Israel's Annexation Plan Is the Latest Stage in a Long History of Violent Dispossession
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=37266"><span class="small">Greg Shupak, Jacobin</span></a>
Wednesday, 22 July 2020 08:24
Shupak writes: "Annexation would see Israel claim sovereignty over roughly 30 percent of the West Bank, including most of the Jordan Valley and more than 230 illegal Israeli settlements."
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Isarael arrives to chair the weekly cabinet meeting at his office in Jerusalem, June 30. (photo: Getty Images)
Israel's Annexation Plan Is the Latest Stage in a Long History of Violent Dispossession
By Greg Shupak, Jacobin
22 July 20
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has missed its first deadline for annexing part of the West Bank, but this Trump-backed scheme for land theft is still firmly on the table. The goal of Netanyahu and his US sponsors is simple: they want to liquidate Palestinian national aspirations.
srael’s US-approved plan to annex much of the West Bank, a naked violation of international law and act of racist thievery, aims to throttle Palestinian national aspirations out of existence. The move is based on the Trump administration’s “deal of the century,” a scheme that the Palestinians played no part in drawing up — less a road map to peace than an attempt to liquidate the Palestinian right to self-determination.
The arrangement supposedly seeks to resolve the Palestinian question by attempting to bribe Palestinians into granting Israel more land. They are expected to demilitarize without Israel doing the same and to accept a nonviable Bantustan in lieu of meaningful statehood, in return for meeting a long list of ludicrous conditions set out by their oppressors, including giving up the right of their refugees to return to their homes, and letting Israel and the United States either choose who governs Gaza or keep the territory unlivable.
Annexation would see Israel claim sovereignty overly roughly 30 percent of the West Bank, including most of the Jordan Valley and more than 230 illegal Israeli settlements — a familiar pattern of colonial larceny, given Israel’s earlier annexations of Jerusalem and of Syria’s Golan Heights, to say nothing of the 77 percent of historic Palestine that is presently called Israel.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially said that he would declare the newest round of annexations on July 1, but his government has delayed the move for an unspecified period, as Netanyahu tries to navigate his tenuous position in domestic politics while coping with COVID-19. He also wants precise indications of what form of pilfering his bosses in Washington will allow. However, all indications are that the Israeli leadership wants to seize the opportunity to consolidate this phase of colonization soon, lest conditions change.
A History of Conquest
Understanding the annexation gambit requires us to recognize that a dual impulse toward expansionism and demographic superiority lies at the heart of the Zionist endeavor. The challenge for Israeli strategists has been to increase the amount of land that that they control in historic Palestine while ensuring a Jewish majority — “maximum land with a minimal number of Arabs,” in the words of historian Nur Masalha. For example, the Trump blueprint involves the forced transfer of over 260,000 Palestinians from being citizens of Israel to subjects of a hypothetical future Palestinian enclave.
The annexations likely to occur this year are the latest chapter in the demographic engineering that has always been central to modern political Zionism. Its founder, Austro-Hungarian author Theodor Herzl, wrote in his diary in 1895 that “we shall endeavor to expel the poor [Palestinian] population across the border unnoticed, procuring employment for it in the transit countries, but denying it any employment” in the colonial Zionist state in Palestine that he envisioned.
Though Zionism has had various currents, the two that have been hegemonic since before the creation of the Israeli state — Labor Zionism and Revisionist Zionism — both, as Avi Shlaim points out, “sought to create a Jewish state in a land that was already inhabited by another people,” even if they differed over exactly how much of historic Palestine the Zionists should control, or the tactics to use in pursuit of their goals.
It has been a settler-colonial enterprise from the start, one based on uprooting the indigenous population and replacing it with people from elsewhere. As Joseph Massad puts it, throughout its history Zionism has “remained unabashed about . . . its commitment to building a demographically exclusive Jewish state modeled after Christian Europe, a notion pervaded . . . by a religio-racial epistemology of supremacy over the Palestinian Arabs not unlike that used by European colonialism with its ideology of white supremacy over the natives.”
In the years leading up to and immediately following the creation of Israel, Zionists were clear about their intentions, and even about the legitimacy of Palestinian claims to Palestine. Vladimir Jabotinsky — the founder of Revisionist Zionism — argued that Zionists who sought compromise with the Palestinians were deluded in their view “that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked . . . [and] who will abandon their birthright to Palestine.”
Later, David Ben-Gurion, Labor Zionist and Israel’s first prime minister, admitted, “If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural; we have taken their country.” For him, turning Palestinians into a minority in their homeland was not enough: “There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 percent.”
Squeezing Palestinians Out
Shrinking the Palestinian population while enlarging that of Israel has been a foundational characteristic of Zionism not only in theory but also in practice. Israel’s creation involved Zionist forces expelling 750,000 Palestinians in the 1947–48 Nakba. Five million of those Palestinians and their descendants are still UN-registered refugees. According to BADIL, an NGO that has special consultative status with the UN’s Economic and Social Council, a further 2.25 million Palestinians have become refugees since 1948 — more than a million of them having been driven from their homes during Israel’s 1967 conquest of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem — and 718,000 more are internally displaced.
Israel prevents the refugees from exercising their right to return to their homes, while in contrast, Israel’s Law of Return allows anyone on Earth who the state deems to be Jewish to migrate to Israel and automatically become a citizen. If justice for the Palestinian refugees were realized, there would likely be a Palestinian majority on both sides of the Green Line, which would be a historic defeat for the Zionist movement.
Israel has gone beyond making sure that the refugees stay refugees in order to build its ethnostate. Its ghastly separation barrier is functionally an annexation wall, as 85 percent of it is Palestinian land. Israel shrinks Gaza by taking over Palestinian land on the Strip and calling it a “buffer zone,” depriving the Palestinians who live there of their homes and agriculture.
According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, Israeli policy in East Jerusalem is designed to pressure Palestinians to leave the city, so as to shape “a geographical and demographic reality that would thwart any future attempt to challenge Israeli sovereignty there.” Since 1967, as the group points out, Israel has revoked the permanent residency of approximately 14,500 Palestinians from East Jerusalem. It is nearly impossible for Palestinians to get building permits in the city and, in 1973, Israel legally mandated a 73–26 demographic advantage for Jewish people in Jerusalem.
Netanyahu has made it clear that he intends to keep growing the colony while leaving Israel legally responsible for the fewest possible number of Palestinians — the logical corollaries of “maximum land with a minimal number of Arabs” are “maximum Arabs on minimum land” and “maximum control and minimum responsibility.” Israel, Netanyahu told a right-wing newspaper, will annex the Jordan Valley without the 50,000–65,000 Palestinians who live there becoming citizens of Israel, lest they have a say in who governs them and how.
Nevertheless, he insisted, overall Israeli “security control” will still apply to Jericho, for example, a Palestinian city in the Jordan Valley. The prime minister added that he won’t even permit the discontiguous, non-sovereign parody of a hypothetical Palestinian “state” that Trump promised. In other words, the US-Israeli plan is to continue to dominate Palestinians while denying them elementary democratic and national rights.
While Israel has added land and subtracted Palestinians in these ways, and by regularly killing them in large numbers, it has enlarged its own population and the territory in its grasp by illegally settling 620,000 people in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In this context, annexation is a further illustration of the fact that the Zionist project involves taking Palestinian land that Israel has no intention of returning.
To the Victor Go the Spoils
The history of Palestinian dispossession has not merely been driven by racial-religious supremacy for its own sake. It also means enhancing the wealth of the Israeli ruling class, as well as that of their international capitalist partners. Following the Nakba, Israel passed the Absentees’ Property Law, which defines ethnically cleansed Palestinians as “absentee,” creating a pretext for Israel to steal the land, houses, and bank accounts of Palestinians.
The law created the absurd category of the “present absentee,” so that Israel could confiscate the property of Palestinians who were still in Palestine but had been internally displaced. These steps simultaneously created a further barrier to Palestinian return while enriching Israelis.
The Israeli state-owned water company Mekorot takes water from Palestinians in the West Bank to supply Israelis — including those living in illegal settlements — for domestic, agricultural, and industrial purposes. It often sells that water back to Palestinians at inflated prices that can absorb half of a poor family’s monthly income.
Israeli settlements control just over 85 percent of the most fertile land in the West Bank: the Jordan Valley in particular is a resource-rich farming region. The northern Dead Sea, also a target of the “deal of the century” armed robbery, is home to magnesium, potash, and bromine that could be monetized into hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The annexations the Trump plot sanctions would, B’Tselem notes, allow Israel to go on plundering valuable Palestinian land and resources.
Even if the US-Israeli alliance were to allow for the creation of “self-governing Palestinian enclaves,” the idea is for Israel to control border crossings, air space, and the sea, which means that it would determine the conditions under which capital, labor, and natural resources flow in and out of the whole of historic Palestine. Likewise, Palestinians would still require Israel’s permission for any construction or development. These dynamics would enable Israel to keep Palestinians in its economic chokehold, while allowing the Israeli ruling class to control productive activities from the river to the sea.
Israel’s Enablers
All of these outrages must be seen in a global and regional context that makes them possible. For decades, the United States has provided Israel with the necessary political, economic, and military tools for carrying out its crimes against the Palestinians, because Israel acts as an attack dog for US imperialist interests around the world.
Israel is now in a position to annex, not only because the Trump White House is giving it permission to do so, but also because Trump was preceded by an eight-year Obama administration that was one of the most pro-Zionist in history. Meanwhile, some European nations may favor disciplining Israel — relatively lightly — over annexation, but the EU as a whole is divided over what, if anything, to do. It is questionable whether any eventual response would amount to more than a mild rebuke.
Conditions in the Middle East are also suitable for annexation: nearly all of the governments in Arab-majority countries, which have long been tacit enablers of Israeli pillaging, are now openly in an alliance with Israel, based on economic ties and shared enmity toward Iran. These relationships mean that Israel knows it can do whatever it wants to the Palestinians without risking any pushback from states in the region. Jordan has made some noises about ending its peace treaty with Israel, but is unlikely to follow through on this rhetoric, given the Jordanian monarchy’s dependence on the United States.
Steadfast Resistance
The goal of annexation is to extinguish the Palestinian cause, but it won’t succeed. Palestinians have not endured a century of colonization, and more than seventy years of exile and statelessness, only to be bought off by Donald Trump and his failson-in-law. Even the most self-interested members of the Palestinian bourgeoisie have refused to take the bait.
Annexation, and the Trump document on which it is based, promises to exacerbate rather than resolve Palestinian grievances. Instead of agreeing to the terms of surrender now being put to them, Palestinians are certain to continue their brave, principled struggle against US-Israeli designs.
The main effect of annexation would be to formalize what is already the de facto reality on the ground: one state controls all of historic Palestine. A Joe Biden administration would likely return to the pre-Trump status quo in which US support for Israeli land theft remains tacit. If Biden becomes president, Israel might sometimes be mildly inconvenienced by murmurs about restarting the peace-process pantomime, to little real effect. Europe might oppose something as openly provocative as annexation, but the EU is so deeply enmeshed with Israel that Europe is not about to abandon the broader project of Zionist settler-colonialism.
Palestinian redress, and the decolonization of Palestine, will not be gifted from the conference rooms of Brussels and Washington. It can only be realized through a combination of mass Palestinian resistance with regional support and international solidarity inside the imperial core. As US-Israeli maneuvers make the idea of a two-state solution even more of a cruel joke, the Palestinian struggle becomes ever more likely to foreground demands for equal rights in a single state across the entirety of historic Palestine. In that sense, with each annexation and every new settlement, Zionism could be sowing the seeds of its own destruction.
Biden: Muslim Americans Took Full Brunt of Vile Trump Hatred of Minorities; Pledges to Reverse Muslim Ban
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51519"><span class="small">Juan Cole, Informed Comment</span></a>
Tuesday, 21 July 2020 13:01
Cole writes: "Joe Biden addressed the Million Muslim Votes organization on Monday. In the context of the extreme hatred for Muslims of the Trump administration and the wider Trump movement, his remarks were crucially significant but probably won't be noticed on cable news."
Joe Biden. (photo: Medium)
Biden: Muslim Americans Took Full Brunt of Vile Trump Hatred of Minorities; Pledges to Reverse Muslim Ban
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
21 July 20
oe Biden addressed the Million Muslim Votes organization on Monday. In the context of the extreme hatred for Muslims of the Trump administration and the wider Trump movement, his remarks were crucially significant but probably won’t be noticed on cable news.
Biden said in part,
“I wish we taught more in our schools about the Islamic faith. I wish we talked about all of the great confessional faiths– it is one of the great confessional faiths. And what people don’t realize–and one of my avocations is theology — is that we all come from the same root here in terms of our fundamental basic beliefs.
You’re doing what has never been done before– you’re registering turning out one million Muslim voters this November. It matters. Your vote is your voice. Muslim American voices matter to our communities, to our country. But we all know that your voice hasn’t always been recognized or represented or gotten the recognition it deserves. And that’s your right as a citizen. What you’re doing is making a real difference.
[Eulogizes the late Rep. John Lewis and advocacy for voting rights for all.] “It was no surprise that when Trump announced the Muslim ban in his first week in office, John went directly to Hartsfield Int’l Airport in his home district in Atlanta to demand answers of immigration officials. They wouldn’t tell him how many people were being detained. Know what his answer was simply? We don’t we just sit down and stay awhile.”
[Urged new legislation for restoration of Voting Right Act.] Muslim communities were the first to feel Donald Trump’s assault on black and brown communities in this country with his vile Muslim ban. That fight was the opening barrage in what has been nearly four years of constant pressure and insults and attacks against Muslim American communities […and other minorities … ]. Donald Trump has fanned the flames of hate in this country across the board… under this administration we have seen an unconscionable rise of Islamic-phobia, and incidents including kids being bullied in school and hate crimes in our communities. He’s named people with a history of open Islamic-phobia — open, straightforward, who have no business serving in high positions in our government, to key leadership roles in our Department of Defense and the Agency for International Development. It is not only an insult to our values, it weakens our standing in the rest of the world . . . he is making a mockery of what we stand for.
I want to work in partnership with you, make sure your voices are included in the decision-making process.”
Biden in essence gave a lay homily or sermon about tolerance and hate in today’s America. He began by urging that something about Islam be taught in American schools. Of course, US public schools seldom touch religion, including the History of Religions, because of the separation of religion and state. But there has been a lively movement for the teaching of World History, and the history of Muslims is the history of one fifth of humankind, so that would be a good rubric for it. Alas, it is often an elective, and I don’t know how widely it is offered. I took such a class when I was in High School and it obviously made a big impact on me.
People on my social media feeds have wondered what Biden meant by calling Islam one of the great confessional religions. My guess is that this is terminology he imbibed from his Catholic upbringing and reading in theology. He probably meant by it a distinctive set of beliefs that adherents must acknowledge. This Swiss site talks about Protestants and Catholics as “confessions” and says such confessions were seen in 19th century German thought to be instrumentalized for political solidarity. Muslims “confess” that there is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet. This European sense of confession overlaps with what Americans would just call a denomination. Because of its French colonial heritage, Lebanon is a country of such “confessions” (Christian, Sunni, Shiite, Druze), and confessional identity shapes politics there.
He underlined the common Abrahamic origins of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, though he did not use the term “Abrahamic.” As a liberal Irish Catholic, Biden is probably influenced by Vatican II and its religious tolerance (it admitted that some of the light that shines in Christianity is also present in Islam). American Catholics can go either way when the contemplate the increasing hatred of Muslims. They can identify with the Muslims, having themselves been victims of Protestant intolerance. Or they can pile on, like Steve Bannon, and use right wing Catholicism as a stick to beat Muslims with. Biden is among the former.
Biden’s remarks incorporated Muslim-Americans as one thread into the national fabric. He depicts them as the first to feel the full force of Trumpian hatred and prejudice, which, however, is also aimed at other minorities. The Muslim Americans, he said, were in the vanguard of feeling the discrimination that would lead to their children being constantly bullied, and to hate crimes against their communities (under Trump, many mosques have been burned down).
For Biden, all Americans are suffering under Trump, and Muslim-Americans are exemplary in being his first and most exploited victims, via the “vile” Muslim Ban, which Biden vows to undo.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52687"><span class="small">Sean Illin, Vox</span></a>
Tuesday, 21 July 2020 13:01
Illing writes: "One of the biggest problems with American democracy is that it's not democratic."
Staff of the House of Representatives review Illinois' Electoral College vote report in January 2017. (photo: Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
A Definitive Case Against the Electoral College
By Sean Illing, Vox
21 July 20
Why the framers created the Electoral College — and why we need to get rid of it.
ne of the biggest problems with American democracy is that it’s not democratic.
Two of the last five presidents were elected despite losing the popular vote, more than half the Senate is elected by roughly 18 percent of the population, and voting districts are increasingly gerrymandered in ways that disenfranchise the people who live there.
Our process for choosing the president, the Electoral College, is probably the strangest and most explicitly anti-democratic feature of the American political system. It was conceived in part as a firewall against majority will in case the mob ever elected someone grotesquely unqualified for the office. (It, uh, didn’t work.)
But the history is more complicated than that. Akhil Reed Amar, a constitutional scholar at Yale, has argued that the Electoral College was a concession to the slave states at the time of the founding. Another popular theory is that the Electoral College was designed to prevent presidential candidates from ignoring the smaller, less populated states.
Whatever the case, there’s no denying that the Electoral College is anti-democratic. According to Democratic data scientist David Shor, “The Electoral College bias is now such that realistically [Democrats] have to win by 3.5 to 4 percent in order to win presidential elections.” So why is it still around? What purpose does it serve today? And more importantly, can we get rid of it?
Jesse Wegman, an editorial board member at the New York Times, has made a pretty definitive case against the Electoral College in his book Let the People Pick the President. Among other things, Wegman argues that the Electoral College creates a false picture of a country reduced to red and blue states when, in fact, the United States is a purple country — and Americans pay a huge price for upholding a system that doesn’t represent that diversity.
I spoke to Wegman about the shoddy origins of the Electoral College, why the hundreds of attempts to abolish or reform it have failed, and why he thinks the US has to eliminate it.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
You explain in the book how slipshod and hurried the process of conceiving the Electoral College was. No one really believed in it all that much and it was cobbled together at the last minute and only adopted because every other idea failed to win enough support. Were there any justifiable reasons for creating it in the first place?
Jesse Wegman
You can certainly look at things from the framers’ perspective and say it’s understandable that they were concerned about how to elect the president. It had never been done before. They were building this out of whole cloth and the concerns that they had were real.
One of the major concerns was that many of the delegates didn’t want Congress involved in electing the president since they had just created a system built on a separation of powers. Another concern was that citizens would never be able to make an informed decision about national candidates because they just wouldn’t have the information they needed, given the nature of communications technology back then.
Sean Illing
What would you say was the foremost reason they created the Electoral College?
Jesse Wegman
I don’t think there was a foremost purpose. As you said, they were scrambling to get this thing done and they debated it endlessly for something like 21 days. And none of the other proposals, like a national popular vote, had enough support to get into the Constitution.
But I’d say the driving force was to get the Constitution finished and sent out for ratification. Beyond that, the main issues were keeping the election of the president out of Congress’s hands and ensuring the electors who made up the Electoral College knew who the candidates were and could make wise decisions.
And then of course you had the immovable obstacle of slavery and ensuring that the slave-holding states didn’t unravel the whole process. James Madison himself said during the middle of the convention that “the popular vote is the fittest way to elect a president,” but that the South wouldn’t go for it. And he says this more than once. So it’s clear that the Founders knew the slave states had a ton of leverage.
Sean Illing
We know the process of passing it was flawed. We know it was the product of brutal compromises. But has the Electoral College ever operated the way it was intended to operate?
Jesse Wegman
No — with the possible exception of the first two elections when George Washington was on the ticket. But after that, we basically had electors who were not operating in what the framers thought of as the best interests of the country. The electors were just party hacks. That was clear by 1796, and it’s just as clear today. The electors have never been these disinterested, neutral, wise men the founders imagined.
Sean Illing
Why have all the attempts to reform or abolish the Electoral College failed?
Jesse Wegman
I think that the most common reason is because one or both political parties have seen themselves as benefiting from it in some way. So it’s almost always a short-term political calculus that keeps the college alive. It’s very rare that it’s about anything relating to democratic principles or some notion of what’s fair or just. No one thinks the Electoral College was a brilliant constitutional invention, but it’s been preserved over the years for political reasons.
Sean Illing
Okay, but the dynamics have changed, right? Now the Electoral College benefits the Republican Party almost exclusively.
Jesse Wegman
You’re right that the college has typically leaned toward one party or the other — that was true in 2016 and almost certainly true for 2020. But I’d also say that it’s harder than we think to say that definitively in advance of an election.
Republicans won the 2004 election, but the Electoral College actually gave the Democrats a boost. If 60,000 votes went the other way in Ohio, George W. Bush would have won the national popular vote by 3 million votes, but John Kerry would’ve been elected. So the advantages aren’t so fixed.
But yes, I concede the point you’re making: Right now, the Electoral College benefits Republicans pretty clearly, and a split election is much, much more likely to go the Republican candidate.
Sean Illing
A lot of people who hear these sorts of objections to the Electoral College think it’s just sour grapes from liberals who don’t like the current outcome of the system. How do you respond to that?
Jesse Wegman
I’m as upset as anybody who experienced their preferred candidate winning more votes and not being elected. I think it violates our basic sense of what majority rule means. All I would say to those people is, look at Trump’s tweet in 2012 arguing that the Electoral College is a disaster for democracy. The circumstances of that tweet is that on Election Night 2012, early exit polling was suggesting that Mitt Romney might win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College to Obama. So the mere possibility that that could happen triggered Trump’s tweet, and all I’ll say is that I sympathize.
Sean Illing
And it’s actually happened twice in the last 20 years for Democrats —
Jesse Wegman
Right! And I’ll bet any amount of money that the moment it happened in the other direction, you would see exactly the same reaction from the other side, and that’s because everybody in their gut feels the unfairness of a system that does not put the person with the most votes in the White House.
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Sean Illing
What would you say is the biggest myth or misconception about the Electoral College?
Jesse Wegman
This idea that somehow small states currently have a voice under the Electoral College system, and that they would lose that voice under a popular vote, is just the exact inverse of reality. Right now, small states have no voice because they, like big states and medium-size states across the country, are not battleground states. The only states that matter in a winner-take-all Electoral College scenario are battleground states, and those are the states where the candidates spend virtually 100 percent of their time and money trying to win.
There are 13 states with three or four electoral votes. We call those the small states. One of those states, New Hampshire, is a battleground state. New Hampshire gets more attention from both campaigns every four years than all the other 12 small states combined. The small states are a complete nonentity right now.
Sean Illing
What about the claim that big cities would dominate a popular election?
Jesse Wegman
As a factual mathematical matter, that’s just untrue. The biggest cities in the country don’t come close to having enough votes to swing a national election. They can’t even swing elections for governor in their own states. New York City didn’t vote for George Pataki. Los Angeles didn’t vote for Pete Wilson in 1990. The 50 biggest cities in the country represent about 15 percent of the population. Even in fairly big cities with more than 350,000 people or so, roughly 40 percent of the vote goes to Republican candidates — and in any case it’s far from zero. And often in rural areas, the same electoral math holds.
And then just by comparison, the rural areas of America also represent about 15 percent of the population, and they vote about 60/40 in favor of the Republicans. So big cities and rural America are essentially a wash in every presidential election. So the idea that big cities would somehow suddenly decide who the president was for everybody else is just wrong on the math.
Sean Illing
A central focus of your book is this idea that ending the Electoral College would change the way candidates campaign and therefore the sorts of issues they prioritize. Why is that a big deal?
Jesse Wegman
It’s a great question, and I think it really gets to the heart of what the problem is here. When candidates only visit a few states and even a few regions in those few states, you really see a warping of policy priorities. Both Democratic and Republican candidates focus on issues that are important to, say, coal miners in Pennsylvania or auto workers in Michigan, but those aren’t the only issues in the country. And if you have a campaign that is forced to pay attention to everyone in the country and has to treat every vote as equally important, which is what a popular vote election would be, this would solve these problems and it would be more fair to the country as a whole.
Issues like immigration reform, health care reform, background checks on guns — these are things that the vast majority of the country supports, and it’s very hard to get presidential candidates to really get behind them if they aren’t the key issues for voters in battleground states.
Sean Illing
The most common defense of the Electoral College is that it’s a kind of last-resort firewall against a manifestly unfit president. Now, obviously, our current president proves how useless that firewall is, but is there a case, in principle at least, for keeping the Electoral College on these grounds?
Jesse Wegman
No, it’s a terrible reason. And you just explained why: Donald Trump. If ever there was a candidate who should have been stopped by what we think the Electoral College was designed to do, it was Donald Trump in 2016. But the reverse happened. So the reality is that the Electoral College has never really worked as a firewall against unfit candidates because it’s a fundamentally partisan institution. The 2016 election ought to put an end to this argument forever.
Sean Illing
There’s at least one way to effectively end the Electoral College without technically abolishing it. Can you explain what that is?
Jesse Wegman
It’s called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and it’s a quite simple way of using the Electoral College that the framers designed as a means to a popular vote. It’s not an end-run around the college, as people like to call it. It draws on the Constitution, which gives states almost total authority to award their electors however they want. So the idea is that states who join it agree to award all of their electors to whichever candidate wins the most votes in the nation, not in their state, which is how most states do it now. It’s an elegant and clever solution to this problem.
Sean Illing
Do you think we reach a breaking point where the status quo loses its legitimacy and we’re confronted with a genuine political crisis?
Jesse Wegman
People often say to me, “Well, how is this ever going to happen? Republicans have to get on board, and they’re never going to do it.” Everybody always has a reason for explaining why this isn’t going to work. I think that overestimates the American people’s tolerance for a system in which majority rule is violated repeatedly. If this happens again in 2020, I think you’ll see a much stronger push to get the compact passed in a few other states that are right now either considering it or may soon.
We’re in a moment where people are thinking about constitutional reform in a way that they rarely do, and there’s an openness to changing our basic structures and to question our basic assumptions about how government works. The way we pick our president is one of the prime places where those new ways of thinking could really lead to concrete change.
FOCUS: We All Know Donald Trump Is Preparing to Rig or Steal the Election - but Exactly How?
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=55180"><span class="small">Bob Cesca, Salon</span></a>
Tuesday, 21 July 2020 12:06
Cesca writes: "By now, it's relatively easy to forecast Donald Trump's tyrannical moves. There are no advanced Frank Underwood-style chess gambits in play here. It's barely Candyland, despite the fascistic goals involved."
Donald Trump at a rally. (photo: David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)
We All Know Donald Trump Is Preparing to Rig or Steal the Election - but Exactly How?
By Bob Cesca, Salon
21 July 20
There's zero possibility that Trump will accept defeat with dignity. We need to prepare for weeks of dreadful chaos
y now, it's relatively easy to forecast Donald Trump's tyrannical moves. There are no advanced Frank Underwood-style chess gambits in play here. It's barely Candyland, despite the fascistic goals involved. Trump is, on top of it all, a simple-minded, easily predictable Golgothan who telegraphs every move of self-preservation. Sometimes it can be reassuring to have a sense of where he's going with his repetitious blurts. At other times it leaves us with this perpetual sense of instability, knowing what might be lurking around the corner. The November election fits horrifyingly into the latter category.
I believe I know how Trump will try to interfere with the process as well as the outcome, and it's more than a little unnerving, especially given the cataclysmic stakes this time. Warning: This is a bit of a horror show, so hang on tight. Oh, and everything that follows presumes a close race, with the advantage leaning in Joe Biden's direction.
We're all brutally aware that every move Trump makes is aimed squarely at re-election. If he's not re-elected, he could face criminal prosecution and dozens of lawsuits after he returns to being a private citizen. He knows better than anyone that the presidency is the only thing saving him either from the slammer or from an underground escape to a non-extradition country.
As part of his herky-jerky maneuvers to evade legal jeopardy, we also know he's willing to sentence hundreds of thousands of Americans to death, and millions more on top of that to suffer from permanent pre-existing conditions, due to his near-genocidal indifference to the pandemic — indifference aimed at manipulating the stock market and thereby boosting in his re-election chances. It's a matter of historical record that he was impeached by Congress and put on trial for trying to cheat in the election, while refusing to discourage Russia from cyber-attacking the process again.
You get the point. He's capable of doing anything in order to win, even risking his legal future. But none of the above tactics directly addresses how he might handle the actual process of suppressing and overturning votes.
Like a petulant boy who tosses a board game across the room when he's losing, Trump is going to hurl the election process into absolute chaos. Here's how: He'll continue to suppress voting by discouraging absentee voting, while benefiting from new and existing roadblocks to in-person voting. Then, on and after Election Day, he'll sue to try and stop absentee ballots from being counted.
You might have seen the unintentionally hilarious video of Trump on "Fox News Sunday" last weekend. During his sweaty, lie-filled exchange with Chris Wallace, the president once again repeated, "I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election." He also said that he might not accept the outcome of the election. "I have to see," Trump said when pressed on the question. Absentee voting, also known as "mail-in" voting, will be his primary target in his plan to derail the election. (Point of order: all mail-in ballots are absentee, including the president's ballots. I will therefore use the term "absentee" from this point forward.)
Election Day won't be a "day" at all this year. In fact, some estimates suggest we won't know the winner of the presidential election, let alone contested Senate and House races, for a week or more after Nov. 3, mainly due to the record number of absentee ballots used during pandemic conditions. It'll take days to electronically tabulate all those votes, and maybe weeks for hand-counted ballots in some precincts. I'm not even factoring in the possibility of recanvassing or actual recounts.
So far, 33 states and the District of Columbia allow some form of voting by mail without an excuse for one's absence. (Oregon has conducted all elections by mail since 1998, with no significant problems. Colorado and Washington state have adopted universal vote-by-mail more recently.) By the way, the absentee voting states include Florida, where Trump will be voting by mail this year — again, with no excuse needed. The other 17 states require an excuse, but at least some of those will likely change the rules before November, eliminating the need for an excuse.
The main focus of Trump's shrieking about absentee voting, of course, is to establish a hearts-and-minds framework to support legal challenges against those ballots. To that end, he's routinely exploiting the bully pulpit to manufacture doubt about the reliability of absentee voting. From there, he's capable of launching a series of lawsuits against boards of elections — perhaps in every state where absentee ballots are used, or just in states with margins too close to call. As long as he continues to hammer his loyalists about the evils of absentee voting between now and Election Day, they'll be increasingly likely to back him up during the actual process, organizing demonstrations and maybe a few "Brooks Brothers riots" not unlike Election 2000.
Any and all swing states will be ripe for legal challenges — not because of actual election or voter fraud but simply because Trump believes there's fraud taking place. (Or, to be more accurate, because he claims to believe that.)
The other point is to discourage the use of absentee ballots, with the broader goal of convincing pro-Trump state officials to roll back existing absentee rules. After all, it's much more difficult to monkey around with absentee votes that, by definition, include a paper trail. On the other hand, in-person votes cast on electronic voting machines are more susceptible to manipulation and hacking, whether by Russian agents or someone else, and we all know about Trump's business partners in Moscow and their track record with American elections. In his desperation, Trump will be eager to meddle with every voting format, covering all his bases.
Challenge after challenge could rocket-propel the entire election back into the hands of the Supreme Court, home of the infamous Bush v. Gore decision, and there's no guarantee that Chief Justice John Roberts will swing the way we hope he will. Irrespective of where Trump's legal challenges land, he will absolutely use the courts as a delaying action, making for a hell of a long process at a time when the patience of the American people is practically nonexistent.
Electors are supposed to cast their ballots on Dec. 14, based on the results of the popular vote. If there's an actual declared winner by that date, I'll be shocked. Trump's legal challenges will be thick and he's shown zero compunction to give up. (See also his relentless legal challenges to protect his tax returns from prosecutors and congressional oversight.)
It's also possible that Trump's indefinite deployment of federal stormtroopers in selected cities will discourage some voters from turning out. Trump's screeching has also suggested that he might order ICE and CBP goons to monitor polling places, which could discourage Latino citizens or other recent immigrants from voting.
One more thing: As the days following the election descend into chaos, it wouldn't shock me if Trump simply declared victory before all the votes are counted. That won't mean much in the grand scheme, but it will further incite his people and worsen the chaos.
I don't know how all this will end, but I feel relatively secure in forecasting the mayhem. Honestly, as with everything Trump, I hope I'm wrong and this election wraps up without a glitch. But given King Joffrey the Flaccid's actions lately, especially with his contra-constitutional deployment of unidentified soldiers to disappear protesters from the streets, it would be foolish to count on a smooth ride. The absolute best strategy for the Democratic Party, and indeed all Normals, is to prepare for a bloody mess before we have a winner. The party ought to be fully lawyered up in anticipation of Trump's psycho-bombs detonating at polling places and in state capitals across the country. Don't be blindsided.
I think we can all agree that Donald Trump will not go quietly, or accept defeat with any measure of dignity. Knowing the stunts he's likely to pull, and preparing accordingly, is half the battle.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=55179"><span class="small">Greg Palast, Greg Palast's Website</span></a>
Tuesday, 21 July 2020 11:11
Palast writes: "It begins with a stone-cold fact: Mail-in ballots are lost by the millions - especially the ballots of low-income young and minority voters, those folks often called, 'Democrats.'"
Empty envelopes of opened vote-by-mail ballots. (photo: Jason Redmond/AFP/Getty Images)
22% of Mail-In Votes Never Get Counted
By Greg Palast, Greg Palast's Website
21 July 20
h, Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.”
I’ve been singing that Animals’ tune for a month. I move my lips, but I’m not sure my words are understood.
It begins with a stone-cold fact: Mail-in ballots are lost by the millions—especially the ballots of low-income young and minority voters, those folks often called, “Democrats.”
The seminal MIT study, Losing Votes by Mail, warns that 22% – more than one in five ballots – never get counted.
As the study concludes:
“If 20%, or even 10%, of voters who stood in line on Election Day were turned away, there would be national outrage. The estimates provided by this paper suggest that the equivalent may be happening among voters who seek to cast their ballots by mail, and yet there is nary a comment.”
Just because I point out this inconvenient truth doesn’t mean I’m against mail-in balloting. Just the opposite: I want to make sure we get through the mail-in minefield alive: fix the system so everyone who wants an absentee ballot gets one—or, at the minimum, we train Americans to vote absentee so that we are not defeated by the Jim Crow bias endemic to absentee voting.
In my new book, How Trump Stole 2020, my chapter “Mail-In Madness,” begs you to fix the broken mail-in system. I’ve been, weirdly, accused of joining Donald Trump in opposing mail-in voting. That’s insane. There is nothing orange-stained about my analysis. Let me be blunt: unless we get the Jim Crow alligators out of our mailbox, and protect our postal votes, Trump has won—not with the voters but with the vote-challenging tricksters.
Jim Crow in the mail-box? Yep. Because not just anyone’s ballot is deep-sixed. Of the 3.3 million absentee ballots lost in 2016, it’s not random, voters of color and young voters find their absentee ballots—if they ever receive them—are the overwhelming targets of the vote vanishing operation.
A Caltech/MIT study, “Whose Absentee Votes Are Counted?” shows rejection rates higher for Democrats than Republicans, higher for younger than older voters, and higher for non-English ballots. Surprised?
Thousands of Korean-Americans, per their rights under federal law, filled in Korean-language ballots which ask, in Korean, for the voter’s signature. Not surprisingly, the voters signed in Korean. All these ballots went straight into the garbage.
If you don’t get a ballot you can’t mail it in. Well, d’oh, Homer! According to the MIT study, most of the millions of absentee ballot lost are because one in nine voters never receive their ballot or it is received too late. Again, the “late” ballots are overwhelmingly slow-mailed to voters of color.
I spoke to an African-American voter who requested ballots for her family 45 days before the Georgia primary—and her husband’s ballot arrived on June 10. The Georgia Primary was June 9. Unsophisticated voter who screwed up? Hardly, this is Andrea Young, voting rights attorney and Executive Director of the ACLU of Georgia.
If they can shaft voting rights attorneys out of their vote, others don’t stand a chance.
One of the main reasons voters don’t get their ballots is that, in the past two years, 16.7 million voters have been purged, erased from the voter rolls and most don’t know it. It could be you. I can tell you it was me: I looked up Greg Palast on my Secretary of State’s website (you should all do that) and it said, “No such voter.”
And that’s how Trump Stole 2020—and 2016. The big swing state of Ohio, from 2012 to 2016, swung from a big Obama victory …to Trump. WTF?
One secret of the Ohio's flip to red is that the Republican Secretary of State in the month before the 2016 presidential election, simply refused to send absentee ballot application cards to 1,035,795 voters, those on the absurdly, inaccurately named “inactive” or “mover” lists. Voters lost their rights—without notice. The purge list was 2-to-1 Democrat.
With 16.7 million voters erased from the registration rolls in the past two years, millions will say, Where the hell is my ballot? Sorry: they’ll be S.O.L. (Google that.)
The Palast Investigations team went through several purge lists and we found that one in seven African-Americans and one in eight LatinXand Asian-American voters in these states were on the hit lists.
You can call it a “flawed” system, but it’s a fraud system, American Apartheid.
What can we do?
Plenty, Jackson. First check your registration. Second, check your registration – again. Third, if you don’t get your mail-in vote, contact your county registrar and demand it. One month before the election, Jackson, not November 2.
Now’s the hard part: filling out and mailing in your ballot. If you’re in Wisconsin, Michigan and many other states, don’t forget the witness signature. And make sure your witness is a verified voter – and verified virus free.
If you’re in swing state Missouri or in Alabama, where Sen. Doug Jones is in a fight for his life, you’ll need to find a notary to notarize your ballot. You may say that’s a poll tax—and just plain dangerous during a pandemic. But three weeks ago, the Supreme Court said that Alabama’s crazy notarization law was just fine.
And in 34 states, if you’re a first time voter, don’t forget to include a copy of your ID. If you’re in the ultimate swing state of Wisconsin and a student—you can only use a student ID if you also enclose a letter of proof of your enrollment in good standing at your school. Huh? You flunk algebra and lose your vote? I can’t make this up.
And if you include that extra paperwork, don’t forget to add a stamp for the extra weight: the US Elections Assistance Commission reports 100,000 ballots in 2016 were rejected for postage due.
Let me be blunt. Mail-in voting sucks – but if you don’t mail in your ballot, you could die. That sucks, too.
So, it’s all about protecting your mail-in ballot. Just know that’s not as simple as “pick and lick” – pick a president and lick the stamp.
There just ain’t enough white guys to re-elect Trump. So the GOP has to get rid of the non-white guys. And they are enlisting your friendly postman to Jim Crow your vote.
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srael’s US-approved plan to annex much of the West Bank, a naked violation of international law and act of racist thievery, aims to throttle Palestinian national aspirations out of existence. The move is based on the Trump administration’s “deal of the century,” a scheme that the Palestinians played no part in drawing up — less a road map to peace than an attempt to liquidate the Palestinian right to self-determination.
oe Biden addressed the Million Muslim Votes organization on Monday. In the context of the extreme hatred for Muslims of the Trump administration and the wider Trump movement, his remarks were crucially significant but probably won’t be noticed on cable news.
ne of the biggest problems with American democracy is that it’s 
y now, it's relatively easy to forecast Donald Trump's tyrannical moves. There are no advanced Frank Underwood-style chess gambits in play here. It's barely Candyland, despite the fascistic goals involved. Trump is, on top of it all, a simple-minded, easily predictable 
