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How activists and citizen journalists can revive the American promise.

| 5:04 PM

It is no secret that American democracy is teetering on the edge of destruction. A white nationalist authoritarian movement currently headed by Donald Trump wants to destroy majoritarian popular consent before a minority of racist whites, prudish evangelicals and overcompensating, insecure men lose their grip on both the culture and the government. Meanwhile, hyperpartisan division is making the notoriously clunky, procedurally challenging and risk-averse American system of government impossible to navigate for anyone trying to change the status quo.

But there is a silver lining to our precarious danger: we are also witnessing an increase in citizen activism, both political and social, unseen in generations. When a police officer murdered George Floyd on that fateful day in May, it reignited a public protest movement still coursing through the nation. Thousands of normally apolitical Americans have joined local clubs, citizen groups and even filed to run for public office.

There is an awareness among many Americans that if the institutions cannot save us, we must play a direct part in saving ourselves. Recording and communications technologies are helping greatly in the effort. The ability to capture police brutality and open racism on video has changed the conversation and awakened the majority of Americans to how often the officially sanitized police record of events differs from the awful reality. Ordinary citizens now have the power to hold both individual and state-sanctioned oppressors accountable in public spaces.

This phenomenon applies to Donald Trump and the federal government as much as to local police officers and bigots. Consider for a moment the recent hullabaloo over Trumps attempts to sabotage the Postal Service. While Democratic leadership in Congress can and should use every tool at their disposal over the issue, there is realistically only so much they can do. The Administration can ignore every subpoena as long as Senate Republicans allow them to get away with it, and precipitating a Constitutional crisis by sending the Capitol police to arrest the Postmaster General could easily add to the destabilizing chaos in which Trump thrives.

The greatest power to stop Trump comes from all of us as direct activists and citizen journalists. Much of what the rightwing authoritarian movement wants to inflict on the country, depends only on quiet acquiescence from the rest of us.

For instance, it was normal people taking pictures of postal boxes being removed from city streets that caused the USPS to backtrack and halt the practice until after election day. And postal workers themselves can put up fierce resistance to any attempts to sabotage ballot delivery. On top of the National Letter Carriers Association directly endorsing Trumps opponent Joe Biden, there are already reports that postal workers plan to deliver ballots on time come rain, sleet, snowor Trump and DeJoy:

Whatever DeJoys actual motive may or may not be, true letter carriers were disturbed by the sight of mail going undelivered. Its frustrating for us, Julion said. Because we know this is not what we do. In an organization of people sworn to get the mail delivered no matter what, DeJoy became known as Delay.

What will likely have a bigger impact on the election is the avowed determination of the 300,000 letter carriers themselves to deliver the ballots this year no matter what DeJoy and his boss Trump do.

Even more so than priority mail, Julion said.Im confident, you get those ballots in our hands, were going to deliver them. If nothing else gets delivered, those ballots will.

He added, Theres a message we want to deliver, too.

The message is that nobody is going to steal this election if they can help it, that falsehoods and sabotage are not going to stop letter carriers from doing their sworn duty and thereby enabling people to exercise their right to vote even in a pandemic.

This is what we do, Julion repeated, adding, We can handle it.

This is what will be required until at least January 20, 2021: an army of regular citizens stepping up to document wrongdoing and use whatever power they have in their work and social life to halt the destruction of democracy and move forward the cause of justice. If Trump and the Republican National Committee send a combination of private and DHS goons to intimidate voters in minority communities, it will be up to citizens to take video and use social media to organize communities to force them to back down. If they try to send squads to prevent the counting of mail-in ballots in a second Brooks Brothers Riot, it will be up to all of us to protect the vote counters by documenting it and standing in their way with overwhelming numbers. It will be crucial for young and healthy Americans not directly assisting anti-totalitarian campaigns to volunteer as poll workers to ensure that in-person voting will not be affected despite the pandemic. And so on.

The next few months will be a crucible not only for American democracy, but the health and safety of the international community and planet. Democratic leaders can do more, but theres still only so much that they can do until Trump is gone because of the flaws inherent in the system. But if we all do our parts and put all hands on deck, we can get through this together.

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Saving Democracy Is Up To All of Us - Washington Monthly

As we try to face the future, we are usually fighting the last war, not the one thats coming next. One of the most striking points the political philosopher David Runciman made in his seminal book How Democracy Ends was that democracies dont fail backwards: they fail forward. Thats why those who see in the current difficulties of liberal democracies the stirrings of past monsters Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, to name just three are always looking in the wrong place. And if thats true, the key question for us at this moment in history is: how might our current system fail? What will bring it down?

The answer, it turns out, has been hiding in plain sight for years. It has three components. The first is the massive concentration of corporate power and private wealth thats been under way since the 1970s, together with a corresponding increase in inequality, social exclusion and polarisation in most western societies; the second is the astonishing penetration of dark money into democratic politics; and the third is the revolutionary transformation of the information ecosystem in which democratic politics is conducted a transformation that has rendered the laws that supposedly regulated elections entirely irrelevant to modern conditions.

These threats to democracy have long been visible to anyone disposed to look for them. For example, Lawrence Lessigs Republic, Lost and Jane Mayers Dark Money explained how a clique of billionaires has shaped and perverted American politics. And in the UK, Martin Moores landmark study Democracy Hacked showed how, in the space of just one election cycle, authoritarian governments, wealthy elites and fringe hackers figured out how to game elections, bypass democratic processes and turn social networks into battlefields.

All of this is by way of sketching the background to Peter Geoghegans fine book. Its a compulsively readable, carefully researched account of how a malignant combination of rightwing ideology, secretive money (much of it from the US) and weaponisation of social media have shaped contemporary British (and to a limited extent, European) politics. And it has been able to do this in what has turned out to be a regulatory vacuum with laws, penalties and overseeing authorities that are no longer fit for purpose.

His account is structured both chronologically and thematically. He starts with the Brexit referendum and the various kinds of unsavoury practices that took place during that doomed plebiscite from the various illegalities of Vote Leave, through Arron Bankss lavish expenditure to the astonishing tale of the dark money funnelled through the Ulster DUP and a loophole in Northern Irelands electoral law. One of the most depressing parts of this narrative is the bland indifference of most mainstream UK media to these scandalous events. If it had not been for the openDemocracy website (for which Geoghegan works), much of this would never have seen the light of day.

Geoghegans account of the genesis and growth of the European Research Group is absolutely riveting

The middle section of the book explores how dark money has amplified the growing influence of the American right on British politics. This is a story of ideology and finance of how the long-term Hayekian, neoliberal project has played out on these shores. Its a great case study in how ruling elites can be infected with policy ideas and programmes via those second-hand traders in ideas of whom Hayek spoke so eloquently: academics, thinktanks and media commentators. In that context, Geoghegans account of the genesis and growth of the European Research Group the party within a party that did for Theresa May is absolutely riveting. And again it leaves one wondering why there was so little media exploration of the origins and financing of that particular little cabal.

The final part of the book deals with the transformation of our information ecosystem: the ways in which the automated targeted-advertising machines of social media platforms have been weaponised by rightwing actors to deliver precisely calibrated messages to voters, in ways that are completely opaque to the general public, as well as to regulators.

Remainers will probably read Geoghegans account of this manoeuvring by Brexiters as further evidence that the Brexit vote was invalid. This seems to me implausible or at any rate undecidable. Geoghegan agrees. Pro-Leave campaigns broke the law, he writes, but we cannot say with any certainty that the result would have been different if they had not. Instead, the referendum and its aftermath have revealed something far more fundamental and systemic. Namely, a broken political system that is ripe for exploitation again. And again. And again.

And therein lies the significance of this remarkable book. The integrity and trustworthiness of elections is a fundamental requirement for a functioning democracy. The combination of unaccountable, unreported dark money and its use to create targeted (and contradictory) political messages for individuals and groups means that we have no way of knowing how free and fair our elections have become. Many of the abuses exposed by Geoghegan and other researchers are fixable with new laws and better-resourced regulators. The existential threat to liberal democracy comes from the fact that those who have successfully exploited some inadequacies of the current regulatory system who include Boris Johnson and his current wingman, Cummings have absolutely no incentive to fix the system from which they have benefited. And they wont. Which could be how our particular version of democracy ends.

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Democracy for Sale by Peter Geoghegan review the end of politics as we know it? - The Guardian

Aug 15th 2020

The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today. By David Stasavage. Princeton University Press; 424 pages; $35 and 30.

TWO COMMON beliefs about democracy are that it began in ancient Athens and, on spreading from there, remained peculiarly Western. David Stasavage, a professor of politics at New York University, finds both views mistaken. Without them, he thinks it will be easier to get hopes and fears for present-day democracy into better perspective and balance.

Understood as government by consultation and consent, democracy, he shows, can be found in many early civilisations, not just classical Greeceincluding ancient Mesopotamia, Buddhist India, the tribal lands of the American Great Lakes, pre-conquest Mesoamerica and pre-colonial Africa. With that spread in mind, he writes that under given conditions, democratic governancecomes naturally to humans. The puzzle is that autocratic governance was just as natural. It, too, was found in many places. In pre-modern China and the Islamic world, for example, autocracytogether with a centralised bureaucracywas for centuries the norm.

To find out why early democracy occurred where it did, the author draws on evidence from archaeology, soil science, demographics and climate studies. The key, in his account, was information.

Early democracy tended to flourish where rulers knew little of what people were growing and had few ways to find out. They might underguess taxable produce (forgoing revenue) or overguess (provoking non-compliance). It was better to ask people how much they grew and, in return, listen to their demands. That pattern was typical where populations were small and a central state weak or non-existent.

With big populations, consultation was impractical. Rulers instead sent officials to see how much was grown and, before long, how many young men could be drafted into armies. Bureaucracies emerged. With their aid, autocratic rule imposed itself on local custom. In pre-modern settings, this autocratic bureaucracy was more common where soil was good, yields high and know-how advanced, especially in writing and measuring. Such systems were able to tax heavily. Song China (10th-13th centuries) and the Abbasid Caliphate (8th-13th centuries) extracted at their height respectively 10% and 7% of gross yearly product. Medieval European rulers managed barely 1%.

Once established, central bureaucracies were hard to dismantle. They took well to modernity and new technologies. Early democracy, by contrast, was notablyalthough not fatallyvulnerable to the rise of modern states and rapid economic development. It accordingly vanished in many places, while surviving in others.

Modernity and central states, in other words, allowed for either autocracy or democracy. But was there a pattern? Mr Stasavage thinks so. He calls it sequencing. If the early democratic institutions of government by consent are established first, he writes, then it is possible to subsequently build a bureaucracy without veering inevitably into autocracy or despotism. It depends on what went before.

Awkwardly for this argument, the West is the one part of the world where early democracy of the small-scale, direct kind evolved most securely into modern, representative democracy. Does that not make democracy peculiarly Western after all? In modern democracys three wavesin the 19th century, post-1945 and post-1989Western democracy was first. Despite glaring collapses, it has fared best. Yet, in Mr Stasavages telling, there was nothing essentiala liberal outlook, say, or respect for property, or a gift for industrythat tied the West and modern democracy together, beyond the luck of the past.

Pre-modern Europe had (with exceptions) democratic customs and weak rulers without effective bureaucracies. Where it occurs, and is not wiped out by autocracy, consensual government, the author writes, leaves very deep traces. Democracy and autocracy each have strong roots. There are good reasons to expect each to endure.

That conclusion may seem small yield for such intellectual labour. But a bracing stringency is one of the virtues of The Decline and Rise of Democracy. It sweeps across the globe in command of recent scholarship. It takes an economic view of politics as putative bargaining between rulers and ruled, dispensing with what actual people thought and did and skirting fastidious analysis of key ideas. Its strongest lessons are negative: it shows how complex democracys patterns are and, on the evidence, how simpler accounts of its past and prospects stumble.

This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under the headline "Beginners luck"

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Why democracy thrives in some places and not in others - The Economist

Timor-Leste only achieved independence in 2002. It was Asias poorest country and desperately needed revenue. Revenue from massive gas resources in the Timor Sea was its big hope. But it needed to negotiate a treaty with Australia on their carve-up. Australia ruthlessly exploited that fact: delays from the Australian side in negotiating a treaty for the carve-up of those resources, and repeated threats of more delays, were a constant theme of the negotiations. In November 2002 the former Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer told Timor-Lestes prime minister, Mari Alkatiri: We dont have to exploit the resources. They can stay there for 20, 40, 50 years. In late 2003 Timor-Leste requested monthly discussions. Australia claimed it could only afford two rounds a year. Poor Timor-Leste offered to fund rich Australias expenses. Australia didnt accept.

The two countries had solemnly agreed to negotiate in good faith. But Australias realpolitik approach was rather: Never give a sucker an even break. Downer told Alkatiri: We are very tough. We will not care if you give information to the media. Let me give you a tutorial in politics not a chance. The truly stark realpolitik bottom line: Downer was probably an invisible man at Timor-Lestes cabinet table. The Australian Secret Intelligence Service, under the guise of renovating Timor-Lestes cabinet room, planted bugs so the Australians could overhear the leaders deliberations. Downer was responsible for Asis. Downer and the Australian government have never confirmed or denied the bugging.

Fortunately, Australias reputation has not been more badly damaged for its grubby behaviour towards Timor-Leste, for two reasons.

First, long-suffering Timor Leste did not maximise opportunities to embarrass Australia. Perhaps Downers bullyboy warning to Alkatiri worked. Ever since the second world war, Australia has promoted its brand as being member No 1 of the rules-based international good citizenship club. In 2004 it was Timor-Leste which played the honourable role, not Australia.

The people who let Australia down so badly in 2004 have not been punished

Second, because the bugging was quietly outed, Australia was given the opportunity to renegotiate the treaty with Timor-Leste to a much fairer outcome, and one more in accord with international norms.

Now one of the Asis officers who did the bugging, Witness K, and his lawyer, Bernard Collaery, are being prosecuted for alleged involvement in Australias despicable actions becoming public.

The prosecutions of Collaery and Witness K were revealed in federal parliament more than two years ago by the independent MP Andrew Wilkie. Wilkie said senior government officials were the real criminals the people who ordered the illegal bugging. Wilkie called upon the Australian federal police to launch an investigation into the bugging. Three senators Rex Patrick, Nick McKim and Tim Storer joined that call. Wilkie said: We wish the police to conduct an investigation to look at whos involved, who the senior officials are, who the government ministers were, noting all of this has been done in secret, adding: No one is above the law.

The bugging was probably criminal according to the laws of both Australia and Timor-Leste, and those who authorised it were likely to have committed the common law crime of conspiracy to defraud.

Two years after Wilkies parliamentary call, the AFP seems to have ignored the four members of parliament. Some people do seem to be above the law. Those people do not include Witness K and Collaery.

The major beneficiary of Australias negotiated initial win was Woodside Petroleum, though the company says it is yet to make any profit from the Timor Sea reserves. In 2014 Downer said on ABC Four Corners that Australia had acted in Woodsides interests in the negotiations. After leaving politics, Downer became a paid consultant to Woodside. The head of Downers department at the time of the bugging, the late Dr Ashton Calvert, became a director of Woodside within eight months after retiring from foreign affairs, and within a year of the bugging.

Witness K was incensed that Downer had profited by becoming a consultant to Woodside. The whistleblower complained to the inspector general of intelligence and security of a changed Asis culture. He was authorised to engage Collaery. The charges against Collaery stem from that engagement. Revelation of the bugging helped Timor-Leste overturn the deal initially negotiated, arguing that the bugging tainted good faith negotiations.

The people who let Australia down so badly in 2004 have not been punished. It is simply not credible that Asis undertook the bugging without the approval of Downer and the then prime minister, John Howard.

The bugging took place 16 years ago but it is not ancient history the criminal prosecutions to kill the alleged messengers are in full swing. Further, although 16 years is a long time in politics, former colleagues of the guilty parties and some of those parties themselves are still very much on the scene.

For example, according to his parliamentary biography, the present Australian treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, was an adviser to Downer from 1999-2001, and was a senior adviser to Howard from 2003-04, the latter being the year of the bugging. Frydenbergs Wikipedia entry says that, in Howards office, he specialised in domestic security issues, border protection, justice and industrial relations.

By 2005 Frydenberg was a director at Deutsche Bank. He was interviewed on Channel Sevens Sunrise program from Timor-Leste in 2006. David Koch introduced Frydenberg to viewers simply as having been a former adviser to Howard and Downer with no reference to Deutsche Bank. Frydenberg spoke to viewers as if he represented the Australian government: Our teams going to be led by a deputy secretary from the Department of Foreign Affairs. The Timor-Leste side is going to be led by their resources minister. In effect, Frydenberg argued Australias case to the viewers, speaking knowledgeably about the resources at stake.

Collaery and Witness K are in the dock but institutions vital to Australias democracy are on trial: the judiciary, the director of public prosecutions and the AFP, as well as that once important guardian of the public interest the attorney general. Each must ensure that Australias legal and criminal justice systems operate apolitically and are not strong-armed to protect ministers and other government officials past and present Andrew Wilkies real criminals.

Ian Cunliffe is the former head of the legal section of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, chief executive of the Australian Constitutional Commission and chief executive/director of research of the Australian Law Reform Commission

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Witness K is in the dock but institutions vital to Australias democracy are on trial - The Guardian

Good morning,

Nancy Pelosi has recalled the House of Representatives from its summer recess early, to vote on a bill to prevent the United States Postal Service downgrading its operations or service from early-2020 levels, in response to what the Democratic House speaker called the sabotage of the mail system by the Trump administration. Donald Trump admitted last week that he was blocking funding to the USPS in a bid to disrupt mail-in voting at Novembers presidential election.

Postal workers told the Guardian that changes implemented by the new postmaster general, the Trump loyalist Louis DeJoy, were already causing major delays. Barack Obama has condemned Trumps explicit kneecapping of the mail, while on Sunday, Bernie Sanders added his voice to the widespread warnings, calling the situation a crisis for American democracy in an interview with NBC:

What you are witnessing is a president of the United States who is doing everything he can to suppress the vote, make it harder for people to engage in mail-in balloting at a time when people will be putting their lives on the line by having to go out to a polling station and vote.

The Covid-19 death toll in the US is now more than 170,000. Teachers in states currently hit hard by the coronavirus, such as Georgia and Florida, remain fearful of plans to press ahead with the reopening of schools. But Jared Kushner has no such concerns: the presidents son-in-law said on Sunday that his own children would absolutely be returning to school, despite the risks.

Students at Johns Hopkins will not be on campus in the fall but, as Kari Paul reports, the Baltimore university is inviting them to collaborate in reconstructing an accurate replica of the campus within the popular videogame Minecraft.

The pandemic has highlighted the homelessness that already exists in Austin, Texas, reports Alexandra Villarreal. But as Lupe Arreola and Amee Chew argue, a coming tsunami of evictions could cause a homeless crisis on a whole new scale:

Cancelling rent and mortgage payments is the most effective solution to the mounting debt and mass displacement threatening working-class communities, communities of color and low-income households during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.

Democrats may not be descending en masse on Milwaukee as originally planned, but the theme of their nominating convention this week nonetheless remains: unity. The partys four-day virtual convention, rebranded as the Convention Across America, will showcase the breadth of support enjoyed by the Biden-Harris ticket with two hours of online programming a night from Monday, featuring such disparate speakers as Bernie Sanders and the former GOP presidential candidate John Kasich.

Sanders has praised Kamala Harris as incredibly smart and tough. The progressive Vermont senator acknowledged that not all his supporters were enthusiastic about the moderate Joe Biden, but insisted there is an overwhelming understanding that Donald Trump must be defeated.

The nation known as Europes last dictatorship has seen the largest pro-democracy protests in its history. On Sunday, tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Minsk, the capital of Belarus, to demand the fall of the countrys authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko. The Belarus opposition, which was defeated in the disputed presidential election a week ago, has called for a general strike from Monday.

The protest coalition has broadened with remarkable speed over the past week, Shaun Walker reports from Minsk, from a small segment of politically active opponents to encompass teachers, doctors and factory workers, many of whom have announced strikes.

Lukashenko has repeatedly begged Vladimir Putin to intervene to salvage his 26-year rule, demanding Russia provide military assistance to the embattled Minsk regime. But the Russian president has so far stopped short of publicly endorsing his ally.

New Zealand has delayed its general election by a month following the coronavirus outbreak in Auckland, its biggest city. The vote will now take place on 17 October, then prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced on Monday.

The temperature in Death Valley California hit 54.4C or 129.9F on Sunday afternoon, which some extreme weather experts believe could be the hottest reading ever reliably recorded on the planet.

Japan has suffered its worst economic contraction in the modern era. The countrys GDP shrank by a record 7.8% from April to June, which equates to an annualised rate of 27.8% the steepest decline since such data became available in 1980.

Israel and the UAE have opened a telephone line between the two countries, in an early sign that the historic diplomatic deal brokered by the US and unveiled last week is taking root.

The unstoppable rise of American chicken

A century ago, Americans considered chicken an alternative to pork or beef. Now they consume it more than any other meat, and the average grocery store chicken has doubled in size. Sarah Mock charts the rise of industrial chicken farming in the US.

Why Fantastic Beasts is a PR disaster

JK Rowlings views on trans rights alienated fans. Ezra Miller was filmed apparently choking a female admirer. And Johnny Depps troubled private life became extremely public. With its creator and stars seemingly cursed, Steve Rose wonders why Warner Bros is persisting with the Fantastic Beasts franchise.

Last week, a wind-storm tore through 10m acres of midwest cropland from Nebraska to Indiana, potentially halving Iowas maize yield for the year. Extreme weather is the new normal, writes Art Cullen, and it poses serious risks to our food supply.

This drought, which could rival or exceed the medieval drought that occurred about AD1200, could last 30 to 50 years, according to research from the Goddard Space Institute. It will become difficult to grow corn in southern Iowa, and impossible in western Kansas.

A piece of a Lego figures arm, believed lost for at least two years, has turned up in the nostril of its owner, seven-year-old Sameer Anwar. The New Zealand boys family said the Lego, which Sameer shoved up his nose aged five, recently reappeared when he took a big sniff of a plate of freshly baked cupcakes.

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First Thing: Trump's USPS cuts are 'a crisis for US democracy' - The Guardian