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On Oct. 13, hearing the case of United States v. Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, the Supreme Courts conservative justices signalled that they will reverse a soundly reasoned federal Court of Appeals ruling and reinstate Dzhokhar Tsarnaevs death sentence. The case not only challenges our legal process, it also tests President BidenJoe BidenJan. 6 panel lays out criminal contempt case against Bannon Overnight Energy & Environment Presented by the American Petroleum Institute Democrats address reports that clean energy program will be axed Two House Democrats to retire ahead of challenging midterms MOREs promise to work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level.

It is no great surprise that conservative justices favor the death penalty and appear unreceptive to Tsarnaevs appeal. But it is surprising and disappointing when Bidens Justice Department asks the court to reinstate Tsarnaevs sentence.

The stakes go beyond his life. Underlying every death case is the vibrancy of our form of government. The challenge that capital punishment poses to democracy is an underappreciated underpinning of efforts to end it in the United States.

Capital punishment is a vestige of monarchical prerogatives which allow a single person to decide who lives or dies. In todays world, autocrats love capital punishment and use it to crush and intimidate political opponents.

Visiting it upon so-called enemies of the state demonstrates their dominance. According to French philosopher Michel Foucault, the ultimate expression of sovereign power is the right to take life or let live. For would-be dictators, merging the death penalty with unconstrained executive power is a marriage of considerable convenience.

Check out national leaders around the world who crave the power to kill their enemies.

Hungary abolished the death penalty in 1990. But its current strongman, Viktor Orban, wants to restore it in the European Union, currently a death penalty-free zone. Orbans the guy who cracks down on a free press, rails against LGBT people, and blames George Soros for flooding Christian Hungary with Muslims.

Rodrigo Duterte, the autocratic Philippines president, also wants to bring back the death penalty as part of his brutal war on drugs. Capital punishment ended there in 2006. China, Iran, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia none paragons of democracy lead the world in death sentences and executions.

At home, Donald TrumpDonald TrumpTrump goes after Cassidy after saying he wouldn't support him for president in 2024 Jan. 6 panel lays out criminal contempt case against Bannon Hillicon Valley Presented by Xerox Agencies sound alarm over ransomware targeting agriculture groups MORE, this nations most autocratic president, was also a death penalty enthusiast. He rushed to kill 13 death row inmates on his way out the White House door.

Weve seen dictators love affair with the death penalty before.

On Feb. 27, 1933, four weeks after becoming German Chancellor and the day after the Reichstaag fire, Adolph Hitler had the death penalty authorized for arson. A month later, he had that decree applied retroactively to cover the date of the fire.

In the 1934 Soviet Union, dictator Josef Stalin, made the number of official executions a state secret in an effort to hide the full scope of his purges. With letat, cest moi absolutism, transparency about such things is unnecessary because neither it, nor life itself, is of value.

By contrast, in a country like ours, built on the principles of philosopher John Locke, individual life and liberty along with rationality, are ideals. Hence, from the start, there was something not quite right about the death penalty in America.

Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, described the death penalty as the natural offspring of monarchical governments . . . An execution in a republic is like a human sacrifice in a religion.

The finality of the death penalty has always made it seem anomalous in a society whose checks-and-balances constitution acknowledges human susceptibility to error. Capital punishment is the ultimate assertion of righteous indignation and undemocratic infallibility.

Today, those like Bryan Stevenson and Equal Justice Initiative, dramatized in the film Just Mercy, have shown that our court system makes more mistakes than it cares to admit. They also teach that death sentences fall unequally on people of color and deny dignity to executioners and executed alike.

To date, strongmen like Orban and Duterte have been unable to overcome abolition and use the death penalty on opponents. In years to come, were an autocrat to take power here, we would need multiple barriers to governments control over life and limb.

That is why our first openly abolitionist president needs to act as he said he would. Regrettably, Biden has both found himself on the wrong side of the Tsarnaev case and failed to end federal capital punishment.

As former Supreme Court Justice William Brennan once observed [W]hen the state punishes with death, it denies the humanity and dignity of the victim and transgresses the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Ending capital punishment, Brennan continued, would be a great day for our country, and also for our Constitution.

It is time for Biden to heed Brennans admonition and to turn federal death row prisoners into lifers. Doing so would advance his agenda to restore and revitalize our democracy.

Austin Sarat (@ljstprof) is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is author of numerous bookson America's death penalty, includingGruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty. The views expressed here do not represent Amherst College.

Dennis Aftergutis a former federal prosecutor.

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Ending the federal death penalty would bolster our democracy | TheHill - The Hill

With the whistle blown on Facebook, Congress must allocate ownership of personal data to the personnot the platformto allow competitive providers to emerge.

According to its former employee Frances Haugen, Facebook algorithms consciously amplify dangerous misinformation and privilege the most divisive content posted on the network. Such content is more frequently shared by users and foregrounding it maximises traffic on the platformand so turnover.

This modus operandi, which became still more aggressive from 2018, is generating perverse incentives pushing even relatively moderate users to sharpen and polarise their content to obtain visibility. It is a Darwinian struggle for prominence which, given the rules of the game, leads to the survival of those users most fit for division and risks skewing public opinion and altering political outcomes. A recent working paper I co-authored shows that exposure to political information through social media has been closely associated with the diffusion of divisive ideas in Europe in the last decade.

Haugen also revealed that, as the volume of divisive content circulating on the platform grows, it becomes more difficult, and more expensive, to monitor, especially in marginal areas where the economic return is not sufficient to justify the associated expense. This is a very dangerous short-circuit, especially in times when co-ordination via web platforms could issue in last Januarys siege of Capitol Hill in Washington.

What is worse, and what dramatically exposes democratic societies to the consequences of the algorithms deployed in Menlo Park in California, is that Facebook and its Big Tech peers, mostly also located in Silicon Valley, occupy dominant positions in extremely concentrated markets. A few firms control the information and communications technologies sector, acounting for increasing shares of physical assets, revenues and market capitalisation. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Googles Alphabet (with Saudi Arabias Aramco) lead the ranks of the top 100 companies in the world.

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As for social media specifically, a few platforms account for most of the traffic of opinions and information they colonise on the web. Facebook, which took over Instagram and WhatsApp, is certainly the biggest, coming next in the PwC ranking.

Why such an impressive push for scale in the digital world? Recognise first that public goods are those that are non-rival and non-exclusive (such as the air we breathe). Unlike most private goods and services, data are non-rivalrous and can be reproduced at no or minimal costas with ideas and knowledge more generally. But they are excludable and can thus be a source of monopoly.

An expanding system could facilitate the entry of new participants. But firms involved in the production of non-rivalrous goods will tend to seek ways to build fences around them, to engender scarcity artificiallyand, in the process, generate rents from the assets they own.

In contrast to true public goods, exclusion is possible in the digital ecosystem through a combination of scale effects, strengthened property rights, first-mover advantages and other anti-competitive practices. The network effects through which everyone gains by sharing the use of a service or resourcenowhere more evident than on content platformshave given rise to demand-side economies of scale, which allow the largest firm in an industry to increase and lock in its attractiveness to consumers and gain market share. This makes it almost impossible for competitors to become attractive and challenge market dominance.

Digital mononopolies are made more dangerous by the fact that most people do not see them as a problem. The perceived price for using a platform such as Facebook or the services provided by Google is zero, even if of course this is not the case. Operating on multi-sided markets, these giants can cross-subsidise, sacrificing profit by constraining one side to enhance the attractiveness of (and recoup losses on) the other.

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Google and Facebook offer their products free in exchange for personal data, which makes them more attractive to advertisers. Ultimately, Facebooks or Googles market power in advertising increases and so does the average cost of advertising, which will be eventually reflected in the price of goods.

One way to address monopoly in a digital world and pave the way for a more pluralist and efficient market would be to break up the large firms responsible for market concentration. This takes literally the frequent comparison between, respectively, oil in the analogue and data in the digital economies. Standard Oil, which controlled 95 per cent of US refineries and had deals with the railways which restricted the ability of others to compete, was broken up in 1911 and required by law to split into many pieces.

The tendency of the market to generate monoplies, however, would make the new configuration inherently unstable. Another approach would be to change the structure of the market in a more profound way, so to avoid the risk of any future such agglomeration.

In this sense the proposal advanced a few years ago by Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik, to reconfigure data ownership, is today more relevant than ever. In a nutshell, the University of Chicago economists propose a legislative reallocation of property rights akin to what has been done on the mobile market, where some countries have established that a phone number belongs to the customernot the provider. This redefinition of property rights, or number portability, has made it easier to switch provider and so has fostered competition.

Along the same lines, in the social-network space, it would suffice to reassign to each customer the ownership of all the digital connections they created, a social graph. This way customers could sign into a Facebook competitor and instantly reroute all their Facebook friends messages to the new platform. By guaranteeing the latter access to new customers data and contacts, social graph portability would reduce the positive network externalities favouring the existing platforms and ensure the benefits of competition.

The US domination of social media and other content platformswith the top seven such firms all originating thereis evident. Any solution will therefore require legislation by Congress. The White House knows that the momentum generated by the Facebook scandal will fade and that the window of popular support for major changes to the technology landscape will close. The time for action is now.

Piergiuseppe Fortunato is an economist at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, where he leads projects on global value chains and economic integration, and an external professor of political economics at the Universit de Neuchtel.

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'Social media', market power and the health of democracy - Social Europe

After the horrific and senseless killing of David Amess on Friday, huge amounts of pain came to the surface in our family. The parallels are obvious and it has hit us all very hard. With Kim Leadbeater (Jos sister) now in parliament, its not just pain that the killing rekindles from the past, but real fear for the present as well.

This is felt by almost all MPs, almost all of their staff and every one of their families. This weekend there will have been hundreds of conversations asking the same question: is it worth it?

If the attack were a one-off, the question could be easily dismissed. But, coming just five years after Jo was killed, and after attacks on Stephen Timms and Nigel Jones people are less sure.

But what really makes many wonder is not just the horrific killings but the day-to-day brutality with which our political debate is conducted, from increasingly regular death threats to online abuse. The police investigation team convened after Jos murder found, between 2016 and 2020, 582 reports of malicious communications and handled 46 cases of harassment. Nine cases were classified as terrorism-related.

David and Jo would have disagreed on much, but one thing they shared was a deep and abiding commitment to our democratic system. Its one of the most fundamental things we have in common. Whatever our differences of opinion, most of us share a belief in democracy. A recent report by More in Common an organisation that I helped set up after Jos murder found that nine in 10 of us still share a principled commitment to our democratic system.

It is that power of democracy to unite us that drives terrorists to want to attack it, and foreign states to want to undermine it.

Yet terrorists and hostile states arent the only threat to democracy. In fact, they probably arent even the most potent. Polarisation, the dehumanisation of our opponents and less social contact between people with different views and backgrounds undermine democracy even more. More in Common found that in around one-third of us our commitment to democracy was thin, with 36% willing to support a strong leader who breaks the rules.

So, in the aftermath of Davids killing, we should all be asking ourselves: what we can do to strengthen our democratic system?

There are specific answers to this, from better security to targeted work to combat the extremism that leads to terrorism. But those often feel like solutions for other people to implement. We may not be able to stop extremists from committing horrific acts, but can we strengthen our democratic culture in other ways? I think the answer to this is yes. And not only that, I think those of us on the left have a particular responsibility.

The first thing we can do is to try to see our opponents arguments in their best light. Its easy now, especially with social media, to pick on a particularly objectionable person making a particularly ridiculous argument for a policy we disagree with and then seek to present that as the case we are up against. But its also lazy and reductive. The rightwing media often does this: find some obscure college campus implementing some weird woke policy and use it to drive outrage and ridicule. But its not just Fox News that behaves like this: parts of the left routinely engage in the same tactics, and it drives us further apart.

Second, we should stop dehumanising and assuming the worst of our opponents. Most of us will think Boris Johnson is the wrong choice for prime minister. But is he really a fascist? Is he actually human scum? Are all Brexit voters racist? We should all challenge people on our own side who dehumanise those we disagree with. It creates an environment that, even if inadvertently, is conducive to violence.

Third: do you actually know any Tories? Given a significant proportion of the country will at some stage have voted for the Conservative party, you have a real problem if youve never had a proper chat with any of its supporters. Not having any friends who are conservative doesnt make you principled; it simply means youre disconnected. Politics should be the art of persuasion and, for that, we have to know and engage with each other first.

None of this will stop attacks like the one on Friday. But they are things that we on the left can do to help build a stronger democratic culture. This isnt about compromising or selling out, its about decency, tolerance and holding on tight to what we have in common.

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After David Amesss horrific death, heres how to protect our democracy - The Guardian

House Bill 1982 advanced 59-30 in the Arkansas House, and its identical version, Senate Bill 743, advanced 22-10. This congressional district proposal would split Pulaski County, the most populous Democratic county in the state, into three separate districts.

One senator reportedly said that while it was not the intent of the legislation, "it was the icing on the cake."

It then raises the question: What were the intentions of such a proposal?

In a 5-4 decision, voting along conservative-liberal judges, the Supreme Court held, in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), with Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion that "[p]artisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts." Before being appealed to the highest court, the Middle District Court of North Carolina ruled that partisan gerrymandering violated Article I, the First Amendment, and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

These present constitutional concerns because the Constitution's preamble opens with the words "We the people."

In Section 2 of Article I, the people retain the right to elect their representatives, and diluting a minority party's power may therefore undermine the rights of some of the people. In the First Amendment, the freedom of speech is fundamental protection, which is subdued if they are disempowered because of discrimination based on political affiliation.

Most important of all is the multifaceted 14th Amendment. It includes equal protection of the law within U.S. jurisdiction and the right to vote; both are challenged by the use of partisan gerrymandering. The district court held that the congressional districts violated the Equal Protection Clause utilizing a three-part test: "the plan reflected a predominant intent to secure a partisan advantage, produced lasting discriminatory effects under a variety of measures, and lacked a valid governmental justification."

This has precedent: The Supreme Court has decided the unconstitutionality of racial discrimination under the 15th Amendment in Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960), the equal protection of law under the 14th Amendment in Baker v. Carr (1962), and the "equality standard" or better known as the "one person, one vote" principle established by Wesberry v. Sanders (1964). Later that year, in Reynolds v. Sims, the highest court opined that Wesberry equivalently applies to state legislatures.

While two founding fathers were instrumental in the origins of gerrymandering, there was much more to unpack than some Supreme Court justices have implied.

Patrick Henry, a prominent member of the Virginia state House, drew a congressional district filled with Anti-Federalists to prevent the passage of the Bill of Rights by defeating its biggest proponent, James Madison. Had Madison lost in the election due to the dangerous political gerrymandering, our nation would look much different than it is today.

In 1812, Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry, a Democratic-Republican opposing the Federalist Party, signed into law a map with a congressional district into the shape of a salamander-like creature, hence creating the name gerrymandering and thereby influencing the contemporary gerrymandering process. President Benjamin Harrison feared partisan gerrymandering and, during his term, claimed it would amount to "political robbery."

These congressional districts, however, are not simply partisan; they're racially biased. The population of African Americans in Pulaski County is 37.9 percent, almost triple the total amount of 15 percent in the state. It is therefore unsurprising that the cracking of this county into three separate districts may be racially motivated,

Furthermore, as Democratic candidate for secretary of state Josh Price has noted, it would remove three majority-Black regions from the 2nd Congressional District, and add the nearly all-white Cleburne County. Was this the true intention of the legislation?

In Shaw v. Reno (1993), the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that racial gerrymandering was unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Therefore, as partisan gerrymandering continues to be debated, racially driven districts have often been struck down due to this precedent.

The judiciary may be hesitant to rule on partisan matters, but can surely strike racial prejudice from the law. In Arkansas, this may be our only hope. However, it is not far-fetched, as even the governor has expressed his concern.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson said he "would urge [lawmakers] that you do not want to dilute minority representation or influence in congressional races. That is an important factor that I believe should be considered." Governor Hutchinson has refused to veto the legislation and is allowing the legislation to be enacted without his signature.

As the state attempts to crack the voting power of minorities in central Arkansas and pack Democratic voters in northwest Arkansas, democracy continues to be diluted. But most of all, the questions of racial and partisan gerrymandering can no longer be ignored.

Nathan James is a double major in transnational studies and political science at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., and a graduate of Bentonville West High School. Josephine Soblotney holds a B.A. in political science and an M.A.T., both from the University of Arkansas.

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OPINION | NATHAN JAMES AND JOSEPHINE SOBLOTNEY: Democracy diluted - Arkansas Online

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said extreme polarization in the U.S. is currently the greatest threat to democracy in America.

Gates, during an interview with Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes that aired on Sunday, specifically pointed to thearea of Washington, D.C., where the White House and Capitol Hill are located.

The greatest threat is found within the two square miles that encompass the White House and the Capitol Building, Gates told Cooper.

Gates served as Defense secretary from 2006 until 2011, leading the Pentagon duringsome of the U.S.s military involvement in Afghanistan under former presidents George W. Bush and Obama, and also headed the CIA between 1991 and 1993.

Asked about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and an attempt by a number of GOP lawmakers to rewrite the events of that day, Gates told Cooper that society seems to be coming unhinged, adding that he has never seen so much hatred in the country.

I don't understand, um, such a denial. And these same people who were terrified on January 6th, and whose lives were in danger, to now basically say, Well, these are just your normal tourists. The whole of our society seems to be coming unhinged. And there's just I've never seen so much hatred, he said.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has always considered himself a Republican, and while he agreed with some of Pres. Trumps policies, he remains highly critical of him. Hes previously called President TrumpDonald TrumpTrump goes after Cassidy after saying he wouldn't support him for president in 2024 Jan. 6 panel lays out criminal contempt case against Bannon Hillicon Valley Presented by Xerox Agencies sound alarm over ransomware targeting agriculture groups MORE thin-skinned and temperamental. https://t.co/D5cJbfs2Pd pic.twitter.com/WEzsUxfNXu

Gates also weighed in on former President Trump's unfounded claim that the 2020 election was stolen, contending that pushing such a theory underscores Chinas claimsabout the U.S.

It seems to me that it underscores the theme that China is sounding around the world that the United States political system doesn't work, and that the United States is a declining power, Gates said.

Asked by Cooper if he thinks Trump will wage another presidential bid in the future,Gates said I hope not, arguing thatthe former president disdains institutions and took measures to weaken them.

I am a strong believer in institutions whether it's, um, the intelligence community, the Defense Department, the State Department, the Justice Department, the FBI. He disdains institutions, and, and I think he did a lot to weaken institutions, Gates said.

Cooper noted that the former Defense secretary,who identifies as a Republican, previously called Trump a thin skinned, temperamental, shoot from the hip and lip, uninformed commander in chief, and said he was too great a risk for America.

I would not edit that at all, Gates told Cooper.

The ex-CIA director alsodiscussed the U.S.s withdrawal from Afghanistan, telling Cooper that the mission probably did not need to have turned out that way.

He pinned the blame on both President BidenJoe BidenJan. 6 panel lays out criminal contempt case against Bannon Overnight Energy & Environment Presented by the American Petroleum Institute Democrats address reports that clean energy program will be axed Two House Democrats to retire ahead of challenging midterms MORE and Trump, contending that Trump had ample time to plan the evacuation, and that Biden should have started the pullout in April when he announced plans for the complete withdrawal.

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Robert Gates says 'extreme polarization' is the greatest threat to US democracy | TheHill - The Hill