush and Democrat Michael Dukakis.  It threw a sop to LWV, offering it the opportunity to host the debates, but its president Nancy M. Neuman said that “the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter … The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.”  CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite. added that the resulting debates were “phony, part of an unconscionable fraud,”  With the LWV out of the picture, that fraud has existed through 2020.  Though the LWV had stood its ground against the Democrats in 1980, it would reverse its own principles and participate in the hoodwinking that it scorned in 1987.  During the 2020 elections, the LWV Voters Guide which appeared on page V1 of the October 15, 2020 St. Louis Post-Dispatch refused to print the brief platforms of either the Green Party or Libertarian Party, falsely claiming that neither had satisfied its guidelines.

    Missouri Green Party treasurer and candidate for Missouri State Treasurer Joe Civettini called the local LWV, asking why it excluded the platform of Howie Hawkins from its listing.  Receiving a confused answer  from its St. Louis branch, he sent an email to the national LWV office, quoting their criteria for inclusion, explaining how Hawkins/Walker met the criteria, and requesting an explanation, apology and reprinting of the Voters Guide. The only possible bone of contention was the League’s requirement regarding qualification in sufficient states.

    So Civettini wrote “The candidate must qualify for the ballot in enough states to win a majority of electoral votes. Howie Hawkins/Angela Walker are on the ballot in 30 states or territories, and qualified as write-in on 17 others. Only LA, NV, OK, and SD will not be able to vote for, or write-in, Hawkins/Walker.”  Apparently contemptuous of small parties that it once defended, the LWV sent no reply.

    Green Party candidate for St. Louis County Executive Betsey Mitchell was similarly ignored in the Voters’ Guide of KSDK radio.  An interesting thing happened in the middle of writing this article.  I was clearing out old emails and ran across an exchange I had with KSDK radio during my 2016 campaign as Green Party candidate for the Governor of Missouri.  KSDK requested that I respond to questions for posting on their web.  Apparently, between 2016 and 2020 KSDK changed its policy from soliciting statements from all candidates who would appear on the ballot to focusing on only the corporate parties.  It makes one wonder: Did the Democratic Party have its finger in that pie?

    One of the most egregious omissions was in the website of St. Louis Public Radio (SLPR) where it featured candidates for Missouri state offices.  It provided names and statements of all Democrat and Republican candidates and excluded Missouri Green Party candidates whose names were on all election ballots: Jerome Bauer for Governor, Kelly Dragoo for Lieutenant Governor, Joe Civettini for Treasurer, and Paul Lehmann for Secretary of State.  It also excluded Libertarian Party candidates.

    On October 25, I wrote to SLPR that “It appears that SLPR is attempting to interfere in elections in ways that would have worse outcomes than efforts by the Republican Party to disenfranchise voters due to ethnicity, income or age.  The SLPR 2020 Voters Guide misrepresents and distorts choices to the St. Louis area which appear on ballots by intentionally presenting the only candidates as those of the Democratic Party and Republican Party.  This creates a bias among those who view the Voters Guide that they must chose between the two big-money parties.  By doing so, SLPR creates a predisposition among voters prior to casting their ballots and thereby distorts electoral outcomes.”

    It was not enough for allies of the Democrats to block information from appearing in print or on websites.  While allies of the RP went on a physical rampage to attack Black Lives Matter protesters, DP allies went on a legal rampage to wipe the Greens off the ballot.  The attack on the Green Party was not limited to presidential nominees in “swing” states where the race between Biden and Trump would be close.  As explained in Krystal Ball’s YouTube video Dem WAR On Green Party Exposes Voter Suppression Hypocrisy, “in Montana they successfully got five Green Party candidates kicked off the ballot. The GP got a sufficient number of signatures… but the DP actually went and contacted voters who had signed the GP petition and bullied them into recanting their signature … The Texas Democratic Party is suing to keep GP candidates off the ballot…At issue is requirement that third party candidates must pay a $5000 filing fee.”

    The Wisconsin Supreme Court decided that the Greens should be taken off the ballot because its Vice-Presidential candidate Angela Walker committed the horrendous crime of moving during the petitioning process.  In Pennsylvania, it was not Trump forces but the DP that delayed mail-in balloting with a court challenge against the Greens.  They justified this by whining that in 2016 Hillary Clinton lost by 44,000 votes and Jill Stein received 49,000 votes.  Aside from the absurd implication that everyone voting for Jill would have gone for Hillary if the GP was not there, there is a wee fact which Democrats skip over in their quest for obfuscation: the LibertarianParty (LP) got three times as many votes as did the Greens.  Thus, with the equally absurd fantasy that all LP votes would have gone to Trump if that party disappeared, then Trump would have won by over 100,000 votes had the DP been successful in purifying ballot choices to only corporate parties.

    It has been the goal of both corporate parties, but fanatically so for the DP, to totally annihilate the possibility of any independent party gaining widespread support not just for their appearance on the ballot, but any opportunity to present their perspectives.

    How Can Parties Affect Politics without Winning Elections? 

    Since the clear attempt of the two parties is to crowd every other party out of debates, out of the news and out of existence, it becomes important to ask if there is any value whatsoever in voting for candidates who do not have any chance of getting into office.  Although Missouri is not known for diverse and radical opinions, in addition to the two monied parties, between 1908 and 1928 its ballot included the following: Prohibition, Progressive, Socialist, Socialist Labor, Farm Workers and National Commonwealth Land.  Other states such as New York could probably find dozens or even hundreds of small parties that have appeared on the ballot during the last couple of centuries.

    The story of how small parties have affected US politics could fill an encyclopedia; but a few examples illustrate how they have altered political reality.  Perhaps the best-known small party was Free Soil, which was critically important for ending slavery.  “At a convention in Buffalo, New York on August 9, 1848, more than 10,000 men from all the northern states and three border states met in a huge tent in a city park. The resulting Free Soil Party was built on a coalition of four elements: the previous Liberty Party, Free-Soil Democrats, Barnburners, and Conscience Whigs.”

    Though the first plank in its platform was “opposition to the extension of slavery into the territories,” it also backed tariff reform and a homestead law.   Frustrated at not winning sufficient votes, many or most of its members switched to the Republican Party which nominated Abe Lincoln.  Had Free Soil not existed, there is no way of knowing how long slavery would have persisted in the US.

    The same year that Free Soil came into existence saw the birth of the Prohibition Party, which, though changing names multiple times, has run candidates through 2020.  The party stemmed from the “perfectionist” religious revivalism of the 1820s and 1830s which called for fundamental social changes such as abolishing slavery and alcohol sales.  By the end of the nineteenth century it embraced “women’s suffrage, equal racial and gender rights, bimetallism, equal pay, and an income tax” and was the first US party to accept women as members.

    Its enormous influence resulted in the eighteenth amendment prohibiting alcohol sales which was ratified by sufficient states in January 1919.  It was repealed in December 1933, showing conclusively that criminalizing drugs is an unworkable solution to a problem, no matter how serious that problems is.  Though the prohibitionists had a very bad idea, they brought many good ones to light.

    Union organizer Eugene Debs ran as the Socialist Party candidate for president in 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920. Striking at the very heart of capitalism, Debs brought working people the opportunity to vote for a new society. The powerful threat of Debs’ socialist ideas were shown as the Democrat’s Woodrow Wilson threw him in prison for speaking out against the slaughter of World War I.

    Twelve years after Republican president Warren Harding let Debs out of jail Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal during his 1933 inaugural address.  US history books often skip over the historical core of the New Deal, which was outlooks and organizing by the Socialist and Communist Parties.  Like later civil rights legislation and the end to the Viet Nam war, Roosevelt’s New Deal victories grew out of mass movements of the day.

    Skip forward almost half a century to the election of 1980.  Though conservative on most issues, Independent John Anderson introduced his signature campaign proposal of raising the gas tax while cutting social security taxes.  Anderson had strongly criticized the Viet Nam War as well as President Richard Nixon’s actions during the Watergate scandal.  Later, he endorsed instant run-off voting, backed Nader in 2000, and helped found the Justice Party in 2012.

    One of few small party efforts that seemed like it might hit the big time was the Reform Party of Ross Perot that brought him 18.9% of votes as an Independent in 1992 and 8.2% 1996.  When Perot first ran in 1992, George Bush was floundering in his efforts to ram the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through congress.  The upstart Democrat Bill Clinton convinced US corporate bosses that he could usher in the trade deal and won the election.  Perot actually did a great service by pushing to the forefront of public awareness how awful NAFTA would be.

    Those who participated in anti-NAFTA actions should remember that congressman Dick Gephardt from St. Louis supposedly led efforts to block the trade deal.  Following a tip from a friend, I researched Gephardt’s traipsing through Mexico until I found the story in the Mexican newspaper Excelsior documenting the congressman’s promise that he would get NAFTA through the US congress.  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published my op-ed piece on June 1, 1993 exposing him as a con artist.  Virtually all of the left liberals at the time ignored that Gephardt was merely telling them what they wanted to hear.  Even after Gephardt left congress for a lucrative position lobbying for Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Visa Inc and Waste Management Inc., liberal Democrats refused to acknowledge that their party had secured NAFTA while allowing anti-NAFTA votes by congresspeople from districts needing union financial support.

    Despite the virtue of the Reform Party in focusing on the vile nature of NAFTA, it imploded during the 2000 campaign over disagreements between wrestler Jesse Ventura, ultra-conservative Pat Buchanan and godfather-wannabe Ross Perot.  Less involved in the fray was a newcomer who began political life as a Democrat, switched to being a Republican and then changed again to offer himself as a moderately conservative Reform Party presidential candidate.

    The moderate of the day was Donald Trump, who denounced Buchanan for being “enamored” with Adolf Hitler, supported universal health care, proposed a “net worth” tax that would only apply to the richest 1%, advocated a tax cut for the 99%, praised Muhammad Ali, enjoyed dinner with Woody Harrelson, and declared that his ideal running mate would be the “wonderful woman” Oprah Winfrey.  One explanation for Trump’s transformation between 2000 and 2016 would be that he experienced an epiphany upon rebirth as a divine being.  Another explanation would be that he was not so different than Dick Gephardt and other corporate Democrats eternally searching for an audience gullible enough to believe them.

    For over 200 years, small parties have combined, split, recombined, dropped old perspectives and added new ones.  The theme that runs through the history of small parties is that they are consistently the origin of concepts that change the political trajectory.  Established parties are where worn out programs go to die.  The long sought for destruction of small parties would suck the life out of political discussion, leaving the US with ossified Siamese twins joined at their financial organs.

    Liberal Democrats are much like Trump when they proclaim that the “winner” of an election is the one who gets the most votes.  Another view, held vehemently by Free Soilers, Prohibitionists and Debs, is that the winners of elections are those who most successfully use them to inspire mass movements.  Many latter day leftists laud the life of Debs while omitting these words from praises of him: “It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.”

    One of the most absurd yet widely held liberal claims is that if Greens were not on ballot then all of its supporters would vote for DP.  They know that this is not true, yet repeat it as if one tells a lie enough times then it becomes true.  As Howie Hawkins explains, “The 2016 exit poll showed that 61% of Stein voters would have stayed home if she was not on the ballot.”  The DP denies these exit poll results as vigorously as the RP denies climate change.

    How Do We Know that Democrats Were Not Interested in Preventing a Trump Power Grab?

    The corporate parties are determined that there will never again be a Free Soil Party, a Eugene Debs campaign, a John Anderson campaign, a Ross Perot campaign, or a Ralph Nader campaign.  Though the DP and RP share this commitment, it has been the Democrats that have been obsessed with gobbling up Hansel and Gretel’s last crumb leading to a path of voter liberation.  They have repeatedly prioritized destruction of the GP over prevention of a power grab by the Republicans.

    Recall the election of 2000, when George W. Bush got a minority of the votes and Al Gore refused to challenge the finagling of Florida returns.  For years, the Dems had been encouraged to support Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), which would have prevented a manipulated election.  But the Dems have always hated IRV.  Why?  Because in every election it would show that millions, if not tens of millions, of their “supporters” would chose the GP first and the DP second.  Vast numbers of people vote for a candidate they find somewhere between boring and despicable.  The DP is committed to ensuring that election returns never reveal the clothes the Emperor is wearing (or not wearing).  This is what caused the 2000 election of George W. Bush.  And what did the DP do during the subsequent 20 years to prevent it from happening again?  Absolutely nothing.

    There is another way the Dems could prevent a second-place Repub (like Trump in 2016) from entering the White House: Proportional Representation rather than Winner-Take-All of Electoral College votes.  This system would assign Electoral College votes in the proportion to the popular vote of each state.  For example, if a state with 7 electoral votes had Candidate A winning 52% of the popular vote and Candidate B winning 45% of the vote, then 4 electoral votes would go to A and 3 to B.  The Dems have no interest in either reform, even though they would increase the likelihood of a DP victory.

    During the time period after the 2020 election, many were worried that RP-dominated legislatures could select RP presidential electors even if their state voted for Biden.  We can safely predict that Dems will do nothing during the next 4, 8 or 12 years to prevent this from happening in future.  Why?  Because this would mean if there were a future unexpected surge in votes for Greens or Libertarians, a legislature dominated by the corporate parties would not be able to pull the same stunt to keep those parties out.

    The DP and RP could look internationally for ways to prevent the manipulation of elections.  According to Venezuelanalysis.com, “electronic voting machines are activated only when a fingerprint that corresponds to the voter’s ID number in the database is registered.  Additionally, the machines print a paper receipt that can be checked by the individual voter and allows for a full manual count to be made if any results are contested. A manual count of more than half of the votes automatically takes place to ensure that the results tally.”  Why would the DP prefer to lose elections to RP candidates over having fair elections that increased the number of Democrats put into office?  Because the DP stands solidly with the RP in applauding corrupt puppets like Juan Guaidó.

    Has the memory of senate Republicans manipulating the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court already passed from the memory of the DP?  What about memory that Joe Biden promised that before the election he would announce if he would ask senate Democrats to exert their constitutional right to increase the number of Supreme Court justices by 3 or 4 members?  If the DP has a majority in the senate at any time during Joe Biden’s presidency, please do not hold your breath waiting for them to add court justices – you might pass out doing so.

    It is not as if no party has pushed to change the constitution.  Franklin Roosevelt angered many when he violated the long-standing tradition of a president running for only two terms.  After he was gone, those upset that he won a third and fourth term amended the constitution to limit a president to two terms.  It is tempting to explain this discrepancy as due to lack of backbone by the Dems.  This is not a likely reason, since they have abundant venom for Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and the Green Party.  The DP does not want to have a family feud with its RP twin because they share so much in common.

    State Department Liberals Support Suppression

    The evidence shows that (a) the Democratic Party has headed a relentless conspiracy to destroy small parties, (b) small parties are critical for introducing new outlooks into US politics, and (c) the DP has zero interest in preventing Republicans from stealing elections.  These cohere into a pattern of depriving the electorate of choosing any ideas outside those approved by corporate interests.

    The issue remains, however, if this destruction of left independence was justifiable as a tactic to replace the depraved Trump by a more reasonable Biden who, at least, offers some chance of being edged to the left.  Please keep in mind that a version of this refrain is re-sung every four years in the US.     The refrain always has the assumption that the Dem cannot possibly be as bad as the Repub.

    The unspoken faith is that political direction is determined solely by elections and mass movements can accomplish little without victory at the polls.  Conveniently left out is the fact that the longest string of progressive accomplishments won during the last half century was not when a Dem was in the White House but during the reign of the arch-degenerate Richard Nixon.  His presidency saw the formal end to the war against Viet Nam, beginning of the food stamp program, creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, recognition of China, passage of the Freedom of Information Act, dismantling of the secret police’s COINTEL program, decriminalization of abortion, creation of Earned Income Tax Credits, a ban on biological weapons and passage of the Clean Water Act.

    We can be certain that Biden’s election will embolden the DP to intensify its attack on independent parties.  Once the DP establishment is finished using the liberals to eliminate electoral opposition, it will expel them like a duck with diarrhea.  There is a serious concern that they will soon begin “focusing their crosshairs on” the left within their own party, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

    The flip side of purging of the left is telling those who remain in the DP that they can only influence it by proving their loyalty.  If they want to become more effective they will need to rise higher in the DP ranks, which means quacking more of the party line.

    More than one American leftist has entered the DP in hopes of creating a “left presence” within it.  During the Kennedy-Johnson presidential years, the DP was full of former leftists who sought to “change the system from within.”  In actually existing liberalism, the system changed them and they supported the US adventure into Viet Nam and turned on their former comrades.  They were called “State Department Liberals” and no one captured their essence better than Phil Ochs in the closing stanza of his most famous song:

    Once i was young and impulsive
    I wore every conceivable pin
    Even went to the socialist meetings
    Learned all the old union hymns
    But i’ve grown older and wiser
    And that’s why i’m turning you in
    So love me, love me, love me, i’m a liberal

    – Phil Ochs, Love Me, I’m a Liberal, 1966

    After DP aristocrats have denounced the anti-imperialism of their left opponents and gone on a legal rampage to remove the names of thought criminals from the ballot, it is only a hop, skip and jump to point them out to the secret police.  Lest this be judged as too harsh, please remember that the DP in power collaborates with secret police across the world and helps teach them their tactics.

    At some point in the march of unconditional surrender to corporate politics, many will say, “Can’t take this no more.  We must break with the Dems.  We must build a new party!”  They will then discover the grave that was dug in 2020.  It will be the grave of shutting off criticism, the grave of “unifying” to defeat Trump.  They will discover that the DP, with which many snuggled so sweetly, sought to unify with them much as the lion sought “unity” with the lamb.

    The great delusion of the left liberals has been that they could “first Dump Trump and then hold Biden accountable.”  How can anyone possibly “push Biden to the left” or “hold his feet to the fire” if they have already told him that they will cave in and support him during the next election if the RP nominates a horrible candidate?

    The DP is basically a vote-hustling corporation which seeks massive donations from bigger corporations in return for serving their financial interests upon election.  The only possible way the left can “influence” the DP is to NOT vote for it.  Once the left gives in and votes for it en masse, the left has gone far beyond accepting a mess of pottage for selling its birthright to bring forth a new world.  It has abandoned that birthright for a vague hint that it might get a tiny whiff of pottage decades after capitalism has made the Earth unlivable for humans.

    To be crassly honest, the liberals have already outlined to the Biden machine their best strategy to elect a DP president in 2024: Send a secret convoy to the RP puppet masters and beg them to renominate Trump.  After all, liberal leaders have promised the DP that that it NEVER has to keep any promise of progressive action because no matter how many wars, international coups, racist exterminations, destruction of medical systems and attacks on working people, they will always crawl back to it during the next election.

    The birthright of the left is to inspire people with our dreams – just as progressive visions have motivated mass movements for two centuries.  It is our birthright to bring people the right to vote for giving birth to a new world – and not merely to chose between the two repulsive nightmares of a dying world.  It is our birthright to gaze through the eyes of Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and countless others and say at the ballot box what we have seen.  It is our birthright to hear the cries of those in poor countries whose lives are ground down by the incessant urge of capital to accumulate more, more, more.  And, yes, though the corporate liberal may find it incomprehensible, it is our birthright to put these truths on the ballot so that others have the right to vote for what so many of us feel.

    Stalwarts of the DPs’ right wing manipulated whatever rules they could find to block the great hope of campaigns for Bernie Sanders known as “Our Revolution.”  Seeing themselves outmaneuvered, Bernie’s leaders refused to mount an independent campaign and shepherded their flock, feeding them to the Joe Biden Blob.  “Our Revolution” was thereby transformed into the “Esau Revolution.”

    So, exactly what does the Esau Revolution despise?  The answer appeared in the book of Genesis thousands of years ago:

    “Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.”

    — Genesis 25: 34

    This article was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2020 at 8:55pm and is filed under Democrats, Donald Trump, Elections, History, Joe Biden.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • US Intervenes as Venezuela Prepares for High Stakes Election

    by Roger D. Harris / November 27th, 2020

    The US finally appointed an ambassador to Venezuela after a decade hiatus and in the runup to the Venezuelan National Assembly elections. The new ambassador, James Story, was confirmed by US Senate voice vote on November 18 with Democrats supporting Trump’s nominee.

    Ambassador Story took his post in Bogotá, Colombia. No, this is not another example of Trump’s bungling by sending his man to the wrong capital. The US government does not recognize the democratically elected government in Caracas.

    Impasse of two Venezuelan presidents

    US hostility to Venezuela started when Hugo Chávez became president in 1999 and continues to this day, according to Adán Chávez, the late president’s older brother and vice-president of the PSUV, the ruling socialist party in Venezuela. “For the last 21 years,” he commented, “the empire has been perfecting its attacks” on Venezuela.

    The elder Chávez, spoke at an international online meeting with the US Chapter of the Network of Intellectuals, Artists and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity on November 19. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, he explained, was not initially socialist, although it was against neoliberalism. The traditional parties in Venezuela in 1998 had lost their appeal to the voters. Hugo Chávez ran and won, looking for a “third way” that was neither capitalist nor socialist. What the revolution discovered was that there was no third way: either socialism or barbarism.

    When in 2013, Venezuela elected President Nicolás Maduro and not the US-backed candidate, the US declared that election fraudulent and refused to recognize the winner. In the 2018 when Maduro was reelected, the US – not taking any chances – proclaimed fraud four months in advance of the vote.

    Then in January 2019, US Vice President Pence telephoned the newly installed president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Juan Guaidó. The following morning Guaidó declared himself president of Venezuela on a Caracas street corner. Almost immediately Donald Trump recognized him as Venezuela’s de facto president.

    Guaidó’s claim to the national presidency was based on being third in constitutional succession, overlooking that neither the Venezuelan president nor vice-president had vacated their offices. At the time, the 35-year-old was unknown to 81% of the Venezuelan people, according to a poll by a firm favorable to the opposition. Guaidó was not even a leader in his own far-right party, Popular Will. He had never run for national office and his previous “exposure” was just that. A photograph of his bare behind made the press when he dropped his pants at a demonstration against the government. The person, whose butt may have been better known than his face, only got to be president of the National Assembly by a scheme which rotated the office among the parties in the legislature.

    But Juan Guaidó had one outstanding qualification to be the US-anointed puppet president of Venezuela – he was a trained US security asset.

    Guaidó’s parallel government has named ambassadors without power and has colluded with the US to loot Venezuelan national assets, some $24 billion. His former attorney is now on the legal team working to take over CITGO, the oil company in the US owned by Venezuela.

    “As time went on,” Mission Verdad reported from Venezuela, “support for Guaidó faded and his childish image became a laughable anecdote of Venezuelan politics.” After several failed coup attempts, corruption, embezzlement, resigning from his own party, and losing the presidency of the National Assembly, Guaidó’s last shred of legitimacy – his National Assembly seat – will be contested on December 6 with elections to the unicameral legislature.

    US interference and sanctions on Venezuela

    The extraordinary level of US interference in Venezuela’s electoral process highlights their importance. The US government has preemptively declared the upcoming National Assembly elections fraudulent.  Guaidó’s political party and others on the far right have dutifully obeyed Trump’s directive to boycott the contest.

    However, other opposition elements have broken with the US strategy of extra-parliamentary regime change and are participating in the elections. They have also distanced themselves from Guaidó’s calls for ever harsher sanctions against his people and even for US military intervention.

    To maintain discipline among the moderate opposition, the US has sanctioned some opposition party leaders for registering to run in the parliamentary elections. Nevertheless, 98 opposition parties and nine Chavista parties (supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution) will be contesting for 277 seats in the National Assembly.

    Following the US’s lead, the European Union rejected the upcoming election and an invitation to send election observers. A long list of international figures including Noble Prize winners and former heads of state petitioned the EU: “This election represents, above all a democratic, legal and peaceful way out of the political and institutional crisis that was triggered in January 2019 by the self-appointment of Juan Guaidó as ‘interim president’ of Venezuela.”

    The Council of Electoral Experts of Latin America (CEELA) and other internationals will be observing the election on December 6. CEELA Chairman Nicanor Moscoso noted: “We, as former magistrates and electoral authorities in Latin America, have organized elections and also participated in over 120 elections…Our aim is to accompany the Venezuelan people.”

    The nine Chavista parties are not running on a unified slate. The new Popular Revolutionary Alternative coalition, which formed to run candidates independently, includes the Venezuelan Communist Party.

    Communists normally would not get favorable ink in The New York Times. But when there are splits on the left, the empire’s newspaper of record exploits them: “They championed Venezuela’s revolution – they are now its latest victims.” The paper reports: “The repression is partly an outcome of Mr. Maduro’s decision to abandon the wealth redistribution policies of his late predecessor, Hugo Chávez, in favor of what amounts to crony capitalism to survive American sanctions [emphasis added].”

    The key to deconstructing the Times’s hit piece is the phrase, “to survive American sanctions.” As Alfred de Zayas, the United Nations Human Rights Rapporteur on Venezuela, had observed even before the pandemic hit, the US sanctions on Venezuela are causing “economic asphyxiation.” Compromises have been necessitated.

    President Maduro has survived a drone assassination attempt, mercenary invasions, and abortive coups. In this context, the ruling party realistically feels under siege.

    Although running independent candidates, Communist Party leader Oscar Figuera states “we see imperialism as the main enemy of the Venezuelan people.” And on that the Chavista forces are united.

    National Assembly elections as a referendum on the Venezuelan project

    Venezuela’s Vice Foreign Minister Carlos Ron characterized the election as a referendum against the “brutal blockade” imposed by the US and its allies and against their effort to undermine Venezuela’s democracy by trying to prevent the election from being conducted. He spoke from Caracas in a webinar produced by the US Peace Council and others on November 18.

    Carlos Ron lamented that the Venezuelan opposition does not play by the rules. In the 24 national elections held since the election of Hugo Chávez, only the two that have been won by the opposition were deemed truly legitimate by them. Yet this is the electoral system that former US President Jimmy Carter proclaimed to be “the best in the world.”

    Margaret Flowers of Popular Resistance spoke in the November 18 webinar calling for the US government to end the illegal coercive economic measures, including unfreezing Venezuela’s assets. Flowers called for reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the legitimate government of Venezuela based on peace and mutual respect.

    Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace spoke at the webinar of the necessity to protect the Venezuelan project as the “gateway to the transformation of the entire region,” which is also why the US sees Venezuela as a threat. He cautioned that Joe Biden has the same regime-change policy as Trump. Our responsibility, Baraka concluded, is to build a clear anti-imperialist movement.

    This article was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2020 at 8:19am and is filed under Crimes against Humanity, Donald Trump, Elections, Joe Biden, Juan Guaidó, Lies, President Nicolas Maduro, Sanctions, United States, US Congress, US Foreign Policy, US Hypocrisy, Venezuela.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.