Gun Rights Delayed Are Gun Rights Denied

 Gun Rights Delayed Are Gun Rights Denied

This year, protests have coursed throughout the nation, and unfortunately, as Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has candidly acknowledged, “we’ve also seen . . . people who have embedded themselves in these seemingly peaceful protests and come for a fight.” As a result of such civic disorder, more people in jurisdictions such as Illinois and Minnesota, sites of widespread looting and even arson, have wanted immediate access to firearms. But some jurisdictions, including these, have failed to process licenses to purchase or carry firearms in a timely manner.  

Such delays violate the right of the people to keep and bear arms. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court expressly held that the right to possess a gun at home was of the essence of the Second Amendment, and the right was extended to the states by McDonald v. Chicago. Yet Illinois, for instance, now imposes lengthy delays to obtain even the licenses necessary to purchase a gun for home or business use. The statute permits as much as a 30-day delay, and in June it took an average of 51 days to get the necessary FOID card. A colleague of mine still has not gotten one after 170 days. A firearm delayed is self-defense denied. That is particularly problematic at a time of increased violence and looting. A gun—even one that is never fired—may make the difference between a burned-down store and a continuing source of livelihood.

An analogy to the First Amendment demonstrates why the delays in gun access are unconstitutional. While the First Amendment permits states to require licenses for demonstrations (because of the need to prevent disruption to other activities), such licenses cannot be so unreasonably delayed as to effectively undermine the right of free speech. Moreover, the First Amendment suggests the need for licensing exceptions for demonstrations in response to breaking news. In any event, judges have permitted short delays of only a few days before licenses for demonstrations must be issued.

Similarly, licensing is permitted under the Second Amendment to make sure that guns do not get in the hands of felons and the mentally ill—categories of people the Supreme Court has stated do not have the right to guns. But delays in issuing gun licenses during unrest would render the Second Amendment right as ineffective as unnecessary delays in protest licensing would the First. Moreover, substantial delays are unneeded to determine whether someone is a felon or has been adjudicated as mentally ill, as the federal instant gun check program shows. These delays are also far more substantial than any “cooling off” period that would help prevent crimes of vengeance or passion, even assuming that such a reason for delay was compatible with the Second Amendment’s provision of a right to ready self-defense.

In a recent article, I offer new evidence about why the analogy between the First and Second Amendments is particularly appropriate. And surprisingly, that evidence, while never previously discussed in the context of the Second Amendment, also provides new support for the proposition that the Second Amendment articulates an individual right whose purpose was to protect personal safety, not just a collective right to be exercised through the militia. And it comes from none other than James Madison, father of the Constitution and drafter of the Bill of Rights. Talk about evidence hiding in plain sight!

Interpreting the Second Amendment by analogy to the First has the advantage of importing a well-reticulated body of First Amendment principles to help guide a Second Amendment law still in its infancy.

The newly discovered support comes in his explication of the natural-rights basis of the Bills of Rights provisions, published shortly after their enactment. There he compares various components of the Bill of Rights to “rights of property” and he does so in Lockean terms that focus on the power of the individual versus the rest of the world:

[Property] in its particular application means “that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.”

[A] man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.

He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.

He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person . . .

This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.

Madison here describes rights that track those protected in the Bill of Rights. He understands them as rights of the individual that each may directly exercise. I have italicized the language most relevant to the Second Amendment because the connection has never been noted before. It seems clear that this is indeed a reference to the Second Amendment because Madison’s discussion follows directly after the individual rights at issue in the First Amendment. This passage also suggests Madison sees the Second Amendment as a right related to self-defense. Thus, it cannot be dismissed as simply a right to avoid government tyranny that can be effective only when exercised collectively. It is an individual right that protects personal safety.

Moreover, this passage provides strong justification for drawing analogies between the First and Second Amendments. Madison’s comment shows that both are rights of the individual on par with what was considered another sacred individual right at the time—the right of property. Although these rights may be able to be regulated for the common good, they cannot be abridged or infringed. Judicial review prevents the political branches from infringing them under the guise of promoting the public welfare.                

Interpreting the Second Amendment by analogy to the First has the specific advantage of importing a well-reticulated body of First Amendment principles to help guide a Second Amendment law still in its infancy. But even more importantly, reference to the First Amendment also encourages neutral treatment of the Second Amendment, because judges as a class are likely more sympathetic to the natural right of expression than to the natural right of self-defense. Judges are uniformly lawyers who make their living by words: the natural right to their opinions is a source of their livelihood. While some may own guns, there is no occupational reason to expect that they will have such a supportive disposition toward the natural right of self-defense.

Indeed, as Justice Antonin Scalia noted in another context: “[W]e federal judges live in a world apart from the vast majority of Americans. After work, we retire to homes in placid suburbia or to high-rise co-ops with guards at the door. We are not confronted with the threat of violence that is ever present in many Americans’ everyday lives.” Thus, considering analogies to the First Amendment helps the judiciary appreciate the full weight of what protection a natural right deserves in a context with which they are more familiar and more apt to sympathize. Neutral principles of adjudication should be applied to similar rights to make sure that some rights are not disfavored because they are less popular with the judiciary.

Finally, the recent unrest reminds us that the First and Second Amendments interact in yet another way. One of the reasons people feel the urge to acquire the means to defend themselves now is the violence that may emerge from even protests authorized by the First Amendment, to say nothing of unlawful assemblies and riots. Thus, a vigorous Second Amendment complements a vigorous First Amendment because protecting the natural right of speech, which includes protest, may make the exercise of the natural right of self-protection even more necessary.  

john o. mcginnis

Previously unnoticed evidence provides new support for the proposition that the Second Amendment articulates an individual right to personal safety.

John O. McGinnis is the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University. His book Accelerating Democracy was published by Princeton University Press in 2012. McGinnis is also the coauthor with Mike Rappaport of Originalism and the Good Constitution published by Harvard University Press in 2013 . He is a graduate of Harvard College, Balliol College, Oxford, and Harvard Law School. He has published in leading law reviews, including the Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford Law Reviews and the Yale Law Journal, and in journals of opinion, including National Affairs and National Review.

The Facts on Race, Crime, and Policing in America

 The Facts on Race, Crime, and Policing in America

No one could fail to be moved by the death of George Floyd, whose crime apparently was only the passing of a counterfeit $20 bill. Of course, we still do not know all of the facts, including whether Mr. Floyd resisted arrest, and if so, how. But the video revealed enough to horrify most Americans, and indeed, people all over the world.

The Floyd incident has raised anew the issue of police use of force, especially against people of color. Most Americans, black and white, believe that the criminal justice system treats blacks less fairly than whites. A 2019 Pew Research poll found that 84 percent of blacks and 63 percent of whites support this view. Those numbers may rise in the wake of the George Floyd episode.

Numerous proposals to reduce police violence are now being offered, but I’m skeptical that these will change things in the short or medium term. The reason for my lack of optimism is not that American police are incurably racist. Police are probably no more racist than the average American. Rather, it is that African Americans—low-income, young, male, urban African Americans, to be precise—engage in violent misconduct at higher rates than other groups, and violent crime begets police violence. As I will show, the more a group engages in violent crime, the more the police will use violence against members of the group.

Race, Crime, and Police Violence

Big city police are deployed in high numbers to low-income African American communities. Why? Because that’s where most of the crime is. That’s where it has been since the 1920s, and especially since the 1960s. Such deployments were far less common prior to the 1960s, when black communities were severely under-policed. The result was impunity for many black violent criminals and, in turn, an incentive for black men to engage in more violence as a self-defense mechanism.

The late 1960s changed this pattern. As black-on-white crime rose, police departments came under mounting pressure to control crime, much of which occurred in or near minority neighborhoods where it victimized black residents. African American violent crime rates soared between the 1960s and the early 1990s. During that period, in big cities, arrests of African Americans for homicide, the most accurate measure of violent crime, accounted for 65 to 78 percent of all homicide arrests. This is an extraordinary figure when one considers that the nonwhite population of these cities ranged from only 20 percent to a bit over 35 percent.

The situation today has improved considerably. African American crime rates, and United States crime rates generally, have fallen dramatically. For all persons of all age groups, the homicide death rate fell 34 percent from 1990 to 2016. For black males in the same time frame, the decline was 40 percent.

While violent crime has fallen, it nevertheless remains disproportionally high in communities of color. The latest police data collected by the FBI indicates that blacks comprised 58 percent of all murder arrests and 40 percent of those apprehended for all violent crimes. This disproportional involvement of African Americans in violent crime turns out to be the most significant factor of all in explaining the use of force against blacks by police.

It will be no surprise that violent criminals in the United States are commonly armed and dangerous. For assaults, for instance, 71 percent of arrested persons carried firearms. Among suspected murderers, 58 percent had guns, as did 42 percent of apprehended robbery suspects. This tally doesn’t include the knives or blunt instruments recovered from violent offenders, including over 48,000 cutting instruments possessed by those arrested for assault alone.

Police, of course, are well aware of this situation. Charged with a duty to apprehend offenders, they are—and must be—prepared to use force. Confrontations, often armed confrontations, in these circumstances are inevitable.

Such confrontations will frequently involve white police and black suspects. Whites are a declining proportion of police departments in the United States, but they’re still close to half the force in big-city departments where white males make up 44 percent of full-time sworn officers.

The Chicago Study

As it turns out, when it comes to the use of force, the race of the police officer may not be significant. A study of 270 police shootings in Chicago from 2006 to 2014 found that the demographics of the officers who fired their weapons matched the demographics of the police department. Whites were 51 percent of the shooters and 53 percent of the force; blacks were 23 percent of the shooters and 25 percent of the force. In other words, there is no evidence that white police were more likely to discharge their weapons or that African American officers were less likely. This is especially noteworthy given the demographics of the shooting victims: 5 percent were white, 14 percent Hispanic, and an eye-popping 80 percent were black.

Equally significant is the reason for the confrontation. In the overwhelming majority of cases (77 percent), the police were reactive, not proactive. They were responding, in the typical scenario, to a call about a violent crime. In the proactive situation (23 percent of the shootings), the officer initiated the contact, e.g., stopped a suspicious person.

One study showed that white police officers were no more likely than black officers to fatally shoot black civilians.

In 80 percent of the shootings, the officer reported a gun threat, and in 60 percent a firearm was recovered. In the remaining 20 percent, the officer said (s)he was threatened with a motor vehicle (12 percent), a weapon other than a gun (10 percent), or a physical attack (8 percent).

In short, according to the Chicago data, in the overwhelming majority of police-civilian shootings, the police didn’t initiate the confrontation, but rather were summoned by civilian reports, whereupon they fired in response to a direct threat of an attack, usually with a gun.

Nowadays many mistrust police accounts, suspecting a cover-up or at least a slanting of the truth. But there is empirical and unbiased support for the police version of events. It comes in a recent study of fatal police shootings and it is to this study that I now turn.

The Fatal Shootings Study

Psychologists led by David J. Johnson of the University of Maryland created a database of 917 fatal shootings of civilians by police in 2015. They correlated various factors—characteristics of the police officer, the civilian who was shot, and the county in which the incident occurred—with the race of the victim.

First, they found no evidence of bias against victims of color. “Controlling for predictors at the civilian, officer, and county levels,” the analysts wrote, “a person fatally shot by police was 6.67 times less likely . . . to be Black than White and 3.33 times less likely . . . to be Hispanic than White. Thus, in the typical shooting, we did not find evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity.”

This accords with national data compiled by the Washington Post, not exactly a pro-police publication, for a five-year period (2015-2019). The Post tallied 4,263 fatal shootings by police for which the race or ethnicity of the victim was known. Of these, 53 percent were white, 28 percent were black, and 20 percent were Hispanic. In other words, nearly twice as many whites as blacks were fatally shot by police.

Professor Johnson and associates examined the 2015 incidents in detail to determine the reasons for the shootings. They found that “[t]he vast majority—between 90 percent and 95 percent—of the civilians shot by officers were actively attacking police or other citizens when they were shot.” This confirms the claims of police shooters in Chicago, as noted above.

It also reinforces Roland Fryer’s highly publicized study on race and the use of force by police. Fryer found, after controlling for numerous factors, that blacks were 27.4 percent less likely than non-Hispanic whites to be fatally shot by police.

A second major finding of the Johnson study was the absence of any correlation between the race of the officer and that of the victim. That is, after controlling for other factors, white police officers were no more likely than black officers to fatally shoot black civilians. In fact, the more black officers on a police force, the more African Americans were fatally shot.

The most significant finding of all, though, was the correlation between violent crime and police shooting. The more violent crime by blacks in a county, the more blacks shot to death by police. In the words of the study:

[O]fficer race, sex, or experience did not predict the race of a person fatally shot beyond relationships explained by county demographics. On the other hand, race-specific violent crime strongly predicted the race of a civilian fatally shot by police, explaining over 40% of the variance in civilian race. These results bolster claims to take into account violent crime rates when examining fatal police shootings.

It is possible, of course, that police discriminate more when nonlethal force is involved. The Fryer study drew that very conclusion, finding, for instance, that police were 18 percent more likely to shove a black person than a white in similar circumstances. But this analysis, which was limited to New York City during the aggressive “stop-and-frisk” years, did not include data on crime rates within each police precinct broken down by race or ethnicity. Unlike the Johnson study, in other words, Fryer did not correlate nonlethal force with the violent crime rate of minority groups.

Police Violence and Criminal Violence

American police must face down armed violent criminals. That’s their job. Often those violent threats come from young, male, urban African Americans. As long as that is the case there will be violent confrontations between police and black civilians. Increasing the number of black police officers won’t change this. Nor will study commissions, police budget reductions, chokehold prohibitions, or the elimination of qualified immunity from civil suits, to mention a few of the proposals to curb police being bandied about. Some of these proposals may be wise, some not. But none will dramatically reduce the number of violent confrontations between police and African Americans.

This situation will change significantly when black violent crime rates decline significantly. That won’t occur any time soon, but it will happen. It happened to Irish-Americans who committed crime at exceptionally high rates in the 19th century, and to Italian-Americans who did likewise in the early 20th century. As the United States continues to reduce obstacles to black social advancement, and as African Americans take advantage of the opportunities that this country affords them, their crime too will become a distant memory.

barry latzer

Charged with a duty to apprehend offenders, police officers must be prepared to use force. Armed confrontations in these circumstances are inevitable.

Barry Latzer is professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. His latest book is The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America (Encounter, 2016). His history of violent crime pre-1940, The Roots of Violent Crime in America: From the Gilded Age through the Great Depression, will be published in 2021 by Louisiana State University Press.

Sooner or Later, A Sovereign People Asserts Its Authority

 Sooner or Later, A Sovereign People Asserts Its Authority

Though American politics at the grassroots is polarized and divided, sharp commentators have written thoughtfully about the similarities between the parties as a practical matter. I would add that the similarities extend to their leaders.

While George W. Bush and Barack Obama could not be further apart ideologically, their attitudes toward governing suffer from the same flaw. Bush said he was “the Decider,” to which Obama rejoined: “I won.” Both ran roughshod over public opinion. This is not just a massive failure on the part of our parties to effectively advocate, explain or persuade on behalf of their respective understandings of what it means to be an American; it’s fair to say that we are witnessing contempt from both parties for the idea that persuasion is their primary role.

This misconception about the role of politics and parties is due, in part, to the ballooning of the  modern administrative state, which has replaced government by consent with government by experts. As the putative head of this enormous band of experts, a President who—like most Americans today—lacks a clear understanding of the origins and purposes of American constitutionalism might be forgiven for imagining he is a kind of Caesar. Governing according to this habit tends, over time, to subvert consent, and Presidents lose their patience for explaining themselves to the people.

Having lost that patience, they soon lose even the natural concern an elected official should have for the people’s scorn. That, too, is left to experts. Today we have a whole class of people who know how to wrangle elections, woo interest groups, and cobble together electoral—if not exactly ideological—majorities. Some even put electronic sensors on groups of average Americans to monitor their emotional responses to candidates and issues.

Yet for all this malpractice in American constitutionalism, it remains that we do not elect sovereigns in America. We do not elect them because we, the People, are the sovereign. Radical actions taken without first taking time to build consensus will embitter the sovereign over time.

Put bluntly: Americans don’t like to be snubbed. This should give us some measure of hope. How can one not love this trait in one’s fellow Americans? We still have a spirit of wanting to be free, not subjects. We want to be persuaded, not told what to think. We think we can judge for ourselves when presented with a fair argument. Whatever experts may say, it remains unwise to embark on international adventures or attempt to “transform” a nation with a simple electoral majority. We may have a basic respect for experts and their degrees, but our trust in them has very definite limits.

This is why dismissing Trump’s appeal as voter anger misses something important. There is anger, sure. But to see only generic cynicism and ranting about “politics as usual” — and to dismiss it as emanating from the uninformed, safely to be disregarded—is facile and, like most facile conclusions, mistaken.

While it is possible that some of Trump’s support comes from people caught up in the moment and earnest in taking Trump as a serious candidate, it is instructive to instead suppose that many of them are in on the joke. There is a kind of pleading desperation in their political responses viewed in this light. Not only does the longtime celebrity know what he is about, with his trademark bombast, they know what they are about in giving him the lead in the primary polling. Wouldn’t it be wise to investigate what is behind voters’ desperation? What do they feel our politics is not addressing?  (Hint: Immigration is only part of the story.)

Perhaps Trump’s legions are trying to tell us that the Republican Party actually deserves a clown as its standard-bearer. If not, at a minimum they are saying a clown is preferable to anything else on offer. As the pundits persist in their denunciations (with which, I should add, I am in basic agreement), Trump supporters take that as yet more proof that the party’s “elite” are, as ever, out of touch.

Does it ever occur to the leadership of either party that their most important job is to persuade more people of the merits of their respective platforms? Do they even read the platforms? The grassroots of both parties are tired of the same canned speeches pulled off the shelf for election-year fundraising. And those we like to call the “mushy middle” are often seated there because they long ago tired of this drivel or, in most cases, never warmed to it in the first place. Party leaders are wrong if they think this can go on indefinitely.

Sooner or later, after all, a sovereign will assert his authority. And when that happens, it may not be a salutary development. Often we do not assert our authority in the smartest way—as the outcome of many elections can attest. We seek persuasion but, in the tradition of most democracies, we too often settle for the best and loudest expression of our outrage.

Much of what may be said of Trump and the Republicans could apply to Democrats and their sudden love affair with Bernie Sanders. In this we see a repudiation of an establishment putting forward more entitled legacy candidates like Bush and Clinton to administer a federal bureaucracy that rewards well-connected friends with power and prestige. Meanwhile, Trump makes laughing stock of this establishment and hay with the voters as he brags about his ability to exploit and buy off politicians for his own purposes.

Democrats thought they were getting something different in 2008 with Barack Obama and, though it is a wonder to many on the Right, a good number of them are dissatisfied with his record on behalf of their ideology. While he pushed through legislation and filled the courts and bureaucracy with fellow travelers, he has not succeeded in winning converts. Our political polarization is as bad as it’s become in great part because neither party has done much serious work at building or deserving consensus on behalf of its ideas.

Party leaders do not seem to understand that it is not just that Democrats and Republicans disagree about policy prescriptions. They disagree fundamentally about the problems the policies are supposed to remedy—about the very ends and purposes of government. Living in a perpetual stalemate on such fundamentals is exhausting.

People are looking for an argument worth hearing. They sense that policy disputes will go nowhere if we can’t settle this larger problem first. But while both sides appear to be trying to choose a champion, both parties are churning up men and women ill-equipped for this battle.

President Obama turned out to be too smug to win over new supporters for anything longer than an election cycle. His determination to force people to accept their freedom as he understands freedom brought us the success of the Tea Party, and cost Democrats control of Congress. For Republicans, holding the House and Senate—two chambers where one expected to hear a more  pronounced assertion of the party’s principles—instead appeared to demonstrate their weaknesses. In a country where so much of the legislative power is diluted and redistributed to a professional ruling class, even good rhetoric can be unpersuasive because it is often not followed by significant action. Couple this with the intentional check of the legislative power in the Presidential veto, and you’ve got a pretty emasculated representative of the public’s will.

Unfortunately, Republican leadership did little to explain to voters the complexity of trying to legislate in a government now dominated by an out-of-control administrative state. And they did even less to dismantle it. All they managed was a fair amount of whining about it.

Instead of appealing to the natural pride of self-governing citizens in a republic and inspiring them to resist the patronizing ways of a government that keeps them down and in their place, the GOP in 2012 insinuated that the culture of dependency among the infamous 47 percent made them incapable of self-government.

Where Democrats appeal to the superiority of supposed intellectual experts, Republicans appear to appeal to the superiority of rich guys.

Can voters be blamed for supposing that if we are going to have politicians with so little respect for self-government anyway, we might as well get behind someone who flatters, entertains, and channels a cathartic kind of manly sensibility that demands the attention of our betters?

Trump’s supporters know he is a destroyer. Sanders’ supporters know the same about their socialist champion. The truth that should frighten the elites of both parties is that destroyers are exactly what these Americans think America needs.

Political parties don’t last forever, but voters do. Well . . . they last at least as long as republics do.

 

What is Success?

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Posted November 29, 2020

 

To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.

Public Defenders See: Innocent, But Fined

 Public Defenders See: Innocent, But Fined

The state of Iowa collects millions of dollars in fines from people whose charges were dismissed. There's also a Catch-22: financially, you're better off guilty

 On August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, a veteran police officer named Darren Wilson shot and killed an 18-year-old Black man named Michael Brown. The resulting furor led to protests across the country, igniting a debate about brutality, use of force, and policing tactics that rages to this day.

In the wake of the protests in Ferguson, Barack Obama’s Justice Department opened a federal civil rights investigation of the city’s police department. On page 2 of the resulting report, the DOJ zeroed in on something unexpected: revenue. Ferguson police, the feds said, were under constant pressure from financially-strained burghers to generate cash, and essentially ordered to ticket as many people — poor people — as possible.

The most penniless residents of the St. Louis exurb were written up for everything from actual crimes to municipal code violations like “High Grass and Weeds,” “Barking Dog,” and “Dog Running at Large.” Between 2010 and 2014, the city wrote up 90,000 summonses and citations, and the number in the last year of that period was double what it was in the first year. Either crime and dog-barking were skyrocketing, or police were experiencing more pressure to write tickets. As the report wrote:

The City’s emphasis on revenue generation has a profound effect on FPD’s approach to law enforcement. Patrol assignments and schedules are geared toward aggressive enforcement of Ferguson’s municipal code, with insufficient thought given to whether enforcement strategies promote public safety or unnecessarily undermine community trust and cooperation… The result is a pattern of stops without reasonable suspicion and arrests without probable cause…

For a lot of Americans, this was the first time they were introduced to the idea that cash-strapped municipalities were using the justice system as a means of generating revenue. The grotesque angle was that cities were so desperate that they were reduced to systematically ticketing people who couldn’t pay.

While this was going on, Alex Kornya, a public defender at Iowa Legal Aid, was experiencing his own sub-journey through one of the more bizarre corners of the criminal justice labyrinth.

“It goes back to Ferguson,” says Kornya. “A large part of the story of Ferguson was how the criminal justice system has been driven into overdrive, because of this need for revenue.” What he was witnessing was related, but weirder, and worse.

In December of 2015, a woman named Lori Dee Mathes was charged with a single count of possession of a controlled substance. Police were really interested in someone else, but executed a warrant on her property and charged her with a low-level offense based on what they found. Nearly two years later, in October of 2017, the state filed a motion to dismiss “upon agreement of the parties.”

Mathes was off the hook — sort of. She was sent multiple bills: $40 for “court reporter fees,” $100 for “filing and docketing fees,” and $1,815.28 in “indigent defense fee recoupment,” i.e. counsel fees.

When Mathes tried to argue an inability to pay these bills, the state balked. After all, there was no more case! On what basis could she argue?

It was a classic Catch-22. If Mathes had been found guilty, she’d have a right to appeal not only the disposition of the case, but also an ability to pay penalties. However, as a higher court eventually ruled, there was no right to appeal anything after a case like hers had been dismissed.

Citing a case called Berman v. United States, the Iowa Court of Appeals wrote that judgment is final when “‘it terminates the litigation between the parties on the merits’ and ‘leaves nothing to be done but to enforce by execution what has been determined.’”

Meaning: if we find you guilty, there’s something to argue. If we drop the charges, there’s “nothing to be done.” Thanks to this logic, as Kornya put it, “people who have dismissed criminal charges end up owing more money than people who are convicted.” As a cosmic punishment, it seemed, for arguing an inability to pay the initial few thousand, Mathes ended up owing $3000 more in appellate fees.

The Mathes case had grown more bitter with time. When Kornya tried to argue down the costs, prosecutors returned fire in the form of a threat with real teeth, writing in a motion that if any of the fees were to be reduced “in any manner,” they might re-file the criminal charge:

In the years since Ferguson, the public has become at least somewhat aware of the phenomenon of the state charging people for the pleasure of having to travel through the criminal justice system. In New York, for instance, people have to pay for the tests the state does to enter their DNA in a database. There may be additional surcharges of hundreds of dollars for felony convictions, “victim assistance” fees, fees for ankle monitors, etc.

People who are released from long prison terms often find themselves under an immediate obligation to repay years of costs racked up behind bars, with a failure to repay in some states leading to re-incarceration. In some states, defendants are assessed hefty fees for pre-trial detention. Kornya says an Iowa 16-year-old, tried as an adult, racked up over $50,000 in pre-trial costs in just one case.

The difference in Iowa is the angle of fees in dismissed cases.

“We've talked to hundreds, thousands of people who have this issue,” says Kornya. “From 2014 to 2019, there was $15 million in debt just associated with dismissed criminal cases with debts in Iowa.” He says the overall number of outstanding counsel fee debt is $177 million, and the collection rate is a pathetic 2%.

These debts arise from the vapor of a legal paradox. Although an Iowa statute, Woodbury County v. Anderson, says costs and taxes may only be assessed via “derogation of the common law,” there is no explicit statute outlining the state’s power to assess fees in dismissed cases. Prosecutors just do it.

How? Unlike plea agreements, which require the completion of a series of verbal or written formalities, there is no concrete mechanism with a dismissal. The attorney for a defendant like Mathes may agree to a deal, and the prosecutor simply has to represent to the court that a series of conditions, including fees, have been agreed upon.

“Are plea agreements perfect? Are there coercive elements to them? My God, yeah,” says Kornya. “However, what happens a lot with these agreements to dismiss is they have no formalities.”

A plea agreement may be required to be read into the record, in open court, with the defendant actually there, in front of a court reporter. Or there might be a written contract. But in dismissed cases like Mathes, Kornya says, “It’s basically just, ‘Oh yeah, she agreed to that.’”

Kornya was involved with another case dealing with a related phenomenon. In State of Iowa v. Jane Doe, a woman charged in 2009 with domestic abuse had her case dropped, for the sensible reason that she was actually the one being abused.

Upon dismissal, Jane Doe was sent a bill for “unpaid court costs” of $718.38, again involving counsel fees. Nearly a decade later, she tried to get her case expunged (a 2016 law had made this easier), but a district court ruled she could not. Why? She still owed court costs she had never been able to pay in the first place.

In an affidavit later filed by Iowa Legal Aid, Doe said her sole income came from two monthly assistance programs, totaling less than $1000. She listed the monthly expenses for caring for her two children (a third was on the way at the time) at $1445. The court finally did waive the fee, but Kornya and others tried to fight the larger issue of the stalled expungements. After all, there were masses of people applying for leases or jobs who were being held back by the appearance of a criminal record, thanks to unpaid fees assessed in dismissed cases.

“A lot of people were in the same situation as Jane Doe, who had a significant debt that only poor people owe,” says Kornya. A non-indigent person who didn’t pay off his or her privately-hired lawyer could be sued, or might face an adverse credit report, but the state couldn’t prevent their record from being expunged.

For a poor person, however, “the state can, and the state did. We thought that was a violation of the constitution.” They took the issue to the Iowa Supreme Court, but lost, 4-3 against.

In Iowa anyway, thousands of the poorest people are being assessed significant fees based on what comes down to parody of Kafka: an informal understanding of agreements informally settled upon, based on a nonexistent legal authority. There are echoes of taxation without representation here, except that like so many things associated with the criminal justice system, the concept is irrational and moronic in addition to being repressive.

“If you're talking about a policy that actually collects revenue, and to support the judicial system, going after people with no money is stupid,” Kornya says. “Because you're not going to get the money… However miserable you make their lives, they still have no money.”

Matt Taibbi is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. He is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, author of several books, co-host of Useful Idiots, and publisher of a newsletter on Substack

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The Mammoth Cost Of Operating America's Combat Aircraft

 The Mammoth Cost Of Operating America's Combat Aircraft

 "Statista " -  The non-partisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released an overview of mission capable rates and the cost of operating U.S. military aircraft. It examined more than 40 different aircraft types, finding that only three of them reached their mission capable goals between fiscal years 2011 and 2019. In total, the report put the collective cost of operating all of the U.S. military's aircraft fleets at $49 billion in fiscal year 2018, taking operational & support (O&S) costs such as maintenance as well as supply support in account. O&S generally makes up 70 percent of a weapon system's total life cycle costs and it includes spare parts, depot and field maintenance, contract services, engineering support and personnel, amongst other factors.

20 aircraft types experienced an increase in their O&S costs from fiscal year 2011 through 2018, 22 saw a decrease and three remained consistent. At $118 million, the Navy's KC-130T Hercules fleet had the lowest operating cost of all the military's fleets during the above period while the Air Force's KC-135T Stratotankers cost $4.24 billion to keep flying, the most of any aircraft type (primarily due to the fleet's size and age). Alongside those availability rates, the research also provides an interesting list of the cost of keeping some of America's leading combat aircraft operational in fiscal year 2018.

The Air Force's bombers are the most expensive aircraft in the U.S. inventory to keep operational, primarily due to their age and complexity. In fiscal year 2018, for example, the B-2 Spirit had operating costs per aircraft at close to $63 million, a figure that is high due to the extra work rquired to maintain that aircraft's low observability characteristics, such as its stealth coating. By comparison, the nearly 70-year old B-52 costs $25 million to keep mission-capable while the B-1B comes in at $23.7 million per aircraft. The high cost of maintaining stealth aircraft is also evident in the fighter fleet.

America's two most sophisticated combat aircraft - the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II - are also the most expensive fighter jets to maintain at $22 million and $13.4 million per aircraft in fiscal year 2018, respectively. The F-22 is demanding for its maintainers, requiring a three-week packaged maintenance plan for every 300 flight hours. Lessons learned with existing stealth aircraft such as the B-2, F-117 and F-22 were incorporated into the F-35's design to make maintenance easier and the introduction of a computerized program to handle any work that's required is just one example. Nevertheless, the F-35 is still more expensive to maintain than older U.S. fighter aircraft such as the F-15 and F-16 that both cost less than $10 million per year to keep in the air.

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See also ==== Autocracy is on the rise: Should we expect military spending to follow? US army data on civilians killed in war against ISIL questioned: In the campaign to retake the ISIL-occupied territories in Iraq and Syria, Airwars estimated that more than 13,000 civilians were confirmed killed.   CIA Partners with Google, Amazon and IBM : The military industrial complex is returning to its roots as the CIA turns to big tech to maintain control and rebuild the war economy.

Moral Decay Leads to Collapse

 Moral Decay Leads to Collapse

- A very strong case can be made that America is now a moral cesspool. Consider just three cases: Jeffrey Epstein, the CEO of Pfizer and JPMorgan Chase.

Sadly, Epstein is the epitome of America's elite: getting away with abusing children for years, if not decades; when finally caught a few years ago, escaping with a legal wrist-slap; acquiring a fortune of $200 million without creating any jobs, innovations or value; buying his way into the good graces of Harvard, MIT and a seemingly endless parade of celebrities, politicians, scientists, etc.

And very par for the course in America's elite: Epstein's crimes were known by America's intelligence and law enforcement agencies, but rather than indict him, they made him an "intelligence asset" that had to protected from exposure to the consequences of the rule of law.

When some tiny sliver of light was shed on his decades of blatant corruption and exploitation, a sliver that implicated the wealthy and powerful, then Epstein was dispatched in classic Deep State fashion, in a manner that speaks volumes about the banana "republic" nature of America.

Pfizer's CEO arranged a massive sale of Pfizer stock and then timed the release of overhyped vaccine data to maximize his private gains.

Nothing illegal here, just another example of what I call legalized looting.

JPMorgan Chase manipulated markets to maximize its gains, and its $1 billion fine is just the cost of doing business in a pervasively corrupt society and economy. Nobody ever goes to prison for these billion-dollar skims, scams, frauds amd embezzlements; financial criminals get a get out of jail free card with every crime.

These three examples are just a few of thousands of examples of insider skimming and gaming the system, abuse of power, fraud, pay-to-play, embezzlement, racketeering and other forms of corruption that enrich the few at the expense of the many.

Whenever I mention America's moral decay, somebody is always quick to discount the decay with cliches such as "there's always been corruption" or "it's human nature, you'll never get rid of it."

These pathetically flimsy excuses mask the reality that America's moral decay has reached extremes that eventually trigger collapse in the financial, social and political realms.

The decay of civic virtue and the social contract is so gradual that only the few who recall specific set-points from previous generations even notice the advancing rot.

A third of the Roman Senate was killed in combat during the disastrous defeat at Cannae; can we imagine a third of the U.S. Senate putting their own lives at risk? No, we cannot; that level of sacrifice is unthinkable in America today. The protected elites have no real skin in the game. The consequences of their mismanagement fall on the unprotected many.

Can we imagine the two eldest sons of a present-day political scion volunteering for combat overseas, with one killed in combat and the other severely wounded? (Joe Kennedy, Jr. and John F. Kennedy in World War II.) Such elite sacrifice is unimaginable in today's America.

As for the social contract: to saddle young people with highly uncertain prospects with $1.7 trillion in student loan debt would have been unimaginable, If not criminal, two generations ago. Now this ruthless exploitation of students--in essence, punitive debt-serfdom that enriches the wealthiest few who own the student loans--is now the norm. Parasitic elites sucking the powerless dry is now the status quo in America.

This academic paper (via A.P.) sheds light on the severe consequences of moral decay: Moral Collapse and State Failure: A View From the Past.

In summary, the authors examined premodern states / empires with an eye on socio-economic systems that generated a social environment which provided real benefits to citizens via a moral code and good government practices.

(I would include the early Tang and Song dynasties in China of examples of such systems that were not democratic but which offered a judiciary of recourse, investment in infrastructure and other forms of public good, rule of law and social mobility.)

Yes, elite corruption is ever-present, but good governance requires limiting elite corruption as part of the social contract in which citizens support the state (paying taxes, etc.) because the state provides for the common good.

The authors point out that citizens expect relatively little of autocracies in the way of public good because the citizenry know the autocracy is a self-serving, corrupt elite. But governments that earned the consent of the governed by providing for the common good are held to a higher standard.

When the moral code that requires service to the public good decays, the legitimacy of the state collapses. Here is a quote from the paper:

"Moral failure of the leadership in this social setting brings calamity because the state's lifeblood--its citizen-produced resource-base--is threatened when there is loss of confidence in the state, which brings in its wake social division, strife, flight, and a reduced motivation to comply with tax obligations.

In the resulting weakened fiscal economy, services that citizens have come to depend on fail, including public goods and administrative control of corruption.

To realize and sustain good government is especially difficult owing in large part to the importance of shared moral obligations between citizens and the state."

In other words, a strict moral code that requires elites to devote resources and leadership for the public good is the critical foundation of the entire social, economic and political order. When this moral code decays, the state and its elites both lose legitimacy and the consent of the governed.

Put another way: once the elites have decayed to exploitive, self-serving, profiteering parasites, the public has no interest in supporting the state or its elites. Rather, they will cheer the collapse and ruin of the parasitic elites.

The explosive rise of elites' wealth and power in the past few decades has been documented and charted, and I've repeatedly posted charts showing that virtually all the real income gains of the past 20 years have flowed to the top 0.1%. This RAND study found that America's elites siphoned $50 trillion into their own pockets in the past two generations: Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.

This is the chilling summation of America's terminal moral decay from Moral Collapse and State Failure: A View From the Past:

"Many citizens perceive that they have little stake in what should be a democratic society.

Decline in citizen confidence is compounded by a great economic transition in the US, a U-turn over the last five decades in wealth and income inequalities.

These economic shifts are undergirded by a new ethos and practices that enshrine shareholder value, personal freedom, nepotism, cronyism, the comingling of state and personal resources, and narcissistic aggrandizement in ways rarely seen in the early history of our Republic."

Our national claim of moral superiority is no longer plausible: America is a moral cesspool that cannot be drained.

Charles Hugh Smith is the proprietor of the popular blog OfTwoMinds.com.

His new book is available! A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet 20% and 15% discounts (Kindle $7, print $17) Read excerpts of the book for free (PDF).  - The Story Behind the Book and the Introduction.

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Censorship in the Biden Era

 Censorship in the Biden Era

 "BAR " - " The corporate media have joined the incoming administration in deciding what we can and cannot see and hear.

“The danger of fascism won’t leave Washington with Donald Trump.”

Ever since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 the country has been warned about the dangers of fascism. It isn’t difficult to see why that is the case, as he banned people from mostly Muslim nations from entering the country, separated families seeking asylum, weakened an already frayed safety net, and undid the protections provided by a variety of government regulations.

The racist right wing was certainly ascendant during his administration, but the danger of fascism won’t leave Washington with Donald Trump. The obnoxious racist may be the public face of tyranny, but there is another danger coming from sectors of the Democratic Party. Their goal is to censor any points of view that undermine their neoliberal and imperialist narratives. 

Bill Russo , deputy communications director for the Joe Biden campaign, publicly demanded that Facebook censor more often than it already does. He and others do so under the guise of preventing Trump from spreading misinformation, using the likes of Steve Bannon as a cover for something more sinister. They may accuse Facebook of “shredding the fabric of democracy,” but they are more interested in making sure that the small group of people who are actually leftists will have no platform with which to oppose Biden policies. 

The corporate media have already made themselves clear by censoring the president himself. On November 5, 2020 Trump claimed to be a victim of election fraud at a White House news conference. Instead of allowing him to make his statement and then analyzing what he said, the television networks pronounced him a liar and cut away  from his remarks.

Trump’s charges are unfounded, but the public should have heard him for themselves and made their own determination about the veracity of his words. But the corporate media are done with him and have joined the incoming administration in deciding what we can and cannot see and hear. They are declaring themselves the arbiters of what information should be made accessible to the rest of the world.

These open attacks against Facebook do require the left to be discerning. Big technology social media platforms are certainly not our friends. They readily silence individuals and pages that question the establishment narrative. Black people risk being kicked off entirely if they utter any words white people may find offensive. But Facebook already buckled under Democratic Party pressure that was ginned up during the Russiagate hoax. They even accepted blame for a non-existent offense. The tale of Russian government memes throwing the election to Trump was false and a useful way to silence dissent and attack another country all at once. It isn’t hard to believe that they will again bend to an establishment that is now back in power.

“Black people risk being kicked off entirely if they utter any words white people may find offensive.”

While keeping Facebook’s history in mind, we must also see through the machinations of a new group of thought police who have made clear that they expect social media to bow to their dictates. That is exactly what Twitter did in censoring a recent news story that was unflattering to Hunter Biden. After protecting the Democratic candidate’s son, Twitter’s CEO showed contrition after the fact and claimed the decision was a mistake. 

It isn’t just corporate media who are a danger here. There are individuals on the Biden transition team who have publicly stated their support for official propaganda. Richard Stengel  is the team leader for the United States Global Agency, which includes Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Middle Eastern Broadcasting Networks. In 2018 Stengel had this to say about official propaganda, “My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist. I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.” It should be noted that Stengel worked for the State Department during the Barack Obama administration and not that of fascist Trump.

It is clear that Biden will be the more effective evil in this regard. There will be no buffoons like Trump or Bannon spewing obvious hatred and nonsense who can be easily dismissed. Instead we will have well spoken operatives like Stengel, who think that propaganda isn’t so bad.

The people need their own platforms, like Black Agenda Report, that will dissect the lies and obfuscations of an administration greeted with a sigh of relief by millions of people weary of Trump and his policies. Already fossil fuel companies and Congress members who benefit from their largesse are on the transition team as are chemical industry representatives slated to go to the EPA. All will end up in the White House along with self-confessed propagandists. We must be ready to engage them all. 

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at patreon.com/margaretkimberley and she regularly posts on Twitter @freedomrideblog. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com. 

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There Are “Legal & Constitutional” Ways For Trump to Stay in Office

There Are “Legal & Constitutional” Ways For Trump to Stay in Office

Fareed Zakaria video causes consternation amongst Biden supporters.

 - In a video released before the election but attracting fresh attention, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria explained the “legal and constitutional” case by which President Trump could stay in office even if he loses the election.

In a moment of actual journalistic integrity, which is incredibly rare these days for CNN, Zakaria outlined how Trump could retain the presidency “without actually winning the vote.”

Explaining how the system worked, Zakaria said electors are determined by that state’s popular vote, but that this is “not a constitutional obligation.”

The host then outlined the exact scenario that happened on election day, with Trump leading on November 3rd but then mail-in ballots swinging the result for Biden, prompting a flurry of challenges and lawsuits.

“Taking account of the confusion, legislatures decide to choose the electors themselves,” said Zakaria before pointing out that eight out of nine key swing states have Republican legislatures.

“If one or more decide that balloting is chaotic and marked by irregularities, they could send what they regard as the legitimate slate of electors, which would be Republican.”

Adding to the confusion, Democrats from the same states would also send their electors to Washington, which Zakaria suggested could be “part of the Republican plan.”

“Because you see when Congress convenes on January 6 to tally the electors’ votes, there would be challenges to the legitimacy of some electors,” explained Zakaria.

This would prompt Congressional Republicans to argue that disputed states should not be counted, which would ensure Biden’s could not reach 270 electoral college votes.

“At that point, the constitution clearly directs that the House of Representatives vote to determine the presidential election, but it does so with each state casting a single ballot,” said Zakaria, noting that this process would result in the re-election of Donald Trump.

“Trump doesn’t have to do anything other than accept this outcome, which is constitutional,” concluded Zakaria.

The video has caused consternation amongst some Biden supporters, who are eagerly pointing out that it was released before the election.

However, this makes no difference whatsoever. Zakaria’s explanation of how Trump could still win is still in play.

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See also ====  Trump Says DoJ, FBI May Have Been In on Large-scale Voter Fraud

The Ruling Elite’s War on Truth

 The Ruling Elite’s War on Truth

American political leaders display a widening disconnect from reality intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by global corporations and billionaires.

November 27, 2020 "Information Clearing House" - "Scheer Post" - Joe Biden’s victory instantly obliterated the Democratic Party’s longstanding charge that Russia was hijacking and compromising U.S. elections. The Biden victory, the Democratic Party leaders and their courtiers in the media now insist, is evidence that the democratic process is strong and untainted, that the system works. The elections ratified the will of the people.

But imagine if Donald Trump had been reelected. Would the Democrats and pundits at The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC pay homage to a fair electoral process? Or, having spent four years trying to impugn the integrity of the 2016 presidential race, would they once again haul out the blunt instrument of Russian interference to paint Trump as Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian candidate?

Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani are vulgar and buffoonish, but they play the same slimy game as their Democratic opponents. The Republicans scapegoat the deep state, communists and now, bizarrely, Venezuela; the Democrats scapegoat Russia. The widening disconnect from reality by the ruling elite is intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by predatory global corporations and billionaires.

“This is a disgraceful thing that was done in this country,” Giuliani said at his recent bad-hair-day press conference. “Probably not much more disgraceful than the things these people did in office, which you didn’t and don’t bother to cover and you conceal from the American people, but we let this happen, we use largely a Venezuelan voting machine in essence to count our vote. We let this happen. We’re going to become Venezuela. We cannot let this happen to us. We cannot allow these crooks, because that’s what they are, to steal an election from the American people. They elected Donald Trump. They didn’t elect Joe Biden. Joe Biden is in the lead because of the fraudulent ballots, the illegal ballots, that were produced and that were allowed to be used, after the election was over.”       

Giuliani’s rant was topped by those of Sidney Powell, until yesterday another of Trump’s lawyers, who blamed software designed for Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, for Trump’s loss, as well as “the massive influence of Communist money.” The software “was created so Hugo Chavez would never lose another election, and he did not after that software was created,” Powell said. “He won every single election and then they exported it to Argentina and other countries in South America, and then they brought it here.”

Compare this to how Hillary Clinton, during the recent primary campaign, warned that the Russians were “grooming” a female candidate, widely assumed to be Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, to run as a third-party candidate to serve Russian interests. Previously, Clinton called the 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein a “Russian asset.” She insisted, although Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his prosecutors found no evidence to support her charge, that the Trump campaign worked closely in 2016 with Moscow and WikiLeaks — which she insists is a Russian front — to defeat her. Hillary’s staff put together a “hit list” in the final days of her 2008 campaign, according to the book, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, listing those who were loyal to the Clintons those who were not. They used a scale of 1 to 7.

“Step back and think about it,” Clinton wrote in her book, What Happened, about the 2016 election.

“The Russians hacked our election systems. They got inside. They tried to delete or alter voter information. This should send a shiver down the spine of every American.”

Never mind that both ruling parties are silent about the massive interference in our elections by Israel, which uses its lobbying groups to lavishly fund political candidates in both parties and flies members of Congress and their families to Israel for junkets at seaside resorts. Israel’s intrusion in our political process, including when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress in 2015, without informing then President Barack Obama, to attack the president’s Iran nuclear deal, dwarfs that of any other country, including Russia.

Fictional & Dangerous Narratives

The two warring factions within the ruling elite, which fight primarily over the spoils of power while abjectly serving corporate interests, peddle alternative realities. If the deep state and Venezuelan socialists or Russia intelligence operatives are pulling the strings no one in power is accountable for the rage and alienation caused by the social inequality, the unassailability of corporate power, the legalized bribery that defines our political process, the endless wars, austerity and de-industrialization. The social breakdown is, instead, the fault of shadowy phantom enemies manipulating groups such as Black Lives Matters or the Green Party.

“The people who run this country have run out of workable myths with which to distract the public, and in a moment of extreme crisis have chosen to stoke civil war and defame the rest of us – black and white – rather than admit to a generation of corruption, betrayal, and mismanagement,” Matt Taibbi writes.

These fictional narratives are dangerous. They erode the credibility of democratic institutions and electoral politics. They posit that news and facts are no longer true or false. Information is accepted or discarded based on whether it hurts or promotes one faction over another. While outlets such as Fox News have always existed as an arm of the Republican Party, this partisanship has now infected nearly all news organizations, including publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, along with the major tech platforms that disseminate information and news. A fragmented public with no common narrative believes whatever it wants to believe.

I first assumed this job posting from The New York Times for a Moscow correspondent was a parody posted by The Onion. It wasn’t. It speaks volumes about the self-immolation of The New York Times and the press.

JOB DESCRIPTION: Vladimir Putin’s Russia remains one of the biggest stories in the world. It sends out hit squads armed with nerve agents against its enemies, most recently the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony in the West to tarnish its democratic systems, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It has deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out in his villa. If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news: We will have an opening for a new correspondent as Andy Higgins takes over as our next Eastern Europe Bureau Chief early next year.

Of course, every charge leveled here against Russia regarding foreign interference can be leveled in spades against the United States, both in the present and past, and even the implied criticism of its pandemic response seems like a textbook case of projection. More to the point, why should the Times even send someone to Moscow to report on what Russians think, feel and how they view themselves and the world if they have already decided they are a cartoon villain? Why have a Moscow bureau at all?

A parody response circulating on the internet imagined a parallel posting by Pravda for a U.S. correspondent:   

JOB DESCRIPTION: Donald Trump’s America remains one of the biggest stories in the world. It sends out its armies, its drones, and its agents around the world to kill its enemies. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony, undermining and overthrowing regimes, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It has deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out on the golf course. If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news. We will have an    opening for a new correspondent.

I was a foreign correspondent for 20 years, 15 of them with The New York Times. My job was to become bicultural, which requires hundreds of hours of language classes, to see the world from the perspective of those I covered and reflect it back to an American audience. But this type of reporting is now anachronistic. The paper might as well rehire the con artist Jayson Blair to sit in his apartment and snort coke while filing fictional variants on the preordained narrative the paper demands. Or maybe computer algorithms can do the job.

I guess I should not be surprised. After all, it was the Times that produced a 10-part podcast by its reporter Rukmini Callimachi based on interviews with a Muslim identified as Abu Huzayfah al-Kanadi who claimed to have been a member of ISIS in the Middle East. He provided lurid accounts of murders and crucifixions he supposedly carried out.

His stories, catering to the rampant Islamophobia that poisons American society, were the audio version of snuff films. They were also a lie. The Canadian “Abu Huzayfah,” whose real name was Shehroze Chaudhry, was arrested in September 2020 by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and charged under Canadian hoax laws for fabricating his story.

Rise of Authoritarian State

The flagrant partisanship and discrediting of truth across the political spectrum are swiftly fueling the rise of an authoritarian state. The credibility of democratic institutions and electoral politics, already deeply corrupted by PACs, the electoral college, lobbyists, the disenfranchisement of third-party candidates, gerrymandering and voter suppression, is being eviscerated.

Silicon Valley billionaires, including Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, donated more than $100 million to a Democratic super PAC that created a torrent of anti-Trump TV ads in the final weeks of the campaign to elect Biden. The heavy infusion of corporate money to support Biden wasn’t done to protect democracy. It was done because these corporations and billionaires know a Biden administration will serve their interests.

The press, meanwhile, has largely given up on journalism. It has retreated into competing echo chambers that only speak to true believers. This catering exclusively to one demographic, which it sets against another demographic, is commercially profitable. But it also guarantees the balkanization of the United States and edges us closer and closer to fratricide.

When Trump leaves the White House millions of his enraged supports, hermetically sealed inside hyperventilating media platforms that feed back to them their rage and hate, will see the vote as fraudulent, the political system as rigged, and the establishment press as propaganda. They will target, I fear, through violence, the Democratic Party politicians, mainstream media outlets and those they demonize as conspiratorial members of the deep state, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci. The Democratic Party is as much to blame for this disintegration as Trump and the Republican Party.

More Targeting & Censorship Ahead

The election of Biden is also very bad news for journalists such as Matt Taibbi, Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley, Glenn Greenwald, Jeffrey St. Clair or Robert Scheer who refuse to be courtiers to the ruling elites. Journalists who do not spew the approved narrative of the right-wing, or, alternatively, the approved narrative of the Democratic Party, have a credibility the ruling elite fears.

The worse things get – and they will get worse as the pandemic leaves hundreds of thousands dead and thrusts millions of Americans into severe economic distress – the more those who seek to hold the ruling elites, and in particular the Democratic Party, accountable will be targeted and censored in ways familiar to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, now in a London prison and facing possible extradition to the United States and life imprisonment.

Barack Obama’s assault on civil liberties, which included the repeated misuse of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, the passage of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to permit the military to act as a domestic police force and the ordering of the assassination of U.S. citizens deemed to be terrorists in Yemen, was far worse than those of George W. Bush. Biden’s assault on civil liberties, I suspect, will surpass those of the Obama administration.

The censorship was heavy handed during the campaign. Digital media platforms, including Google, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, along with the establishment press worked shamelessly as propaganda arms for the Biden campaign. They were determined not to make the “mistake” they made in 2016 when they reported on the damaging emails, released by WikiLeaks, from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta.

Although the emails were genuine, papers such as The New York Times routinely refer to the Podesta emails as “disinformation.” This, no doubt, pleases its readership, 91 percent of whom identify as Democrats according to the Pew Research Center. But it is another example of journalistic malfeasance.

Following the election of Trump, the media outlets that cater to a Democratic Party readership made amends. The New York Times was one of the principal platforms that amplified Russiagate conspiracies, most of which turned out to be false. At the same time, the paper largely ignored the plight of the disposed working class that supported Trump.

When the Russiagate story collapsed, the paper pivoted to focus on race, embodied in the 1619 Project. The root cause of social disintegration — the neoliberal order, austerity and deindustrialization — was ignored since naming it would alienate the paper’s corporate advertisers and the elites on whom the paper depends for access.

Once the 2020 election started, The New York Times and other mainstream outlets censored and discredited information that could hurt Biden, including a tape of Joe Biden speaking with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, which appears to be authentic. They gave credibility to any rumor, however spurious, which was unfavorable to Trump.

Twitter and Facebook blocked access to a New York Post story about the emails allegedly found on Hunter Biden’s discarded laptop. Twitter locked The New York Post out of its own account for over a week. Glenn Greenwald, whose article on Hunter Biden was censored by his editors at The Intercept, which he helped found, resigned.

He released the email exchanges with his editors over his article. Ignoring the textual evidence of censorship, editors and writers at The Intercept engaged in a public campaign of character assassination against Greenwald. This sordid behavior by self-identified progressive journalists is a page out of the Trump playbook and a sad commentary on the collapse of journalistic integrity.

The Attack on WikiLeaks

The censorship and manipulation of information was honed and perfected against WikiLeaks. When WikiLeaks tries to release information, it is hit with botnets or distributed denial of service attacks. Malware attacks WikiLeaks’ domain and website. The WikiLeaks site is routinely shut down or unable to serve its content to its readers.

Attempts by WikiLeaks to hold press conferences see the audio distorted and the visual images corrupted. Links to WikiLeaks events are delayed or cut. Algorithms block the dissemination of WikiLeaks content. Hosting services, including Amazon, removed WikiLeaks from its servers. Julian Assange, after releasing the Iraqi war logs, saw his bank accounts and credit cards frozen. WikiLeaks’ PayPal accounts were disabled to cut off donations.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation in December 2017 closed down the anonymous funding channel to WikiLeaks which was set up to protect the anonymity of donors. A well-orchestrated smear campaign against Assange was amplified and given credibility by the mass media and filmmakers such as Alex Gibney. Assange and WikiLeaks were first. We are next.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy told CNN during this campaign that Russian disinformation efforts are “more problematic” than in 2016. He warned that “this time around, the Russians have decided to cultivate U.S. citizens as assets. They are attempting to try to spread their propaganda in the mainstream media.”

This will be the official mantra of the Democratic Party, a vicious red-baiting campaign without actual reds, especially as the country spirals out of control. The reason I have a show on Russia-funded RT America is the same reason Vaclav Havel could only be heard on the U.S.-funded Voice of America during the communist control of Czechoslovakia.

I did not choose to leave the mainstream media. I was pushed out. And once anyone is pushed out, the ruling elite is relentless about discrediting the few platforms left willing to give them, and the issues they raise, a hearing.

“If the problem is ‘American citizens’ being cultivated as ‘assets’ trying to put ‘interference’ in the mainstream media, the logical next step is to start asking Internet platforms to shut down accounts belonging to any American journalist with the temerity to report material leaked by foreigners (the wrong foreigners, of course – it will continue to be okay to report things like the ‘black ledger’),” writes Taibbi, who has done some of the best reporting on the emerging censorship.

“From Fox or the Daily Caller on the right, to left-leaning outlets like Consortium [News] or the World Socialist Web Site, to writers like me even – we’re all now clearly in range of new speech restrictions, even if we stick to long-ago-established factual standards.”

Taibbi argues that the precedent for overt censorship took place when the major digital platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Google, Spotify, YouTube — in a coordinated move blacklisted the right-wing talk show host Alex Jones.

“Liberal America cheered,” Taibbi told me when I interviewed him for my show, “On Contact”:

“They said ‘Well this is a noxious figure. This is a great thing. Finally, someone’s taking action.’ What they didn’t realize is that we were trading an old system of speech regulation for a new one without any public discussion. You and I were raised in a system where you got punished for speech if you committed libel or slander or if there was imminent incitement to lawless action, right? That was the standard that the Supreme Court set, but that was done through litigation. There was an open process where you had a chance to rebut charges. That is all gone now.

Now, basically there’s a handful of these tech distribution platforms that control how people get their media. They’ve been pressured by the Senate, which has called all of their CEOs in, and basically ordered them, ‘We need you to come up with a plan to prevent the sowing of discord and spreading of misinformation.’ This has finally come into fruition. You see a major reputable news organization like the New York Post — with a 200-year history — locked out of its own Twitter account. The story [Hunter Biden’s emails] has not been disproven.

It’s not disinformation or misinformation. It’s been suppressed as it would be suppressed in a Third World country. It’s a remarkable historic moment. The danger is that we end up with a one-party informational system. There’s going to be approved dialogue and unapproved dialogue that you can only get through certain fringe avenues. That’s the problem. We let these companies get this monopolistic share of the distribution system. Now they’re exercising that power.”

In the Soviet Union the truth was passed, often hand to hand, in underground samizdat documents, clandestine copies of news and literature banned by the state. The truth will endure. It will be heard by those who seek it out. It will expose the mendacity of the powerful, however hard it will be to obtain. Despotisms fear the truth. They know it is a mortal threat. If we remain determined to live in truth, no matter the cost, we have a chance.

Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.