Mediaboss Marketing

Photo Credit: IoSonoUnaFotoCamera via Flickr/CC

Timothy Snyder, a Yale scholar and an authority on European political history, has spent decades studying the rise of fascist movements. With the ascension of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, Snyder sees echoes from history, and warns that the time to save America from autocracy is in short supply.

I think things have tightened up very fast; we have at most a year to defend the republic, perhaps less, Snyder stated in an interview with German outlet Sddeutsche Zeitung. What happens in the next few weeks is very important.

Snyder, whose multiple books include On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, points out that Americans must dispense with wishful thinking about institutions helping to curb Trumps power. In fact, that misguided notion is precisely what landed us in this situation.

The story that Americans have told themselves from the moment he declared his candidacy for president, was that one institution or another would defeat him or at least change his behaviorhe wont get the nomination; if he gets the nomination, he will be a normal Republican; he will get defeated in the general election; if he wins, the presidency will mature him (that was what Obama said), Snyder recounts. I never thought any of that was true. He doesnt seem to care about the institutions and the laws except insofar as they appear as barriers to the goal of permanent kleptocratic authoritarianism and immediate personal gratification. It is all about him all of time, it is not about the citizens and our political traditions.

In the days after the election, Snyder penned a must-read Slate article that recalled historical markers from Hitlers rise to reveal the similar path of Trumps advance. The historian had hoped to cajole Americans out of complacency, to urge them to find their bearings, to remind them none of this is normal and that democracy is in the crosshairs.

The temptation in a new situation is to imagine that nothing has changed, Snyder says. That is a choice that has political consequences: self-delusion leads to half-conscious anticipatory obedience and then to regime change... Most Americans are exceptionalists; we think we live outside of history. Americans tend to think: We have freedom because we love freedom, we love freedom because we are free. It is a bit circular and doesnt acknowledge the historical structures that can favor or weaken democratic republics. We dont realize how similar our predicaments are to those of other people.

I wanted to remind my fellow Americans that intelligent people, not so different from ourselves, have experienced the collapse of a republic before. It is one example among many. Republics, like other forms of government, exist in history and can rise and fall.

Snyder points to the desperate need to shake off historical amnesia as the Trump administration looks to authoritarian regimes as models. [O]ne reason why we cannot forget the 1930s is that the presidential administration is clearly thinking about them, but in a positive sense, Snyder stated. They seem to be after a kind of redo of the 1930s with Roosevelt where the Americans take a different coursewhere we dont build a welfare state and dont intervene in Europe to stop fascism. Lindbergh instead of FDR. That is their notion. Something went wrong with Roosevelt and now they want to go back and reverse it.

During the campaign [Trump] used the slogan America First and then was informed that this was the name of a movement that tried to prevent the United States from fighting Nazi Germany and was associated with nativists and white supremacists. He claimed then not to have known that. But in the inaugural address he made America First his central theme, and now he cant say that he doesnt know what it means. And of course Bannon knows what it means. America First is precisely the conjuration of this alternative America of the 1930s where Charles Lindbergh is the hero. This inaugural address reeked of the 1930s.

Snyder urges immediate resistance to the administrations targeting of Muslims, immigrants, blacks and LGBT people, because if it can slice off one group, it can do the same to others. He says protest and pushback should continue with regularity.

The Constitution is worth saving, the rule of law is worth saving, democracy is worth saving, but these things can and will be lost if everyone waits around for someone else.

He also notes that the speed with which the Trump team has worked to hammer home its agenda is a strategy designed to cause fatigue and depression. The key is not to be grow tired or become resigned. In particular, he cautions against succumbing to Trumps attempts to paint all those who reject his agenda as un-American.

The idea is to marginalize the people who actually represent the core values of the republic, says Snyder. The point is to bring down the republic. You can disagree with [protesters], but once you say they have no right to protest or start lying about them, you are in effect saying: We want a regime where this is not possible anymore. When the president says that, it means that the executive branch is engaged in regime change towards an authoritarian regime without the rule of law. You are getting people used to this transition, you are inviting them into the process by asking them to have contempt for their fellow citizens who are defending the republic. You are also seducing people into a world of permanent internet lying and away from their own experiences with other people. Getting out to protest, this is something real and I would say something patriotic. Part of the new authoritarianism is to get people to prefer fiction and inaction to reality and action. People sit in their chairs, read the tweet and repeat the clichs: Yes, they are thugs instead of It is normal to get out in the streets for what you believe. [Trump] is trying to teach people a new behavior: 'You just sit right where you are, read what I say and nod your head.' That is the psychology of regime change.

The only way to stop is to not obey, Snyder reiterates.

For more of Snyder's insights on historys lessons and how to apply them to Trump, check out his 20-point guide on forms of resistance.

KaliHolloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

Read this article:
Time Is Already Running Out on Our Democracy, Says Expert - AlterNet

War is Gods way of teaching Americans geography. This 19th-century quip, often attributed to the satirist Ambrose Bierce, deserves a 21st-century update: Attacks against the U.S. are Gods way of teaching Americans how weaker enemies are stronger than they seem.

Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are the paradigmatic examples of this. On September 11, 2001, they gave Americans, along with the rest of the world, a lesson in asymmetric warfarearmed conflict between two sides whose relative military power differs significantly, and in which one party can gain advantage by targeting the other ones weak points.

Did Putin Direct Russian Hacking? And Other Big Questions

In that case, 19 suicidal terrorists armed with box cutters gained control of three commercial jetliners and used them to strike some of the most sensitive and symbolic targets of the most powerful and technologically advanced nation in the world. Al-Qaeda spent an estimated $500,000 on the attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people and cost hundreds of billions of dollars in material losses. The reactions that followed were even larger and more consequential than the attacks themselves: The United States launched what is to date its longest war ever (in Afghanistan), and its third-longest (in Iraq), at the estimated combined cost of $3 trillion to $5 trillion. Moreover, the geopolitical disruptions from all these events are still shaping todays world.

If Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda taught a new generation of Americans about kinetic asymmetric war, WikiLeaks and the Kremlin have taught them about cyber asymmetric war. While the first relies on physical violence to kill people, destroy buildings, and disable critical infrastructure, the second uses the internet and other cyber tools, which can cause not only physical damage but also weaken the institutions that are critical for the functioning of a democratic government.

When Leon Panetta, then the U.S. secretary of defense, warned in 2012 about the possibility of a cyber-Pearl Harbor, he envisioned physical calamity like hackers causing train derailments or contaminating the water supply. Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, involving what U.S. intelligence believes were Kremlin-directed hacks and leaks of emails damaging to the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, differed from this vision. It represented a political cyber-Pearl Harbor.

And that cyber confrontation was asymmetrical, not because America was at a technological disadvantage (the U.S. is among the worlds leaders in the technologies needed to wage cyberwars), but because Russia was able to exploit the weak points of America as a democracy.

What made America uniquely susceptible to the attack from an authoritarian Russia is emblematic of what makes other democracies particularly vulnerable, relative to their authoritarian counterparts, to political cyberattack. For one thing, the 2016 election attack targeted the democratic process itself. In the words of the intelligence communitys January 2017 report on the incident, the hacks and leaks worked to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. They aimed to take advantage of the free flow of information in a democratic society, the affect of that information on public opinion, and the electoral mechanisms through which public opinion determines a countrys leadership. (The assessment did not allege cyberattacks on voting machines, nor asses the actual impact Russian meddling might have had on the final outcome.)

If, on the other hand, a hacker leaked damaging information about Vladimir Putin, there are various obstacles in the way of its having an electoral effect. Restrictions on the media in Russia could prevent the information from circulating widely. Even if it did manage to attract publicity and sway public opinion, what then? Putin has tight control over the countrys electoral apparatus, meaning that a voting citizenry inclined to punish him for leaked evidence of misdeeds has no real mechanism to do so. The Panama Papers leaks of spring 2016, which resulted from the alleged hack of a law firm specializing in offshore banking, help illustrate the point. Though they exposed shady financial dealings within Putins inner circle, the Russian media covered them in a way favorable to Putin. The leaks made virtually no dent in his popularity.

And if democratic politicians are more vulnerable to the effects of leaks, democracies are also more likely to produce leakers to begin with. The legal protections individuals enjoy in the democratic states make it hard to deter this type of behaviorthough as illustrated by the case of Chelsea Manning, who provided classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, leakers can be prosecuted and jailed. (Edward Snowden, who leaked classified details of government surveillance programs to journalists, fled the U.S. before he could face prosecution.) But the cost of leaking in an autocratic society like Russia, where political opponents of Putin have been known to wind up dead, could be far higher, obviously posing a major disincentive.

Democracies, too, have used cyberattacks against non-democratic states. Perhaps the best known example is the use of StuxNet, the successful attack, most likely by the United States and Israel, involving a malicious computer worm that sabotaged an element of Irans nuclear program. Other countries with similar capabilities could be stealthily using them against their rivals. As a member of former President Barack Obamas council of advisers on science and technology told me: The internet is now fully weaponized.

But, so far, the main political victims of cyberattackers have been leaders and public figures in democratic countriesespecially the United States. And the United States is not the only democracy vulnerable to political cyberattacks. One of the conclusions of the intelligence communitys report on the 2016 election hacks points to a much broader implication: We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the U.S. presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against U.S. allies and their election processes.

With elections coming up in several European countries, the Kremlin might turn its attention to influencing outcomes that would benefit its national interests. From bolstering populist candidates who have vowed to leave the EU, to encouraging skepticism of NATO by global leaders (most notable, so far, being President Trump), to supporting candidates who would ease the economic sanctions imposed on Russia for its actions in Crimea, there are numerous incentives for Putin to interfere, and numerous ways in which he could do so. Indeed, Russian cyber meddling was longstanding practice in Europe before 2016, and France, Germany, and the Netherlands are facing cyberattacks ahead of their elections this year.

The question is: Why havent Western democracies made the necessary reforms to adapt to the threat? Why have they let countries like Russia get the upper hand, not in capabilities, but in practice? One answer is that democracies, by their very nature, hinge on checks and balances that limit the concentration of power and slow down governmental decisionmaking. While all bureaucracies, including those of authoritarian regimes, are slow-moving, Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping surely are less encumbered by their laws and institutional constrains than their democratic counterparts.

Japans attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 unleashed a massive American reaction. It remains to be seen what the reaction to Americas political cyber-Pearl Harbor will beif any.

See the article here:
How Democracies Lose in Cyberwar - The Atlantic

President Trump met with law enforcement leaders twice this week, saw Jeff Sessions confirmed as top cop, and signed three tough-on-crime executive orders, which were then condemned by an organization composed of some of the nations top law enforcement officers.

Heres how Trumps tough-on-crime week went down:

Trump met with law enforcement brass from major cities on Wednesday and said there would be a "zero-tolerance policy for acts of violence against law enforcement," adding that we need national action to deal with crime in Chicago and declaring that since drugs are "afflicting our nation like never, ever before," we need to be ruthless in the fight against them. "We're going to stop these drugs from poisoning our people," he said.

At the swearing-in of Sessions, he signed three tough on crime executive orders declaring a new era of justice.

"The murder rate in our country is the highest its been in forty-seven years, right?" Trump told a group of county sheriffs he met with on Tuesday, the day before the police chiefs. "Did you know that? Forty-seven years. I used to use that, Id say that in a speech and everybody was surprised, because the press doesnt tell it like it is. It wasnt to their advantage to say that. But the murder rate is the highest its been in, I guess, from forty-five to forty-seven years."

In reality, the murder rate is historically low, despite a sharp spike in cities like Baltimore and Chicago over the last two years.

This confab with top cops was taking place at the same time that anti-drug crusader and racist pettifogger Sessions was being confirmed as the chief law enforcement officer in the country.

Law enforcement has already taken on much of the language and tactics of the War on Terror, which in some ways borrowed from the War on Drugs. But Trump further confuses them, complaining to the police chiefs, for instance, about the judicial branch questioning his Muslim ban. "They're taking away our weapons one by one," Trump said, as if the unfettered power of the president is synonymous with effective law enforcement. "This is a weapon that you need, and they're trying to take it away from you.

An executive order signed Thursday morning announced that the administration would begin developing policies that comprehensively address illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and violent crime.

Talking to the chiefs, Trump declared that the country supports law enforcement, while the dishonest media tries to convince you it's different," presumably referring to coverage of widespread protests over the past few years in the wake of police killings of unarmed African Americans.

The country may support law enforcement, but law enforcement might not necessarily support Trump. In what should be seen as a stinging rebuke on Friday, a report written by Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, a group comprising nearly two hundred current and former police chiefs, sheriffs, federal and state prosecutors, and attorneys general from all fifty states, rejected Trumps tough-on-crime approach.

In early February, the President signed an executive order creating this Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety at the Justice Department, and signed another order to curb gang and drug activity. The proposal and these orders, however, do not target their language and efforts on fighting violent crimethe most serious threat to our public safety. Instead, they encourage law enforcement to focus on crime more generally. Federal resources are imperative to combat crime across the country, but failing to direct these resources toward our most immediate and dangerous threats risks wasting taxpayer dollars, the report, called Fighting Crime and Strengthening Criminal Justice: An Agenda for the New Administration, reads.

We need not use arrest, conviction, and prison as the default response for every broken law. For many nonviolent and first-time offenders, prison is not only unnecessary from a public safety standpoint, it also endangers our communities, it continues.

The paper was co-authored by David Brown, who was the widely praised police chief in Dallas when five law enforcement officers were shot at a protest there last summer.

Well have to wait and see how the regime responds to these recommendations. But it is likely the administration will push back against a more measured approach to policing because a comprehensive war on crime is a great way to scare the populace and eliminate political enemies, as Nixon aide John Ehrlichman made clear in a conversation with Harpers last year.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," Ehrlichman said. "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

If anything, Trump is more paranoid and vindictive than Nixon. And it will be hard for police departments to refuse federal money. Because tons of cops are empowered by the election of Trump, and because policing is one of the few professions where the union is often as powerful as the boss, chiefs who dont support Trumps policies may fall.

Read the original here:
Democracy in Crisis: Trump's Tough-on-Crime Week - The Independent Weekly

The mission of Democracy is to build a vibrant and vital progressivism for the twenty-first century that builds on the movements proud history, is true to its central values, and is relevant to present times.

Democracy will publish on a quarterly basis and serve as a place where ideas can be developed and important debates can be spurred.

We do not seek to publish policy papers; well leave the important details on budget line items and dollar figures to others. Rather, we seek breakthrough thinking on the concepts and approaches that respond to the central transformations of our time: the breakdown of the ladder of upward mobility; the promise and problems of an information-based, globalized economy; new national security threats which cross old boundaries and defy old assumptions from jihadist terrorism and nuclear proliferation to climate change, pandemics, and poverty; and a society where people work and live in new and different ways.

Progressives have been at their best when we are both rigorous in looking at the world as it is and vigorous in introducing creative approaches to remake the world as we believe it should be. Democracy is not interested in either reiterating the conventional wisdom or maintaining unity around outdated orthodoxies. We see our role as upsetting tired assumptions, moving past outdated and obsolete divisions, and stretching the envelope of what is accepted by and of progressives.

Our ambitions are largeas is the scale of the work before usbut we have no doubt that ideas can change the course of our nation. Now is the time to fashion a new progressivism for the twenty-first century, and we welcome all who are willing to join in this conversation.

Read the Editors introductory letter from our inaugural issue.

Founding Editors: Kenneth Baer, Andrei Cherny

Publisher: Bernard Schwartz

President: Andrei Cherny

Editor: Michael Tomasky

Managing Editor: Jack Meserve

Associate Editor: Sophia Crabbe-Field

Contributing Editor: Nathan Pippenger

Contributing Editor: Ethan Porter

Editorial Advisory Committee

E.J. Dionne, Chair

Robert Abernethy, Melody Barnes, William Budinger, Christopher Edley, Ezekiel Emanuel, William Galston, Leslie H. Gelb, Nick Hanauer, Elaine Kamarck, Karen Kornbluh, Eric Liu, Robert Reich, Cristina Rodrguez, Isabel Sawhill, Bernard Schwartz, Theda Skocpol, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Sean Wilentz

Copy Editor:Paul Stephens

Intern:Isabella Le Bon

Design: Point Five, NY: Alissa Levin, Benjamin Levine, Nathan Eames

Website Development: Tierra Innovation

Illustrated icons: Tim Boelaars

Sign up for our print edition! Four issues a year, $24. Or give the gift of Democracy to a friend or family member.

Sign up for our email newsletter! We'll send periodic reminders of what's new and what's coming. Don't miss out!

Democracyis an independent, nonprofit organization. Readers and donors like you make what we dopossible. We thank you for your support!

Follow

Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Inc. All right reserved. Design by Point Five, NY. Built by Tierra Innovation.

Link:
About : Democracy Journal

Under the new proposals, Alan Rusbridger could have faced criminal charges for handling the US intelligence data leaked by Edward Snowden. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

The Law Commissions purpose is to review the state of the law in England and Wales and where necessary to suggest how it should be updated. It is one of those rarely noticed constitutional cogs, an important institution that does important work. The law that relates to official secrets is indeed dated and, in a digital age of global publication, it is also technologically obsolete. Yet this is not at the heart of the proposals the commission is making. Instead, it proposes powers that would herald a new journalistic ice age. Anyone that published an intelligence- or foreign affairs-related story based on a leak would be open to criminal charges. Reporters, as well as the whistleblowers whose stories they tell, would be under threat of sentences of up to 14 years, regardless of the public interest and even if there were no likelihood ofdamage.

This all began in 2015, when the government asked the barrister Professor David Ormerod, the law commissioner for criminal law and evidence, to examine the protection of official data. The date is significant: the Guardian, together with other European and American newspapers, had recently published some of the huge volume of material leaked by Edward Snowden about surveillance techniques. Some of the information had been shared by British intelligence with the US National Security Agency, where Mr Snowden was a contractor. But there were no grounds for legal action, as no British citizen or resident had been responsible for the leaks. Nor could British journalists be charged with collecting and disseminating the material under the Official Secrets Act of 1911, because, in the terms of the legislation, they did not have a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state. That is, they were not spies. In fact, this paper strongly believes that the stories we published were in the public interest. That view is supported by the debate and inquiries that have followed.

The updated 1989 Official Secrets Act would also have been difficult to apply. To secure a conviction for unauthorised publication, the prosecution would have had to show that it had been damaging. This paper was very careful in what information it disclosed. What we published might have been embarrassing, but we believed that it was not damaging. The Law Commissions proposals for a new act appear expressly designed to make sure that if such a thing happened again, this time charges could be brought with confidence. Its proposals require only that someone had been gathering information that might benefit a foreign power or might prejudice the interests or safety of the state. They would not need to involve any intent to pass the information on to a foreign agency. A journalist would merely have to be notified that the information was capable of benefiting a foreign power for its publicationto be banned.

It is not so long ago that the menu in MI5s staff canteen was an official secret. Now the Law Commissions proposals would make it almost impossible for anyone who handles such data to publish anything about security activities that the government preferred to keep secret. If they had been in force three years ago, they would certainly have meant that Alan Rusbridger, the Guardians editor at the time of the publication of the Snowden files, could have faced criminal charges.

Assurances that these tools of state would never be used in an oppressive way look increasingly hollow when the US judiciary is castigated by President Trump for upholding the constitution, while British politicians fail to defend judges here against media attack.

In its report, the Law Commission lists Guardian Media as one of the organisations that was consulted on its proposals. This consultation was brief and informal and ended with a promise, honoured only in the breach, that everyone would be kept informed about the next steps.

News organisations, in an intensely hostile business climate, operate in an ever harsher environment. Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 may yet be brought into force, exposing any news organisation that refused to sign up to the recognised regulator to the full costs of both parties in a libel action, regardless of whether it won or lost. The Investigatory Powers Act, which became law last autumn, has in the words of one lawyer, ripped the heart out of any ability to protect journalistic sources. In this angry digital age of fake news, where hard fact grows ever more precious, accurate and fair reporting has never been more important. Without it, democracy itself is weakened.

Read the original here:
The Guardian view on official secrets: new proposals threaten democracy - The Guardian