Monday, February 10, 2020
What Is Happening to Assange Will Happen to the Rest of Us
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/what-is-happening-to-assange-will-happen-to-the-rest-of-us/
Chris Hedges
David Morales, the indicted owner of the Spanish private security firm Undercover Global, is being investigated by Spain’s high court for allegedly providing the CIA with audio and video recordings of the meetings WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had with his attorneys and other visitors when the publisher was in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The security firm also reportedly photographed the passports of all of Assange’s visitors. It is accused of taking visitors’ phones, which were not permitted in the embassy, and opening them, presumably in an effort to intercept calls. It reportedly stole data from laptops, electronic tablets and USB sticks, all required to be left at the embassy reception area. It allegedly compiled detailed reports on all of Assange’s meetings and conversations with visitors. The firm even is said to have planned to steal the diaper of a baby — brought to visit Assange — to perform a DNA test to establish whether the infant was a secret son of Assange. UC Global, apparently at the behest of the CIA, also allegedly spied on Ecuadorian diplomats who worked in the London embassy.
The probe by the court, the Audiencia Nacional, into the activities of UC Global, along with leaked videos, statements, documents and reports published by the Spanish newspaper El País as well as the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, offers a window into the new global security state. Here the rule of law is irrelevant. Here privacy and attorney-client privilege do not exist. Here people live under 24-hour-a-day surveillance. Here all who attempt to expose the crimes of tyrannical power will be hunted down, kidnapped, imprisoned and broken. This global security state is a terrifying melding of the corporate and the public. And what it has done to Assange it will soon do to the rest of us.
The publication of classified documents is not yet a crime in the United States. If Assange is extradited and convicted, it will become one. Assange is not an American citizen. WikiLeaks, which he founded, is not a U.S.-based publication. The extradition of Assange would mean the end of journalistic investigations into the inner workings of power. It would cement into place a terrifying global, corporate tyranny under which borders, nationality and law mean nothing. Once such a legal precedent is set, any publication that publishes classified material, from The New York Times to an alternative website, will be prosecuted and silenced.
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The flagrant defiance of law and international protocols in the persecution of Assange is legion. In April 2019, Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno capriciously terminated Assange’s right of asylum at the London embassy, where he spent seven years, despite Assange’s status as a political refugee. Moreno authorized British police to enter the embassy — diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory — to arrest a naturalized citizen of Ecuador. (Assange retains his Australian citizenship.) The British police seized Assange, who has never committed a crime, and the British government keeps him imprisoned, ostensibly for a bail violation.
Assange is being held in the notorious high-security HM Prison Belmarsh. He has spent much of his time in isolation, is often heavily sedated and has been denied medical treatment for a variety of physical ailments. His lawyers say they are routinely denied access to their client. Nils Melzer, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture who examined Assange with two physicians, said Assange has undergone prolonged psychological torture. Melzer has criticized what he calls the “judicial persecution” of Assange by Britain, the United States, Ecuador and Sweden, which prolonged an investigation into a sexual assault case in an effort to extradite Assange to Sweden. Assange said the case was a pretext to extradite him to the United States. Once Assange was arrested by British police the sexual assault case was dropped.
Melzer says Assange would face a politicized show trial in the United States if he were extradited to face 17 charges under the Espionage Act for his role in publishing classified military and diplomatic cables, documents and videos that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each of the counts carries a potential sentence of 10 years, and an additional charge that Assange conspired to hack into a government computer has a maximum sentence of five years. A hearing to determine whether he will be extradited to the United States starts Feb. 24 at London’s Woolwich Crown Court. It is scheduled to last about a week and then resume May 18, for three weeks more.
WikiLeaks released U.S. military war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, a cache of 250,000 diplomatic cables and 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs along with the 2007 “Collateral Murder” video, in which U.S. helicopter pilots banter as they gun down civilians, including children and two Reuters journalists, in a Baghdad street. The material was given to WikiLeaks in 2010 by Chelsea Manning, then Bradley Manning, a low-ranking intelligence specialist in the U.S. Army. Assange has been accused by an enraged U.S. intelligence community of causing “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.” Manning was convicted of espionage charges in August 2013 and sentenced to 35 years in a military prison. She was granted clemency in January 2017 by President Barack Obama. Manning was ordered back to prison last year after refusing to testify before a grand jury in the WikiLeaks case, and she remains behind bars. No one was ever charged for the war crimes WikiLeaks documented.
Assange earned the enmity of the Democratic Party establishment by publishing 70,000 hacked emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee and senior Democratic officials. The emails were copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The Podesta emails exposed the donation of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the major funders of Islamic State. It exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. It exposed Clinton’s repeated mendacity. She was caught in the emails, for example, telling the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, a statement that contradicted her campaign statements. It exposed the Clinton campaign’s efforts to influence the Republican primaries to ensure that Donald Trump was the Republican nominee. It exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate. It exposed Clinton as the principal architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate.
Journalists can argue that this information, like the war logs, should have remained hidden, but they can’t then call themselves journalists.
The Democratic and Republican leaders are united in their crusade to extradite and sentence Assange. The Democratic Party, which has attempted to blame Russia for its election loss to Trump, charges that the Podesta emails were obtained by Russian government hackers. However, James Comey, the former FBI director, has conceded that the emails were probably delivered to WikiLeaks by an intermediary, and Assange has said the emails were not provided by “state actors.”
WikiLeaks has done more than any other news organization to expose the abuses of power and crimes of the American empire. In addition to the war logs and the Podesta emails, it made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency and their interference in foreign elections, including French elections. It disclosed the internal conspiracy against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour members of Parliament. It intervened to save Edward Snowden, who made public the wholesale surveillance of the American public by our intelligence agencies, from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow. (The Snowden leaks also revealed that Assange was on a U.S. “manhunt target list.”)
The inquiry by the Spanish court is the result of a criminal complaint filed by Assange, who accuses Morales and UC Global of violating his privacy and client-attorney confidentiality rights. The WikiLeaks founder also says the firm is guilty of misappropriation, bribery and money laundering.
Morales, according to El País, “stated both verbally and in writing to a number of his employees that, despite having been hired by the government of then-Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, he also worked ‘for the Americans,’ to whom he allegedly sent documents, videos and audios of the meetings that the Australian activist held in the embassy.”
“Despite the fact that the Spanish firm — which is headquartered in the southern city of Jerez de la Frontera — was hired by Senain, the Ecuadorian intelligence services, Morales called on his employees several times to keep his relationship with the US intelligence services a secret,” the paper reported.
“The owner of UC Global S. L. ordered a meeting between the head of the Ecuadorian secret service, Rommy Vallejo, and Assange to be spied on, at a time when they were planning the exit of Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy using a diplomatic passport in order to take him to another country,” according to El País. “This initiative was eventually rejected by Assange on the basis that he considered it to be ‘a defeat,’ that would fuel conspiracy theories, according to sources close to the company consulted by this newspaper. Morales called on his employees to keep his relationship with the US intelligence services a secret.”
The Vallejo-Assange meeting, which included Assange’s lawyers, took place Dec. 21, 2017. The security firm made audio and video recordings through microphones and cameras installed in the embassy. The CIA was immediately made aware of the plan, perhaps through an “external streaming access point” installed in the embassy, according to El País. The next day the United States issued an international arrest warrant for Assange.
Microphones were implanted in fire extinguishers and a women’s restroom where Assange’s lawyers would cloister themselves with their client in an effort to avoid being recorded. The windows in the embassy were given a treatment that provided better audio quality for the laser microphones that the CIA was using from exterior locations, the paper reported.
When Moreno was elected to the presidency in Ecuador, replacing Rafael Correa, who had granted Assange asylum in the embassy, an intense campaign was launched to force the publisher from the embassy. It included daily harassment, cutoff of internet access and the termination of nearly all visits.
UC Global, which provides personal security for casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and protection for his company Las Vegas Sands, apparently used Adelson, a friend of President Trump and one of the largest donors to the Republican Party, to lobby the Trump administration and then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo to make Assange a priority target.
La Repubblica, like El País, obtained important files, recordings and other information stemming from the UC Global surveillance at the embassy. They include photos of Assange in the embassy and recordings of conversations he had with doctors, journalists, politicians, celebrities and members of his legal team.
“The videos and audio recordings accessed by the Repubblica reveal the extreme violations of privacy that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks journalists, lawyers, doctors and reporters were subjected to inside the embassy, and represent a shocking case study of the impossibility of protecting journalistic sources and materials in such a hostile environment,” the Italian newspaper wrote. “This espionage operation is particularly shocking if we consider that Assange was protected by asylum, and if we consider that the information gathered will be used by the United States to support his extradition and put him in prison for the crimes for which he is currently charged and for which he risks 175 years in prison: the publication of secret US government documents revealing war crimes and torture, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Guantanamo.”
Pete Buttigieg's Campaign Tried to Have Me Arrested
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/pete-buttigiegs-campaign-once-tried-to-have-me-arrested/
Norman Solomon
You’d think that a presidential campaign backed by 40 billionaires and untold numbers of bundled rich people wouldn’t worry about just one leaflet on Medicare for All.
But minutes after Pete Buttigieg finished speaking in an auditorium at Keene State College in New Hampshire on Saturday, a Pete for America official confronted me outside the building while I was handing out a flier with the headline “Medicare for All. Not Healthcare Profiteering for the Few.”
“You can’t pass that out,” the man told me. I did a double take, glancing at the small “Pete” metal badge on his lapel while being told that he spoke on behalf of the Buttigieg campaign.
We were standing on the campus of a public college. I said that I understood the First Amendment. When I continued to pass out the flier, the Buttigieg campaign official (who repeatedly refused to give his name) disappeared and then quickly returned with a campus policeman, who told me to stop distributing the leaflet. Two Keene city police soon arrived.
The Buttigieg official stood a few feet behind them as the police officers threatened me with arrest for trespassing. Ordered to get off the campus within minutes or be arrested, I was handed an official written order (“Criminal Trespass Notice”) not to set foot on “Keene State College entire campus” for a year.
So much for freedom of speech and open election discourse in public places.
Why would a representative of the mighty Buttigieg campaign resort to such a move? A big clue can be found in a deception that Buttigieg engaged in during the debate on Friday night.
Buttigieg’s dishonesty arose when Amy Klobuchar, a vehement foe of Medicare for All, attacked Bernie Sanders for allegedly seeking to “kick 149 million Americans off their current health insurance in four years.” Klobuchar was reciting a key insurance-industry distortion that neglects to mention how a single-payer system would provide more complete health coverage, at less cost — by eliminating wasteful bureaucracy and corporate profiteering.
But Klobuchar then pivoted to attack Buttigieg: “And Pete, while you have a different plan now, you sent out a tweet just a few years ago that said henceforth, forthwith, indubitably, affirmatively, you are for Medicare for All for the ages, and so I would like to point out that what leadership is about is taking a position, looking at things, and sticking with them.”
Buttigieg was far from candid in his response: “Just to be clear, the truth is that I have been consistent throughout in my position on delivering healthcare for every American.”
That answer directly contradicted an early 2018 tweet from Buttigieg: “Gosh! Okay. . . I, Pete Buttigieg, politician, do henceforth and forthwith declare, most affirmatively and indubitably, unto the ages, that I do favor Medicare for All, as I do favor any measure that would help get all Americans covered.”
No doubt if the flier I was handing out at Keene State College had praised Buttigieg, his campaign would not have called the police to have me ejected. But the Buttigieg for President staffer recognized that Buttigieg’s spin on healthcare was undermined by facts in the flier (produced and financed by RootsAction.org, which is completely independent of the official Sanders campaign).
“Buttigieg is claiming that Medicare for All would dump people off of health coverage and deprive them of ‘choice,’” our flier pointed out. “Those are insurance-industry talking points. He is deliberately confusing the current ‘choice’ of predatory for-profit insurance plans with the genuine full choice of healthcare providers that enhanced Medicare for everyone would offer.”
Apparently, for the Buttigieg campaign, such truthful words are dangerous.
Norman Solomon
Columnist
Norman Solomon is the coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.org...
Neoliberals Weaponized Human Rights to Justify Global Exploitation
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/neoliberals-weaponized-human-rights-to-justify-global-exploitation/
Neve Gordon / Los Angeles Review of Books
In the mid-1980s, Rony Brauman, who, at the time, was the president of the leading humanitarian organization Médecins sans Frontières, established a new human rights group called Liberté sans Frontières. For the inaugural colloquium, Brauman invited a number of speakers, among them Peter Bauer, a recently retired professor from the London School of Economics. Bauer was an odd choice given that he was a staunch defender of European colonialism; he had once responded to a student pamphlet that accused the British of taking “the rubber from Malaya, the tea from India, [and] raw materials from all over the world,” by arguing that actually “the British took the rubber to Malaya and the tea to India.” Far from the West causing Third World poverty, Bauer maintained that “contacts with the West” had been the primary agents of the colonies’ material progress.
Bauer hammered on this point at the colloquium, claiming that indigenous Amazonians were among the poorest people in the world precisely because they enjoyed the fewest “external contacts.” Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, he continued, showed proof of the economic benefits such contacts brought. “Whatever one thinks of colonialism it can’t be held responsible for Third World poverty,” he argued.
In her illuminating new book, “The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism,” Jessica Whyte recounts this story only to ask why Brauman, a leading humanitarian activist, invited Bauer — whom The Economist had described as being as hostile to foreign aid as Friedrich Hayek had been to socialism — to deliver a talk during the opening event for a new human rights organization. Her response is multifaceted, but, as she traces the parallel histories of neoliberalism and human rights, it becomes clear that the two projects are not necessarily antithetical, and actually have more in common than one might think.
Click here to read long excerpts from “The Morals of the Market” at Google Books.
Indeed, Liberté sans Frontières went on to play a central role in delegitimizing Third World accounts of economic exploitation. The organization incessantly challenged the accusations that Europe’s opulence was based on colonial plunder and that the world economic system made the rich richer and the poor poorer. And while it may have been more outspoken in its critique of Third Worldism than more prominent rights groups, it was in no way an outlier. Whyte reveals that in the eyes of organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, for instance, the major culprit for the woes of postcolonial states was neither Europe nor the international economic order but rather corrupt and ruthless Third World dictators who violated the rights of their populations as they undermined the development of a free economy. This approach coincides neatly with neoliberal thought.
Whyte contends that we cannot understand why human rights and neoliberalism flourished together if we view neoliberalism as an exclusively economic doctrine that favors privatization, deregulation, and unfettered free markets over public institutions and government. Although she strives to distinguish herself from thinkers like Wendy Brown and Michel Foucault, she ends up following their footsteps by emphasizing the moral dimension of neoliberal thought: the idea that a competitive market was not “simply a more efficient means of distributing resources; it was the basic institution of a moral and ‘civilised’ society, and a necessary support for individual rights.”
She exposes how neoliberal ideas informed the intense struggle over the meaning of “human rights,” and chronicles how Western rights groups and neoliberals ultimately adopted a similar interpretation, one that emphasizes individual freedoms at the expense of collective and economic rights. This interpretation was, moreover, in direct opposition to many newly independent postcolonial leaders.
Whyte describes, for instance, how just prior to the adoption of the two 1966 human rights covenants — the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights — Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana, coined the term “neo-colonialism” to refer to a series of mechanisms that perpetuate colonial patterns of exploitation in the wake of formal independence. Nkrumah “argued that the achievement of formal sovereignty had neither freed former colonies from the unequal economic relations of the colonial period nor given them political control over their own territories,” thus preventing these states from securing the basic rights of their inhabitants. A “state in the grip of neo-colonialism,” he wrote, “is not master of its own destiny.”
Nkrumah thought that only when postcolonial states fully controlled their natural resources would they be able to invest in the population’s well-being. In the meantime, neo-colonial economic arrangements were denying African states the ability to provide adequate education and health care as well as other economic and social rights to their populations, thus revealing how these economic arrangements were welded in a Gordian knot with international politics. Any attempt to understand one without the other provided a distorted picture of reality.
Such combining of the economy with the political, however, was anathema to neoliberal thought. In 1927, exactly three decades before Ghana’s new leader led his country to independence, Hayek’s mentor, economist Ludwig von Mises, had already argued that colonialism took advantage of the superior weaponry of the “white race” to subjugate, rob, and enslave weaker peoples. But Mises was careful to distinguish colonial oppression from the economic goals of a competitive market, noting that Britain was different since its form of colonialism pursued “grand commercial objectives.” Similarly, the British economist Lionel Robbins separated the benign economic sphere from the merciless political one, writing in the 1930s that “[n]ot capitalism, but the anarchic political organization of the world is the root disease of our civilization.”
These thinkers set the tone for many neoliberal economists who have since defined colonial imperialism as a phenomenon of politics, not capitalism, while casting the market as a realm of mutually beneficial, free, peaceful exchange. In this view, it is the political realm that engenders violence and coercion, not the economic sphere. Yet, during the period of decolonization neoliberals also understood that they needed to introduce moral justifications for the ongoing economic exploitation of former colonies. Realizing that human rights were rapidly becoming the new lingua franca of global moral speak, Whyte suggests that they, like Nkrumah, began mobilizing rights talk — except that neoliberals deployed it as a weapon against states who tried to gain control over their country’s natural resources as well as a shield from any kind of criticism directed toward their vision of a capitalist market.
Their relation to the state was complicated, but was not really different from the one espoused by their liberal predecessors. Neoliberal thinkers understood that states are necessary to enforce labor discipline and to protect corporate interests, embracing states that served as handmaidens to competitive markets. If, however, a state undermined the separation of political sovereignty from economic ownership or became attuned to the demands of its people to nationalize resources, that state would inevitably be perceived as a foe. The solution was to set limits on the state’s exercise of sovereignty. As Friedrich Hayek, the author of “The Road to Serfdom,” put it, the “taming of the savage” must be followed by the “taming of the state.”
Shaping the state so that it advances a neoliberal economic model can, however, be a brutal undertaking, and the consequences are likely to generate considerable suffering for large segments of the population. Freed from any commitment to popular sovereignty and economic self-determination, the language of liberal human rights offered neoliberals a means to legitimize transformative interventions that would subject states to the dictates of international markets. This is why a conception of human rights, one very different from the notion of rights advanced by Nkrumah, was needed.
In Whyte’s historical analysis the free-market ideologues accordingly adopted a lexicon of rights that buttressed the neoliberal state, while simultaneously pathologizing mass politics as a threat to individual freedoms. In a nutshell, neoliberal economists realized that human rights could play a vital role in the dissemination of their ideology, providing, in Whyte’s words, “competitive markets with a moral and legal foundation.”
At about the same time that neoliberalism became hegemonic, human rights organizations began sprouting in the international arena. By the early 1970s, Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists were already active in numerous countries around the globe, and Americas Watch (a precursor to Human Rights Watch) had just been established. According to Samuel Moyn, a professor of history at Yale and author of the best seller “The Last Utopia,” it was precisely during this period that human rights first achieved global prominence. That Western human rights organizations gained influence during the period of neoliberal entrenchment is, Whyte argues, not coincidental.
Although Whyte emphasizes the writings of leading neoliberal thinkers, a slightly more nuanced approach would have framed these developments as the reflection of a conjunctural moment, whereby the rise of neoliberalism and of human rights NGOs was itself part of numerous economic, social, and cultural shifts. Chile serves as a good example of this conjuncture, revealing how a combination of historical circumstances led neoliberal economics and a certain conception of human rights to merge.
Notwithstanding the bloody takeover, the extrajudicial executions, the disappearances and wholesale torture of thousands of dissidents, Hayek’s response to Pinochet’s 1973 coup was that “the world shall come to regard the recovery of Chile as one of the great economic miracles of our time.” Milton Friedman, a key figure in the Chicago School, later echoed this assessment, describing Chile as an economic and political “miracle.” The two Nobel Prize winners were not detached observers, having provided advice to Pinochet on how to privatize state services such as education, health care, and social security, and it was Friedman’s former students, the “Chicago Boys,” who occupied central positions within the authoritarian regime, ensuring that these ideas became policy.
What is arguably even more surprising is the reaction of human rights organizations to the bloody coup in Chile. Whyte acknowledges that Naomi Klein covered much of this ground in “The Shock Doctrine,” where she details how Amnesty International obscured the relationship between neoliberal “shock therapy” and political violence. Characterizing the Southern Cone as a “laboratory” for both neoliberalism and grassroots human rights activism, Klein argued that, in its commitment to impartiality, Amnesty occluded the reasons for the torture and killing, and thereby “helped the Chicago School ideology to escape from its first bloody laboratory virtually unscathed.” While Whyte concurs with Klein’s assessment, she has a slightly different point to make.
To do so, she shows how Samuel Moyn contested Klein’s claim that the human rights movement was complicit in the rise of neoliberalism; he argued that the “chronological coincidence of human rights and neoliberalism” is “unsubstantiated” and that the so-called “Chilean miracle” is just as much due to the country’s “left’s own failures.” Moyn’s comment, Whyte cogently observes, “raises the question of why, in the period of neoliberal ascendancy, international human rights organisations flourished, largely escaping the repression that was pursued so furiously against leftists, trade unionists, rural organizers and indigenous people in countries such as Chile.”
She points out that the CIA-trained National Intelligence Directorate had instructions to carry out the “total extermination of Marxism,” but in an effort to present Chile as a modern civilized nation, the junta did not disavow the language of human rights, and at the height of the repression allowed overseas human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists to enter the country, giving them extensive freedom of movement.
Whyte explains that in focusing their attention on state violence while upholding the market as a realm of freedom and voluntary cooperation, human rights NGOs strengthened the great neoliberal dichotomy between coercive politics and free and peaceful markets. Allende’s government had challenged the myth of the market as a realm of voluntary, non-coercive, and mutually beneficial relations, and the Chilean leader paid for it with his life. By contrast, the junta with the Chicago Boys’ aid sought to uphold this myth, while using the state both to enhance a neoliberal economic order and to decimate collective political resistance. Whyte acknowledges that in challenging the junta’s torturous means, human rights NGOs arguably helped restrain the worst of its violence, but they did so at the cost of abandoning the economy as a site of political contestation.
Whyte’s claim is not simply that the human rights NGOs dealt with political violence in isolation from the country’s economic transformations, as Klein had argued. Rather, she shows that the gap between Amnesty’s version of human rights and the version espoused by postcolonial leaders, like Nkrumah, was wide. Indeed, Amnesty International invoked human rights in a way that had little in common with Nkrumah’s program of economic self-determination, and the organization was even hostile to the violent anti-colonial struggles promoted by UN diplomats from postcolonial societies during the same period. The story of human rights and neoliberalism in Chile is not, as Whyte convincingly shows, simply a story of the massive human rights violations carried out in order to allow for market reforms, or of the new human rights NGOs that contested the junta’s violence. It is also the story of the institutionalization of a conservative and market-driven vision of neoliberal human rights, one that highlights individual rights while preserving the inequalities of capitalism by protecting the market from the intrusions of “the masses.”
Expanding Whyte’s analysis to the present moment (the book focuses on the years between 1947 and 1987) while thinking of the relation between neoliberalism and human rights as part of a historical conjuncture, it becomes manifest that many if not most human rights NGOs operating today have been shaped by this legacy. One of its expressions is that rights groups rarely represent “the masses” in any formal or informal capacity. Consider Human Rights Watch, whose longstanding executive director Kenneth Roth oversees an annual budget of over $75 million and a staff of roughly 400 people. In four years’ time, Roth will outstrip Robert Mugabe’s 30-year tenure in office; while Roth has dedicated most of his adult life struggling against social wrongs, he has never had to compete in elections to secure his post. Indeed, due to the corporate structure of his organization the only constituency to which he is accountable are Human Rights Watch’s board members and donors — those who benefit from neoliberal economic arrangements — rather than the people whose rights the NGO defends or, needless to say, the “masses.” Moreover, Human Rights Watch is not exceptional within the rights-world, and even though rights organizations across the globe say they are interested in what the “people want,” sovereignty of the people in any meaningful sense, wherein the people can control the decisions that affect their lives most, is not really on the agenda.
Undoubtedly, Human Rights Watch has shed light on some of the most horrendous state crimes carried out across the globe over the past several decades. Exposing egregious violations is not an easy task and is a particularly important endeavor in our post-truth era. However, truth-telling, in and of itself, is not a political strategy. Even if exposing violations is conceived of as a component of a broader political mobilization, the truths that NGOs like Human Rights Watch have been revealing are blinkered. Given that they interpret human rights in an extremely narrow way, one that aligns quite neatly with neoliberal thought, their strategy therefore fails to provide tools for those invested in introducing profound and truly transformative social change.
From the get-go, most Western human rights NGOs had been attuned to Cold War politics and refrained from advocating for economic and social rights for decades, inventing numerous reasons to justify this stance: from the claim that the right to education and health care were not basic human rights like freedom of speech and freedom from torture, to the assertion that economic and social rights lacked a precise definition, thus rendering them difficult to campaign for. It took close to a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ongoing campaigning of Third World activists for the leading human rights organizations to acknowledge that economic and social rights, such as the right to health care, education, and social security, were indeed human rights, rights that they should dedicate at least some of its resources to fight for. But even today, almost 20 years after their integration within Human Rights Watch’s agenda, the resources allocated to the protection of these rights is relatively small, and the way that the organization strives to secure them is deeply skewed by the neoliberal view that politics and markets are separate realms and that human rights work should avoid interference with the capitalist structure of competitive markets. Wittingly or not, organizations like Human Rights Watch have not only bolstered the neoliberal imagination, but have produced a specific arsenal of human rights that shapes social struggles in a way that weakens those who aim to advance a more egalitarian political horizon.
Several years ago, Roth tried to justify Human Rights Watch’s approach, claiming that the issues it deals with are determined by its “methodology,” and that the “essence of that methodology […] is not the ability to mobilize people in the streets, to engage in litigation, to press for broad national plans, or to provide technical assistance. Rather, the core of our methodology is our ability to investigate, expose, and shame.” The hallmark of human rights work, in his view, is uncovering discrimination, while the unequal arrangement of the local and international economy leading to discrimination are beyond the organization’s purview. Not unlike the neoliberal thinkers discussed in Whyte’s book, Human Rights Watch limits its activism to formal equality, adopting a form of inquiry that ignores and ultimately disavows the structural context, which effectively undercuts forms of collective struggle.
Returning to Rony Brauman and the creation of Liberté sans Frontières, toward the end of the book Whyte recounts how in a 2015 interview he understood things differently than he had in the mid-1980s. “I see myself and the small group that I brought together as a kind of symptom of the rise of neoliberalism […] We had the conviction that we were a kind of intellectual vanguard, but no,” he laughed, “we were just following the rising tendency.”
Whyte suggests that this assessment is, if anything, too modest: rather than being a symptom, the humanitarians who founded Liberté sans Frontières explicitly mobilized the language of human rights in order to contest the vision of substantive equality that defined the Third Worldist project. Brauman and his organization benefited from the neo-colonial economic arrangements and, she notes,
were not powerless companions of the rising neoliberals, but active, enthusiastic and influential fellow travellers. Their distinctive contribution was to pioneer a distinctly neoliberal human rights discourse, for which a competitive market order accompanied by a liberal institutional structure was truly the last utopia.
The destructive legacy that Whyte so eloquently describes suggests that the convergence between neoliberals and rights practitioners has defanged human rights from any truly emancipatory potential. Formal rights without the redistribution of wealth and the democratization of economic power, as we have learned not only from the ongoing struggles of postcolonial states but also from the growing inequality in the Global North, simply do not lead to justice. So if the objectives of a utopian imagination include equitable distribution of resources and actual sovereignty of the people, we urgently need a new vocabulary of resistance and novel methods of struggle.
Big Wins for 'Parasite' Give Oscar Night an Emotional High
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/big-wins-for-parasite-give-oscar-night-an-emotional-high/
Called up to the stage again and again, Bong Joon Ho kept saying he was ready for a drink — “bloody ready.”
But the Oscars weren’t bloody ready to stop giving him awards.
By the end, the South Korean director and his masterful social thriller “Parasite” had won best original screenplay, best international film, best director, and best picture, the latter a history-shattering win as the first non-English language film to win the top prize in the Oscars’ 92-year history.
Bong’s giddy, increasingly incredulous acceptance speeches — and the warmly raucous reception he received — were emblematic of an Oscar night that turned out to be much more inclusive and joyous than expected.
Indeed, when nominations were announced less than a month ago, the story was the depressing lack of diversity in the acting nominees, and the fact that no female directors were nominated. That obviously didn’t change, but the show itself struck an inclusive note from the start, with a bold and rousing performance by Janelle Monae. The night also saw the first Maori to win an Oscar; a rare win by a woman in the best score category; and the first actor with Down syndrome to present at the Oscars.
Some key moments of Oscars 2020, both serious and whimsical:
TIME TO COME ALIVE
As the very first person to take the stage, Monae set the tone when she plainly addressed the diversity issue in her opening number. “It’s time to come alive, because the Oscars is so white, it’s time to come alive!” she sang. Her performance directly referenced movies and actors who’d been snubbed in the nominations, and also the missing female directors.
“I’m so proud to stand here as a black, queer artist telling stories,” Monae said. “Happy Black History Month.”
MISSING: A CERTAIN REPRODUCTIVE ORGAN
Diversity — both racial and gender — was also a major topic of the “non-monologue” given by “non-hosts” Chris Rock and Steve Martin. (Like last year, the show famously went hostless.) Rock quipped pointedly that actor Mahershala Ali had two Oscars, but “you know what that means when the cops pull him over? Nothing.” Martin noted that among the directing nominees, something seemed to be missing. “Vaginas?” replied Rock.
A BIT O’ POLITICS
Although politics wasn’t a huge subject of the evening, Martin did manage to get off an effective one-liner about recent fumbles on the Democratic side, referring back to that time “La La Land” was mistakenly announced best picture — and then noting that wouldn’t happen this year, “because the academy has switched to the new Iowa caucus app.” Ouch.
THE PROM KING GETS HIS CROWN
This we know to be true: If Hollywood is high school, the Oscars is prom night. And Brad Pitt has always been the prom king, missing only his actual crown.
The much-admired actor, finally winning his first acting Oscar for his sly, knowing performance in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” grew emotional as he looked back at his fairytale rise to Hollywood stardom, beginning with a combustively sexy performance in “Thelma & Louise” nearly three decades ago. “Once upon a time in Hollywood. Ain’t that the truth!” he said, misty-eyed.
He also got a little political. “They told me you only have 45 seconds up here, which is 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week,” he said in one of the few references to the recent impeachment hearings.
ADELE DAZEEM, CORRECTED
Introducing his co-star in the “Frozen” franchise, Idina Menzel, Josh Gad threw some shade at John Travolta for his famous mangling of the actress-singer’s name in 2014. Gad noted Menzel’s name was “pronounced exactly how it is spelled.” Menzel’s performance of the nominated song “Into the Unknown” included the appearance of Elsas from all over the world, belting along in their native tongues.
A FIRST FOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLE …
An emotional highlight of the night was Taika Waititi’s win for best adapted screenplay for the anti-hate themed “Jojo Rabbit.” Waititi, from New Zealand, became the first Oscar winner of Maori descent. He dedicated his victory “to all the indigenous kids of the world who want to do art and dance and write stories. We are the original storytellers, and we can make it here as well.”
Later, as a presenter, Waititi took the stage and noted the Academy was gathering “on the ancestral lands of the Tongva, Tataviam and the Chumash.”
… AND FOR DISABLED ACTORS
When “The Peanut Butter Falcon” star Zack Gottsagen appeared to present in the live-action short category, it was a first for both him and for the Oscars.
Gottsagen was the first presenter with Down syndrome, and he received a standing ovation after intoning the familiar line: “And the Oscar goes to …”
A NEW FIGHT CLUB
Rarely has the best original score category become a vehicle for a presentation on women’s empowerment, but that’s what happened Sunday night as Sigourney Weaver, Brie Larson and Gal Gadot — female action stars, past and present — took the stage.
After joking that they were forming a new fight club — “Men are all invited, but no shirts allowed,” Gadot said — they announced that for the first time, a female conductor (Eimear Noone) would lead the orchestra in performing nominated film scores.
Then Hildur Guðnadóttir won the award, for “Joker,” only one of three solo women to ever win best score.
“To the girls, to the women, to the mothers, to the daughters, who hear the music bubbling within, please speak up,” she said. “We need to hear your voices.”
AND SPEAKING OF VOICES
When Joaquin Phoenix won as expected, the “Joker” star spoke about “the opportunity to use our voice for the voiceless.” He added that he saw a commonality in the different causes people in the Hollywood community fight for.
“Whether we’re talking about gender inequality or racism or queer rights or indigenous rights or animal rights, we’re talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one race, one gender or one species has the right to dominate, control and use and exploit another with impunity,” he said.
He also apologized for past behavior. “I’ve been a scoundrel in my life,” he said. “I’ve been selfish, I’ve been cruel at times, hard to work with. I’m grateful that so many of you in this room have given me a second chance.”
EMINEM, TAKE TWO
Also getting a second chance was rapper Eminem, who stunned the crowd by showing up for a surprise performance of “Lose Yourself” — 17 years after it won best original song from the movie “8 Mile.”
On Twitter, Eminem, whose real name is Marshall Mathers, wrote: “Look, if you had another shot, another opportunity… Thanks for having me @TheAcademy.”
Mathers didn’t show up in 2003, when he won, but this time, in a category introduced by Lin-Manuel Miranda, he wasn’t throwing away his shot. (Ba-dum-bump.)
BUT NO SECOND CHANCE FOR ‘CATS’
Too soon?
Nah.
You knew somebody had to make fun of “Cats,” and they did — James Corden and Rebel Wilson, that is, who both came onstage in full “Cats” regalia.
“As cast members of the motion picture ‘Cats,’” Wilson said, at which point the audience was already laughing, “nobody more than us understands the importance of…”
“Good visual effects,” they said together.
Then they didn’t drop the mic. They just pawed at it, again and again.
N.H. Voters Say Sanders Has Best Chance of Toppling Trump
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/n-h-voters-say-sanders-is-the-most-electable-candidate-against-trump/
Julia Conley / Common Dreams
New polling out of New Hampshire showed voters in the state, who will go to polls on Tuesday in the Democratic primary, believe Sen. Bernie Sanders has the best chance of beating President Donald Trump in the general election.
The CNN survey was taken by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center between February 4 and 7, just after the Vermont senator garnered more votes than any other candidate in the Iowa caucuses.
Out of 715 adults surveyed, 29% of voters in the state said they believed Sanders could win in November, compared with 25% for former Vice President Joe Biden and 14% for former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Political Polls@PpollingNumbers
NH CNN Poll:
"Who do you think has the best chance of winning in November?"
Sanders 29% (+9 Since Jan 23)
Biden 25% (-16)
Buttigieg 14% (+6)
Warren 6% (-1)
Bloomberg 3% (+1)
Klobuchar 2% (-)
Gabbard 2% (-)
Yang 2% (+1) https://twitter.com/PpollingNumbers/status/1226295456944336896 …
Political Polls@PpollingNumbers
New Hampshire @CNN Poll:
Sanders 28%
Buttigieg 21%
Biden 11%
Warren 8%
Gabbard 6%
Klobuchar 5%
Steyer/Yang 3%http://www.cnn.com/2020/02/08/politics/new-hampshire-poll/index.html …
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“This seems like a pretty big deal,” tweeted journalist Krystal Ball.
In the primary, Sanders was favored by 28% of voters in the poll, versus 21% who supported Buttigieg. Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had 11% and 9% of the vote, respectively. Another poll released Sunday by the Boston Globe, WBZ-TV, and Suffolk University showed Sanders leading Buttigieg in New Hampshire by two percentage points but placing both candidates in a statistical tie with the poll’s margin of error.
The surveys were released on the heels of the McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club Dinner in Manchester, N.H., where supporters of Sanders reiterated their support for Medicare for All and slammed Buttigieg for his alignment with Wall Street interests.
Sanders supporters rejected the former mayor’s statement that the demand for a nominee supported by a grassroots movement rather than one backed by corporate interests is “divisive.”
A large group of Sanders supporters shouted their disapproval and chanted, “Wall Street Pete” as Buttigieg criticized the notion that a candidate “must either be for a revolution or for the status quo.”
Peter Daou
✔@peterdaou
Chants of #WallStreetPete drown out #Buttigieg when he takes a shot at #Bernie's grassroots movement.
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At a campaign event at St. Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire Friday, Sanders refrained from commenting on the mayor personally but questioned his ability to change the U.S. political and economic systems considering his financial ties to Big Pharma and other powerful corporate sectors.
“I like Pete Buttigieg, nice guy, but we are in a moment where billionaires control not only our economy but our political process,” Sanders said. “Do you think if you’re collecting money from dozens of dozens of billionaires you’re going to stand up to the drug companies and you’re going to throw their CEOs in jail if they’re acting criminally?”
Organizers for the Sanders campaign reported high numbers of canvassers arriving at field offices throughout the state over the weekend to help campaign, as some on-the-ground observers warned Buttigieg has appeared to have gained support following the Iowa caucuses, in which he won two more State Delegate Equivalents than Sanders and one delegate than the senator, but won fewer votes from caucusgoers.
Shannon Jackson@shannondjackson
Team NH continues to amaze me. Today we knocked over 150,000 doors — that’s more than 227 a minute or 4 per second! Talk about a POLITICAL REVOLUTION! #NotMeUs #Bernie2020
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“If we can’t know for sure” whether Sanders will win the primary Tuesday, tweeted Jacobin writer and supporter Meagan Day, “we have to fight like everything’s on the line!”
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