04 May 21
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William Boardman | What Does a "Racist Country" Look Like Anyway?
William Boardman, Reader Supported News
Boardman writes: "'America is not a racist country,' Republican senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said in his party's official response to President Biden's address to the nation on April 28. There are reasons that should have been a laugh line."
merica is not a racist country,” Republican senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said in his party’s official response to President Biden’s address to the nation on April 28. There are reasons that should have been a laugh line: Biden did not say America was a “racist country,” the Black senator was rebutting the president’s call for racial justice across all ethnicities, and the reality is that America was founded as a country in which owning and selling Black people was justified and legalized on the basis of the racist doctrine that they were part of an inferior race. Scott didn’t get a laugh. He wasn’t trying to be funny. He was being intellectually dishonest and uttering a coded racist call to the white supremacist cohort of the Republican party that he is tolerant of their different, racist point of view. That’s where denial takes you, into crazy-land. That’s where partisanship takes you, invoking unreality to pander to polarization.
Scott’s maneuver is a variation on the same racist denial that’s worked for Republicans at least since Reagan. Countering the “not a racist country” argument is tricky, since it sets a trap for saying “America is a racist country.” There’s no such thing as a “racist country.” Countries contain racists and tolerant people, just as they contain dishonest and honest people.
Vice President Kamala Harris tried to evade the “America is racist” trap by adopting Scott’s framing, then trying to sidestep it and turn it to her own partisan advantage:
I don’t think America is a racist country…. But we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country, and its existence today…. we know from the intelligence community, one of the greatest threats to our national security is domestic terrorism manifested by white supremacists.
Harris is right about the threat of “domestic terrorism” from the white right, but she’s engaged in threat inflation here. Worse, she uses an inflated threat to distract from the core realities of racism in America. Daily race realities are much less dramatic than “terrorism,” but just as lethal: they keep a crowd at bay watching a police murder, but they don’t protect a teenager with his hands in the air. President Biden talked about racism this way:
We’ve all seen the knee of injustice on the neck of Black Americans. Now is our opportunity to make some real progress. The vast majority of men and women wearing a uniform and a badge serve our communities and they serve them honorably. I know they want to help meet this moment, as well.
My fellow Americans, we have to come together to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the people they serve, to root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system and to enact police reform in George Floyd’s name that passed the house already….
The country supports this reform and Congress should act. We have a giant opportunity to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice, real justice, and with the plans outlined tonight, we have a real chance to root out systemic racism that plagues America and American lives in other ways….
This is not demagoguery built around some notion of a “racist country,” this is a reality-based appeal to Americans to demonstrate their goodness by addressing the systemic racism that ebbs and flows through American life every day, and always has. The nation has made progress, some progress, but daily justice is a far cry from reality.
Denying this reality, or minimizing it, is a habitual Republican tactic (or possibly a sincere belief, perhaps). Like Scott, Republican senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina doesn’t acknowledge that systemic racism is part of the fabric of American life. On Fox News, Graham denied any racism, arguing that, because the country elected a Black president and a Black vice president, “our systems are not racist. America is not a racist country.” Fox host Chris Wallace did not ask Graham to interpret the country’s election of a white bigot president in between the Black officials. That strikes me as a pretty clear example of systemic racism at work, although it could just be the familiar intellectual laziness of American journalism. Or both.
The day before the Derek Chauvin guilty verdict on April 20, CNN’s Chris Cillizza contributed to a multi-faceted example of the way systemic racism works. In Cillizza’s view, with the country “on knife’s edge” awaiting a verdict, “elected officials … need to urge calm and restraint.” He then falsely accused a congresswoman of inciting violence, with a headline reading:
Maxine Waters just inflamed a very volatile situation
Cillizza chose not to acknowledge that the volatility of the situation, whatever it actually was, was the result of a long history of juries failing to convict guilty cops, possibly even a stone-cold killer like Chauvin. In advance of events he could know know, Cillizza was not only anticipating a racist verdict, he was preparing to scapegoat Maxine Waters for whatever reaction resulted from such a travesty of justice. Actually, he was scapegoating a Black congresswoman in advance on the basis of things she did not say in the way that he reported them:
“I hope we get a verdict that says guilty, guilty, guilty,” she said in response to reporters’ questions. “And if we don’t, we cannot go away. We’ve got to stay on the street. We get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”
Cillizza went on to editorialize based on his cherry-picked misquote:
… That sort of rhetoric — at a moment of such heightened tensions — is irresponsible coming from anyone. It’s especially irresponsible coming from an elected official like Waters.
By strong implication, Cillizza was accusing Waters of inciting violence. No matter that the violence had not happened (and, as it turned out, would not happen). Cillizza has been around long enough to know that Maxine Waters is constantly demonized by the right, so why is he jumping on that particular lynchwagon with such careless abandon?
In fact, Cillizza has quoted her out of context – whether out of malice or laziness, who’s to say? The full transcript of her remarks offers no evidence that she was calling for any violence. Although Cillizza acknowledges that Waters made her comments in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, in the context of another incident of cop violence, the killing of Daunte Wright in the driver’s seat of his car, Cillizza makes no effort to distinguish between those contexts.
Waters was addressing the Brooklyn Center killing when a reporter change the subject and asked about Derek Chauvin. After some overlap and confusion, Waters answers the question, “What should protestors do?” for which the context is ambiguous, but the only protestors were there in Brooklyn Center, where the case is far from adjudicated or resolved. Waters seems to answer in that context, informed by America’s systemic racism:
Well, we’ve got to stay on the street. And we’ve got to get more active. We’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.
After the Chauvin verdict, variations on this answer became a common response (including Biden’s call for passing the George Floyd Act). There is no call for violence in the call to confront ongoing, systemic racism. But Cillizza in his lily-white political correctness feels free to lecture a victim based on his projection of her nonexistent call for violence. Even so, not a big deal if it stops there, with a casually racist slur from another veteran journalist. But it didn’t stop there, the story had legs. As The Washington Post reported:
Republicans have highlighted Waters’s comments as having the potential to lead to violence, but they have also faced accusations of hypocrisy over their lack of action over former president Donald Trump’s frequent inflammatory comments, or on members of their own party who have been accused of egging on violence.
Eric Nelson, one of Derek Chauvin’s defense lawyers, promptly tried to take advantage of the offending Waters quote. On April 19, with the jury out of the courtroom, he used it as the basis for a motion to declare a mistrial. He claimed that Waters:
… an elected official, a United States Congressperson, was making what I interpreted to be and what I think are reasonably interpreted to be, threats against the sanctity of the jury process, threatening and intimidating a jury, demanding that if there’s not a guilty verdict that there would be further problems….
After a brief colloquy with the judge, Nelson concluded:
And now that we have U.S. Representatives threatening acts of violence in relation to this specific case, it’s mind boggling to me, Judge.
Immediately, Judge Peter Cahill responded with extrajudicial commentary:
Well, I’ll give you that Congresswoman Waters may have given you something on appeal that may result in this whole trial being overturned. But what’s the state’s position?
The state’s position was that the motion for mistrial was based on “vague statements” and that the basis of the motion was tantamount to hearsay:
If there’s a specific statement that a specific U.S. Representative made, then there needs to be some formal offer of proof with the exact quotes of the exact statement or some kind of a declaration. And I’m sure Mr. Nelson can do that if he thinks that that’s something that’s appropriate. I don’t know that this particular Representative made a specified threat to violence. I don’t know what the context of the statement is….
And so I just don’t think that we can muddy the record with vague allegations as to things that have happened without very specific evidence that’s being offered before the court….
And so without any specific offer of proof or information in the record, without any specific evidence that this particular jury was influenced in any particular way, I believe that the defendant’s motion should be denied.
This is precisely the sort of analysis that Cillizza and others should have made before accusing Maxine Waters of inciting violence. The evidence isn’t there. Attorney Nelson acknowledged that the best case is only interpretation – in other words: speculation, projection, predisposition to think the worst of a demonized Black congresswoman. Prejudiced people tend not to stop and think.
Before denying the motion for mistrial, Judge Cahill took the time to excoriate Rep. Waters and other unnamed elected officials for commenting on the Chauvin case in ways that, he implies, violate their oath of office. He concluded his brief diatribe by saying: “A congresswoman’s opinion really doesn’t matter a whole lot.” But if that’s the case, why rant on about it?
Elsewhere in the jungle of American racism, Republicans in Congress set about once again trying to censure Maxine Waters for the things they wished she’d said. This time, Republican leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy introduced a two-page censure resolution that selectively quotes Rep. Waters out of context. The bulk of the resolution relies on extensive quotes from Jude Cahill’s comments, also selectively and out of context.
On April 20, the House voted 216-210 (4 members not voting) along strict party lines to table McCarthy’s resolution, effectively rendering it moot. The previous motion to censure Rep. Waters was sent to the Ethics Committee, never to be seen again. Following the vote on her censure motion, Rep. Waters said:
I love my colleagues and they love me. I don’t want to do anything to hurt them or hurt their chances for re-election. I will make sure that they are comfortable with my kind of advocacy so that we can all be sure that we can do the right thing.
Even though America is not a “racist country,” far too many Americans, consciously and unconsciously, behave in racist patterns.
And sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they convict guilty cops. Sometimes they defend their Congressional colleagues. Sometimes they acknowledge that combatting racism requires endless, nonviolent confrontation.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Rifles for sale at a Virginia store. (photo: Jim Watson/Getty Images)
Gun Injuries Put Over a Half-Million People in Hospitals From 2000 to 2016, Study Finds
Christopher Ingraham, The Washington Post
Ingraham writes: "Tens of thousands of people are admitted to hospitals for gun injuries every year, according to a first-of-its-kind database that underscores how the societal costs of gun violence extend well beyond mortality."
First-of-its-kind database provides state-level estimates of gun hospitalizations over time
ens of thousands of people are admitted to hospitals for gun injuries every year, according to a first-of-its-kind database that underscores how the societal costs of gun violence extend well beyond mortality.
Developed by researchers at the Rand Corp., a California-based think tank, the study found roughly 550,000 people were admitted for gunshot wounds from 2000 to 2016, representing billions of dollars in health-care costs annually, as well as untold pain and suffering.
The data comes as narrow Democratic control of Congress and the White House has ushered in hopes among advocates for new policies intended to curb gun violence in the United States. A spate of high-profile mass shootings in 2021 has ratcheted up pressure on lawmakers to act.
Much of the research on gun control deals with homicide and suicide data because state and federal governments typically keep detailed records of how and when people die. But injuries also exact a considerable economic and public health toll: Gun-related hospital visits account for an estimated $2.8 billion in health-care spending annually, as well as billions more when lost work and wages are factored in.
A 2017 study found that the average gunshot patient incurred hospital costs of more than $95,000.
Precise numbers for those hospitalizations, however, have previously been unavailable. There’s no comprehensive national database of gunshot injuries, for instance. And as the Rand researchers found, the quality of hospitalization data varies widely from state to state.
Some independent researchers, such as those with the Gun Violence Archive, have been compiling data on gun injuries based on media and police reports and other public records. But not all shootings leave that kind of paper trail.
The Rand data include estimates of gun-related hospitalizations for all 50 states from 2000 through 2016. The people behind the database hope their work will allow other researchers to better understand how state-level policies influence gun violence.
“Accurate data on firearm-related injuries are essential, and these hospitalization data will see widespread use,” said Garen Wintemute, a gun violence researcher at the University of California at Davis, who was not involved with the study.
“Previous work [on the effects of gun violence] primarily focused just on firearm deaths because injury estimates like we have produced are not available for every state,” said Andrew Morral, the director of Rand’s Gun Policy in America project, which produced the report. To fill in the gaps, Morral and his colleagues drew on a variety of sources, including state and federal databases, crime reports, hospital admission data, household surveys and emergency department data.
By combining and extrapolating from these sources, they were able to produce estimates of gun-related hospitalizations in cases where data was incomplete or missing altogether.
The researchers note their estimate of roughly 550,000 total admissions is almost certainly an undercount of gunshot victims: People with minor injuries may not seek hospital care, for instance, and wouldn’t show up in this data. Nor would anyone treated in the emergency room and released without being admitted.
At the state level, gun injuries roughly track the better-known homicide data. Louisiana leads the nation with an average of 24 gun hospitalizations for every 100,000 people each year. At the bottom of the list is Hawaii, with less than one-tenth the injury rate of Louisiana.
The authors did some preliminary work on the correlations of gun injury and made a surprising finding: At the state level, gun ownership rates aren’t closely correlated with gun hospitalizations.
“This is a little surprising,” Morral said. There’s a well-known relationship between gun ownership and suicide, for instance. But that relationship doesn’t apparently extend to gun injuries. Morral said that injuries, however, are closely correlated with rates of violent crime overall. And that suggests another driver: poverty.
The relationship between poverty and violent crime is well documented in the United States and elsewhere. According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, for instance, people living in poor households “had more than double the rate of violent victimization” than those in high-income areas.
A 2018 Brookings Institution analysis found that “boys who grew up in families in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution — families earning less than about $14,000 — are 20 times more likely to be in prison on a given day in their early 30s than children born to the wealthiest families — those earning more than $143,000.”
The correlation between state-level poverty rates and gun hospitalizations is apparent in the chart above. The relationship between hardship and gun deaths is even tighter.
Looking at the trends over time, Rand’s data shows that gun hospitalizations are basically flat through 2016. While data is not yet available for the following years, recent increases in the homicide rate suggest that gun injuries will probably creep upward, too.
Morral and his colleagues hope the new data set will pave the way for better research into how state-level policy changes affect rates of gun violence. The variation between states “can be useful for evaluating the impact of state firearm policies or other state-level factors that are hypothesized to influence firearm injury and might be a useful predictor of other phenomena at the state level,” they write.
The data could also lead to better accounting of the economic toll of gun violence in the United States.
Philippine journalist Maria Ressa waves to members of the media after attending a court hearing in Manila on July 22, 2020, on charges of tax evasion. Ressa pleaded not guilty on July 22 to tax evasion, as President Rodrigo Duterte's government faced growing calls to drop all charges against the veteran reporter. (photo: AFP/Maria Tan)
Online Violence Is Silencing Women Journalists
Guilherme Canela, Al Jazeera
Canela writes: "UNESCO has just announced the Philippine investigative journalist and media executive, Maria Ressa, as the winner of the Guillermo Cano Prize for Press Freedom, which honours champions of media freedom, particularly those who have faced danger in order to do this."
Governments need to take action to protect women journalists from increasing online threats.
NESCO has just announced the Philippine investigative journalist and media executive, Maria Ressa, as the winner of the Guillermo Cano Prize for Press Freedom, which honours champions of media freedom, particularly those who have faced danger in order to do this. Ressa risks her own personal safety every day, as she pursues the facts and holds the powerful to account. She is often the target of anonymous online attacks – in 2016 she received 90 online hate messages an hour – many of which are rooted in misogyny and racism.
But Maria Ressa is by no means alone. Women everywhere are being attacked online for daring to practice journalism while female. Back in 2014, 23 percent of the women journalists who responded to a UNESCO survey said they had been threatened, intimidated and insulted online in connection with their work. By December 2020, this number had leapt to 73 percent.
Women journalists from more than 120 countries, across all UNESCO regions of the world, have now spoken out in a new study commissioned by UNESCO and carried out by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), describing how they were attacked online. They work for the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and other national and local media outlets.
The study reveals alarming trends: female journalists are threatened with physical violence, rape, kidnapping, and doxxing – the publication of their addresses on social media. Some are publicly accused of using sex to secure stories. Their inboxes and those of their newsroom colleagues are spammed with lies, disinformation and pornographic images with their faces photoshopped in. In some cases, these women’s partners and children are directly threatened, or sent the photoshopped images. Unsurprisingly, a quarter of women told the researchers they had sought psychological help; some had suffered PTSD.
Increasingly, online violence leads to offline abuse, attacks and harassment: some of the women interviewed who were trolled via email or social media, were then also verbally abused, or physically attacked. This was the case for over half of Arab women journalists surveyed. The late Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was initially targeted with online threats that she would be burnt as a witch, before being killed with a car bomb.
I cannot emphasise enough that online abuse aimed at shutting down women journalists and deterring them from reporting on controversial stories, works. After being targeted, 30 percent of the women surveyed said they self-censored on social media and 38 percent adopted a lower public profile. Some women switched beats to report on less inflammatory stories, some quit journalism or even emigrated.
I was concerned when young female journalism students at a debate I recently participated in said that they were considering dropping out due to the horror stories they hear about the trolling of women journalists. Even at a young age, women are aware that their gender will be used against them by those who want to prevent them from investigating and publishing the truth.
Online violence is taking a wrecking ball to freedom of expression. It undermines watchdog journalism and public trust in facts. It is also turning back the clock on progress towards diversity in the media. While most women journalists are targeted, the report found that Black, Jewish, lesbian and bisexual women were disproportionately attacked. The media play a key role in reporting and representing all sides of the debate. If we lose the voices of these journalists from the media, then genuine public debate itself collapses.
The age-old problem of misogyny will not be solved overnight. But we must hold the social media companies more accountable and demand they step up to their responsibility in countering the spread of hate and disinformation online. For example, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, falsehoods spread six times faster online than real news.
In addition, social media companies must be much more transparent about how they deal with reports of abuse and requests for removal of content. Many of the journalists the researchers spoke to were forced to police their own social media feeds, and to then enter into a laborious exchange with host platforms over the deletion of each abusive comment.
The UN Plan of Action on Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity gives us a framework for policy reform built around prevention, protection and prosecution of these crimes. More sophisticated mechanisms must be put in place and tools to protect women journalists must be developed, including access to legal advice and mental health support. Judges must also be trained to apply international human rights standards when dealing with these cases.
The journalists interviewed for this report were well aware that contributing means they risk facing a second wave of online abuse, yet 98 percent of them still chose to be named rather than remain anonymous. They did this because they wanted to help expose this often concealed, but spiralling global problem.
U.S. president Joe Biden in Washington, D.C., 2021. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
No, We Don't Need These Forever Wars
Jason Brownlee and Branko Marcetic, Jacobin
Excerpt: "China doesn't have an empire. The United States doesn't need to saber-rattle. And we really don't need to fight these forever wars."
f the Left’s expectations were low for Joe Biden on the domestic sphere, they were somewhere around floor level when it came to foreign policy. Biden didn’t promise much, and what he did promise didn’t seem to point to anything particularly ambitious.
But have conditions nonetheless forced a subtle shift in US foreign policy? And what does the future hold, as Biden takes the reins of empire at a perilous time of global crisis and declining US supremacy?
Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic spoke to Jason Brownlee, professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, about Biden’s foreign policy so far, the state of American empire, and whether the United States is really headed toward a “New Cold War” with China.
BM: We’re speaking on Biden’s hundredth day in office. What are your thoughts on his foreign policy so far?
JB: Biden has, for some of us, confounded expectations. Certainly at the macro level there is continuity. The United States is trying to maintain primacy in the world.
But two small rhetorical issues where I think Biden has been more direct and more progressive than his predecessors is: one, when it came to the coup in Myanmar in February, he called it a coup; and two, he acknowledged the Armenian genocide, which is a step his predecessors hadn’t taken.
He has also ended the ground war in Afghanistan. That won’t end the US presence in Afghanistan; I expect the United States will continue to be involved in the country as a proxy war, similar to how we’re involved in Iraq and Yemen, where we use air power, special forces, and local surrogates to maintain a presence there. In that sense, I think the forever wars aren’t going to end, and I don’t see Biden wrapping up the US presence in the wider arc of the Persian Gulf region either.
Structurally he hasn’t reoriented the course of American power overseas, and if we dug into details region by region there’d be several cases where his policies would be subject to a lot of criticism. For example, in the Middle East beyond Afghanistan, we see carte blanche to Israel, standard anti-Iranian policies, and constraints to weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that are provisional.
There’s also been no change in US relations with Egypt, no punishment for Sisi’s oppression of Egyptians. And in the Western hemisphere, Biden has not even returned to the rapprochement with Cuba that Obama pursued, and has taken a more hardline stance toward leftist governments while being supportive of right-wing governments.
BM: In his speech announcing the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden seemed to double down on the framework of the “War on Terror.” Are we looking at a future where the United States continues to fight that so-called war while also embarking on a massive military buildup to counter China?
JB: Now that the Iraq War’s over, and now that the Afghan ground war is winding down to completion, the “War on Terror” operations are relatively inexpensive in terms of US lives and in terms of expenditure. It’s one of the reasons they continue without much discussion or attention among the US public.
The question for Afghanistan depends on what happens with the Taliban. We could see a straight up military reconquest of Kabul, and then we’d be back to a pre-9/11 status quo, where the northern alliance is in a tiny bit of the country, and the Taliban is again the government in Afghanistan. It’s analogous to Vietnam in the 1970s, where eventually an insurgency will come down and overthrow the government. Does the United States accept that as we eventually did in Vietnam, or does it fight to prevent that?
There is another course, where the Taliban decides to exercise military restraint and comes to some sort of power-sharing agreement. That would be the most hopeful outcome, because the Taliban does have a mass constituency and the war will not end until that constituency is incorporated into national politics.
On China: the country remains the United States’ single biggest trading partner, so it’s hard for me to think of them as being in a Cold War. The competition that Biden sees the United States in is about economic growth. Currently, China’s GDP in purchasing power terms is larger than the United States. By the end of the decade it’ll be larger than the United States in current dollar terms too.
So Biden is hoping to delay that moment when China gets the bragging rights of saying it has the largest economy in the world. And he’s hoping to do that by bolstering domestic US growth and at the same time using the nationalist notion of economic competition to win the domestic debate at home over domestic spending. He’s turning the types of discretionary spending, welfare, and infrastructure projects that Republicans would criticize into a national security issue.
BM: One of the ironies of the Cold War is that while it led to many terrible things, the drive to compete with the Soviet Union also contributed to some positive steps, including civil rights and more public investment. Do you see a similar dynamic happening now?
JB: If it leads to growth and advances in education spending, and raises living standards more broadly, it could gain a kind of political momentum. But I would hope that one would not need to use nationalist rhetoric in an adversarial framework to justify commonsensical welfare spending in a developed state like the United States. In the long term it’s not healthy to have some external Other that you use to justify your domestic policy agenda. If Bernie Sanders was president and was proposing the same thing, I don’t think he would be talking about the need to compete with China. These programs have their own innate benefits.
The backdrop to this conversation is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been useful for clarifying the important role government can play in people’s lives. It’s reminded ordinary Americans that when it comes to their safety and security, threats like ISIS and the like were really inflated the past couple of decades. Public health has a direct impact on their lives, and, in that respect, government can play a positive role.
BM: Is the Cold War analogy that we hear so often applied to US-China relations today correct or appropriate? Is China really in the equivalent position that the USSR was during the actual Cold War?
JB: The short answer is no. China is not a global power, it’s a regional power. The Soviet Union had nuclear capabilities well outside its territory, nuclear-armed submarines and so on. At some point, military spending between the United States and USSR was comparable, though the United States was well ahead. China’s military spending is less than half of the United States’ spending, and it doesn’t have the international network of bases the United States has.
The United States remains an empire — an empire in decline, but still an empire — and China is not. I don’t think the Cold War analogy is useful for two countries that are so economically interdependent, and given the conflict and proxy wars that took place between the US and USSR for decades.
BM: To what extent do you think the lessons of the past few decades of foreign policy been learned or internalized by the national security establishment in the United States?
JB: The costs of the Democrats’ ignoring public opinion on bread-and-butter issues have risen. We have decades of public opinion data going back to the 1970s, showing strong majorities of average Americans prioritize material conditions at home, and not pursuing regime change wars and ground invasions of other countries. The same polls show policymakers in Washington and opinion makers around them in think tanks and so on favor free market approaches and political change overseas through military intervention.
What we’ve seen so far with Biden suggests that for the moment, this disconnect between the priorities of the public and that of the policy-making elite is being bridged. But I’d say right now there’s no evidence leading figures in “the Blob” have substantially changed their worldview.
I think two things explain why we’re on a course of foreign policy restraint, relatively speaking. One is that COVID-19 has concentrated minds and eliminated room for discretionary campaigns and interventions and humanitarian crusaderism, if you can call it that. Of course, that might change if a crisis comes up and if the pandemic subsides.
The second factor is the 2020 elections. They obviously put Biden and Harris into the White House, but they were not good for the Democrats. It suggests that if they don’t take seriously the domestic policy priorities of the electorate, they could get really wiped out in 2022 and 2024. I think there is an electoral calculus at work here in which the interventionist policies the Blob likes and the public opposes are not considered electorally feasible.
If the Democrats don’t compete effectively on domestic policy, they will lose out to Republicans for a long period of time, the way their counterparts in Hungary and India lost out to [Viktor] Orbán and [Narendra] Modi. Biden and his close confidants seem to understand that in a pure, realpolitik kind of way, they need to do what Clinton and Obama didn’t do, and align the Democratic Party with domestic priorities that are commonsensical and will have broad support.
BM: What is the state of US primacy in the world? Is the United States still established as the world’s superpower, or are things more tenuous right now?
JB: When international relations scholars look at primacy in terms of a unipolar and multipolar world, they tend to look to wealth as the basic metric of power. While China within the decade will surpass the United States in GDP, if you add to US GDP the GDP of NATO, the EU, and a few other allies, you would quickly get to over 50 percent of world GDP in the hands of the United States and various allies.
I think as long as that remains the case, US primacy — even if it’s shared primacy with European partners, Australia, Canada, Japan, and South Korea — would remain dominant. Also, so long as the US dollar remains the global reserve currency, then I see the United States continuing to enjoy an important kind of economic primacy.
BM: What is the prospect of a break from business-as-usual on foreign policy in the foreseeable future?
JB: The first step to ending US wars overseas is to elevate domestic needs and domestic priorities on the public agenda. COVID-19 made that happen in a big way.
We can see a shift away from some of the worst types of intervention that happened under Bush and Obama, but it’s not going to be a shift that is heralded or celebrated, because it’s the absence of interventionism. It’s the glory of not doing.
I’d also say, it’s not going to be coherent. Capital and US business and finance interests at the top of the US hierarchy can be served in a number of ways. They can profit from wars, but also from peace and diplomacy. The 1979 peace deal between Egypt and Israel saw billions of dollars of business opportunities for defense firms, even though it was a peace deal. Dick Cheney, in the private sector in the 1990s, supported lifting sanctions on Iran because his business interests at the time aligned with better relations with the country. We won’t find consistency, even among people who are really ideological.
We’ll see a mix of military and diplomatic options, but I think overall we’ve seen a return to pre-9/11 strategy where the main approach to intervention is to work through local proxies and use airpower, and now drone strikes, minimizing US casualties and the cost that the American public experiences at home. At the same time, it’ll be highly destabilizing for the countries on the receiving end.
Spying and cars. (photo: Soohee Cho/The Intercept/Getty Images)
Your Car Is Spying on You, and a CBP Contract Shows the Risks
Sam Biddle, The Intercept
Biddle writes: "U.S. Customs and Border Protection purchased technology that vacuums up reams of personal information stored inside cars, according to a federal contract reviewed by The Intercept, illustrating the serious risks in connecting your vehicle and your smartphone."
A “vehicle forensics kit” can reveal where you’ve driven, what doors you opened, and who your friends are.
The contract, shared with The Intercept by Latinx advocacy organization Mijente, shows that CBP paid Swedish data extraction firm MSAB $456,073 for a bundle of hardware including five iVe “vehicle forensics kits” manufactured by Berla, an American company. A related document indicates that CBP believed the kit would be “critical in CBP investigations as it can provide evidence [not only] regarding the vehicle’s use, but also information obtained through mobile devices paired with the infotainment system.” The document went on to say that iVe was the only tool available for purchase that could tap into such systems.
According to statements by Berla’s own founder, part of the draw of vacuuming data out of cars is that so many drivers are oblivious to the fact that their cars are generating so much data in the first place, often including extremely sensitive information inadvertently synced from smartphones.
Indeed, MSAB marketing materials promise cops access to a vast array of sensitive personal information quietly stored in the infotainment consoles and various other computers used by modern vehicles — a tapestry of personal details akin to what CBP might get when cracking into one’s personal phone. MSAB claims that this data can include “Recent destinations, favorite locations, call logs, contact lists, SMS messages, emails, pictures, videos, social media feeds, and the navigation history of everywhere the vehicle has been.” MSAB even touts the ability to retrieve deleted data, divine “future plan[s],” and “Identify known associates and establish communication patterns between them.”
The kit, MSAB says, also has the ability to discover specific events that most car owners are probably unaware are even recorded, like “when and where a vehicle’s lights are turned on, and which doors are opened and closed at specific locations” as well as “gear shifts, odometer reads, ignition cycles, speed logs, and more.” This car-based surveillance, in other words, goes many miles beyond the car itself.
iVe is compatible with over two dozen makes of vehicle and is rapidly expanding its acquisition and decoding capabilities, according to MSAB.
Civil liberties watchdogs said the CBP contract raises concerns that these sorts of extraction tools will be used more broadly to circumvent constitutional protections against unreasonable searches. “The scale at which CBP can leverage a contract like this one is staggering,” said Mohammad Tajsar, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.
MSAB spokesperson Carolen Ytander declined to comment on the privacy and civil liberties risks posed by iVe. When asked if the company maintains any guidelines on use of its technology, they said the company “does not set customer policy or governance on usage.”
Getting Smartphone Data Without Having to Crack Into a Smartphone
MSAB’s contract with CBP ran from June of last year until February 28, 2021, and was with the agency’s “forensic and scientific arm,” Laboratories and Scientific Services. It included training on how to use the MSAB gear.
Interest from the agency, the largest law enforcement force in the United States, likely stems from police setbacks in the ongoing war to crack open smartphones.
Attacking such devices was a key line of business for MSAB before it branched out into extracting information from cars. The ubiquity of the smartphone provided police around the world with an unparalleled gift: a large portion of an individual’s private life stored conveniently in one object we carry nearly all of the time. But as our phones have become more sophisticated and more targeted, they’ve grown better secured as well, with phone makers like Apple and phone device-cracking outfits like MSAB and Cellebrite engaged in a constant back-and-forth to gain a technical edge over the other.
So data-hungry government agencies have increasingly moved to exploit the rise of the smart car, whose dashboard-mounted computers, Bluetooth capabilities, and USB ports have, with the ascendancy of the smartphone, become as standard as cup holders. Smart car systems are typically intended to be paired with your phone, allowing you to take calls, dictate texts, plug in map directions, or “read ”emails from behind the wheel. Anyone who’s taken a spin in a new-ish vehicle and connected their phone — whether to place a hands-free call, listen to Spotify, or get directions — has probably been prompted to share their entire contact list, presented as a necessary step to place calls but without any warning that a perfect record of everyone they’ve ever known will now reside inside their car’s memory, sans password.
The people behind CBP’s new tool are well aware that they are preying on consumer ignorance. In a podcast appearance first reported by NBC News last summer, Berla founder Ben LeMere remarked, “People rent cars and go do things with them and don’t even think about the places they are going and what the car records.” In a 2015 appearance on the podcast “The Forensic Lunch,” LeMere told the show’s hosts how the company uses exactly this accidental-transfer scenario in its trainings: “Your phone died, you’re gonna get in the car, plug it in, and there’s going to be this nice convenient USB port for you. When you plug it into this USB port, it’s going to charge your phone, absolutely. And as soon as it powers up, it’s going to start sucking all your data down into the car.”
In the same podcast, LeMere also recounted the company pulling data from a car rented at BWI Marshall Airport outside Washington, D.C.:
“We had a Ford Explorer … we pulled the system out, and we recovered 70 phones that had been connected to it. All of their call logs, their contacts and their SMS history, as well as their music preferences, songs that were on their device, and some of their Facebook and Twitter things as well. … And it’s quite comical when you sit back and read some of the the text messages.”
The ACLU’s Tajsar explained, “What they’re really saying is ‘We can exploit people because they’re dumb. … We can leverage consumers’ lack of understanding in order to exploit them in ways that they might object to if it was done in the analog world.’”
Exploiting the Wild “Frontier of the Fourth Amendment”
The push to make our cars extensions of our phones (often without any meaningful data protection) makes them tremendously enticing targets for generously funded police agencies with insatiable appetites for surveillance data. Part of the appeal is that automotive data systems remain on what Tajsar calls the “frontier of the Fourth Amendment.” While courts increasingly recognize your phone’s privacy as a direct extension of your own, the issue of cracking infotainment systems and downloading their contents remains unsettled, and CBP could be “exploiting the lack of legal coverage to get at information that otherwise would be protected by a warrant,” Tajsar said.
MSAB’s technology is doubly troubling in the hands of CBP, an agency with a powerful exception from the Fourth Amendment and a historical tendency toward aggressive surveillance and repressive tactics. The agency recently used drones to monitor protests against the police murder of George Floyd and routinely conducts warrantless searches of electronic devices at or near the border.
“It would appear that this technology can be applied like warrantless phone searches on anybody that CBP pleases,” said Mijente’s Jacinta Gonzalez, “which has been a problem for journalists, activists, and lawyers, as well as anyone else CBP decides to surveil, without providing any reasonable justification. With this capability, it seems very likely CBP would conduct searches based on intelligence about family/social connections, etc., and there wouldn’t seem to be anything preventing racial profiling.”
Tajsar shared these concerns.
“Whenever we have surveillance technology that’s deeply invasive, we are disturbed,” he said. “When it’s in the hands of an agency that’s consistently refused any kind of attempt at basic accountability, reform, or oversight, then it’s Defcon 1.”
Part of the problem is that CBP’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, is designed to proliferate intelligence and surveillance technologies “among major law enforcement agencies across the country,” said Tajsar. “What CBP have will trickle down to what your local cops on the street end up getting. That is not a theoretical concern.”
A citizen protests in Bogota, Colombia, May 1, 2021. (photo: Twitter/snowlions)
Colombia: 21 People Killed and 503 Arrested Amid Protests
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Colombia's Defending Liberty on Sunday informed that 21 homicides and 503 arbitrary detentions have been committed in the country during the protests unleashed against President Ivan Duque."
So far, 10 women have been raped by police officers, 42 human rights defenders were assaulted, and 208 people were injured.
olombia's Defending Liberty on Sunday informed that 21 homicides and 503 arbitrary detentions have been committed in the country during the protests unleashed against President Ivan Duque
According to this NGO, ten women were raped by police officers, 42 human rights defenders were assaulted, 208 people were injured, and 18 protesters suffered eye injuries this weekend.
The Institute for Development and Peace Studies (INDEPAZ) reported that 10 citizens were killed in Cali City. The first victim of State terrorism was 16-year-old Marcelo Agredo, who died after being shot twice by a police officer.
Thousands of people have also taken to the streets in the cities of Barranquilla, Medellin, and Bogota to reject the tax reform presented by the government.
Although Duque announced the withdrawal of the bill, which proposed an increase in the price of basic goods, Colombians remain in the streets protesting against violence, insecurity, and systematic massacres.
Due to police brutality, Indigenous peoples are mobilizing from the Cauca Department to Bogota to demand Duque's resignation.
Since the beginning of the national strike on April 28, the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (ESMAD) has been repressing the protests, most of them peaceful.
Indigenous youths protest the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Line 3 pipeline in Washington, U.S. (photo: Reuters)
The Dakota Access Pipeline Faces Possible Closure
Devika Krishna Kumar and Stephanie Kelly, Reuters
Excerpt: "A U.S. court could order the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) shut in coming weeks, disrupting deliveries of crude oil, and making nearby rail traffic more congested."
WHAT IS DAPL?
The 570,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) Dakota Access pipeline, or DAPL, is the largest oil pipeline out of the Bakken shale basin and has been locked in a legal battle with Native American tribes over whether the line can stay open after a judge scrapped a key environmental permit last year.
A federal judge ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to update the court on its environmental review of the pipeline by May 3 and decide if it believes the line should shut during the process.
WHAT IS THE DISPUTE?
Native American tribes long opposed to DAPL say the line endangers Lake Oahe, a critical water source. Pipeline construction under the lake was finished in early 2017 and the line is currently operating. But a judge last year vacated a key permit allowing that service, raising the possibility that the line could close while a thorough environmental review was completed.
Dakota Access oil pipeline's operators plan to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, according to a court filing last week.
WHAT ARE THE CHANCES THAT THE LINE WILL CLOSE?
So far, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has not requested the line to be closed, even after the federal permit was canceled. It expects to complete the environmental review by March. Market analysts believe there is some chance the judge orders the line closed, and there is concern about the disruption that would cause.
WHAT WILL OIL PRODUCERS DO IF THE LINE IS CLOSED?
The U.S. shale boom created more demand for rail transport of crude in North Dakota, the second-biggest oil producing state in the country. Outbound rail traffic rose by almost 300% between 2002 and 2015, a North Dakota Department of Transportation report showed.
However, rail is expensive and takes longer to ship, making pipelines the preferred shipping method. If DAPL were to shut, producers would be pushed toward crude by rail again, BTU Analytics said.
WHAT COULD HAPPEN FOR FARMERS IF THE LINE IS SHUT?
If shippers divert oil shipments onto railcars, it will create transport bottlenecks in the region, especially in North Dakota, which relies on rail to transport over 70% of its agricultural production, economists and industry sources said.
"Probably more grain would be piled on the ground until the time it could be moved by rail," said Jeff Thompson, a farmer in South Dakota and a director of the South Dakota Soybean Association, which supports DAPL.
In 2019, North Dakota led the nation in the production of all dry edible beans, canola, durum wheat, and spring wheat. The state is a captive rail market, which means there are no other economically viable options to deliver agricultural products, said Stu Letcher of the North Dakota Grain Dealers Association.
ARE RAILROADS PREPARED?
Railroads have improved load capacity over the last decade in response to past constraints, said Bill Wilson, professor at North Dakota State University and a member of the North Dakota Soybean Council.
"I would be surprised that, if DAPL was shut down, that the railroads were not capable of handling that added business," Wilson said.
BNSF Railway, which operates the greatest number of route-miles in North Dakota, is prepared to handle any increase in rail traffic if the DAPL is shut, the company said.
The other major railroad serving the region, Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd, is committed to delivering for customers across all businesses, said spokesman Andy Cummings.
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