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To the editor:

As we all know, if we listen to the commentators who support former President Donald Trump, the Democrats stole the 2020 election and President Joe Biden is not the legitimate president.

What you will not hear is exactly how this was done.

Having been a poll worker in New Hampshire watching the registration process, check-in procedure and private voting booths monitored by members of both political parties and independents, I cannot figure out how this was done.

The mail-in ballots come in two separate envelopes with the outer envelope establishing authenticity of name and address, and checked against voter rolls.

The legitimacy of the vote was challenged in multiple states and argued in front of 60 judges, many appointed by Trump. In each case, the judge asked for evidence, and none was provided.

It has become apparent that the Republican Party has morphed into a cult-like organization with no problem targeting our democracy itself.

This big lie perpetuated about the 2020 election is now being used as the foundation for new restrictive voting laws. Many ominously replace a secretary of state responsible for voting security with partisan legislatures.

Americans who ignore what is happening do so at their peril.

Our democracy can disappear overnight, leaving us with the question: How did this happen?

John Mosto

Salem, N.H.

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LETTER: Attacks on voting rights threaten democracy | Letters To The Editor | newburyportnews.com - The Daily News of Newburyport

U.S. President Joe Biden claims that he warned Russian leader Vladimir Putin at their meeting in Geneva last week that human rights is always going to be on the table when dealing with his administration. He also threatened Russia with devastating consequences if opposition activist Alexey Navalny were to die in a Russian prison.

Criticizing the assault on media freedoms and human rights in Russia and China has long been an American political reflex. Indeed, Bidens insistent rhetoric that democracy is in a global contest with autocracy marks him as one of the U.S. leaders intellectually conditioned by the Cold Wars simple oppositions.

However, a more severe and unfamiliar test for Bidens foreign policy looms: whether he will be equally keen to put human rights on the table with India, a key member of the democratic coalition he wants to rally.

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Critics of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi raised this thorny question even before Biden was inaugurated. They say that Indias slide into illiberalism should be called out no less than Turkeys or Hungarys.

Modis government and its supporters havent made things any easier for Biden with their continued campaign unprecedented in India against writers, journalists and intellectuals. Just last week, the government threatened to withdraw Twitter Inc.s liability protections for failing to comply with new social media guidelines.

Soon thereafter, police in the state of Uttar Pradesh, run by Modis Bharatiya Janata Party, registered a criminal complaint against Twitter and several journalists including a Washington Post columnist for reporting the claims made by a Muslim victim of mob violence.

Of course, there has long been a bipartisan consensus in Washington that India is a critical ally in its attempt to check Chinese influence in Asia. In overlooking the Modi governments excesses, Biden probably counts on support from a U.S. foreign policy establishment invested more in realpolitik than human rights.

Double standards similarly shadowed proclamations of human rights and democracy during the Cold War. Successive administrations from Eisenhower onwards collaborated with some atrocious regimes while claiming to defend the democratic free world against communist autocracy.

But the world was, and felt like, a very different place then, before the communications revolution that transformed how billions of people see themselves and their place in the world.

The U.S. enjoyed global hegemony for decades, cultural as well as geopolitical and military, and was usually able to impose its own interpretations of the events it shaped diplomatically and militarily.

The then-alternative global sources of information and analysis such as Pravda, Tass and Peoples Daily had none of the propagandistic elan and vigor of Russias RT and Chinas Global Times today, let alone Twitter and Facebook bubbles and WhatsApp groups. The U.S. political and economic system seemed superior even to many of its distant victims.

Post-Donald Trump, the U.S. now faces close and hostile examination of its domestic and foreign policies. It is struggling to renovate its tarnished image abroad, rebuilding in the ruins of broken treaties and commitments. It is also engaged, more crucially, in a battle for democracy at home, as one of its two major political parties seems intent on undermining voting rights and other democratic institutions.

Biden must also contend with a rising number of critics in his own party. Legislators on the left of the Democratic Party such as Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna have been vocal critics of Modi. Vice President Kamala Harris as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke out against Modis crackdown on the Muslim-majority valley of Kashmir; they will find it difficult to remain silent if democratic norms are further eroded in India.

The U.S. foreign policy establishment would also find it hard to keep counterposing Indian democracy to Chinese authoritarianism if the state continues to go after writers and journalists especially those affiliated to American periodicals, universities and think tanks.

Biden seems weirdly oblivious to these fresh complexities as he echoes a Cold War rhetoric from the 1970s and 80s. The White House correspondent of the New York Times notedin him a stubborn optimism that critics say borders on worrisome naivete.

Such optimism is surely laudable, as is Bidens determination to keep human rights on the table. But he needs to combine it with principled realism, breaking free of obsolete geopolitical certainties just as boldly as he has overturned decades of economic dogma.

This means putting fundamental rights on the table everywhere, at home as well as abroad, with new friends such as India no less than old adversaries such as Russia and China.

Certainly, an old posture of American moral superiority will convince very few people. To some, it will indeed make the new administration seem worryingly naive to others, depressingly cynical.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:Pankaj Mishra at pmishra24@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:Nisid Hajari at nhajari@bloomberg.net

Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal.

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Should India Be Included in Biden's Democracy Alliance? - Bloomberg

I recently visited friends in St. Louis and sadly found it to be a much different place from when I graduated from Washington University Law School nearly 50 years ago. I still have great affection for St. Louis and read the Post-Dispatch regularly. However, I continue to see Missouris serious problems dominate the headlines.

St. Louis leads the nation in murders, Missouri leads the nation in coronavirus cases per capita. It ranks 49th in state aid to public schools and 50th in tobacco taxes. Centene threatens to leave and calls Missouris Medicaid decision an embarrassment. St. Louis has grown 0% in the last decade (as goes St. Louis, so goes Missouri). And a 35-year-veteran police chief in OFallon resigned over Missouris new gun law.

Yet, Missouri elected officials exacerbate the problems. They spend their time declaring federal gun laws invalid, banning abortions after eight weeks, overturning Medicaid expansion, eliminating the motorcycle helmet requirement law, reducing funding for public education, and trying (but failing) to create Rush Limbaugh Day.

And that doesnt even include Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitts spurious lawsuits against China, Google, Facebook, federal immigration policies, the Pennsylvania presidential election results, and St. Louis County over its pandemic public health orders. Missouri has become the laughing stock of the nation, but these are no laughing matters.

Stephen Fishman Laguna Beach, Calif.

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Trump may have damaged democracy beyond repair; Missouri is embarrassing; and other top letters - STLtoday.com

In 2018 after his then-planetary-record net worth had hit $131 billion, yet right before the pandemic that would make his Amazon the alpha and omega of online shopping for so many American families Jeff Bezos admitted he had so much money the only thing he could think to do with it was to blast himself into space. He told a reporter that year: The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel ...

That is basically it.

Really, Jeff? Im thinking that some of Americas schoolkids you know, the ones in classrooms where students dont have the right textbooks but they do have asbestos or lead in the fountain water might have a few ideas on deployment. In fact, they might also have some idea for multibillionaire investor Warren Buffett, who famously complained that his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does, and then proved it by watching his wealth grow by more than $24 billion (with a B) in the mid-2010s but only paid $23.7 million (with an M) in federal taxes, or just a 0.1% rate.

Then theres the case of Tesla and SpaceX mogul Elon Musk, whose stocks exploded despite a global pandemic and its overlapping recession to make him currently the worlds richest man, even with the fact that according to an unconvincing Insider profile he doesnt care about money. Perhaps, but either he or his accountant cared enough in 2018 to file a return showing that Musk owed zero federal income taxes.

To paraphrase Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the rich are very different than you and me they pay a much lower rate of taxes. OK, you probably already had a hunch this was the case, but this month a major article from ProPublica based on leaked IRS documents finally proved it. The tax records from 25 of the wealthiest Americans found the real tax rate on their expanding wealth was just 3.4%, while the typical family paid 14% of its income to the IRS.

In theory, ProPublicas bombshell report couldnt have come at a better time right when Congress is considering a proposal backed by President Joe Biden that would increase taxes on the very rich and the large corporations that have done so well, even during a deadly pandemic, in order to pay for Americas many unmet needs, from fixing crumbling roads and bridges (and maybe some buildings?) to converting to clean energy to a chronic lack of child care. Getting corporations like Amazon one of 91 Fortune 500 companies that paid no federal taxes in 2018 and its billionaire founder Bezos to cough up their fair share could finance a lot of Bidens $4 trillion proposals.

In reality, virtually every Republican and a handful of moderate-or-maybe-conservative Democrats like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema have made it clear that significant new taxes on the rich or on corporations not even the high rates the wealthy paid in the 1950s and 60s when the U.S. economy was booming, but merely a return to the already low levies that existed in 2017 are a deal breaker. They insist that if America wants to stop bridges and other stuff from falling down, the dollars will have to be squeezed elsewhere.

This impasse comes at a moment when 245 years of always imperfect American democracy is now under attack on multiple fronts. On the left side of the political dial, theres rising and legitimate concern about a GOP-led assault in state capitals, including measures that in 2024 could allow lawmakers to anoint either Donald Trump or whatever Trump lite comes next as the 47th president, regardless of the actual vote. Thats horrifying, but the nations inability to make its billionaires pull their own weight a matter of fundamental fairness, supported by an overwhelming majority of voters suggests that the American Experiment folks are trying to save is, in the immortal words of rocks The Eagles, already gone.

READ MORE: Until we punish American greed, no coronavirus bailout will save our warped economy | Will Bunch

The ProPublica expos ratifies the notion that America is now a kleptocracy our political system so weakened by years of unlimited dark money campaign contributions by wealthy interests that Congress is trained to serve the interests of the donor class over not only the needs but the stated desires of its voters.

In a government so finely tuned to service the needs of the super-rich, it took an illegal act the self-appointed whistleblower who sent individual IRS returns of the wealthiest Americans to ProPublica to show the public how low their effective tax rate really is. My position on that maneuver is a complicated one. As a progressive who a) believes citizens privacy should be protected and b) finds past misuses of the IRS to target individuals, by the likes of Richard Nixon or J. Edgar Hoovers FBI, to be appalling, I condemn this leak. It was wrong. But once that information reached ProPublica, its journalists had an obligation to determine if the material was real and, more importantly, in the public interest. And clearly, it is.

The train of fundamental economic unfairness in America has been a long time coming. In 2019, an analysis by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman with the fitting title, The Triumph of Injustice, used official (and anonymous) IRS data to show how the tax rate paid by the 400 wealthiest American families declined from 56% in 1960 and 47% in 1980 when Ronald Reagan won the presidency to just 23% by 2018. That is less than the 24.4% paid by the bottom half of U.S. households. The road to this outrage took years of reducing top marginal tax rates, steep cuts in capital gains and estate taxes, slashed IRS enforcement and approval of tax shelters deliberate political acts by Congress and presidential administrations.

That stunning but not personalized finding failed to get a lot of attention. But in a celebrity culture that so recently elected a celebrity fascist as president, maybe the tabloid-style details of the ProPublica report how Bezos was able to claim in 2011 that despite a net worth of $18 billion hed lost money, even claiming a $4,000 child credit, or how Mike Bloomberg paid no federal taxes some years even as he pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into a 2020 bid to buy the White House could make a difference. The reporting also reveals loopholes like that one that allowed billionaire Trump backer Peter Thiel to use the Roth IRA vehicle meant to help middle-class Americans retire to instead build a $5 billion tax-exempt nest egg.

But the truth is Americans didnt need salacious details to believe the rich should pay higher taxes. Last year, a Reuters poll found 64% of Americans strongly or somewhat agreed that the very rich should contribute an extra share of their total wealth each year to support public programs. That included a majority of rank-and-file Republicans. Despite that strong support, Bidens initial plan to pay for his ambitious $2 trillion-plus infrastructure agenda was a modest one, focused mainly on the corporations that also dodge taxes. But merely proposing a corporate tax rate of 28% less than the 35% rate when Trump took office in 2017 was a bridge too far for Congress.

Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the lobbyists and donors behind his power like Business Roundtable president Joshua Bolten, who said policymakers should avoid creating new barriers to job creation and economic growth, particularly during the recovery called new taxes a nonstarter. But even moderate Democrat Manchin under heavy pressure from the oil-billionaire Koch family freaked out at the modest 28% corporate rate. So far, the desire of a majority of American voters for tax fairness cant match the clout of a donor class that in 2010 was given carte blanche by the Supreme Courts Citizens United ruling to pump dollars into the body politic.

The bipartisan infrastructure deal announced by Biden last week much less ambitious than his initial proposal, yet already on shaky political ground would actually aim to squeeze additional tax dollars from the Bezos crowd, not by higher rates but through aggressive IRS enforcement. If enacted, these audits are yet long overdue but lets also be clear that keeping tax rates for the rich at just a fraction of what they were before the Reagan revolution produced massive inequality is an act of rank political cowardice.

The Democrats may get another crack at this, if they proceed with the current plan to increase spending on the public good, for things like child care or climate action, through a budget reconciliation bill that could be passed with 51 votes. Even then, though, the party will have to work around Manchins and other moderates Koch-fried reluctance to do more than tinker around the margins of our massive tax unfairness. If so, the anger that has permeated American politics on both the right and the left which is rooted in this lack of equity will only get worse.

Over the rest of 2021, youll hear a lot about preserving the rotting foundation of U.S. democracy, by somehow pushing to end voter suppression and the increasing anti-democratic bent of the GOP. Meanwhile above the surface, the actual house is on fire from space-traveling plutocrats pocketing the funds that could make America a fair and livable place for the middle class. Saving the American Experiment is only an academic exercise unless it works for all the people.

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The real crisis for American democracy is our cowardly inability to tax the rich | Will Bunch - The Philadelphia Inquirer

Exterior of the German Constitutional Court. Photo: DPA Picture Alliance / Alamy Stock Photo

Recent months have seen a series of ground-breaking judicial decisions on climate change and, more broadly, environmental protection. In one of the most celebrated, the German Federal Constitutional Court held that the German Basic Law (constitution) limits the scope for political decision-making with regard to protection of the environment. According to the Court, environmental protection is elevated to a matter of constitutional significance for two reasons. First, a democratic political process is organised on more short-term lines based on election cycles, which places it at a structural risk of being less responsive to tackling ecological issues that need to be pursued over the long term. Second, because future generationswho it described as those who will be most affectedhave no voice in shaping the current political agenda.

In doing so, the Court placed the issue of democratic unenfranchisementthe absence of entitlement to exercise the right to voteand the lack of political voice of future generations at the heart of its reasoning.

The inability of todays children and as yet unborn future generations to input into decision-making around the environmentand hence the need for judicial intervention to secure their rights and interests in that contexthas been a consistent theme in the growing body of global child- and youth-focused climate change advocacy and litigation. This is evidenced by the claims submitted to courts by child and youth litigants and their representatives, as well as by campaigns and advocacy beyond the courtroom.

From Europe to Asia to Africa to Oceania, children and young people have stressed both their own exclusion and that of as yet unborn future generations from political decision-making that has crucial implications for the enjoyment of rights both now and in the future. This reflects a growing recognition that, in the words of the founding claim that led to a ground-breaking Colombian Supreme Court of Justice decision ordering the protection of the Amazon rainforest from deforestation: intergenerational equity does not only occur between the present generation and a future generation of people who do not yet exist, but also occurs between those who make decisions today and the generation of we younger people who will face the effects of the decisions that are made in the present.

The willingness of the German Constitutional Court to engage with democratic exclusion as a basis for judicially enforced constitutional constraint on the political process is not shared by all courts hearing climate changes cases. A Norwegian Supreme Court decision in December 2020 rejected efforts to prevent the government from issuing exploratory Arctic drilling permits. In doing so, the court stressed that since decisions in matters of fundamental environmental issues often involve political considerations and broader priorities, that was an argument in favour of such decisions being made by elected bodies, and not by the courts.

There is a strong argument that children and future generations inability to exercise either direct or indirect influence on the elected branches of government should serve as the basis of an enhanced role for the courts in protecting their rights in climate change litigation. This is consistent with the arguments made by American scholar John Hart Ely and others in favour of a representation-reinforcing role for judicial review. Where the primacy accorded to majoritarian democratic decision-making (and hence a more deferential or limited role for judicial decision-making) is based on an understanding that those affected by such decisions will be able to participate in or otherwise influence them, then that primacy will necessarily be affected where such participation or influence is lacking.

It has historically been assumed that the rights of children will be protected within democracy through political representation by other enfranchised groupswhether on the basis of shared interests, sympathy or empathy. While this assumption is questionable at the best of times (and is even more questionable when extended to as yet unborn future generations), it is particularly dubious where those who are presumed to ensure this virtual representation of children place a very different priority on climate change and environmental protection than children themselves do. In the UK, for instance, YouGov survey results revealed that while the environment was the second most important issue for voters in the 2019 election between the ages of 18-24, it came fifth and sixth for voters aged 50-64 and 65+, respectively. Given that in the UK, older voters are more likely to turn out to vote than younger voters, and given the growing relative weight of older people in the voting-age population, the scope for effective representation of childrens views by older voters seems limited.

The courts thus have a crucial role to play in ensuring that children and future generations exclusion from democratic decision-making does not result in the violation of their rightswhether now or in the future. While this is not a role that is limited to the issue of environmental protection, that context is proving a crucial testing ground for establishing the extent to which courts will enforce those groups rights in the face of opposition on the part of elected branches of government. And, ironically, even where such cases do not prove successful, they frequently serve to force the issue of environmental protection onto the agenda of democratic decision-makers in a way that might well not happen otherwise.

Hardly a week goes by without a significant case on environmental protection being either launched or decided, with cases involving the rights of children or future generations currently before courts in places as diverse as South Korea, Peru and South Africa. Different national courts of course operate within different constitutional and legal schema and traditions. This will necessarily affect their approach to the cases that come before them. However, a feature of all of the domestic systems in which these cases are decided is the unenfranchisement and ineffective representation of children and future generations in democratic decision-making.

Children and young peoples environment-related advocacy has demonstrated to the world their capacity for political agency and engagement. It remains to be seen, however, to what extent their ongoing lack of political power will advance judicial willingness to intervene to secure their rights in a time of environmental crisis.

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Democracy is failing to protect the environment for future generations. So the courts are stepping in - Prospect Magazine