The United Nations lowered the U.S. ranking to #41 among nations in 2022 due to the extreme gap between the rich and the rest and women’s loss of reproductive freedom. Elsewhere the U.S. ranks as a “flawed democracy” because of its severely fractured society.  These ongoing societal failures feed a continuous decline in health, such that we now ranks 48^th among 200 countries in life expectancy, while having the largest number by far of billionaires and millionaires compared to other wealthy countries.  Corporate lobbies for the weapons industry, fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, processed foods, etc. dictate our federal government’s priorities while 78% of US people live paycheck to paycheck.

Blessed is the Poor People’s Campaign: This national campaign in more than 45 states is organized around the needs and demands of the 140 million poor and low income Americans.  Its vision to restructure our society from the bottom up, recognizes “we must…deal with the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the denial of health care, militarism and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism that blames the poor instead of the systems that cause poverty.”  Add sexism to that list of injustices.

Blessed is Fair Share Massachusetts, a coalition of labor unions and dozens of community and faith-based organizations that won passage of the Fair Share Amendment in 2022. The constitutional amendment has instituted a 4% surcharge on annual income over $1 million.  In 2024 the $1.8 billion accrued from the tax on millionaires provides free school meals; free community college; and funds to invest in roads, bridges, and public transit. 

In 1948, the United States signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which recognizes adequate housing as one cornerstone of the right to an adequate standard of living. All 27 European Union (EU) member states as well as Australia and South Africa institutionalized housing as a human right for their citizens while the United States has not.  In every state except Oregon and Wyoming, it can be illegal to be homeless, essentially casting blame on 650,000 adults and over 2 million children for their poverty-stricken homelessness

Blessed is Rosie’s Place, a model to our country of woman-centered humanism.  Much more than a shelter, it is a mecca and “a second chance for 12,000 poor and homeless women each year” in Boston.  Rosie’s Place was founded on Easter Sunday 1974 in an abandoned supermarket, as the first shelter for women in the country.  From providing meals and sanctuary from the streets, it grew into a multi-service community center that offers women emergency shelter and meals plus support and tools to rebuild their lives.  Rosie’s offers a food pantry, ESOL classes, legal assistance, wellness care, one-on-one support, housing and job search services, and community outreach.  Ninety percent of homeless women have suffered severe physical or sexual abuse at some time in their lives.

Blessed are the nearly 3000 domestic violence shelters and groups organized throughout the U.S. to provide temporary shelter and help women re-build their lives, offering legal assistance, counselling, educational opportunities and multi-services for their children.

“Beating the Blues,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

A recent Gallup Survey found that the U.S. ranks last among comparable nations in trust of their government and major institutions, including business leaders, journalists and reporters, the medical system, banks, public education and organized religion – a plunge from top of the list nearly 20 years ago.

Blessed is Hands Across the Hills, a blue-state red-state seven-year effort formed after Donald Trump’s 2016 election to bring together progressive residents in western Massachusetts and more conservative residents of rural eastern Kentucky, for conversations and sometimes intense dialogues about their political and cultural differences.  They disputed the idea, “that we are hopelessly divided, as a myth sold to us by politicians and mass media, to hide our nation’s all-too-real inequalities.”

Blessed are the peacemakers across dozens of federal agencies, including the military and in communities throughout the country who challenge, resist, resign and refuse orders in our flawed hyper-militaristic government. Since the US-enabled genocide in Gaza, more than 250 veterans and active-duty soldiers have become members, respectively, of About Face: Veterans Against the War,  Feds for Peace, Service in Dissent, and A New Policy PAC.  All have arisen from current and former federal employees aligned with the majority of Americans who want the Israeli-US war on Gaza (now expanded to Lebanon and the West Bank) to end through diplomacy.

Blessed are those of the people, for the people and by the people – beacons in a country sundered by militarism, rich privilege, origins in slavery and genocide of Native Americans, and persistent inequality of women.

However, as the Americans chanted “no taxation without representation” when they were fighting for their independence and tried to shake off the yoke of a foreign power over their lives, it is now appropriate for the people of the world to say “no extermination without representation.” If the rest of the world cannot have representation in US elections, at least we are entitled to express a view about it, especially when it affects the well-being or even the continued existence of the rest of the world.

I am writing this not as an enemy of the United States, but as a long-time friend and admirer. From my childhood, I heard glowing praise of America and its history from my father who had spent many years of his life as a young man in New York and who was a great lover of that country. I wrote a PhD thesis on Oriental Influences on the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson when I came to study in England, and spent a wonderful summer in the United States visiting Emerson’s house in Concorde and doing research on his work at the Weidner Library at Harvard. Later on, I spent a year at Harvard as a Senior Fulbright visiting scholar teaching courses on Persian and American literature.

I also established the first Department of American Studies in Iran when I served as professor and Dean of the Faculty of Languages at the University of Isfahan. I also helped arrange the conference on the 200th anniversary of American Independence at the University of Shiraz, which served as the main anniversary conference in the Middle East and Asia. So, I have many reasons to be interested in the outcome of the US election.

The United States continues to be the most consequential country in the world. By nominal GDP, the United States is still the biggest economy in the world, and even by PPP, it is the second richest country. However, from a military point of view, it is by far the most powerful country compared to all its rivals. Never in world history has a country possessed such overwhelming power in all the corners of the world. While Russia and China can be regarded as regional superpowers, the United States is the only hyperpower with global reach and can even be regarded as the sole world hegemon.

As American generals are fond of repeating, the United States enjoys “full spectrum dominance” on land, on sea and in the air, and they are not reluctant to use America’s awesome military power. There are more than 750 U.S. military bases in at least 80 countries. They are spread from Europe to the Middle East to the Far East, right up to Japan, Australia, South Korea, and many offshore bases all over the world. NATO, which the United States leads, has 32 members and constitutes by far the biggest military alliance, surrounding Russia.

In addition to NATO in the West (which has also taken part in US wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East), there are a number of US-led alliances aimed at containing China. Following the Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) and Japan-U.S.-South Korea trilaterals, and the U.S.-Japan-India-Australia Quad, the latest US-Japan-Philippines military alliance is yet another initiative to isolate China and enhance the US’s position in the Asia-Pacific.

Since the Second World War when, on the ruins of European and Asian empires, the United States became the richest and strongest country in the world, it tried to extend its power and became a virtual empire. Although many justifications have been put forward for the use of nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the available evidence shows that one of the main reasons for their use was a demonstration of US power to Russia, which was emerging as the main US rival in the form of the former Soviet Union.

Shortly after the Second World War, the United States tried to stop the communist advance in the Far East with the invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, killing many millions of people in those countries. Those wars were really proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union and China. While during the Cold War, there existed some military balance between the Western and Soviet blocs, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States felt that all restrictions on her had been lifted and she could act as the sole superpower in a unipolar world. That gave rise to the US’s Operation Desert Shield to expel the Iraqi forces from Kuwait, which killed tens of thousands of Iraqi forces.

The war was followed by the invasion of Afghanistan following the 9/11 terrorist outrage, and later Iraq, and different military campaigns in Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, etc. Those wars killed a few million people and cost a few trillion dollars to US taxpayers. Following the expansion of NATO to nearly all former Warsaw Pact member states, and plans to bring Ukraine into NATO, President Putin felt he had no alternative but to invade Ukraine to prevent the establishment of NATO bases in the country that he regarded as Russia’s backyard.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Congress has provided Ukraine with at least $175b of military and humanitarian assistance. This is in addition to billions of dollars of military and economic aid given to Ukraine by Europe and other NATO members.

Since the horrendous HAMAS attack on Israel on 7 October, the Israeli government has conducted a merciless war and massacre on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and lately on Lebanon, which has killed at least 44,000, most of them women and children, 134-146 journalists, 120 academics, over 224 humanitarian aid workers, including 179 employees of UNRWA, and has injured hundreds of thousands of civilians. Most people in the Global South and even in Europe and the United States cannot understand how a Democratic administration can so blindly support a regime which according to ICJ, the world’s highest judicial authority, is engaged in “plausible genocide” and whose leaders are accused by the ICC of war crimes.

Although the Biden administration carries the major responsibility for arming Israel and becoming complicit in its war crimes, the decision of the Trump administration to grant Jerusalem and the Golan Heights to Israel, contrary to international law, and bribe some subservient Arab regimes to normalise relations with Israel in some phoney deals, known as the Abraham Accords, created a feeling of impunity among Israeli leaders who feel they can commit any crime and violate any international law without any sanctions or punishments. As a result, Israel has been acting as though it is above the law and can openly challenge and ignore numerous UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions. This blatant lawlessness and impunity endangers the entire international order and bodes ill for the future of the so-called “rules-based international order”.

In a landmark ruling on 19 July 2024, the ICJ “declared that Israel’s occupation of the Gaza strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is unlawful, along with the associated settlement regime, annexation and use of natural resources.” It called on Israel to immediately withdraw its forces and settlements from the occupied territories and pay reparation to the Palestinians. Not only has the US not implemented that resolution, but it has continued to deliver the most-deadly weapons to Israel enabling its genocide in Gaza and war crimes in the West Bank and Lebanon.

“No Extermination without Representation,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

The scope of the war on Gaza has now expanded to neighbouring countries with dangerous confrontations between Israel and Iran, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Far from punishing Israel for those war crimes, the United States has imposed further sanctions on Iran and several other Middle Eastern countries. Iran and Russia are two of the most sanctioned countries in the world. Not only have those unilateral sanctions not forced those countries to surrender to US demands, but they have also pushed Iran closer to Russia and Russia closer to China.

The recent BRICS summit in Kazan, held from 22-24 October, was convened with the participation of five new members, namely Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The new Nine-member BRICS partnership accounts for 45% of the world’s population and 30% of the world’s land surface. Its combined GDP of around US$65 trillion (35% of global GDP PPP) and an estimated US$5.2 trillion in combined foreign reserves are larger than that of the G7 bloc.

The wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East and growing conflict with China have brought the world to the brink of a devastating world war with unimaginable consequences. The planet is now in a more dangerous position than at any time since the Second World War. At the same time, the United States is now more isolated than ever. A good example of US isolation can be seen in the vote at the United Nations General Assembly on 30th October 2024, demanding an end to the US embargo on Cuba. Only the United States and Israel voted against the resolution, Moldova abstained, and 187 countries, including all European countries, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Canada, voted for it. This level of isolation, the whole world against the United States and Israel, is unprecedented.

Most American voters do not usually pay much attention to foreign affairs, but as can be seen from the above examples, in the current interconnected world no country can keep itself immune to international developments. What the United States does in its foreign policy matters and will boomerang back to itself. Without presuming to tell the Americans how to vote in the forthcoming election, I only wish to urge them to pay more attention to the US’s foreign policies and to American values that must govern those relations.

Well, it turns out that I’ve met a fair number of those undecided voters in person, going door to door canvassing in eastern Pennsylvania, where, it’s fair to say, the 2024 election may be decided. They’re real people, with perfectly real everyday concerns. They have families living in pleasant suburbs in and around Easton, Bethlehem, and Allentown, their neatly tended lawns a mix of grass, crabgrass, and dandelions, and older model SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks in their driveways. And I’d dare you to knock on one of their doors and, when someone answers, say, “So, who the hell are you?”

I get it: they’re easy to demonize, especially if you’re a liberal or leftist news junkie living on the Upper West Side of New York or in Takoma Park, Maryland, or Cambridge, Massachusetts; you read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, or Politico; and your Monday nights are built around watching Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart. I’m not surprised if, like Anne Enright, the novelist from University College Dublin, writing for “On the Election” in the New York Review of Books, you vent your pent-up frustration over undecideds who are “lonely and sometimes pathetically grandiose.” It upsets Enright to be “watching twelve billion election dollars chase down a few thousand anxious minds in Pennsylvania.” Can’t they just make up those minds of theirs?

To my mind, the forehead-slapping awe at those undecided in this presidential election took its purest form in a commentary by comedian and satirist Lewis Black on a recent episode of The Daily Show:

“We still have no idea who the fuck is gonna win! And that’s all thanks to one very special group of morons… Oh yes, undecided voters: the same people you see at the ice cream shop asking for 12 mini spoon samples. It’s a $3 cone, asshole! How is anyone still undecided in this election? … This election still comes down to winning over a few dozen Pennsylvanians with carbon monoxide poisoning. Now, don’t get me wrong. Maybe these undecided voters aren’t stupid. Maybe they have a good reason for being idiots.”

But one Sunday afternoon, while crisscrossing several blocks in a neighborhood of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, knocking on perhaps 40 front doors over several hours, I had the opportunity to talk to a number of those very undecideds. Out of the 40 homes curated from lists of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents — those who had, in fact, voted in recent elections — about half of them were home and came to the door. And of those 20, maybe half a dozen told me that they hadn’t yet decided who they were going to vote for or if they planned to vote at all.

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As a start, it turns out, a number of them haven’t really been following the news. According to research by the campaigns, many of them work two jobs. They don’t get the Times or the Post. Many, in fact, don’t even get the local paper. They know who’s running, but while they seemingly know a fair amount about Donald Trump, they know a lot less about Kamala Harris. They didn’t watch the two conventions on TV or even get around to watching the presidential debate between Harris and Trump. And, by the way, that puts them among the majority of Americans: an estimated 67 million people watched that event on September 10th, while 158 million people voted in 2020 and an additional 81 million eligible voters who didn’t cast a ballot back then missed it or skipped it.

My sense, from the voters I talked to — totally unscientific, yes, but backed up by some polling and research — is that voters who say they’re undecided have largely tuned out politics in these years. Maybe that’s because they’ve long come to believe that all politicians are corrupt or feckless; or maybe it’s because they’ve been around long enough to have concluded that “things never change” and that their own lives are only marginally affected by whoever’s in office; maybe it’s because with kids, a job (or two), caring for older parents or relatives with special needs, and struggling to make ends meet, they just don’t have space in their lives for “the news”; or maybe they just didn’t care to share their thoughts with a stranger at their door. Whatever the reasoning, not a single undecided voter I spoke to rejected the message I was carrying or pushed back hard against the idea that maybe Harris deserves a genuine look.

And they’re still up for grabs. The lead story in the October 22nd New York Times was headlined: “Battle is Fierce for Sliver of Pie: Undecided Votes.” Its subhead: “Election Could Hinge on People Who Aren’t ‘Super Political.’”

Harris Chipping Away at Undecideds?

So, how many are there? With the polls showing a razor-thin difference between Harris and Trump among those who have indeed made up their minds, it’s hard to pin down exactly how many people may still be undecided. By some measure, since early summer, things may have been moving toward the Democrats when evaluating undecided voters. According to a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll and analysis, before President Biden quit the race the number of undecideds was just 3%. But when he quit, that number jumped to 9%, reflecting the fact that Harris was an unknown quantity to many Americans. According to PBS, that number shrank after the September debate, as potential voters, women in particular, learned more about Harris, especially over the abortion rights issue. The New York Times reported that the Trump campaign has found that the number of undecideds has fallen from around 10% in August to perhaps 5% today.

And according to Newsweek, citing an Emerson College survey of undecided voters, in recent weeks those voters have been breaking Harris’s way by an almost 2-1 margin. “Emerson College polling, conducted between October 14 and 16,” that magazine reported, “shows that among undecided voters who chose who they would vote for in the past week or month, 60 percent opted for the Democratic vice president, while 36 percent opted for Republican former President Donald Trump.”

It’s impossible, of course, to determine precisely how many voters are actually undecided. Some surveys put the number at about 13%, others at just 3% or so. A Times/Siena survey found that, in the “swing states” alone, the undecideds are 3.7%, or 1.2 million potential voters. Whatever their numbers, in an election in which polls have consistently recorded essentially a swing-state dead heat between Harris and Trump, even that tiny number might be enough to tilt the final result. However, undecided voters could also simply decide to sit out the election (as many analysts suggest they might do) or, if their votes split evenly, have no effect at all on the final tally.

In addition to partisan voters, and those enthusiastic about one candidate or the other, there are those characterized as “swing voters,” “low-information voters,” or simply infrequent voters. All of those categories can reasonably be imagined as “persuadable,” though the cost-benefit ratio involved in efforts to reach them and get them to the polls could be prohibitive. A pair of professors and election specialists, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques, writing for Time, argue that so-called swing voters — “who do lean towards one candidate but are open to voting for the alternative” — will be critical on November 5th. And surprisingly enough, swing voters (including undecideds) may add up to as much as 15% of the current electorate, according to a Times/Siena poll that the two authors cite.

Unfortunately, Harris may not be helping herself, given how she’s running her campaign. At its start, she benefited enormously from a skyrocketing burst of enthusiasm triggered by President Biden’s decision to drop out. His age, seeming infirmity, and catastrophically bad debate performance against Trump cast a pall of depression over many Democratic organizations and activists, and it seemed Trump then had a path toward a clear victory. But Harris’s emergence, her emphasis on “joy” and optimism (and Tim Walz’s effective use of the term “weird” to describe the GOP ticket) touched off a swell of — yes! — optimism. According to Forbes, when Biden was the Democratic candidate, just 30% of Democrats claimed to be enthusiastic about voting in November versus 59% of Trump supporters. By early September, however, 68% of Harris supporters expressed enthusiasm against just 60% of Trump backers.

Since then, however, some have argued that her campaign has been lackluster, her speeches too carefully scripted and vetted, too cautious and repetitive, dampening some of the enthusiasm that erupted over the summer. As Robert Kuttner wrote in “Harris and the Enthusiasm Gap” for The American Prospect, “Interviews and focus groups keep quoting undecided or Trump-leaning voters as saying that they don’t really know what Harris stands for. Could that be because her own message is blurred?”

Still, Harris has maintained a slight but consistent lead over Trump in national polls ever since the Democratic convention and has lately scheduled a burst of interviews on 60 Minutes, Fox News, “The View,” Stephen Colbert’s late show, the popular women’s podcast “Call Her Daddy,” Univision, and a CNN town hall.

The Turnout Imperative

By all accounts, the Democratic ground game — canvassing, phone banking, text banking, postcard writing, local candidate rallies, tables at local events, and more — has been far superior to the GOP’s. Even when taking into account efforts like Elon Musk’s supposed army of paid volunteers, Harris’s on-the-ground efforts are three times the size of Trump’s, according to the Washington Post: “She boasts more staff, more volunteers, a larger surrogate operation, more digital advertising, a more sophisticated smartphone-based organizing program and extra money for extraneous bells and whistles typically reserved for corporate product launches and professional sports championships.”

In eastern Pennsylvania, as I saw, local and out-of-state unions are going all-out in canvassing, voter registration, and GOTV drives. When I visited Democratic headquarters in Easton, Pennsylvania, in early October, its large meeting hall was filled with what looked like a hundred union volunteers in matching T-shirts from Local 1199 SEIU (Service Employees International Union), who had traveled to Easton from Newark, New Jersey.

That area, part of Northampton County, just north of the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia, is a mostly working-class region of 320,000 people, increasingly diverse and still bearing the mark of a fading heavy manufacturing base. (Billy Joel’s 1982 anthem, “Allentown” — like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” — is an ode to what Allentown once was and what it was becoming: “Well, we’re living here in Allentown/And they’re closing all the factories down/Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time/Filling out forms, standing in line.”) For the Harris campaign, it’s a vital area.

In a feature story on the 2024 campaigns in Northampton County, the Washington Post noted that the county has voted for the winner in almost every election for a century:

“The battle over voters in Northampton County reflects some of the biggest themes and tensions running through the presidential contest all across America less than three weeks from Election Day. Strategists view Pennsylvania as perhaps the most important swing state on the map this year and believe its 19 electoral college votes could be the tipping point. Northampton is an unusual cross-section of the country — one of 26 ‘pivot’ counties nationwide that backed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.”

If you’re not from one of the swing states, much of the presidential campaign has undoubtedly gone largely unnoticed, since electioneering and campaign ads are targeted and often particularly designed for the states, cities, and communities that are most in play. If you live in a place like Allentown or Bethlehem, on the other hand, you’ve been inundated. “I’m a Pennsylvania native and have been through many election cycles in a state that is no stranger to high-profile competitive campaigns, but I haven’t seen anything like what is playing out here this fall,” Christopher Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, told the Times. “I share a laugh with my mailman when he drops off our mail because of the size of the pile of mailers he brings each day, and I’m getting used to evenings and weekends full of knocks on my door.”

The Harris campaign, especially, has gone high tech and there are a host of phone apps and websites that have emerged in recent election cycles to apply technology to local campaigning. Many of them, like Reach, allow canvassers and campaigners to chat with each other, keep track of voter conversations and results from door-knocking and phone banking, while updating information as it’s collected, and maintaining a file on which voters are interested, say, in volunteering or making a donation.

When canvassing myself in Bethlehem, I used Minivan, another popular phone app from NGP, which describes itself as “the leading technology provider to Democratic and progressive political campaigns and organizations, nonprofits, municipalities and other groups.” Through it, activists can “access an integrated platform of the best fundraising, compliance, field, organizing, digital and social networking products.” Even for the uninitiated (like me) Minivan is simple to use. After visiting a voter on a neighborhood walking tour, it’s easy to report whether that voter is home or away, record notes on your conversation, and enter other data that’s instantly synced into the system for follow-up.

Reach, Minivan, and other systems (including the progressive donation site ActBlue) can be accessed through Mobilize.us, which claims to have connected 5.5 million volunteers to local political actions nationwide. (That, too, for a novice like me, was blessedly easy to use.) Saying that it provides “the most powerful tools for organizing,” Mobilize.us can link any volunteer with “single-shift events,” recurring events, virtual events (like Zoom programs), in-person events (like rallies, speeches, and debates), and phone call campaigns to legislative offices.

In Pennsylvania, as in many parts of the country, voting is already underway. It’s far too early to make sense of what’s known so far, but it’s at least encouraging for Harris partisans that, of the more than one million mail-in ballots already returned, 62% came from Democrats and just 29% from Republicans. Even in Northampton County, hardly a Democratic Party bulwark, mail-in ballots are running about two to one in favor of the Democrats. And canvassers like me, the phalanx from 1199 SEIU, made sure that every voter we spoke to knew how to cast their votes early or by mail.

At this point, of course, it’s just fingers crossed and keep ringing those doorbells until November 5th, since the one thing none of us can afford is a Project 2025 version of a Trump presidency.

Copyright 2024 Bob Dreyfuss

Via Tomdispatch.com

Given that Helene’s human impact was plain for all to see, what struck me was that significant numbers of headlines about that storm’s devastation centered not on those people hardest hit, but on the bizarre conspiracy theories of extremist observers: that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is funneling tens of millions in funds and supplies meant for hurricane survivors to migrants, that the Biden administration has been in cahoots with meteorologists to control the weather, or that Biden and crew actually planned the storm! One of my personal favorites came from a neighbor I encountered at the post office in our rural Maryland town: we don’t have enough money for FEMA rescue operations, she told me, because we’re funding Israeli healthcare and housing — a reference, undoubtedly, to the tens of billions of dollars of bombs and other aid this country has sent Israel’s military in its war in Gaza and beyond.

Of course, some conspiracy theories have a grain of truth at their core: if only we had focused long ago on issues of human welfare here instead of funding decades of foreign wars, it’s possible we might not be living in such an inequitable, infrastructurally weak country, or one increasingly devastated by climate-change-affected weather. But why did it take the deranged rantings of figures like former President Donald Trump and multibillionaire Elon Musk on social media to begin a discussion about how we choose to spend limited federal dollars? If only more government relief money was indeed spent on basic human necessities like housing and healthcare, anywhere at all, and not on war!

All of this ambient chatter has had an impact as real as the 140 mile-per-hour-plus winds and severe flooding that razed communities in six states across the Southeast in the last month and killed hundreds of Americans, with more still missing. In a region where death remains so omnipresent that observers can smell human bodies as they drive through mountain passes, conspiracy theories have led to real threats that forced FEMA crews to relocate from hard-hit Rutherford County, North Carolina, after reports of armed militia members who said they were “hunting FEMA.”

Given the truly destructive nature of all that chatter, I wasn’t surprised to hear New York Times “The Daily” host Michael Barbaro open one of his podcasts about Hurricane Milton with a question to fellow political journalist Maggie Haberman that would have seemed odd in any other context: “How quickly do we expect this storm to become political?”

How quickly do we expect this storm to become political? How about: How long before the next storm hits category 4 or even 5 status and makes landfall? It seems as if the world we’re living in isn’t Helene’s or Milton’s but the alternative-factual world of former Trump staffer Kellyanne Conway and forecasting what nonsense will pop up next about the weather (or almost anything else) has become more real than the weather itself.

The Complex Identity of Rural America

At the start of the Covid pandemic, I moved to a fairly progressive rural community in Maryland after my family purchased a small farm there where we have an orchard, a large produce garden, and a flock of egg-laying chickens (all of which are, I suppose, our versions of hobbies). I remain confounded by the fact that so many Americans — especially rural ones — vote for the party whose leaders divert aid and attention from solving problems that affect their communities, including the hurricane season and other kinds of extreme weather, not to speak of the rescue work that follows such natural disasters, and the need to provide services and protection for migrants who work on such farms and in rural businesses. Case in point: Republican members of the House and Senate voted against stopgap funding for FEMA a few weeks before Helene hit, doing their part to jeopardize aid to so many of their supporters, even though such efforts may ultimately prove unsuccessful.

It’s well known that many rural Americans provide a bulwark of support for Republican candidates and far-right causes. During the 2016 presidential elections, Donald Trump gained more backing from that group than any other president had in modern American history. The impact of rural America on his coalition of voters in the 2020 presidential elections was comparable to that of labor unions for Democrats.

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Some rural voters also have spoken up loudly when it comes to far-right causes and identity politics. Typically, Tractor Supply Company, which bills itself as the “largest rural lifestyle retailer” and sells gardening tools, feed, small livestock, clothing, and guns, among other things, succumbed last summer to a pressure campaign from its customers to stop anti-discrimination and awareness-raising diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring programs that had previously earned it national recognition. Its management also pledged to stop participating in LGBTQ+ pride events and eliminate its previous goals to cut carbon emissions in its operations. The campaign kicked off after a right-wing influencer in Tennessee, who ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in 2022, posted on X that the company was funding sex changes, among other baseless accusations.

Rural America and Climate Change

I had to balk at such a campaign. Anywhere you look in my town, you can find evidence of how initiatives like Tractor Supply Company’s serve to benefit our community.

To consider (at least to my mind) the most pressing case in point, it’s increasingly difficult for people to farm in today’s climate because governments are not curbing greenhouse gas emissions fast enough. The Biden administration has significantly chipped away at the problem by investing in clean energy, reining in the worst corporate polluters, and curbing emissions and coal usage. Unfortunately, this country still produces record amounts of oil and natural gas, and the ravages of extreme weather in my mid-Atlantic agricultural community are plain to see, as is also true nationally.

Let me share a few small-scale, personal examples. A few years ago, I found that there was enough water locally and nighttime temperatures dipped sufficiently low to grow vegetables, meaning my family wouldn’t have to purchase much produce during the summer months. The past two summers, however, heat, wildfire smoke, and more recently, drought, have made small-scale farming prohibitively difficult, at least for my less experienced hands. My tomatoes haven’t cooled enough at night to ripen sufficiently. More than half of the new fruit trees I purchased to add to our orchard died for lack of sufficient water, and I found myself having to stay up in our barn with one of my best laying hens that I found collapsed from heat stroke one summer day. Dipping her little feet in cool water and forcing electrolytes down her beak ultimately revived her, but the near death of that tiny animal that the local Tractor Supply branch had sold me and advertised as “heat hardy” shook me.

Worse yet, earlier this spring, wildfires swept through my back woods and neighborhood, burning down one of my neighbor’s sheds, threatening numerous homes, including mine, and forcing a neighboring farm to evacuate their livestock. And even worse than that, there wasn’t enough water in my once robust creek for the local fire department to extinguish the flames quickly before the fire impacted several properties.

Our family is lucky. We each have a full-time job to sustain us and so don’t have to rely on farming to do anything but enrich our lives. Unfortunately, other families who have bravely sought to feed more people for a living can’t always say the same. Hurricane Helene is a case in point. According to the American Farm Bureau, that storm (and Milton on its heels) had a unique impact on rural communities and agriculture, with billions of dollars in fruit, nuts, and poultry lost. Food supply in rural communities across the Southeast has already been impacted and grocery price increases throughout the country will be likely.

In the U.S., where more than half of all land is used for agricultural purposes, the number of farms has been decreasing since the 1930s. And while climate change has made growing seasons longer, it’s also made the weather far less predictable. Despite farmers scaling up production and adapting their methods, doing everything from bringing horticulture indoors to using recycled human food waste as feed, yield has fallen and it’s growing ever more difficult to stay in the black. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the crucial global research body tracking that phenomenon, recently found that the largest casualty of our overheating planet is the struggle of agriculture to produce enough food for people to live, leading to growing food insecurity in regions around the world.

Worse yet, government efforts to help farmers survive sometimes create more problems than they solve. For example, financial and tax incentives for farmers who can demonstrate that they are using their crops to capture carbon require large amounts of paperwork, while climate regulations that may help farms in the long run entail red tape and restrictions that make paying the bills far harder in the short term. Yet some of the more vulnerable farmers like those in communities of color have welcomed recent government interventions as reparations for decades of discrimination in federal loan programs, as have indigenous communities who benefit from grants to develop more sustainable farming practices.

Nonetheless, if voting patterns and consumer pressure campaigns are any harbinger of the future, too many rural voters and consumers don’t seem to be thinking about how to create just such sustainable farming practices in a climate-changing world. Instead, the loudest voices in rural America seem focused on fear-based identity politics and anger rather than what elected officials have — and have not — said and done to aid their everyday lives in increasingly difficult times.

By some indicators, rural lives have only grown far more precarious in our moment and maybe that helps explain why so many farm families are frustrated with the powers that be. Farmers in this country are more than three times as likely to die by suicide as people in the general population. Factors like high rates of gun ownership and social isolation have an impact, but so do unpredictable weather, supply chain interruptions born of the Covid-19 pandemic, and our government’s slow and haphazard response to so much in the Trump years.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

I find it perplexing that the rural customers of Tractor Supply rejected diversity, equity, and inclusion campaigns from that rural retailer, since people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ folks make up a significant part of rural communities, just not the well-paid or well supported ones. Most farmworkers who tend crops and livestock and engage in other forms of manual labor like processing or transporting our food are, in fact, foreign born and work for only the little more than half of the year that encompasses the growing season. Those workers or others in their families need to get second jobs just to make ends meet. They are more at risk of climate- and access-related health issues because of air pollution and heat-stroke. Such risks were compounded by Trump-era policies that cut federal funding for rural health centers and curbed insurance regulations in struggling rural clinics and hospitals.

In an America where discrimination as well as pay gaps based on race, gender, and sexual orientation remain rampant, making equity a priority can only help those who actually sustain this country’s farming communities. In my county, where equity and inclusiveness are central to social policy, about a third of the children at our small rural school receive free lunches and other services. That portion of the school population consists significantly of kids whose parents are willing to do low-wage work on local farms and that’s not generally white, American-born families.

What’s clear is that Donald Trump’s politics of grievance appeals to voters who see their lives and those of their children worsening, not getting better, as time goes by. Social science research has identified emotions like anger, fear, and nostalgia as key to his appeal to rural Americans and other groups whose health indicators, isolation, and economic well-being are only worsening. If his recent seemingly unhinged “dance party” in Pennsylvania is anything to go by, I suspect he’s hearkening back to a time in American history when communities were smaller, life was simpler, and racism was rampant and — yes! — unhinged. (Note, by the way, his inclusion of “Dixie,” the unofficial Confederate anthem, on that playlist he danced to for 39 straight minutes.) While rural America certainly struggles in more ways than I can describe, it’s precisely the things that Democratic candidates are trying to do now that would bring them back to a healthier, more sustainable way of life.

In a world where the weather’s only growing worse, if my community is a good example — and I suspect it’s as good as any — rural Americans need to think hard when they go to the ballot box (or the cash register) and consider the universe of hard scientific facts rather than just listening to the latest conspiracy monger on X or Instagram. Their lives and their livelihoods may just depend on it.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

As the pundits weighed in on Joe Biden’s abysmal performance at that June 27th debate with Donald Trump and cast doubt on his prospects for reelection, “learned helplessness“ was used over and over again in the days leading up to his withdrawal from the presidential race in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris. Two days after the debate, for instance, The Economist, focusing on Biden’s refusal to declare himself a non-candidate for the presidency, concluded that “many [Democrats] have fallen into learned helplessness,” as evidenced by the gap between their private doubts and their public assertions.

Writing for the San Francisco-based progressive daily, 48hills, Bruce Mirkin chastised the Democrats for choosing hopelessness over hope. “Instead of ‘yes, we can,’” he wrote, “the instinctive response from a good portion of the folks who should be helping to defend democracy seems to be ‘no, we can’t.’” He then labeled the party’s inaction “learned helplessness.” Jordan Zakarin, writing for the Center for American Progress Action’s Progress Report, extended that diagnosis from “the worst debate performance in modern history” to the larger moment in Washington. He pointed, for instance, to Attorney General Merrick Garland having “slow-walked prosecuting Donald Trump.” “It is,” he concluded, “a learned helplessness,” a “preemptive surrender.”

The question is: What should we make of the concept of “learned helplessness”? Where did it come from and what are the remedies writ large? In this distinctly disturbing moment in our history, is it possible that an all-American version of despair and hopelessness has changed in light of Joe Biden’s backing out of the presidential race?

The Psychological Concept

To better understand the sudden shower of references to “learned helplessness,” a little history is in order. In the late 1960s, psychologist Martin Seligman coined the term while conducting experiments with dogs. He had accidentally stumbled on the fact that dogs that experienced electrical shocks without having any control over starting or stopping them were ultimately rendered strangely passive. They proved unwilling to move, even to escape further mistreatment.

After more experiments demonstrated that being subjected to severe pain or stress did indeed induce a state of inaction in dogs, Seligman then turned to humans and discovered that individuals who had suffered an act or acts of trauma and abuse continued, well after the painful incident, to show signs of depression and anxiety that rendered them completely unable to act. They continued to exist, he discovered, in a state of profound resignation and inaction, long after the traumatic moment in which they found themselves powerless. Afterward, they were convinced that nothing was under their control, that any action they might take would be futile, and that failure was inevitable, should they even try to act. (Later studies suggested that some elderly individuals might also experience such a state of profound resignation and inaction in response to “stressful life events,” at times in association with dementia.)

But here’s the truly strange thing: more than three decades later in the years after the 9/11 attacks, Seligman’s concept of “learned helplessness” would be quite purposely baked into the interrogation and torture program created and implemented for war on terror detainees by American officials during the administration of President George W. Bush. As the executive summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s torture report explained, one of the two psychologists contracted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the purpose of devising its interrogation program “had reviewed research on ‘learned helplessness,’ in which individuals might become passive and depressed in response to adverse or uncontrollable events. He theorized,” the report added, “that inducing such a state could encourage a detainee to cooperate and provide information.”

That psychologist, Bruce Mitchell, even met with Seligman while designing techniques to use on war-on-terror detainees suspected of ties to the 9/11 terror group al-Qaeda and its leadership at the secret “black sites” the CIA set up globally. (Seligman, it seems, had no idea of the horrors Mitchell and his associates were planning.) Ironically enough, Seligman’s findings and his concept of “learned helplessness” would indeed become a basic part of the development of the CIA’s torture program. (Seligman would come to condemn the use of the concept for interrogations at those black sites. As The Washington Post reported, “When [Seligman] later learned through media accounts how it was employed — for enhanced interrogation — he issued a statement: ‘I am grieved and horrified that good science, which has helped so many people overcome depression, may have been used for such bad purposes.’”)

To induce a profound state of helplessness, those post-9/11 captives were sent to the CIA’s black sites where they were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” designed to elicit information from them. Their torture included beatings, being smashed into walls, being hung by their limbs in excruciatingly painful positions, forced nudity, sodomy, and repeated sleep deprivation, among other things. The CIA also used waterboarding (subjecting detainees to the feeling of drowning), placed them in coffin-like boxes, and threatened to use a gun or a power drill on those who refused to give answers sought by their interrogators. Just last month, in a pre-trial hearing at the forever prison the Bush administration set up offshore — and away from the federal court system — at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002, such techniques were once again described in detail, this time by John Bruce Jessen, the psychologist who, along with Mitchell, designed the nightmarish interrogation program. In addition to his testimony, he also demonstrated the technique of “walling,” which involved slamming a detainee’s head against a wall.

The goal was simple: to reduce that prisoner to a profound state of complete paralysis and disempowerment in which, having no hope of relief or escape, he would do whatever his captors wanted. Detainees would see that there was no way out but to answer their captors’ questions, which, it turned out, often led them, in desperation and a state of learned helplessness, to confess to things they hadn’t done, to confess to whatever their captors wanted to hear.

Buy the Book

Having studied and written about the nightmare of those prisoners and Guantánamo for so many years now, it’s been supremely jarring to see the term “learned helplessness” re-emerge in connection to the current unnerving state of American politics and the 2024 presidential election. Yet, in many ways, it seems a strangely appropriate lens through which to view the world of Donald Trump and the rest of us. It was true, as many commented, that a sense of learned helplessness indisputably crept into the mindset of so many of us in this country — at least prior to Joe Biden’s decision not to pursue a second term as president.

The American people have indeed suffered multiple stressful, even traumatic experiences in recent years. The shock of a government that didn’t protect them on September 11, 2001; the devastating experience of a president who refused to protect them from Covid, as bodies piled up on the streets of this country; the winnowing away of rights and liberties once protected by the Constitution and the Supreme Court — from the overturning of Roe v. Wade to a rash of recent decisions, including one that gave a president essential immunity in relation to more or less anything he did, no matter how devastating; the inability of the courts to proceed in their prosecutions of Donald Trump; the nearly paralyzed state of a riven Congress amid an economic reality that has led so many younger Americans to be unable to purchase their own homes or send their children to college — all have collectively cowed the population. Even before both the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision and the dismal debate performance of Biden, a sense of learned helplessness seemed well in place, and understandably so.

The Republican Party has also succumbed to a state of learned helplessness. One after another, former opponents of Trump and the MAGA ideology he stands for have succumbed to his agenda and given up on pursuing their own independent goals. Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance is certainly a case in point. Having formerly called out Trump for his lack of morality, his xenophobia, and his racism, as well as for being a “total fraud” and “America’s Hitler,” he is now on board with the ideas he once said he deplored, including, for example, an untethered anti-immigration stance that calls for massive deportations of illegal immigrants. Similarly, Trump’s Republican election opponent Nikki Haley has given up her “legacy of blunt assessments and brutal takedowns” of the former president, as The Nation’s John Nichols has aptly described her opposition to Trump, whom she once described as “a dangerous stooge of Russian president Vladimir Putin.”

The question is: What, if anything, does the research tell us about curing such a state?

Is There, in Fact, a Cure?

Psychologists do point to remedies for such a profound state of hopelessness. They suggest several healing paths forward, including therapy to examine the causes of one’s despair and to discover constructive paths beyond it; exercise to stimulate the body and the mind; and a commitment to “learned optimism,” a pattern of reaction geared to expecting the best rather than the worst out of any situation. As Psychology Today points out, “Seligman later developed the concept of learned optimism. By explaining events to ourselves in a constructive manner and developing a positive internal dialogue, people can break free from their cycle of helplessness.” Small wins and an energized commitment to positivity are basic tenets of finding a way to “learned optimism.”

If a turn towards optimism offers a way out of the helplessness of our times, perhaps we are seeing the beginning of just such an event. Recently, Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick, again invoking the term “learned helplessness,” suggested that reports of the plans of the Biden administration to back Supreme Court reform were a sign of the kind of future “systemwide cognitive reboot for American voters that seems almost inconceivable in the generalized torpor and despair of July 2024.” The headline of her article read, appropriately enough, “Are We Finally Letting Go of Our Learned-Helplessness Syndrome Around the Supreme Court?”

So, too, the outpouring of energy and excitement following Biden’s decision to bow out of the presidential race and the enthusiasm for newer, younger Democratic Party leadership — and for Vice President Kamala Harris, in particular — already seems eons removed from the head-shaking resignation of Democratic voters confronting a “choice” between an aging Joe Biden and You Know Who on election day. In fact, in many ways, that new turn of affairs could be just what the doctor ordered, though, of course, a possible November election victory for Donald Trump could still put the phrase “learned helplessness” in a grimly new light.

For Democrats, the idea that there could be a brighter future, one in which a sense of control replaced one of powerlessness — an election in which their presidential candidate has a viable chance of winning — has taken hold. In place of anxiety and depression, there is optimism, or at least a “cautious hope.” Declaring her “immense pride and limitless optimism for our country’s future,” Nancy Pelosi echoed the importance of this newfound optimism when endorsing Kamala Harris as the party’s candidate for 2024. As Tim Alberta summed it up in The Atlantic, “As far back as springtime, the numbers told a straightforward story: Biden was not going to win. Democrats could only look on, powerless.” However, now, he concludes, it is the Republicans who are feeling hope and control fade away: “Sunday brought an unfamiliar feeling of powerlessness. For the first time in a long time, Trump does not control the narrative of 2024.”

Whether or not such optimism gains momentum in the potentially tumultuous days ahead remains to be seen, as does whether the Republicans can find a way out of their own potential sense of learned helplessness in the face of a changing scenario. Whatever happens, given what I know about the past use of that phrase and the nightmare of the war on terror’s use of torture, my own hope is that, with election 2024, the very concept of learned helplessness and the realities it represents, whether it applies to torture at the hands of the U.S. government or suffering at the hands of Trumpian politics, can finally be politically laid to rest.

Call it learned optimism, if you wish, but fingers crossed.

Copyright 2024 Karen Greenberg

Tomdispatch.com

The Labor Party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, overturned a big Conservative majority of 80 seats in the Parliament achieved by Boris Johnson’s victory in December 2019, with an unprecedented majority of 412 Labor seats to the Conservative Party’s 121 seats, a gain of 211 seats by Labor and a loss of 250 seats by the Conservatives.

Only five years ago, the Labor party led by Jeremy Corbyn suffered its biggest loss since 1935, while in this election the Conservative Party suffered the biggest defeat in its entire history. The election has completely changed Britain’s political landscape. The Conservative Party is a big vote-winning machine and regards itself as the natural party of government. It has ruled Britain for most of its recent history. As the result of winning this election, Keir Starmer has become the 58^th UK prime minister, but only the 7^th Labor prime minister. This shows the scale of the dominance of  British politics by the Conservative, and in the past by a few Liberal prime ministers.

This also shows the significance of the latest Labor victory. The scale of this victory was even bigger than Margaret Thatcher’s landslide victory in 1983 when she won 397 seats to Labor’s 209 seats, or the former Labor landslide victory in 1997 under Tony Blair when Labor won 418 seats compared to the Conservative’s 165 seats, with a gain of 145 seats by Labor and the loss of 178 seats by the Conservatives.

A large number of prominent Conservative ministers have lost their seats and have been kicked out of the parliament. They include former Prime Minister Liz Truss, the House of Commons Leader Penny Mordant who was tipped as a future Tory leader, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg who was a former cabinet minister and the leader of the Commons, and 12 other cabinet ministers, including Defense Secretary Grant Shapps, Justice Secretary Alex Chalk, Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer, Chief Whip Simon Hart, and many other prominent Tories who have fallen by the wayside.

Contrary to US elections where campaigning goes on virtually for the second half of a presidential term, the latest British campaign only lasted six weeks. Elections were held from 7.00 in the morning to 10.00 at night on Thursday. The ballots were counted overnight and the results were announced by 09.00 in the morning. Rishi Sunak, the outgoing Conservative prime minister, conceded defeat at around 03.00 in the morning and in a gracious speech accepted responsibility and apologized for the election defeat, and congratulated Keir Starmer for his impressive victory.

Early in the morning, he and his family left their apartment in 10 Downing Street, went to see King Charles to submit his resignation, followed shortly by Keir Starmer who was invited by the king to form the new government. Starmer drove with his wife back to 10 Downing Street by mid-day and gave his first speech as prime minister in front of the famous black doors of his new residence.

The transfer of power in UK elections is among the fastest, smoothest and most orderly changes of governments in the world. The outgoing prime minister did not question the accuracy of the votes, did not try to overturn the election results and did not ask his deputy prime minister to subvert the will of the electorate. Within a 24-hour period, the election was held, results were announced, the former prime minister left office and the new one took over.

The new prime minister spent the afternoon finalizing the members of his government who will take part in the first cabinet meeting tomorrow morning. The first King’s Speech, which includes the policies of the new government will be delivered to the members of both Houses of Parliament on July 18^th.

Another important aspect of these elections was that, contrary to a number of European countries where we have seen a move to the extreme right, this election resulted in the triumph of a left-of-center party against a rightwing Conservative Party. In many recent elections in Hungary, Holland, Germany, Italy and recently in France we have seen big wins by far-right parties.

Sunak could have remained in power till next January but, encouraged by a fall in the inflation rate and a few favorable economic indicators, he called an early election hoping that Labor and the far-right Reform Party would be unprepared for it. His gamble resulted in the biggest loss for his party.

However, although on paper, Keir Starmer has achieved a remarkable victory, the future may not be as rosy as it seems at the moment. The country is facing a number of major economic problems, including low productivity, high interest rates resulting in high mortgages and high prices, a widening gap between the rich and the poor, long waiting lists for seeing a doctor or a dentist and unacceptable delays in hospital admissions, etc.

In his first speech outside Number 10 Downing Street, Starmer who had won with his slogan of “Change” referred to the public’s mistrust of politicians and said: “Change begins now … We said we would end the chaos, and we will, we said we would turn the page, and we have. Today, we start the next chapter, begin the work of change, the mission of national renewal and start to rebuild our country.” However, he admitted: “Changing a country is not like flicking a switch. And the world is now a more volatile place. This will take a while.”

The problem is that millions of people who have been suffering as the result of a long recession and who have pinned their hopes on rapid change under the new government may not be willing to wait too long for all the promises to be fulfilled.

LBC Video: “Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘warning’ for Keir Starmer” | LBC

The other problem is that although the number of seats that have been won may look very impressive on paper, the Labor victory has not been based on solid foundations. Labor may have come to dominate the parliament but it has won only 36% of the vote. The Conservatives won 23%, and Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party won some 17% of the vote. In other words, the combined number of votes cast for rightwing parties exceeds the numbere of votes cast for Labor. The vote has been a rejection of the Conservative Party and not necessarily an endorsement of the Labor Party.

Nigel Farage, a close friend and supporter of President Trump, was the leader of the far-right UK Independence Party (UKIP) from 2006 to 2009, and 2010 to 2016. He was also the main force behind Brexit who pushed for the referendum under former Prime Minister Cameron and who supported Boris Johnson to get it done. He stood unsuccessfully seven times to win a seat in the Parliament and succeeded yesterday in his eighth attempt.

Being disillusioned by the failure of Brexit to stop large numbers of migrants to Britain and to achieve what he called full political and economic independence from Europe, he formed the Reform UK party, and only during the election campaign he stood again for parliament.

His party which is way to the right of the Conservative Party won 17% of the vote, but due to the nature of the first past the post system of voting in Britain, it won only four seats in the parliament. Most former Conservative voters who were fed up with the party voted for Reform, resulting in big losses for the Conservative Party. Reform came in second place in 103 constituencies, set against only three during the last election in 2019, when a pact with Boris Johnson led it to hold off contesting Conservative-held seats.

Consequently, the big Labor win is more due to the hemorrhage from the Conservatives to Reform, rather than due to support for Labor. The Reform Party which devastated the Conservatives in this election has vowed to target Labor in the future and become the main opposition to Labor. This should ring alarm bells for the Labor Party, especially if the government cannot stem the tide of illegal immigration or if it tries to reach some agreements to cooperate with the EU.

While Reform poses a threat from the right, many people on the left of the Labor Party are also very worried about the center-right policies of the new Labor Party. Many leftwing labor supporters even regard Starmer a traitor who went along with a rightwing campaign against former Labor leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Cornyn who advocated socialist policies and even opposed the possession of nuclear weapons and NATO membership had many supporters in the Labor Party, especially among younger members. He built Labor into the biggest political party in Europe.

However, he became the victim of an extensive campaign of vilification and was accused of anti-Semitism. The fact remains that, as in most Western countries, there are more antisemites in the extreme right groups than in socialist groups. However, the well-orchestrated campaign resulted in Corbyn’s defeat in the 2019 election, which was won by Boris Johnson. Although the Labor Party attracted many more members under Corbyn than before, the anti-Semitism campaign was very effective and led to his undoing.

It is interesting to note that Starmer got three million votes less in 2024 than Corbyn got in 2017 and half a million votes less than Corbyn got in 2019. However, due to the vagaries of the British voting system, Corbyn went to a crashing defeat, while Starmer won a landslide victory in 2024. After his defeat in 2019, Corbyn resigned as party leader and Starmer who had been appointed as EU negotiator by Corbyn was elected leader. He waged a relentless campaign of purging the Labor Party of alleged antisemites, and when Corbyn protested that the extent of antisemitism in the party had been exaggerated, Starmer expelled him from the party. In this election, Corbyn stood as an independent candidate in his constituency and won with a big manority.

All of this has alienated a considerable number of leftwing members of the Labor Party who have never forgiven Starmer for his alleged betrayal of his former boss. In a rare recent interview, Corbyn said that the pressure of the Israeli government on the Labor Party had been huge and this had led to his ouster. He said: “During one extremely hostile meeting of the Parliamentary Labor Party Committee, they confronted me and said will you give a blanket undertaking that you, as party leader and potentially prime minister will automatically support any military action Israel undertakes? And I said No, I give no such undertaking. I will give no such agreement because the issue of Palestine has to be resolved and Palestinian people do not deserve to live under occupation, and the siege of Gaza has created the most incredible stress, and by the way I have been there on nine occasions in Israel, Palestine and the West Bank… So, was I surprised at this support for Israel? No, because the pressure of the Israeli government on the Labor Party is huge…”

So, although at the moment the Labor victory is sweet and the government will be able to do a great deal of good for the country, there are some clouds in the horizon which might become threatening in the future, especially if the new government is not able to resolve all the problems quickly and adequately.

( RFE/RL ) – More than 60 percent of Iran’s electorate did not vote in the June 28 presidential election, despite it being billed as an important poll given the role that the next president could play in the succession to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

With no candidate managing to secure enough votes to win the election outright, a second round of voting will be held on July 5 between reformist hopeful Masud Pezeshkian and hard-line conservative and former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili.

The record-low turnout came after widespread calls by dissidents at home and abroad to boycott the election, arguing that no change has come from voting in past elections.

Iran has seen a trend of sliding voter turnout since 2020 that is driven in part by a growing frustration over a lack of freedoms, a faltering economy, and declining living standards.

Speaking to RFE/RL’s Radio Farda, Sweden-based Iranian political activist Mahdieh Golrou said the declining voter turnout in recent major elections was also the direct result of “a coordinated act of civil disobedience” that allows the disillusioned public to “communicate their dissent to the authorities.”

More than 50 political activists in Iran and other countries have called on the masses to continue their boycott going into the July 5 runoff.

“Any political participation or vote for handpicked and powerless candidates is a dark and bitter joke,” the activists, including imprisoned Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi, said in a statement on June 30.

They argued that by shunning the Islamic republic’s “rigged scenarios,” the public would place itself in a position of power and facilitate the “fall of the regime.”

The Fear Factor

After the June 28 poll, analysts told RFE/RL that the fear of another hard-line president coming to power might compel some who boycotted the first round to vote for Pezeshkian in the runoff.

That now appears to be what Pezeshkian and his supporters on social media are focusing on to convince supporters of the boycott to vote for him.

“Reformist, ultraconservative in Iran presidential runoff as voters stay home” • FRANCE 24 English Video added by IC

Pezeshkian on June 30 wrote on X that “the future of Iran is in danger” and that only a high voter turnout could save the country.

Convincing them to cast their ballots will be no easy task, however. Observers have cast doubt on Pezeshkian’s credentials as a true reformist, noting that he has been largely supportive of Khamenei’s policies and is likely seen as relatively harmless to the aims of the clerical establishment.

Some have said that Pezeshkian would need to present a clearly outlined platform for reforms before opposition-minded voters could be expected to vote for him.

Others have highlighted the dangers of a Jalili presidency, warning that he could double down on the enforcement of the hijab, or Islamic head scarf, for women, and push Iran along a path of total global isolation akin to North Korea.

Former Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi vowed that Iranians “will not allow Iran to fall into the hands of the Taliban,” a suggestion that hard-line supporters of Iran’s Shi’ite clerical establishment did not take kindly to.

Addressing the majority of the electorate who shunned the ballot box, pro-reform lawmaker Gholamreza Tajgardun said their “voices have been heard.” However, he urged them to turn out for the second round to “show that together we can” instigate change.

Even if the boycott is broken, voter apathy remains a serious obstacle.

Some in Iran who do not back the boycott have been asking whether there is any point in voting.

Hossein Dehbashi, a documentary filmmaker with ties to the pro-reform movement, asked on X if there was “a difference between bad and worse” if ultimately the government is restricted in what it can and cannot do.

This is a sentiment that many in Iran share, according to France-based sociologist Saeed Peyvandi.

“[Iranian] society no longer easily accepts promises because its trust has repeatedly been betrayed,” Peyvandi told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda. The Islamic republic has “never understood” people’s complaints, he added, and now “trust in the establishment has collapsed.”

With reporting by Elaheh Ravanshad of RFE/RL’s Radio Farda

Via RFE/RL

Copyright (c)2024 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

The survey was conducted between 20 February and 15 April this year, when the world was largely transfixed by the Israeli war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

It is important to note that the DPI, although informative, is itself conceived in a biased context as it is the product of a global survey conducted by western-based companies and organisations.

The DPI results were published ahead of a scheduled 2024 Copenhagen Democracy Summit, whose speakers will include Hillary Clinton, US Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and President of the European Council Charles Michel. The first speaker listed on the conference website is Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Founder and Chairman of the Alliance of Democracies Foundation, which commissioned the DPI.

All of this is reflected in the kind of questions which are being asked in the survey, placing greater emphasis on whether, for example, ties should be cut with Russia over Ukraine, and China over a war that is yet to take place in Taiwan. Such major shortcomings notwithstanding, the outcome of the research remains interesting and worthy of reflection.

There are some major takeaways from the report. For a start, there is growing dissatisfaction with the state of democracy, and such discontent is not limited to people living in countries perceived as non-democratic; it also includes people in the US and Europe.

What’s more, democracy, in the collective awareness of ordinary people, is not a political term often infused as part of official propaganda. When seen from the viewpoint of the people, democracy is a practical notion, whose absence leads to dire implications. For example, 68 per cent of people worldwide believe that economic inequality at home is the greatest threat to democracy.

On the question of “threats to democracy”, there is growing mistrust of Global Corporations (60 per cent), Big Tech (49 per cent) and their resulting Economic Inequality (68 per cent), and Corruption (67 per cent). This leads to the unmistakable conclusion that western globalisation has failed to create the proper environment for social equality, empower civil society or build democratic institutions. The opposite, based on people’s own perceptions, seems to be true.

“Globe.” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3.

Then we have global priorities which, as seen by many nations around the world, remain committed to ending wars, poverty, hunger, combating climate change, etc. However, this year’s top priority among European countries, 44 per cent, is also centred on reducing immigration, a significant number compared with the 24 per cent who prioritise fighting climate change.

Although the world appears to be divided about cutting ties with Russia and China, the selection of the question again reeks with bias.

The respondents in western countries, who are subjected to relentless media propaganda, prefer cutting such ties, while most people in the rest of the world prefer keeping them. Consequently, due to China’s positive perception in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, the DPI gave Beijing a “net positive”. Russia, on the other hand, is on the “path of image rehabilitation in most countries surveyed with the exception of Europe,” reported Politico.

The greatest decline was suffered by the United States, largely due to Washington’s support for Israel in its ongoing war in the Gaza Strip. “Over the past four years… perceptions of the US’s global influence became more positive – peaking in 2022 or 2023 – and then declined sharply in 2024,” the report concluded.

The large drop took place in the Muslim countries that were surveyed: Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkiye, Morocco, Egypt and Algeria. Some western European countries are also becoming more critical of the US, including Switzerland, Ireland and Germany.

Most people (55 per cent compared with 29 per cent) believe that social media has a positive effect on democracy. Despite growing social media censorship, many in the Global South still find margins in these platforms which allow them to escape official or corporate media censorship. Growing criticism of social media companies, however, is taking place in western countries, according to the survey.

Despite official propaganda emanating from many governments, especially in the west, regarding the greatest threats to world peace, the majority of people want their governments to focus on poverty reduction, fight corruption, promote economic growth, and improve healthcare and education, while working to reduce income inequality. “Investing in security and defence,” came seventh on the list.

Finally, people in countries which have an overall negative perception of the United States include some of the most influential global and regional powers, such as China, Russia, Indonesia, Austria, Turkiye, Australia and Belgium.

Despite massive media propaganda, censorship and scaremongering, people around the world remain clear on their collective priorities, expectations and aspirations, which are real democracy, social equality and justice. If these collective yearnings continue to be denigrated and ignored, we should expect more social upheaval, if not outright insurrections and military coups in coming years.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

It was the best opposition performance since the late 1970s

( Globalvoices.org ) – Turkey’s local elections which took place on March 31, will go down in history as one of its most surprising. Turkey’s demoralized opposition, namely the [secular] Republican People’s Party (CHP), dominated in what many pundits described as the ruling [center-right] Justice and Development Party’s worst defeat of its 22-year existence. For the first time since 1977, the CHP took more votes nationwide. In his televised address afterward, the CHP leader Özgür Özel called the elections “historic” as he teared up. Scores of supporters took to the streets to celebrate the results across Turkey.

Istanbul, where CHP secured victory in 2019, was one of the key cities in this year’s race. At the time, losing control over the municipality in Istanbul was described as a major blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development party (AKP), as it was where he started his political career when he was elected mayor in 1994. The results of yesterday’s election nationwide cemented this rejoinder on Erdoğan’s agenda.

In the capital, Ankara, the CHP’s incumbent mayor, Mansur Yavaş, outdid his rival by over 28 percent. In Turkey’s third-largest city, Izmir, opposition candidate Cemil Tugar finished 11 points ahead of the ruling party’s candidate.

Elsewhere across the country, as the results were trickling in, the map was slowly turning red as many of the provinces previously led by the AKP were showing victories for the opposition party candidates.

According to Gönül Tol, Director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkish Program, the change was “notable,” as “opposition CHP [was] not confined to coastal regions but expanding into Anatolia, the conservative/nationalist heartland of the country.”

In total, the opposition won in 35 out of 81 provinces. The rest of the provinces were split between AKP (24 provinces), the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM, 10 provinces), the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP, 8 provinces), the New Welfare Party (two provinces), and Iyi Party (Good Party, one province). With some six million eligible voters, the turnout at the time of writing this story was estimated at more than 78 percent across the country’s 81 provinces, with almost all ballots counted. In previous municipal elections, the turnout was 84.5 percent. In Turkey, the voter turnout has always been high ranging between 70 and 90 percent throughout the years.

This victory also reversed political tides ahead of the next general elections scheduled for 2028. There were hints the AKP would be making constitutional changes which could allow incumbent President Erdoğan to stay in power, despite earlier promises these elections would be his last.

While the president cannot legally run in the next presidential race in 2028, according to Turkey’s Constitution, there are two scenarios in which this can change. In the first scenario, Erdoğan and the AKP would need to secure 400 votes in the parliament to change the constitution. Turkey’s parliament, the Grand National Assembly, consists of 600 seats. At the moment, the AKP and its main ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), hold 313 seats. Thus, pushing for a constitutional amendment with a parliamentary vote would largely depend on whether the ruling party and President can secure the support of other political party representatives.

In the second scenario, the parliament can call for an early election. But even in this scenario, 360 parliamentary votes are needed.

With election results in, these plans will likely be put on hold.

While still low, the number of women mayors also increased, rising from four to 11. In Bilecik, a provincial capital of Turkey’s Bilecik Province, in northwestern Anatolia, Melek Mızrak Subaşı who was likened to Daenerys Targaryen, the fictional character in George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire — which was later made into the HBO blockbuster Game of Thrones series, also secured victory.

The elections also saw instances of violence. At least one person was killed and 11 injured in the city of Diyarbakir, and at least sixteen were injured in the province of Sanliurfa, according to media reports.

Critiques against Erdoğan

As results started to trickle in, one of the widely discussed questions was what kind of election results Turkey would see had it been a different opposition candidate running against President Erdoğan.

The local election results also illustrated that the dynamics between the local and general elections were different. Turkey’s ongoing economic crisis, wherein the country’s currency lost 40 percent of its value since last year and over 80 percent in the last five years, did matter, and the voters placed the blame on the ruling government in the local elections. In an interview with Reuters, Hakan Akbaş, a senior adviser at the Albright Stonebridge Group, said, “The economy was the decisive factor. Turkish people demanded change and İmamoğlu is now the default nemesis to President Erdoğan.”

Another surprising result came from the Yeniden Refah (the New Welfare Party), a religious-conservative party which pundits speculated could divide the AKP’s votes among conservative and religious voters disillusioned by Erdoğan’s economic choices. It came third in the race after the ruling AKP secured over  six percent of votes.

In his balcony speech delivered past midnight, Erdoğan adopted a less divisive tone than usual, expressing his gratitude to all of his party candidates as well as the people. He also said the party would fix mistakes ahead of the 2028 general elections. Unlike in previous municipal elections in 2019, the ruling party also did not contest election results, with Erdoğan, saying he and his party accept the people’s decision. In 2019, after the CHP’s Ekrem İmamoğlu won against the AKP’s Binali Yıldırım, the latter objected to the results. In the re-run, İmamoğlu won with an even higher margin — some 860,000 votes versus 13,700 votes.

In securing his re-election, İmamoğlu now has a clear shot at becoming the next leader of the opposition CHP as well as a likely candidate in the next presidential race. According to Sinan Ülgen, director of the Istanbul-based Edam think tank, “This outcome has certainly been a watershed for İmamoğlu. He will emerge as the natural candidate of the opposition for the next round of presidential elections.” Whether İmamoğlu will succeed remains to be seen, especially as the popular Istanbul Mayor is still facing a charge over allegedly insulting public officials in a speech he made after he won Istanbul’s municipal election in 2019. The higher appeals court must uphold the verdict, but until then, İmamoğlu remains Istanbul’s mayor.

Also important to note is that these elections were free but not fair. Ahead of the vote, Erdoğan relied heavily on his presidential powers as well as the government institutions and media. In a country where 90 percent of traditional media is controlled by the government, it was not surprising to see that much of the air time was devoted to the ruling party and its candidates. There was plenty of disinformation, as was the case during the general elections last year. In December 2023, the Information Technologies and Communications Authority (BTK), Turkey’s top telecommunications watchdog, imposed an access ban on 16 VPN providers. The country has also witnessed a backsliding on human rights, democracy, judicial independence, and the rule of law.

Featured image: Tons of CHP supporters took to the streets after their surprise victory in Turkey’s election. Collage by Arzu Geybullayeva.

Written byArzu Geybullayeva

Via Globalvoices.org