Worldwide High Performance Computing Industry to 2026 – The Market is Driven Largely by Simulations, Engineering and Design Solutions – PRNewswire

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DUBLIN, Jan. 25, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "High Performance Computing Market by Component, Infrastructure, Services, Price Band, HPC Applications, Deployment Types, Industry Verticals, and Regions 2021 - 2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The High Performance Computing market includes computation solutions provided either by supercomputers or via parallel processing techniques such as leveraging clusters of computers to aggregate computing power. HPC is well-suited for applications that require high performance data computation and analysis such as high frequency trading, autonomous vehicles, genomics-based personalized medicine, computer-aided design, deep learning, and more. Specific examples include computational fluid dynamics, simulation, modeling, and seismic tomography.

This report evaluates the HPC market including companies, solutions, use cases, and applications. Analysis includes HPC by organizational size, software and system type, server type, and price band, and industry verticals. The report also assesses the market for integration of various artificial intelligence technologies in HPC. It also evaluates the exascale-level HPC market including analysis by component, hardware type, service type, and industry vertical.

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The market is currently dominated on the demand side by large corporations, universities, and government institutions by way of capabilities that are often used to solve very specific problems for large institutions. Examples include financial services organizations, government R&D facilities, universities research, etc.

However, the cloud-computing based "as a Service" model allows HPC market offerings to be extended via HPC-as-a-Service (HPCaaS) to a much wider range of industry verticals and companies, thereby providing computational services to solve a much broader array of problems. Industry use cases are increasingly emerging that benefit from HPC-level computing, many of which benefit from split processing between localized devices/platforms and HPCaaS.

In fact, HPCaaS is poised to become much more commonly available, partially due to new on-demand supercomputer service offerings, and in part as a result of emerging AI-based tools for engineers. Accordingly, up to 52% of revenue will be directly attributable to the cloud-based business model via HPCaaS, which makes High-Performance Computing solutions available to a much wider range of industry verticals and companies, thereby providing computational services to solve a much broader array of problems.

In a 2020 study, we conducted interviews with major players in the market as well as smaller, lesser known companies that are believed to be influential in terms of innovative solutions that are likely to drive adoption and usage of both cluster-based HPC and supercomputing. In an effort to identify growth opportunities for the HPC market, we investigated market gaps including unserved and underserved markets and submarkets. The research and advisory firm uncovered a market situation in which HPC currently suffers from an accessibility problem as well as inefficiencies and supercomputer skill gaps.

Stated differently, the market for HPC as a Service (e.g. access to high-performance computing services) currently suffers from problems related to the utilization, scheduling, and set-up time to run jobs on a supercomputer. We identified start-ups and small companies working to solve these problems.

One of the challenge areas identified is low utilization but (ironically) also high wait times for most supercomputers. Scheduling can be a challenge in terms of workload time estimation. About 23% of jobs are computationally heavy and 37% of jobs cannot be defined very well in terms of how long jobs will take (within a 3-minute window at best). In many instances, users request substantive resources and don't actually use computing time.

In addition to the scheduling challenge, we also identified a company focused on solving additional problems such as computational planning and engineering. We spoke with the principal of a little-known company called Microsurgeonbot, Inc. (doing business as MSB.ai), which is developing a tool for setting up computing jobs for supercomputers.

The company is working to solve major obstacles in accessibility and usability for HPC resources. The company focuses on solving a very important problem in HPC: Supercomputer job set-up and skills gap. Their solution known as "Guru" is poised to make supercomputing much more accessible, especially to engineers in small to medium-sized businesses that do not have the same resources or expertise as large corporate entities.

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Key Topics Covered:

1 Executive Summary

2 Introduction2.1 Next Generation Computing2.2 High Performance Computing2.2.1 HPC Technology2.2.2 Exascale Computation2.2.3 High Performance Technical Computing2.2.4 Market Segmentation Considerations2.2.5 Regulatory Framework2.2.6 Value Chain Analysis2.2.7 AI to Drive HPC Performance and Adoption

3 High Performance Computing Market Dynamics3.1 HPC Market Drivers3.2 HPC Market Challenges

4 High Performance Computing Market Analysis and Forecasts4.1 Global High Performance Computing Market 2021 - 20264.1.1 Total High Performance Computing Market4.1.2 High Performance Computing Market by Component4.1.3 High Performance Computing Market by Deployment Type4.1.4 High Performance Computing Market by Organization Size4.1.5 High Performance Computing Market by Server Price Band4.1.6 High Performance Computing Market by Application Type4.1.7 High Performance Computing Deployment Options: Supercomputer vs. Clustering4.1.8 High Performance Computing as a Service (HPCaaS)4.1.9 AI Powered High Performance Computing Market4.2 Regional High Performance Computing Market 2021 - 20264.2.1 High Performance Computing Market by Region4.2.2 North America High Performance Computing Market by Component, Deployment, Organization, Server Price Band, Application, Industry Vertical, and Country4.2.3 Europe High Performance Computing Market by Component, Deployment, Organization, Server Price Band, Application, Industry Vertical, and Country4.2.4 APAC High Performance Computing Market by Component, Deployment, Organization, Server Price Band, Application, Industry Vertical, and Country4.2.5 MEA High Performance Computing Market by Component, Deployment, Organization, Server Price Band, Application, Industry Vertical, and Country4.2.6 Latin America High Performance Computing Market by Component, Deployment, Organization, Server Price Band, Application, Industry Vertical, and Country4.2.7 High Performance Computing Market by Top Ten Country4.3 Exascale Computing Market 2021 - 20264.3.1 Exascale Computing Driven HPC Market by Component4.3.2 Exascale Computing Driven HPC Market by Hardware Type4.3.3 Exascale Computing Driven HPC Market by Service Type4.3.4 Exascale Computing Driven HPC Market by Industry Vertical4.3.1 Exascale Computing as a Service

5 High Performance Computing Company Analysis5.1 HPC Vendor Ecosystem5.2 Leading HPC Companies5.2.1 Amazon Web Services Inc.5.2.2 Atos SE5.2.3 Advanced Micro Devices Inc.5.2.4 Cisco Systems5.2.5 DELL Technologies Inc.5.2.6 Fujitsu Ltd5.2.7 Hewlett Packard Enterprise5.2.8 IBM Corporation5.2.9 Intel Corporation5.2.10 Microsoft Corporation5.2.11 NEC Corporation5.2.12 Nvidia5.2.13 Rackspace Inc.

6 High Performance Computing Market Use Cases6.1 Fraud Detection in the Financial Industry6.2 Healthcare and Clinical Research6.3 Manufacturing6.4 Energy Exploration and Extraction6.5 Scientific Research6.6 Electronic Design Automation6.7 Government6.8 Computer Aided Engineering6.9 Education and Research6.10 Earth Science

7 Conclusions and Recommendations

8 Appendix: Future of Computing8.1 Quantum Computing8.1.1 Quantum Computing Technology8.1.2 Quantum Computing Considerations8.1.3 Market Challenges and Opportunities8.1.4 Recent Developments8.1.5 Quantum Computing Value Chain8.1.6 Quantum Computing Applications8.1.7 Competitive Landscape8.1.8 Government Investment in Quantum Computing8.1.9 Quantum Computing Stakeholders by Country8.1.10 Other Future Computing Technologies8.1.11 Market Drivers for Future Computing Technologies8.2 Future Computing Market Challenges8.2.1 Data Security Concerns in Virtualized and Distributed Cloud8.2.2 Funding Constrains R&D Activities8.2.3 Lack of Skilled Professionals across the Sector8.2.4 Absence of Uniformity among NGC Branches including Data Format

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/iedkoq

Media Contact:

Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [emailprotected]

For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900

U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

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Worldwide High Performance Computing Industry to 2026 - The Market is Driven Largely by Simulations, Engineering and Design Solutions - PRNewswire

IonQ and South Korea’s Q Center Announce Three-Year Quantum Alliance – PRNewswire

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COLLEGE PARK, Md., Jan. 19, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --IonQ, the leader in quantum computing, today announced a three-year alliance with South Korea's Quantum Information Research Support Center, or Q Center. The Q Center is an independent organization at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) focused on the creation of a rich research ecosystem in the field of quantum information science. The partnership will make IonQ's trapped-ion quantum computers available for research and teaching across South Korea.

IonQ's systems have the potential to solve the world's most complex problems with the greatest accuracy. To date, the company's quantum computers have a proven track record of outperforming all other available quantum hardware.

Researchers and students across South Korea will be able to immediately start running jobs on IonQ's quantum computers. This partnership will enable researchers, scientists, and students to learn, develop, and deploy quantum applications on one of the world's leading quantum systems.

"I am proud to see IonQ enter this alliance with Q Center," said Peter Chapman, CEO & President of IonQ. "IonQ's hardware will serve as the backbone for quantum research. Our technology will play a critical role not only in the advancement of quantum, but also in fostering the next generation of quantum researchers and developers in South Korea."

"Our mission is to cultivate and promote the advancement of quantum information research in South Korea," said SKKU Professor of SAINT (SKKU Advanced Institute of NanoTechnology), Yonuk Chong. "We believe IonQ has the most advanced quantum technology available, and through our partnership, we will be able to make tremendous strides in the advancement of the industry."

This alliance builds on IonQ's continued success. IonQ recently released a product roadmap to deploy rack mounted quantum computers by 2023, and achieve broad quantum advantage by 2025. IonQ also recently unveiled a new $5.5 million, 23,000 square foot Quantum Data Center in Maryland's Discovery District. IonQ has raised $84 million in funding to date, announcing new investment from Lockheed Martin, Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH (RBVC) and Cambium earlier this year. Previous investors include Samsung Electronics, Mubadala Capital, GV, Amazon, and NEA. The company's two co-founders were also recently named to the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee (NQIAC).

About IonQIonQ is the leader in quantum computing. By making our quantum hardware accessible through the cloud, we're empowering millions of organizations and developers to build new applications to solve the world's most complex problems in business, and across society. IonQ's unique approach to quantum computing is to start with nature: using individual atoms as the heart of our quantum processing units. We levitate them in space with electric potentials applied to semiconductor-defined electrodes on a chip, and then use lasers to do everything from initial preparation to final readout and the quantum gate operations in between. The unique IonQ architecture of random-access processing of qubits in a fully connected and modular architecture will allow unlimited scaling. The IonQ approach requires atomic physics, precision optical and mechanical engineering, and fine-grained firmware control over a variety of components. Leveraging this approach, IonQ provides both a viable technological roadmap to scale and the flexibility necessary to explore a wide range of application spaces in the near term. IonQ was founded in 2015 by Jungsang Kim and Christopher Monroe and their systems are based on foundational research at The University of Maryland and Duke University.

About SKKUSungkyunkwan University (SKKU) is a leading research university located in Seoul, South Korea. SKKU is known around the world for the quality of its research and invests heavily in research and development. SKKU has more than 600 years of history as a leading educational institution, and is guided by the founding principles of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and self-cultivation.

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https://ionq.com

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IonQ and South Korea's Q Center Announce Three-Year Quantum Alliance - PRNewswire

Securing the DNS in a Post-Quantum World: Hash-Based Signatures and Synthesized Zone Signing Keys – CircleID

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This is the fifth in a multi-part series on cryptography and the Domain Name System (DNS).

In my last article, I described efforts underway to standardize new cryptographic algorithms that are designed to be less vulnerable to potential future advances in quantum computing. I also reviewed operational challenges to be considered when adding new algorithms to the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC).

In this post, I'll look at hash-based signatures, a family of post-quantum algorithms that could be a good match for DNSSEC from the perspective of infrastructure stability.

I'll also describe Verisign Labs research into a new concept called synthesized zone signing keys that could mitigate the impact of the large signature size for hash-based signatures, while still maintaining this family's protections against quantum computing.

(Caveat: The concepts reviewed in this post are part of Verisign's long-term research program and do not necessarily represent Verisign's plans or positions on new products or services. Concepts developed in our research program may be subject to U.S. and/or international patents and/or patent applications.)

The DNS community's root key signing key (KSK) rollover illustrates how complicated a change to DNSSEC infrastructure can be. Although successfully accomplished, this change was delayed by ICANN to ensure that enough resolvers had the public key required to validate signatures generated with the new root KSK private key.

Now imagine the complications if the DNS community also had to ensure that enough resolvers not only had a new key but also had a brand-new algorithm.

Imagine further what might happen if a weakness in this new algorithm were to be found after it was deployed. While there are procedures for emergency key rollovers, emergency algorithm rollovers would be more complicated, and perhaps controversial as well if a clear successor algorithm were not available.

I'm not suggesting that any of the post-quantum algorithms that might be standardized by NIST will be found to have a weakness. But confidence in cryptographic algorithms can be gained and lost over many years, sometimes decades.

From the perspective of infrastructure stability, therefore, it may make sense for DNSSEC to have a backup post-quantum algorithm built in from the start one for which cryptographers already have significant confidence and experience. This algorithm might not be as efficient as other candidates, but there is less of a chance that it would ever need to be changed. This means that the more efficient candidates could be deployed in DNSSEC with the confidence that they have a stable fallback. It's also important to keep in mind that the prospect of quantum computing is not the only reason system developers need to be considering new algorithms from time to time. As public-key cryptography pioneer Martin Hellman wisely cautioned, new classical (non-quantum) attacks could also emerge, whether or not a quantum computer is realized.

The 1970s were a foundational time for public-key cryptography, producing not only the RSA algorithm and the Diffie-Hellman algorithm (which also provided the basic model for elliptic curve cryptography), but also hash-based signatures, invented in 1979 by another public-key cryptography founder, Ralph Merkle.

Hash-based signatures are interesting because their security depends only on the security of an underlying hash function.

It turns out that hash functions, as a concept, hold up very well against quantum computing advances much better than currently established public-key algorithms do.

This means that Merkle's hash-based signatures, now more than 40 years old, can rightly be considered the oldest post-quantum digital signature algorithm.

If it turns out that an individual hash function doesn't hold up whether against a quantum computer or a classical computer then the hash function itself can be replaced, as cryptographers have been doing for years. That will likely be easier than changing to an entirely different post-quantum algorithm, especially one that involves very different concepts.

The conceptual stability of hash-based signatures is a reason that interoperable specifications are already being developed for variants of Merkle's original algorithm. Two approaches are described in RFC 8391, "XMSS: eXtended Merkle Signature Scheme" and RFC 8554, "Leighton-Micali Hash-Based Signatures." Another approach, SPHINCS+, is an alternate in NIST's post-quantum project.

Figure 1. Conventional DNSSEC signatures. DNS records are signed with the ZSK private key, and are thereby "chained" to the ZSK public key. The digital signatures may be hash-based signatures.

Hash-based signatures can potentially be applied to any part of the DNSSEC trust chain. For example, in Figure 1, the DNS record sets can be signed with a zone signing key (ZSK) that employs a hash-based signature algorithm.

The main challenge with hash-based signatures is that the signature size is large, on the order of tens or even hundreds of thousands of bits. This is perhaps why they haven't seen significant adoption in security protocols over the past four decades.

Verisign Labs has been exploring how to mitigate the size impact of hash-based signatures on DNSSEC, while still basing security on hash functions only in the interest of stable post-quantum protections.

One of the ideas we've come up with uses another of Merkle's foundational contributions: Merkle trees.

Merkle trees authenticate multiple records by hashing them together in a tree structure. The records are the "leaves" of the tree. Pairs of leaves are hashed together to form a branch, then pairs of branches are hashed together to form a larger branch, and so on. The hash of the largest branches is the tree's "root." (This is a data-structure root, unrelated to the DNS root.)

Each individual leaf of a Merkle tree can be authenticated by retracing the "path" from the leaf to the root. The path consists of the hashes of each of the adjacent branches encountered along the way.

Authentication paths can be much shorter than typical hash-based signatures. For instance, with a tree depth of 20 and a 256-bit hash value, the authentication path for a leaf would only be 5,120 bits long, yet a single tree could authenticate more than a million leaves.

Figure 2. DNSSEC signatures following the synthesized ZSK approach proposed here. DNS records are hashed together into a Merkle tree. The root of the Merkle tree is published as the ZSK, and the authentication path through the Merkle tree is the record's signature.

Returning to the example above, suppose that instead of signing each DNS record set with a hash-based signature, each record set were considered a leaf of a Merkle tree. Suppose further that the root of this tree were to be published as the ZSK public key (see Figure 2). The authentication path to the leaf could then serve as the record set's signature.

The validation logic at a resolver would be the same as in ordinary DNSSEC:

The only difference on the resolver's side would be that signature validation would involve retracing the authentication path to the ZSK public key, rather than a conventional signature validation operation.

The ZSK public key produced by the Merkle tree approach would be a "synthesized" public key, in that it is obtained from the records being signed. This is noteworthy from a cryptographer's perspective, because the public key wouldn't have a corresponding private key, yet the DNS records would still, in effect, be "signed by the ZSK!"

In this type of DNSSEC implementation, the Merkle tree approach only applies to the ZSK level. Hash-based signatures would still be applied at the KSK level, although their overhead would now be "amortized" across all records in the zone.

In addition, each new ZSK would need to be signed "on demand," rather than in advance, as in current operational practice.

This leads to tradeoffs, such as how many changes to accumulate before constructing and publishing a new tree. Fewer changes and the tree will be available sooner. More changes and the tree will be larger, so the per-record overhead of the signatures at the KSK level will be lower.

My last few posts have discussed cryptographic techniques that could potentially be applied to the DNS in the long term or that might not even be applied at all. In my next post, I'll return to more conventional subjects, and explain how Verisign sees cryptography fitting into the DNS today, as well as some important non-cryptographic techniques that are part of our vision for a secure, stable and resilient DNS.

Read the previous posts in this six-part blog series:

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Securing the DNS in a Post-Quantum World: Hash-Based Signatures and Synthesized Zone Signing Keys - CircleID

SpaceX is about to run its final test of Starship SN9 before 1st launch – Livescience.com

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SpaceX is gearing up to test the ninth prototype of its big, shiny rocket, Starship SN9 Wednesday (Jan. 20), lighting up its engines for what should be the last time before its inaugural flight. The test is expected before 5 p.m. Central Time.

The rocket won't go anywhere during this "static fire" test. (Or, at least, it's not supposed to.) But if all goes according to plan, this test should clear the way for a launch in the near future, though SpaceX has not set a date. NASA Spaceflight is livestreaming the test from the Boca Chica, Texas, site where SpaceX builds and tests its Starships.

Related: Here's every spaceship that's ever carried an astronaut into orbit

This will be the second static fire test of SN9, after a trio of Jan. 13 tests ended inconclusively, with the engines not firing for the full intended duration, as NASA Spaceflight reported. The company has since swapped out the engines used in the past tests.

Starship is SpaceX's moonshot literally. The company has suggested the 160-foot-tall (49 meters) and 30-foot-wide (9 m) vehicle could one day land large groups of people on the moon or Mars. It has also sold tickets to board a future Starship for an orbit around the moon. To do all that will require a far-larger "Super Heavy" booster rocket to loft Starship into space, and that rocket has not yet been built.

For now, SpaceX is focused on developing the Starship vehicle itself. The last prototype, SN8, demonstrated impressive capabilities during a December 2020 test flight. That test saw SN8 loft to the cruising altitude of a jetliner and make a controlled approach to its landing site before exploding on contact, as LiveScience reported at the time. SpaceX hasnt said what its goals are for this next launch, though a successful landing of the mammoth vehicle could be on the menu.

Originally published on Live Science

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SpaceX is about to run its final test of Starship SN9 before 1st launch - Livescience.com

Marques Brownlee details his business as a tech YouTuber and how he makes money on the platform – Business Insider India

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Marques Brownlee was saving up his allowance money in high school when he decided to launch a YouTube channel.

The money he was saving up would help him buy a new laptop, where he could film and edit videos.

To help run the day-to-day of his creator business, Brownlee signed with the talent agency WME, and he has a small team of motion graphics artists, cinematographers, and assistants.

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"Oh, this is the number one holiday family reunion question," Brownlee told Nilay Patel in a recent episode of The Verge's podcast "Decoder."

For most YouTubers, their main source of revenue comes from the ads placed in their videos by Google.

"So, YouTube ads is the primary, fundamental way that YouTubers make money," Brownlee said on the Verge podcast. "You upload a video, there's ads somewhere on it or in it, and the YouTuber gets paid for the placement of those ads because they brought the eyeballs to the video."

Here is a breakdown of the main ways Brownlee makes money as a creator:

Creators who are part of YouTube's Partner Program are able to make money from their YouTube channels by placing ads within a video. These ads are filtered through Google's AdSense program.

Brownlee said on the Verge podcast that he also earns money by promoting brands in his YouTube videos.

"I negotiate the rate," Brownlee said on the Verge podcast. "The contract is usually built by my agent. I work with WME. And so, their lawyers will look over the contract and negotiate the terms, so I'm not literally reading the contracts. That's an arm I chopped off. I used to do that, too. They take their cut, obviously, for also bringing some of those contracts and companies to my inbox. But at the end of the day, if you could see the amount of stuff we say no to - it's just like a constant flow of, 'We want to be on the channel. We want to be in a video' - to find the stuff that really makes sense. And then, that's just me going, 'Let's see how we can make this work best.'"

But influencers don't have to run their own merch operation to take advantage of the business opportunity. Many, like Brownlee, partner with a company (he sells merch through the site Cotton Bureau.)

"For example, we have a merch store. You can buy apparel that has our cool designs on it," Brownlee said on the Verge podcast.

Read more: The top 7 merchandise companies helping creators on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok earn money without relying on ads

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Marques Brownlee details his business as a tech YouTuber and how he makes money on the platform - Business Insider India

Here’s what former first ladies wore on Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day, from stylish jackets to symbolic suits – Business Insider India

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Today's inauguration might have been all about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but some former first ladies almost stole the show with their fashion.

Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton both arrived at the event wearing purple and burgundy ensembles that were packed with symbolism. Laura Bush, on the other hand, mirrored Jill Biden's fashion in a baby-blue coat. Melania Trump also made a bold fashion statement on Wednesday, despite not attending the event.

She wore the ensemble while departing the White House sans face mask. The former first lady and her husband did not attend Biden's inauguration.

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Like other first ladies who attended Biden's inauguration, Obama's outfit was majorly symbolic. Not only was it designed by Sergio Hudson, a Black fashion designer who she's worked with in the past, as reported by The Cut, but its purple-hued shade is also representative of bipartisanship and women's suffrage.

She wore a gray dress underneath a baby-blue coat, which she closed with only one button. The former first lady also wore sheer tights, black flats, a gray face mask, and shining pearls.

The outfit's color scheme resembled the blue ensemble worn by Jill Biden at the same event.

Clinton has worn purple to make a statement in the past. In 2017, she and her husband Bill Clinton both wore purple as a sign of bipartisanship after Donald Trump won the presidential election.

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Here's what former first ladies wore on Joe Biden's Inauguration Day, from stylish jackets to symbolic suits - Business Insider India

Confederate relics still standing at many Texas universities – The Texas Tribune

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This summer, students called on the University of Texas at Austin to stop playing the The Eyes of Texas, the alma mater song that has historical minstrel show ties. Aggies petitioned Texas A&M University to take down the statue of Lawrence Sullivan Sul Ross, a former governor and Confederate general. Students at Rice University demanded removal of the monument of the school founder, William Willy Rice, a slave owner.

This wasnt the first time Texas universities had faced these pressures. But as students joined protests across the nation condemning the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and called for an end to racial injustice, they turned to their university leaders to address those ills on campus. School officials pledged to act.

But eight months later, the song is still playing at UT-Austin. Statues of Confederate leaders and segregationists still watch over Texas campuses. And many students of color feel most of their demands have been ignored or intentionally mired in lengthy, bureaucratic processes intended to delay answers to difficult questions.

The fact that its taking so long is disheartening, said Kendall Vining, a Rice junior, who co-wrote a list of 19 ways administrators could create a campus more inclusive for Black students. It means that, of course, somebody else is still trying to decide what's best for us, rather than us literally telling them what could be done to help.

While Texas campuses are implementing some significant changes like diversity training, increased scholarships for students of color, new curriculum on racial inequity and more recruitment for diverse faculties many students said the efforts dont directly address their demands or go far enough to dismantle the legacy of white supremacy on their campuses. Black students, who remain underrepresented on most large college campuses in the state, said the buildings and statues that remain serve as a reminder that they attend schools that werent intended to serve them.

When we have people who dont know what it feels like to be oppressed try to make decisions about the oppressed, they often overlook the real demands and they only see racism from their narrow point of view, said Qynetta Caston, a student at Texas A&M where just 3% of students are Black.

University leaders admit there is much work to be done, and insist they remain committed to change. In June and July, university leaders announced a variety of new initiatives aimed at correcting long-standing, institutional wrongs on campus. For example, the Texas A&M System approved $100 million in scholarship funding to boost diversity at all 11 campuses, and the University of North Texas launched a mandatory cultural competency training for all new students starting this fall. Texas A&M University-Commerce partnered with the George Floyd Foundation to start a new internship program for Black male students.

Yet Black students across the state grew frustrated as school officials relegated some of the hardest questions to newly assembled diversity committees. They worry universities are using committees to stall until outspoken students graduate.

But school leaders argue broad, cultural change takes time.

Theres always a desire to move faster and do it better, said Joe Carpenter, a spokesperson for the University of Texas at Arlington, where students were asking administrators to increase faculty of color and rename multiple buildings even before Floyds death. Some things, to be done right, take the involvement, not of one individual to just dictate something. Some of these initiatives aren't going to be successful if they're the idea of one person or if they are implemented by one person.

Its like the administration really believes that white supremacy is a reformable thing, rather than something that needs to be completely wiped away.

As cities across America watched protests fill the streets, dozens of universities removed statues and renamed campus buildings named for people with racist histories.

The University of Mississippi moved a statue out of the main building to a campus cemetery. The University of Alabama removed plaques honoring students who fought for the Confederate Army. In Las Vegas, the University of Nevada took down a statue of their Rebel mascot. Princeton University renamed colleges named after former President Woodrow Wilson due to his racist beliefs. Louisiana State University took the name of a former school president off its library because he advocated for segregation.

But Texas universities have largely dodged demands to remove historical reminders countering with committees vowing to study the issue and other offerings to improve diversity.

Its like the administration really believes that white supremacy is a reformable thing, rather than something that needs to be completely wiped away, said Shifa Rahman, a Rice University junior who organized sit-ins at the statue of Willy Rice. Rice set aside money before he died that helped establish the school in 1912 with the specific goal of serving white Texans.

A group of students at Rice have participated in the sit-ins nearly every evening since Aug. 31.

Rahman said administrators cant expect students to study among symbols of people who promoted white supremacy and still build an equitable campus. These symbols need to be abolished, he said.

Students at Rice dont just want the statue removed. A list of demands also included more Black faculty and improved lighting for Rice identification photos so students with dark skin are properly photographed.

In 2019, Rice launched a task force to explore the universitys historical connections to slavery, segregation and racial injustice, but has not released a report yet. President David Leebron said in an email to The Texas Tribune that they expected this work to take between two and four years. He also said they recently added a group to the task force who will discuss buildings and statues on campus, including the Willy Rice statue.

We have repeatedly said that the statue issue would be addressed after the task force finishes its initial report and we have all the information and all the varied opinions essential to making the right decision, Leebron said. As you might expect, there is a wide range of opinions on the statue and various alternatives have been suggested for addressing the history behind it, which is why its important to approach this issue thoughtfully.

In the meantime, Rice, where 5% of students are Black, announced a new diversity training and is piloting a diversity course this spring. Rice also hired its first vice provost for diversity, equity and inclusion.

Texas students agitating for change said their patience is wearing thin.

For every action that the university takes, there has to be like a committee, and then another committee to verify that committee and were just like in the cycle of committees, said Alcess Nonot, a senior at UT-Austin and president of the UT Senate of College Councils.

UT-Austin administrators pledged to review the schools diversity and inclusion action plan in the wake of the summer protests. The university had already taken down multiple Confederate statues in 2017, which resulted in at least one lawsuit that the university won. They also launched a new committee to study the history of the schools alma mater song, The Eyes of Texas, after students asked the university to stop singing it. The song premiered at a minstrel show in the early 1900s and the phrase Eyes of Texas was taken indirectly from comments Gen. Robert E. Lee used to make to students when he became a college president that the eyes of the South are upon you.

The University of Texas at Arlington, Baylor University, the University of Houston and Texas A&M University all similarly launched diversity committees.

Former Texas A&M President Michael Young set an Oct. 30 deadline for a final report with recommendations to improve race relations, diversity and address historical representations on campus, specifically the Sul Ross statue. Almost three months later, the committee has still not released a report.

A spokesperson said once the committee started meeting they realized it would take longer to delve into the issues and did not want to rush the process. However, system President John Sharp said in August, citing an attorney general opinion, the statue could only be moved by an act of the Legislature. Sharp said in a 2018 letter to the Aggie student newspaper that the statue would be on campus "forever" because Ross deserved to be honored for his service to the university.

At Baylor, university leaders launched a new scholarship program and created a new diversity training video, though it was largely panned by students and the Baylor Lariat student newspaper's editorial board as "missing the mark." A commission to review historical representations on campus, including statues of the three university founders, is expected to issue recommendations this spring.

Students like Lexy Bogney, a senior and president of the Baylor National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter, said they suspect these commissions and committees are used to placate alumni and donors that might disagree with student demands.

Even when [Baylor was] just saying, Black Lives Matter, you could see so many alumni on Twitter and Facebook, just saying, Why would you guys fall for this? Bogney said. I think this slow change is kind of coming from them trying to appease regents and alumni.

Indeed, alumni and donors at many Texas schools have been vocal in countering student demands for change, flooding university inboxes with threats to pull their money and even organizing counter protests, as they did at Texas A&M to support the Sul Ross statue.

In some cases, universities resistant to removing statues are erecting new ones honoring people of color. Texas A&M is building a statue of Matthew Gaines, one of the first Black state senators in Texas.

Students have been pushing for the Gaines statue since the 1990s, struggling to raise the necessary funds until last year. For Caston and other students, adding a statue of a Black man doesnt negate the presence of the Sul Ross statue.

Students echoed the same concern at Texas State University after the university announced it would rename two buildings on campus after distinguished alumni of color instead of renaming Flowers Hall, which is named after John Flowers, who defended segregation, and Beretta Hall, which is named after Sally Beretta, a Daughter of the Confederacy.

Until they actually acknowledge the real issues that they have helped create and maintain over the years, they can never be diverse and inclusive, said Evan Bookman, a senior who serves as the universitys NAACP chapter president.

A spokesperson for Texas State said the university will also name two previously unnamed streets at the campus north of Austin after distinguished alumni of color, too.

Questions about renaming Beretta and Flowers Halls have arisen in task force discussions, said spokesperson Jayme Blaschke, without answering additional questions. This will be an on-going inclusive conversation about complex issues that require collaboration and time to fully research.

UT-Austin, where just 5% of students are Black, is also erecting multiple new statues on campus rather than renaming buildings at the request of students. Theyre building a statue of the first group of Black undergraduate students, known as the Precursors, and built another of Julius Whittier, the first African-American letterman on the Longhorns football team.

UT-Austin was one of the only universities in the state that renamed a building in the wake of the summer protests. The Robert L. Moore Building became the Physics, Math and Astronomy Building. Moore was a decorated professor who opposed integration.

Still, students hoped the university would go farther. They had demanded that UT-Austin remove an additional statue and rename six more areas of campus including T.S. Painter Hall. Painter was the university president when Heman Sweatt sued after he was denied admission to UT Law School because he was Black, culminating in the Supreme Court case, Sweatt v. Painter. The university lost, allowing Sweatt to be the first Black person to attend UT Law School in 1950.

Instead of renaming Painter Hall, UT-Austin officials said they would name an entranceway to the building after Sweatt and create a space to honor Sweatt within the building.

It was actually kind of offensive, said Audra Collins, a computer science major at UT-Austin and president of the Association of Black Computer Scientists. To honor Heman Sweatt, you want to put a plaque or dedicate the entrance to the building of his oppressor?

UT-Austins Vice Provost for Diversity Edmund Gordon is leading the effort to honor Sweatt and said he understands the students perspective.

The notion that to just name an entrance after Sweatt within a building named after Painter is ironical, he said. But I would like to be able to continually demonstrate that irony rather than have it changed.

Gordon opposed previous decisions at UT-Austin to remove Confederate statues because he thinks it lets people forget the history and policies that have allowed Black students to remain underrepresented and underserved on campus.

He remembers when the UT System renamed a residence hall that was previously named for William Stewart Simkins, a former UT law professor who fought in the Confederacy and was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The residence was named after Simkins in the 1950s to intimidate Black students after the Supreme Court decision that integrated schools.

If you ask students if they know what the name of [the residence hall] was before, its completely been erased from our memory, Gordon said. And I think thats a problem.

Students also wanted school leaders to address the impact of policing at their own universities. Those calls grew louder as students and activists across the country called for cities to defund police departments and reallocate money to other services.

Systemic racism [has] been developing for centuries. There are no magic wands to wave.

University of Houston graduate students demanded UH stop contracting with Houston police, citing police shootings among city officers there. They also called for anti-racism training for university officers. Other students said majority Black events are over-policed on campus.

Officials launched a slew of committees and work groups to examine UH policies, including policing and security.

University leaders are currently reviewing work group recommendations for possible approval, but no official changes have been made. Students criticized university leaders for not making more tangible changes, arguing there have been too many conversations about racial injustice without meaningful action. A spokesperson defended the universitys efforts.

Our work to confront racial injustice continues, and it remains a University priority, said UH spokesperson Shawn Lindsay. Systemic racism [has] been developing for centuries. There are no magic wands to wave.

Students said theyve watched universities act quickly in other instances.

Typically, if the school administration wants something done relatively quick, it takes a few strokes of a pen, and it's done, said Brian Kirksey, vice president of the Black Student Union This is something that's been an ongoing conversation for a few months now...It's definitely frustrating.

As students across Texas continue to push for change, Black students at Baylor University said they were reminded last semester that true inclusivity and equity will take more than removing statues and adding new scholarships.

This fall, the university would not allow a Black fraternity to show a video that broadly condemned police brutality in the nation as part of an annual family weekend talent show.

Administrators told students it was inappropriate for the intended audience, according to multiple students. Instead, school officials held a separate pre-recorded Zoom discussion about systemic racism on campus with students and faculty where the video was aired.

Inappropriate for the intended audience meant that Baylor did not want to exhibit a video concerning the daily life that we African Americans must live in every day to their intended audience of the white majority, the fraternity said in a statement on Instagram in September.

Baylor administrators defended their decision to move the video to another platform to the Tribune and said the video was viewed more than it would have been at the talent show, which people had to pay to access.

But Black students, who total 6% of student body, said administrators were still limiting when its appropriate to talk about race. The earlier statements from university leaders of support for Black lives over the summer started to ring hollow.

Clearly, that was just another learning opportunity for Baylor to see that they can't pick and choose when they want to stand on different platforms and what they support, said senior Mya Ellington-Williams.

Disclosure: Baylor University, Facebook, Rice University, Texas A&M University, the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Houston and the University of North Texas have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Confederate relics still standing at many Texas universities - The Texas Tribune

Debate to remove the Confederate Monument outside of the Iredell County Government Center – Greensboro News & Record

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The local chapter of the NAACP is hoping to remove this statue in front of Iredell County Government Center in downtown Statesville, N.C.

STAFF REPORT

The fight to remove the Confederate Monument outside of the Iredell County Government Center will continue into 2021 and it could be getting more interesting in the near future.

You said wait until next year after the election, Todd Scott said. Well, the election is over. If you choose not to vote, we will move forward with our plans to the national NAACP to increase their efforts and support to have it removed.

Scott, the president of the Statesville branch of the NAACP, issued that statement to the Iredell County Board of Commissioners during the public comment period on Tuesday night.

Weve been asking for them to do this for decades, Scott said. My mom died in 2019. She was 94, and she could remember talking about it long ago.

The statue, which has long been a target of the local NAACP, gained new notoriety last summer when the group Times4Change began protesting, asking for the statues removal from in front of the county government building.

However, despite the protests, there has been no progress toward a resolution.

That is why Scott is warning the commissioners about the potential of the national and state-level NAACP offices getting involved in the fight.

If I dont hear from (Chairman (James) Mallory) by Monday, Im going to my executive board, Scott said. If I go to them and say I think we should sue, they will pass it to the state and national levels for approval.

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Debate to remove the Confederate Monument outside of the Iredell County Government Center - Greensboro News & Record

Gwinnett County to vote today on removing Confederate monument in Lawrenceville – 11Alive.com WXIA

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The vote is set to be held at 2 p.m.

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. Gwinnett County's board of commissioners will vote today on whether to remove a Confederate monument in Lawrenceville's city square.

The monument has been in place on the grounds of the historic county courthouse since the early 90s when the board of commissioners allowed the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) to erect it there.

Over the last couple of years, it has been the subject of calls for removal numerous times, including by the Lawrenceville City Council, former Gwinnett District Attorney Danny Porter, and various civic groups and organizations.

Many of those calls were renewed this summer during the protests against racial injustice across the country, and with the removal or relocation of Confederate monuments in several cities.

A release sent out by one commissioner, Kirkland Carden, ahead of the vote called the monument "hateful and divisive."

An interfaith group who lobbied for its removal last year said it "glorifies a cause that brutalized the ancestors of many members of our community."

"While the recognition of fallen veterans is important, the placement of such a monument should be given careful consideration," the city council said in a statement last year. "As the City of Lawrenceville prepares to commemorate its bicentennial in 2021, it provides us a unique opportunity for reflection. Symbols and monuments are a tangible connection to our history, creating opportunities to remember our past and inform the ideals and actions that guide us in the present."

The monument itself is a broad stone slab, standing about five or six feet high with the inscription "1861-1865 Lest We Forget" on it.

On one side it says: "In remembrance of the citizens of Gwinnett County who honorably served the Confederate States of America." The other side includes a Winston Churchill quote that says in part "no nation can long survive without pride in its traditions."

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Gwinnett County to vote today on removing Confederate monument in Lawrenceville - 11Alive.com WXIA

Name of Virginias Camp Pendleton will be changed from that of Confederate general; new recommendation due next month – WAVY.com

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VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WAVY) The process to rename Camp Pendleton a military base in Virginia named after a Confederate general is underway.

In a press conference in June, Gov. Ralph Northam said he supported renaming bases that carry Confederate names. After that, he directed his administration to review and recommend a replacement name for Camp Pendleton, which is in Virginia Beach, a governors office spokeswoman said.

A working group, which includes representatives from the Secretariat of Veterans and Defense Affairs and the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, has been reviewing multiple names and will submit its recommendation to Northam by the end of February.

Renaming the Confederate bases from Northam was brought up during a press conference in June during which Northam urged Virginians to take Confederate statues down the right way. In July, legislation went into effect in Virginia allowing localities to remove, relocate or contextualize their Confederate monuments.

Just like the statues, these names are divisive, Northam said during the press conference.

The 2021 National Defense Authorization Act passed by Congress in December also included an amendment cosponsored by U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) to rename other Department of Defense facilities that carry Confederate names.

The three bases impacted by that amendment in Virginia include Fort Lee, Fort Pickett, and Fort AP Hill. They will be renamed over a three-year process.

Do you really expect us to believe that a society that continues to honor those who tried to destroy our country to save slavery will be serious about ending the racial disparities that exist today? You either support the equality of all or you do not. And if you honor those who opposed our equality, indeed, opposed the very notion of our humanity, what hope can we have about overcoming the real time injustices that are manifest all around us? Kaine said in July.

Watch video of Kaines July 2020 floor speech on Confederate nameshere.

Get the free WAVY News App, available for download in the App Store and Google Play, to stay up to date with all your local news, weather and sports, live newscasts and other live events.

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Name of Virginias Camp Pendleton will be changed from that of Confederate general; new recommendation due next month - WAVY.com

Graham Selby: Here’s why the Confederate battle flag is offensive – Conway Daily Sun

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The other day I was driving through Eaton and saw a Confederate flag flying prominently from someones home. It angered me seeing that, especially in light of the attack by white supremacists on our Capitol and parading the Confederate flag inside while someone used an American Flag to beat a police officer.

Why did it anger me? Because the Confederate flag is a symbol of racism. It does not represent a time in our history we should be glorifying. Racism is not, as many believe, hating some because of their color. It is believing that someone of a different color is inferior. Read this excerpt from a speech on March 21, 1861, by Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States:

They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error ... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition ...

He goes on to say that it was God who created the races unequal. He also goes on to espouse many more offensive ideas. The name of the speech is the Cornerstone Speech where slavery is the cornerstone of the new government they proposed to establish. Now do you know why that flag is offensive?

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Graham Selby: Here's why the Confederate battle flag is offensive - Conway Daily Sun

Andy Schmookler: The issue of the Confederacy in America today – Northern Virginia Daily

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The Civil War was a terrible bit of history, not least because it isnt just history. Its still with us.

The ongoing controversies over Confederate monuments and over schools being named after Confederate generals demonstrate that. As do the Confederate flags one sees flying in peoples yards, or pasted on their vehicles.

I sometimes wonder what the people who fly the Stars and Bars would say that flag expresses for them. From my years living in the Shenandoah Valley, what Id expect to hear is that they see the Confederate cause as expressing a noble and brave spirit, defiant of tyranny and defending of the cultures most basic values.

But whatever anyones intended meaning, that flag is also inescapably connected with the realities of history. Its a history centered on a war that got precipitated by the secession from the Union of the slave states in response to the election to the presidency of an anti-slavery candidate (Lincoln).

History makes it crystal clear that what that war was about was slavery.

Thats what the seceding states declared clearly during the months in which they committed themselves to fight that war rather than accept a government that opposed the expansion of slaverys domain into the new lands of the United States.

One of the Confederacys best leaders (its Vice President, Alexander Stephens) called it great moral truth that the white man is superior to the Black, and that the subordination of the Black to the white man is the Blacks natural and moral condition.

(Indeed, the history shows that the defense of slavery was the overriding purpose of practically every political effort the South made in the decades leading up to the Civil War from the war with Mexico to the transcontinental railroad to the Fugitive Slave Act and Dred Scott.)

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 suffices to show that the South had no principled concern with states rights. The notion that the South had some such noble cause was a lie that was concocted right after the war by the South (and that subsequent generations of southerners enforced as the official view of the war).

In addition, the Stars and Bars the flag of the rebels has consistently expressed a spirit of lawlessness:

The states that formed the Confederacy acted unconstitutionally when they unilaterally decided against the views of the president of the United States that they had the right to secede. Law obligated the South to assert in the Courts the rights it claimed.

Many in the South e.g. with the KKK acted lawlessly to overthrow Reconstruction and to terrorize the Blacks back into submission.

And this month, the mixture of Confederate flags with Trump banners among the lawless insurrectionists who overran the Capitol building and disrupted the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimate election suggests that same disrespect for the law is still connected with the persistent spirit of the Confederacy.

But those historic realities are not the way the people who nowadays fly the Stars and Bars and those who protest the renaming of schools see the Confederacy.

Seeing the Confederacy as heroic, they make heroes of Generals like Stonewall Jackson who fought for the noble cause of the slave power.

Hence the dilemma about the school names:

On the one hand, the historic truth shows reasons that is regrettable for a community to choose school names that declare the Confederacy at the heart of that communitys identity.

But on the other hand, changing the name of a school like Shenandoah Countys Stonewall Jackson High School comes up against the persistent reality that the spirit of the Confederacy albeit based on a false image still lives deep in the hearts and minds of a lot of people.

Whats the best way to deal with that dilemma particularly in an area where pro-Confederacy allegiance still predominates?

It is important to remember: what matters is the spirit that dwells in the culture. And that culture gets defined much more fundamentally by whats in the hearts and minds of the people than by mere names on buildings.

Clearly, just signaling a change that has not occurred i.e. taking the name of a Confederate general off a building doesnt move the culture in the desired direction.

Indeed, here in Shenandoah County, it has apparently done the opposite provoking a flare-up that reinforces the very sense of identification it would be desirable to change. A flare-up with hundreds of citizens feeling provoked to punish some fine public servants from the county School Board for their well-intentioned efforts to move the area toward a healthier relationship both with history, and with some important values.

What might have worked better to move hearts and minds?

Perhaps the establishment of a process of constructive conversation around the issues raised by question of renaming. A process structured to facilitate the issues being debated in a fashion that educates.

Instead of a decision, a proposal to discuss.

My sense is the fine educators on the Shenandoah County School Board would be capable of fostering such a discussion.

Whats needed for greater peace to replace the conflict that the Civil War still generates is education that enables the truth to gain ground against the lie.

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Andy Schmookler: The issue of the Confederacy in America today - Northern Virginia Daily

Letter to the editor: Honor Black citizens with grand counterpoint to Confederate monument – The Augusta Chronicle

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Tennent Houston| Augusta

Augustas Confederate Monuments and Landmarks Task Force has recently made public its recommendations to the city government, one of which is the removal of the Confederate monumentfrom Broad Street. Mayor Hardie Davis is to be commended for approaching the volatile issue of historic structures and names in such a measured and reasonable manner.

But I think there is a much better solution than moving the existing monument. Instead, leave this statue in place but also erect an equally grand and prominent monument, perhaps on upper Broad Street, to the Black struggle for equality and to their contributions to our community and country.

We should note that while Springfield Village Park already recognizes the rich heritage of the historic church of that name and other Black citizens of Augusta, we lack a suitably prominent monument to recognize the magnitude of what Augustas Black citizens have suffered through the injustices of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, discrimination and racism. Nor do we have an appropriate monument to recognize the importance of what they have contributed to our citys long history.

So why dont we work together to build a grand counterpoint to the Confederate memorial, perhaps on upper Broad Street, to honor our Black citizens? Would not these complementary bookends better reflect the hopes and aspirations of Augusta today? Wouldnt it be better for us all to work together constructively to make our city better? I believe that such an effort would enjoy such broad and enthusiastic support and would be an effort in which we could all take pride.

Tennent Houston, Augusta

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Letter to the editor: Honor Black citizens with grand counterpoint to Confederate monument - The Augusta Chronicle

Is the populist tide ebbing? Despite Donald Trumps impending departure, growing global populism is still po – The Times of India Blog

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Donald Trumps departure from office on Wednesday, after his historic second impeachment, will be welcomed by many who decry the rise of global populism. Yet Trump is a symptom, not a cause, of populism whose rise may continue into the 2020s fuelled by the aftermath of the coronavirus crisis.

As of 2020, some 2 billion of the worlds population was governed by populist leaders, including the more than 300 million US populace, according to academic research from the Global Populism Database a comprehensive tracker of populist discourse. That data, from an international network of academics, analysed speeches through textual analysis of key leaders in 40 countries during the last two decades.

What the research found is that leaders from across different continents won power through common campaign tactics, including attacking multinational organisations, so-called fake media, and immigrants. And this electoral success is itself a microcosm of a wider upending of the tectonic plates of the global political landscape.

The research found that, some 20 years ago, only a handful of states with populations over 20 million including Italy, Argentina and Venezuela had leaders classified as populists through their speeches. This was an era that saw the controversial billionaire businessman Silvio Berlusconi as a right-of-centre maverick prime minister in Rome, presaging the rise of Trump; and Hugo Chvez as Venezuelan president.

This-then relatively small populist club expanded significantly during the aftermath of the 2007-08 international financial crisis. But it was not until the last half a dozen years that there has been the biggest rise in populism.

To be sure, there are still some limits on the rise of populism with a significant number of countries including Canada, France and Germany never having a governmental leader in the post-war era that has used populist rhetoric. However, even in these states, the share of the vote going to populist political parties has tripled since 1998.

The research highlights that this latest wave of populism is just one of several over the last several hundred years. Populism has been a recurrent phenomenon in the United States, for instance. Andrew Jackson, who served as US president from 1829 to 1837, won the moniker King Mob and some have drawn comparisons between him and Trump.

However, this latest wave of populism has cast a bigger footprint than perhaps ever before. The Global Populism Database indicates some 2 billion people are therefore today governed by a somewhat/ moderately populist, populist or very populist leader, an increase from 120 million at the turn of the millennium, with the research calling out leaders like Indias Narendra Modi as belonging in the populist camp.

Another key finding is how shades of populism differ across the world. In South America, populism leans towards socialism, albeit with Jair Bolsonaro as a key outlier, whereas current populists in Europe tend to be right of centre.

Looking to the future, one key question is whether this populist phenomenon will tail off in coming years. While that is possible, there is a plausible case that populism will grow. It should be remembered here that, while Trump lost in November, he won more votes than in 2016, and would most likely have been re-elected had the pandemic not struck.

Populism will likely remain at historically high levels for the foreseeable future for two reasons.

First, the coronavirus crisis has triggered a deeper, wider global recession than after the financial crisis of just over a decade ago. While the world is still in the midst of the corona crisis, it is already clear it will be the deepest recession since the World War II, with the largest fraction of economies experiencing declines in per capita output since at least 1870 according to the World Bank.

Yet, it is not just the absolute decline in economic output, but also rising economic inequality that is key. While some affluent cohorts have seen their wealth increase since the pandemic began, including through a booming stock market in many countries, poorer people have often seen their incomes stagnate or worse.

There is also an inter-generational impact too with young people disproportionately likely to lose their jobs. This puts countries at risk of long-term damage to earnings potential and job prospects, fuelling political discontent.

Second, there are some factors completely unrelated to the current economic slump that may also drive greater populism. This includes the disruptive and mobilising role of social media.

There remains debate about how instrumental social media has been in fomenting political populism in recent years. However, whether one sees this new technology as an essential component that translated discontent into concrete support for populism, or accentuated what was already inevitable, indisputably it has played an enabling role that may only grow.

Taken together, Trumps toppling is a setback for global populism, but it cannot be assumed that this political phenomenon has now peaked. The coronavirus crisis has increased the prospect of further political and economic instability in the 2020s which social media may help mobilise.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

END OF ARTICLE

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Is the populist tide ebbing? Despite Donald Trumps impending departure, growing global populism is still po - The Times of India Blog

That Old-Time Southern Populism – The American Prospect

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On January 5th, Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won their critically important races as populists. Within 24 hours, the recently defeated president, whom mainstream scribblers had also carelessly once labeled a populist, was inciting his followers to storm Congress in a bid to hold onto power as an unelected ruler.

It was a stunning split screen. Less than a full day after Georgians elected only the second Black Southerner to the Senate since the Civil War, along with a young Jewish investigative journalist, Trump loyalists were smashing their way into the Capitol Building, draped in the flag of a vanquished slave empire. And though weve spent four years designating Trumpism as the epitome of a 21st-century populist movement, when you look at both of these events in tandemthe arguments made, the villains cast, and the vision laid out for the futureits clear who the torchbearers of populism are.

More from Eli Day

Take a look at Ossoff and Warnocks closing arguments. They werent ballads to restoring civility or returning to the chummy, backslapping days when Republicans and Democrats would come together to destroy welfare or pursue horrific wars of aggression. Want a $2,000 check? Vote Warnock was actual ad copy from the Warnock campaign, a raw appeal to peoples material concerns. It linked up nicely with Ossoffs jugular attacks, casting Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue (both former CEOs) as a pair of self-serving elites, feasting lavishly at a time when millions face starvation. Were running against the Bonnie and Clyde of corruption in American politics, Ossoff hammered. Who, when they learned about the pandemic that was bearing down on our shores, their first call was to their stockbrokers.

One side of the screen shows us what can happen when a multiracial movement fights to widen political possibility and improve the lives of ordinary people, forming a new Southern Populism that echoes the original. The other has climaxed in a white supremacist explosion on behalf of a wealthy scam artist turned authoritarian who faithfully serves the rich and built his political fortunes on a very old divide-and-conquer blueprint that was first laid out by populisms enemies.

As Thomas Frank writes in The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, Populism was the first of Americas great economic uprisings, a roar of outrage from people in the lower half of the countrys social order against an inequitable system [of] elite failure. This was Ossoff and Warnocks closing argument in a nutshell. More importantly, it describes the network of independent progressive groups that powered them to victory, and which show no signs of simply relying on the goodwill of powerful figures, even friendly ones, to deliver the progressive agenda theyve called for.

Even Joe Biden, who often mimicked the pointless rage of budget warriors as a senator and vice president, felt the populist currents coursing through Georgia. If you send Jon and the Reverend to Washington, he said at an election eve rally, those $2,000 checks will go out the door. History will show this to be important for more reasons than anyone can count. First and most critically, these victories and the populist currents that carried them have big implications for what Democrats can do, now that they control all three branches of government. Second and more subtly, it answers a question that has ricocheted across more than a century of Southern politics: whether a message that links racial unity with progressive economic policy can win in the South.

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To state the obvious, Democrats must now actually wield the power they have. Its true that the phrase Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is a tune so sweet you have to play it back a few times. But if Democrats want it to last, they cant repeat the mistakes that got them wiped out in the 2010 midterm elections. Namely, they must implement measures that improve peoples lives. There is no excuse, including the very abolishable filibuster, for failing to do this. Democrats have the ability to enact an aggressive economic agenda as millions face mass poverty, starvation, and eviction; to address our rapidly frying planet; to protect and expand workers bargaining power; and to install a robust voting rights regime. If Congress wont budge, President Biden can accomplish at least some of these advances by his own authority. And blue states can take it even further.

But like any populism worth its salt, progressives cant depend on the goodwill of powerful people. It will likely take constant shoves from the partys left-wing grassroots to achieve anything of lasting significance. After all, their majority was secured on these expectations.

Organizing and populist messaging turned out liberal voters, despite the lack of a Trump bogeyman on the ticket.

IT WAS A POPULIST VISION of economic relief and a greater say in democracy that inspired organizers and everyday people to sweep across Georgia to rally the troops for the January 5th runoff elections. I hung out with a few of them while reporting there. Shauna Coco Swearington of Marietta, Georgia, for instance, knocked doors every day, six days a week, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., she tells me. She let me tag along one afternoon, in one of Atlantas working-class Black neighborhoods. Coco was one of nearly 1,000 UNITE HERE canvassers who barely rested between the general election and the Senate runoff races. She told me that when COVID-19 hit, she was displaced from her job of 25 years as a server at the Westin hotel in Atlanta. So now Im out of health insurance, she explained. Ive got diabetes and heart disease. I need my medications. So it was very important for me to get on this campaign.

By winning the Senate, Coco hoped to see worker-friendly policies that provide job security for those who have been laid off, increase the minimum wage, and make it easier for workplaces to unionize. She also recognized that working people are uniquely positioned to tag each other into the fight.

Were the common people, were the people out there in the trenches doing the work, she said. So who better to tell you, This is my story, and this is why you need to go out and vote because this could be your story too. Her point is simple: Working people are the most convincing messengers on working-class concerns. And its even better if theyre empowered by political campaigns to talk to people about bread-and-butter ideas like getting cold hard cash into working peoples hands. In Georgia, where 48 percent of people are reportedly poor or low-income, that turned out to be a winning message.

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Bidens historic victory in the Peach State was different. He eked out a win in Georgia thanks to a one-two punch: Stacey Abramss strategy of increasing turnout by tapping into an army of unregistered young people and people of color, and more importantly, suburban nausea with Trump, which gave big margins in the metro Atlanta suburbs to the Biden-Harris ticket. Despite the suburban reversal, Trump still came within inches of victory, and improved his numbers with voters of color. As Jamelle Bouie writes in The New York Times, that likely had something to do with Republicans being in power when the government put a lot of money into the hands of a lot of people who didnt have it before, and, on the flip side, Democrats failure to put forward a compelling economic vision. Indeed, Biden promised during the campaign that nothing would fundamentally change.

With Trump on the sidelines, many pundits thought Georgia might be at the mercy of big money and Republican entreaties to stop socialism. What they largely missed was that an electorally powerful fusion dance had taken place. On one side, organizers did an extraordinary job keeping the states diverse electorate engaged. Turnout rates were almost at presidential levels, unheard of in these typically sleepy runoffs. And Black voters, Democrats most reliable and most neglected voting bloc, came out at even more impressive rates, decidedly fueling the runoff victories. This should humble anyone who thinks that no amount of organizing will change the reality that only the most obsessive voters show up to off-cycle elections.

On the other side, Ossoff and Warnock started arguing that the government has a duty to ensure everyones basic survival, calling for a $15 minimum wage, $2,000 emergency checks, and reopening closed hospitals, because health care is a human right, not just a privilege for those who can afford it or live in the right ZIP code. As Anat Shenker-Osorio, a leading researcher and voice on progressive messaging, puts it, In the waning days they did an incredible job of providing an affirmative narrative: This is what we stand for, this is what we believe in, this is the kind of Georgia and country that we can have [it was] obviously incredibly effective.

The combination of organizing and populist messaging turned out liberal voters, Black and white, despite the lack of a Trump bogeyman on the ticket. The Biden win is what can happen when you have a historically unpopular opponent riling up the base. The Ossoff and Warnock wins are more sustainable, less reliant on the opponent. And they signal a winning formula for a new Southern populism, one that braids together the regions rich diversity with a wildly popular economic message. Until now, Democrats had barely wrapped their hands around the first. But after years of unsuccessfully chasing white moderates across the South, the Georgia runoffs uncorked a model for competing.

Its one that has been there all along.

GEORGIAS POPULIST STORY, like the countrys, is nearly 150 years old, and unfolds across a vast ecosystem of independent, grassroots organizing. The message to working people has always been straightforward: The business and political class are concentrating greater and greater amounts of wealth and power. They are numerically tiny and see our unity as a threat to be eliminated. But by recognizing our shared fates, and pooling our enormous numbers, we can whip the money power and rearrange our institutions to satisfy the public good.

When Georgias first populist wave touched down in the late 1800s, King Cotton had only recently been dethroned. The Civil War had just liberated four million kidnapped humans from unpaid labor, representing an epic expropriation of private property paved with 750,000 dead soldiers. Almost immediately, some of these newly freed people pointed out that their wage labor looked an awful lot like forced labor.

In an 1883 speech, Frederick Douglass argued that The man who has it in his power to say to a man you must work the land for me, for such wages as I choose to give, has a power of slavery over him as real, if not as complete, as he who compels toil under the lash.

Douglass was teeing up his main argument. Since every worker was at the mercy of the boss, unity between Black and white workers was the key to overcoming the petty tyrants who ordered them around. Just as importantly, he warned, it is a great mistake for any class of laborers to isolate itself. Instead, there should be a strong bond of brotherhood between those who shoulder the hardships of labor. With unity comes strength, in other words, and if white workers could overcome the myth that they were members of a special skin aristocracy, then working people might finally be able to organize and combine for [their] own protection. Otherwise, there would be no end in sight to the sharp contrast of wealth and poverty in which the landowner is becoming richer and the laborer poorer. The Populist Party wouldnt have its launch party for another decade, but Douglass already had the battle lines clearly drawn.

For a brief and bright moment, there were signs that white laborers wanted in. When the Populist Party formed in 1892, Georgia was one of its most powerful outposts. Emerging from the ashes of the old Farmers Alliance, their assessment was simple: The countrys economic and political systems loyally served the rich at the expense of everyone else. Outraged by the Gilded Ages runaway inequality, the populists called for an egalitarian alternative, including aid for struggling farmers, expanded voting rights, and public ownership of key industries like railroads.

The connection to Douglasss argument was clear. And though we dont have any uplifting multiracial team chants to show for it, many white farmers saw the obvious strategic importance of linking arms with their Black peers in the fight for a fairer world. (Black farmers, who wanted to join the Alliance but were pushed into separate, second-string groups, did not need to be convinced of the importance of working-class unity.) But it would all be pitifully short-lived.

Just because attacks appealing to racial disunity are predictable does not make their success inevitable.

A monument to Tom Watson, a giant of Georgia populism, sits across the street from the state Capitol in Atlanta. In an 1892 essay titled The Negro Question in the South, Watson argued that a union of Black and white workers would have flung the money power into the dust years ago. The crushing burdens which now oppress both races in the South, he added, will force them to become political allies and on these broad lines of mutual interest the present will be made the stepping-stone to future peace and prosperity.

But like its counterparts across the country, Georgias populist vessel was partly devoured from the inside. Watson would eventually win a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1920, long after the Populist Partys official demise and only after swapping out pleas for interracial cooperation with brutal political and social repression of Black Americans, writes James Cobb, one of Georgias leading historians. Where he had once courted Black workers, Watson was now calling for their total disenfranchisement. Where he had once urged that lynching be made odious to whites, he now argued lynch law is a good sign that a sense of justice yet lives among the people.

Reading it now, its almost as if the 1892 essay was a warning letter to his future self. The earlier Watson saw clearly that all workers had a similarity of cause and a similarity of remedy, and that you are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of financial despotism which enslaves you both. Future Watson said to hell with all that. By his own standards, racist tirades obviously undermined the actual goals of populism. But they had narrow perks for an ambitious Georgian at the turn of the 20th century.

I want to be careful here. The Populist Party had many powerful archenemies, including the economic royalists Franklin Roosevelt would eventually battle. Theres plenty of blame to go around for its demise. That includes the Tom Watsons of the world, who sat on the inside of this promising vehicle for working-class power and started shooting out the tires before it could really take off.

Its important to note, however, that Watson betrayed populisms core principles. What made populism distinct was its diagnosis of what caused economic suffering in the country, and the target of its fury. Racism poisons every corner of American political life, and the populists were no exception. But, Frank writes, populists were not the great villains of the eras racist system. That dishonor went to the movements archenemies in the southern Democratic Party, leaders who were absolutely clear about their commitment to white supremacy. Populism, with its emphasis on broad working-class unity, was an attack on these doctrines and the elites who depended on them. If you undermined that unity, then you undermined the populist mission itself.

Watsons story is so bizarre. It plays out like a twisted Shakespearian plot twist, except Watson does the double-crossing himself. By his own assessment, he ended up strengthening the hand of the exact group of wealthy landowners the populists furiously opposed, who stood to gain enormously from driving white and Black workers apart. But Watsons ambition got in the way of his stated goals.

OTHERS WOULD FOLLOW. Episodes like the Savannah longshoremen strike of 1891 signaled the staying power of divide-and-conquer politics. That fall, nearly 2,500 Black workers walked off their jobs at the docks, demanding higher wages, overtime pay, and union recognition. According to Temple Universitys massive archival Black Worker series, a committee of the Savannah commercial leaders organized to break the strikers will. Since Black workers refused to cross the strike line, company officials decided to hire white replacements. What could have been a remarkable example of Black and white workers winning concrete gains only confirmed that race could be used to divide the working class.

Just because attacks appealing to racial disunity are predictable does not make their success inevitable. As Ns Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, one of the many organizing groups working to activate voters of color, says, There is a long history of radical resistance all across the state of Georgia. Popular movements like the abolitionist, womens, civil rights, and labor movements successfully dragged the United States to greater levels of human decency, and all have deep roots in the American South. Labor unions, for example, were arguably at their most dangerous when they teamed up with the civil rights movement, combining calls for racial and workplace justice based on the belief that economic security and anti-discrimination were joined at the hip, as Thomas Sugrue, professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University, says.

Georgias own Dr. King spoke frequently before labor unions and their federations. In a letter to the Amalgamated Laundry Workers in 1962, King wrote: The coalition that can have the greatest impact in the struggle for human dignity here in America is that of the Negro and the forces of labor, because their fortunes are so closely intertwined. Kings final mission before his death was in support of striking Black sanitation workers in Memphis.

King also constantly warned of the dangers of failing to directly address the deadly power of racism to wipe out working-class unity. In his 1965 remarks concluding the Selma-to-Montgomery march, King described a southern aristocracy shaken to its core by the threat of poor Black and white people coming together as equals. To prevent this, the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow, which he ate when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide. This, he said, perhaps with Tom Watson in mind, eventually destroyed the Populist Movement. As Thomas Frank writes, King was suggesting that the movement of the 1890s had an obvious modern counterpart. Working people of both races could come together once more to build a nation of justice and plenty.

But the opposition, determined to keep workers segregated by race, in proximity and in consciousness, had modern counterparts too. Before civil rights legislation and working-class solidarity could even get off the ground, they were dusting off the predictable playbook: Flood the zone with enough racist garbage to split the coalition.

You have likely heard of its most infamous update: the Republican Partys Southern strategy. Launched by Richard Nixon and echoed by fanatical champions across the country, including Georgians like Lester Maddox and Newt Gingrich, conservatives began serving up white resentment like hotcakes, gobbling up the Southern political map in the process. This came to be known as the cultural leg of the Republicans three-legged stool. The other two were nonstop fist-pumping for war and worship of free markets. But those either dont reliably move people to vote, in the case of endless war, or actually repulse them, in the case of wildly unpopular conservative ideas like cuts to the social safety net and tax breaks for the rich. The economic and military legs of the stool get you corporate campaign donations; they do not get you votes.

Long before Trump, conservative stars like Nixon, Gingrich, and Ronald Reagan would hammer elites for looking down their nose at everyday people. These seeds would eventually blossom into the Tea Party and the Trump campaign, long before being rebranded as right-wing populism. All the while, the GOPs actual agenda has remained slavishly devoted to the countrys increasingly powerful business class. Trumps signature legislation, remember, was a $1.9 trillion tax cut for the wealthy.

Until recently, the Southern strategy was treated as nearly irreversible. The best Democrats could do was hold onto a few seats and prevent the rest of the country from being swallowed by a sea of red. But the math is changing.

Before Bidens surprise victory, Democrats had not won a presidential race in Georgia since 1992. For years, they told themselves that winning statewide office required at least 30 percent of the white electorate. This meant becoming a bootleg Republican Party: worshiping markets, dedicating themselves to world domination, and repeating right-wing bullshit about the moral decline of Black and poor people. It was designed to cleave off enough of a slice of the white vote to earn a victory. The typical messenger was a nondescript white man: John Barrow, Roy Barnes, Max Cleland, Zell Miller, Jimmy Carters grandson Jason.

Georgia Democrats rarely pushed that boulder uphill. The last Democratic gubernatorial victory was in 1998. By 2006, just three DemocratsBlack officeholders Thurbert Baker (attorney general) and Mike Thurmond (labor commissioner), and 42-year agriculture commissioner Tommy Irvinmanaged to win statewide. By 2010, the entire suite of statewide officers were Republican, and it stayed that way for a decade.

Stacey Abrams offered an alternative to this losing scenario. After entering the Georgia House of Representatives in 2007, she proposed that the party instead focus on mobilizing young people and people of color, who voice their disgust with politics by finding better things to do with their time.

Though Abrams didnt win the governors seat in 2018, she came within 55,000 votes, closer than any Democrat in recent history. She only won 25 percent of the white vote, supposedly a disqualifying condition. But Abrams put up unparalleled numbers with Black, Latino, and Asian American voters, bringing her within a few disenfranchised votes of victory. As FiveThirtyEight reported, Georgias blue turn is unimaginable without Abramss years-long project to juice turnout among people of color, even if the greater factor in the Biden victory was genuine suburban horror at Trumps rotten personality.

With the victories by Ossoff and Warnock, Georgias political math has been recalculated. Neither candidate hit 30 percent of the white vote, though they came close. A new and more liberal electorate attracted to the fast-growing Atlanta metro area has made those numbers more reachable. And the runoffs spotlighted the overwhelming power of voters of color, including in Black rural areas, which saw presidential-level turnout. These Democratic voters came to the polls in enough numbers to win because Ossoff and Warnock actually offered them something; populist messaging and multiracial organizing went hand in hand. The old wisdom about what it takes to win in Georgia has been shaken like an Etch A Sketch.

The failed strategy of Kelly Loefflers loss reveals a conservative movement that has nothing to offer and knows it.

THE QUESTION NOW IS how to make sure it lasts. True to the populist tradition, every Georgia organizer I spoke with stressed the importance of building an independent progressive movement that haunts the dreams of politicians across the country to ensure they actually deliver for working people. Not a single organizer talked about how excited they were to go home and hope for the best, now that Democrats have a Senate majority. They see this as a time to apply relentless pressure to ensure a positive progressive agenda is carried out.

The issues that are paramount to Black womens lives just dont get the air they deserve. Black women dont get asked, Whats important to you? What do you need? says Malika Redmond, the co-founder and executive director of Women Engaged, an Atlanta-based organization that fights for social change through voter engagement and reproductive justice advocacy. Redmonds organization knows that they cannot rely on mainstream institutions or parties to seriously address their priorities without constant activism. Women Engaged works to generate something that we can hold the powerful accountable for, Redmond says.

Each organizer was clear about the difficult battles ahead. Elections are a snapshot of a moment in time, says Gwen Mills, the secretary-treasurer of UNITE HERE. They tell us how much organized power there is and who you can get elected at a particular time. After a short breather, Mills says, its back to organizing in the streets and workplaces. You have to keep the grassroots fire burning, Mills says, because the power and the money behind the corporate lobby is just staggering. In other words, elections may clarify where things stand or even modestly improve the battle terrain, but they have very limited firepower beyond that.

Building a strong working-class army requires addressing the weak spots that the opposition exploits and, as weve seen, has always exploited. People of color make up about half of Georgias population (though still 39 percent of the vote, even in the Senate runoffs). And since racism is also a weapon used to loot the countrys most vulnerablethink housing segregation, income and wealth inequalityworking-class issues are Black and brown issues.

One thing we know is that if were not talking to our members, somebody else is, says Marlene Patrick-Cooper, president of UNITE HERE Local 23, which covers a large swath of the South. All over the country, there has always been an employer goal to divide the workers. This is a lesson from the School of Hard Knocks. For decades, divide-and-conquer tactics have eroded unions, weakening their defenses against demolition efforts like right to work. As a result, union membership was pushed off a cliff in recent decades, falling from one-third of workers in the 1950s to barely 10 percent today. That fall tied weights to the ankles of wages, and they havent gone anywhere meaningful since.

Instead of running from the problem, UNITE HERE is tackling the racial history of right to work head-on, Patrick-Cooper says. The union has established a two-day training session, where members learn how racism created cracks wide enough to ram policies like right to work through countless statehouses. You cannot be successful as a union if you dont have solidarity on the shop floor, if workers dont all stand together, Mills adds.

This is the kind of key defensive tactic that makes an offense possible. If solidarity isnt built between elections, and if unions and other independent sources of power cannot secure concrete gains for working people between elections, then their coalitions will be repeatedly torn to pieces and forced to scramble frantically once election season rolls around. After all, it was the combination of long-term anti-racist work and Southern progressives positive vision for the future that made Georgia competitive in the first place.

Consider the split screen again. The conservative movement not only has a wildly unpopular agenda, but cultural resentment, warmongering, and free-market cultism just dont pack the same electoral punch they once did. As Brooklyn College professor and author of The Reactionary Mind Corey Robin puts it, the reason Republicans under Trump have been turning up the volume on white rage isnt because its powers are growing. They hope that the noise will compensate for the fact that conservatism is actually weaker than it has ever been. White identity pays out thinner and thinner dividends to an increasingly miserable base.

As Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton show, deaths of despair already had life expectancy for middle-aged white people declining before COVID-19. The same population who fueled the right-wing march that started 40 years ago is poorer than they were at the beginning, and they are arriving at deaths door ahead of schedule. During that time, the rights agenda has dominated everywhere: privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for the rich and destruction of the countrys already pitiful social welfare state, not to mention violent opposition to civil rights gains like desegregation. Everybody hates this agenda, with the possible exception of overthrowing the gains of the civil rights movement, a truly American pastime beloved by liberals and conservatives alike.

The point is, bigotry is all thats left for the right. Kelly Loeffler, for instance, spent the runoff election blowing 150-year-old dog whistles in a losing campaign as grotesquely racist as any fire-breathing segregationists. She routinely painted her opponent, a Black pastor who preaches where Dr. King once stood, as a radical liberal hell-bent on bringing socialism and Marxism upon these delicate shores. Loeffler and Perdue cant run as themselves. They cant run promising anything, Shenker-Osorio tells me. Because they dont stand for anything that most people want. So the only thing left to them, and the Republican Party more broadly, is to try to scare people about the other side and to try to trade on and kind of exacerbate peoples feelings of resentment.

Warnock counterprogrammed with campaign ads of him with puppies, offering a cuddly portrait. But more important, he countered with policy, populist progressive policy, meant to improve peoples lives and fortunes. Loefflers flailing race-based appeal fell short.

Her satisfying defeat, of course, does not mean that the right has been defanged. The last decade has provided explosive evidence for Robins warning that weak movements can be dangerous movements, leading right up to a clumsy but still highly organized insurrection. But the failed and tired strategy of her loss does reveal a movement that has nothing to offer and knows it.

They are now in survival mode. Everyone from Donald Trump to Mike Lee to Lindsey Graham admits that the Republican Party must either snuff out democracy itself or be snuffed out themselves. Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman has been carefully chronicling the entire landscape of modern-day poll taxes and booby traps theyve laid out to mutilate voting rights for Black and brown and poor people. So heres what we have: an agenda that deposits larger and larger shares of the nations wealth into the bank accounts of a tiny few while basically telling everyone else, Good luck and God bless, as they face avoidable crises like poverty, starvation, medical bankruptcy, and homelessness. And at the same time, they are working furiously to get the eligible voting pool back down to its 18th-century size because they cannot survive otherwise.

This is the phony populism of the right. The original populist uprising, of course, had its share of hideous blemishes. But in terms of actual principles, todays conservative movement is basically populisms evil twin. It may dress itself up in populist clothing sometimes, but when you compare their deeper worldviews and aspirations, they clash furiously.

On the other screen, progressive and left-wing grassroots organizations are trying to fling the doors of democracy open wider to enact a sweeping progressive agenda. Georgia is absolutely bursting with them. The immigrant rights organization Mijente apparently contacted every Latino voter in the state during the runoff election. According to a press release, the New Georgia Project reached out to Georgians through more than 10 million calls, texts and door knocks. Peoples Action, a network of state and local grassroots organizations, called 1.2 million low-propensity voters: students, Asian Americans, and voters in rural areas. They held over 23,000 in-depth deep canvass conversations and got well over half of those voters to turn out for Ossoff and Warnock. Black Voters Matter spent the runoff zigzagging through often-neglected Black corners of the state. And UNITE HERE also passed the one-million-door threshold.

For many observers, the runoffs were a referendum on whether Georgias multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, progressive majority, as Ns Ufot put it in a recent Intercept story, was sustainable. Could a genuine populist movement, one built on working-class solidarity across difficult fault lines, have enough punching power to whoop the far right in the Deep South? January 5th provided an answer, though the work goes on.

Read more here:

That Old-Time Southern Populism - The American Prospect

All Quiet on the Populist Front? by Jan-Werner Mueller – Project Syndicate

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Because every country is different, the ignominious exit of a political figure like US President Donald Trump does not necessarily tell us anything about the fate of authoritarian populists elsewhere. Just as populists tend to learn from one another's successes, so will they heed others' mistakes.

BERLIN Liberals around the world are daring to hope that there is a silver lining to the violent denouement of Donald Trumps presidency: namely, that the inciter-in-chiefs ignominious exit from the political stage will chasten authoritarian populists elsewhere. Unfortunately, their optimism is naive.

Contrary to the clich about a populist wave sweeping the world in recent years, the rise and fall of populist leaders tends not to have significant transnational effects. Just as there is no honor among thieves, there was no solidarity among the supposed Populist International when it really mattered. Trump chums like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and even Russian President Vladimir Putin ultimately acknowledged Joe Bidens electoral victory.

More important, while Trump has been omnipresent, he has never been a typical populist. Right-wing populists in government tend to be more careful when it comes to maintaining a faade of legality and avoiding direct association with street violence. Because the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 was clearly a sign of desperation, it does not necessarily foreshadow the fate of populist (and radical right-wing) movements elsewhere. The only real takeaway is that other populist kleptocrats might also resort to violent street mobilizations if they are ever truly cornered.

Liberals often claim to appreciate the world in all its complexity, whereas populists are great simplifiers. But it is liberals who have pushed the highly simplistic narrative of a global populist wave, as if one need not consider particular national contexts very carefully.

According to this domino theory which was enthusiastically embraced by populists themselves Trumps unexpected triumph in 2016 was supposed to trigger victories for right-wing populists in Austria, the Netherlands, and France. In fact, the opposite happened. In Austria, Norbert Hofer, the presidential candidate of the far-right Freedom Party, lost after adopting Trumpist antics that made him seem un-presidential. In the Netherlands, the far-right demagogue Geert Wilders had Trumps endorsement but ultimately underperformed. And in France, Marine Le Pens loss to Emmanuel Macron in the 2017 presidential election confirmed what had already become clear: Euro-Trumpism might not be such an effective strategy after all.

It should go without saying that what works in one political culture might not work in others. Much also depends on the decisions of actors who are not populists themselves: In the US case, Trump benefited from the collaboration of established conservative elites and the Republican Party. In fact, with the possible exception of Italy, no right-wing populist party has come to power in Western Europe or North America without conscious help from supposedly center-right actors (most of whom have never been held accountable for their role in mainstreaming the far right).

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Moreover, even if the parties and governance styles associated with right-wing populism end up resembling each other, it does not follow that the rise of populists has the same root causes everywhere. A much more likely explanation for the similarities is that populist leaders have selectively learned from one another.

For example, it is now standard populist practice to pressure pesky nongovernmental organizations through ostensibly neutral legal changes. In what some observers have called autocratic legalism, many right-wing populists in power studiously follow formal rules and practices to maintain a patina of neutrality and create plausible deniability for political acts. Unlike Trump, these leaders understand that street violence by an uncontrollable movement could trigger a backlash both within their own country and among international audiences.

Even where violence is de facto encouraged, as with the persecution of Muslims in India under the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, figures like Modi are careful not to go on record with statements that might be interpreted as direct incitement. Similarly, the Hungarian government relentlessly traffics in racist and anti-Semitic tropes, but Prime Minister Viktor Orbn is careful never to go beyond loud dog whistles, lest he endanger his crucial relationships with the German Christian Democrats and the German car industry.

To be sure, if cornered, any populist might resort to Trumps endgame methods: trying to coerce elites into committing fraud to prevent a transfer of power, or deploying right-wing extremists on the ground to intimidate lawmakers. These desperate acts signaled Trumps weakness. But it is important to note that most Republicans still did not disown Trump even when confronted with his blatant lawlessness on January 6.

Other right-wing populists may well take notice of this fact. The recent events in the United States have shown that elites who are prepared to collaborate with authoritarians will tolerate quite a lot in the end. This ignominious precedent is especially likely to hold true in other countries where crony capitalism has implicated the business community in illegal behavior.

Populists cleverer than Trump smother democracy slowly through legal and constitutional machinations. But right-wing populist kleptocracies based on a fusion of big business and bigotry, in the words of the Indian journalist Kapil Komireddi, might not go down quietly.

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All Quiet on the Populist Front? by Jan-Werner Mueller - Project Syndicate

Inoculating the masses against demagogic populism – The Kathmandu Post

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Prime Minister KP Sharma Olis political fate hangs in the balance. With Nepali Congress taking an oppositional stand, his status as the ethnonational chieftain stands challenged. Though nothing is ever certain in the game of politics, a vertical division in the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) appears to be a foregone conclusion. He is no longer the Supremo that once held sway over the polity and society of the country.

The decision of dissolving the Pratinidhi Sabha in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic is comparable to the declaration of promulgating a contested statute in the middle of Gorkha Earthquake aftershocks through the 16-point conspiracy. But five years after his phenomenal rise as the saviour of Khas-Arya pride, Oli has lost his charisma due to failures on all fronts.

The economy is in shambles. Allegations of corruption in high places are rife. Nepotism, favouritism and quid pro quo in political appointments have become the norm. The prime minister has fallen so low in public esteem that even nominations made upon the recommendations of the Constitutional Council have failed to escape scrutiny.

If details of court proceedings that have seeped into the public sphere are anything to go by, lawyers appear to have a very strong case for the restoration of the Pratinidhi Sabha. Such an eventuality may impel Oli to take even more desperate actions.

Among the three principal outside players in Nepali politics, it seems the Chinese were the first to lose confidence in the sincerity of the person they had helped become the chief of a fraternal communist party wedded to the Xi Jinping Thought. Oli consistently ratcheted up anti-India rhetoric to burnish his ultra-nationalist image. For some strange reasons, prominent interlocutors from the US seemed to admire the hilarity of a Third World strongman. But even they aren't too pleased with the absolute ineffectiveness of their favourite agent of political stability.

Perhaps Oli had anticipated that his bugbears in the South Block will help him come out of constitutional and political imbroglio due to the compulsions of the new Cold War simmering in South Asia. For now, all such hopes lie shattered. It seems Foreign Minister Pradeep Kumar Gyawali received nothing tangible in New Delhi except hackneyed promises of continued goodwill.

While New Delhi appears ready to give the prime minister a long rope, it doesn't seem to be too willing to pull him out of the bog. The goat-tailed map has closed many hospitable doors for several Nepali politicos including the jingoist-in-chief of Baluwatar.

Ignored signs

Political, diplomatic and propaganda weights are being stacked up one by one against the tottering chieftain. If it were a normal person in his position, they would humbly make way for the constitutional search of a more suitable claimant. But demagogic politicos are of a different breed altogether. They plan to remain in power forever and inflict huge damage to the polity if they are made to leave against their will. The triumph of Trumpism despite his fall from grace is an illustrative case in point.

The most effective way of fighting demagoguery is to read early warning signals and expose a putative populist before one manages to arouse the raw passions of the dominant community. Unfortunately for Nepal, Oli succeeded in taking an entire country for a ride with his seemingly comical outbursts against Madhesis and Janajatis that pandered to the prejudices of the Khas-Arya ethnonational.

The Supremo didn't even hide his duplicity of having no faith in federalism, inclusion and plurality but aspiring to become the prime minister ostensibly to protect and promote a constitution that enshrined such provisions, though in a limited way. His decision to remove the 'Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal' from the official name wasn't a bolt from the blue; he had expressed his intentions earlier in unmistakable manner by deriding republicanism as a journey to the US in an oxcart.

Demagoguery and authoritarianism are inseparable. Oli began to concentrate all political and administrative authority in the residential Secretariat of the prime minister from the day he took office. He seldom cared to attend his official chamber at Singha Durbar. Party meetings were invariably held at Baluwatar. His health condition didn't come in the way of supposedly working '18 hours a day' as long as everyone paid obeisance to his person at his residence.

Be it the challenger to his position inside the party or a competitor from the opposition benches, Oli took immense pleasure in belittling all political opponents. The 'with us or against us' mindset of authoritarian populists holds immense appeal for the masses yearning for a strong leader in the times of uncertainty. He valued political processes so little that not just the office of the president, even the lower house of the Parliament was reduced to the level of being merely formalising institutions of all whimsical decisions.

Even when he sold hopes of piped gas to every kitchen, trans-Himalayan railway to the Gangetic plains or Nepali ships sailing to the high seas, his tone used to be flippant. The only time he sounded serious was when he claimed that Hindu sages had discovered the theory of gravitation before Newton or the authentic Rama of Hindu mythology was born in Nepal. Demagogues peddle supposed glories of the past which a disempowered populace is always eager to embrace.

Predictable risks

Demagogues almost always harbour delusions of grandeur. Such a tendency invariably leads to misplaced priorities. Apart from being the only president in US history to be impeached twice, the only other thing President Trump will perhaps be remembered for is his slogan, 'Build That Wall!'.

Prime Minister Modi's enduring legacy will be the monumental folly of demonetisation and the colossal 'Statue of Unity' that was imported from China to be erected in Gujarat. The edifice complex of Oli expresses itself in the prioritisation of Dharahara over housing for the Gorkha Earthquake survivors and the erection of view towers on hilltops and in flatlands over building schools and hospitals.

Before he leaves, Prime Minister Oli is sure to squander scarce resources in order to leave what he probably believes will be his enduring legacy: a palace for the Prime Minister inside Baluwatar.

Demagogues have flexible moral values and decry or deploy political violence as it suits them. Whenever threatened, they are likely to unleash the fear and hatred of the dominant community against numerical as well as political minorities in an orgy of violence. Unlike Prime Minister Modi, Oli may not be capable of 'doing a Gujarat' on an entire country, but imitating Trump's Capitol incitement is a do-able option for a person completely unconcerned about the judgement of history.

Sooner rather than later, KP Sharma Oli will have to go. The challenge for Nepali society is to work for a relatively peaceful transition. It doesn't help that his main challengers aren't too well known for peaceful politics. Difficult as it may be to digest, violence is hardwired in the political proclivities of Nepalis.

The bigger challenge will be to create conditions where demagogic exhortations are countered with the appeal for peaceful politics and populist rhetoric is resisted with the promise of plurality and participation in public life. Vaccinating against the pandemic to ensure herd immunity is difficult enough, but to inoculate an entire society against demagogic populism is an impossible task that every generation has handled, with the media, academia and intelligentsia as front-liners.

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Inoculating the masses against demagogic populism - The Kathmandu Post

What populist means: Theres more to the label, associated with leaders like Donald Trump, than meets the eye – Firstpost

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Perhaps one reason that the word populist becomes useless is because it describes a wide variety of political actors, spanning the ideological spectrum.

Donald Trump. Reuters/File Photo

Joining the Dotsis a fortnightly column by author and journalist Samrat in which he connects events to ideas, often through analysis, but occasionally through satire.

***

One of the most fractious electoral processes in the history of what is still the worlds most powerful country is scheduled to end in a few hours with the inauguration of Joe Biden as President and Kamala Harris as Vice President of the US. Donald Trump will, at long last, leave the White House after an incendiary campaign to overturn the election results that culminated in an insane attack by a mob of his followers on Americas parliament, the Capitol. His departure will hopefully mark the beginning of the end for others of his ilk ruling countries around the world, who are loosely called populists.

Populist, however, is a useless word. No one can say where exactly popular ends and populist begins. The distinction, such as it is, would probably be lost on practically the entire voting population. This is in contrast to other words such as communist, nationalist, liberal, and fascist that, even when reduced to labels, continue to carry some meaning in ordinary usage.

Perhaps one reason that the word populist becomes useless is because it describes a wide variety of political actors, spanning the ideological spectrum. Political scientists studying it, such as Matthijs Rooduijn of the University of Amsterdam, have found only four characteristics that populists share in common. Firstly, they emphasise the central position of the people. Secondly, they criticise the elite. Thirdly, they perceive the people as a homogenous entity. Lastly, they proclaim a serious crisis.

The trouble is, democracy also emphasises the central position of the people. Criticising the elite is also a characteristic of Leftists in general. Perceiving the people as a homogenous entity is something that the Chinese Communist Party, the Saudi, Iranian, Turkish and Pakistani regimes, and the Hindutva brigade in India, among others, all seem to do. And proclamation of some serious crisis is a staple of every election campaign in which the opposition wants to unseat the incumbent.

What we are up against, in the global rise of what is called populism, therefore, seems to be a deeper crisis in our fundamental ideas than most of us would like to admit. We do not want to see populism as the deepening of democracy or its homogenising impulse as a natural progression in the idea of the nation. Yet it could be argued that this is what it is. Arguably more people at the grassroots are more deeply engaged with politics now than ever before. They are expressing their political opinions loudly and angrily. If they want to drive out immigrants everywhere, or build walls in America and Ram temples in India, isnt that only an expression of the will of the masses?

The answer to this question cannot be found without grasping the nettle of elitism. The core feature of populism around the world is its hatred for old elites and all that smacks of elitism. This was channeled by authoritarian demagogues who rode ressentiment to power. The disdain for political correctness displayed by characters like Trump talking of grabbing women by the p**sy and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines cracking rape jokes in public speeches was them, as sons of the soil, breaking the rules of good behaviour established by elites. Their disgusting talk did absolutely nothing to dent their popularity with their followers.

Nor did their attacks on science, even in the midst of a global pandemic. If the masses in America and Brazil dont want to believe wearing masks does anything to prevent COVID, well then, they must be right. If Hindu masses are associated with a belief in the ability of cow urine to cure everything from cancer to COVID, then science be damned, cow urine will be celebrated as a cure. If evangelical Christians do not believe Darwins theory of evolution because it contradicts the Bible, Darwin must be wrong. If the populist demagogues could, they would probably put the Law of Gravitation to the vote to decide if its right.

This is because the issue is not truth or fact at all. The real issue is pride in ones beliefs. It is about who decides, and how, whats okay to say and whats not, whats respectable and whats laughable. What the populist demagogues discovered was that there existed a vast reservoir of people who did not understand why their beliefs should be considered inferior to any other. They did not want experts deciding the issue by arcane theory and incomprehensible evidence. It was a matter of standing up for the equality of ones beliefs, which are after all a part of identity. Why should the belief in the divine efficacy of cow urine or the theory that God created the world in seven days be inferior to any other? Most people have no way of really knowing; the science is beyond them, and therefore it is a matter of one persons word against anothers.

The modern world, and its institutions and norms, were invented in the 18th and 19th centuries through the diffusion of ideas that spread among new elites created by new systems of education in economies and societies that underwent radical change. Democracy was then not widespread globally. Within the relatively few democratic countries that existed, the franchise was initially restricted to certain sections of the population usually wealthy and predominantly male. Even in India, where electoral democracy started before independence, it was with a limited franchise and communal representation in the councils of British India. It opened up over time to include the entire adult population. On the whole, this has been an excellent thing, but there has been a noticeable decline in the quality of political leadership over the years.

Where once there was Mohandas Gandhi and Sardar Patel, Gujarats and Indias leaders today are Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. The Dalit leadership has travelled from Dr BR Ambedkar to Mayawati and Ramdas Athavale. Jawaharlal Nehrus Congress is led by Rahul Gandhi. Mamata Banerjee is Bengals leader. Her challenger from the Hindu Right, a position occupied once by Syama Prasad Mukherjee, is Dilip Ghosh. Several of the stalwarts of yore, like the ones now, displayed characteristics that might today be called populist, but they differed vastly from the current crop in education, personality and character.

What accounts for the changing profile of the popular leader?

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What populist means: Theres more to the label, associated with leaders like Donald Trump, than meets the eye - Firstpost

Ransomware reveals the hidden weakness of our big tech world – ZDNet

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Ransomware continues to cause damage across the world. Rarely a week goes by without another company, or city, or hospital, falling prey to the gangs who will encrypt the data across PCs and networks and demand thousands or millions in exchange for setting it free.

These aren't victimless crimes; every successful attack means a company faces huge costs and risks being pushed out of business, or public services disrupted just when we need them, or medical services put in jeopardy in the middle of a crisis.

And yet it seems impossible to stop the attacks or catch the gangs. That's because the ongoing success of ransomware reflects many of the real-world failings of technology that we often forget or gloss over.

SEE: Network security policy (TechRepublic Premium)

There are obvious, fundamental weaknesses that ransomware exploits. In some cases these are problems that have existed for years, that the tech industry has failed to address; others are issues that are, right now, beyond the skills of the smartest entrepreneurs who want to tackle cybersecurity challenges.

A few examples spring to mind. Hackers would be unable to gain even their first foothold if companies took security seriously. That means applying patches to vulnerable software when they are issued, not months or years later (or never). Equally, companies wouldn't be on the tedious treadmill of applying constant security updates if the tech industry shipped software code that was secure in the first place.

And while we tend to think of the borderless world of the internet, the real world of geopolitics looms large when it comes to ransomware as many of these gangs operate from countries that have no interest in catching such crooks or handing them over to police in other jurisdictions. In some cases that's because the ransomware gangs are bringing in much needed funds for the country; in other cases so long as the gangs aren't going after local victims, the authorities are quietly happy for them to create havoc elsewhere.

It's not all doom and gloom; the fight back against ransomware is advancing on a few fronts.

Intel has showcased some new hardware-level technologies that it says will be able to detect a ransomware attack that antivirus alone might miss.

SEE: Cybersecurity: This 'costly and destructive' malware is the biggest threat to your network

A group of tech companies including Microsoft, Citrix and FireEye are working on a three-month project to come up with options that they promise will "significantly mitigate" the ransomware threat by identifying different ways of stopping such attacks. And more political pressure should be put on the nation states that are happy to let ransomware gangs flourish within their borders.

There is also a need to put more pressure on governments to look at whether, and in what circumstances, it should be acceptable to pay the ransom at all. Profit is the only reason that ransomware exists; if it is possible to stop the gangs from making their big payday, then the problem goes away almost immediately.

Everyone seems to agree that ransomware is a menace that can no longer be ignored. Now we need to see some tangible progress before these attacks create more chaos.

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Ransomware reveals the hidden weakness of our big tech world - ZDNet

The Blind Spot Endures: A Profile of Just One of Trump’s Last Minute Intercessions – InsiderNJ

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Like any household where an abusive patriarch intoxicated by his own absolute power has exited after beating up his family, we are all breathing a collective sigh of relief.

The civil servants mostly of color have cleaned up all of the excrement and graffiti in the marbled hallways of the Capitol built by their slave ancestors that was left by Trumps army of neo-Confederates that killed a police officer in the name of their uncivil war.

Its tempting to only focus on the reassuring avuncular presence of President Joe Biden, who is working overtime to restore that sense of basic decency thats been lacking for so long.

Like the family thats returned from vacation to find a ransacked home, we still have yet to compose an accurate inventory of what was stolen. Are the crooks still in the basement? Are the pets still alive? Is great grandmas wedding ring where Mom left it?

We were so distracted by his frontal violent assault on our Capitol by his minions, we failed to properly account for hisout the doorcrime wave committed in the final hours of his presidency with his pardoning of 70 people and commuting the sentences of another 73.

As Trump and his posse gallop for the swamps of Florida, we need to put the blood hounds on the scent given off by the stench of so many of these pardons.

We need the names of the facilitating law firms and lawyers cross referenced with their corporate client so there can be a proper accounting.

No doubt, there will be some on the list that were meritorious, righting by executive action true miscarriages of justice.

As could be expected, health care fraudsters with Jersey connections made Trumps rogues gallery roll call.

While our elected politicians all wonder aloud whats to account for our stark race-based health/wealth inequalities revealed by COVID-19, they should read their rap sheets to get a clue.

One of those who benefited from a Trump commutation was Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Florida ophthalmologist, who was a major campaign donor to Senator Bob Menendez, and got a 17-year federal sentence for his conviction in a $73 million Medicare fraud case.Now, thanks to support from Menendez and dozens of others he gets 13 years shaved off his sentence.

In 2015, Menendez was indicted on federal corruption charges. The DOJalleged that between 2006 and 2013, he had taken close to $1 million worth of lavish gifts and campaign contributions from Melgen in exchange for using the power of his Senate office to influence the outcome of ongoing contractual and Medicare billing disputes worth tens of millions of dollars to Melgen and to support the visa applications of several of Melgens girlfriends.

In 2017, a hung jury resulted in a mistrial and prosecutors opted to not retry the case, but Menendez bootstrapped that into a kind of exoneration.

He cast himself as a victim.

I want to thank the jury, 12 New Jerseyans who saw through the governments false claims and used their Jersey common sense to reject it, Menendez told reporters, Politico reported.

The way this case started was wrong, the way it was investigated was wrong, the way it was prosecuted was wrong, and the way it was tried was wrong as well, he said. Certain elements of the FBI and of our state cannot understand or, even worse, accept that the Latino kid from Union City and Hudson County can grow up and be a U.S. senator and be honest.

Throughout his Melgen tribulation the leadership of New Jerseys Democratic establishment rallied around him with the same partisan blindness displayed by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy for Trump.

Yet, what the jury could not see his Senate colleagues did.

In April of 2018 Menendez was severely admonished by the bi-partisanU.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethicsfor over a six-year period taking and not disclosing gifts of significant value from Dr. Melgen while at the same time using his position as a member of the Senate to advance Dr. Melgens personal and business interests.

Lost in all of this was just how awful were Melgens offenses. These were not some kind of white-collar victimless violations. There was real flesh and blood to these crimes.

All too often when we see a headline like $73 million Medicare fraud our jaundiced eyes glaze over. Here in the Soprano state that could be just a couple of municipal bond offerings or the proceeds from a few big pharma insider stock tips.

But Dr. Melgen, one of the nations most prolific Medicare billers in his day, was so much more industrious and disciplined in his efforts that it merits closer examination and appreciation.

The enterprising Melgen specialized in treating macular degeneration, the major cause of vision loss for people 50 or over.

According to Judge Kenneth Marra, who presided over Melgens sentencing, his practice was conducted in a manner where he routinely, and as a matter of standard practice, diagnosed patients with medical conditions they did not have in order to allow him to bill for diagnostic procedures and medical services that were not medically necessary or justified.

Judge Marra continued. Specifically, the Court finds that Defendant routinely falsely diagnosed patients with either wet or dry Age-Related Macular Degeneration. This mis-diagnosis allowed Defendant routinely and as a matter of standard practice to subject his patients to medically unjustified procedures and treatment, and then fraudulently bill for those procedures.

All totaled, theMiami Heraldreported prosecutors proved that about 77 percent of Melgens wet macular degeneration and 61.8 percent of his dry macular degeneration diagnoses were unsupported by medical records.

But that wasnt all.

Melgen was also tagged by federal regulators for usingsingle vialsofLucentis, a drug that is injected in the eye to slow the loss of eyesight related to diabetes, to treatthreepatients despite the fact a vial is prescribedto be used on a single patient. Not only did this scam net Melgen a huge windfall but, according to the Centers for Disease Control drug guidelines, put his own patients at risk ofinfection.

The Palm Beach Postquoted Dr. Robert Bergen, a retired New Jersey retinal specialist who reviewed for prosecutors the charts of over 300 of Melgens patients. He said that Melgen was notorious in the world of specialty eye medicine. Everybody knew about this guy, Bergen told the paper after he testified Melgens treatment of his patients was totally disgraceful.

Its the most egregious example of totally taking advantage of patients, not caring about diagnosing them properly, it was the antitheses of what a decent physician should do, said Bergen.

As federal health regulators were zeroing in on Melgen, Menendez appealed for intervention with his Senate colleagues and the Secretary of Health and Human Services for a re-interpretation of the regulations under which the government was pursuing Melgen.

It wasPalm Beach Postcolumnist Frank Cerabino who seemed to see the scale of the miscarriage of justice with Trumps commutation clearest.

It wasnt just the tens of millions of dollars that Melgen had bilked from taxpayers, wrote Cerabino. That was bad enough. But not the heart of it.

Cerabino continues. There was an element of unnecessary physical pain for those unsuspecting patients who had to endure Melgens self-enriching, medically dubious eye treatments, which included eye injections and retinal laser blasts.

The Palm Beach Post columnist points out the treatments were described at trial by expert witnesses as elder abuse,unconscionable and horrifying.

Thats the guy who needs to be set free? asked Cerabino. The guy who found a way to get rich by mistreating old peoples eyes?

Evidently the suffering of Melgens army of unsuspecting elderly patients was of no consequence for Menendez, who according to his statement after the commutation was still willing to use his influence for the wayward eye doctor.

Months ago, I was asked if I could offer insight about an old friend, and I did, along with what I understand were more than 100 individuals and organizations, including his former patients and local Hispanic groups familiar with Sals leadership and philanthropy in the South Florida community, Menendez said in a statement.

The blind spot endures.

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The Blind Spot Endures: A Profile of Just One of Trump's Last Minute Intercessions - InsiderNJ