Felony charges are first in fatal crash involving Tesla Autopilot

Driver was using partially automated driving in incident that killed two people

The misuse of Tesla's Autopilot, which can control steering,

 speed and braking, has occurred on numerous occasions. 

Associated Press

Jan 18, 2022

California prosecutors have filed two counts of vehicular manslaughter against the driver of a Tesla on Autopilot who ran a red light, slammed into another car and killed two people in 2019.

The accused appears to be the first person to be charged with a felony in the US for a fatal crash involving a motorist who was using a partially automated driving system. Los Angeles County prosecutors filed the charges in October, but they came to light only last week.

The driver, Kevin George Aziz Riad, has pleaded not guilty. Mr Riad, a limousine service driver, is free on bail while the case is pending.

The misuse of Autopilot, which can control steering, speed and braking, has occurred on numerous occasions and is the subject of investigations by two federal agencies.

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The filing of charges in the California crash could serve notice to drivers who use systems like Autopilot that they cannot rely on them to control vehicles.

The criminal charges are not the first involving an automated driving system, but they are the first to involve a widely used driver technology. Authorities in Arizona filed a charge of negligent homicide in 2020 against a driver Uber had hired to take part in the testing of a fully autonomous vehicle on public roads. The Uber vehicle, an SUV with the human backup driver on board, struck and killed a pedestrian.

By contrast, Autopilot and other driver-assist systems are widely used on roads across the world.

An estimated 765,000 Tesla vehicles are equipped with it in the US alone.

In the Tesla crash, police said a Model S was moving at a high speed when it left a freeway and ran a red light in the Los Angeles suburb of Gardena and struck a Honda Civic at an intersection on December 29, 2019. Two people who were in the Civic, Gilberto Alcazar Lopez and Maria Guadalupe Nieves-Lopez, died at the scene.

Mr Riad and a woman in the Tesla were admitted to hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

Scene where a Tesla crashed into a barrier on US Highway 101 in Mountain View, California, killing two people. AP

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transport Safety Board have been reviewing the widespread misuse of Autopilot by drivers, whose overconfidence and inattention have been blamed for multiple crashes, including fatal ones. In one crash report, the latter agency referred to its misuse as “automation complacency".

The agency said that in a 2018 crash in Culver City, California, in which a Tesla hit a firetruck, the design of the Autopilot system had “permitted the driver to disengage from the driving task”. No one was hurt in that crash.

Last May, a California man was arrested after officers noticed his Tesla moving down a motorway with the man in the back seat and no one behind the steering wheel.

Teslas that have had Autopilot in use also have hit a motorway barrier or tractor-trailers that were crossing roads. The NHTSA has sent investigative teams to 26 crashes involving Autopilot since 2016, involving at least 11 deaths.

Since the Autopilot crashes began, Tesla has updated the software to try to make it harder for drivers to abuse it. It has also tried to improve Autopilot’s ability to detect emergency vehicles.

The families of Lopez and Nieves-Lopez have sued Tesla and Mr Riad in separate lawsuits. They have alleged negligence by Mr Riad and have accused Tesla of selling defective vehicles that can accelerate suddenly and that lack an effective automatic emergency braking system. A joint trial is scheduled for mid-2023.

Lopez’s family, in court documents, alleges that the car “suddenly and unintentionally accelerated to an excessive, unsafe and uncontrollable speed”. Nieves-Lopez’s family further asserts that Mr Riad was an unsafe driver, with multiple moving infractions on his record, and couldn’t handle the high-performance Tesla.

Separately, the NHTSA is investigating a dozen crashes in which a Tesla on Autopilot ran into several parked emergency vehicles. In the crashes under investigation, at least 17 people were injured and one person was killed.

Updated: January 18th 2022, 5:07 PM

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Toys ‘R’ Us Directors Face New Fraud Claims Over Bankruptcy

Eliza Ronalds-Hannon and Bill Allison, Bloomberg News

A shopper walks towards the entrance of a Toys R Us Inc. retail store in Frederick, Maryland, U.S., on Monday, April 16, 2018. Billionaire Isaac Larian, the toy marketer whose lineup includes Little Tikes and Bratz dolls, offered to save part of Toys "R" Us from liquidation with an almost $900 million bid for stores in the U.S. and Canada. , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Toys “R” Us board members and owners face new allegations of fraud and breach of duty over the company’s 2017 bankruptcy.

Creditors claim in ongoing litigation that seven company directors have now said they knew they shouldn’t have approved executive bonuses and onerous bankruptcy loans at the outset of the case that put the retailer on the fast track to a sudden liquidation six months later. 

The additional debt served to keep Toys “R” Us in business during its restructuring, but cost it more than $500 million in fees and interest and came with strict terms, or covenants, court documents show. The costs were borne by trade creditors and employees who continued to work with the company on the promise of a successful turnaround, but went unpaid when it couldn’t comply with the debt terms and shut down.

Meanwhile, the owners and directors who signed off on the ill-fated financing received immediate bonuses of as much as $2.8 million as part of the plan, according to the filings. The creditors allege the authorization of those bonuses violated federal criminal law.

A lawyer representing the company’s former executives and directors previously has called the creditors’ lawsuit “baseless” and said the group would defend against it “vigorously.”

The collapse of Toys “R” Us involved a little-anticipated bankruptcy filing in 2017 that set off a months-long effort to restructure the company in bankruptcy court before it ultimately liquidated early the next year. The company had struggled for a decade with a crushing debt load from its 2005 leveraged buyout by Bain Capital, KKR & Co. and Vornado Realty Trust. 

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

 Pegasus Spyware Scandal Escalates, Raising Pressure On Polish Government – Analysis

 January 19, 2022  

By Balkan Insight

New evidence emerged at a Senate hearing and in media reports about the Polish government’s alleged use of the Pegasus spyware against both the opposition and the ruling Law and Justice party’s own former allies.

By Claudia Ciobanu

The Polish Central Anti-Corruption Bureau, CBA purchased the controversial Pegasus spyware in 2017 with money from a Ministry of Justice special fund, which is illegal in Poland, according to evidence presented on Tuesday during a Senate hearing into the use of the surveillance technology in the country.

Senator Krzysztof Kwiatkowski, the former head of Poland’s Supreme Audit Office presented a series of documents during the hearing which indicated that the Ministry of Justice paid 25 million zloty (about 5.5 million euros) from a victims’ support fund to the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau back in 2017, with the express purpose of purchasing technical equipment for combatting crime. Kwiatkowski said that the technology that was purchased as a result was the Pegasus software.

Kwiatkowski said that the Audit Office had already pointed out in 2018 that the expenditure was illegal according to Polish law, because such purchases by the CBA should come from the state budget and face proper parliamentary scrutiny.

Marcin Bosacki, the opposition senator heading Tuesday’s hearing, said the way the purchase was carried out indicates the governing Law and Justice, PiS party’s intention to keep the spyware secret.

“The CBA at the time functioned as the private secret services of PiS,” Bosacki said.

The evidence presented during the hearing indicated that high-level figures in the PiS government were coordinating the purchase of the spyware back in 2017.

Clients who buy the Pegasus software can use it to infect targets’ phones, access any information on the devices and even other devices linked to it, and turn the phone into a spying tool by controlling its camera and microphone.

What has been revealed so far about the identity of the targets in Poland has seemed to back up the allegation that the governing party used the spyware to serve its political goals.

In December 2021, Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity unit at the University of Toronto, Canada, named some of the targets of the Pegasus spyware in Poland. The names included prosecutor Ewa Wrzosek and high-profile lawyer Roman Giertych, both of whom have been critical of the PiS government, and opposition parliamentarian Krzysztof Brejza.

In the first part of the Senate hearing on Monday, Citizen Lab senior researcher John Scott-Railton said that the spyware targeting of Brejza, which took place in 2019, was “very complex” and “one of the most aggressive forms of attack” that Citizen Lab, which studies the use of Pegasus across the world, had seen.

Scott-Railton compared the use of Pegasus in Poland to surveillance methods deployed by the Russian state.

According to experts, Brejza’s phone was attacked 33 times in 2019, during a period when the politician was coordinating the electoral campaign of the biggest opposition force in Poland, the Civic Coalition.

Bosacki, the head of the Senate commission, said that one of the goals of the hearings was to determine whether the hacking of Brejza’s phone had an impact on the outcome of the 2019 parliamentary vote, adding that a country was no longer a democracy if secret services could determine the results of elections.

The Polish Senate, the upper house of parliament which is narrowly controlled by the opposition, established the commission after the PiS-controlled lower house, the Sejm, refused to investigate the matter earlier this month. A Sejm commission would have had more power, being able to force witnesses to appear and demand prosecutions.

Targets ‘include ruling party’s ex-spokesperson’

On Tuesday morning, Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper quoted an unnamed source involved in the purchase of Pegasus, who claimed that the first contract signed by the Polish authorities in 2017 for the purchase of spyware included 40 licences, which would allow 40 different people to be put under surveillance.

Gazeta Wyborcza’s source was formerly an employee of Matic Sp., the Polish firm which acted as an intermediary in the purchase of Pegasus by the CBA from the software’s Israeli producer, NSO Group.

According to Gazeta Wyborcza’s sources, the list of Pegasus targets includes several former PiS allies. The first to come under attack chronologically, said the sources, was Adam Hoffman, a former PiS parliamentarian and spokesman for the party, who later quit PiS, went into business and secured some contracts with state companies.

Other targets named by the newspaper are former influential PiS allies whose relationships with the governing party went sour over time.

In early January, following the Citizen Lab revelations and some initial ambiguity from PiS, party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski admitted that the Polish government owned the spyware but denied using it to target the opposition.

“It would be unfortunate if Poland’s secret services were not equipped with such a surveillance tool,” Kaczynski told right-wing magazine Sieci.

“But I can only emphasise that the opposition’s stories that Pegasus was used for political purposes are nonsense,” he added.

“These findings are shocking but not surprising,” human rights groups Amnesty International, which confirmed the spying of Brejza using its own resources, said in a public statement January 7. “They raise serious concerns not only for politicians, but for the whole of Poland’s civil society in general, particularly given the context of the government’s record of persistently subverting human rights and the rule of law.”

“These revelations demonstrate yet again why there is an urgent need for a commitment from governments to stop any forms of surveillance that breaches human rights and the need for a global moratorium on the export, sale, transfer and use of surveillance equipment, until a robust human rights-compliant regulatory framework is in place,” Amnesty International urged.

Further hearings on the Pegasus issue are planned at the Senate, and a commission is expected to issue a report and recommendations, which could involve proposals for new legislative controls over the security services.

Balkan Insight
The Balkan Insight (fornerkt the Balkin Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN) is a close group of editors and trainers that enables journalists in the region to produce in-depth analytical and investigative journalism on complex political, economic and social themes. BIRN emerged from the Balkan programme of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, IWPR, in 2005. The original IWPR Balkans team was mandated to localise that programme and make it sustainable, in light of changing realities in the region and the maturity of the IWPR intervention. Since then, its work in publishing, media training and public debate activities has become synonymous with quality, reliability and impartiality. A fully-independent and local network, it is now developing as an efficient and self-sustainable regional institution to enhance the capacity for journalism that pushes for public debate on European-oriented political and economic reform.

British Gas pension money used for buying Israeli spyware NSO Group

January 18, 2022

A British Gas sign on January 02, 2022 in Leicester, England [Nathan Stirk/Getty Images]

January 18, 2022 

Pension money for staff at the energy company, British Gas, was used for buying shares in the Israeli spyware developer, NSO Group, which was responsible for the hacking of tens of thousands of people's devices over the years, a report has revealed.

According to the Financial Times newspaper, the retirement investment fund and parent company of British Gas – Centrica – was one of the largest contributors to an investment stake in the NSO Group in 2019.

That contribution amounted to a staggering 1 billion euros, with Centrica's fund also having allocated the pension wealth to a private equity fund raised by another firm named Novalpina Capital, which owns a 70 per cent stake in NSO Group.

The paper cited two people with knowledge on the matter as saying that Centrica's Combined Common Investment Fund has a seat on a committee of Novalpina's biggest investors, each of whom contributes tens of millions of euros, at the very least.

The NSO Group has been made infamous over the past few years due to its hacking scandals, particularly in July last year when the University of Toronto's internet watchdog, Citizen Lab, exposed its client governments' misuse of the Pegasus spyware through the hacking of around 50,000 phones and devices belonging to journalists, human rights activists and political critics worldwide.

British Gas's staff pensions going towards a company implicated in such scandals – especially in a company blacklisted by the United States – is seen as being directly linked to human rights abuse and the misuse of spyware by various governments.

This is not the first time pension money has been used to buy shares in such companies, with Amnesty International in October addressing a number of other retirement funds for contributing to Novalpina's fund. Those firms included two American ones, Oregon's public employee retirement system and Alaska's $81bn permanent funds, and two English local government ones, East Riding Pension Fund and the South Yorkshire Pensions Authority.

Israel's State Comptroller to probe use of Pegasus to spy on citizens

January 18, 2022 

Israeli demonstrators, dressed in black and wearing protective face masks, take part in a "Black Flag" demonstration outside the Israeli parliament (Knesset) in Jerusalem on April 30, 2020 [AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP via Getty Images]

January 18, 2022

Israel's State Comptroller, Matanyahu Englman, and Privacy Authority said, on Tuesday, that they would probe Israeli police over claims of using NSO Group's Pegasus hacking technology against citizens and protesters in Israel.

Israeli business news outlet, the Calcalist, reported on Tuesday morning that Israeli police have, for years, been making widespread use of the spyware against Israeli civilians.


Israel's Pegasus spyware global weapon to silence critics?

 – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

The Calcalist also said that the police spied on people not suspected of crimes, exploited a legal loophole and kept the surveillance under tight secrecy without oversight by a court or a judge.

Englman said that the use of such espionage devices "raises questions of balance between their usefulness and the violation of the right to privacy and other freedoms."

Israel Police Chief, Kobi Shabtai, admitted using the notorious spyware against Israeli citizens, but promised that everything was done with the appropriate warrants and oversight.

Meanwhile, he denied using the spyware against anti-Netanyahu activists, anti-government protesters, or other activists.

"These kinds of tools were not used against Black Flag [anti-Netanyahu] demonstrators, the phones of heads of municipalities or to track anti-pride parade activists," Shabtai was quoted by the Times of Israel saying.

He claimed that such a tool is "one of the most controlled and supervised areas by all legal entities both inside and outside the police."

However, Israeli Channel 12, according to The Jerusalem Post, reported the police saying it used the technology of the company, Cellebrite, to hack a Black Flag protester's cell phone.

Israeli Police Under Fire Over Reported Use of Pegasus to Hack Israelis

by Reuters and Algemeiner Staff
JANUARY 18, 2022 

An aerial view shows the logo of Israeli cyber firm NSO Group at one of its branches in the Arava Desert, southern Israel July 22, 2021. Picture taken with a drone. REUTERS/Amir Cohen

Israel’s parliament will seek an explanation from police over the force’s reported use of a controversial hacking tool against citizens of the country, a senior legislator said on Tuesday.

Without citing sources, the Calcalist financial daily said police have possessed the Pegasus spyware made by Israel’s NSO Group — which is now on a US government blacklist — since 2013.

Calcalist said the police used it against targets including anti-government protest leaders, sometimes without the required court warrants.

The report added a new domestic angle to global pressure on Israel following allegations that Pegasus has been abused by some foreign client governments to spy on human rights activists, journalists and politicians.

Israeli and American missile defense agencies completed a “successful” flight test on Tuesday of the Arrow-3 weapon system, which was...

Responding to the Calcalist report, Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai said the force had acquired third-party cyber technology, but he stopped short of confirming or denying any usage of Pegasus.

All such monitoring activity, he said in a statement, “is carried out according to law … (and) for example, in the case of covert listening, a request is filed with a court, which examines the matter”.

He denied the newspaper’s report that police had used spyware against, among others, leaders of so-called “Black Flag” protests last year that demanded the resignation of then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on trial on corruption charges he denies.

On Israel’s Channel 12 TV news, legislator Meirav Ben Ari said the parliamentary public security committee she chairs would convene as early as next week to question police about the Calcalist report.

“Many members of parliament have approached me today. This is a very disturbing incident, raising concerns about violation of privacy and democracy as a whole,” Ben Ari said. “The police, as they do whenever they come to my hearings, will explain.”

SPYWARE CUSTOMERS

NSO said it could not confirm or deny any existing or potential customers. It said it does not operate the system once sold to its governmental customers nor is it involved in any way in the system’s operation.

“NSO sells its products under license and regulation to intelligence and law enforcement agencies to prevent terror and crime under court orders and the local laws of their countries,” it said.

Last month, a group of US lawmakers asked the Treasury Department and State Department to sanction NSO and three other foreign surveillance companies they say helped authoritarian governments commit human rights abuses.

In November, Apple sued NSO, saying that it violated US laws by breaking into the software installed on iPhones.

NSO has also faced either legal action or criticism from Microsoft Corp, Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc, Google parent Alphabet Inc and Cisco Systems Inc.

CYBER CRIME

'Stalkerware' apps help domestic abusers spy on their victims
A terrifying app category known as “stalkerware” is readily accessible on any app store. NBC News’ Jacob Ward explains how these invasive apps are tailor-made to enable abusive partners to monitor and collect data on their victims.

 Jan. 18, 2022

CRIMINAL CRYPTO CAPITALI$M

 

Europol Shuts Down VPNLab.net

NTD News

Europol has shut down VPN Lab, which it calls a provider of choice for cybercriminals. What impact does this have on the world of cybercrime?

Philly schools partner with Black Doctors Consortium to get more Black and Latino students vaccinated

By Johann Calhoun Jan 18, 2022, 

Sheilah McMillan, right, a nurse supervisor for the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium gives Jeremiah Brooks, a senior at Paul Robeson High School, his booster shot Tuesday inside the school’s gym. Johann Calhoun / Chalkbeat


Jeremiah Brooks, a senior at Paul Robeson High School for Human Services in West Philadelphia, waited patiently until his turn to get his COVID-19 vaccine booster Tuesday morning inside the school’s gym.

“I believe it will protect me from the virus,” Brooks said. “My message to other students is to take this vaccine because it will definitely protect them and will slow down COVID so that kids can come back and have a good education instead of learning from a computer screen at their home.”

Brooks was one of dozens of Robeson students Tuesday who got free vaccine and booster shots through a program created by the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium. The partnership, which also includes the school district and the city’s health department, is pushing to get mostly Black and Latino students from specific geographic locations in Philadelphia vaccinated.

Fifty-six percent of youth between the ages of 12 to 17 in Philadelphia have received at least one dose, as have 32.1% of children aged 5-11. But numbers for African-American and Latino youth are low and need to improve, health officials said.

Dr. Ala Stanford talks to a student after a listening session at Paul Robeson High School in West Philadelphia Tuesday. Johann Calhoun / Chalkbeat

Forty-five percent of Black youth between ages 12 and 17 and 13.8% between the ages of 5 to 11 have received at least one dose. The number is slightly higher for Hispanic young people, with 63% between 12 and 17 receiving one dose and 19.4% between 5 and 11.

Black students make up over half of the district’s population, which stands at 120,000 students.

The consortium, led by Dr. Ala Stanford, has been a key player in helping underserved communities throughout the pandemic. The consortium provided and advocated for greater access to testing, then administered COVID-19 vaccines when they first became available in early 2021 and educated people about their benefits.

Stanford took questions Tuesday inside Robeson’s auditorium from students who are still skeptical about the vaccine. The students were instructed to write questions on cards for Stanford to answer.

“Will the vaccine prevent me from getting COVID?”

“Will you die if you don’t get the vaccine?”

“How do you feel after getting the vaccine shot”

Stanford told the students they are only eligible to get the Pfizer vaccine and that 97% of hospital patients in Philadelphia are not vaccinated. Vaccines may not prevent students from getting COVID, Stanford said, however it lessens the chance of them getting extremely sick or dying.

“I’m coming to you from a place of being a wife, being a mother, being an educator and being somebody who for the last year put my life on hold to take care of other people and to take care of folks who look like me who don’t always have access to care,” Stanford said.

Another vaccination clinic is scheduled from 2-7 p.m. Thursday at Robeson. More clinics are planned through Feb. 18 and will be available for anyone who is eligible for the vaccine, regardless of affiliation with the schools.

“This is a proactive move to help students, staff, and their families,” said Superintendent William Hite. “Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, protecting the health and well-being of students and staff has been our top priority. We have been very intentional about listening to the science and the science is very clear – vaccines are a very effective way to mitigate the spread of this virus. So, we welcome the opportunity to partner with Dr. Stanford and help our school communities stay healthy and well.”

Robeson Principal Richard Gordon IV, who last year was named national principal of the year, said he was pleased with the number of students who asked Dr. Stanford questions. The vaccination site attracted around 50 students and staff.

“When you bring a renowned voice on vaccinations and how to combat COVID-19, and that person is somebody who is from Philadelphia, somebody who looks like who we serve everyday, I think that makes a tremendous impact,” Gordon said.

Since returning from winter break, the district has struggled to keep schools open for in-person learning amid a dramatic surge in COVID cases. Many teachers and other staff members were either sick or in quarantine.

After shifting nearly half of its schools to remote learning last week, the Philadelphia district announced Monday that only 15 schools will be virtual this week due to staffing challenges. Last week, 92 schools had shifted to remote learning.

White House Weighs Support for Klobuchar’s Tech Antitrust Bill

Jennifer Jacobs and Anna Edgerton, Bloomberg News

(Bloomberg) -- The Biden administration is exploring ways to rein in the nation’s biggest technology companies, possibly through bipartisan legislation that’s under consideration in the U.S. Senate, according to people familiar with the matter.

The White House is planning a meeting this week to discuss the topic, according to two of the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss the deliberations. 

The event will include critics of the tech giants as well as representatives of smaller digital firms. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed and economic adviser Brian Deese have helped to organize the session and next steps, two people said.

The White House would like to help build consensus for the measure, but doesn’t intend to openly endorse the legislation at this point, according to one of the people familiar with situation.

White House communications staff didn’t immediately comment.

Lawmakers have urged the White House to help advance the measure, which is intended to curb the dominance of Apple Inc., Amazon Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. 

The bill, from Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, has inspired fierce opposition from major U.S. technology companies, who warn that it would harm products that are popular with consumers. The legislation, which the Senate Judiciary Committee could consider as soon as Thursday, would prohibit dominant platforms from giving an advantage to their own products, like, say, Google Maps and Apple Music. 

Apple and Google on Tuesday warned that the bill would hurt their ability to protect user security and safety and would put U.S. technology at a disadvantage against foreign competitors, who wouldn’t be subject to the new guidelines. The Biden administration is also weighing the concerns raised by the four companies that would be affected, one of the officials said. 

The White House has increasingly turned to corporate executives to serve as informal advisers, policy allies and political boosters as the administration grapples with controversial issues. 

The Klobuchar-Grassley bill is the tech-focused measure that is best positioned to advance in Congress, since it has a strong roster of bipartisan co-sponsors and a companion bill in the House. Democratic lawmakers have been pushing the White House to publicly support the legislation. 

President Joe Biden will weigh whether to mention the anti-trust issue in his March State of the Union speech, one of the people said.

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

The line connecting Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump runs through Dixie
John Stoehr
January 17, 2022

Confederate memorial (Shutterstock)


Today we honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. There are many obvious reasons to raise up his name in tribute and praise. But there’s another less obvious reason – the civil rights leader understood southern politics.

Much of our discourse treats southern politics as if it were just another regional bloc. Or the region and its history are whitewashed in ways similar to slavery being whitewashed from US history. I think King knew better. If you don’t understand southern politics, you don’t understand politics, period.

I’m not a scholar, but I lived in the south for nearly a decade. I was a reporter and editor at small newspapers. I’m here to tell you, things are different.

Speaking truthfully is not a civic virtue. Free speech is not valued. The common good is not recognized. There is no such thing as “the public.” Equality is paid lip service. The rights of property are unquestioned.

Meanwhile, conformity is enforced, gender roles policed, the racial hierarchy maintained unto death. To call southern politics the politics of a rightwing authoritarian collective is not too much. Everything is us against them. We talk about fascism as if it’s modern. The American sort goes back to 1619.

In a very real sense, the white south is like a mini-Russia – one-party control, endemic corruption, no concern for governance and constant appeals to the very worst in humanity for the sake of restricting liberty to the master race. The line connecting Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump runs through Dixie.

If this sounds unkind, consider this. Southern politics, by which I mean white southern politics, is what gave motivation and rationale to the J6 insurgents. They were not betraying the country. They were not committing acts of treason. They were instead defending “real Americans” from “tyranny.”

Let’s turn now to an authority, Angie Maxwell. She’s a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas and director of its Center of Southern Politics and Society. Her latest book, with Todd Shields, is The Long Southern Strategy. She explained that entertainment, not governing, is the thing in the south.

What about southern politics is vital to understanding American democracy that most people don't know about, including southerners?

Prior to the publication of VO Key, Jr's landmark study, Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949), most research in American politics (not historians) focused primarily on the non-South. The very short introduction to Key's enormous book still reveals some of the most shrewd insights about the region.

Specifically, Key claims that because of one-party politics, the South has no real political system capable of solving its very real problems. In a one-party political system, politics becomes a "drole facade" – a politics of entertainment as opposed to a contest of ideas.

There is little oversight or restraint. Politicians who are cult of personalities are successful. Political rallies are tent revival-like sources of entertainment.

When the South was in the process of realigning from Democratic dominance to Republican dominance, observers and scholars thought the region was purple and competitive. The party labels were but the ideologies were not.

The one-party dominance still exists in most of the southern states. It's just the GOP in control instead of the Democratic Party. So in many southern states there is no opposition party infrastructure.

There is scant participation in parties by the public. Little oversight is still the norm. Most of the substantive changes have been the result of federal laws and requirements or Supreme Court rulings.

This is important, because it shows why Georgia specifically has moved the needle and become so competitive.

Democratic workers there have invested in infrastructure and community organizing. It doesn't matter how talented a Democratic candidate may be, without the grassroots network and public buy-in to the party, they will not be successful.

Another thing that many people may not realize is how important the South is for the national Democratic Party.

Most southern states go red, of course. Although Obama won three southern states, he could have lost them and still reached the magic number for an Electoral College victory. So many folks don't see the importance of the South for the Democratic Party.

However, the South still has a significant number of delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Since many southern states moved their primaries up in the calendar – remember the moniker "SEC primary" – and since they often vote similarly in those primaries, they have an enormous impact on momentum in a crowded Democratic Party field.

Candidates who know that and invest in the South are often successful there, though it can seem like a waste of resources for winning votes in the general.

In terms of the Republican primaries, we all know the South is crucial, but I don't know if we realize the extent. Because most of the Republican primaries are winner-take-most if not winner-take-all, and because the RNC awards bonus delegates to states that went red in the general in the last election cycle, the South has a disproportionate effect on who gets the RNC nomination. I wrote a piece about it last January.

Something many people do not know is how limited our research on southern politics is – particularly over time research. The ANES (American National Election Surveys) at University of Michigan is the gold standard in our over time data on American politics. Their national surveys have been running consistently since 1952.

However, in most years, their southern samples in those surveys are very, very small. That isn't their fault. They are taking a national snapshot.

However, since the region has been so dominated by one-party politics, political behavior and attitudes operate differently. And that is rarely captured.

That is why the center I run, and upon which my research is based, oversamples the South so that we can compare the region to the rest of the country and see where it is distinct and where it is not.

Are you able to generalize the political values of one-party southern politics?

For the dominant party, symbolic politics is key, as opposed to governing. There isn't a real threat to losing power or control, so catering to the base is everything, as is party loyalty and party allegiance.

The fear is always being primaried in your own party, not losing in a general. Compromise isn't necessary, so it's about jockeying for recognition within the party.

For the party in opposition, where one party dominates, it has to be about compromise and political pragmatism.

For example, the reason Bernie Sanders did not fare well in the South in the 2020 Democratic primaries is not necessarily because southern Democrats think Medicare for all is a bad idea. It just seems like a pipe dream. It seems so far from their lived reality in a state dominated by a politics of privatization. Many southern states never expanded Medicaid, and in the ones that did, it was a huge battle.

Many people don't realize what an uphill battle it is in most southern states to reach real two-party competition. That's why it was amazing to see Georgia, North Carolina and Texas too close to call on election night 2020. Just being at that place represents decades of work.

This is also why the gutting of the Voting Rights Act (as a result of the 2013 Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder) is so devastating in the South. Folks may look at a state like Arkansas, for example, and say well they have four GOP Congressman now, and they will likely have four after 2022. What's the big impact of redistricting post-Shelby County?

What they don't see is all the years of work that made an African-American woman and state Senator Joyce Elliot, a serious contender in 2020 in the 2nd district (Little Rock). But now Little Rock has been split into three separate congressional districts, undoing all of those decades of organizing.

The South is overly influential in selecting the GOP's presidential nominee. The South is critical to any GOP victory in the general. The influence of the South in the selection of the Democratic Party's presidential nominee is underestimated.

The long history of one-party politics in the South has created real structural barriers to progress and change. For the party in opposition, it takes decades of work to become competitive again, and a great deal of that could be wiped away without a restoration of the protections of the Voting Rights Act.

For Republicans, politics is symbolic. For Democratic, it's about pragmatism. That sounds a lot like our national politics. Has American politics been "southernized"?

Yes. American politics has become southernized in that the majority of states are under one party rule, as opposed to divided government.

The longer that persists and the more extreme the gap in partisan power, the more likely non-southern states will encounter the same structural problems that have plagued the South.

In terms of parties, the Republicans nationalized southern white identity in an effort to turn the South red — The Long Southern Strategy — and that rebranded conservatism in a southern white image.

Scoring high on scales that measure racial resentment, modern sexism or Christian nationals accounted for 95 percent of Trump’s white vote.

In terms of Democrats, Democrats outside of the South tend to resemble Democrats in southern states where Republicans dominate, leaving Democrats little recourse but to be pragmatic and compromising – because they have no other choice.

Democrats in strong blue states operate in a very different environment.

'This is absurd': A legal expert unpacks the hidden agenda behind the Supreme Court's 'pernicious' decision ​

John Stoehr
January 14, 2022

Chief Justice John Roberts (screengrab)

Normal people don’t pay much attention to the United States Supreme Court. I don’t know why. Here’s nine people who tell us what the law is. They tell us what the law is even if their reasoning for it is trash.

Such is the case with the court’s latest ruling. The six Republican justices could have said to themselves, “Gee, the pandemic is bad. It’s killing a lot of people. Maybe we shouldn’t second guess the people who know what they’re talking about when it comes to public health.”

Nah.

The court instead decided to second guess the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The White House had tried to implement the president’s vaccine-or-test mandate via OSHA’s statutory authority to regulate workplace safety. The mandate would have affected employers with over 100 workers, or about 100 million people.

The Republicans justices make-believed they were public health experts. The covid, though it continues to rage through the workplace, isn’t an occupational hazard, they said. Why? It exists, like other hazards in life, outside the workplace. Therefore, OSHA doesn’t have the statutory authority the Biden administration says it has.

This is stupid, according to Josh Chafetz, professor of law at Georgetown and author of Congress’s Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers. (“Stupid” wasn’t his word, though.) Air exists outside the workplace. So does water. Yet OSHA regulates them. This is what happens when justices make-believe.

It gets worse.

The justices said they were restoring power to Congress, but Josh said nuh-uh. That’s bad faith. What they are really trying to do is dismantle the administrative state. To do that, Republican justices invented out of thin air something called the “major questions doctrine.”

It’s complicated. Josh explained in our chat. The long and short of it, though, is that the court’s Republicans figured out a way to tear down what they don’t like while never appearing to have torn down anything.

The result is a court that’s okie-dokie with mass death while being hostile toward a government trying to prevent more mass death.

The ruling was about the authority of OSHA. Why did the conservatives say it does not have authority over workplace safety?

Their opinion basically hinged on two reasons – one absurd and one pernicious. The absurd one is best summed up in this sentence from the opinion: "Although COVID–19 is a risk that occurs in many workplaces, it is not an occupational hazard in most. COVID–19 can and does spread at home, in schools, during sporting events, and everywhere else that people gather."

In other words, the majority said that OSHA is designed to regulate things that are unique to workplaces, and since Covid exists everywhere in society, it isn't unique to workplaces.

This is absurd for a couple of reasons.

First, it's not anywhere in the statutory language. The statute gives OSHA the authority to set "occupational safety and health standards." It doesn't say that the dangers against which OSHA can protect have to exist only in occupational environments – it simply says that OSHA can regulate them when they exist in such environments.

And that brings us to the second reason, that it's absurd: Lots of stuff OSHA regulates exists outside of workplaces. OSHA can regulate for workplace fire safety, even though fires burn down houses and churches and other places, too. OSHA can regulate for workplace air quality, even though air pollution exists on the streets, too.

The second, pernicious basis of the opinion is what is called the "major questions doctrine" in administrative law.


Under most circumstances, when an agency regulates pursuant to statutory authorization, the courts will defer to that agency's understanding of the law, so long as that understanding is reasonable. (This is called "Chevron deference," named for a 1984 case.)

The "major questions doctrine" is a carveout to this regime that basically says, "We won't defer to agencies when the agency has taken it upon itself to decide a 'major question.'"


This is pernicious because what counts as a "major question" is entirely in the eye of the observer, and is a post-hoc determination made by the court.

Which means that, although the Court claims the “major questions doctrine" is Congress-empowering, it just empowers the justices who decide in the moment whether they think a particular question is "major" or not. So, here, they decide that the vaccinate-or-test mandate is "major" and therefore that OSHA gets no deference.

So they say they are respecting Congress but not really?

Exactly. They say this is all about returning power to Congress. (In effect, they're saying, “Surely if Congress meant to allow the agency to address such a major question, it would have said so explicitly in statutory text.”)

But Congress had no way of knowing when it wrote the statute (a) precisely what issues would arise or (b) whether the justices would decide those issues were "major" (and therefore outside the normal deference regime) or not.

So this isn't actually about respecting Congress's wishes – after all, Congress chose to write broad language against the backdrop of a generally applicable deference regime.


Instead, it's about the Republican justices inventing a new doctrine that allows them to impose deregulatory outcomes whenever they want to under the flag of empowering Congress.

Clarence Thomas seemed to underscore this point. He said Congress did not “expressly authorize" vaccine requirements. The thinking here seems to be that if Congress does not write laws in granular detail, no agency has any authority. Am I onto something?

That's Thomas writing in dissent in the other case, the one about healthcare workers specifically. He says that the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services don’t specifically have that authority. That ties into a deep anti-administrativism that runs throughout Thomas's jurisprudence, and increasingly in that of many of his colleagues as well.

This would also require Congress to be as nimble, informed and experienced about, say, public health policy as the public servants whose job is public health policy. That seems absurd.

Indeed! Again, what looks like deference to Congress is in fact cover for a deregulatory regime, because these judges know full well that this is not how legislatures are set up to work in the modern world.

Deregulation with the outcome being increased profits is one thing. Deregulation with the outcome being mass death is another. Before this pandemic is over, 1 million Americans will be dead.

Yep. And the Republican justices just made the policy choice to allow many more to die.

This goes back to the subjectivity of what counts as a "major question."

To my mind, getting vaccinated is a minor inconvenience at most. Getting tested is also a minor inconvenience. Getting to choose whether to be vaccinated or tested weekly is even more minor.

But the majority describes them as "major," so suddenly they're overturning OSHA's decision and creating a situation that will kill more people.

Can we say in fairness that some of the justices are giving credence to anti-vax views?

Yes, I think that's fair. They're all vaccinated and boosted, of course, as are so many elites of all types who are playing footsie with anti-vaxxers.

But they're definitely giving support to the anti-vax movement with both the decision and also with some of the language.

I'll also note that they describe it as a vaccine mandate, rather than a vaccine-or-test mandate, which is telling.

So this doesn't end with covid vaccines.

Definitely not.

The broadening of the major questions doctrine means a lot of environmental regulations are probably in trouble, as are just about any other regulations that the Republicans on the Court don't like.

That's what's so pernicious -- they can describe just about anything as "major" and then use that as a reason to deny deference, which in practice means gutting the regulation.

What is the ideal deregulatory scheme for these people? A federal government with no authority to provide for the general welfare?

Well, Thomas, at one extreme, has repeatedly expressed nostalgia for the "Lochner era," the period between the mid-1890s and 1937 when the Court frequently struck down both state and federal health, safety, and welfare laws.

I think some of his Republican colleagues don't want to go that far, but they do want to radically pare back the administrative state, which would have a significant deregulatory effect.

But what’s the threshold between too little and too much?

I'm not sure they have that fine-grained a view, and of course their ability to calibrate is limited by some of the constraints of the judicial role.

But the majority today definitely thinks that there is too much federal regulation generally, and it is using a lot of different sorts of mechanisms to pare it back across the board.

This is bad for democracy.

I agree. And, again, what makes it even more frustrating is that they claim to be doing it in the service of empowering representative institutions.

Josh, our hour is up. Many thanks for your time, consideration and caring.

My pleasure! It was fun!

Jan. 6 was literally a white supremacist assault on democracy. Has anyone in the media come out and said that?

Chauncey Devega, Salon
January 18, 2022

Screenshot from Raw video (Arun Gupta) https://www.facebook.com/arun.gupta.75054689/videos/246940530907779/

Public opinion polls and other research have repeatedly shown that white racist attitudes, whether presented as "old-fashioned" racism or in less direct fashion as racial resentment and racial hostility, are strongly associated with support for Donald Trump and his Republican fascist movement. It is certainly true that feelings of economic insecurity, inequality and social alienation among the white working class are central to understanding the rise of American neofascism. But throughout American history, those forces have primarily manifested through white racism in its various forms

As social theorist Stuart Hall described this dynamic: "Race is the modality in which class is lived."

W.E.B. Du Bois explained it this way in a memorable passage from "Black Reconstruction":

Slavery bred in the poor white a dislike of Negro toil of all sorts. He never regarded himself as a laborer, or as part of any labor movement. If he had any ambition at all it was to become a planter and to own "niggers." To these Negroes he transferred all the dislike and hatred which he had for the whole slave system. The result was that the system was held stable and intact by the poor white.

President Lyndon Johnson offered a famous observation in a similar vein: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

RAWSTORY+
'He is the Yoda of intel': How conspiracy theorists were instrumentalized to mobilize followers to violence on Jan. 6

In this sense, the Age of Trump is the latest iteration of a much older politics of white rage and white supremacy whose origins extend well back before the Founding.

Last January Trump's agents and allies attempted to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election. Their plot consisted of a multifaceted nationwide plan to disqualify Joe Biden's votes -- and some participants literally suggested deploying the military after declaring a national state of emergency to cement Trump's control over the country.

The evidence shows that the Capitol attack of Jan. 6 was an integral component of Trump's coup attempt, intended to delay the certification of the Electoral College votes and prevent the final and formal election of Biden as president. In none of these events was race in any way a peripheral or irrelevant issue.

It is simply factual to describe Jan. 6 as a white supremacist attack on multiracial democracy. But if one were to rely on the consensus of the America's mainstream news media on the one-year anniversary, one might come away with the belief that racism and white supremacy played little or no role in the events of that day.

Very few of the personal essays and reflections from journalists and others who were at the Capitol or nearby on Jan. 6 explicitly mentioned that Trump's attack force was almost entirely all white. Instead, those accounts depicted a race-less and colorless horde of angry political hooligans attempting to overthrow American democracy.

Other writing about the events of Jan. 6 focused more impersonally on the role of authoritarianism and "populism." But again, the specific racial marker was missing: It was not described as "white" populism or "white" authoritarianism or, better yet, "white fascism," "white terrorism" or "white violence."


Likewise, Trump's attack force and coup plotters were involved in an "insurrection" — but not a "white" insurrection. They were "enraged" about the 2020 election and its results but not driven by "white rage."

By not centering the role of race in the events of Jan. 6, other realities are obscured as well. Trump's attempted coup and the ongoing attacks on American democracy are a function of toxic white masculinity, militant "Christianity," collective narcissism and other pathologies, including a profound societal impulse towards violence, self-destruction and death.

Many journalists may object to this criticism by responding that race and racism are not their "beat," and they lack expertise in that area. My response would be that they are neglecting one of the most important aspects of American society, and therefore failing to understand crucial context for the current political crisis.

To those who say they don't want to "make a mistake" when writing about race and racism, I would respond: Learn and study. Talk to experts, ask questions and educate yourself. Treat those topics as you would any other matter of critical societal importance.

If the answer is, "I chose to not write that story," I would say you made a choice to ignore a central element of the Age of Trump, and America's actual or potential descent into fascism and racial authoritarianism. If the answer is more that the role of race on Jan. 6 "did not occur to me." The luxury not to "see" or understand racism and white supremacy is itself an example of white privilege and how it works on day-to-day manner. I do not question your good intentions — but those have little, if anything, to do with racist or white supremacist outcomes.

If the answer is to respond that it's "obvious" that the Trump attack force was white and it serves no purpose to mention said fact, I would explain how that is still a form of racial erasure which is doing the work of white supremacy. Assuming that these things are "obvious" helps to make invisible the myriad ways that whiteness and white power structure American society.

The power of racial colorblindness as a tool of white supremacy is easily understood: If the Jan. 6 attackers had been black or brown or Muslim, there would have been no such racial erasure. They would have been described in racial terms by the media, and in public discourse more generally, likely almost every single time the event was mentioned.

My concerns about racial erasure and the events of Jan. 6 are directed primarily toward the mainstream news media and its "reasonable" liberal or moderate voices. Right-wing media is a propaganda machine that serves the interests of white supremacy, and has no legitimacy or credibility in this discussion. But if mainstream "centrist" and liberal voices in the media are to play any kind of effective role as defenders of democracy in this moment of crisis, they must remove the blinders of whiteness.

At its core, American neofascism is a white supremacist project. To blind yourself to that fact is to limit your ability to understand it — and to grasp the magnitude of the existential danger now facing American society. That is the road to defeat, and the literal end of America's experiment in multiracial democracy. Mainstream media can do better — and it absolutely must.