Covid 19 coronavirus: 'Tragic error' caused pandemic to decimate Italian city of Bergamo
29 Nov, 2020

A member of the Italian Red Cross walks through an alley in the old town in Bergamo during his home visit to Covid-19 positive patients in April. Photo / Getty Images news.com.au

By: Ally Foster

When the first wave of coronavirus infections swept through Europe, one city in northern Italy became a chilling example of the virus' deadly power, with the rest of the continent watching in horror as hospitals were overrun and morgues overflowed with victims.

The city of Bergamo and its surrounding province was decimated by the Covid-19 pandemic, with one wrong decision allowing the virus to spread silently through the region until it was too late to bring it under control.

At the start of the year when the only coronavirus cases Italy had recorded were linked to overseas travellers, the advice, taken from recommendations by the World Health Organisation, was to only test for the virus if a patient had a link to China.

Nurses attend to a Covid-19 patient at the Pope John XXIII Hospital on April 7, 2020 in Bergamo, Italy. Photo / Getty Images

So, when people started to arrive in emergency rooms across Bergamo with a cough and fever they were determined to have the flu and sent home to rest.

When more patients without any connection to China began to get increasingly ill, medical professionals were struggling to understand the cause.

Dr Monica Avogadri, 55-year-old anaesthesiologist at Pesenti Fenaroli Hospital, was stumped when an 83-year-old man that had been sent home with flu symptoms was rushed back to hospital unable to breathe.

Neither the man nor his wife had any connection to China.

''China?" was the wife's response, Dr Avogadri told the New York Times.

"She didn't even know where it was."

Without an apparent link to China Dr Avogadri wasn't able to conduct a Covid-19 test.

Just days later, on February 20, another doctor in the nearby town of Codogno broke Italy's testing protocol and discovered the first known case of local transmission in the country.

By this point multiple other infections were already circulated undetected in the community, which would soon turn into an explosion of cases and lead to thousands of deaths.

A Civil Protection member rests a flower on the coffin of a Bergamo coronavirus victim in the hangar where 18 coffins wait to be transported to Florence. Photo / Getty Images

After hearing about the case Dr Avogadri, who by this point was also ill, called the hospital and asked for the 83-year-old patient be tested for Covid-19.

A test on the man and his hospital roommate came back positive.

"It was at that moment I understood we were screwed," the hospital's director Dr Giuseppe Marzulli told the New York Times.

"We had looked for who had been in China, and this was the tragic error."

In the weeks following, cases soared in the Bergamo province, with hospitals becoming overrun and the virus claiming so many victims that army trucks were forced to come in an take coffins to other regions.

About 3000 people are reported to have died from coronavirus, however the real number is believed to be significantly higher.

An antibody survey conducted in May revealed about 38.5 per cent of Bergamo's population had been infected by Covid-19, meaning the region had some of the highest infection levels in the world.

"Assuming that the 38.5 per cent cumulative prevalence found in the present study applies to the general population of the Bergamo province – 1.1 million inhabitants – one should infer an actual number of 420,000 SARS-CoV-2 infections," a paper based on the survey results read.

"This is much higher than those reported in the official data, which report 16,000 cases as of 25th September 2020. Within the limitation of this approach, our esteem suggests that 96 per cent of infections went undetected by the healthcare system."

With Europe now experiencing a deadly second wave of infections, Bergamo is now fairing a lot better than other parts of Italy.

Experts are speculating whether the area's high initial infection rate could be providing residents some form of herd immunity this time around.

"We are very far from achieving herd immunity. But in areas that experienced a high frequency of infections, there are probably enough antibodies to limit the circulation of the virus," Giuseppe Remuzzi, an infectious disease expert who oversaw the antibody survey told The Wall Street Journal.


On Saturday Europe crossed a grim barrier, registering more than 400,000 Covid-19 deaths.

Britain, where police arrested over 60 people during a protest in London against virus restrictions, accounted for 57,551 fatalities, followed by Italy with 53,677, France with 51,914 and Spain with 44,668.

Despite cases surging across the continent, some countries are choosing to reopen stores ahead of Christmas, with France and Poland among the countries lifting restrictions.

Belgium will allow shops to reopen from December 1, but keep the current semi-lockdown in place possibly until mid-January. The move mirrors similar easing in Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

Ireland has also announced a staggered easing of restrictions to allow some businesses to reopen and for families to gather ahead of Christmas.

Institutionally racist': New Zealand's security agencies were Islamophobic and ignored right-wing threat, says Muslim group
29 Nov, 2020 

Abdur Razzaq Khan, of the Federation of Islamic Associations, presenting its report into the Christchurch terror attacks. Photo / Mark Mitchell


By: Amelia Wade
Political reporter, NZ Herald@AmeliaJWade

New Zealand's security agencies were "institutionally racist and Islamophobic" and ignored the rising threat of right-wing extremism because it was instead focused on Muslim terrorism, a Kiwi Islamic organisation says.

The Federation of the Islamic Associations of New Zealand (FIANZ) today publicly released its submission to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the March 15 terror attacks.

It investigated how the New Zealand Intelligence Community [NZIC] didn't foresee the threat of right-wing extremism despite rising attacks overseas and the Muslim community here feeling increasingly unsafe.

"We asked for help. We knew we were vulnerable to such an attack. We did not know who, when, what, where or how. But we knew," the report said.

A team of researchers pored over a decade of media reports, speeches in Parliament, public addresses, online forums among other sources to establish how the threat had been ignored.

It concluded security organisations were institutionally racist, Islamophobic, incorrect and misled the public.

"We are not trying to generate any hate, we are just trying to give the facts as we see them. The problem is much deeper than that," said Abdur Razzaq Khan, who chaired the federation's submission to the Royal Commission.

The federation said Muslim communities were left "defenceless" because of "systemic failures" of diversity at the security organisations which failed to properly engage with Muslim communities.

The report pointed to numerous examples of the director-general of security Rebecca Kitteridge wrongly framed terrorism as a "Muslim issue" rather than seeing the community as potential victims.

"We are not trying to generate any hate, we are just trying to give the facts as we see them," said Abdur Razzaq Khan as he released the Federation of Islamic Associations' Royal Commission submission. 

Photo / Mark Mitchell

Their submission included a speech from Kitteridge in 2016 at Victoria University where she said New Zealanders "can walk the streets free from fear" of events like Paris, Brussels, Ottawa, London and Sydney which were all perpetrated by Islamic radicals.

She did not mention the events of Oslo, Quebec, Pittsburg or Macerata which were orchestrated by right-wing extremists.

It was not until mid-2018 that agencies began assessing the threat of right-wing extremists, the report said.


But Khan said they did not blame any individual for the "failings", or say that the NZIC was staffed by white supremacists or individuals with anti-Muslim bias.

"This is not the fault of any individual - this is the culture of Islamophobia."

The NZSIS was extremely capable and if they had focused on finding right-wing extremism, they would have found the Christchurch terrorist.

"This rat would have easily been identified if they were looking - but they weren't looking.

"They are very good, they searched out those Muslims who were searching out objectionable material and they prosecuted."

The federation also found the Christchurch mosque attacks terrorist would never have been able to obtain a firearm if proper procedures were followed because two of his referees did not meet police criteria.


In order to avoid a terror attack happening again, the federation recommended criminalising hate crimes, denying right-wing extremism, establishing a Ministry of Super Diversity, improving how media portray Muslims, and better training for the police and security agencies.

The New Zealand Intelligence Community said it could not respond to specific claims until the Royal Commission's report was released on December 8. The 800-page report has been presented to the Government.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she wanted the public to see the report before "launching into the discussion" on whether New Zealand's security agencies had failed.

Zimbabwean witchdoctor's daughter cannot stay in New Zealand, tribunal rules

A historical image of a witchdoctor in Bulawayo in the then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Photo / Getty Images

By: Melissa Nightingale
NZ Herald reporter based in Wellington

nov 29/2020

The daughter of a Zimbabwean witchdoctor has been declined refugee status in New Zealand despite her fears that she'll be forced to take his place in the tribe if she returns home.

The woman said if she returned to Zimbabwe her late father's tribe could use sorcery against her to force her to become the next witchdoctor.

She would then have to undergo female genital mutilation and be made to carry it out on other young girls in the tribe as part of her duties.

But the New Zealand Immigration and Protection Tribunal has rejected her bid to stay in Aotearoa, saying there was no evidence witchcraft could be used against her if she went back to her home village.


The details were laid out in a recently-released tribunal decision.

The witchdoctor's child

The woman's mother fell pregnant at 17 to the witchdoctor of another tribe - members of the VaRemba culture - who lived about 250km away.

When her parents found out about the pregnancy, they took her to the man's tribe and demanded he take care of her, as custom dictated.

But the mother was unhappy there, as he and his family were abusive to her and she was made to do chores for the man's witchcraft practice - including slaughtering animals and accompanying young children to circumcision ceremonies.

She saw young girls with serious post-circumcision infections and other young girls being forced into marriage at a young age, the tribunal decision said.

She eventually fled back to her home village and remained there, giving birth to her child in 1992.

In February 2016, the mother heard the witchdoctor had died, and decided she and her daughter should attend the funeral.

"Villagers who were gathered for the funerary events were surprised and confused to see them, until one woman recognised [the mother] and introduced them to everyone.

"The gathering seemed happy to see them and there was ululating and singing."

The pair spent the night at the village, and were told the next morning that the spirit of the woman's father was now "upon her". They did not think much of the comments and departed a short time later.

That same month, the daughter, then in her 20s, married a trader she had met in the capital city of Harare. By May, the pair and their son had travelled to New Zealand on false South African passports, and sought refugee or protected person status.

The woman gave birth to another son in August that year, while detained in community accommodation.

Their initial appeals for refugee status pointed to political troubles for the husband, and were dismissed as not credible.

Her husband's application has now been severed from the rest of the family's and focuses on other factors such as debt he owes back in Zimbabwe.

Tribe: She must be the next witchdoctor

The trouble began in 2017 when members of the tribe approached the woman's mother at her home and told her that as the witchdoctor's eldest child, the woman must return home and take his place.

They said many people had died since his death, and that a spirit had possessed one of their members and announced the woman must be the village's next witchdoctor.

The mother gave evidence to the tribunal by video link and telephone, saying the tribe members had visited her multiple times demanding her daughter return to the village, and at one point had become aggressive and broken her fence.

She had not reported the incident to police because she knew police would not involve themselves in matters related to witchcraft.

The daughter fears returning home as she believes the tribe will forcibly bring her back to the village and use sorcery to make her become the next witch doctor.

"She would be forced to abandon her Christian faith, would suffer [female genital mutilation] and would have to practise it on other women and girls. She would have to take a vow of celibacy and undergo humiliating and invasive ceremonial rituals. Her children would be forced to be circumcised," the decision said.


She has applied for refugee or protected person status for herself and her two sons on these grounds.

The decision

The tribunal found there was "simply no scientific principle underlying any claim of the efficacy or power of sorcery".

"Absent any testable, verifiable and falsifiable, and independent evidence of witchcraft powers which would otherwise seem to defy the laws of physics and/or chemistry, the tribunal is satisfied that claims of harm arising from acts of witchcraft do not suffice for the purposes of establishing the well-foundedness element of the refugee inquiry."

It had not been established that the tribe would be able to use sorcery to force the woman to take up the mantle of witchdoctor, the decision said.

"She may be subjectively fearful that they can do so but the objective reality is that they cannot."

There was also no evidence of any real risk she would suffer serious harm or that she would be physically forced into the role, the decision said.


The appeals for refugee and protected person status were dismissed.

Brazil's Bolsonaro alleges fraud in US presidential election

Sun, 29 November 2020

Brazil Elections 

Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro talks with the media outside a polling station, after voting during the run-off municipal elections in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sunday, Nov. 29, 2020. Bolsonaro, who sometimes has embraced the label "Trump of the Tropics," said Sunday he'll wait a little longer before recognizing the U.S. election victory of Joe Biden, while also echoing President Donald Trump's allegations of irregularities in the U.S. vote.

(AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro — who sometimes has embraced the label “Trump of the Tropics” — said Sunday he’ll wait a little longer before recognizing the U.S. election victory of Joe Biden.

Speaking to reporters while casting a ballot in municipal races, he also echoed President Donald Trump's allegations of irregularities in the U.S. vote.

“I have my sources of information that there really was a lot of fraud there,” he said. “Nobody talks about that. If it was enough to define (victory) for one or the other, I don't know.”

Asked if he would recognize Biden's victory, he said, “I am holding back a little more.”

He also expressed doubts about Brazil's current electronic voting system, which he has suggested is vulnerable to fraud. He has urged the country to go back to a paper ballot system for the 2022 presidential election.

The conservative Brazilian leader has appealed to the same sort of right-wing populist base in Brazil that Trump has courted in the United States, and has welcomed comparisons to the U.S. president.

Like Trump, he has embraced unproven treatements for COVID-19 and has campaigned to ease restrictions meant to combat it, arguing the economic loss is more damaging than the illness itself.

Russia seeking to build its own space station


TEHRAN, Nov. 29 (MNA) – Russia's rocket and space corporation Energia on Thursday announced that it is working on the development of a new multifunctional space station.

Russia's own orbital station will consist of three to seven modules unmanned or with a crew of two to four people, said Vladimir Solovyov, first deputy general designer of Energia for flight operation and testing of rocket and space systems, Xinhua Net reported.

At a conference of the Russian Academy of Sciences on space, Solovyov raised concern about the longevity of the International Space Station (ISS) as certain components have been damaged and could not be replaced.

Solovyov, who is also the flight director of the ISS Russian segment, said the station may stop operation by 2025 and the cost of maintaining it may amount to 10-15 billion rubles (132-198 million U.S. dollars).

Russia's state space corporation Roscosmos said Thursday that it plans to discuss the operational lifespan of the ISS with NASA early next year.

The ISS lifespan is highly dependent on the technical condition of the modules and certain political aspects that are planned to be addressed, Roscosmos said in a press release.

The corporation is currently awaiting proposals from Energia on the creation of a new national space station, which will first be considered at the Roscosmos Scientific and Technical Council and then reported to the government, it said.

Officials raid home of Diego Maradona’s doctor, probe death as manslaughter case


By Jorge Fitz-Gibbon
November 29, 2020 

Diego Maradona (right) and Leopoldo LuqueDiego Maradona press office/AFP

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Argentine investigators raided the home of Diego Maradona’s doctor on Sunday as they probe a possible case of involuntary manslaughter in the soccer legend’s death.

The blitz comes after Maradona’s lawyer last week called for a full investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of the 60-year-old former soccer phenom, who died Wednesday after suffering a heart attack, the Mirror reported Sunday.

Investigators converged on the home of the doctor, Leopoldo Luque, 33, around 8:40 a.m. Sunday and are expected to question him as they probe possible medical negligence in Maradona’s death, the outlet said.

“As Luque was Maradona’s personal physician the decision was taken to search his house and surgery (office) to look for documents that could determine whether, during Maradona’s treatment at home, there were any irregularities,” a law enforcement source told Argentina’s La Nacion.

The soccer star’s lawyer, Matias Moria, raised questions about his death Thursday.

“The ambulance took more than half an hour to arrive, which was criminal idiocy,” he said, according to the Independent Online.

On Saturday, Maradona’s daughters — Dalma, Giannina, and Jana — spoke to investigators and also raised questions about Luque’s potential involvement in their father’s death, the Mirror reported.

Maradona’s family was already incensed after a funeral worker last week released a selfie alongside the icon’s body.

Funeral worker Claudio Fernandez was fired over the incident.

Maradona is considered one of the sport’s all-time greats, scoring 34 goals in 91 international appearances, including four World Cups.

AUSTRALIA

Sydney records hottest November night as heatwave sweeps city


November 29, 2020
By Agence France-Presse

  

A fiery sunset over the Members' Stand during the one-day cricket match between India and Australia at the Sydney Cricket Ground in the sweltering city -- via AFP

Sydney recorded its hottest November night as Australia’s largest city suffered through a weekend heatwave that saw daytime temperatures peak above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).

The overnight temperature did not drop below 25.3 degrees Celsius Saturday into Sunday in central Sydney, according to the meteorology bureau, making it the hottest November night since records began.

The temperature had already hit a scorching 30 degrees Celsius by 4:30 am Sunday, before reaching above 40 degrees for the second consecutive day.

“New South Wales is in the midst of a severe heatwave with very warm conditions already being experienced yesterday, and today being a repeat of some of those conditions,” said the Bureau of Meteorology’s Agata Imielska.

Daytime records for November fell elsewhere in Australia’s southeast, with the outback towns of Griffith and Mildura reaching 43.2 and 45.7 degrees Celsius respectively on Saturday.

The heatwave saw bans on lighting fires imposed across large swathes of New South Wales (NSW) state, which was badly hit by catastrophic bushfires during the last southern hemisphere summer.

A number of blazes broke out Sunday, including one on Sydney’s western outskirts that the NSW Fire and Rescue Service said damaged a property.

More than 60 bushfires were still burning across the state, but most had been brought under control by firefighters as a southerly wind change led to a rapid drop in temperatures.

It was the first burst of significant bushfire activity since the devastating 2019-2020 fires, which burned an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom and left 33 people dead as tens of thousands fled their homes.

The fire season also killed or displaced nearly three billion animals and cost the economy an estimated US$7 billion.

The latest heatwave comes just two weeks after government scientists warned the fossil-fuel reliant country should brace for worse to come, predicting climate change will continue to exacerbate bushfires, droughts and cyclones in Australia.

Conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison has repeatedly played down the link between climate change and the bushfires, and has committed to keeping Australia as one of the world’s leading fossil fuel exporters.

But Australians are increasingly concerned about climate change, with a recent poll by Sydney’s Lowy Institute showing almost 90 percent believing it is a critical or important threat.

Scientific drama continues over life on Venus

November 29,  2020 Nicole Karlis, Salon - Commentary

A radar mosaic image of Venus. (NASA.gov)

In September, news about the possibility of floating, cloud-based life on Venus caused a storm in the science world as tumultuous as the sulfur clouds that rain acid down on the second planet from the Sun.

A paper published in Nature Astronomy by a group of international astronomers explained how they detected phosphine (PH₃), a gaseous molecule composed of one phosphorus and three hydrogen atoms, in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Researchers saw phosphine’s signal in spectrograms from two radio telescopes they used to capture the data, and estimated there were 20 parts per billion of the compound in Venus’ clouds.

This discovery, the astronomers stated, was believed to be a “promising” sign of life, as phosphine on Earth is created in the gaseous emanations of anaerobic life. Could it be that, high above among the mountains, craters, thousands of volcanoes and thick atmosphere, little microbes flitted about the Venusian sky?

“If no known chemical process can explain PH₃ within the upper atmosphere of Venus, then it must be produced by a process not previously considered plausible for Venusian conditions,” the authors of the paper stated. “This could be unknown photochemistry or geochemistry, or possibly life.”

On Earth, phosphine is produced as a waste byproduct of simple anaerobic bacteria, and they are a notorious signature of the uncommon gas. The researchers struggled to figure out any other way that the gas could be produced on Venus, geologically or in the atmosphere somehow, but came up empty.

But quickly after astronomers published the initial paper, more research papers followed questioning the observation of phosphine—both its presence and the abundance of the compound. In one critique of the original study, researchers suggest that the signs of phosphine were coming from another common gas in Venus’ clouds, sulfur dioxide, which has a similar spectrogram. Another critique focused on how difficult it is to extract a phosphine signal out of the data that the initial group of researchers used, according to Nature. Subsequently, the same team of astronomers of the initial paper re-examined their data and cited a processing error and recalculated its estimate to 5 parts per billion. In other words, if there’s phosphine there likely isn’t as much of it. Their results were published in a preprint posted on 17 November to arXiv.

So, does that mean that life on Venus has been ruled out?

“If phosphine indeed exists at the claimed abundance of ~5 ppb [parts per billion], then this abundance is still orders of magnitude larger than what one can get out of plausible volcanic activity on the planet based on what we know from Earth,” Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb told Salon over email. “But although we know that phosphine originates from life on Earth, we do not fully understand the detailed path by which it is produced (namely which microbes make it and how).”

Loeb said there is still a lot of research that needs to be done in order to land on a definitive answer to whether or not there’s life on Venus or not— like going to Venus and collecting some microbes in a probe, say.

“We will not be convinced that life exists on Venus until microbes are found by scooping the Venusian clouds,” Loeb said. “The claimed detection of phosphine plays the important role of motivating a mission that will go there.”

Notably, Loeb added that the over-reported estimate of phosphine wasn’t a “mistake.”

“I would not call it a mistake but an overestimate, for now, until proven wrong by better data,” Loeb said.

As luck would have it, NASA’s DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging Plus) mission is one contender to study the upper atmosphere of Venus. According to Forbes, NASA is due to make a decision next year on whether or not the mission will move forward. If phosphine is indeed abundantly present in Venus’ atmosphere, this mission would be able to detect it.

“DAVINCI+ will measure the compositional and dynamic context for interesting gases such as phosphine—and likely others not yet discovered,” Dr. James Garvin, Chief Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the principal investigator of DAVINCI+, told Forbes. “We do not have enough information to rule out more exotic processes potentially responsible for unanticipated phosphorous gases such as phosphine; DAVINCI+’s proposed measurements could directly provide essential chemical context.”

NASA hasn’t paid much attention to Venus since the 1990s, when the Magellan mission mapped out the planet’s surface. But as Loeb told Salon, the “claimed detection” of phosphine “plays the important role of motivating a mission that will go there.”

In other words, the planet Venus could be undergoing its own kind of renaissance in the planetary science world.

When asked if there’s more potential interest in missions to Venus, Loeb said “definitely.” He added that the original report inspired members of his own research group to write two more papers on the subject.

Therese Encrenaz, an astrophysicist at LESIA, Paris Observator, told Salon via email that she is convinced that “there are still many open questions regarding the photochemistry and meteorology of its atmosphere.”

“Venus has been forgotten for too long, relative to the space exploration of Mars,” Encrenaz said. “There is no need for phosphine to be interested in Venus! I am very happy to see potential space missions on Venus being in the competition for future selections, at ESA [European Space Agency] and NASA; I hope at least one of them will get selected.”

As Noam Izenberg, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and deputy chair of NASA’s Venus Exploration Analysis Group, previously told Salon, even if there ends up not being phosphine or life on Venus, the search alone “highlights how much we don’t know about Venus, and that fundamental new discoveries […] await us next door.”

What can the left expect from a Biden-Harris administration? Pretty much nothing

Published on November 28, 2020By Tony McKenna, Salon

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris appear at a Democratic presidential debate (MSNBC/screen grab)

On Nov. 7 of this year, the United States let out a collective roar that rippled across the nation, resonating the crowds of blue-clad people swelling the streets and the squares, and causing buildings to tremble as those inside broke out the champagne and began to dance. The celebrations lasted long into the night. For those few precious moments, it felt as though a curse had been lifted, a nightmare abated. Trumpism had ground itself to a resounding and decisive halt and it seemed that political space on the left, and on the center ground, had finally begun to open again.

A scion of 21st-century reality TV, Trump was a vulgar presence; a combination of incompetence and inanity, hitched to the bombast and braggadocio of a circus ringmaster, and rounded off with all the ethical inclinations of a CEO of a napalm factory. Trump was a president of pantomime proportions: In the White House he single-handedly invigorated the satire industry, as the mirth to be made from his perpetual claims to greatness (his level of expertise in every scientific field would have made Joseph Stalin blush) was recycled into comedy skit after comedy skit on “Saturday Night Live” (a “very stable genius,” anyone?)

And yet, as Karl Marx noted so many years ago, the flipside to farce is so often tragedy. While Trump continued to strut, parade and self-promote there was a more sinister aspect to the spectacle of his absurdity. Gaudy, grandiose language of “greatness” and the innate superiority of the “nation” began to filter through the fourth wall of political PR, reaching deeper, darker and more undisclosed regions. The rallying cry “Make America Great Again” started to prick the ears of shady extremists, and forces on the far right began to stir from within the shadows.

In spring 2016, some months before Trump’s election, Andrew Anglin — founder of the prominent neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer — had predicted, “Jews, Blacks, and lesbians will be leaving America if Trump gets elected — and he’s happy about it. This alone is enough reason to put your entire heart and soul into supporting this man.” A year later, on the campus of American University in Washington, which had just elected its first black female student president, nooses began to appear — courtesy, in fact, of the same Daily Stormer site, which had mobilized far right elements in a campaign of hate and harassment against her.

A couple of months after that came the notorious spectacle of Charlottesville, when large numbers of bare-chested, belligerent white men lumbered through the streets chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” Alongside the assorted confederate flags and spidery black of swastikas, T-shirts and caps featuring Trump’s MAGA slogan were increasingly on display. When the forces of the left mounted a counter demonstration, a white supremacist — unable to bottle a visceral sense of rage — drove his car into them, killing one demonstrator and injuring several others. In the aftermath of the atrocity, Trump remarked that there were “some very fine people on both sides” and expressed the view that “both sides” were culpable for the violence — a clear wink-wink, nod-nod to the murderer and the toxic, protean forces that had generated him.

That Trump’s presidency had bolstered and emboldened such elements surely explains the mass eruption of joy and celebration which greeted the news of his departure. But those who would look toward the partnership of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and the commissioning of a new Democratic leadership, to inaugurate an epoch of reason and enlightenment and thereby banish the darkness should undoubtedly look again. For one thing, it bears remembering what brought Trump to power in the first place. Trumpism arrived at the White House, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Trump did not win in 2016 on the back of a broad right-wing social movement which was then translated into a vast hike in the number of Republican votes. Inasmuch as Trump “won” at all — in two presidential elections, he hasn’t even come close to winning the popular vote — he did only marginally better than John McCain had done in losing what was generally viewed as a landslide election in 2008. Trump won 46.1% percent of the popular vote in 2016, while McCain had won 45.7% eight years earlier.

The real difference was on the other side of the ledger: In 2008, Barack Obama had won 52.9% of the popular vote, while in 2016 Clinton only managed to procure 48.2%. In other words, the Democratic vote share had fallen by almost four million votes (even before we take into account the significant increase in population between 2008 and 2016).

Although many tried to lay the blame for this at the door of shady Russian hackers or dodgy tech companies such as Cambridge Analytica, their effect was marginal, perhaps imperceptible. The real reason for this electoral demise can be found in the eight years of Democratic administration that preceded it. Those were the years in which Obama’s abstract and facile exhortations toward “hope” and “change” were extinguished in the fiery wastelands of the battle-scarred Middle East and beyond, as his administration prosecuted military attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan, and the use of drone technology became endemic.

On the domestic front, the situation was no less grim. Having facilitated perhaps the largest economic crisis in history through their rapacious and often illegal financial dealings, the great banking oligarchs remained untouched and unrepentant, shielded as they were by the same government whose campaign coffers those CEOs had so generously filled in the run-up to the 2008 election. (Goldman Sachs was Obama’s top corporate donor that year, headlining a large number of other Wall Street contributors.)

Indeed behind closed doors, beyond the smooth façade of his presidential image, Obama spoke to the big banking heads with prosaic candor: “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” This pithy quote, leaked into the public sphere, casts a light on the inner sanctum, the way political strategy is negotiated behind the back of the population. More importantly, it reveals the attitude of the Obama administration itself to the powerful, and to the people; i.e., the admission that its function is to protect the former from the latter (themselves regarded with patrician contempt as little more than pitchfork-wielding yokels).

The Democrats lost in 2016 because they had failed to provide a genuine political alternative. Both major political parties had followed the neoliberal economic line that privileged and protected the interests of those at the top, and offered an increasingly narrow vision of “choice” to an increasingly weary and disillusioned electorate. Fewer and fewer people turned out to vote, and it was on this basis that Trumpism would step into the void. Voter turnout dramatically improved this year, to be sure. But the question now becomes: What type of choice does the Biden-Harris administration provide?’ What type of political alternative can it offer?

One key selling point is the fact that Harris will be the first Black female vice president in U.S. history. That’s not to be scoffed at, especially considering the potent injection of racism and national chauvinism the country has suffered at the hands of Trumpism. At the same time, it does Harris something a disservice, inasmuch as it does not speak to her actual politics. Once we examine these in detail, the record that emerges is a somewhat murky one. For instance, during her tenure as attorney general of California the state Supreme Court ruled that prison overcrowding represented “cruel and unusual punishment,” yet Harris fought against the early release of prisoners, with her legal team arguing that such a measure would deplete the prison population and therefore deprive the state of a cheap source of labour.

This of course reflected the same political process of neoliberalism that underlay the fusion of private capital with the prison system and had led to the draconian prison reforms carried out under Bill Clinton in the ’90s and continued by both the Bush and the Obama administrations. This led to a vast number of people, disproportionately Black or Latino, languishing in “correctional” facilities for little more than misdemeanors or minor infractions. The profit motive — driven by neoliberal administrations of both the Democrat and Republican stripe — has eaten into the correctional system like a corrosive acid, warping its raison d’être such that Time Magazine, in a 2016 exposé, discovered “that approximately 39% of the nationwide prison population (576,000 people) is behind bars with little public safety rationale.”

And then there are the ubiquitous and tragic cases of those who are imprisoned and later discovered to have been falsely convicted — cases like that of Daniel Larsen, who spent more than a decade in prison before the Innocence Project was able to overturn his conviction. In the event, even after Larsen’s innocence had been established, Harris’ office tried to keep him incarcerated on the bureaucratic and rather spiteful grounds that his legal team had filed for release too late, after an official deadline had expired. (Larsen, thankfully, was released anyway.)

In any case, it seems likely that Harris will be an effective component in an administration likely to reprise many themes from the Obama era, including facilitating the march of private capital into various state sectors, fortifying the armed forces, protecting Wall Street and the financial elite, and cultivating U.S. military interests abroad in robust and murderous fashion. On the subject of Wall Street, it is worth noting that, in the run-up to the 2020 election, Biden boasted the backing of 131 billionaire donors to Trump’s 99, with the banking elite clearly registering in a Biden administration a safe pair of hands to steer the course of financial capital. Indeed, Biden’s selection as his White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, has a long-established career in venture capital.

On the question of military spending and foreign policy, this year a majority of Senate Democrats, including Harris, voted against and defeated an amendment that would have diverted 10% from a bloated military budget of some $740 billion into jobs, health care and education. Although it is still early days, the president-elect’s political team has already “underscored his deep commitment to the defence of Japan and U.S commitments under Article 5.” That’s a clear shot across the bow of China and an expression of a deepening Democratic commitment to a more aggressive stance toward the biggest economic rival to the U.S., one which some commentators have inferred (correctly, in my view) could lay the basis for a new Cold War.

In other words, the Biden administration shuffles onto the scene already a revenant; it can only offer a revivified formula of the same neoliberal strategy which has already exhausted itself in earlier decades. It is difficult to imagine that it will offer the electorate either something qualitatively new or something that’s likely to genuinely uplift the economic interests of the vast majority. The cloud of euphoria — which was more about the exorcism of Trump than about the ascension of Biden — is likely to dissipate rather quickly under the grind of the neoliberal machine. While Trump himself will eventually depart from the White House, the electoral core he has carved out for himself will remain very much in place.

Importantly, Trump’s most recent provocation — his efforts to call into question the validity of the democratic process, both before and after the election — on the surface the last-ditch cry of foul by a gaudy vulgarian, will in fact act as a potent rallying point for a political base all too ready to congeal around the notion that a liberal elite has robbed the “anti-establishment” candidate of his rightful win.

And the more the Democratic Party pursues its pro-Wall Street policies, the more it will reveal itself as the party of an elite minority — and the more such a conspiracy theory will gain traction in the minds of the bewildered, the small business owners flayed by the economic downturn, those in the traditional rural heartlands who find their prospects and their lands shrinking, those on the edge of destitution. Not to mention those whose sense of social inferiority, isolation and neglect is salved by the potency of the purest racial hatred and the longing for a nostalgic vision of a more traditional Americana in which white skin was the emblem of a pioneer spirit, conferring on its owner both innate privilege and automatic respect.

The slick brand of managerial capitalism which encompasses high finance and a new era of global imperialism, which Biden’s administration is almost certainly set to offer, could well create the perfect conditions in which a new type of far-right demagoguery can metastasize; something which will unite the anguished fury of the lower-middle classes with the most rabid fringes of the far right, fusing them into a toxic and potentially lethal brew.

For this reason, radicals must resist and protest the Biden administration from the outset. To provide it with support — to see in it the liberal antidote to Trumpism — is to make a critical error of the first order, one that will allow the most virulent elements of the Republican Party, in the words of Thomas Frank, to become “ever bolder in their preposterous claim to be a ‘workers’ party’ representing the aspirations of ordinary people.”

Malcolm X once wrote that the perception of the viciously right-wing character of the Republican Party works to cloak the establishment essence of the Democrats; in showing a voter “the wolf,” he argued, the ruling class is able to drive that same voter “into the open jaws of the smiling fox.” What Malcolm X would not live to see is the era we have inherited, the one in which fox begets wolf.

Forget about ‘moving on’ — the nation can’t heal without holding Trump accountable

By Amanda Marcotte, Salon- Commentary
November 29, 2020 


Donald Trump’s coup was still ongoing when the takes preaching the value of forgiveness and letting bygones be bygones started to come out.

“We would remain bitterly divided,” law professor Randall Eliason wrote in a Washington Post op-ed arguing against prosecuting Trump for his many likely crimes. “[C]riminal prosecutions can’t bind up this country’s deep political and social wounds.”

“There is an opportunity to rediscover our common ground with one another — and the way forward does not involve relitigating the last four years in federal criminal court,” argues Michael Conway, former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, in an NBC News opinion piece arguing that Joe Biden should actually pardon Donald Trump, for the love of heaven — the incumbent president who’s still sending his minions to court, trying to steal the election.

Unfortunately, Biden is living up to every stereotype of the quisling Democrat and taking this advice seriously. Reports suggest that in the interest of national “unity,” Biden is discouraging the idea of prosecuting Trump.

This is a serious mistake. Words like “unity” and “forgiveness” sound great in the abstract, but are utterly meaningless in the current political context for one reason: The sole responsibility for all this healing is being foisted, once again, on the backs of liberals. Conservatives can’t be bothered. They’re too busy working on their next moves to undermine democracy, sow division and create chaos.

This pattern — Republicans screw everything up and are allowed to get away with it in the name of “unity,” and take that as permission to go even further the next time — has been playing out since Richard Nixon first snagged his post-Watergate pardon. In a recent feature in the New York Times Magazine, Jonathan Mahler laid out the frustrating pattern in teeth-grinding detail:

When President George H.W. Bush pardoned six Reagan White House officials who were involved in the Iran-contra affair, he warned of “a profoundly troubling development in the political and legal climate of our country: the criminalization of policy differences.” Bush was sparing members of his own party. President Obama created what is perhaps an even more relevant precedent for Biden by choosing not to prosecute members of the George W. Bush administration who had authorized the unlawful torture of detainees; his nominee for attorney general, Eric Holder, used the very same phrase — the criminalization of policy differences — when the issue came up during a 2009 congressional hearing.

Mahler also notes that this goes back to Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, which was justified in the name of “healing.”

But can a wound really heal when one party is busy applying bandages, while the other lurks in waiting, ready to stab the victim again? Of course not. And that’s the problem we’re facing. The “unity” isn’t unity at all. It’s a fake unity in which one side — the side that did not cause the damage wrought by Trump or Bush or Reagan or Nixon — does all the work, while the other side keeps looking for new opportunities to cause trouble. If anything, conservatives grows ever bolder in their corruption, realizing they will never face consequences for their actions, and in fact can count on the left to clean up all their messes for them.

This is all very reminiscent of the mentality around domestic violence in the bad old pre-feminist days, when wives whose husbands beat them were told to suck it up, walk on eggshells and take the abuse in silence. Only when feminists started setting up domestic violence shelters and pressuring the justice system to start holding abusers accountable did things finally start to change.

Biden himself should understand this, as he was the original sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act, which codified and mainstreamed this notion that abusers should face consequences and victims should be allowed to walk away. Biden’s legislation worked: Domestic violence decreased by 67% and murders by men of their female partners declined by 35%. It turns out turning the other cheek was just an invitation to abusers to continue the violence. But introducing consequences for abuse — lost marriages, jail time — saved lives.

It’s time to employ the same logic here. Democrats have tried reconciling with Republicans again and again, but since the work was wholly one-sided and the responsibility for “unity” held only by those who had done the least to destroy it, the result was failure. Instead, Republicans doubled down and doubled down again, escalating from Watergate to Iran-Contra to the Iraq War to now, with a president who is literally trying to steal an election.

All this anxiety around the question of what to do with Trump has little to do with Trump himself. Even those who are waxing poetic about healing and unity are forced to admit Trump is a monster who deserves absolutely nothing. But the fear is that by holding Trump accountable, Biden’s administration would be implicitly passing judgment on the millions of Americans who voted for him.

To which I say, good. Consider, for instance, this year’s Republican National Convention, a lengthy whine session about “cancel culture” from the various speakers. These were people so unused to facing consequences for their actions that the idea of lost dinner-party invitations seems like a painful price to pay for trying to to end democracy. Trump’s voters thrilled to this, enraptured by the idea that they are entitled to lash out at anyone they like, and should never pay even the slightest price — not even a disapproving look from a liberal — in response. They’ve grown soft and childish in this environment of no consequences, unwilling to take on even the slightest responsibility to their neighbors in the midst of a pandemic.

It’s time to stop coddling the easily hurt feelings of conservatives and instead turn our attention toward the nearly 80 million people who turned out — despite extensive efforts at disenfranchisement — to bring the Trump presidency to an end. What do we owe those Americans, the ones who actually did their part to save this country? Instead of demanding that they do more to pander to conservatives’ injured feelings, why not, for once, repay them for their hard work with justice? After all Trump has put this country through, that’s the least those who stood up and resisted him deserve.