Chris Hedges's Blog, page 20

Trump Wants to Betray American Workers Yet Again

Before sharing my opinions about Trump’s recent proposal to cut student loan forgiveness, let me explain my own situation.

In my 20s, I was fresh out of college with a business degree and worked in software for a few years. In my 30s, I went to graduate school for sociology. I’m single and I had no family support. So I took out student loans.

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American Higher Education Is Even More Corrupt Than It Looks



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I made the decision to take student loans carefully. It’s a risk, because you might not graduate and then you’ll be left with thousands of dollars to pay back.

There were two mitigating factors that led me to go for it. First, you can opt for income-based repayment. Under that option, your loan payments are tied to your income. If you’re broke, your payments are small. If you’re rich, you pay more. That seems fair.

Second, if you work in the public sector or at a non-profit organization, your loans are forgiven after 10 years of repayment. (If not, they are forgiven after 20 years.)

I’m a little more than a year away from graduation. After seven years of graduate school, if I’m lucky, I’ll get a job that pays less than I made in software in my 20s. And then I’ll pay back loans for a decade.

I’ll be 50 years old when my loans are forgiven. It will affect my ability to buy a home, start a family, or save for retirement. I chose that.

Yet Trump has proposed cutting loan forgiveness for people who work in non-profit or government jobs for ten years. For students like me who already took out loans, it’s reneging on a promise.

If you want to run the government like a profit-maximizing business, maybe cutting loan forgiveness makes sense. But there are good reasons why the government should not be run like a business.

Businesses are run to maximize the profits of their shareholders. Any benefits to their customers or the wider public are incidental. The government should benefit all of us.

A healthy society is one with social mobility, where a talented, hardworking person born into poverty can rise above their class. Unless you’re a star athlete, education is the key to getting ahead. Education is not equally accessible to all.

Students from low-income families with college aspirations are already at a disadvantage for a long list of reasons. Sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab studies how the current financial aid system is skewed against the poor. For example, she finds that aid packages underestimate the actual cost of attending school, and assume that children don’t contribute financially to their parents (which many low income students do).

Loans aren’t ideal. Any measures that could allow students to graduate without crippling debt would be better. But they are something. They allow some students who could not otherwise afford it to get a college education. They promote social mobility.

I want to live in a country where talented people from poor families can still go to college. I think that makes our country better — not just in an idealistic way because of lofty morals, but in a real, tangible way that I believe we will all gain from.

I don’t think we are better when the rich stay rich because Aunt Becky can buy her kids’ way into college without them earning it, while a genius born to poor parents can’t. I think we all do better when talented people born into poor families can realize their full potential, enriching our society for all of us.

Loan forgiveness isn’t the magic bullet to achieving a perfect meritocracy, but it’s something. And it’s not a giveaway of free money — it’s an investment in a better society.

Pete Buttigieg’s Vile Turn as the Anti-Sanders Candidate

Soon after his distant third-place finish in the Nevada caucuses, Pete Buttigieg sent out a mass email saying that “Senator Sanders believes in an inflexible, ideological revolution that leaves out most Democrats, not to mention most Americans.” The blast depicted “the choice before us” in stark terms: “We can prioritize either ideological purity or inclusive victory. We can either call people names online or we can call them into our movement. We can either tighten a narrow and hardcore base or open the tent to a new, broad, big-hearted American coalition.”

The bizarre accusations of being “narrow” and not “inclusive” were aimed at a candidate who’d just won a historic victory with one of the broadest coalitions in recent Democratic Party history.

Buttigieg has gone from pseudo-progressive to anti-progressive in the last year, and much of his current mission involves denouncing Bernie Sanders with attack lines that are corporate-media favorites (“ideological purity. . . call people names online. . . a narrow and hardcore base”). Buttigieg’s chances of winning the 2020 presidential nomination are now tiny, but he might have a bright future as a rising leader of corporate Democrats.

Weirdly, Buttigieg’s claim that Sanders has “a narrow and hardcore base” came from someone who appears to be almost incapable of getting votes from black people. In Nevada, columnist E.J. Dionne noted, Buttigieg “received virtually no African American votes.” And Buttigieg made his claim in the midst of a Nevada vote count showing that Sanders received more than three times as many votes as he did. The Washington Post reported that Sanders “even narrowly prevailed among those who identified as moderate or conservative.”

As chances that Buttigieg could win the nomination slip away — the latest polling in South Carolina indicates his vote total there on Saturday is unlikely to be any higher than it was in Nevada — his mission is being steadily repurposed. After increasingly aligning himself with the dominant corporate sectors of the party — vacuuming up millions of dollars in bundled checks along the way — Buttigieg is hurling an array of bogus accusations at Sanders.

Four months ago, while Buttigieg’s poll numbers were spiking in Iowa and big donations from wealthy donors poured in, I wrote an article with a headline dubbing him a “Sharp Corporate Tool.” The piece cited an influx of contributions to Buttigieg from the health insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital industries — while he executed a U-turn from proclaiming support for Medicare for All to touting a deceptive rhetorical concoction called “Medicare for all who want it.” I concluded that Buttigieg is “a glib ally of corporate America posing as an advocate for working people and their families.”

Since then, continuing his rightward swerve, Buttigieg has become even more glib, refining his campaign’s creation myth and fine-tuning his capacity to combine corporate policy positions with wispy intimations of technocratic populism. Buttigieg is highly articulate, very shrewd — and now, in attack mode, more valuable than ever to corporate patrons who are feverishly trying to figure out how to prevent Sanders from winning the nomination. During last week’s Nevada debate, Buttigieg warned that Sanders “wants to burn this party down.”

Over the weekend, the Buttigieg campaign sent out email that tried to obscure its major support from extremely wealthy backers. “At the last debate,” Buttigieg’s deputy campaign manager Hari Sevugan wrote indignantly, “Senator Bernie Sanders condemned us for taking contributions from billionaires. That’s interesting. Because what that tells us is in the eyes of Bernie Sanders, the donations of 45 folks (that’s .0054% of our total donor base) are more important than the donations of nearly 1,000,000 grassroots supporters.”

But Sevugan left out the pivotal roles that very rich contributors have played in launching and sustaining the Buttigieg campaign, with lobbyists and corporate executives serving as high-dollar collectors of bundled donations that add up to untold millions. Buttigieg’s corresponding shifts in policy prescriptions make some sense if we follow the money.

In a detailed article that appeared last week, “Buttigieg Is a Wall Street Democrat Beholden to Corporate Interests,” former Communications Workers of America chief economist Kenneth Peres summed up: “Buttigieg and his supporters like to portray him as a ‘change agent.’ However, he has proven to be a change agent that will not in any significant way challenge the current distribution of power, wealth and income in this country. Given his history, it is no surprise that Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Health Insurers, Real Estate Developers and Private Equity have decided to invest millions of dollars into Buttigieg’s campaign.”

In the aftermath of the Nevada caucuses, Buttigieg is escalating his attacks on Sanders (who I actively support), in sync with “news” coverage that is especially virulent from some major corporate outlets. Consider, for example, the de facto smear article that the New York Times printed on Sunday. Or the venomous hostility toward Sanders that’s routine on Comcast-owned MSNBC, which has stepped up its routine trashing of Sanders by journalists and invited guests.

More than ever, corporate Democrats and their media allies are freaking out about the grassroots momentum of the Bernie 2020 campaign. No one has figured out how to stop him. But Buttigieg is determined to do as much damage as he can.

Harvey Weinstein Found Guilty in Landmark #MeToo Moment

NEW YORK — Harvey Weinstein was convicted Monday of rape and sexual assault against two women and and was immediately handcuffed and led off to jail, sealing his dizzying fall from powerful Hollywood studio boss to archvillain of the #MeToo movement.

The 67-year-old Weinstein had a look of resignation on his face as he heard verdict that could send him to prison for up to 29 years.

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Weinstein Charged With Sex Crimes in L.A. on Eve of N.Y. Trial



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“This is the new landscape for survivors of sexual assault in America, I believe, and it is a new day. It is a new day because Harvey Weinstein has finally been held accountable for crimes he committed,” District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said. “Weinstein is a vicious, serial sexual predator who used his power to threaten, rape, assault and trick, humiliate and silence his victims.”

Weinstein was convicted on charges stemming from a 2006 sexual assault and a 2013 rape. The jury found him not guilty on the most serious charges, two counts of predatory sexual assault, each carrying a sentence of up to life in prison.

The jury of seven men and five women took five days to convict him. The most damaging conviction, for the sexual assault of production assistant Mimi Haleyi, carries up to 25 years behind bars. The rape charge is punishable by up to four years. Sentencing was set for March 11.

Judge James Burke ordered Weinstein taken to jail immediately. Court officers surrounded Weinstein, handcuffed him and led him out of the courtroom without the use of the walker he relied on for much for much of the trial. The judge said he will request that Weinstein be held in the infirmary after his lawyers said he needs medical attention following unsuccessful back surgery.

The verdict followed weeks of often harrowing and excruciatingly graphic testimony from a string of accusers who told of rapes, forced oral sex, groping, masturbation, lewd propositions and that’s-Hollywood excuses from Weinstein about how the casting couch works.

The conviction was seen as a long-overdue reckoning for Weinstein after years of whispers about his behavior turned into a torrent of accusations in 2017 that destroyed his career and gave rise to #MeToo, the global movement to encourage women to come forward and hold powerful men accountable for their sexual misconduct.

“Weinstein with his manipulation, his resources, his attorneys, his publicists and his spies did everything he could to silence to survivors,” Vance said after the verdict.

The case against the once-feared producer was essentially built on three allegations: that he raped an aspiring actress in a New York City hotel room in 2013, that he forcibly performed oral sex on Haleyi and that he raped and forcibly performed oral sex on “Sopranos” actress Annabella Sciorra in her apartment in the mid-1990s.

Three additional women who said they, too, were attacked by Weinstein also testified as part of an effort by prosecutors to show a pattern of brutish behavior on his part.

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sex crimes unless they grant permission, as Haleyi and Sciorra did.

Jurors signaled their struggles with the Sciorra charges four days into deliberations. On Friday, after reviewing sections of her testimony and related evidence, they sent a note to the judge indicating they were deadlocked on the counts but had reached a unanimous verdict on the others. After some debate in the courtroom, the judge ordered jurors to keep deliberating.

While Weinstein did not testify, his lawyers contended that any sexual contact was consensual and that his accusers went to bed with him to advance their careers.

The defense seized on the fact that two of the women central to the case stayed in contact with Weinstein through warm and even flirty emails — and had sex with him — well after he supposedly attacked them.

The hard-charging and phenomenally successful movie executive helped bring to the screen such Oscar winners as “Good Will Hunting,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The King’s Speech” and “Shakespeare in Love” and nurtured the careers of celebrated filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith.

Weinstein now faces charges in Los Angeles. In that case, announced just as the New York trial was getting under way on Jan. 6, authorities allege Weinstein raped one woman and sexually assaulted another on back-to-back nights during Oscars week in 2013. One of those women testified as a supporting witness at the New York trial.

The trial was the first criminal case to arise from a barrage of allegations against Weinstein from more than 90 women, including actresses Gwyneth Paltrow, Salma Hayek and Uma Thurman. Most of those cases were too old to prosecute.

During the trial, Weinstein regularly trudged into the courthouse stooped and unshaven, using a walker after recently undergoing back surgery — a far cry from the way he was depicted in court as a burly, intimidating figure whose eyes seemed to turn black with menace when his anger flared.

Many of Weinstein’s accusers described him as a “Jekyll and Hyde” character who could be incredibly charming at first, making jokes and showing interest in using his immense power to help their careers.

But that was an act, they said, meant to gain their trust and get them to a place — often a hotel room or an apartment — where he could violate them.

“If he heard the word ‘no,’ it was like a trigger for him,” his rape accuser testified.

Several women testified that Weinstein excused his behavior as the price for getting ahead in Hollywood. One said that when she laughed off his advances, he sneered, “You’ll never make it in this business. This is how this industry works.”

The jury heard lurid testimony that Weinstein injected himself with a needle to get an erection, that his genitals appeared disfigured, that he sent Sciorra a box of chocolate penises and that he once showed up uninvited at her hotel room door in his underwear with a bottle of baby oil in one hand and a video in the other.

The prosecution’s task was made more complicated because two of the women at the very center of the case didn’t just abandon Weinstein after the alleged encounters: Haleyi testified that she had sex with him two weeks later, while the rape accuser whose name was withheld said she had a sexual encounter with him more than three years afterward.

Like Haleyi, she sent Weinstein friendly and sometimes flirtatious emails, such as “Miss you big guy” and “I love you, always do. But I hate feeling like a booty call.”

During a cross-examination from Weinstein’s lawyers so exhaustive that she broke down in tears on the stand, the woman said she sent him flattering emails and kept seeing him because she was afraid of his unpredictable anger and “I wanted him to believe I wasn’t a threat.”

To blunt that line of questioning, prosecutors called to the witness stand a forensic psychiatrist who said that most sexual assault victims continue to have contact with their attackers and that they hope what happened to them “is just an aberration.”

During closing arguments, Weinstein lawyer Donna Rotunno charged that Weinstein had become “the target of a cause and a movement” — #MeToo — and asked the jury to ignore “outside forces.”

“This is not a popularity contest,” she said.

She said the case against Weinstein amounted to “regret renamed as rape,” arguing that the women exercised their free will to try to further their careers.

Prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon told the jury that Weinstein considered himself such a big shot in Hollywood that he thought he could get away with treating women as “complete disposables.”

“The universe is run by me and they don’t get to complain when they get stepped on, spit on, demoralized and, yes, raped and abused by me — the king,” she said, mimicking Weinstein.

Rumors about Weinstein’s behavior swirled in Hollywood circles for a long time, but he managed to silence many accusers with payoffs, nondisclosure agreements and the constant fear that he could crush their careers if they spoke out.

Weinstein was finally arrested and led away in handcuffs in May 2018, seven months after The New York Times and The New Yorker exposed his alleged misconduct in stories that would win the Pulitzer Prize.

Among other men taken down by the #MeToo movement since the scandal broke: news anchors Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, actor Kevin Spacey and Sen. Al Franken.

Weinstein, the product of a working-class family from Queens, achieved success at two movie studios he created with his brother Bob: Miramax — named for their parents, Miriam and Max — and then the Weinstein Co.

The Weinstein Co. went bankrupt after his disgrace. A tentative settlement was reached last year to resolve nearly all lawsuits stemming from the scandal. It would pay Weinstein’s alleged victims about $25 million. Under the proposed deal, Weinstein would not have to admit any wrongdoing or personally pay anything; the studio’s insurance companies would cover the cost.

Pioneering NASA Mathematician Katherine Johnson Dies

Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who calculated rocket trajectories and earth orbits for NASA’s early space missions and was later portrayed in the 2016 hit film “Hidden Figures,” about pioneering black female aerospace workers, has died. She was 101.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said on Twitter that she died Monday morning. No cause was given.

Bridenstine tweeted that the NASA family “will never forget Katherine Johnson’s courage and the milestones we could not have reached without her. Her story and her grace continue to inspire the world.”

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Johnson was one of the “computers” who solved equations by hand during NASA’s early years and those of its precursor organization, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

Johnson and other black women initially worked in a racially segregated computing unit in Hampton, Virginia, that wasn’t officially dissolved until NACA became NASA in 1958. Signs had dictated which bathrooms the women could use.

Johnson focused on airplanes and other research at first. But her work at NASA’s Langley Research Center eventually shifted to Project Mercury, the nation’s first human space program.

“Our office computed all the (rocket) trajectories,” Johnson told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in 2012. “You tell me when and where you want it to come down, and I will tell you where and when and how to launch it.”

In 1961, Johnson did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 Mission, the first to carry an American into space. The next year, she manually verified the calculations of a nascent NASA computer, an IBM 7090, which plotted John Glenn’s orbits around the planet.

“Get the girl to check the numbers,” a computer-skeptical Glenn had insisted in the days before the launch.

“Katherine organized herself immediately at her desk, growing phone-book-thick stacks of data sheets a number at a time, blocking out everything except the labyrinth of trajectory equations,” Margot Lee Shetterly wrote in her 2016 book “Hidden Figures,” on which the film is based.

“It took a day and a half of watching the tiny digits pile up: eye-numbing, disorienting work,” Shetterly wrote.

Shetterly told The Associated Press on Monday that Johnson was “exceptional in every way.”

“The wonderful gift that Katherine Johnson gave us is that her story shined a light on the stories of so many other people,” Shetterly said. “She gave us a new way to look at black history, women’s history and American history.”

Shetterly noted that Johnson died during Black History Month and a few days after the anniversary of Glenn’s orbits of the earth on Feb. 20, 1962, for which she played an important role.

“We get to mourn her and also commemorate the work that she did that she’s most known for at the same time,” Shetterly said.

Johnson considered her work on the Apollo moon missions to be her greatest contribution to space exploration. Her calculations helped the lunar lander rendezvous with the orbiting command service module. She also worked on the Space Shuttle program before retiring in 1986.

Johnson and her co-workers had been relatively unsung heroes of America’s Space Race. But in 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Johnson — then 97 — the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

The “Hidden Figures” book and film followed, telling the stories of Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, among others. Johnson was portrayed in the film by actress Taraji P. Henson. The film was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and grossed more than $200 million worldwide.

In 2017, Johnson was brought on stage at the Academy Awards ceremony to thunderous applause. Jackson and Vaughan had died in 2005 and 2008 respectively.

Johnson was born Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, near the Virginia border. The small town had no schools for blacks beyond the eighth grade, she told The Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1997.

Each September, her father drove Johnson and her siblings to Institute, West Virginia, for high school and college on the campus of the historically black West Virginia State College.

Johnson taught at black public schools before becoming one of three black students to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools in 1939.

She left after the first session to start a family with her first husband, James Goble, and returned to teaching when her three daughters grew older. In 1953, she started working at the all-black West Area Computing unit at what was then called Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton.

Johnson’s first husband died in 1956. She married James A. Johnson in 1959.

Johnson spent her later years encouraging students to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Looking back, she said she had little time to worry about being treated unequally.

“My dad taught us ‘you are as good as anybody in this town, but you’re no better,’” Johnson told NASA in 2008. “I don’t have a feeling of inferiority. Never had. I’m as good as anybody, but no better.”

The Zionist Colonization of Palestine

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the product of ancient ethnic hatreds. It is the tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same land. It is a manufactured conflict, the outcome of a 100-year-old colonial occupation by Zionists and later Israel, backed by the British, the United States and other major imperial powers. This project is about the ongoing seizure of Palestinian land by the colonizers. It is about the rendering of the Palestinians as non-people, writing them out of the historical narrative as if they never existed and denying them basic human rights. Yet to state these incontrovertible facts of Jewish colonization — supported by innumerable official reports and public and private communiques and statements, along with historical records and events — sees Israel’s defenders level charges of anti-Semitism and racism.

Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, in his book “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonization and Resistance, 1917-2017” has meticulously documented this long project of colonization of Palestine. His exhaustive research, which includes internal, private communications between the early Zionists and Israeli leadership, leaves no doubt that the Jewish colonizers were acutely aware from the start that the Palestinian people had to be subjugated and removed to create the Jewish state. The Jewish leadership was also acutely aware that its intentions had to be masked behind euphemisms, the patina of biblical legitimacy by Jews to a land that had been Muslim since the seventh century, platitudes about human and democratic rights, the supposed benefits of colonization to the colonized and a mendacious call for democracy and peaceful co-existence with those targeted for destruction.

“This is a unique colonialism that we’ve been subjected to where they have no use for us,” Khalidi quotes Said as having written. “The best Palestinian for them,” Said wrote, “is either dead or gone. It’s not that they want to exploit us, or that they need to keep us there in the way of Algeria or South Africa as a subclass.”

Zionism was birthed from the evils of anti-Semitism. It was a response to the discrimination and violence inflicted on Jews, especially during the savage pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century that left thousands dead. The Zionist leader Theodor Herzl in 1896 published “Der Judenstaat,” or “The Jewish State,” in which he warned that Jews were not safe in Europe, a warning that within a few decades proved terrifyingly prescient with the rise of German fascism.

Britain’s support of a Jewish homeland was always colored by anti-Semitism. The 1917 decision by the British Cabinet, as stated in the Balfour Declaration, to support “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” was a principal part of a misguided endeavor based on anti-Semitic tropes. It was undertaken by the ruling British elites to unite “international Jewry” — including officials of Jewish descent in senior positions in the new Bolshevik state in Russia — behind Britain’s flagging military campaign in World War I. The British leaders were convinced that Jews secretly controlled the U.S. financial system. American Jews, once promised a homeland in Palestine, would, they thought, bring the United States into the war and help finance the war effort. To add to these bizarre anti-Semitic canards, the British believed that Jews and Dönmes — or “crypto-Jews” whose ancestors had converted to Christianity but who continued to practice the rituals of Judaism in secret — controlled the Turkish government. If the Zionists were given a homeland in Palestine, the British believed, the Jews and Dönmes would turn on the Turkish regime, which was allied with Germany in the war, and the Turkish government would collapse. World Jewry, the British were convinced, was the key to winning the war.

“With ‘Great Jewry’ against us,” warned Britain’s Sir Mark Sykes, who with the French diplomat François Georges-Picot created the secret treaty that carved up the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France, there would be no possibility of victory. Zionism, Sykes said, was a powerful global subterranean force that was “atmospheric, international, cosmopolitan, subconscious and unwritten, nay often unspoken.”

The British elites, including Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, also believed that Jews could never be assimilated in British society and it was better for them to emigrate. It is telling that the only Jewish member of Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s government, Edwin Montagu, vehemently opposed the Balfour Declaration. He argued that it would encourage states to expel its Jews. “Palestine will become the world’s ghetto,” he warned.

This turned out to be the case after World War II when hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, many rendered stateless, had nowhere to go but Palestine. Often, their communities had been destroyed during the war or their homes and land had been confiscated. Those Jews who returned to countries like Poland found they had nowhere to live and were often victims of discrimination as well as postwar anti-Semitic attacks and even massacres.

The European powers dealt with the Jewish refugee crisis by shipping victims of the Holocaust to the Middle East. So, while leading Zionists understood that they had to uproot and displace Arabs to establish a homeland, they were also acutely aware that they were not wanted in the countries from which they had fled or been expelled. The Zionists and their supporters may have mouthed slogans such as “a land without a people for a people without a land” in speaking of Palestine, but, as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt observed, European powers were attempting to deal with the crime carried out against Jews in Europe by committing another crime, one against Palestinians. It was a recipe for endless conflict, especially since giving the Palestinians under occupation full democratic rights would risk loss of control of Israel by the Jews.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the godfather of the right-wing ideology that has dominated Israel since 1977, an ideology openly embraced by Prime Ministers Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu, wrote bluntly in 1923: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’ ”

This kind of public honesty, Khalidi notes, was rare among leading Zionists. Most of the Zionist leaders “protested the innocent purity of their aims and deceived their Western listeners, and perhaps themselves, with fairy tales about their benign intentions toward the Arab inhabitants of Palestine,” he writes. The Zionists — in a situation similar to that of today’s supporters of Israel — were aware it would be fatal to acknowledge that the creation of a Jewish homeland required the expulsion of the Arab majority. Such an admission would cause the colonizers to lose the world’s sympathy. But among themselves the Zionists clearly understood that the use of armed force against the Arab majority was essential for the colonial project to succeed. “Zionist colonization … can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population — behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach,” Jabotinsky wrote.

The Jewish colonizers knew they needed an imperial patron to succeed and survive. Their first patron was Britain, which sent 100,000 troops to crush the Palestinian revolt of the 1930s and armed and trained Jewish militias known as the Haganah. The savage repression of that revolt included wholesale executions and aerial bombardment and left 10% of the adult male Arab population killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. The Zionists’ second patron became the United States, which now, generations later, provides more than $3 billion a year to Israel. Israel, despite the myth of self-reliance it peddles about itself, would not be able to maintain its Palestinian colonies but for its imperial benefactors. This is why the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement frightens Israel. It is also why I support the BDS movement.

The early Zionists bought up huge tracts of fertile Palestinian land and drove out the indigenous inhabitants. They subsidized European Jewish settlers sent to Palestine, where 94% of the inhabitants were Arabs. They created organizations such as the Jewish Colonization Association, later called the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, to administer the Zionist project.

But, as Khalidi writes, “once colonialism took on a bad odor in the post-World War II era of decolonization, the colonial origins and practice of Zionism and Israel were whitewashed and conveniently forgotten in Israel and the West. In fact, Zionism — for two decades the coddled step-child of British colonialism — rebranded itself as an anticolonial movement.”

“Today, the conflict that was engendered by this classic nineteenth-century European colonial venture in a non-European land, supported from 1917 onward by the greatest Western imperial power of its age, is rarely described in such unvarnished terms,” Khalidi writes. “Indeed, those who analyze not only Israeli settlement efforts in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, but the entire Zionist enterprise from the perspective of its colonial settler origins and nature are often vilified. Many cannot accept the contradiction inherent in the idea that although Zionism undoubtedly succeeded in creating a thriving national entity in Israel, its roots are as a colonial settler project (as are those of other modern countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). Nor can they accept that it would not have succeeded but for the support of the great imperial powers, Britain and later the United States. Zionism, therefore, could be and was both a national and a colonial settler movement at one and the same time.”

One of the central tenets of the Zionist and Israeli colonization is the denial of an authentic, independent Palestinian identity. During the British control of Palestine, the population was officially divided between Jews and “non-Jews.” “There were no such thing as Palestinians … they did not exist,” onetime Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir quipped. This erasure, which requires an egregious act of historical amnesia, is what the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called the “politicide” of the Palestinian people. Khalidi writes, “The surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it.”

The creation of the state of Israel on May 15, 1948, was achieved by the Haganah and other Jewish groups through the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and massacres that spread terror among the Palestinian population. The Haganah, trained and armed by the British, swiftly seized most of Palestine. It emptied West Jerusalem and cities such as Haifa and Jaffa, along with numerous towns and villages, of their Arab inhabitants. Palestinians call this moment in their history the Nakba, or the Catastrophe.

“By the summer of 1949, the Palestinian polity had been devastated and most of its society uprooted,” Khalidi writes. “Some 80 percent of the Arab population of the territory that at war’s end became the new state of Israel had been forced from their homes and lost their lands and property. At least 720,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinians were made refugees. Thanks to this violent transformation, Israel controlled 78 percent of the territory of former Mandatory Palestine, and now ruled over the 160,000 Palestinian Arabs who had been able to remain, barely one-fifth of the prewar Arab population.”

Since 1948, Palestinians have heroically mounted one resistance effort after another, all unleashing disproportionate Israeli reprisals and a demonization of the Palestinians as terrorists. But this resistance has also forced the world to recognize the presence of Palestinians, despite the feverish efforts of Israel, the United States and many Arab regimes to remove them from historical consciousness. The repeated revolts, as Said noted, gave the Palestinians the right to tell their own story, the “permission to narrate.”

The colonial project has poisoned Israel, as feared by its most prescient leaders, including Moshe Dayan and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a right-wing Jewish extremist in 1995. Israel is an apartheid state that rivals and often surpasses the onetime savagery and racism of apartheid South Africa. Its democracy — which was always exclusively for Jews — has been hijacked by extremists, including current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have implemented racial laws that were once championed mainly by marginalized fanatics such as Meir Kahane. The Israeli public is infected with racism. “Death to Arabs” is a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches. Jewish mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, carry out indiscriminate acts of vandalism and violence against dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and the hapless African immigrants who live crammed into the slums of Tel Aviv. Israel has promulgated a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that eerily resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law permits exclusively Jewish towns in Israel’s Galilee region to bar applicants for residency on the basis of “suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.” The late Uri Avnery, a left-wing politician and journalist, wrote that “Israel’s very existence is threatened by fascism.”

In recent years, up to 1 million Israelis have left to live in the United States, many of them among Israel’s most enlightened and educated citizens. Within Israel, human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — have found themselves vilified as traitors in government-sponsored smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance and subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli educational system, starting in primary school, is an indoctrination machine for the military. The Israeli army periodically unleashes massive assaults with its air force, artillery and mechanized units on the largely defenseless 1.85 million Palestinians in Gaza, resulting in thousands of Palestinian dead and wounded. Israel runs the Saharonim detention camp in the Negev Desert, one of the largest detention centers in the world, where African immigrants can be held for up to three years without trial.

The great Jewish scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom Isaiah Berlin called “the conscience of Israel,” saw the mortal danger to Israel of its colonial project. He warned that if Israel did not separate church and state and end its colonial occupation of the Palestinians it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. “Religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism was to socialism,” said Leibowitz, who died in 1994. He saw that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war in which Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem, would result in the degeneration of the Jewish society and the death of democracy.

“Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam [a reference to the war waged by the United States in the 1970s], to a war in constant escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution,” Leibowitz wrote. He foresaw that “the Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police — mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.”

The Zionists could never have colonized the Palestinians without the backing of Western imperial powers whose motives were tainted by anti-Semitism. Many of the Jews who fled to Israel would not have done so but for the virulent European anti-Semitism that by the end of World War II saw 6 million Jews murdered. Israel was all that many impoverished and stateless survivors, robbed of their national rights, communities, homes and often most of their relatives, had left. It became the tragic fate of the Palestinians, who had no role in the European pogroms or the Holocaust, to be sacrificed on the altar of hate.

Haiti Police in Firefight With Troops Near National Palace

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—Off-duty police officers and their supporters exchanged fire for nearly two hours on Sunday with members of the newly reconstituted Haitian army in front of the national palace, in a dangerous escalation of protests over police pay and working conditions.

At least three police officers were wounded, fellow officers told The Associated Press.

AP journalists saw dozens of men who said they were off-duty officers march with hundreds of supporters toward the palace in the latest in days of demonstrations demanding better pay for Haitian law-enforcement officers.

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The protest stopped outside the army headquarters facing the palace.

Associated Press journalists then saw several soldiers at the headquarters building fire into the air. Shortly afterward, an exchange of fire erupted between the soldiers and police. It was not clear which side began firing at the other first.

The army was disbanded in 1995 after the fall of a dictatorship that used soldiers to repress domestic opponents. President Jovenel Moise reformed the army in 2017, promising that the military would patrol Haiti’s borders, assist in natural disasters and avoid domestic affairs.

At least three men were taken to a hospital near the shooting with wounds to the legs and feet that did not appear to be life-threatening. Uniformed police officers told an AP journalist that the wounded men were fellow officers. The uniformed officers spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

Shooting continued until after 3 p.m. and did not appear to be ceasing.

Vendors Push Risky New Voting Machines Over Safe Paper Ballots

In the rush to replace insecure, unreliable electronic voting machines after Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential race, state and local officials have scrambled to acquire more trustworthy equipment for this year’s election, when U.S. intelligence agencies fear even worse problems.

But instead of choosing simple, hand-marked paper ballots that are most resistant to tampering because paper cannot be hacked, many are opting for pricier technology that computer security experts consider almost as risky as earlier discredited electronic systems.

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Called ballot-marking devices, the machines have touchscreens for registering voter choice. Unlike touchscreen-only machines, they print out paper records that are scanned by optical readers. South Carolina voters will use them in Saturday’s primary.

The most pricey solution available, they are at least twice as expensive as the hand-marked paper ballot option. They have been vigorously promoted by the three voting equipment vendors that control 88 percent of the U.S. market.

Some of the most popular ballot-marking machines, made by industry leaders Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems, register votes in bar codes that the human eye cannot decipher. That’s a problem, researchers say: Voters could end up with printouts that accurately spell out the names of the candidates they picked, but, because of a hack, the bar codes do not reflect those choices. Because the bar codes are what’s tabulated, voters would never know that their ballots benefited another candidate.

Even on machines that do not use bar codes, voters may not notice if a hack or programming error mangled their choices. A University of Michigan study determined that only 7 percent of participants in a mock election notified poll workers when the names on their printed receipts did not match the candidates they voted for.

ES&S rejects those scenarios. Spokeswoman Katina Granger said the company’s ballot-marking machines’ accuracy and security “have been proven through thousands of hours of testing and tens of thousands of successful elections.” Dominion declined to comment for this story.

Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. voters will be using ballot-marking machines this year, compared with less than 2% in 2018, according to Verified Voting, which tracks voting technology.

Pivotal counties in the crucial states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina have bought ballot-marking machines. So have counties in much of Texas, as well as California’s Los Angeles County and all of Georgia, Delaware and South Carolina. The machines’ certification has often been streamlined in the rush to get machines in place for presidential primaries.

Ballot-marking devices were not conceived as primary vote-casting tools but as accessible options for people with disabilities.

Critics see them as vulnerable to hacking. At last year’s DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas, it took tinkerers at the ‘Voting Village’ not even eight hours to hack two older ballot-marking devices.

Tampering aside, some of the newer ballot-marking machines have stumbled badly in actual votes. That happened most spectacularly in November when ES&S’s top-of-the-line ExpressVote XL debuted in a Pennsylvania county.

Even without technical troubles, the new machines can lead to longer lines, potentially reducing turnout. Voters need more time to cast ballots and the machine’s high costs have prompted election officials to limit how many they purchase.

“There are a huge number of reasons to reject today’s ballot-marking devices — except for limited use as assistive devices for those unable to mark a paper ballot themselves,” says Doug Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist who co-authored the voting technology history “Broken Ballots.” ‘

But election officials see ballot-marking devices as improvements over paperless touchscreens, which were used by 27 percent of voters in 2018. They like them because the touchscreens are familiar to voters, looking and feeling like what they have been using for nearly two decades, and officials can use one voting method for everyone.

Michael Anderson, elections director for Pennsylvania’s Lebanon County, said “voters want it.” The county offers voters both machine- and hand-marked ballots.

“When we give them a paper ballot, the very first thing they say to us is, ‘We’re going back in time,’” he said.

New York State election commission co-chair Douglas Kellner was an early critic of paperless electronic voting machines. But he is confident in a ballot-marking device, the ImageCast Evolution by Dominion, certified for use in his state. He said safeguards built into the machines and security protocols make a hack of the Image Evolution “extraordinarily unlikely.”

But Jones is among experts who think today’s ballot-marking devices undermine the very idea of retaining a paper record that can be used in audits and recounts. It’s an idea supported by a 2018 National Academies of Sciences report that favors hand-marked paper ballots tallied by optical scanners. Some 70 percent of U.S. voters used them in the past two presidential elections and will do so again in November.

One state, Colorado, is banning bar codes from ballot-marking voting machines beginning in 2021.

Election administrators who reject hand-marked paper ballots as antiquated, inconvenient or unwieldy have few options beyond ballot-marking devices. That’s because the $300 million voting equipment and services industry is so insular and entrenched.

The industry faces virtually no federal regulation even though election technology was designated critical infrastructure in January 2017. Federal certification guidelines for voting machine design are 15 years old and voluntary. The leading vendors have resisted publicly disclosing third-party penetration testing of their systems.

”It’s a self-reinforcing system that keeps it frozen in a place in the past,” said Eddie Perez, a former product development director for Hart InterCivic, the No. 3 voting equipment company, now with the OSET Institute, a nonprofit that promotes reliable voting solutions. “They don’t want to make any changes in the equipment unless they absolutely have to.”

The Republican-controlled Senate has refused to take up bills that would, among other things, require a voter-verifiable paper trail and require bulletproof postelection audits. Republicans say the federal government should not impinge on states’ authority to oversee elections.

Northampton County, on Pennsylvania’s eastern edge, mirrored the state’s choice in 2016 by voting for Donald Trump after twice choosing Barack Obama. Last Election Day, it became ground zero in the debate over ballot-marking devices.

The county’s new ExpressVote XLs failed doubly.

First, a programming misconfiguration prevented votes cast for one of three candidates in a judge’s race from registering in the bar codes used to count the vote. Only absentee ballot votes registered for the candidate, said the county executive, Lamont McClure. The other problem was miscalibrated touchscreens, which can “flip” votes or simply make it difficult to vote for one’s desired candidate due to faulty screen alignment. They were on about one-third of the county’s 320 machines, which cost taxpayers $8,250 each.

One poll judge called the touch screens “garbage.” Some voters, in emails obtained by the AP in a public records request, said their votes were assigned to the wrong candidates. Others worried about long lines in future elections.

Voters require triple the time on average to navigate ES&S ballot-marking machines compared to filling out hand-marked ballots and running them through scanners, according to state certification documents.

ES&S said its employees had flubbed the programming and failed to perform adequate preelection testing of the machines or adequately train election workers, which would have caught the errors.

Election commissioners were livid, but unable to return the machines for a refund because they are appointees.

“I feel like I’ve been played,” commissioner Maudeania Hornik said at a December meeting with ES&S representatives. She later told the AP she had voted for the devices believing they would be more convenient than hand-marked paper ballots, especially for seniors.

“What we worry is, what happens the next time if there’s a programming bug — or a hack or whatever — and it’s done in a way that’s not obvious?” said Daniel Lopresti, a commissioner and Lehigh University computer scientist.

ES&S election equipment has failed elsewhere. Flawed software in ballot-marking devices delayed the vote count by 13 hours in Kansas’ largest county during the August 2018 gubernatorial primary. Another Johnson County, this one in Indiana, scrapped the company’s computerized voter check-in system after Election Day errors that same year caused long lines.

“I don’t know that we’ve ever seen an election computer — a voting computer — whose software was done to a high standard,” said Duncan Buell, a University of South Carolina computer scientist who has found errors in results produced by ES&S electronic voting machines.

Voting integrity activists have sued, seeking to prevent the further use in Pennsylvania of the ExpressVote XL. Grassroots organizations including Common Cause are fighting to prevent their certification in New York State.

ES&S defends the machine. In a Dec. 12 filing in a Pennsylvania lawsuit, company executive Dean Baumer said the ExpressVote XL had never been compromised and said breaches of the machine “are a practical impossibility.”

ES&S lobbied hard in Pennsylvania for the ExpressVote XL, though not always legally.

After ES&S won a $29 million contract in Philadelphia last year in a hasty procurement, that city’s controller did some digging. She determined that ES&S’ vice president of finance had failed to disclose, in a mandatory campaign contribution form, activities of consultants who spent more than $400,000, including making campaign contributions to two commissioners involved in awarding the contract. ES&S agreed to pay a record $2.9 million penalty as a result. It said the executive’s failure to disclose was “inadvertent.”

The Philadelphia episode contradicts claims by ES&S officials, including by CEO Tom Burt in Jan. 8 testimony to a congressional committee, that the company does not make campaign contributions.

Public records show ES&S contributed $25,000 from 2014-2016 to the Republican State Leadership Committee which seeks GOP control of state legislatures.

ES&S has also paid for trips to Las Vegas of an “advisory board” of top elections officials, including from South Carolina, New York City and Dallas County, Texas, according to records shared with the AP from a Freedom of Information request.

Philadelphia paid more than twice as much for its ExpressVote XL machines per voter ($27) as what Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, disbursed ($12) for hand-marked paper ballots and scanners — plus ballot-markers for the disabled — from the same vendor.

Allegheny County’s elections board rejected ballot-marking devices as too risky for all but disabled voters. Its vice chair, state judge Kathryn Hens-Greco, regretted during a September hearing having to award ES&S the county’s business at all given its behavior in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

But no other vendor offered a hand-marked option with enough ballot-configuration flexibility for the county’s 130 municipalities.

While cybersecurity risks can’t be eliminated, Hens-Greco said, the county would at least have “the ability to recover” from any mischief: a paper trail of hand-marked ballots.

MSNBC Melts Down Over Sanders’ Front-Runner Status

As it became clear Saturday evening that Sen. Bernie Sanders would run away with the Nevada caucus and secure his position as the frontrunner in the Democratic presidential primary, MSNBC anchors and contributors lashed out at the senator and his supporters in bizarre and sometimes hysterical fashion, descending into what one observer could only describe as a “full-blown freakout.”

Earlier in the Democratic primary process, the Comcast-owned network was notorious for ignoring the senator from Vermont, and covering him negatively when it covered him at all.

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But Saturday marked a clear escalation in hostility from MSNBC‘s on-air personalities as Sanders’ diverse coalition of supporters propelled him to a landslide victory in Nevada, the third consecutive state in which the senator has won the popular vote.

Nicole Wallace, former communications director for the George W. Bush White House, described Sanders’ multi-racial, multi-generational coalition as a “squeaky, angry minority” and accused the senator of deploying “dark arts” as she introduced Democratic political consultant James Carville, who proceeded to declare Sanders’ win in Nevada a victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

At one point in his appearance, Carville waved at the camera and said, “Hi, Vlad,” suggesting Putin was likely watching MSNBC‘s coverage of the caucus results.

“A squeaky, angry minority.”

MSNBC is gonna be must-watch TV the next few weeks. Carville follows by calling Putin the real winner today. pic.twitter.com/9FRds8YWD3

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) February 22, 2020

Wallace later lamented that she has “no idea what voters think about anything anymore” after her colleague, Steve Kornacki, explained that Sanders performed well in precincts with a large number of Culinary Union workers, despite the union leadership’s antagonism toward the senator.

"Those are the voters that have seen the sheets that Culinary handed them about #MedicareForAll and decided to vote anyway for @BernieSanders" #NevadaCaucus

(Nicolle Wallace: "I have no idea what voters think about anything anymore")

A Guide to Restoring Faith in Democracy

“In Defence of Democracy”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

American democracy is in trouble as never before. In the past, there have been moments when democratic process and democratic guarantees have been suspended — Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, the internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II, the McCarthy hearings with their extralegal destruction of lives and careers — and we have lived through tragic errors in judgment, as in the Vietnam War — but never has the whole system of America democracy been so fundamentally challenged as simply no longer able to meet the needs of its citizens.

Daily, President Trump challenges some aspect of the balance of executive, congressional, and judicial powers that form the core of American democracy, descending into blatant illegality defended through lies that do not seem even intended to be believed so much as they are expressions of the conviction that “you elected me and now I can do what I want.”

But even without the frightening, barely credible reality of Donald Trump, the current sorry state of American democracy would be evident. The US Congress has for many years ceased to make any serious effort to represent the desires of their constituencies, and the radical gap that has opened between the modestly left and the far right has made examples of genuine debate and deliberation few and far between, offering instead a kind of ideological kabuki. And, at some level, voters know this. Thus, poll after poll shows a majority of Americans of both parties would like to see greater gun control, but a 2019 Reuters/Ipsos poll found that just eight percent felt “Very Confident” that their elected officials would do anything about it. That electing Democrats leads to increased attention to the needy while Republicans regularly transfer wealth to the wealthy suggests that elections still matter, but, beyond that, what remains of American democracy is an open question.

The United States is hardly alone in this development. Traditional political parties across the established democracies of Europe are losing ground to new extreme right anti-democratic forces: the Freedom Party in Austria, the Danish People’s Party, the AfD in Germany, the Lega Nord in Italy, the National Rally in France, the Swedish Democrats, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. Several have become the second largest parties in their countries, which does not bode well for the future of liberal democracy even in those countries that are most successful economically. So far, these insurgent forces have been held at bay by traditional forces of authority, but how long this can last is uncertain.

In the less established democracies in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, authoritarian leaders are being elected despite their open contempt for the democratic processes that are bringing them to power — Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Andrzej Duda in Poland, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. The painful experience with authoritarian communism in Eastern Europe and military dictatorship in Brazil seems to provide little stay against these developments. Further, the success of authoritarian government in China in lifting 800,000 people from desperate poverty, the reemergence of a remilitarized Russia as a force in European politics, and Donald Trump’s embrace of authoritarians in all forms lend encouragement to these anti-democratic forces.

There has been a flood of critical analyses of these developments with titles such as How Democracies Die (Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, 2018), How Democracy Ends (David Runciman, 2018), Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency (Larry Diamond, 2019), and I must add an older book, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic (Bruce Ackerman, 2010), which predicted the equivalent of the Trump presidency with uncanny accuracy. Many of these books are brilliant in their analyses of what has gone wrong structurally with contemporary democracy and constitute powerful warnings about the state of affairs in the United States and around the world. What they generally lack, however, is useful advice about what is to be done to restore faith in and the actuality of liberal democracy.

As we grab at straws, perhaps the most immediately plausible remedy for the failures of contemporary democratic government and for restoring faith in democracy itself is to replace representative democracy with direct democracy, that is, the system in which major decisions are put to a majority vote of the electorate. The possibility of direct democracy is generally raised with little attention to how it might work in practice and how we might get from here to there.

The Irish-Canadian legal scholar Roslyn Fuller, drawing on a deeply considered analysis of the Roman Senate rather than the simplifying clichés with which Roman governance is usually discussed, attempts to answer these questions in her new book, In Defence of Democracy. Fuller’s new book follows on her earlier book about Roman democracy, Beasts and Gods: How Democracy Changed Its Meaning and Lost its Purpose (2015). In the years between these books, she established the Solonian Democracy Institute to encourage research and experimentation on ways to increase citizen participation in democratic decision making, and she ran for Irish parliament on a platform which basically said that she would put all major decisions to a majority vote of her constituents. What she has learned from these ventures is readily apparent in her new book.

At the heart of Fuller’s argument is the conviction that representative democracy has been conquered by the oligarchic forces of monied elites and that elites will always overestimate their own wisdom while bending (or should we say, buying) policies to benefit themselves. As Fuller puts it,

in our democracy to date there has been a split between the ideology of equal participation and the practical reality of elites running the show: the political elites drafted and voted on laws; media elites decided which stories to publish; financial elites determined which candidates and parties to back.

Today, she maintains, with the virtually universal spread of digital technology, this elite control need no longer be the case. Digital media and already-existing software make it possible at low cost for the mass of voters to make themselves heard and to engage in direct and even deliberative decision making. If monied interests have corrupted the representative process (as they surely have — how else could one explain the recent massive tax cut for the wealthy?), Fuller argues that direct decision making by the electorate may be the only way to make it just too costly for special interests to bribe their way to the head of the line.

Those of us who live in states like California and have seen up close the way special interests use money and deceptive wording to bend the referendum process to their benefit might well question this basic hypothesis, and Fuller does not do justice to the rampant manipulation of digital media today. However, when she discusses the specifics of how direct democracy might work, she does offer suggestions about how these corrupting influences might be limited.

Before getting to her discussion of direct democracy itself, Fuller devotes a good deal of space to countering what she sees as the elite argument that the general public is not wise enough, informed enough, sufficiently understanding of their own self-interest, or rational enough to be entrusted with the responsibility of major decision making. She has good fun showing how regularly the general voter is underestimated in both the writing of libertarians like Jason Brennan and in social science research by serious scholars such as Larry Bartels and Christopher Achen as well as in the traditional media that reflects elite opinion. Thus, to take the two voter “mistakes” that loom large today — the election of Donald Trump and Brexit — she writes:

Rather than acknowledge that many people are seeking alternatives (Trump, Brexit) for an actual reason, or that whenever anyone asks, people keep saying they want change, anti-democrats continue to claim that we live in the best possible reality (indeed, this insistence that the status quo was terrific, despite all evidence to the contrary, was exactly what had such devastating effects for both the British Remain and Hillary Clinton’s presidential claim).

While her argument for the wisdom of the general voter is not entirely persuasive, she does open the reader to sense that voters really might understand their situation better than we have been taught to believe. To this she adds her sense that the elites are as likely to be wrong as the general voter, to which she argues “[e]ven if Brennan were to be correct (and he isn’t) that most voters are ‘ignorant, irrational and misinformed but nice,’ I’d take that over ‘sophisticated, rational and informed but evil’ any day of the week.” Here, as more generally, she simplifies the choices to make her point, which always tends back toward the self-interested positions of elites of all sorts.

Having made her claims for the potential of general voters, Fuller then takes up two other possibilities for improving the performance of contemporary democracy: a greater element of meritocracy and sortition, the practice of putting decision making to a small group of rotating, randomly selected voters. Fuller gives possible versions of meritocracy short shrift because for her all of them are strategies for keeping power in the hands of the elite. Sortition, she argues, may have worked for certain aspects of governance in Rome, but modern nations are just too large for voters to feel represented by a small group of voters even granted that the responsibility of voting for a limited period of time might focus their minds and encourage a greater grasp of the issues than the general voter has either time or incentive for. The ratios of those randomly selected to the populace of voters is just too large to ever be persuasive. Fuller concludes that those who would argue for sortition despite this limitation are seeking yet another way to enhance control by the elite by limiting decisions to a small group that “can be hammered by experts until they realize the error of their ways.”

Having cleared the ground, Fuller then offers her “Five Principles for Transformational (but Reasonable) People Power.” First is the shift to online discussion and voting, and with it the possibility of mass participation. Here she discusses already-existing software and offers examples, ranging from participatory budgeting in Reykjavik to the Pirate Party and the Five-Star Movement in Europe, which use software to develop policy from the bottom up. The referendum on Brexit is offered as yet another example of direct democracy, although here the challenge of making the transition to direct democracy is evident. The referendum, offered originally as an opinion poll, was then treated by the Leavers as binding democratic decision even though it came into direct conflict with the will of the legislators the public had elected to represent them. The result has been years of disarray in British government.

Second is pay for participation to level the playing field between those with the financial means to have time to vote and those struggling to maintain themselves.

Third is “focused, outcome-oriented deliberation.” Fuller acknowledges that social media platforms and various news sites have “all too often become the new arenas for […] petty, mudslinging, back-biting wars of attrition” and that for direct democracy to be genuinely deliberative will take carefully controlled media platforms that set limits on debate and point always toward arriving at conclusions. Fuller offers a number of suggestions about the establishment of procedures to make this process work and even comes close to meritocracy when she suggests that there be “a requirement that someone who wants to speak about a technical topic has formal qualifications in the area.” How this process is developed and controlled is clearly the crux of the matter. Fuller offers suggestions about how to proceed, but the larger point is to begin and to learn through practice in various smaller-scale environments.

Her fourth is “precarious, informal leadership (but leadership just the same).” The role of rhetors in the Roman Senate is offered as an example (i.e., individuals who had no political power but won their right to be heard and to help direct debates through their wisdom and eloquence). Her hope is that if the other elements of direct democracy were put in place, equivalent articulate and able individuals would emerge to help lead the process of direct democracy. Whether one credits this presumption depends on just how rational one takes the average voter to be. For those who remain skeptical, Fuller’s fallback position would be better risk the abuse of direct democracy than continue listening to a self-interested elite.

Finally, Fuller finds a small, not entirely clear role for sortition, not in legislating but in guiding the implementation of what has been decided upon by direct democratic voting. This is the least worked-out piece of her argument, but the will behind it is clear, which is to find more ways for more people to participate in government.

In the end, does Fuller make her case? I would say that she is not finally persuasive at the national level. However, direct democracy is already proven to work in more limited contexts, as it is already doing in several cities and countries. Direct democratic voting on the platforms of political parties, or on specific well-defined issues on the city and state level, would almost certainly have an impact on the individual’s trust in the democratic process. As this gradual buildup over a period of years from the local and regional to the national level is, in any case, how Fuller imagines arriving at full-scale direct democracy, there is nothing to be lost by trying and possibly much to be gained. This is particularly true in light of the evident loss of confidence in the historical parties of left, right, and center, which has left the door open to populist movements, many with anti-democratic tendencies. Genuinely listening to those one hopes to represent and building party platforms based on their desires would seem a natural step toward restoring faith in at least this component of democracy. For those who choose to work in this direction, In Defence of Democracy will prove a valuable guide

Italian Towns on Lockdown as Virus Spreads Internationally

SEOUL, South Korea—South Korea reported an eight-fold jump in viral infections Saturday with more than 400 cases mostly linked to a church and a hospital, while the death toll in Iran climbed to six and a dozen towns in Italy effectively went into lockdowns as health officials around the world battle a new virus that has spread from China.

Some virus clusters have shown no direct link to travel to China. The spread in Italy prompted local authorities in the Lombardy and Veneto regions to order schools, businesses, and restaurants closed and to cancel sporting events and Masses. Hundreds of residents and workers who came into contact with an estimated 54 people confirmed infected in Italy were in isolation pending test results. Two people infected with the virus have died.

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South Korea has reported 433 cases and its third death from the virus, a man in his 40s who was found dead at home and posthumously tested positive. There’s concern that the country’s death toll could grow. In and around South Korea’s fourth-largest city, Daegu, health workers scrambled to screen thousands. Virus patients with signs of pneumonia or other serious conditions at the Cheongdo hospital were transferred to other facilities, 17 of them in critical condition, Vice Health Minister Kim Gang-lip told reporters.

He said that the outbreak had entered a serious new phase, but still expressed cautious optimism that it can be contained to the region surrounding Daegu, where the first case was reported on Tuesday.

Globally, nearly 78,000 people have been infected in 29 countries, and more than 2,300 have died.

A team of global experts with the World Health Organization is on the way to China’s Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Saturday. It has been visiting other parts of China this week.

Tedros also told a meeting of African health ministers that the WHO is concerned about cases with “no clear epidemiological link, such as travel history to China or contact with a confirmed case.” He is especially concerned about the growing number of cases in Iran.

But Tedros said the top concern is the potential spread to countries with weaker health systems, including in Africa. The 20% of virus patients with severe or critical disease require intensive care equipment that is “in short supply in many African countries,” he said. Just one case of the virus has been confirmed in Africa, in Egypt.

In some positive news, China said Saturday that the daily count of new virus cases there fell significantly to 397, though another 109 people died of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. Most of the new cases and all but three of the deaths were in Hubei province, where the outbreak started.

The new figures, along with an upward revision of Hubei’s earlier count, brought the total number of cases in mainland China to 76,288, with 2,345 deaths. China has severely restricted travel and imposed strict quarantine measures to stop the virus from spreading.

A few Chinese provinces, eager to restart factories and their economies, began easing those restrictions after reporting no new cases in recent days. Liaoning and Gansu provinces both lowered their emergency response level, and two cities in Shaanxi province resumed bus services and removed checkpoints at railway stations, bus stations and on some highways.

Of the 229 new cases in South Korea, 200 are from Daegu and nearby areas. By Saturday morning, the city of 2.5 million and surrounding areas counted 352 cases, including two fatalities in the Cheongdo hospital. Both patients had pneumonia.

The central government has declared the area a “special management zone” and is channeling support to ease a shortage in hospital beds, medical personnel and equipment.

While some experts say the virus has started to spread nationwide, pointing to a number of infections in Seoul and elsewhere that weren’t immediately traceable, government officials remained hopeful of containing the outbreak.

“Although we are beginning to see some more cases nationwide, infections are still sporadic outside of the special management zone of Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province,” Kim said during a briefing. He called for maintaining strong border controls to prevent infections from China and elsewhere from entering South Korea.

Nationwide, the numbers told of a ballooning problem. There were 20 new cases reported Wednesday, 53 on Thursday and 100 on Friday.

Around 230 of those have been directly linked to a single house of worship, a Daegu branch of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, where a woman in her 60s attended two services before testing positive for the virus.

Officials are also investigating a possible link between churchgoers and the spike in infections at the Cheongdo hospital, where more than 110 people have been infected so far, mostly patients at a mental illness ward.

Health officials were screening some 9,300 church followers, and said that 1,261 of them have exhibited cough and other symptoms.

Among them, four had traveled abroad in recent months, including one to China, although that trip came in early January and was not near Hubei.

All 74 sites operated by the Shincheonji Church have been closed and churchgoers have been told to instead watch services online for a sect whose leader claims to be an angel of Christ, but who is dismissed by many outsiders as a cult leader. Its teachings revolve largely around the Book of Revelation, a chapter of the New Testament known mostly for its apocalyptic foreshadowing.

Health and city officials say the woman who first tested positive had contact with some 1,160 people, both at the church, a restaurant and a hospital where she was treated for injuries from a car accident.

But officials say it’s unlikely that the woman set off the chain of infections, and that she was probably just the first person to be detected in an area where the virus was circulating in the population.

Anxiety is also palpable in other parts of the country. In Seoul, South Korea’s capital, fear of the virus led many to avoid shops and restaurants and instead eat at home and order necessities online. Buses and subways were full of mask-clad commuters.

Rallies were banned in downtown Seoul, but hundreds went ahead with an anti-government protest on Saturday.

The first three cases in the country’s 600,000-member military also sprung up on separate bases Friday, bringing added concern. A U.S. Army garrison in Daegu restricted access and imposed self-quarantine for American troops.

“There remain zero confirmed cases of USFK personnel with COVID-19 despite the rise in confirmed South Korean cases,” U.S. Forces Korea said in a statement.

In Japan, new cases of the virus include a middle school teacher in her 60s, prompting concern for the health of other teachers and students in Makuhari in Chiba prefecture southeast of Tokyo.

Iranian health authorities on Saturday reported the country’s sixth death from the virus. The governor of Markazi province told the official IRNA news agency that tests of a patient who recently died was positive for the virus. Ali Aghazadeh said the person also had a heart problem. So far, 28 cases have been confirmed in Iran, including at least five of the six who died.

Saudi Arabia barred travel to Iran and said anyone coming from there can enter only after a 14-day quarantine. The decision directly impacts thousands of Iranians who travel to Mecca and Medina for Islamic pilgrimages, effectively barring them from the kingdom.

In the United States, 35 people have tested positive for the virus, including 18 who returned home from a quarantined cruise ship in Japan and one new case reported Friday in California.

Egypt is among 13 countries that the WHO identified as high priority in Africa because of direct travel links to China or a high volume of Chinese travel.

A growing number of African nations now have the laboratory ability to test for the virus, up from two early this month. About 11,000 health workers have been trained about the virus, Tedros said, and the WHO has shipped more than 30,000 sets of personal protective equipment to several African nations.

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Associated Press writers Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and Aya Batrawy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.