Plunder, pillage, and fascism from the beginning

Many Americans increasingly fear a fascist future. Today’s holiday carries a poignant message: it has been here for four hundred years.

Last week, the New York Times published an analysis by columnist Megan Stack reminding many observers of one persistent factor ensuring corruption in Washington: the revolving door between politics and corporate law firms shamelessly dedicated to promoting Wall Street interests over those of the public.

Just days later, the Guardian published an analysis by human rights lawyer and former political prisoner Steven Donziger explaining Moore v Harper, a particular case before the Supreme Court poised to undermine our democracy even more directly.

Each of these articles examine remarkable threats to our democracy more or less ignored by the media establishment. Equally overlooked by contemporary media sources are the litany of historical crimes underlying today’s distribution of capital and power.

Indigenous People’s Day not only commemorates the communities that survive and endure the continuing legacy of murderous genocide. It should also offer a reminder that these analyses of discrete vectors of corruption are, if anything, under inclusive.

Many Americans increasingly fear a fascist future. Today’s holiday carries a poignant message: fascism has thrived in the United States for four hundred years.

[photo credit: Joe Wolf]

The New York Times acknowledges bipartisan corruption

Stack’s column in the New York Times stretches well beyond the predictable arc of critiquing corruption among former Trump officials who have, since leaving Washington, found themselves representing the same companies whose interests they promoted as corrupt self-serving lackeys in government.

Impressively, Stack reaches beyond the obvious low-hanging fruit to address an elephant—and donkey—in the room: the bipartisan nature of the sordid revolving door in Washington, and its disturbingly pervasive support among Democrats, including those from the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations.

The first former official named in the article is the former CIA Director, who Trump promoted to the position after engineering the destruction of evidence of the CIA’s criminal trail during the era when, according to President Obama, “we tortured some folks.” Despite not wielding a law degree, and needing to legitimately fear detention in any foreign country as an international war criminal, Gina Haspel now works at the law firm King & Spalding and helps lead the firm’s government affairs, national security, and corporate espionage practices.

Former officials guilty of international human rights offenses—from each of the corporate political parties—have often found plush positions in private industry. Their work in private practice undermining the public interest has served many patrons, from corporate weapons contractors and fossil fuel plunderers, to foreign governments with continuing histories of human rights abuses, as well as any number of (legitimate or not) interests connected to their former agencies.

While Stack’s article thankfully notes how this pattern infects both major parties in Washington, it overlooks the institutional corruption enabled by impunity for individuals who commit crimes while in office. Failing to hold accountable individual officials ultimately encourages their agencies to continue and extend their crimes against the public.

That’s how indefinite detention without charge or trial, and unconstitutional mass surveillance, have survived two decades and four presidential administrations. That’s why mass slavery-via-incarceration has survived for over a century and a half, despite representing in plain sight the industrial slavery that hundreds of millions of Americans have been brainwashed to falsely believe our nation repudiated after the Civil War.

Years before ever running for office, I asked one of those officials—former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper—a question after the conclusion of a 2015 Senate hearing. It was a constitutionally protected act of journalism for which I was detained and arrested, while Clapper walked out of the room with an entourage and a public pension despite lying to Congress under oath about the very subject suppressed by the New York Times and its editors 10 years earlier. (More on that below)

History is said not to repeat itself precisely, but very much to rhyme. The exposure of long-standing corruption that I have challenged for 20 years offers one particularly compelling example.

What the Times overlooks

Despite her insightful analysis and impressively bipartisan critique, even Stack conveniently ignores the unique role played by the Times in the saga she exposes. Far more than most publications, the New York Times is a reliable cheerleader for the very same bipartisan institutional corruption that it bemoans this week. 

Paid subscribers will see below a reminder of how the Times previously swung a presidential election two decades ago, playing a critical role in accelerating the descent into fascism by enabling authoritarian policies despite their emphatic rejection at the ballot box mere months before.

While the press is supposed to serve as a fourth branch of government helping to guard democracy by ensuring transparency, the saga that I recap below exposes the Times stooping to the level of serving government censors with the outrageously stated purpose of undermining electoral accountability. 

Beyond the Times, the co-optation of the nation’s leading newspapers renders the government officials who silence them effectively unaccountable. But even beyond those officials, this pattern of deference to authority enables policy decisions that could never survive a transparent, open debate.

From surveillance & war for profit, to congressional insider trading, and the revolving door between agencies and Wall Street law firms, any number of corrupt practices survive because press outlets refuse to cover what the Times reflexively and self-servingly describes as “all the news that’s fit to print.”

That is all simply to say that corporate media (and franky, even many outlets that claim to be “independent”) sources continue to threaten our Republic as much as armed vigilantes storming the Capitol. Unfortunately, I’ve encountered that pattern personally.

The reason I’ve been waging a lawsuit for the past year and a half against the Hearst Corporation is precisely because racist election disinformation published by the San Francisco Chronicle offends not only its subjects, but also undermines democracy while reinforcing open, unapologetic corruption. While the Chronicle has stooped lower than most publications in its defense of the establishment, its suspension of ethics and accuracy to serve capital is unfortunately emblematic of a far wider pattern.

That pattern unfortunately stretches far beyond the press. It infects the very institutions created to safeguard our Republic.

The right wing Supreme Court turns its sights on democracy

Human rights lawyer Stephen Donziger stands among our nation‘s most prolific recent political prisoners. He was subjected to house arrest for nearly three years following a prosecution by a private law firm after winning a nearly $10 billion judgment from Ecuadorian courts against Chevron on behalf of several indigenous tribes in Ecuador.

Donziger wrote an analysis last week of a case pending before the Supreme Court in its Term that began last week. Moore v Harper presents a question that could effectively close the door on electoral democracy altogether: whether the processes set up by state legislatures to govern elections are subject to judicial review at all.

Donziger emphasizes that the U.S. Supreme Court chooses which cases to address, leaving the vast majority of petitions seeking court review unheard. The Independent State Legislature theory presented by the case has been a fringe idea in the past, so much so that it could not have reached the Court before now.

But the decision by the Court’s conservative majority to hear this case in the first place indicates its likely outcome. If the conservative Justices rule with the same proclivity for judicial activism that they have embraced in the past, their decision would reverse centuries of precedent and invite state legislatures to rig elections within their states.

Should the Court ultimately decide that neither state nor federal courts are empowered to oversee the decisions of state legislatures—even when they effectively predetermine the outcome of elections—the electoral process would descend into the kind of farce that has grown routine in authoritarian countries, where countries go through the exercise of voting for alternatives that are entrenched long before Election Day.

For the past two years, Democrats in Congress have wrung their hands and whined about the threat to our Republic posed by a potential autocrat, particularly the figure of a recent president with a shamelessly criminal past. Two major faults underlie this narrative.

First, Trump was insulated by the leaders of both political parties in Washington. That was much of why I ran to replace Pelosi: I pay too much attention to fall for the ruse that she and her party present, and remain painfully aware of how much the Democrats did to empower him when it mattered, from recruiting him to run in 2016 in the first place, to promoting him within the field of GOP candidates during a contested primary, to funding his concentration camps without protections for human rights, taking the strongest impeachment charges off the table to accommodate Pelosi’s corruption, and more.

Second, and even more revealing, is the simple fact that authoritarianism in the United States is a longstanding phenomenon, and elections have been reduced to largely theatrical exercises for at least the past hundred years. The greatest threats to our Republic are neither new, nor do they loom in the future.

Whatever pretense of democracy in America one may have ever maintained was a farce from the beginning. In a country dedicated originally to the exclusion of anyone except white men with property from the voting franchise, Indigenous Peoples Day offers a reflection not of the unfortunate aberration, but instead the disturbing rule.

Indigenous Peoples Day should remind us of America’s brutally fascist past

Hitler and his Nazi followers found America’s racial history too brutal to precisely emulate, so they pursued a less vicious program of racial destruction. The Holocaust in Europe left a shameful legacy including millions of murders, forced migration and labor, and shattered families and entire cultures. 

The North American genocide was objectively worse: it was so heinous that it depleted part of the human gene pool, destroying multiple civilizations in its conquest of a continent while leaving precious little in its wake.

The genocide of indigenous north Americans across their dozens of tribal communities was not isolated to a human genocide, but rather the gateway to an ongoing ecocide that continues to this day.

Around the world, activists are clamoring to address a mounting global climate catastrophe predicated on fundamental commitments that the United States has never seen fit to revisit: the sanctity of private property, the right of capitalists to extract natural resources that they can neither produce nor replace to enrich themselves at the cost of the future, patterns of what economists describe as “internalized externalities” that consistently reveal the free hand of the market to be a little more than an rent-seeking corporate fist, and the co-optation of legions of people in their own ultimate marginalization, pitting human beings against life on Earth in the service of their own comfort and leisure.

I’ve written elsewhere about how Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. warned America about the precursors of the climate catastrophe well before it revealed itself, and how the entire world today pays the price of Americans choosing to ignore his message while lionizing his figure and reducing him to an amusement park attraction.

Indigenous people have offered the same warning for even longer, standing as the canaries in the coal mine of America’s fascist expansion long before anyone recognized the profound costs implicit in, for example, removing stewards of forests who had for millennia prevented the kinds of devastating wildfires that now routinely ravage states from Colorado to California every year.

Indigenous peoples day should be a poignant reminder of the failure of the American experiment, the vast divergence between our lofty rhetoric and fascist reality, and the ultimate end that awaits us if we fail to shrug off its yolk: continuing mass extinction leaving Earth a barren, lifeless, poisoned rock spinning while hurtling through space.

Want to learn the story of how the New York Times helped pave the road to a fascist future by allowing government censors to hide information from the public with a specific intention of subverting electoral accountability? Read on…