History Shows Joe Biden 3.0 Is a Bad Idea

William Rivers Pitt, 

Truthout

April 26, 2019

https://truthout.org/articles/history-shows-joe-biden-3-0-is-a-bad-idea/

So Joe’s in now, and really, thank God. The corporate neoliberal “center” is dreadfully under-represented in the current tiny field of potential Democratic nominees. In the event candidates Buttigieg, Harris, O’Rourke, Booker, Klobuchar, Moulton, Inslee, Hickenlooper and Gillibrand fail to successfully advocate for continuing 30 years of failed conservative “centrist” Democratic policies, former Senator and Vice President Joe Biden (D-Delaware) will be there to shoot the gap.

:facebrick:

“The third time’s lucky,” reads Alexander Hilsop’s 1862 compendium of Scottish proverbs. I guess we’re all going to find out how true that is over the course of the 79 weeks standing between this ragged little patch of time and the 2020 presidential election. Senator Biden’s first run at the brass ring began on June 9, 1987, and ended in searing disgrace only 106 days later after his campaign was subsumed by plagiarism accusations and his questionable relationship with the facts of his own life.

Biden ran for president for the second time 20 years later, after dancing right up to the edge of declaring his candidacy before stepping back in 1992 and again in 2004. Biden managed to stay in the 2008 race for 11 months while never polling above single digits, finally withdrawing after placing 5th in the Iowa caucus. He did get noticed, however, and ultimately accepted the number two slot on what became a victorious Obama/Biden ticket.

Biden kicked off his third presidential run on Thursday with an ominous and somewhat cumbersome 6:00 am tweet — “[E]verything that has made America — America — is at stake.” The announcement tweet failed to mention Biden’s plans to attend a big-dollar fundraiser hosted by David Cohen, chief lobbyist for Comcast, the most despised company in the country. This, morosely, is par for a very long course.

Though he labels himself a friend to working people, Biden has a record of harming workers that spans decades. “His energetic work on behalf of the credit card companies has earned him the affection of the banking industry,” wrote Sen. Elizabeth Warren in 2002, “and protected him from any well-funded challengers for his Senate seat.”

“State laws have made Delaware the domicile of choice for corporations, especially banks,” writes Andrew Cockburn for Harpers, “and it competes for business with more notorious entrepôts such as the Cayman Islands. Over half of all US public companies are legally headquartered there.” Joe Biden spent 36 years as a Delaware senator until Obama raised him up in 2008, and during that time he served his core constituency with vigor.

Biden voted in favor of one of the most ruthlessly anti-worker bills in modern legislative history, the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, depriving millions of the protections provided by Chapter 7 bankruptcy. For this, and for his pro-corporate labors stretching all the way back to 1978, he has earned the financial devotion of the too-big-to-fail club many times over.

Millennial voters are touted as the sleeping giant of the 2020 election: Turn them out in large numbers, goes the thinking, and you can practically start measuring the drapes in the Oval Office today. If this is true, and I believe it is, candidate Biden began his campaign behind an eight-ball roughly the size of, well, Delaware.

“Student debt broke $1.5 trillion in the first quarter of 2018 according to the Federal Reserve,” writes Mark Provost for Truthout. “Twenty percent of student borrowers default on their loan payments. Delaware’s own senator and former vice president of the United States, Joe Biden, is at the center of the decades-long campaign by lenders to eviscerate consumer debt protections.”

Biden became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1987, at a time when Republicans were running actively racist campaigns under the gossamer veil of being “tough on crime.” Chairman Biden, who was about to spend 106 days failing to become president at the time, was not about to miss the boat. By 1994, he had become the Democratic championfor the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, a vicious piece of legislation which ushered in an age of mass incarceration that lawmakers today are still laboring to dismantle.

Biden’s problems on the matter of race go far beyond his full-throated support for the 1994 crime bill. “I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the Black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers,’” he said in 1975 regarding school desegregation. “‘In order to even the score, we must now give the Black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.’ I don’t buy that.”

You can expect to see that quote at least once a day for as long as his campaign remains active. One can try to shrug off a 44-year-old quote as the words of a man whose opinions on race have “evolved” — he shared the ticket with Obama! — but his record on the issue is unavoidably long and bleak. “Joe Biden’s greatest strength is that he’s been in the mainstream of American politics for the last 50 years,” writes the NBC politics blog, The Fix. “And that’s his greatest weakness, too.”

In this, Biden mirrors the history of the party whose nomination he seeks, a party that was firmly on the wrong side of racial justice until the middle of the 1960s. “My state was a slave state,” he told Fox News in 2006. “My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest Black population in the country. My state is anything [but] a Northeast liberal state.” Later that same year, before a mostly Republican crowd in South Carolina, Biden jokedthat Delaware only stayed in the Union during the Civil War “because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South.”

Joe Biden voted in favor of George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. I have spent the last 17 years of my life writing about that horrific war, and expect to still be writing about it right up until they wind me in my shroud. There is no lack of irony to be found in the fact that Biden ultimately decided not to run for president in 1992 because he voted against George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War resolution, believing that vote irretrievably damaged his chances for victory. Some 26 years later, his vote in favor of a different Iraq war will be around his neck like a blood-soaked millstone, and justly so.

And then there is the matter of Anita Hill, which rolls many of the most pressing issues of the day — women’s rights, the patriarchy, racism, the conservative balance of the Supreme Court, collusion with a Republican Party that thinks “bipartisanship” is hilarious — into a very hard ball.

“Joe Biden was the ringleader of the hostile and sexist hearing that put Anita Hill, not Clarence Thomas, on trial,” writes Shaunna Thomas, co-founder and executive director of the women’s group, UltraViolet. “In doing so, Biden caused tremendous harm to all survivors, he set back the movement, and he helped put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. This is not a subject he can sweep under the rug. This is not something he can just get out of the way before announcing his candidacy. This is not something one line in a speech or interview will fix.”

Prior to announcing his candidacy, Biden expressed regret for his treatment of Anita Hill, going so far as to say “I’m sorry” on the Today show in September 2018, which speaks volumes about how long he has been contemplating this campaign (Hill was not present in the studio to hear the apology). On the day he announced this third run, CNBC reported that Biden had spoken to Hill personally. “They had a private discussion,” said a campaign spokesperson, “where he shared with her directly his regret for what she endured and his admiration for everything she has done to change the culture around sexual harassment in this country.”

According to The New York Times, however, Hill was having none of it. “Ms. Hill, in an interview Wednesday, said she left the conversation feeling deeply unsatisfied and declined to characterize his words to her as an apology,” reported the Times. “She said she is not convinced that Mr. Biden truly accepts the harm he caused her and other women who suffered sexual harassment and gender violence.”

“I cannot be satisfied by simply saying I’m sorry for what happened to you,” Hill is quoted as saying. “I will be satisfied when I know there is real change and real accountability and real purpose. The focus on apology, to me, is one thing. But he needs to give an apology to the other women and to the American public because we know now how deeply disappointed Americans around the country were about what they saw. And not just women. There are women and men now who have just really lost confidence in our government to respond to the problem of gender violence.”

Joe Biden’s first three public endorsements — from conservative Democratic Senators Chris Coons (Delaware), Bob Casey (Pennsylvania) and Doug Jones (Alabama) — tell you all you need to know about who is rooting for his candidacy. A significant number of the policies he has devoted his life to are simply terrible. He’s a bannerman for a failed Democratic Party experiment, and the only people who don’t seem capable of perceiving that failure are the “centrist” Democrats cheering him on.

Biden is planning to run on the same “But I can win!” platform that worked out so poorly in the last election. The politics blog Crystal Ball labels him as potentially “The Most Experienced New President Ever,” which was also what some people were saying about Hillary Clinton in 2016. Even in the short time between now and then, a great many Democratic voters have demonstrably left him behind.

Three decades of watching conservative Democrats assist Republicans as they drove the country to the right is enough already. Alexander Hilsop’s proverb, I strongly suspect, is dead wrong on this one. Joe Biden is leading in the polls at the moment, but if he’s still in the race after Super Tuesday, I will be stunned. At least he’ll know how to find the exit. He’s done it before.

The Time of the Era and the Time of an Analysis

 27 April, 2019

Jorge Assef

http://www.thelacanianreviews.com/

In the course of his Brazilian seminars published under the title of “The Erotics of Time”, Jacques-Alain Miller, referring to La Rochefoucauld’s saying about the impossibility of looking death in the face, states: We could say there is a Horror Temporis[1].

After the decline of the Name of the Father, and confronted with the empire of the capitalist discourse and the consequent rise of object a to the social zenith, we can see how our era lives in the frenzy of making the most of its time. The push to jouissance, along with the imperative that “time is money” so don’t waste it, have shaped the hyper-modern version of the contemporary “Horror Temporis”: This is the horror at wasting time which translates into an ongoing status of subjective urgency.

The other side of these phenomena is that those who do not know how to catch this train remain on the fringes, in some sort of suspension of time, or delayed condition of apathy or uncertainty. How does this phenomenon appear in the clinic today?

One typical form has to do with being in a hurry: patients ask about the length of the treatment in their first interview, say that they don’t have time to come often, get upset if there are delays in the waiting room, etc. Another form is a kind of lethargy manifested in the doubt that some patients express about coming every week, using as justification the argument that there is nothing so important going on in their lives, they would not know what to talk about, for instance.

What both these forms express is an avoidance of what Lacan situated as the logical time between the instant of seeing and the moment for concluding. Lacan calls this blank space, where there are no certainties (whether good or bad), no conclusions and no answers, the time for understanding. It has to do with a necessary lapse, a lapse where something can come into being, something can be loosened, something can be built, can ripen, break away or crop up.

For this “Time for Understanding” to acquire its power, we need to safeguard it against the oppression of apathy as dead-time and from the acceleration of hyper-activity; which is something that in itself goes against the grain of our era and its imperatives. It installs the analytical experience as an unprecedented pause in the generalized velocity of our way of life.

There is an often repeated remark from Lacan’s interview on Belgian radio published as a text called “Radiophony” where, referring to Socrates, he states: “He knew like us that a being needs time to come to be” [2]. Lacan says that this time, which is a logical time, needs to be respected and supported not only by the patient but also by the analyst. That is why he then adds: “This ‘it takes time’ (faut du temps), he — i.e. the analyst — supports it long enough for that which comes to be said not to fail…[3]”

And precisely, when Lacan gives his interview for the Italian magazine Panorama he states: “My books are called incomprehensible. But for whom? I did not write them for everyone, thinking that just anyone could understand them. (…). For me, it is enough to have an audience who reads my work. If they do not understand, well, let’s be patient. (…) I am also convinced that within ten years at the utmost, people reading my work will find it entirely transparent (…).’ [4].”

He does not say that his work will become transparent, as if he were a man ahead of his time; he says that those who read it will, within ten years at the utmost, find it transparent, meaning that he also includes time in the act of reading. The formation of the psychoanalyst thus also requires time for understanding.

In fact, when an analyst acquires the skill of managing time in the direction of the treatment (which includes supporting the time needed “to come to be”) it is an effect of their formation, and formation is also a matter of time.

We thus see that supporting time, a time that has no forced limits, no deadlines, no certainties, the time of the “Time for Understanding”, is part of the materiality of the analytical session. That is why Lacan says: “(…) except that discourse is not simply (…) something which leads somewhere, has a fabric, a texture, and not only does it take time, not only does it have a dimension in time, a certain density which means that we cannot in any way be satisfied with the instantaneous present (…)[5]

Therefore, it is thanks to this “Time for Understanding” that the “Instants of Seeing” can irrupt, like the spring of the lion that Freud talks about, as well as the “Moments for Concluding” as precipitations that often take the subject by surprise.

The analytical experience ranges between these two zones[6]:

The series, frequency, continuity and regularity: so that those events in life that left a mark on the subject (and which fixed a certain regime of jouissance) are displayed. Then the effects of truth can be gathered[7] and organized as knowledge.

The cut, spring, surprise, the act, the irruption.

It is between these two registers of time that one makes room for something to happen that will lead to the end of the analysis.

In the meantime, our practice does not detain itself in setting deadlines, or goals according to a time schedule, a chronological period or fixed hours. It is not a question of how long an analysis takes or how long a session lasts, but about the effects that are produced there.

It is said that once a journalist asked Jackson Pollock how he knew when one of his drip paintings was finished. His answer was: “And how do you know when you are finished making love?”

The time of the analytic act is a time that breaks all clocks, because it operates at the level of the subjective experience of time. This is why Miller claims: (…) In precise terms, I consider Lacanian sessions as a time frame with a supplement of the infinite (…) Otherwise the problem of the duration of sessions would become insolvable. They will always be too short or too long (…) It is not that we give short sessions, but that we give sessions that are infinite[8].

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[1] Miller, J-A (2002). “La erótica del tiempo”. P. 19. Buenos Aires: Tres Haches.

[2] Lacan, J. (2012) “Radiofonía” in Otros Escritos. P. 449. Buenos Aires: Paidós.

[3] Lacan, J. (2012) “Radiofonía” in Otros Escritos. P. 451. Buenos Aires: Paidós.

[4] Lacan, J. (1974 [2015]) “Jacques Lacan Freud for Ever” an interview with Panorama. Published in Hurly-Burly. The International Lacanian Journal of Psychoanalysis. Issue 12. P. 16. Published for the Freudian Field by the New Lacanian School.

[5] Lacan, J. (1957-1958 [2017]). “Formation of the Unconscious. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan | Book V”. USA: Polity Press.

[6] Brousse, M-H. (2019) Available at: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=299986064184879/

[7] Córdoba, C. (2019). Available at: https://www.facebook.com/CIECSeminarioInternacional/photos/a.790997284294532/2145609028833344/

[8] Miller, J-A. (2002). “La erótica del tiempo”. P. 19. Buenos Aires: Tres Haches.

Progressive capitalism – an oxymoron

Michael Roberts

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/progressive-capitalism-an-oxymoron/

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel (Riksbank) prize winner in economics and former chief economist at the World Bank, as well as an adviser to the leftist Labour leadership in the UK.  He stands to the left in the spectrum of mainstream economics.

He has just published a new book called People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent, in which he proclaims that “We can save our broken economic system from itself.”  He is very concerned about the rising inequality of incomes and wealth in the major economies, especially in the US.  “Some 90 percent have seen their incomes stagnate or decline in the past 30 years. This is not surprising, given that the United States has the highest level of inequality among the advanced countries and one of the lowest levels of opportunity — with the fortunes of young Americans more dependent on the income and education of their parents than elsewhere.”

You see, capitalism used to be ‘progressive’ in that it developed the economy and raised the human condition, using scientific knowledge and innovation; and it worked well, with the rule of law and democratic checks on ‘excesses’.  But then in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher came along and changed the rules, deregulating the economy – and now Trump is breaking down the checks and balances.  So the progressive capitalism of the 1960s has been destroyed.  By relying on uncontrolled markets, exploitation and inequality has run riot.

“The result is an economy with more exploitation — whether it’s abusive practices in the financial sector or the technology sector using our own data to take advantage of us at the cost of our privacy. The weakening of antitrust enforcement, and the failure of regulation to keep up with changes in our economy and the innovations in creating and leveraging market power, meant that markets became more concentrated and less competitive.” (Stiglitz)

What is Stiglitz’s solution? “Things don’t have to be that way. There is an alternative: progressive capitalism. Progressive capitalism is not an oxymoron; we can indeed channel the power of the market to serve society.” You see, it is not capitalism that is the problem but vested interests, especially among monopolists and bankers. The answer is to return to the days of managed capitalism that Stiglitz believes existed in the golden age of the 1950s and 1960s.

How are we to return to the golden age of progressive capitalism?  On Democracy Now, the online broadcaster, Stiglitz was asked in an interview: “should it be progressive capitalism or workers power?”  He replied, “the market is going to have to play an important role. So, that’s why I wanted to use the word “capitalism.” But I wanted to signal that the form of capitalism that we’ve seen over the last 40 years has not been working for most people. And that’s why I talk about people. We have to have progressive capitalism. We have to tame capitalism and redirect capitalism so it serves our society. You know, people are not supposed to serve the economy; the economy is supposed to serve our people”. When he was asked “Hasn’t capitalism always done that (ie serve the rich and the monopolies rather than the poor and workers)?”, he responded “Not to the extent that it has.”

Stiglitz’s views are either pure naivety or clever sophistry –or maybe both. Does he really think that there was a period when capitalism benefited both workers and corporations; rich and poor?  The ‘golden age’ after 1945 up the late 1960s was the exception in advanced capitalist economies and then only for those economies, not for Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.  For the greater part of the globe, those decades were ones of dire poverty and a battle against imperialist exploitation.

Anyway, it is a myth that in the 1950s and 1960s that everybody gained from ‘progressive’ capitalism in the West.  And what gains that were made in public services, a welfare state, relatively full employment and rising incomes were mainly the result of struggle and pressure by the labour movement, forcing concessions from the owners of capital.

And Stiglitz never explains why this supposed regulated, democratic progressive capitalism came to an end in the 1970s, except to suggest it was down to the vile politics of Reagan, Thatcher etc.  But readers of this blog know that there was a change of objective conditions from the mid-1960s, namely a sharp fall in the profitability of capital globally.

That meant that capital could no longer accede to rising real incomes, more public services and free education and health etc.  The years of high profitability that allowed for concessions were over. Profitability is the driving force of capitalism, so politicians were elected (both right and left) committed reducing the welfare state and labour power; privatising and deregulating. Above all, progressive” capitalism had a series of major slumps that weakened the labour movement and restored (to some extent) profitability.

Indeed, Stiglitz never mentions the causes of recessions at all except to suggest that they are due to rising inequality: “If we had curbed exploitation in all of its forms and encouraged wealth creation, we would have had a more dynamic economy with less inequality. We might have curbed the opioid crisis and avoided the 2008 financial crisis.”  And yet the international slumps of 1974-5 and 1980-82 took place when inequality was at its lowest since industrial capitalism began (according to Thomas Piketty – graph).  So rising inequality was not the cause of the Great Recession but the result of efforts to raise profitability after the 1980s.  

And how do we get back to this ‘progressive capitalism’ anyway?  Stiglitz proposes regulation, breaking up the ‘monopolies’, progressive taxation, ending corruption and enforcing the rule of law in trade. “The prescription follows from the diagnosis: It begins by recognizing the vital role that the state plays in making markets serve society. We need regulations that ensure strong competition without abusive exploitation, realigning the relationship between corporations and the workers they employ and the customers they are supposed to serve. We must be as resolute in combating market power as the corporate sector is in increasing it.” These prescriptions are the stock of the reformist left in the US and elsewhere.  America’s Left Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren has made similar proposals with her “accountable capitalism” plan.

What on earth would make the top 1% and the very rich owners of capital agree to reduce their gains in order to get a more equal and successful economy?  And how would regulation and more equality deal with the impending disaster that is global warming as capitalism accumulates rapaciously without any regard for the planet’s resources and viability?  Programmes of redistribution do little for this.  And if an economy is made more equal, would it stop future slumps under capitalism or future Great Recessions?  More equal economies in the past did not avoid these slumps.

Unlike 1949, in 2019, none of Stiglitz’s ‘progressive’ measures are possible. Indeed, radical change is now probably only possible with ‘workers’ power’ and if that became a reality we could move beyond such measures to real democratic control of the economy, by replacing capitalism, rather than ‘saving it from itself’’.

33-year study shows increasing ocean winds and wave heights

April 25, 2019

University of Melbourne

Extreme ocean winds and wave heights are increasing around the globe, with the largest rise occurring in the Southern Ocean, University of Melbourne research shows.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190425143540.htm

Global trends in extreme (90th percentile) wind speed over the period 1985-2018. Areas in red indicate increasing values, whereas blue indicates decreases.

Credit: Professor Ian Young

[IMAGE]

Extreme ocean winds and wave heights are increasing around the globe, with the largest rise occurring in the Southern Ocean, University of Melbourne research shows.

Researchers Ian Young and Agustinus Ribal, from the University's Department of Infrastructure Engineering, analysed wind speed and wave height measurements taken from 31 different satellites between 1985-2018, consisting of approximately 4 billion observations.

The measurements were compared with more than 80 ocean buoys deployed worldwide, making it the largest and most detailed dataset of its type ever compiled.

The researchers found that extreme winds in the Southern Ocean have increased by 1.5 metres per second, or 8 per cent, over the past 30 years. Extreme waves have increased by 30 centimetres, or 5 per cent, over the same period.

As the world's oceans become stormier, Professor Young warns this has flow on effects for rising sea levels and infrastructure.

"Although increases of 5 and 8 per cent might not seem like much, if sustained into the future such changes to our climate will have major impacts," Professor Young said.

"Flooding events are caused by storm surge and associated breaking waves. The increased sea level makes these events more serious and more frequent.

"Increases in wave height, and changes in other properties such as wave direction, will further increase the probability of coastal flooding."

Professor Young said understanding changes in the Southern Ocean are important, as this is the origin for the swell that dominates the wave climate of the South Pacific, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

"Swells from the Southern Ocean determine the stability of beaches for much of the Southern Hemisphere, Professor Young said.

"These changes have impacts that are felt all over the world. Storm waves can increase coastal erosion, putting costal settlements and infrastructure at risk."

International teams are now working to develop the next generation of global climate models to project changes in winds and waves over the next 100 years.

"We need a better understanding of how much of this change is due to long-term climate change, and how much is due to multi-decadal fluctuations, or cycles," Professor Young said.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Melbourne. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Journal Reference:

Ian R. Young, Agustinus Ribal. Multiplatform evaluation of global trends in wind speed and wave height. Science, 2019; eaav9527 DOI: 10.1126/science.aav9527

Revealed: the Trump-linked ‘Super PAC’ working behind the scenes to drive Europe’s voters to the far right

openDemocracy undercover investigation reveals ‘explosive’ evidence of ‘extraordinary coordination’ between controversial Madrid campaign group and far-right parties across Europe. 

Español.

Adam RamsayClaire Provost

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/revealed-the-trump-linked-super-pac-working-behind-the-scenes-to-drive-europes-voters-to-the-far-right/

A controversial Madrid-based campaign group, supported by American and Russian ultra-conservatives, is working across Europe to drive voters towards far-right parties in next month’s European Parliament elections and in Spain’s national elections this Sunday, openDemocracy can reveal today.

Our findings have caused alarm among lawmakers who fear that Trump-linked conservatives are working with European allies to import a controversial US-style ‘Super PAC’ model of political campaigning to Europe – opening the door to large amounts of ‘dark money’ flowing unchecked into elections and referenda.

The Madrid-based campaign group CitizenGo is best known for its online petitions against same-sex marriage, sex education and abortion – and for driving buses across cities with slogans against LGBT rights and “feminazis”.

But now openDemocracy can reveal new evidence of “extraordinary coordination” between this group and far-right parties across Europe – from Spain to Italy, Germany and Hungary.

In Spain, CitizenGo is supporting the far-right party Vox that is expected to make big gains this weekend, winning seats in the country’s parliament for the first time and potentially forming part of the new government.

Speaking to our undercover reporter posing as a potential donor, CitizenGo’s director described plans to run attack ads against Vox’s political opponents, and talked about how to get around campaign finance laws.

Meanwhile a senior Vox official compared CitizenGo to a “Super PAC” in the US, referring to the controversial groups that can spend unlimited sums influencing elections in America – and which are known for aggressive, negative campaigning.

openDemocracy can further reveal today how CitizenGo has been supported by an experienced American political fundraiser and tech consultant linked to the Trump campaign, the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement, who boasted of being able to use controversial technology to collect personal data about potential voters.

Former US Democratic Senator Russ Feingold described our findings as “frightening” and called on European leaders to act to protect the democratic process.

“Europe has an opportunity to get ahead of this and not make the same mistakes that were made here in the United States”, said Feingold, who worked alongside Republican senator John McCain for reform of electoral finance in the US.

CitizenGo’s board also includes a close business associate of the “Orthodox Oligarch” Konstantin Malofeev – who has been targeted by USand European sanctions for allegedly propping up the pro-Russian breakaway republic in eastern Ukraine – and an Italian politician, Luca Volonte, currently on trial in Milan facing corruption charges.

European lawmakers have described openDemocracy’s findings as “explosive” and have called for “urgent action” to “maintain the integrity” of upcoming elections.

In a letter to the European Commission’s transparency tsar Frans Timmermans, MPs, MEPs and Senators from six European countries said these findings “merit urgent and high-level investigation by the European Commission and relevant national authorities”.

“We have all seen how democracy can easily be eroded if we remain complacent about the activities of anti-democratic actors… [who oppose] European fundamental rights, European values and liberal democracy”, they warned.

‘Make Spain Great Again’

The Spanish far-right party Vox has pledged to build walls around Spanish enclaves in North Africa, jail Catalan independence leaders, loosen gun control laws and “make Spain great again”. The party also opposes “political correctness”, marriage equality for gay people and laws against gender-based violence.

CitizenGo’s leader, Ignacio Arsuaga, has publicly supported Vox, as has the group’s Spanish language partner organisation, HazteOir – which recently lost the equivalent of charity status after campaigns the government said “denigrate or devalue” LGBT people.

But our research reveals new evidence of the close relationship between CitizenGo, HazteOir and Vox.

Describing Vox as “my friends”, Arsuaga said they’ve met with its senior officials to share their campaign plans and described how they ‘indirectly’ support the party.

Our undercover reporter specifically asked Arsuaga how to get around Spanish campaign finance laws rules – donating more to Vox than the legal limit – and about doing so anonymously, which is against the law.

Arsuaga explained that there are no such limits on donations to groups like CitizenGo, and “if you give privately to a non-profit there is no need to disclose that”. He said CitizenGo would not channel money to Vox itself but “you could give to any foundation that doesn’t mind to give, to forward the money, to Vox... that would be a good option”.

“This is something we haven’t made public”, Arsuaga continued, “but, in Spain, we’re going to launch a campaign before the general elections... where we are going to show bad things that have been said” by the leaders of parties that Vox is running against, for example “in favour of abortion or in favour of LGBT laws” – describing since-released posters and adverts against candidates from other parties.

“We’re never going to ask people to vote for Vox... but the campaign is going to help Vox indirectly”

Ignacio Arsuaga, CitizenGo

The Vox official that Arsuaga put our undercover reporter in touch with confirmed that supporting CitizenGo could help the party, “indirectly”, describing them as independent but that “we are actually currently totally aligned”.

He told our reporter that while there is a limit on the size of individual donations to parties, “there is not a limit on the number of donors, okay, it can be split among several donors… and they only have to register [their first] name, last name and the origin”.

“There are other ways of making support”, he added, describing “a lack of regulation in terms of the equivalent of Super PACs in the United States, those institutions or organisations that give airtime or advertising in support of causes or candidates or political parties. I understand that that is outside of the limitations of the actual political parties which is very, very regulated”.

Super PACs don’t officially exist in Europe but he said “there are movements to create those and I think they are unregulated” and “Ignacio’s organisation, that’s kind of that”.

Financial scandals and links to the ‘hard right’

Vox has been hit by several financial scandals, including the late 2018 supreme court condemnation of its then vice-president for “accounting irregularities” in one of his companies, disqualifying him from overseeing other accounts for three years.

It also received €800,000 in donations from an extremist Iranian opposition group for its 2014 European elections campaigns – and has been linked to a controversial foundation that glorifies Francisco Franco, Spain’s former dictator.

Arsuaga also told our reporter that Vox’s General Secretary Javier Ortega Smith, simultaneously the lawyer leading Vox’s private prosecution of Catalan independence supporters, “comes, I would say, from the hard right, like Falangists… Franco’s movement – but nobody knows, it’s a kind of private thing”.

Neither Ortega Smith nor the Vox party responded to openDemocracy’s requests for comment on Arsuaga’s claim.

“He comes, I would say, from the hard right, like Falangists... Franco’s movement – but nobody knows, it’s a kind of private thing”

Ignacio Arsuaga, CitizenGo

Responding to openDemocracy’s request for comments before publication, Arsuaga said: “It is self-evident that supporting HazteOir.org or CitizenGO means indirectly supporting the parties that defend (in some way) the principles we defend”.

It is “public knowledge that we work to influence and put pressure on political parties”, he said, saying that this is done “by no means ‘behind the scenes’”. He also disputed the characterisation of parties that CitizenGo aligns with as “far right”.

Powerful American and Russian backers

CitizenGo was set up in 2013 – the same year as Vox – as an ultra-conservative version of the progressive campaign platforms Avaaz.org and MoveOn.org. It has run powerful campaigns globally, including in Kenya where last year it helped get the reproductive health charity Marie Stopes temporarily banned from providing abortion services.

CitizenGo also has some very powerful international backers and partners. As previously mentioned, Alexey Komov, a close associate of the “Orthodox Oligarch” Konstantin Malofeev, and Luca Volonte, the Italian politician currently on trial in Milan facing corruption charges, both serve on the group’s board of trustees.

Bank statements from Volonte’s Novae Terrae Foundation in Italy, seen by openDemocracy, show that it paid CitizenGo €12,000 in 2014 – at the same time as the foundation was receiving money from entities later identified as part of a ‘laundromat’ pumping illicit cash into Europe from Azerbaijan and Russia. There is no evidence to suggest that the money paid to CitizenGo came from these illicit sources.

Meanwhile, Arsuaga told our undercover reporter that Patrick Slim, son of the Mexican oligarch Carlos Slim, gave his group €40,000, which “for him is just a very small amount”, Arsuaga noted – although it is close to the maximum individual donation to a political party permitted under Spanish law (and four times election campaign limits).

It was not clear whether this donation was for CitizenGo or HazteOir, neither of which are political parties. At the time of publication, Patrick Slim had not replied to openDemocracy’s request for comment.

Another CitizenGo board member is Brian Brown, a prominent US anti-LGBT activist who leads the World Congress of Families (WCF) network that recently met in Italy, with deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini from the far-right Lega party among its speakers.

Arsuaga told our reporter that he met Brown at a WCF meeting in Madrid in 2012 and that CitizenGo gets advice “every couple of months or so” from a “senior expert” in fundraising and technology who is “paid by Brian Brown”.

This expert is Darian Rafie, Brown’s partner at an American organisation called ActRight, which describes itself online as a “clearinghouse for conservative action”.

Previously, CitizenGo has presented itself in the logo on its website as a “member of the ActRight family” and openDemocracy understands that ActRight paid for a CitizenGo staff member in 2013, a claim that Rafie did not deny in emailed comments.

ActRight is currently encouraging people to “thank president Trump for stopping transgender insanity in the military”. On Facebook, its recent posts include those supporting Trump; those mocking the appearances of left-wing women; and asking “How much do you think Barack Obama paid Harvard to admit his pot-head daughter?”

ActRight’s Rafie is an experienced political consultant in the US who has played key roles in a number of companies that have worked for the Republican National Committee and the Republican party in Ohio and Michigan; received payments from a Super PAC supporting Texas Republican Ted Cruz (as did ActRight in 2015); and worked with the Tea Party group Think Freely Media.

Speaking to our undercover reporter, Rafie said he “did a lot of fundraising politically with Trump”, through political action committees (PACs) but also “directly with the campaign… [and] directly with the party”, and that he expects one of his companies to be working “in the majority of states” in the 2020 election campaigns.

‘Your phone is leaking information’

“There is a lot of stuff to be done with mobile phones and geo-fencing areas”, Rafie told our reporter. He explained: “Say there’s a rally somewhere, one of these big Trump campaign rallies. What we’ll do is we’ll draw a Polygon around that event and then we’ll register all the phones that were there”.

“Then we follow those phones home, then we know who they are, and what they do, and now I know what your Netflix unique ID is, and I’ve got your Facebook unique ID, so then I can communicate with you through a whole variety of ways”.

Rafie said “you can do that in Europe” too, though “it’s a little more limited… because the privacy laws are better, for the consumer”.

He said: “It’s actually really scary, when you peek beneath the covers, and realise that this phone that you’re carrying around with you is leaking everywhere all of your information” which can be correlated with personal data “very quickly”. In the US, he explained, “all of the data is routinely collated and correlated and available for sale”.

“We follow those phones home. Then we know who they are, and what they do, and now I know what your Netflix unique ID is, and I’ve got your Facebook unique ID, so then I can communicate with you through a whole variety of ways”.

Darian Rafie

Over email, Rafie clarified to openDemocracy that this company uses “ad networks” as do “many political campaigns and businesses in the United States… to delineate an area and identify unique device IDs and their associated advertising profiles”.

“We should all be frightened by the amount of data routinely collected, collated and sold by ad networks (such as Google and Facebook)”, he added.

Friends across Europe

On stage at the World Congress of Families meeting in Verona, Italy, in late March, CitizenGo’s Arsuaga urged European and other international ultra-conservatives to pursue an indirect, “less understood, practised path to power” that he summarised as: “By controlling [politicians’] environment… you also control them”.

‘By controlling [politicians’] environment… you also control them’

Ignacio Arsuaga, CitizenGo

Speaking to our undercover reporter at this event, Arsuaga revealed that CitizenGo also has “a lot of contact” with the Fidesz and Lega far-right parties in Hungary and Italy, along with “some contact” with the far-right AfD in Germany.

Asked if he discussed his group’s campaign strategies with these parties, Arsuaga told our undercover reporter “yeah, yeah… we inform them about what we are going to do”.

He also offered to introduce us to Lega party senator Simone Pillon and an AfD official believed to be Maximilian Krah, who was photographed with Salvini at the Verona event.

In Germany, CitizenGo’s events have attracted Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis – another World Congress of Families speaker, patron of conservative Christian causes and a friend of Steve Bannon – along with the AfD’s Benjamin Nolte.

In Italy, CitizenGo was one of the organisers of the WCF event in Veronaalong with the ProVita anti-abortion campaign that has ties to the neo-fascist party, Forza Nuova.

CitizenGo has also been involved in training Italian activists including via a four-day workshop in 2018 with the Leadership Institute – a US conservative group that counts Vice President Mike Pence among the alumni of its trainings in America.

openDemocracy contacted the Lega, AfD and Fidesz parties but they did not respond to requests for comment on their relationships with CitizenGo.

‘A loud and clear wake-up call’

Lawmakers from across Europe have expressed alarm at openDemocracy’s findings about CitizenGo and its international networks.

German MEP Terry Reintke, Greens/EFA spokesperson for gender equality and social policy in the European Parliament, said: “It is shocking how close and deep-running the ties between right-wing, nationalistic populists are – even spanning over the Atlantic. Especially with the European elections ahead, this is extremely worrying”.

She added that this “needs to be a loud and clear wake-up call… This is an attack on fundamental rights and freedoms of all of us”.

British MEP Molly Scott Cato called for “tough and immediate action... to protect the integrity of the democratic process”. CitizenGo is an example, she added, of how “the extreme right often… presents themselves as protectors of life, liberty and family” – while “behind this thin veneer there so often lurks a sinister political agenda”.

Scottish National Party MP Alyn Smith reiterated his concern that “these [European] elections will face a concerted effort to manipulate the outcome” and called for “more investigations, particularly in the UK after the activities of the Leave campaigns, so legislators can tackle these in the future”.

Petra Bayr, an MP from Austria and Vice-President of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, expressed her concern about European groups “trying to import a controversial US-style ‘Super PAC’ model of political campaigning to Europe, which can allow large amounts of dark money to flow unregulated into elections and referenda, often in support of extremist parties and financing controversial, negative campaigning”.

Commenting on openDemocracy’s findings, former Wisconsin Democratic senator Russ Feingold warned of a “downward spiral effect on democracy”.

“There is a great irony in this. [Far-right parties] are trying to appeal to ultra nationalist sentiments but they are using tactics that are completely contrary to the sovereignty of those countries. These are international actors, oligarchs and others who are trying to control the political processes of these countries. Even if you are a nationalist, one would think you would be a little bit concerned about that”, Feingold said.

Speaking from Washington DC, Adav Noti, a US election lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center, also warned that Super PACs have been “destructive” in the US, with “horrible effects” for American democracy.

“The last eight years since the invention of this Super PAC vehicle have seen a real sharp increase in the extent to which our elections are dominated by a small number of ultra wealthy individuals and corporations”, said Noti.

“A federal election in the US is supposed to be decided by 150m voters and yet the policy preferences are being determined by literally 20 people, 20 major donors”.

In emailed comments to openDemocracy, CitizenGo’s Ignacio Arsuaga said his groups do report donors to Spain’s Ministry of Interior and that “according to the current Data Protection legislation, we cannot tell the press who is our donor”.

He said “all the donations we have received are legal”, and that “the destination of our funds has always been legal and public”.

Additional reporting by Peter Geoghegan, Claudia Torrisi, Belen Lobos and Alexander Nabert.