Democracy Is Under Assault Around The World, And Right Here In Texas
By William Rivers Pitt

"Democracy and pluralism are under assault." So reads the first line of Freedom House's annual report card on the standing of liberty around the world, titled "Freedom in the World." While this assessment is grimly accurate, one does not have to scan the globe seeking evidence for the ongoing assault on democracy. There was plenty to be found on Super Tuesday, right down in Texas.

Founded in 1941 by a cohort of activists and politicians that included Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendel Willkie, Freedom House is "a nongovernmental, nonpartisan advocacy organization," according to The Washington Post. The group has published this report every year since 1973. "It has become the most widely read and cited report of its kind, used on a regular basis by policymakers, journalists, academics, activists, and many others," according to the Freedom House website.

India's surge toward Hindu nationalism and China's repression of Uighurs and other Muslim groups, along with China's efforts to disrupt democracies around the world, take center stage in this year's Freedom House report. The report likewise notes the many citizen protest movements that have erupted across the globe. "However," it reads, "these movements have in many cases confronted deeply entrenched interests that are able to endure considerable pressure and are willing to use deadly force to maintain power."

The Freedom House report takes special notice of the United States under the administration of Donald Trump, finding many areas of deep concern. The report specifically cites Trump's affinity for authoritarian leaders like North Korea's Kim Jong Un and Russia's Vladimir Putin, as well as his relentless attacks on journalism and journalists in the U.S. Arms sales to Saudi Arabia, another authoritarian regime, are also underscored.

"Balancing specific security and economic considerations with human rights concerns has been difficult for every administration," reads the report, "but the balance has grown especially lopsided of late. This problem has been compounded by efforts to undermine democratic norms and standards within the United States over the past several years, including pressure on electoral integrity, judicial independence, and safeguards against corruption."

Indeed, "efforts to undermine democratic norms and standards within the United States over the past several years, including pressure on electoral integrity," were very much on display during the Texas primary on Tuesday. Texas election officials needed no help from the Trump administration to disenfranchise voters and damage the seedcorn of democracy, however. Chief Justice John Roberts and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court did all the heavy lifting on that seven years ago.

"The Supreme Court on Tuesday effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote," reported The New York Times in June of 2013, "freeing nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval. The decision will have immediate practical consequences. Texas announced shortly after the decision that a voter identification law that had been blocked would go into effect immediately, and that redistricting maps there would no longer need federal approval."

In her dissent of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling on the Voting Rights Act (VRA), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described the decision as being tantamount to "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, insisted that "our country has changed," and minority voters no longer require federal protections for their right to vote, even in states where that right has been trampled on systematically and repeatedly.

Justice Ginsburg was correct. The consequences from the 2013 evisceration of the VRA, particularly the portion of the Act that protected marginalized voters in states with a long history of racial discrimination at the ballot box, came to full bloom in Texas this week.

Voters of color waited in line to vote for seven or more hours on Election Day, and the reason is no mystery. "One of the reasons there's such long lines in Texas is that state closed 750 polling places after Supreme Court gutted Voting Rights Act," reported journalist Ari Berman. "50 counties that gained most Black & Latino residents between 2012-2018 closed 542 polling sites." Further reporting by the Guardian underscored Berman's findings.

"I think we see a number of states that have more restrictive legislation than they would have if preclearance had been in place," Myrna Perez, head of the Brennan Center for Justice's Voting Rights and Elections Program, said on the fifth anniversary of the court's Shelby County decision. "I think we have seen some lawmakers push the envelope and see how far they can go with laws that disenfranchise people. And I do think that it contributed to a real ugliness in the country, with racism and the acceptance of racism."

The Freedom House report emphasized that democracy is specifically under assault from "deeply entrenched interests that are able to endure considerable pressure." One does not need to travel to China, India or Russia to witness this truth. The Supreme Court's conservative majority has grown since 2012, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been packing the courts with conservative judges who cleave to the racist lie proffered by Chief Justice Roberts that claims "our country has changed."

It has changed since 2013. It is worse now than it was then, and that trend has accelerated during the administration of Trump.

The idea that this country is a pure-hearted beacon of freedom is belied by history, by the fact that slavers drafted the Constitution in such a way as to defend their system of slavery. "Freedom" here has always been a pleasant fiction, but the long tide of activism has slowly but certainly invested more and more people with those freedoms white Europeans have taken for granted since first setting foot on this soil.

That work remains incomplete, and will always be incomplete because racism and white supremacy are the alleles that bind the DNA of this manufactured, plunder-born nation.

For all this, the struggle continues. First and foremost is the right to vote. Without it, even our ragged, purchased, corporate-owned democracy is a hollow shell, a bell with no clapper, a lie swaddled in lies. The Freedom House report put its finger directly on the pulse of the problem. Democracy is indeed under attack around the world, and right here at home.

(c) 2020 William Rivers Pitt is a senior editor and lead columnist at Truthout. He is also a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of three books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know, The Greatest Sedition Is Silence and House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation. His fourth book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible, co_written with Dahr Jamail, is available now on Amazon. He lives and works in New Hampshire.

If It's Biden vs. Trump, This Year's One-Choice Election Will Be For Oligarchy
By Chris Hedges

We don't need a "Punch and Judy" show between Trump and Biden. But that, along with corporate tyranny, is what we seem fated to get, unless we take to the streets and tear the house down.

There is only one choice in this election. The consolidation of oligarchic power under Donald Trump or the consolidation of oligarchic power under Joe Biden. The oligarchs, with Trump or Biden, will win again. We will lose. The oligarchs made it abundantly clear, should Bernie Sanders miraculously become the Democratic Party nominee, they would join forces with the Republicans to crush him. Trump would, if Sanders was the nominee, instantly be shorn by the Democratic Party elites of his demons and his propensity for tyranny. Sanders would be red-baited - as he was viciously Friday in The New York Times' "As Bernie Sanders Pushed for Closer Ties, Soviet Union Spotted Opportunity" - and turned into a figure of derision and ridicule. The oligarchs preach the sermon of the least-worst to us when they attempt to ram a Hillary Clinton or a Biden down our throats but ignore it for themselves. They prefer Biden over Trump, but they can live with either.

Only one thing matters to the oligarchs. It is not democracy. It is not truth. It is not the consent of the governed. It is not income inequality. It is not the surveillance state. It is not endless war. It is not jobs. It is not the climate. It is the primacy of corporate power-which has extinguished our democracy and left most of the working class in misery-and the continued increase and consolidation of their wealth. It is impossible working within the system to shatter the hegemony of oligarchic power or institute meaningful reform. Change, real change, will only come by sustained acts of civil disobedience and mass mobilization, as with the yellow vests movement in France and the British-based Extinction Rebellion. The longer we are fooled by the electoral burlesque, the more disempowered we will become.

I was on the streets with protesters in Philadelphia outside the appropriately named Wells Fargo Center during the 2016 Democratic Convention when hundreds of Sanders delegates walked out of the hall. "Show me what democracy looks like!" they chanted, holding Bernie signs above their heads as they poured out of the exits. "This is what democracy looks like!"

Sanders' greatest tactical mistake was not joining them. He bowed before the mighty altar of the corporate state. He had desperately tried to stave off a revolt by his supporters and delegates on the eve of the convention by sending out repeated messages in his name - most of them authored by members of the Clinton campaign - to be respectful, not disrupt the nominating process and support Clinton. Sanders was a dutiful sheepdog, attempting to herd his disgruntled supporters into the embrace of the Clinton campaign. At his moment of apostasy, when he introduced a motion to nominate Clinton, his delegates had left hundreds of convention seats empty.

After the 2016 convention, Sanders held rallies - the crowds pitifully small compared to what he had drawn when he ran as an insurgent - on Clinton's behalf. He returned to the Senate to loyally line up behind Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose power comes from his ability to funnel tens of millions of dollars in corporate and Wall Street money to anointed Democratic candidates. Sanders refused to support the lawsuit brought against the Democratic National Committee for rigging the primaries against him. He endorsed Democratic candidates who espoused the neoliberal economic and political positions he claims to oppose. Sanders, who calls himself an independent, caucused as a Democrat. The Democratic Party determined his assignments in the Senate. Schumer offered to make Sanders the head of the Senate Budget Committee if the Democrats won control of the Senate. Sanders became a party apparatchik.

Sanders apparently believed that if he was obsequious enough to the Democratic Party elite, they would give him a chance in 2020, a chance they denied him in 2016. Politics, I suspect he would argue, is about compromise and the practical. This is true. But playing politics in a system that is not democratic is about being complicit in the charade. Sanders misread the Democratic Party leadership, swamp creatures of the corporate state. He misread the Democratic Party, which is a corporate mirage. Its base can, at best, select preapproved candidates and act as props at rallies and in choreographed party conventions. The Democratic Party voters have zero influence on party politics or party policies. Sanders' naivete, and perhaps his lack of political courage, drove away his most committed young supporters. These followers have not forgiven him for his betrayal. They chose not to turn out to vote in the numbers he needs in the primaries. They are right. He is wrong. We need to overthrow the system, not placate it.

Sanders is wounded. The oligarchs will go in for the kill. They will subject him to the same character assassination, aided by the courtiers in the corporate press, that was directed at Henry Wallace in 1948 and George McGovern in 1972, the only two progressive presidential candidates who managed to seriously threaten the ruling elites since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The feckless liberal class, easily frightened, is already abandoning Sanders, castigating his supporters with their nauseating self-righteousness and championing Biden as a political savior.

Trump and Biden are repugnant figures, doddering into old age with cognitive lapses and no moral cores. Is Trump more dangerous than Biden? Yes. Is Trump more inept and more dishonest? Yes. Is Trump more of a threat to the open society? Yes. Is Biden the solution? No.

Biden represents the old neoliberal order. He personifies the betrayal by the Democratic Party of working men and women that sparked the deep hatred of the ruling elites across the political spectrum. He is a gift to a demagogue and con artist like Trump, who at least understands that these elites are detested. Biden cannot plausibly offer change. He can only offer more of the same. And most Americans do not want more of the same. The country's largest voting-age bloc, the 100 million-plus citizens who out of apathy or disgust do not vote, will once again stay home. This demoralization of the electorate is by design. It will, I expect, give Trump another term in office.

By voting for Biden, you endorse the humiliation of courageous women such as Anita Hill who confronted their abusers. You vote for the architects of the endless wars in the Middle East. You vote for the apartheid state in Israel. You vote for wholesale surveillance of the public by government intelligence agencies and the abolition of due process and habeas corpus. You vote for austerity programs, including the destruction of welfare and cuts to Social Security. You vote for NAFTA, free trade deals, de-industrialization, a decline in wages, the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs and the offshoring of jobs to underpaid workers who toil in sweatshops in China or Vietnam. You vote for the assault on public education and the transfer of federal funds to for-profit and Christian charter schools. You vote for the doubling of our prison population, the tripling and quadrupling of sentences and huge expansion of crimes meriting the death penalty. You vote for militarized police who gun down poor people of color with impunity. You vote against the Green New Deal and immigration reform. You vote for limiting a woman's right to abortion and reproductive rights. You vote for a segregated public-school system in which the wealthy receive educational opportunities and poor people of color are denied a chance. You vote for punitive levels of student debt and the inability to free yourself of debt obligations through bankruptcy. You vote for deregulating the banking industry and the abolition of Glass-Steagall. You vote for the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical corporations and against universal health care. You vote for bloated defense budgets. You vote for the use of unlimited oligarchic and corporate money to buy our elections. You vote for a politician who during his time in the Senate abjectly served the interests of MBNA, the largest independent credit card company headquartered in Delaware, which also employed Biden's son Hunter.

There are no substantial political differences between the Democrats and Republicans. We have only the illusion of participatory democracy. The Democrats and their liberal apologists adopt tolerant positions on issues regarding race, religion, immigration, women's rights and sexual identity and pretend this is politics. The right wing uses those on the margins of society as scapegoats. The culture wars mask the reality. Both parties are full partners in the reconfiguration of American society into a form of neofeudalism. It only depends on how you want it dressed up.

"By fostering an illusion among the powerless classes" that it can make their interests a priority, the Democratic Party "pacifies and thereby defines the style of an opposition party in an inverted totalitarian system," political philosopher Sheldon Wolin writes.

The Democrats will once again offer up a least-worst alternative while, in fact, doing little or nothing to thwart the march toward corporate totalitarianism. What the public wants and deserves will again be ignored for what the corporate lobbyists demand. If we do not respond soon to the social and economic catastrophe that has been visited on most of the population, we will be unable to thwart the rise of corporate tyranny and a Christian fascism.

We need to reintegrate those who have been pushed aside back into the society, to heal the ruptured social bonds, to give workers dignity, empowerment and protection. We need a universal health care system, especially as we barrel toward a global pandemic. We need programs that provide employment with sustainable wages, job protection and pensions. We need quality public education for all Americans. We need to rebuild our infrastructure and end the squandering of our resources on war. We need to halt corporate pillage and regulate Wall Street and corporations. We need to respond with radical and immediate measures to curb carbon emissions and save ourselves from ecocide and extinction. We don't need a "Punch and Judy" show between Trump and Biden. But that, along with corporate tyranny, is what we seem fated to get, unless we take to the streets and tear the house down.

(c) 2020 Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, spent seven years in the Middle East. He was part of the paper's team of reporters who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. Keep up with Chris Hedges' latest columns, interviews, tour dates and more at www.truthdig.com/chris_hedges.

The Titanic Disaster's Financial Impact On America
By James Donahue

The sinking of the White Star Line's new liner Titanic and the loss of an estimated 1,500 lives after striking an iceberg on its maiden voyage on April 15, 1912 has remained one of the world's most memorable disasters. While there have been other ship disasters perhaps just as horrifying that claimed even more lives, the Titanic story is the one that remains etched most deeply in the historical record. And there are several strange synchronicities that we suspect account for this.

In 1898 a book titled "Wreck of the Titan" by Morgan Robertson was published that predicted in almost graphic detail the Titanic disaster. Robertson even got the name of the doomed liner almost right. In the story the ship, which was declared "unsinkable" was an 800-foot-long giant carrying 2,500 passengers on a maiden voyage when it struck an iceberg on its starboard side and sank in the North Atlantic. More than half of the passengers died for lack of enough lifeboats.

The Titanic disaster was almost a carbon copy of the Robertson story. It measured 882 feet in length, was on its maiden voyage on the North Atlantic with 2,224 passengers plus 885 crew members when it struck an iceberg on its starboard side and sank. More than half of the people on the ship perished for lack of enough lifeboats.

That the ruins of the Titanic have since been found and artifacts recovered for display in marine museums around the world; that various films have been made about the disaster, books and even songs written have helped keep the Titanic story alive in the human psyche. The loss of the Titanic and a collision that severely damaged a sister ship, The Olympic, probably caused a severe financial strain on the White Star Line. Both vessels were insured so there was some recovery. Nevertheless, White Star merged with its competitor, the Cunard Line, in 1934, during the heart of the Great Depression.

A recent story in the Internet site Rise Earth suggested that the disaster also had a powerful long-range impact on the banking system in the United States and Europe because a few very wealthy and powerful businessmen perished with the Titanic. They included John Jacob Astor IV, considered the richest man in the world, Isa Strauss and Benjamin Guggenheim.

According to the article, all three men were strongly opposed to a bill moving through the U.S. Congress that led to the creation of the Federal Reserve. Another heavy hitter, J. P. Morgan, who supported the concept of a Federal Reserve and who helped finance the Titanic, was slated to be on the voyage but cancelled at the last minute.

The anonymous author of the brief Rise Earth story suggested that the destruction of the Titanic was carefully planned by Morgan to insure the creation of the Federal Reserve, which took control of U. S. currency out of the control of Congress and placed it into the hands of a board of powerful world bankers.

It was on Christmas Eve in 1913, the year after the Titanic sank, that a key number of U.S. Congressmen met in special session in Washington, while the rest of the members were home for the holidays. There were just enough of them to pass the long disputed Federal Reserve Act. It was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson, even though Wilson, a Democrat, ran for office on a promise that he opposed the act. He later said he was convinced that the plan for a Federal Reserve, as drafted by Senate Republican leader Nelson Aldrich during a secret meeting with bankers and high rollers on Jakyll Island, Georgia, in 1910, offered a better system of stabilizing the monetary system.

Present at the meeting were Aldrich and executives for the banks of J. P. Morgan, Rockefeller and Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. directed the proceedings and wrote the final draft of what became known as the Aldrich Plan. Col. Edward House, a banker present at the meeting, later was named a close advisor to President Wilson and was the founder of the Council on Foreign Relations.

It was only about a decade later that the world collapsed into the Great Depression. The Reserve has been printing money on loan to the Federal Government ever since. The United States has since moved from having no national debt to facing a multi-trillion dollar deficit. Most of our tax money is paid each year in interest to the bankers who control the Federal Reserve. The U. S. dollar, once backed up by a gold reserve at Fort Knox, is now locked in run-away inflation.

Was the Rise Earth story creditable? Was J. P. Morgan involved in murdering the opposition to the Federal Reserve by arranging the sinking of the Titanic? Did he get the idea from Robertson's book?

It is troublesome to note that Robertson, a noted author and former Great Lakes ship captain, was found dead in his hotel room in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1915. He was poisoned from an overdose of paraldehyde. Robertson was only 53.

(c) 2020 James L. Donahue is a retired newspaper reporter, editor and columnist with more than 40 years of experience in professional writing. He is the published author of five books, all dealing with Michigan history, and several magazine articles.