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Warren founded Generation Citizen, which engages young people in political activism to promote their civic education, and a visiting fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, which seeks to strengthen global democracy by improving civic engagement and inclusive dialogue.

The right to vote, the bedrock of our country's democracy, is under attack. Predicated on former President Donald Trump's continued insistence that the election was stolen, Republicans have launched an unprecedented push to make it harder to vote under the veneer of election integrity. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, at least 389 bills have been introduced in 48 states to restrict access to voting, and 14 states have already enacted laws that tighten the rules around casting ballots.

In response, more than 100 prominent scholars recently signed onto a statement declaring that democracy is "now at risk", and they called for urgent federal action, noting that several states are becoming "political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections." President Biden has enlisted Vice President Harris to lead the administration's efforts to protect voting rights. Democrats in Congress are waging an all-out campaign to pass the For the People Act (a comprehensive voting rights bill known as H.R. 1 in the House and S. 1 in the Senate) and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (H.R. 4), which would restore provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court.

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The reality, however, is that passing both bills is highly unlikely, given fervent resistance from Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to abolishing the filibuster. Signing the bills into law would also be insufficient efforts to actually save our democracy.

Biden clearly understands the crisis in democracy, remarking at his first press conference: "I predict to you, your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded, autocracy or democracy, because that is what is at stake." The administration's approach to the domestic and global crisis in democracy has been centered on focusing on voting rights and planning a "Democracy Summit," bringing together countries and civil society around the world dedicated to the pursuit of democracy.

Voting and a summit are not enough. On other issues, like the economy, infrastructure, racial inequality and climate change, the administration has launched bold efforts, allocating trillions of dollars of funding and passing transformational policies that may remake the fabric of American society for generations to come. Biden should recognize the existential nature of the threat to democracy, and articulate and pursue a similarly bold democracy agenda. This agenda should focus on the hyper-local and the macro-global: promoting democracy at the most local levels of government, while also leading a global vaccine distribution plan that demonstrates the soft power of the American government at the international stage.

Protecting the right to vote is crucial. Republicans are pursuing regulations that are race-based and will disproportionately restrict access to people of color. But the crisis in democracy goes far beyond access to the ballot box.

The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index evaluates democracies around the world, measuring 60 indicators across five general categories: electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties. The United States currently ranks 25th out of 167 countries analyzed marking it as a flawed democracy.

The crisis in democracy is not just an American problem. According to the index, less than 9 percent of the world's population currently lives in a "full democracy." More than a third of the world's population lives under authoritarian rule.

The fact that democracy is receding across the globe demonstrates the endemic nature of the problem: It goes far beyond any leader or political party. Individuals are increasingly distrustful of a system that they feel like has promised much, and offered little in return, especially as economic inequality increases across the world. The fact that China, as an emerging power, has provided an alternate form of government is threatening. China's average GDP growth of 7.01 percent from 2013 to 2020 marks one of the world's highest, while its rank on the Democracy Index is one of the world's lowest. China's autocratic system is attempting to demonstrate that countries can build economic power without democracy.

In the wake of China's rise, Biden sees his role in restoring democracy as pursuing policies that will strengthen the economy and lessen inequality, proving, as he articulated in his speech to a joint session of Congress, that "democracy still works, that our government still works and we can deliver for our people." He needs to go beyond delivering results and invest serious resources into the local aspects of democratic culture, and the global potential of American democratic power.

At the local level, studies have articulated that the increasing focus on the federal level furthers polarization and democratic dysfunction. Conversely, local cities and towns across the country have the potential to productively engage citizens in democratic engagement. The city of Durham, N.C., has begun to implement an Equitable Community Engagement Blueprint, drafted in collaboration with community members, to authentically engage and involve community members in every step of the city's decision-making processes. Detroit has formalized a system of community "block clubs," connecting the city to community groups, business owners, faith leaders, educators and everyday residents, which has proven vital for vaccine distribution. The city of Seattle recently approved $1 million in spending to support the creation of a participatory budgeting process in the city. A recent bipartisan congressional effort has focused on a $1 billion fund for civics education in districts across the country. These experiments are occurring across the country the administration should highlight these efforts and allocate serious monetary resources to support and scale their implementation.

Globally, the Biden administration can and should continue to articulate a more forceful and ambitious comprehensive strategy to improve vaccine distribution. While the United States roars back, countries across the world, from India to Latin America, are experiencing the worst of the pandemic. While the administration has backed a global waiver to intellectual property protections around Covid-19 vaccines and recently committed 500 million vaccine doses to the rest of the world, much more is needed. Indeed, the World Health Organization estimates $11 billion vaccine doses are needed for 70 percent immunity. The U.S. needs to convince more democracies to give more vaccines and needs to ensure that countries can use intellectual property to create their own vaccines.

Indeed, this accelerated pace is still behind China's global vaccine distribution. To date, China claims it has sent "350 million doses of vaccines to the international community, including vaccine assistance to over 80 countries and vaccine exports to more than 40 countries."

Given the Biden-articulated choice between Chinese autocracy and U.S. democracy, countries may very well be persuaded by the Chinese model if they see them as better able to provide real results. If the U.S. is serious about showing that its model of democracy can work, it must demonstrate it can lead the world in ending the pandemic.

Ensuring that all Americans can vote is vital to a functioning democracy. But it is just one lever in ensuring that democracy can survive, and thrive. As the president has noted, the fate of democracy itself may be at stake. We should respond with that level of ambition.

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Protecting voting isn't enough to save democracy - The Fulcrum

You said it, Greg Jayne: Inequity real risk to capitalism (The Columbian, June 13). And its also a real risk to democracy. Justice Brandeis said that best: We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cant have both.

Today, the scales are tipped too far; not only are some people able to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth, this is occurring while the majority of Americans are struggling in fact, some have been slipping backwards. What kind of system, and what kind of philosophy or theology, would support this dysfunctional imbalance?

As Jayne points out, this is the system our youth are confronting as they start their journey on the path of the American dream. The system does not support them, and their political clout to change it pales in contrast with that of the super rich. At least a few of the super rich, like Warren Buffet, realize how privileged they are and recommend raising taxes on the wealthy. If only they all had a conscience like this. Looks like the have nots are going to have to lead the way to save both capitalism and democracy.

Read the original here:
Letter: Save capitalism and democracy - The Columbian

US Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin arrive for a bipartisan meeting on infrastructure after original talks fell through with the White House on June 8, 2021. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

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In his first address to Congress on April 28, Joe Biden invoked the January 6 insurrection, saying, The images of a violent mob assaulting this Capitol, desecrating our democracy, remain vivid in all our minds. He added, The insurrection was an existential crisisa test of whether our democracy could survive. And it did. But the struggle is far from over.

These were uncharacteristically bold words from Biden, but they are not hyperbolic. On January 6, a sitting president incited a mob to attack Congress in order to sabotage the certification of his successor. Shocking as that was, it was only the flash point in a larger war against democracy. In truth, Donald Trumps clown coup had little chance of succeeding. The more serious threat lay in the very fact that he was able to do something so reckless and yet remain the standard-bearer of his party, someone whom most congressional Republicans still wouldnt vote to impeach.

Though Trump has left the White House, the Trumpification of the GOP continues apace. Those few brave but hapless Republicans who stood up to Trump, like Congresswoman Liz Cheney, are finding themselves pariahs in their own party, stripped of their positions and scorned by party loyalists. The GOP has embraced the Trumpian Big Lie that the election was stolen, an idea endorsed by 53 percent of Republicans according to a May Reuters/Ipsos poll. Trump is not so much an ex-president as a pretender to the throne, the exiled king of Mar-a-Lago whom elected Republicans cross at their peril.

The Big Lie is behind the efforts of state-level Republicans to roll back voting rights. As Geoffrey Skelley reported in FiveThirtyEight, In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Republican lawmakers have pushed new voting restrictions in nearly every state. From making it harder to cast ballots early to increasing the frequency of voter roll purges, at least 25 new restrictive voting laws have been enacted, with more potentially on the horizon. The most disturbing innovation in this rollback of democracy is the idea that state legislators could be empowered to overturn election results and pick their own presidential electors. In that scenario, Biden or another Democrat could win the popular count in states that carry over 270 electoral votes and still be deprived of the presidency. MORE FROM Jeet Heer

According to Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr., If Republicans win the governorships of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin next year, taking total control in those key swing states, they could impose all kinds of electoral barriers for the next presidential election. The Republicans are laying the groundwork to refuse to certify a 2024 Democratic presidential victory should the GOP hold a House majority.

Only the complacent would dismiss this as fanciful. Considering all the antics Trump pulled to try to overturn the 2020 electionand the fact that most elected Republicans are now going out of their way to grovel in front of him2024 will almost certainly be an even bigger test of American democracy.

Democrats have a very narrow window of opportunity to shore up our democracy against the ongoing GOP threat. The good news is that the party has put forward two very strong measuresHR 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Actwhich are the most robust pro-democracy reforms in a generation. Taken together, they would make it easier to vote, make voting more secure, limit the power of dark money in politics, and push back against antidemocratic shenanigans like gerrymandering.Current Issue

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Such measures are all extraordinarily popular with the general public. Writing in The New Yorker in March, Jane Mayer reported receiving a recording of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groupsincluding one run by the Koch brothers networkreveal[ing] the participants worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of [HR 1s] provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors.

The two voting rights acts proposed by the Democrats are both necessary and popular. Even with their narrow hold on power in Congress, it should be a no-brainer to push them through. Alas, its very hard to pass a prodemocratic measure in an antidemocratic system. Joe Manchin, with his cult of bipartisanship, is one major stumbling block. The West Virginia senator, as Luke Savage notes in The Atlantic, has reiterated his opposition to H.R. 1 on the deeply spurious grounds that any prospective voting-rights legislation ought to pass with bipartisan supporta DOA line of reasoning even when it comes to the watered-down version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act that Manchin himself is proposing.Related Articles

Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema supports HR 1 but, like Manchin, is also a fetishist of the filibuster. Since neither bill can be passed by reconciliation and both lack Republican support, the only way for either to get through the Senate is by overturning the filibuster. The core truth is that Manchin and Sinema are committed to the old order, even if following the established path leads to a successful Republican coup.

Ultimately, this issue is a test of how serious Biden and the Democrats are about their own rhetoric. If American democracy is indeed facing an existential crisis, then Biden should pull out all the stops to win over Manchin and Sinema: offer them any inducements that he has availableand threaten them with severe punishments for not toeing the party line. This is what Republicans are doing to recalcitrant members like Cheney and Mitt Romney. If the GOP can be in deadly earnest trying to undermine democracy, we have every right to expect Democrats to be just as organized, just as dedicated, and just as ruthless in preserving democracy.

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Are Dems Incapable of Defending Democracy? Or Just Unwilling? - The Nation

In June 2016, while researching an article for Vanity Fair, I asked Donald Trump if he was using tax havens to escape tax. I know a lot about tax havens, but I dont use them, he told me. There is greater incentive in many ways to keep your money in the United States.

Fellow billionaires may chuckle, because they know this too, following decades of attacks by special interests on the US tax system. Their goal, as the Texas Republican congressman Bill Archer once said, has been to pull it out by its roots and throw it away so it can never grow back.

Last week, the investigative journalism body ProPublica released shocking new evidence of how easy it is for US billionaires to escape paying tax. Using leaked tax records, it reported that Amazons Jeff Bezos, the publisher Michael Bloomberg, the corporate raider Carl Icahn, Teslas founder, Elon Musk, and the financial investor George Soros all paid zero federal income taxes in some years. From 2014-2018 the richest 25 Americans, many of them monopolists, saw their wealth surge by more than $400bn, while paying taxes worth just 3.4% of that. Meanwhile, average American wage earners in their 40s saw their wealth rise by $65,000 and paid $62,000 in tax.

How do the billionaires get away with it?

Loopholes, is one answer. Trumps tax advisers used copious gaps in real-estate tax laws and stunts such as putting goats on a golf course in New Jersey to qualify for farmland tax reliefs. Another trick is to take a carefully primed asset currently worth almost nothing, push it into a tax-free retirement account just under the contribution limit on the account like putting it through the eye of a needle, in the words of the South Dakota Trust Company owner, Pierce McDowell then flick a financial switch and watch its value explode, tax-free, once safely inside the account.

There are many others. But the really big loophole is this. Lesser mortals pay tax on salaries. Billionaires avoid grubby salaries or even income. Instead, they own assets that rise in value and the rise, those unrealised gains, escape tax. Those richest 25 Americans owned $1.1tn in wealth in 2018 equivalent to the wealth of 14.3 million average Americans yet paid only $1.9bn in personal federal taxes. The 14.3 million little people paid $143bn, or 75 times as much.

In Britain, the situation is similar. Billionaires own assets instead of earning income, and generally dont pay tax when those assets rise in value.

We have many other loopholes. Here, UK billionaires can outdo their American counterparts in some ways. The weirdest is surely the archaic non-dom rule, a legacy of empire, where wealthy residents of the UK who can claim that their domicile is elsewhere only pay tax on their income that arises inside or is brought into the UK. (So they carefully make sure that any income stays offshore.)

The bigger British speciality is, of course, tax havens. We protect and nurture some of the worlds biggest, from the Cayman Islands to the British Virgin Islands to Jersey. Americans use tax havens too, but they loom far larger in British billionaires tax-escape strategies, often in a legal grey zone. (Trumps main tax haven strategy, my investigation found, was to park multiple corporations in Delaware, a US state boasting strong secrecy and other offshore characteristics.)

What can be done? There is no silver bullet, but a few broad strokes, with appropriate exemptions for the little people, would be wildly popular and economically successful.

First, abolish the non-dom rule, as a sign that we are serious.

Next, bolster the corporation tax, most of which is ultimately paid by wealthier folk. Rishi Sunak admitted recently that George Osbornes cuts to the UKs corporation tax rate from 28% to 19% had failed to bring investment. The cuts have also failed to deliver growth, as Tom Bergin explains in his new book, Free Lunch Thinking. Sunak is pushing corporation tax rates up to 25% now; raise this further still. Meanwhile, G7 leaders have just agreed on measures including a global minimum corporation tax rate of at least 15% to tackle tax havens. The G7 deal faces many hurdles, and leaves little for poorer countries, but its a decent start. Complement this by broadening the tried-and-tested financial transactions tax. A new push on this is now underway.

Wealth taxes, used successfully for years around the world, are essential too. If someone owns 1bn in assets (in shares, gold coins, castles or whatever), a simple 1.5% (say) annual wealth tax earns 15m a year. The UK Wealth Tax Commission estimates that a 1% tax could raise more than 50bn a year: the size of last years extra health funding for Covid. Add to the list a land value tax, another kind of wealth tax.

Equalise tax rates. If we taxed income from wealth at the same rate as income from work, we could raise up to 120bn, about double what we get from corporation tax. As we get braver we should also aim to tax all those unrealised gains so if a billionaires wealth rises, they pay tax on that annually, whether or not they sell (or realise) assets. Some powerful Democrats in the US are now pushing for just this.

In the UK, as in the US, the tax authority has been under attack. HMRC staffing levels have fallen from 105,000 in 2005 to around 60,000 today. Estimates of the tax gap of uncollected taxes range from 35bn to a more credible 90bn a year. Tax collectors repay their salaries many times over. Reinvest in HMRC, and especially focus on taxing the wealthy and multinationals.

Finally, of course, get serious about our crime-infested tax haven racket. This would not only shore up our tax system, our economy and our democracy, but it could be our greatest gift to the world right now, as humanity struggles to overcome the pandemic.

Link:
Making sure the big people pay their taxes would be a boost to democracy - The Guardian

The world has been treated to successive spectacles of national leaders gathering at a G7 Summit in Cornwall and a NATO Summit in Brussels.

The U.S. corporate media have portrayed these summits as chances for President Joe Biden to rally the worlds democratic nations in a coordinated response to the most serious problems facing all of us, from the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and global inequality to ill-defined threats to democracy from Russia and China.

People around the world share our concerns about the United States dystopian political system and imperial outrages.

But theres something seriously wrong with this picture. Democracy means rule by the people. The exceptional power of wealthy Americans and corporations to influence election results and government policies, however, has led to a de facto system of government that fails to reflect the will of the American people on many critical issues.

So when President Biden meets with the leaders of democratic countries, he represents a country that is, in many ways, an undemocratic outlier rather than a leader among democratic nations. This is evident in:

Fortunately, Americans are not the only ones noticing that something is terribly wrong with U.S. democracy. The Alliance of Democracies Foundation (ADF), founded by former Danish Prime Minister and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, conducted a poll of 50,000 people in fifty-three countries between February and April 2021, and found that people around the world share our concerns about the United States dystopian political system and imperial outrages.

For Americans, the most startling result of the poll might be its finding that more people around the world (44 percent) see the United States as a threat to democracy in their countries than China (38 percent) or Russia (28 percent), which makes nonsense of U.S. efforts to justify its revived Cold War on Russia and China in the name of democracy.

In a larger poll of 124,000 people that ADF conducted in 2020, countries where large majorities saw the United States as a danger to democracy included China, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Ireland, France, Greece, Belgium, Sweden, and Canada.

Biden, after having tea with Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle on June 13 2021, swooped into Brussels on Air Force One for a NATO summit to advance its new Strategic Concept, which is nothing more than a war plan for World War III against both Russia and China.

But we can take solace from evidence that the people of Europe, whom the NATO war plan counts on as front-line troops and mass casualty victims, are not ready to follow President Biden to war.

A January 2021 survey by the European Council on Foreign Affairs found that large majorities of Europeans want to remain neutral in any U.S. war against Russia or China. Only 22 percent would want their country to take the U.S. side in a war on China, and 23 percent in a war on Russia.

Few Americans realize that Biden already came close to war with Russia in March and April, when the United States and NATO supported a new Ukrainian offensive in its civil war against Russian-allied separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Russia moved tens of thousands of heavily armed troops to its borders with Ukraine, to make it clear that it was ready to defend its Ukrainian allies and was quite capable of doing so.

On April 13, Biden blinked, turned around two U.S. destroyers that were steaming into the Black Sea, and called Putin to request the summit that is now taking place.

The antipathy of ordinary people everywhere toward the U.S. determination to provoke military confrontation with Russia and China begs serious questions about the complicity of their leaders in these incredibly dangerous, possibly suicidal, U.S. policies. When ordinary people all over the world can see the dangers and pitfalls of following the United States as a model and a leader, why do their neoliberal leaders keep showing up to lend credibility to the posturing of U.S. leaders at summits like the G7 and NATO?

Maybe it is precisely because the United States has succeeded in what the corporate ruling classes of other nations also aspire tonamely greater concentrations of wealth and power and less public interference in their freedom to accumulate and control them.

Maybe the leaders of other wealthy countries and military powers are genuinely awed by the dystopian American Dream as the example par excellence of how to sell inequality, injustice, and war to the public in the name of freedom and democracy.

In that case, the fact that people in other wealthy countries are not so easily led to war or lured into political passivity and impotence would only increase the awe of their leaders for their U.S. counterparts, who literally laugh all the way to the bank as they pay lip service to the sanctity of the American Dream.

Ordinary people in other countries are right to be wary of the Pied Piper of U.S. leadership, but their rulers should be, too. The fracturing and disintegration of U.S. society should stand as a warning to neoliberal governments and ruling classes everywhere to be more careful what they wish for.

Instead of a world where other countries emulate or fall victim to the United States failed experiment in extreme neoliberalism, the key to a peaceful, sustainable, and prosperous future for all the worlds peopleincluding Americanslies in working together, learning from each other and adopting policies that serve the public good and improve the lives of all, especially those most in need. Theres a name for that. Its called democracy.

More here:
Why Democracies in G7 and NATO Should Reject U.S. Leadership - Progressive.org