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Monday, August 26, 2024 4:19:12 PM
Teflon populism See the article below. Firstly, lengthy excerpts
from an article more relevant today than it was six years ago
"Trump to Dictators: Have a Nice Day
[...]
Watching President Trump recently accuse Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of stabbing him in the back prompted me to Google a simple question: How many Canadians were killed or wounded since April 2002 fighting alongside Americans in Afghanistan? The answer: 158 were killed and 635 wounded.
Think about that: America, not Canada, was attacked on 9/11. Nevertheless, our ally to the north sent thousands of its own young men and women to Afghanistan to help us destroy the forces of Al Qaeda that attacked our cities — and 158 Canadians gave their lives in that endeavor.
And yet, when their prime minister mildly pushed back against demands to lower Canada’s tariffs on milk, cheese and yogurt from the U.S., Trump and his team — in a flash — accused Trudeau of “betrayal,” back-stabbing and deserving of a “special place in hell.”
A special place in hell? Over milk tariffs? For a country that stood with us in our darkest hour? That is truly sick.
But it tells you all you need to know about how differently Trump looks at the world from any of his predecessors — Republican or Democrat. Everything is a transaction: What have you done for ME today? The notion of America as the upholder of last resort of global rules and human rights — which occasionally forgoes small economic advantages to strengthen democratic societies so we can enjoy the much larger benefits of a world of healthy, free-market democracies — is over.
“Trump’s America does not care,” historian Robert Kagan wrote in The Washington Post. ... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trumps-america-the-rogue-superpower/2018/06/14/c01bb540-6ff7-11e8-afd5-778aca903bbe_story.html?utm_term=.fd93e201b612 ... “It is unencumbered by historical memory. It recognizes no moral, political or strategic commitments. It feels free to pursue objectives without regard to the effect on allies or, for that matter, the world. It has no sense of responsibility to anything beyond itself.”
Mind you, I can support Trump verbally cozying up to North Korea’s murderous dictator, Kim Jong-un, if it actually does reduce the prospects of war on the Korean Peninsula and lead to a process of denuclearization there. Nothing else has been effective — so trading Trump’s phony praise of “Little Rocket Man” for a real end to North Korean weapons and missile testing is a trade I’ll endorse — if it works.
But what’s terrifying about Trump is that he seems to prefer dictators to our democratic allies everywhere.
As Trump told reporters about the North Korean dictator on Friday: “He speaks, and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.
Trump later said this was a joke. Sorry, no U.S. president should make such a joke, which, alas, was consistent with everything Trump has said and done before: He prefers the company of strongmen and, as long as they praise him, does not care how leaders anywhere treat their own people — including how they treat people risking their lives to model their countries on ours (or at least on what they thought was ours).
While this approach may buy us some time with North Korea, it is hurting us and our friends in many other places
[...]
Take Egypt. On May 31, Human Rights Watch reported that the Egyptian police had “carried out a wave of arrests of critics of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in dawn raids since early May 2018.” Those arrested included Hazem Abd al-Azim, a political activist; and Wael Abbas, a well-known journalist and rights defender; as well as Shady al-Ghazaly Harb, a surgeon; Haitham Mohamadeen, a lawyer; Amal Fathy, an activist; and Shady Abu Zaid, a satirist.
I got to know some of these young people during the Arab Spring. They are not violent, radical Islamists. They are wonderful, peace-loving, rule-of-law-seeking Egyptians — eager to work with any Egyptian leader who wants to build a more open, tolerant, consensual Egyptian political and civil society. Harb, an enormously decent British-educated surgeon, was imprisoned merely for tweeting mild criticism of Sisi’s crackdown on dissent.
“The state of oppression in Egypt has sunk so low that al-Sisi’s forces are arresting well-recognized activists as they sleep, simply for speaking up,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The message is clear that criticism and even mild satire apparently earn Egyptians an immediate trip to prison.”
Sisi should hang his head in shame for arbitrarily jailing good young people like this — and the U.S. Congress should be taking up their cause if our president and secretary of state are too cynical to do so.
The same is true in Turkey today under the leadership of a real bum, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. I realized the other day that almost all my Turkish journalist friends had been either jailed, fired or exiled by the caliph-tyrant Erdogan.
This is a trend. As the Committee to Protect Journalists reported in December: ...https://cpj.org/reports/2017/12/journalists-prison-jail-record-number-turkey-china-egypt.php ...
“For the second consecutive year, more than half of those jailed for their work around the world are behind bars in Turkey, China and Egypt. … President Donald Trump’s nationalistic rhetoric, fixation on Islamic extremism and insistence on labeling critical media ‘fake news’ serves to reinforce the framework of accusations and legal charges that allow such leaders to preside over the jailing of journalists.”
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has initiated some hugely important efforts to diminish the control of hard-line Islamists in his country and empower its women. But the arbitrary, nontransparent way he has arrested and interrogated allegedly corrupt Saudi business leaders — and similarly 17 women driving activists — is contributing to a climate of fear there. This will undermine his efforts to attract the foreign and Saudi investments that are vital to M.B.S.’s vision of reforming the Saudi economy.
In U.S.-allied Bahrain, Abduljalil Alsingace, the blogger and human rights defender, who was sentenced in 2011 to life in prison for writing “critically about human rights violations, sectarian discrimination and repression of the political opposition,” is rotting in jail, noted the Committee to Protect Journalists.
In U.S.-allied Philippines, the outspoken senator and former human rights commissioner Leila de Lima, who has been critical of President Rodrigo Duterte’s antidrug war that has left more than 7,000 dead in the past three years in gun battles with the police and vigilantes, was thrown in jail in February 2017 on trumped-up drug charges and still languishes there.
And in once pro-Western Poland, the country’s most powerful politician, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, is trying to replace the independent judiciary with judges selected purely for their loyalty to him and his party, snubbing his nose at the European Union’s liberal, rule-of-law values.
Your -- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/opinion/trump-to-dictators-have-a-nice-day.html
**
Teflon populism
21 Jun 2019 | Slawomir Sierakowski
[ Insert: Famed “forever chemicals” lawyer Robert Bilott talks PFAS and policy at Yale
Nearly all people in the United States have PFAS in their blood. Attorney Robert Bilott — famous for revealing a decades-long record of toxic PFAS chemical exposure by the DuPont company — spoke on the importance of effective communication in translating scientific research into legislation.
Kayla Yup 10:35 pm, Feb 26, 2023
Staff Reporter
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/02/26/famed-forever-chemicals-lawyer-robert-bilott-talks-pfas-and-policy-at-yale/ ]
With links
Populist rule is invariably associated with corruption, nepotism and incompetence. Why, then, do populists appear immune to scandal? Revelations that would have shocked electorates just a few years ago leave nary a mark on populist leaders and government ministers. And, sometimes, what doesn’t kill them even seems to make them stronger.
Examples are legion. When Der Spiegel reported that the far-right Alternative for Germany had misappropriated funds, the party’s supporters couldn’t have cared less. When the same publication unearthed a video of Austria’s now-former vice chancellor, Heinz-Christian Strache, negotiating a quid pro quo with a Russian interlocutor, his far-right Freedom Party lost only a couple of percentage points in the polls, and probably only temporarily. Likewise, the parties of Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán continue to dominate their countries’ politics, despite repeated corruption scandals.
But the most scandal-proof populist of all is Poland’s de facto ruler, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Independent Polish media outlets have revealed new affairs involving Kaczynski and his Law and Justice (PiS) party practically on a weekly basis—all of them damning.
For example, Kaczynski was recently caught on tape arranging for the payment of a bribe to the partner of an Austrian businessman involved in the construction of a skyscraper project tellingly named K-Towers. And just before the European Parliament election in May, Poland was shaken by a documentary exposing paedophilia by Catholic priests, along with a massive coverup by the church hierarchy, which has close ties to PiS. Nonetheless, the PiS government has refused to form a lay commission to investigate the matter.
Also in May, Polish journalists discovered that Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki purchased land from the Catholic Church that has increased in value a hundredfold as a result of a planned road project, but which he has avoided disclosing by using a transmutation agreement with his wife. Citing a former colleague of Morawiecki, journalists also found that he’s due to receive a multimillion-zloty payment from Santander, the bank where he worked before becoming prime minister, upon the completion of his term.
Any one of these revelations would have ended the career of a politician in any previous Polish government. But since PiS came to power in 2015, not a single government minister has resigned as a result of a scandal. On the contrary, scandals seem to have shored up the party’s base. Although polls show that 84% of Poles support establishing a lay commission to investigate paedophilia in the church, a significant share of the electorate still supports PiS. Most Poles believe that scandals are real, but that didn’t stop PiS from securing a substantial victory in the European Parliament, with 45.5% of the vote. If anything, the party has gained even more leeway to engage in malign and corrupt behaviour.
The PiS government is immune to scandal for two reasons. The first is the strong economy, which has allowed it to pursue successive social programs aimed at marginalised voters. For example, just before the European Parliament election, the government disbursed an extra month’s worth of retirement benefits and issued payments to rural residents. Both groups voted overwhelmingly for PiS.
The second factor is propaganda. Because PiS constantly levies spurious, defamatory charges against the opposition and groups such as doctors, judges and striking teachers, real scandals no longer seem all that shocking or compromising. This debasement of public discourse is no accident. Kaczynski has made a conscious effort to create a media environment in which anything goes. That is why he frequently accuses European Council President Donald Tusk of conspiring with the Russians to orchestrate the plane crash that killed his brother in 2010. It is also why he traffics in conspiracy theories about German Chancellor Angela Merkel being installed by the Stasi (communist East Germany’s notorious secret police) and about refugees carrying infectious diseases.
For a politician like Kaczynski, a public sphere with no standards of truth or rules of decorum is ideal. The media and opposition can expose whatever they want; it won’t change anything. While investigative journalists compile fact after fact and receipt after receipt, and publish rigorous year-long investigations, PiS is busy poisoning public discourse through the state-run media outlets it oversees.
Owing to its unscrupulous use of targeted cash transfers and propaganda, PiS is not only immune to scandals but benefits from them. Where everyone else sees the disclosure of ugly facts, PiS supporters see a frontal assault on their own interests. Revelations of malfeasance by the ruling party merely strengthen many working-class Poles’ resolve to defend a government that has assisted them through social-welfare transfers.
The situation might be different if PiS politicians faced the risk of criminal investigation or prosecution. But the prosecutor’s office has been fully co-opted and will not seriously investigate the ruling party. You can hear a recording of Kaczynski bribing a businessman, but you can’t interrogate him (the same also seems to apply to US presidents suspected of obstructing justice). And if you are an investigative reporter who uncovers facts that are inconvenient for the government, you can expect to come under pressure to reveal your sources.
And so, Poland—and Europe—is left with a government that is utterly impervious to scandal and charges of nepotism. The PiS administration is beyond reproach, not because it is a moral authority, but precisely because it is so shamelessly immoral. It may be pillaging the country, but it is sharing enough of the spoils not to have to look over its shoulder.
Author
Slawomir Sierakowski, founder of the Krytyka Polityczna movement, is director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Warsaw and a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. This article is presented in partnership with Project Syndicate © 2019. Image courtesy of George Redgrave on Flickr.
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/teflon-populism/
”
from an article more relevant today than it was six years ago
"Trump to Dictators: Have a Nice Day
[...]
Watching President Trump recently accuse Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of stabbing him in the back prompted me to Google a simple question: How many Canadians were killed or wounded since April 2002 fighting alongside Americans in Afghanistan? The answer: 158 were killed and 635 wounded.
Think about that: America, not Canada, was attacked on 9/11. Nevertheless, our ally to the north sent thousands of its own young men and women to Afghanistan to help us destroy the forces of Al Qaeda that attacked our cities — and 158 Canadians gave their lives in that endeavor.
And yet, when their prime minister mildly pushed back against demands to lower Canada’s tariffs on milk, cheese and yogurt from the U.S., Trump and his team — in a flash — accused Trudeau of “betrayal,” back-stabbing and deserving of a “special place in hell.”
A special place in hell? Over milk tariffs? For a country that stood with us in our darkest hour? That is truly sick.
But it tells you all you need to know about how differently Trump looks at the world from any of his predecessors — Republican or Democrat. Everything is a transaction: What have you done for ME today? The notion of America as the upholder of last resort of global rules and human rights — which occasionally forgoes small economic advantages to strengthen democratic societies so we can enjoy the much larger benefits of a world of healthy, free-market democracies — is over.
“Trump’s America does not care,” historian Robert Kagan wrote in The Washington Post. ... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trumps-america-the-rogue-superpower/2018/06/14/c01bb540-6ff7-11e8-afd5-778aca903bbe_story.html?utm_term=.fd93e201b612 ... “It is unencumbered by historical memory. It recognizes no moral, political or strategic commitments. It feels free to pursue objectives without regard to the effect on allies or, for that matter, the world. It has no sense of responsibility to anything beyond itself.”
Mind you, I can support Trump verbally cozying up to North Korea’s murderous dictator, Kim Jong-un, if it actually does reduce the prospects of war on the Korean Peninsula and lead to a process of denuclearization there. Nothing else has been effective — so trading Trump’s phony praise of “Little Rocket Man” for a real end to North Korean weapons and missile testing is a trade I’ll endorse — if it works.
But what’s terrifying about Trump is that he seems to prefer dictators to our democratic allies everywhere.
As Trump told reporters about the North Korean dictator on Friday: “He speaks, and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.
Trump later said this was a joke. Sorry, no U.S. president should make such a joke, which, alas, was consistent with everything Trump has said and done before: He prefers the company of strongmen and, as long as they praise him, does not care how leaders anywhere treat their own people — including how they treat people risking their lives to model their countries on ours (or at least on what they thought was ours).
While this approach may buy us some time with North Korea, it is hurting us and our friends in many other places
[...]
Take Egypt. On May 31, Human Rights Watch reported that the Egyptian police had “carried out a wave of arrests of critics of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in dawn raids since early May 2018.” Those arrested included Hazem Abd al-Azim, a political activist; and Wael Abbas, a well-known journalist and rights defender; as well as Shady al-Ghazaly Harb, a surgeon; Haitham Mohamadeen, a lawyer; Amal Fathy, an activist; and Shady Abu Zaid, a satirist.
I got to know some of these young people during the Arab Spring. They are not violent, radical Islamists. They are wonderful, peace-loving, rule-of-law-seeking Egyptians — eager to work with any Egyptian leader who wants to build a more open, tolerant, consensual Egyptian political and civil society. Harb, an enormously decent British-educated surgeon, was imprisoned merely for tweeting mild criticism of Sisi’s crackdown on dissent.
“The state of oppression in Egypt has sunk so low that al-Sisi’s forces are arresting well-recognized activists as they sleep, simply for speaking up,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The message is clear that criticism and even mild satire apparently earn Egyptians an immediate trip to prison.”
Sisi should hang his head in shame for arbitrarily jailing good young people like this — and the U.S. Congress should be taking up their cause if our president and secretary of state are too cynical to do so.
The same is true in Turkey today under the leadership of a real bum, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. I realized the other day that almost all my Turkish journalist friends had been either jailed, fired or exiled by the caliph-tyrant Erdogan.
This is a trend. As the Committee to Protect Journalists reported in December: ...https://cpj.org/reports/2017/12/journalists-prison-jail-record-number-turkey-china-egypt.php ...
“For the second consecutive year, more than half of those jailed for their work around the world are behind bars in Turkey, China and Egypt. … President Donald Trump’s nationalistic rhetoric, fixation on Islamic extremism and insistence on labeling critical media ‘fake news’ serves to reinforce the framework of accusations and legal charges that allow such leaders to preside over the jailing of journalists.”
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has initiated some hugely important efforts to diminish the control of hard-line Islamists in his country and empower its women. But the arbitrary, nontransparent way he has arrested and interrogated allegedly corrupt Saudi business leaders — and similarly 17 women driving activists — is contributing to a climate of fear there. This will undermine his efforts to attract the foreign and Saudi investments that are vital to M.B.S.’s vision of reforming the Saudi economy.
In U.S.-allied Bahrain, Abduljalil Alsingace, the blogger and human rights defender, who was sentenced in 2011 to life in prison for writing “critically about human rights violations, sectarian discrimination and repression of the political opposition,” is rotting in jail, noted the Committee to Protect Journalists.
In U.S.-allied Philippines, the outspoken senator and former human rights commissioner Leila de Lima, who has been critical of President Rodrigo Duterte’s antidrug war that has left more than 7,000 dead in the past three years in gun battles with the police and vigilantes, was thrown in jail in February 2017 on trumped-up drug charges and still languishes there.
And in once pro-Western Poland, the country’s most powerful politician, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, is trying to replace the independent judiciary with judges selected purely for their loyalty to him and his party, snubbing his nose at the European Union’s liberal, rule-of-law values.
Your -- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/opinion/trump-to-dictators-have-a-nice-day.html
**
Teflon populism
21 Jun 2019 | Slawomir Sierakowski
[ Insert: Famed “forever chemicals” lawyer Robert Bilott talks PFAS and policy at Yale
Nearly all people in the United States have PFAS in their blood. Attorney Robert Bilott — famous for revealing a decades-long record of toxic PFAS chemical exposure by the DuPont company — spoke on the importance of effective communication in translating scientific research into legislation.
Kayla Yup 10:35 pm, Feb 26, 2023
Staff Reporter
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/02/26/famed-forever-chemicals-lawyer-robert-bilott-talks-pfas-and-policy-at-yale/ ]
With links
Populist rule is invariably associated with corruption, nepotism and incompetence. Why, then, do populists appear immune to scandal? Revelations that would have shocked electorates just a few years ago leave nary a mark on populist leaders and government ministers. And, sometimes, what doesn’t kill them even seems to make them stronger.
Examples are legion. When Der Spiegel reported that the far-right Alternative for Germany had misappropriated funds, the party’s supporters couldn’t have cared less. When the same publication unearthed a video of Austria’s now-former vice chancellor, Heinz-Christian Strache, negotiating a quid pro quo with a Russian interlocutor, his far-right Freedom Party lost only a couple of percentage points in the polls, and probably only temporarily. Likewise, the parties of Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán continue to dominate their countries’ politics, despite repeated corruption scandals.
But the most scandal-proof populist of all is Poland’s de facto ruler, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Independent Polish media outlets have revealed new affairs involving Kaczynski and his Law and Justice (PiS) party practically on a weekly basis—all of them damning.
For example, Kaczynski was recently caught on tape arranging for the payment of a bribe to the partner of an Austrian businessman involved in the construction of a skyscraper project tellingly named K-Towers. And just before the European Parliament election in May, Poland was shaken by a documentary exposing paedophilia by Catholic priests, along with a massive coverup by the church hierarchy, which has close ties to PiS. Nonetheless, the PiS government has refused to form a lay commission to investigate the matter.
Also in May, Polish journalists discovered that Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki purchased land from the Catholic Church that has increased in value a hundredfold as a result of a planned road project, but which he has avoided disclosing by using a transmutation agreement with his wife. Citing a former colleague of Morawiecki, journalists also found that he’s due to receive a multimillion-zloty payment from Santander, the bank where he worked before becoming prime minister, upon the completion of his term.
Any one of these revelations would have ended the career of a politician in any previous Polish government. But since PiS came to power in 2015, not a single government minister has resigned as a result of a scandal. On the contrary, scandals seem to have shored up the party’s base. Although polls show that 84% of Poles support establishing a lay commission to investigate paedophilia in the church, a significant share of the electorate still supports PiS. Most Poles believe that scandals are real, but that didn’t stop PiS from securing a substantial victory in the European Parliament, with 45.5% of the vote. If anything, the party has gained even more leeway to engage in malign and corrupt behaviour.
The PiS government is immune to scandal for two reasons. The first is the strong economy, which has allowed it to pursue successive social programs aimed at marginalised voters. For example, just before the European Parliament election, the government disbursed an extra month’s worth of retirement benefits and issued payments to rural residents. Both groups voted overwhelmingly for PiS.
The second factor is propaganda. Because PiS constantly levies spurious, defamatory charges against the opposition and groups such as doctors, judges and striking teachers, real scandals no longer seem all that shocking or compromising. This debasement of public discourse is no accident. Kaczynski has made a conscious effort to create a media environment in which anything goes. That is why he frequently accuses European Council President Donald Tusk of conspiring with the Russians to orchestrate the plane crash that killed his brother in 2010. It is also why he traffics in conspiracy theories about German Chancellor Angela Merkel being installed by the Stasi (communist East Germany’s notorious secret police) and about refugees carrying infectious diseases.
For a politician like Kaczynski, a public sphere with no standards of truth or rules of decorum is ideal. The media and opposition can expose whatever they want; it won’t change anything. While investigative journalists compile fact after fact and receipt after receipt, and publish rigorous year-long investigations, PiS is busy poisoning public discourse through the state-run media outlets it oversees.
Owing to its unscrupulous use of targeted cash transfers and propaganda, PiS is not only immune to scandals but benefits from them. Where everyone else sees the disclosure of ugly facts, PiS supporters see a frontal assault on their own interests. Revelations of malfeasance by the ruling party merely strengthen many working-class Poles’ resolve to defend a government that has assisted them through social-welfare transfers.
The situation might be different if PiS politicians faced the risk of criminal investigation or prosecution. But the prosecutor’s office has been fully co-opted and will not seriously investigate the ruling party. You can hear a recording of Kaczynski bribing a businessman, but you can’t interrogate him (the same also seems to apply to US presidents suspected of obstructing justice). And if you are an investigative reporter who uncovers facts that are inconvenient for the government, you can expect to come under pressure to reveal your sources.
And so, Poland—and Europe—is left with a government that is utterly impervious to scandal and charges of nepotism. The PiS administration is beyond reproach, not because it is a moral authority, but precisely because it is so shamelessly immoral. It may be pillaging the country, but it is sharing enough of the spoils not to have to look over its shoulder.
Author
Slawomir Sierakowski, founder of the Krytyka Polityczna movement, is director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Warsaw and a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. This article is presented in partnership with Project Syndicate © 2019. Image courtesy of George Redgrave on Flickr.
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/teflon-populism/
”
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