Monthly Archives: May 2020

On April 14, to no ones surprise, Barack Obama endorsed Joe Biden for president of the United States. The former president came off as eloquent and calming throughout a 12-minute videoalso unsurprising, as he clearly wishes to fill a Donald Trump-sized chasm in the hearts of worried Americans. Obama emphasized Bidens role in helping the U.S. recover from the last recessionmore predictable praise, given the looming post-COVID-19 economy.

Then, six minutes in, Obama said something that took many off guard. After praising Bernie Sanders, the democratic-socialist senator and erstwhile Biden rival, he claimed that Biden already has what is the most progressive platform of any major party nominee in history.

Really? How could Obama claim that Joe Bidena man who argued repeatedly for the governments right to cut Social Security over his years in the Senate, who voted against busing for desegregation decades ago, who has fundraised millions of Wall Street dollars for his current campaign, who infamously backed the Iraq Warhow could this guy helm the most progressive platform in American history?

There is some merit to the claimalbeit the kind that plays best in debating societies. PolitiFact, a fact-checking site run by the non-profit Poynter Institute for Media Studies, calls it half-true, noting that Biden wants to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, erase past marijuana convictions, shut down private prisons, abolish the death penalty, create a national firearm registry and implement a study into reparations for slavery. He also loudly committed to naming a woman as his running mate, and a Black woman to the Supreme Court. Objectively, these are the most progressive policies Americans have seen in their countrys 243-year history.

READ:Can Joe Biden win the presidency from his living room couch?

The counter-argument: The definition of progressive in 2020 isnt what it was 243 years ago, or even 10 years ago. The title of most progressive can only be examined contemporaneously, not retrospectively. George McGovern, who suffered a huge loss to Richard Nixon in 1972 (fun fact: the same year Biden was first elected to the Senate), pushed an aggressively liberal agenda for his time, including withdrawal from the Vietnam War, amnesty for draft dodgers, a 37 per cent reduction in defence spending over three years, and other environmental and crime policies that, while status quo today, were deemed radical in their day. The question, then, isnt whether Joe Biden is more liberal than any of his predecessors, but whether hes more liberal than any of his contemporaries. That answer is obviously no.

Neither interpretation is wrong. According to David Barker, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University in Washington, D.C., Bidens progressive promises are less about social progress than frank popularity. That is how Biden has always operated; he modulates his positions based on where the median American voter is, Barker told Macleans in an email. In that way, he has always been squarely in the centre of the Democratic party ideologically, wherever that centre has beennever a lefty and never a true centrist.

That delicate spot, squarely in the middle of a never-ending tug of war between moderates and progressives, is precisely where Biden finds himself trapped right now, as he draws up his platform in the run-up to the November election. Appease the frustrated far left, and he risks alienating the middle; pander too much to the middle, and progressives may simply stay home. For Democrats, this decades-long conundrumhow to advance a liberal agenda without scaring off middle-of-the-road votershas taken on existential implications. Three and a half years ago, a moderately progressive agenda led by the first-ever female nominee pushed middle-of-the-road voters in key swing states into Trumps arms. Has anything changed?

The greatest flashpoint between progressive and moderate Democrats has been Medicare for All, the health-care overhaul pushed by Sanders that would abolish private insurance companies and bring all Americans into a single-payer system. A recent countrywide poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent non-profit health-care organization, found support among 56 per cent of respondents for Medicare for All, but fully 68 per cent for a so-called public option, which is what Biden is proposing. That would allow anyone to buy into Medicare, an affordable program currently available only to seniors.

Bidens more liberal policies might be better received by conservative voters because of COVID-19 (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Still, despite the support, Biden has not etched his health-care plan in stone. Shortly after Sanders dropped out on April 8, crowning Biden the presumptive nominee, Bidens camp shot out two policy proposals ostensibly targeting the Berniesphere: He would lower the age of Medicare from 65 to 60 and forgive student debt for low-income and middle-class individuals who attended public post-secondary institutions and historically Black colleges. In the media, this twofer was widely construed as an overture to the left, which sounded odd, since virtually every other presidential candidate, after clinching the nomination, shifts toward the centre. (The theory is that party members on the extremes will vote for you anyway, so you need to start working on undecided centrists and independents.)

In reality, diehard Sanders supporters were not impressed by those policies. Biden struggles with younger voters, says Luke Savage, a Canadian staff writer at Jacobin, a democratic-socialist magazine based in Brooklyn. He doesnt struggle with older votersthats his base. Lowering the Medicare age eligibility by five years isnt really courting Sanders supporters. (Young progressivesespecially womenmay be even more skeptical of Biden after a former aide, Tara Reade, accused him of sexually assaulting and harassing her in the early 1990s. Biden has denied the allegations and prominent Democrat women seem to be rallying around the candidate rather than his accuser.)

READ:Joe Biden:For those that have been knocked down, counted out, left behind, this is your campaign

Optimistic progressive Democrats have portrayed this as merely a first step in a years-long battle. Theyre hopeful about six joint task forces established by Biden and Sanders in Aprilon climate change, health care, criminal justice, immigration, the economy and educationthat comprise members of both camps, which could lead to further leftward policy shifts.

Even if Biden adjusts his messaging, however, those platforms are unlikely to replace any of his current ones, becauseas with his health-care strategytheyre poll-tested and popular. According to Ryan Pougiales, a senior political analyst at Third Way, a centrist Washington-based think tank, Biden was merely throwing a bone to the left with his Medicare age-lowering compromise. Bidens health-care plan, essentially, is a Medicare public option. So literally anyone has the option of buying into Medicare. Any adjustments he makes between now and November will not substantially change that.

Still, the outreach is meaningful, and it extends beyond Sanders. In mid-March, Biden absorbed Elizabeth Warrens progressive proposal on bankruptcy reform, which would help middle-class Americans move on with their lives more quickly after declaring bankruptcy by waiving fees and protecting them from looming debts.

Democrats across the spectrum point to this consolidation as proof of a quality unknown in todays White House: the candidates ability to listen. While critics blast it as flip-flopping, others hail it as open-mindedness crucial to building a strong coalition. Against Donald Trumps authoritarian tendencies, it may be Democrats greatest weapon. Say what you will about Joe Bidenand hell hear you out.

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Hours after Sanders dropped out, eight progressive youth organizations signed a public letter addressed to Biden, and published it on the website of Tom Steyers climate organization, NextGen. The letter is a blueprint for the program that Gen Z, democratic socialists and their progressive allies are hoping Biden will adopt: support Medicare for All, cancel all student debt, legalize marijuana. Biden will almost certainly not do any of that.

But some requests overlap with what he has already promised. For example, the NextGen authors want him to repeal the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits Medicaid dollars being used for abortions; Biden formerly supported the amendment, but openly changed his mind last June. They want greater accountability and transparency for border patrol guards while expanding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program; his website promises he will do both. The letter makes no mention of a $15 minimum wagea moot request, since Biden (following Sanderss lead) is already on board.

One could envision the former veep shifting left on other files. His website sketches plansalbeit watered-down versions of what the NextGen authors wantfor investing US$20 billion in crime prevention over incarceration, and laying out a framework for the Green New Deal. Around the same time Biden adopted Warrens bankruptcy proposal, he picked up a 2017 Senate bill, led by Sanders, which would make public colleges and universities tuition-free for students coming from a household with an income less than $125,000.

Promises, however, are one thing; actions are another. Progressives cried out when Biden named Larry Summers, the former president of Obamas National Economic Council, who enjoys close ties with Wall Street executives, as his economic adviser. Serious progressives care as much about appointments as they do about policy. Weve encouraged the Biden campaign to bring on personnel in the campaign, transition and presidency that are committed to fighting for people, not corporations or Wall Street, Chris Torres, a political director at the progressive organization MoveOn, told Macleans in an email.

By including establishment Democrats in his cohort, Biden will never win over all Sanders supporters. But looking at the data, one has to ask: Why bother trying? A Morning Consult poll of 2,300 Sanders fans found that 80 per cent would vote for Biden in November. And while democratic socialists often point to Bidens weakness among younger Americans, who skew progressive, multiple polls from March all showed Biden beating Trump among millennials by at least 10 percentage points. Even if those predictions dont come to pass, younger voters are statistically less likely to vote than older ones, who skew conservative. Crunching the numbers in Vox, the journalist Matthew Yglesias summarized it mathematically: Every voter on the margin between Democrats and Republicans is worth twice as much as every voter on the margin between Democrats and the Green Party.

Yet Biden cannot ignore young Americans, for fear that they might actually vote Green, or not at all, and spoil the outcome in critical states. The delicate political calculation he has to make is how far he can go to mollify the progressive wing, says Matthew Dickinson, a political science professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. He points to Bidens electability argument, that he can win back the disenchanted middle- and working-class white voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania who swung to Trump in 2016 after decades of supporting Democrats. The issue that really divides those Trump supporters is a sense of fairness. They think that the rules have been stacked against them. And anything that smacks of favouritism or elitism, or elevating one group over the concerns of other groups, they tend not to support. For Biden to win back the Rust Belt, hell need to convince voters that a $15 minimum wage, public option and criminal-justice reform are in fact equitable policies.

Luckily for him, that argument may be easier to make in 2020 than it was in 2016, due to the seismic shift brought about by COVID-19. Terry Moe, a political science professor at Stanford University, believes weve been living in a post-Reagan world for decades, where conservative politicians successfully run on anti-government policies, promising retrenchment, lower taxes and less red tape. In the same way the Great Depression led to Roosevelts New Deal in the 1930s, he says, the current pandemic proves how badly we rely on well-funded, effective government. This could be the beginning of a new political era in which politicians run on agendas that promote government capacity and government action in solving social problems, Moe says. That is the progressive agenda.

Democrats will likely link the concept of a strong and equitable government to everything Trump opposes, harkening in some ways to the anything-but-Trump campaign of 2016. The message may sound more convincing after a devastated economy compounds the chaos of Trumps last four years. With a pragmatic, fair, progressive-lite platform, they might be able to convince enough voters to join the blue team.

Policies this early have never been about affecting real change, anyway. Theyre about hope. And at this point, with no standard-bearer left to fight for them, hope is all progressives have.

This article appears in print in the June 2020 issue of Macleans magazine with the headline, Whats left to Biden. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

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In his bid for the presidency, Joe Biden is stuck in the middle - Maclean's

On February 24, Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of a criminal sexual act in the first degree and rape in the third degree. On Wednesday, March 11, he was sentenced to 23 years in prison. On Thursday, March 19, California issued a stay at home order, the first statewide measure in the United States, and New York followed suit on March 20. On Sunday, March 22, Weinstein tested positive for the coronavirus.

The impact of the Weinstein verdict is not as simple as a win for the #MeToo movement. His sentencing, by a jury that included six men, is good news for women who hope to be successful in court and thus may encourage women to come forward and bring charges against their assailants. But the conviction does not change the culture in which women live, especially women of color and working-class women. These women still live in a world where sexual assault is common, and resources to bring charges are scarce.

This victory for the #MeToo movement will not have the same impact on women and feminism now that the coronavirus crisis has all out attention. Shelter-in-place orders, which are clearly necessary during this crisis, have several unintended effects that will impact #MeToo and other social movements.

First on a long list of these unintended consequences is the fact that women (and children) are forced to stay at home with their abusers. Domestic abuse is on the increase across the world during the lockdowns. The UN has asked governments to take this into account in the ways they address this pandemic.

READ MORE

Second, feminism, womens advances in work and pay, as well as hard-won cultural changes of the past 50 years in the US and abroad, will take a hit. In families with two working parents and children, telework will most often result in women having a triple or at times a quadruple burden: paid work, unpaid housework, childcare (which will now include home-schooling for some) and, at times, elderly care. There will be places where men help or take up an equal share of this burden, but more often than not this will fall on women. In single-mom households, of which many women are low-wage workers who unlikely to telework or who have lost their jobs due to layoffs, survival, not feminism, will be the priority.

Then there is the fact that no one is paying attention to the Weinstein verdict during the coronavirus crisis. This is partly due to so many other pressing concerns and partly to the primacy of the story in the news. This reduces its potential to fuel the movement. To compound the problem, no one can protest or march, or even go to court in some places during a lockdown. Many legal practices have been suspended.

Finally, a recession is imminent. This will mean that fewer people have money to give to organizing efforts and nonprofits will have to lay off staff. Many nonprofits are already feeling the impact.

How will all of this impact the future of the #MeToo movement? While we cannot answer this question, we can look for clues in past crises that led feminist movements to refocus their efforts, and the #MeToo movement can look for guidance and hope in their strategies. Of particular relevance is the womens suffrage movement. During its lifetime, it survived three major crises the American Civil War, World War I and the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 as well as economic recessions, including the panics of 1857 and 1873. What can the current #MeToo movement learn from their reaction to these crises?

First of all, it needs to focus attention on the crisis because the crisis requires it and deserves it. During the Civil War, the womens rights movement directed its energy toward assisting with the war effort. This was a strategic choice as well as a practical one there was really no other choice. The crisis required all hands on deck and did not allow for other issues to take primacy.

The #MeToo movement needs all its organizational strength to assist with the crisis, thereby maintaining member involvement and positive relations with political allies, the press and kindred movements. During the Civil War, the womens rights movement worked with or created groups dedicated to abolition. The womens movement viewed the two issues as related and hoped that after slavery was ended, their allies would assist them in gaining the vote and other womens rights.

The focus on abolition kept women involved, politically savvy and ready to take up the cause again once the war was over. When the United States joined the First World War, many women from various American suffrage organizations assisted with the war effort and with the Spanish pandemic that followed. There is evidence to suggest that they were rewarded in some states for their work during both crises.

Finally, #MeToo needs to look for ways in which its issue and the crisis are interconnected and frame the movement narrative around that. But it must choose carefully. The womens suffrage movement sought to connect the plight of women with that of slaves. This tactic met with mixed reactions. Women were legally chattel at the time, but the reality of life for many white women in the movement was not identical to the reality of life for slave women. Thus, this tactic harmed some of their relations with abolitionists and didnt resonate with the public. But later in the movement, during World War I, women did successfully make the case to President Woodrow Wilson and other political leaders that it was ironic that the US was fighting for democracy abroad when it wasnt truly a democracy at home. So: Connect, but choose wisely and thoughtfully.

How can these lessons be put into in practice? During the current COVID-19 pandemic, the group Women Deliver has highlighted the interconnectedness of this virus and womens issues, thereby maintaining their work on womens issues while simultaneously showing their commitment to ending the pandemic. The frame is thoughtful and relevant. Many womens groups could adopt a similar approach, as we know this virus will have a disproportionate impacton low-wage workers and people of color, but in particular women in both groups.

The #MeToo movement could organize around ways to help women who are stuck at home with an abuser during lockdown orders. While the #MeToo movement has been focused around sexual harassment at work, domestic violence is a close cousin. And the movement certainly could continue to organize around the sexual harassment that female low-wage workers continue to face as essential workers. This is as pressing as ever.

Crafting ways for those active in the movement to remain relevant at this time will help everyone. It will help the movement survive this time when attention is rightly directed elsewhere, it will help women in abusive relationships, and it will help women who continue to be sexually harassed in the workplace and have no recourse during this crisis. Given the roots of the movement, it is a logical step.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observers editorial policy.

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Keeping the #MeToo Movement Relevant During the Pandemic - Fair Observer

Through the past three years and more at the pinnacle of the Indian armed forces, General Bipin Rawat acquired a reputation as an outspoken general causing firestorms of controversy every now and then. The controversies erupted largely due to his panache for making politically loaded remarks. An impression accrued over time that Gen. Rawat violated the purported core principles of nonpartisanship. Indeed, he has been viciously pilloried for this reason.

However, Gen. Rawats exclusive interview with the Times of India newspaper last weekend falls in an entirely different category, where he addresses the chorus of angry pro-forever-war generals (and ex-faujis) in our country who are disillusioned with the Modi governments lack of enthusiasm to increase the defence budget.

Read more: WHY DOES US WANT REDUNDANT INDIA TO PLAY ROLE IN AFGHANISTAN?

The thrust of what Gen. Rawat said in the interview can be summarised in three clusters:

Anything on the surface can be picked up by satellites and knocked off by missiles. I think the Navy needs more submarines rather than aircraft carriers, which themselves require their own individual armadas for protection

Gen. Rawat has spoken with remarkable candour. It has a stunning effect already. Especially, since a reasonable assumption is that Gen. Rawat has articulated official thinking with a purpose to calibrate Indias defence strategy.

Indeed, what we see here is not a mere tweaking of the defence strategy. His views reflect radically new thinking. Concepts such as cold start, fighting two-front wars, interoperability and so on that were inherited from the UPA government (2004-2014) are being discarded. The new emphasis is on local products and local supply chains self-reliance.

Gen. Rawats interview appeared two days before Prime Minister Narendra Modis address to the nation on Tuesday where he said, inter alia, Making India self-reliant is the only way to make 21st century belong to IndiaThis era of self-reliance will be our new pledge, we have to move on with new resolve.

Read more: India Will Occupy Azad Kashmir & Gilgit Baltistan: Bipins Verbal Diarrhea

Suffice to say, this week becomes a truly defining moment if one were not to miss the wood for the trees. The doctrine laid down by the PM and applied to the sphere of defence strategy by Gen. Rawat punctuates a 15-year steady upward curve in the thinking and actions by our bureaucratic and military establishment since the signing of the landmark India-US defence agreement in 2005 by then Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee and his American counterpart Donald Rumsfeld.

It is crucial today to realise where we have reached in this 15 year-period in order to fully and properly assess the profundity of what Gen. Rawat has said in his weekend interview. From the Indian perspective, what began as a much-needed modernization of our armed forces, metastasized incrementally almost inexorably over this period as an obsessive drive to attain interoperability between the Indian and US militaries.

The American side has done extraordinarily well in dominating the Indian bureaucracy civilian and military alike to take us to this point today, where we no longer, as Gen. Rawat plaintively framed it, tend to define our GSQRs not as per our own operational requirements, but instead in terms of what the US or other advanced countries have.

The US supplies the bulk of the NATO countries requirements of weaponry. Not only that, the US will not countenance if a member country chooses to turn to a third country for meeting its boutique requirements even in a specific situation

If the US has seven aircraft carriers, shouldnt we at least have three? Our mind no longer applies logically, rationally. The thinking is done for us largely by the Americans.

It is plain to see that, to quote Gen. Rawat, Anything on the surface can be picked up by satellites and knocked off by missiles. I think the Navy needs more submarines rather than aircraft carriers, which themselves require their own individual armadas for protection.

Look at where we started this journey under the UPA rule and where we have reached today in such slavery of the mind. The Americans did a brilliant job in calibrating the Indian mind to suit their purposes. They have tickled our vanities by giving us promises to make us rulers of the global commons and in future even the space, including outer space and to take us to wherever the Chinese went.

Thus, the Americans have designated India as a Major Defence Partner (MDP). Incredible, isnt it? They have never designated another country like this not even their closest Anglo-Saxon, NATO ally Britain. We became ecstatic when we were told that their MDP designation is unique to India. We lost our mental poise in that ecstacy.

Read more: Tensions with China: General Rawat wants to prepare for a two-front war

The Indian and American think-tankers promptly sat down to jointly outline actionable recommendations for the Indian policymakers consideration with a view to make the MDP designation optimal in its application. We refused to see the writing on the wall that MDP is quintessentially a sound business strategy to promote the commercial interests of American arms vendors.

The US has applied much the same technique to make its NATO allies a captive market for American arms exports. If they created the NATO doctrine in the Cold War era casting the former Soviet Union as their eternal enemy, today it is about the two revisionist powers Russia and China.

So they keep whispering into our ears that in China, India has an eternal enemy. For tackling the Soviet Russian enemy, the US and its NATO partners had enshrined interoperability of the armed forces of the western alliance as the cardinal principle of the common defence strategy of the member countries.

Suffice to say, there is hardly anyone among Indias elite today who doesnt have a son or daughter or son-in-law or nephew settled in the US

The result is plain to see. The US supplies the bulk of the NATO countries requirements of weaponry. Not only that, the US will not countenance if a member country chooses to turn to a third country for meeting its boutique requirements even in a specific situation.

Washington threatens to sanction such errant partners as it is today doing to Turkey, which, by the way, has the second biggest army amongst the NATO allies, next only to the US, and has specific defence needs, given its geography and the post-cold war geopolitical situation in its surrounding regions.

The Indian bureaucratic establishment civilian and military should have no illusions that Turkeys plight today can well be Indias tomorrow, if push comes to shove, and New Delhi ever decides to exercise its strategic autonomy in the pursuit of its national interests that does not conform to the US regional and global strategies.

In fact, the Americans are in such punishing mood that they are today training, arming and financing the Kurdish separatist-terrorist groups that work toward vivisecting Turkey the equivalent of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Toiba combined in todays circumstances in J&K.

Read more: Indian Army Chief Threatens to Attack & Occupy Azad Kashmir

To cut a complex story short, on the one hand, brilliant minds like Ashton Carter an Oxford-trained physicist whose entire adulthood was spent in the bowels of the US defence and intelligence sold to us the doctrine of interoperability which has become the mantra today of the Indian defence establishment. Carter could do it with such delectable ease since we didnt even have an interlocutor to match his intellect or vast experience whose career graph since 1993 was almost entirely devoted to strategic affairs.

By the way, for his unparalleled service to the US national security, Carter was on five occasions awarded the Pentagons Distinguished Public Service Medal. (Besides, he is also the recipient of the CJCS Joint Distinguished Civilian Service Award and the Defense Intelligence Medal for his contributions to intelligence.) It is doubtful if India can produce someone of his calibre in the next quarter century.

Now, why did the US press him into service on India? Why should the deepening and expansion of the interoperability between the two militaries be such top priority? Why such unseemly hurry? All that only goes to underscore the criticality of locking in India as a defence partner to meet the emergent requirements of the US Indo-Pacific strategies to contain China, the rising rival on the horizon who threatens to challenge Americas century-long global hegemony.

If Make in India is languishing and the road to develop an indigenous defence industry for the country something that a much smaller country like Iran could achieve with such stunning success despite very heavy odds

The slavery of the Indian mind is such today that, if Gen. Rawat is to believed, the Indian military is misrepresenting our operational requirements to the political masters to hoodwink them into permitting the acquisition of fanciful weaponry from abroad that are by no stretch of imagination relevant to the countrys actual defence requirements.

The shameful tragedy is that the Americans have bought us cheap. Suffice to say, there is hardly anyone among Indias elite today who doesnt have a son or daughter or son-in-law or nephew settled in the US. Green Card has become the magical wand of the US that can open any door in Delhi today.

To my mind, therefore, the real significance of PMs address to the nation last night lies not in the combat against a medieval virus but in his determination to turn the present crisis into a window of opportunity to liberate the Indian mind and to choreograph and launch an entirely new approach for Indias national strategy pivoted on principles of self-reliance.

Having said that, when it comes to the defence arena, prudence demands that one must keep fingers crossed. To be sure, there will be institutionalized opposition from the Indian civilian and military bureaucracy and other entrenched interest groups who can be trusted to wage a war of attrition on the political leadership.

Read more: HERES WHY TURKEY, IRAN AND MALAYSIA SPOKE UP ON KASHMIR

If Make in India is languishing and the road to develop an indigenous defence industry for the country something that a much smaller country like Iran could achieve with such stunning success despite very heavy odds remains deserted without much traffic to speak of, the principal reason for it is that PM has to juggle a dozen balls in the air simultaneously at any given time.

Succinctly put, notwithstanding his fame for possessing a forceful will, attention span remains limited, whereas follow-up is always the all-important quotient of statecraft in the Byzantine corridors of power.

This is where, in retrospect, the appointment of Gen. Bipin Rawat as Indias first Chief of Defence Staff assumes an altogether new meaning.

M. K. Bhadrakumar has served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, with postings as Indias ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001). He writes extensively in Indian newspapers, Asia Times, and the Indian Punchline. This piece was first published in theIndian Punchline. The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Global Village Spaces editorial policy.

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Why did the US press Gen Bipin Rawat into service on India? - Global Village space