Monthly Archives: May 2019

Unicorns

Posted by on 2019-05-31 No comments

This week there were a couple of studies in the news which shine a little light into the darkness that is settling over America. One should be read by all Democrats. The other will almost certainly be ignored by reality- and reading-averse Republicans. But both call into question the existence of near-mythological creatures believed to be true.

The first study, released last week by the Pew Research Center, calls into question the importance of the mythological swing voter. It turns out that the 40% of voters who identify as “independents” are not really all that independent. 13%, in fact, are pretty much reliable Republicans, while 17% are fairly reliable Democrats. This leaves 7% — mostly young and male — who are politically unmoored. This is no great revelation in a polarized political landscape in which the “middle” has largely eroded.

What’s important, however, is that, of these 7% only a third actually vote, which reduces the actual number of “independents” to about 2.3% of the American electorate. Democrats might actually appeal to some of these disaffected young voters if they chose a progressive candidate under 70, yet many in the 2020 race think they can appeal to the unicorn by bashing the social safety net, going weak on abortion, or alienating minority voters by slamming “identity politics.” Rather than trying to lower themselves to GOP standards, Democrats ought to be doubling-down on what makes them stand out from Republicans. And redoubling their opposition to Trump’s Imperial Presidency.

On this last point, Allan Lichtman, a professor at American University who has correctly predicted the last nine presidential elections, warns that — unless Democrats “grow a spine” and risk alienating white swing voting unicorns by launching impeachment proceedings — we will see Donald Trump re-elected in 2020.

* * *

The last study, which was actually published a couple of years ago, reinforces a large body of research on immigration and criminality, showing (once again) that immigrants are actually less likely to engage in criminal behavior. The so-called “violent illegal” or Trump’s “Mexican rapist” are both unicorns, figments of the white supremacist imagination.

With the dry title, “Urban crime rates and the changing face of immigration: Evidence across four decades,” a study in the Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice concludes:

Research has shown little support for the enduring proposition that increases in immigration are associated with increases in crime. Although classical criminological and neoclassical economic theories would predict immigration to increase crime, most empirical research shows quite the opposite. We investigate the immigration-crime relationship among metropolitan areas over a 40 year period from 1970 to 2010. Our goal is to describe the ongoing and changing association between immigration and a broad range of violent and property crimes. Our results indicate that immigration is consistently linked to decreases in violent (e.g., murder) and property (e.g., burglary) crime throughout the time period. […]

Despite continuing nativist arguments alleging a causal relationship between immigration and crime, individual-level research based on arrest and offense data of the foreign-born shows that they are overall less likely to offend than native-born Americans. Some argue, however, that regardless of immigrants’ relatively low involvement in crime at the individual level, immigration might nevertheless be tied to increases in crime through structural and macro-level mechanisms. […]

Our results indicate that, for property crimes, immigration has a consistently negative effect. For violent crimes, immigration has no effect on assault and a negative effect on robbery and murder. This is strong and stable evidence that, at the macro-level, immigration does not cause crime to increase in U.S. metropolitan areas, and may even help reduce it. The interpretation of our results gives us pause when considering the current cultural ethos in the United States. The variety of legislation at the state level aimed at immigrants, legal or not, is underscored by popular sentiments about how current immigration is detrimental to the U.S. economically and socially. But at least when it comes to crime — and in fact, on many other counts addressed in the literature — there is no evidence at a metropolitan level of these severe impacts. Our results are clear and overarching that immigration does not lead to increases in crime in American metropolitan areas.

Modi’s India

Posted by on 2019-05-26 No comments

All politics is personal. It’s impossible to look away from the mirror of history you’ve been part of. And it’s impossible not to have emotions about places that have been significant parts of your life. Our complicated feelings for the United States go without saying. For migrants and visitors to other lands, the same is true. They become part of us.

I sometimes start to say that I “grew up in” — but correct myself because I came into sentience in India in the 1950’s, a boy only a couple of years younger than India itself. My sister and I began our formal education at the Beldhi Church School in Jamshedpur, in the state of Jharkhand (Bihar when we lived there). Every day we’d pass through school gates, past the poor and the sick, to a little sandstone building where we received instruction from Indian Baptist nuns. Today the sandstone building is still there — it’s an administration building — but the school is now a secondary school with an impressive campus.

Our family was in India for several years because my father, an engineer, had been conscripted into an army of international contractors to build, at the time, the largest steel mill in Asia for Tisco, the steel division of the Tata family. The company’s (and town’s) founder, Jamsetji Tata, had taken to heart Thomas Carlyle’s quip that “the nation which gains control of iron soon acquires the control of gold.” Besides learning English and maths, we practiced writing our Sanskrit letters on lined paper. My classmates were all Americans, Brits, Germans, Russians, Icelanders, and Anglo-Indians. I grew up — rather, came into sentience — reading the wonderful Times of India comics section and devouring British children’s books left over from the last days of colonial rule.

My parents were in their late twenties and early thirties — both from small-town America that even today cares very little about the rest of the world. The one thing this mismatched couple had in common was the love they both had for India. We often drove into the countryside where my father’s Leica and my mother’s Roloflex recorded thousands of scenes of a country coming into its own after centuries of colonialism. We paid tolls to cross one-laned roads blocked by elephants. We sat on our roof and watched Divali lights twinkling below stars arrayed differently from those in the northern hemisphere.

My father’s hobby, if you can call it that, was to impersonate a Western journalist and crash Indian Congress Party events. In this way he met Jawaharlal Nehru, “covered” a reception for the Panchen Lama, and had a drink with Marshal Tito. My mother, enamored with India’s diversity, visited temples of every sort — Hindu, Buddhist, Jain — and snapped photos of Ashura parades. After requiring major surgery and a long convalescence, she bicycled from Shimla back to Jamshedpur on her own, recording people all along the route. When my son made a trip of his own to India a few years ago, we calculated that my mother’s trip had been just short of a thousand miles.

These are all recollections from a child’s charmed memories of a lost world — or, more likely, a world that never really existed, a white boy’s simplistic view of a complicated country where class, caste, and colonialism played out just as they have here in the United States. And yet, for all the gauze and distortion of these memories, my connection to India includes the beginnings of an understanding of a larger world beyond my own. My continuing love for India is enmeshed in all this, and that affection is as real as the country’s complicated history.

Scarcely a generation had passed since Jawaharlal Nehru served as the country’s first Prime Minister when the same sort of religious nationalism that killed Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi in 1948 led to India’s war with Pakistan in 1971. In 1975 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (Nehru’s daughter) declared a two-year state of emergency which jailed political opponents, censored the press, and shut down opposition groups (future Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote a book about it). It surprised no one when Gandhi was assassinated by her own bodyguard in 1984 after conducting a raid on the [Sikh] Golden Temple in Amritsar in the Punjab.

In 1998 India became a nuclear power. The Tatas, the Parsi family that brought our family to India, continued to amass vast wealth and political power, spinning off ventures in Information Technology, automobiles, chemicals, beverages, ceramics, fashion, pharmaceuticals, energy, and investment. At some point after 2000, Bengaluru overtook Silicon Valley as the world’s leading Information Technology hub. But the caste system, poverty, xenophobia, violence against women, illiteracy, and lack of sanitation still exist alongside India’s new malls, gated industrial parks, and dot-com millionaires. Income inequality has thrived in India’s neoliberal “democracy.”

And neoliberalism breeds autocrats.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi came of age politically in the Seventies during Indira Gandhi’s “emergencies.” Modi got his political start in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), originally an anti-colonial group predating India’s founding but now a right-wing nationalist paramilitary organization. It was a former member of the RSS who killed Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi in 1948 and it was RSS members who destroyed the 16th Century Babri Masjid in 1992.

Like Sinn Fein’s relationship to the IRA, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the political wing of a nationalist movement that includes a paramilitary wing, the RSS. As Prime Minister, Modi has filled many government posts with RSS members and has set about implementing RSS’s racist and nationalist prescriptions.

As a freshly-appointed Chief Minister of the state of Gujurat, Modi encouraged anti-Muslim riots in 2002 and promoted unvarnished Hindu nationalism — Hindutva. In 2014, when the BJP took control of India’s “lower” house, the Lok Sabha, for the first time, Modi became Prime Minister and he firmly entrenched Hindutva in his party’s policies.

On May 23rd, 2019, running even more overtly as a nationalist, using his old Twitter handle Chowkidar — watchman — Modi was re-elected for another five-year term amid widespread voter disenfranchisement of Muslim and Dalit (Untouchable) voters. Still, India has 900 million eligible voters and 67% turned out to give Modi 543 seats in the Lok Sabha (Congress), where only 272 seats are necessary for a majority.

During the last election BJP president Amit Shah promised to rid the country of “infiltrators” — meaning Muslims by specifically exempting every other group from this threat. Like the American Republican Party, the BJP has become safe haven for violent extremism. One BJP candidate, Pragya Thakur, stands accused of planning the bombing of a mosque in 2008.

In 2017, after Rahul Gandhi filed his candidacy papers for the 2019 elections, Modi took a swipe at Gandhi’s “anointment” by dubbing him “Aurangzeb Raj,” a Mughal king appointed by his father. Like Donald Trump’s digs at Hillary Clinton’s virtual coronation, there was a certain truth to the jibe.

Rahul Gandhi, who is also the current head of the Indian National Congress, is the son of Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi and former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi; grandson of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi; great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister; and great-great grandson of Motilal Nehru, the founder of the Indian National Congress. Mirroring Trump’s “birther” tactics, The BJP circulated the rumor that Rahul Gandhi was actually an Italian citizen. But there is no question that, throughout India’s entire history, the Congress Party has been the family business (or visa versa).

India is sometimes described as the “largest democracy in the world.” Yet Congress Party hegemony and corruption, and now the country’s extreme turn to the right, blatant Islamophobia, and violence against non-Hindu minorities all raise the question of what sort of democracy India really is. Accompanying Modi’s far-right turn is the move to turn India into an Orwellian surveillance state. Each of India’s billion citizens is now required to participate in a system that allows the government to track them by National ID.

I still remember India eight years after its Independence. Of course, those memories are colored by nostalgia and the ignorance of the child who preserved them. But what many Indians remember of that brief moment in history was an optimistic nation trying to turn centuries of colonialism into a democracy for all of its many people.

But those days are long gone. It’s Modi’s India now.

NO! to the Alma del Mar giveaway

Posted by on 2019-05-20 No comments

Massachusetts may sound like an odd state for Republican policies to be implemented by Democrats. Yet as I write this the “Democratic” Bristol County DA is lobbying for the Republican governor’s “Dangerousness” [mass incarceration] legislation. And the latest bipartisan attack on public education is from comrporate Democrats — Dartmouth state Rep. Christopher Markey and Westport Rep. Paul Schmid, whose pro-charter school bill, HD4174 turns state education law on its head to pay for Alma del Mar with public funds. As a charter, the school is less accountable to the public than to its trustees or its corporate board.

Though frequently described as an experiment, Alma del Mar’s charter is just another skirmish in a greater war for the privatization of American schools. Nationally, charter schools have already fleeced taxpayers to the tune of at least $1 billion. The Network for Public Education Action has documented the role of the super-rich in buying legislative approval for charter schools. Their ultimate goal is privatization. Now New Bedford in in their crosshairs.

HD4147 is opposed by numerous local community groups and organized labor, including NBCSOS (New Bedford Coalition to Save our Schools), the Greater New Bedford Labor Council and the NAACP. This corporate giveaway is the work of a couple of tony suburban Democrats working with the Republican governor and business interests to usher charter schools into Massachusetts through a back door.

In a recent op-ed co-signed by numerous corporate interests, Anthony Sapienza, who heads up the New Bedford Economic Development Council (NBEDC), assures us that the legislation is a “first-of-its-kind partnership” and “a solution that is critical to the stability of all other public schools and the city’s finances.” Sapienza gushes about “neighborhood schools,” arguing that giving Alma del Mar to a corporation is all part of “tangibly advancing strategies for sustainable and shared growth” in New Bedford. Alma del Mar will be a neighborhood school only in the narrowest sense — just as Stop and Shop is your neighborhood green grocer only in the narrowest sense. To echo the NBEDC‘s slogan, Alma del Mar will be “open for business.”

Sapienza rather disingenuously frames the question as a choice between the city raising $8 million to expand an existing school by 600 students — or giving away $4 million to a private corporation to outsource another 450 desks. Since Alma del Mar was built on city property at a cost of $16 million, the real question is whether any sane person thinks New Bedford will save $4 million — an amount less than 1% of the city’s FY2020 city budget — by giving away $16 million to a private entity.

HD4147 is plainly a raw deal for city residents — especially when you actually read the legislation yourself.

Section 2 of the bill says that — for purposes of all the expensive stuff — the school “shall be considered a public school.” But — to the great delight of the corporations pushing the bill — “for all other purposes, including but not limited to chapters 71A and 71B of the General Laws, Alma del Mar Charter School, including its second campus, shall be considered a Commonwealth Charter School.”

And Schmid and Markey are giving them both away.

Section 3 of the Markey-Schmid legislation gives the city permission to dispose of the physical buildings as it sees fit: “Notwithstanding any contrary provision in or interpretation of section 15A of chapter 40 of the General Laws, the School Committee may transfer custody of 135 Shawmut Avenue [the former Horatio A. Kempton School] to the City of New Bedford pursuant to a simple majority vote stating that said property is no longer needed by the New Bedford Public Schools.”

In what alternate reality does a school district give away $16 million of property because no further use is foreseen? The answer is — only in the world of corporatized education.

Section 4 provides the corporate school with guaranteed taxpayer-funded tuition payments. Section 5 cuts the public out of any review process for the transfers in the preceding sections.

Regime Change

Posted by on 2019-05-15 No comments
smiling jackals
smiling jackals

We now have a proto-fascist in the White House, breaking everything he touches. Trump is at war with minorities, gays, women, non-Christians, science, education, the environment, the poor, Congress, the Constitution, Mexico, Central America, China, Russia, and even European allies. Americans are always willing to make regime change elsewhere — but we sure could use some here.

Even if we were not in the middle of a Constitutional crisis, distracted by Trump’s chaos and his intentional destabilization of government, most Americans wouldn’t pay much attention to militarism and foreign policy. The appointments of John Bolton, Michael Pompeo, and Elliott Abrams were no doubt less compelling than the Mueller Report, Brett Kavanaugh’s hearings or James Comey’s firing. But they were chosen to throw bloody red meat to Trump’s “base.”

Elliott Abrams is a war criminal convicted of lying to Congress, though he was subsequently pardoned. Mike Pompeo is fond of threatening enemies with US invasion. Like Pompeo, John Bolton has never met a war he didn’t love, pressing for “regime change” in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen, North Korea, and Iran. With the selection of these three sociopaths, Trump is telegraphing plans for Venezuela and Iran. Like Iraq, both countries have long been in the crosshairs of American neoconservatives. The administration’s plans may be old but they’re reliable — coups, puppet regimes, and manufactured threats to the US and its allies. All depend on gullibility and attention deficit from the American public.

In March 2017, amid US sanctions and right-wing sabotage and violence which included ongoing assassination attempts, the Venezuelan Supreme Court granted Nicolás Maduro emergency powers and dissolved the National Assembly. The “old” legislature was replaced by the Constituent Assembly, which was originally formed to rewrite the Constitution. Since then Venezuela has been divided over the legitimacy of both the “new” and the “old” legislature. But this is what happens when a nation grants special powers to a leader, who then uses them to delegitimize the legislature. Since 2017 the “old” legislature has functioned as Venezuela’s opposition and — like it or not — the “new” legislature is now the people’s house. In 2018 Maduro was re-elected president of Venezuela, which — again, like it or not — should have answered the question of legitimacy.

But in January 2019, after receiving an OK from Vice President Pence, the chairman of the “old” legislature, Juan Guaidó, simply took microphone in hand and declared himself president of Venezuela. This was apparently enough legitimacy for the Trump Administration’s John Bolton, who then set about to create rebellion among the Venezuelan military. Guaidó follows a long history of US puppetry — the Pahlavis, the Somozas, Batista, Ngo Dinh Diem, Costillo Armas, Rios Montt, Chalabi, Micheletti, Karzai, to name a few. By recognizing Guaidó and then expelling Maduro appointees from their own embassy, the Trump administration is now trying to depose the head of a divided but democratically-elected government.

Yet, of all the chaos that Trump has unleashed, the threat of an attack on Iran is the most terrifying. Neocons have never been happy with John Kerry’s Iran deal, in which Iran and the US agreed to an accord that would keep Iran from enriching weapons-grade plutonium in exchange for relief from US sanctions. Despite zero evidence of violations by Iran, Trump withdrew from the deal and is considering prosecuting Kerry for violating the Logan Act — for speaking with foreign diplomats, as most former American diplomats do even after leaving their diplomatic posts.

To escalate the provocations even further, Trump denoted the Iranian Guard a “terrorist” organization. And last week, following the deployment of a carrier strike force and B-52 bombers to the Persian Gulf, the US accused Iran of sabotaging tankers. Two Saudi, one Norwegian, and one Emirati ship were allegedly attacked with improvised limpet mines close to the Emirates. Trump threatened to send 120,000 troops to the region, telling the press, “It’s going to be a bad problem for Iran if something happens, I can tell you that. They’re not going to be happy.”

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif suggested that the sabotaging of vessels was a “false flag” operation and ascribed war noises to the work of the “four Bs” — Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, United Arab Emirates crown prince Mohamed bin Zayed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and White House national security adviser John Bolton, who in 2015 advocated bombing Iran. And if one looks at a map of US military bases surrounding Iran, it is hard to imagine why Iran would want to provoke the US.

Europeans, who remain party to the Iran agreement, are skeptical of Trump’s accusations. Norbert Röttgen, chair of the Foreign Affairs committee of the German parliament, downplayed American warnings of imminent Iranian attacks. He said that the BND (German intelligence) has not found any escalation in Iranian threats. In fact, Röttgen described the US warnings as mere “saber rattling, a show of force to demonstrate seriousness and to justify American foreign policy vis-a-vis Iran.”

But, after a generation of American wars in the Middle East, there is still an appetite for more. The Trump administration and its supporters believe invading Iran would be a “slam dunk,” as the Bush administration thought Iraq would be. Almost a generation has gone by since the first Gulf War and the US is still not out of Iraq. And after a generation, hundreds of thousands killed, and trillions of dollars squandered, the US still remains in Afghanistan propping up a puppet regime. Geniuses like Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton doubt it would take much to defeat Iran — “two strikes, the first strike and the last strike.”

Cooler heads remind us that a US invasion would be the Mother of all Quagmires. Juan Cole, a Mideast expert at the University of Michigan, published the “Top Ten differences between the Iraq War and Trump’s Proposed Iran War.” Among them:

  • Iran is 3.7 times bigger than Iraq — 1.5 million square miles, almost the size of Alaska
  • Iran has 3 times more people than Iraq — 81 million
  • Iran can mobilize 1.5 million paramilitary forces and 500,000 active duty personnel
  • While the Gulf War “Coalition” drew on NATO allies to fight Iraq, Europe is now skeptical of a war on Iran
  • Iraq’s neighbors were happy to see Saddam go; Iran still has many regional friends

Even FOX News host Tucker Carlson was concerned about Bolton’s influence. “More than anything in the world, national security adviser John Bolton would love to have a war with Iran. It will be like Christmas, Thanksgiving, his birthday [all] wrapped into one,” Carlson said.

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has introduced a petition to block Trump’s unilateral entry into a war with Iran, and Nancy Pelosi reminded everyone that “the responsibility in the Constitution is for Congress to declare war. So I hope that the president’s advisers recognize they have no authorization to go forward in any way. They cannot call the authorization, AUMF, the authorization for the use of military force that was passed in 2001, as any authorization to go forward in the Middle East now.”

Impeachment might be largely a formality in the almost certain absence of Senate prosecution of Trump’s crimes, but proceedings should be initiated anyway. Congress must insist on all its rights and powers, which include declaring war. As for Abrams and Bolton, they deserve tenures just as short as Anthony Scaramucci’s — if not cells at the Hague.

But if anyone should be getting regime change this month, please, let it be the American people.

Anyone but Trump

Posted by on 2019-05-14 No comments

During the 2016 presidential campaign, faced with a corrupt proto-fascist, and not sure what it really stood for, the Democratic Party ran on a simplistic, fearful platform — “anybody but Trump.” Few remember now what else Hillary Clinton campaigned on — much less actually believed in, because her views on everything from abortion, gay rights, criminal justice, immigration, and trade had all “evolved” and it was difficult to untangle Clinton the Candidate from Clinton the Goldman-Sachs speaker — or Clinton the peddler of influence from her $2 billion family foundation.

After her stunning loss the corporate media began pushing the message that Democrats had been too focused on “identity politics” — that concern for gays, women, minorities, and immigrants had robbed the party of its rightful win.

Then, as now, Republicans whined about identity politics (knowing full-well that white privilege itself is the most toxic example), called Democratic safety-net programs “socialist,” railed against “political correctness” and lied about the basic science behind human gestation and environmental warming. And Democrats took the bait, wishing they had appealed more to the mythological unicorn — the fabled white swing voter.

Now, as the 2020 presidential campaign begins, faced with the same corrupt, and now much more dangerous proto-fascist — and still unsure of what they really stand for — Democrats have again trotted out the same simplistic platform — “anybody but Trump.” And this time around, it looks like it will be up to a white candidate to appeal to the white swing voter.

At least fifteen of the twenty Democratic contenders will never survive the primaries. As of May 13th, the leaders were Biden (39.8%), Sanders (16.3%), Warren (8.3%), Harris (7.7%), and Buttigieg (6.8%). Not one candidate of color is running in double digits. Two Democratic candidates (Sanders and Warren) are progressives — idea people who want to fix a long list of economic, social, and criminal justice wrongs. They and Tulsi Gabbard are also the only candidates to question American militarism. But this year the Democratic Party is not interested in grand ideas — not even those diametrically opposed to the President’s. “Anyone but Trump” is their only idea. Sadly, Sanders and Warren’s campaigns are dead out of the gate.

Instead, the Democratic Party leadership sees Biden and Buttigieg as the best shot to appeal to White Middle America — by turning their backs on progressive agendas Sanders and Warren and some of the newly-elected House representatives have championed. In Las Vegas this week Pete Buttigieg dropped the hammer on identity politics. This was a tip of the hat to MAGA America and a slap in the face to minorities. Polls show that Buttigieg has the support of 18% of South Carolina’s voters and 8% of the state’s Democratic voters. But among African-Americans that percent is a well-deserved zero.

Among millennials and young black voters Biden is doing relatively well in the polls for the moment. Unless the septuagenarian suffers a health crisis, he looks to become the next Anointed One. But young people are unreliable voters. And so are dispirited and disrespected voters. As Charles M. Blow pointed out in the New York Times, “there is part of the Biden enthusiasm, and to a lesser extent the energy around candidates like Bernie Sanders, that focuses too heavily on the fickle white, working-class swing voters and is not enough focused on the party’s faithful.”

For Blow the Anointing of Joe Biden is an insult to loyal black voters. “Democrats want to hold constant their support from women and minorities even as they chase the votes of people hostile to the interests of women and minorities. What does it say that the Democrats lust after disaffection rather than rewarding devotion? Democrats tell their base that this must be done, that the prodigal [white] children must be brought home, as if that is their only path to victory. It is not. That is a lie. And, it’s a lazy lie.”

Not only is it a lazy lie, it’s a crazy one as well. White swing voters, who in 2008 and 2012 voted for Obama and Biden and then flipped to Trump in 2016, just aren’t going back anytime soon. Not only are these voters unicorns; the fervent hope that Democrats can win them back is a delusion.

The other path to power, as Blow hinted, is Steve Phillips’ New American Majority, an idea he developed in his book Brown in the New White. The idea is neither new nor very difficult math. If you add up white progressives and progressives of color you’ve got a numerical majority that can beat Republicans — not in 2040, when whites will be a numerical minority, but right now. The gotcha, says Phillips, is that the Democratic Party needs to start offering better reasons for registered African-Americans voters to show up at the polls — like representation, support, and money. Anointing Biden, then, is just a prescription for another electoral loss.

So for the moment it looks like it’s going to be Biden in 2020, and if it is — then Democrats are going to lose. 2020 could have been about ideas and programs to truly make this country a better place. Instead, it seems to be contracting into a referendum on replacing one set of hair work and dental veneers with another.

Orwell hadn’t even heard of Facebook

Posted by on 2019-05-05 No comments

This week Donald Trump tweeted that his administration was “looking into” the “banning” of conservatives on “liberal” social media. With a conservative stranglehold on talk radio and powerful news outlets like FOX and Sinclair effectively functioning as mouthpieces for Trump’s policies, on the face of it Trump’s charges seem ridiculous. But Trump’s criticism hit an unexpected nerve with friends of free speech. Censorship in social media may not exclusively target conservatives, but it’s a very real thing.

A while ago I taught a citizenship class. If you read though the one hundred official U.S. citizenship questions, only one amendment — the First — gets any love. Not one question mentions any of the other amendments to the Constitution — and for good reason. It would be tough to explain school prayer, bowing to Evangelicals on abortion and adoption, stop and frisk, illegal wiretapping, blanket surveillance, cruel prison punishments including death by mystery cocktail, violations of habeus corpus, excessive bail, the lack of speedy trials, voter suppression, systemic racism, Constitution-free borders, limited “free speech zones,” and prosecutorial practices that effectively deny an accused person the right to a jury trial.

And what would be the point? Many of my students came from places where American “democracy” has propped up dictators and taught genocide and torture to their militaries. Or maybe these prospective Americans just looked around and noticed that, around here, civil liberties don’t really apply to immigrants or people of color.

Nevertheless, the citizenship questions give star billing to the First Amendment, which “guarantees” freedoms of speech, religion, assembly, and the right to petition the government. The First Amendment is clearly the beating heart of American democracy — for the writers of the citizenship test — and it’s almost an article of their faith that it grants us rights found nowhere else on earth.

Norman Rockwell, Freedom of Speech
Norman Rockwell, Freedom of Speech

But in truth the First Amendment is a completely toothless piece of text that does little to stop abuses arising from telling people what you think.

Read the fine print. The Constitution promises that the government won’t go after you for your views or interests — although it certainly has and does. Donald Trump, for example, tried to go after 1.3 million people who may have clicked on a website dedicated to disrupting his low-attendance inauguration. But besides attacking the First Amendment, the president’s sweeping demand for ISP data was also a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Reporters sans Frontieres ranks the United States 43rd in press freedom, a sign it’s pretty much on life support. And when Trump began targeting the Black Lives Matter movement, it was only the most recent example of a government that has always done expressly what the First Amendment forbids.

Now while the First Amendment theoretically keeps the government from silencing you, there’s absolutely nothing to stop an employer, a social or political organization, a business, or a school from censoring, expelling or punishing you. Adjunct professor Lisa Durden found this out when she was fired for defending Black Lives Matter on FOX News — not because the popular teacher had done anything wrong at her community college. White supremacist Richard Spencer lost his gym membership because of his views — not because of any specific behavior at the gym. Juli Briskman was canned by her employer for a third party photo showing her giving Donald Trump the middle finger as his motorcade sped past her while she was bicycling. The excuse given by Akima, a federal contractor — Briskman “violated” the company’s social media policy.

Americans regard China’s Great Firewall — which censors what Chinese citizens can view online — as a significant feature of authoritarian rule in that country. Yet the only difference between Chinese and American censorship is that here in the United States it’s been outsourced to corporations and employers — and, increasingly, internet service companies.

Twitter censored Politwoops, a group exposing backtracking and lying by politicians who delete or alter their ill-considered Twitter posts. Facebook censors content for both China and for the United States. When activist Mary Canty Merrill penned an open letter, “Dear White People,” she was censored by Facebook. Conservative Google employee James Damore wrote an internal memo criticizing his company’s diversity programs and was immediately terminated.

Some think the Internet is open and free. But remember — the Internet began its life as a defense industry (DARPA) project, and U.S., European, Chinese, Saudi, and other laws actually compel service providers to monitor and censor content while also delivering personal data (either lawfully or under secret programs like PRISM) to spy agencies. The U.S. government even forces ISPs to lie about it after the fact.

The internet, also as a consequence of the many lunatics who post on it, has become a gratuitously censored place. Social networks go out of their way to sanitize “offensive” or “upsetting” content. Google, Facebook, and Twitter — for all the hate speech they manage to monetize — feel obliged to protect us from beheadings, nursing mothers, the aftermath of terror attacks, radical manifestos, and “harmful” or “dangerous” hyperbole from both right and left. Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are both sitting in jail now because they posted proof of U.S. war crimes, including a video of the 2007 murder of two Reuters reporters by the U.S. military.

A dangerous consequence of overt censorship is self-censorship. With enough positive or negative reinforcement people simply stop telling you what they really think. Or, if they persist, someone will censor them for simple lack of “civility.” In the aftermath of the 2016 election I observed this phenomenon as Bernie and Hillary people duked it out. One moderator of an Indivisible group decided to shut down debate by insisting on acceptable views, acceptable discussion, acceptable tone, and acceptable news sources.

In the preface to one edition of Animal Farm, George Orwell noted that popular opinion is often a greater threat to freedom of thought and expression than authoritarian government, and that anyone who chafes against prevailing orthodoxy often “finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness” by his own friends.

… the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the [Ministry of Information] or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

Any fairminded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian ‘co-ordination’ that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines – being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

And Orwell hadn’t even heard of Facebook.