18 January 22
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The Senate on Tuesday will begin to debate legislation that combines two separate bills already passed by the House — the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — and folds them into an unrelated measure. The move would allow the Senate to bring the bill directly to the floor, avoiding an initial filibuster.
But that strategy would still allow Republicans to block it from coming to a final vote, and Democrats lack the unanimous support needed in their party to change Senate rules to muscle through the legislation themselves. Still, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said late last week that Democrats would forge ahead anyway, forcing Republicans to publicly declare their opposition to the bill….
The push to proceed even in the face of almost certain failure reflects the party’s conundrum, facing two key defections in its ranks and a wall of Republican opposition. It comes days after a critical Democrat, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, emphatically announced that she would not support undermining the filibuster to pass legislation under any circumstances and Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia reiterated the same position.
Mr. Kaine suggested on Sunday that other paths around the filibuster existed, including narrowly altering it explicitly to pass the voting rights bill, and lengthening the debate time in an effort to pass the bill on a simple majority vote.
But privately, Democrats have been less sanguine, especially after a remarkable speech delivered by Ms. Sinema on the Senate floor on Thursday, just hours before Mr. Biden was scheduled to lobby Democrats on the bill. The speech, in which she declared unwavering opposition to altering the filibuster, sent a fresh wave of fury through the Democratic ranks.
“These two Democrats have decided that it is much more important to them to protect the voting rights of the minority on the Senate floor than to protect the voting rights of minorities in this great country of ours, the minorities that made it possible for them to be in the position that they’re currently in,” Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina and the majority whip, said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “So, I hope, but I don’t think, that we will change their mind.”
Between 6,000 and 12,000 children were exposed to drinking water with high levels of lead in Flint, Michigan. (photo: John Walker/The Fresno Bee)
The former criminal prosecution team investigating the Flint water crisis was building a racketeering case against state officials. Then the team was dismantled
The case – which would have come under the Rico (racketeer-influenced and corrupt organizations) laws often used to charge organized crime groups – was widespread and set to implicate additional state officials who played a role in the poisoning of Flint, according to these sources.
But when the team was suddenly broken up and the investigation restarted with a new set of investigators, the Rico case never materialized.
What happened? Critics point to the Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel.
Running to replace the term-limited Republican attorney general Bill Schuette in 2018, Nessel, a Democrat, criticized the Flint criminal investigation under Schuette as “politically charged show trials” and campaigned on revamping the investigation. Shortly after Nessel won the attorney general race and took office, her administration fired the top prosecutors and investigators working on the Schuette-launched investigation and restarted the prosecution with a new team.
At that point, the prosecution team assembled by Schuette had been working for nearly three years – and filed criminal charges against 15 Michigan state and Flint city officials, including four officials charged with financial fraud that prosecutors said triggered the water crisis.
But when Nessel relaunched the investigation, her office dropped charges against top state and city officials, citing flaws in the Schuette-era investigation. In 2021, Nessel’s office recharged several of those defendants – with a new round of indictments that included involuntary manslaughter, misconduct in office, obstruction of justice, extortion and perjury. But gone were the financial fraud charges.
“Nessel let it go,” said Eric Mays, chairman of the Flint city council, who closely followed the criminal prosecution both before and after Nessel. “Was it a lack of political or legal will? I cannot say. But it bothers me to this day her team hasn’t addressed it.”
When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Nessel’s office said: “The prosecution team reviewed all the evidence and pursued all viable charges.”
When she was an attorney-general hopeful, Nessel’s criticism of the Flint investigation worried local activists. Days before the 2018 general election, Melissa Mays – a Flint water activist and the lead plaintiff in a major civil lawsuit against the former Michigan governor Rick Snyder, among others – reached out to Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic candidate then running for governor. In an email obtained by the Guardian, Mays expressed concern over growing speculation that Nessel planned on overhauling the Flint investigation.
Mays – a mother of three whose children were sickened by drinking Flint’s contaminated water as was she – was especially worried that, if elected, Nessel would fire Todd Flood, the special prosecutor appointed by Schuette. It was Flood who brought financial fraud charges against the two emergency managers appointed by Snyder to run Flint in place of its elected mayor and city council – Darnell Earley and Gerald Ambrose – as well as two Flint city officials.
Whitmer wrote back: “While Schuette is an opportunist he is also a skilled politician whose [sic] begun something that the people of Flint can appreciate some value in,” she said. Whitmer also offered Mays her assurances: “I see it though and will talk to [Nessel].”
It is unclear if Whitmer ever did speak with Nessel. (Whitmer did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment before publication.) Shortly after Nessel took office, Fadwa Hammoud, appointed by Nessel as the state’s solicitor general, fired Flood.
The disappearance of the financial fraud charges is significant because the bond deal that allowed the city of Flint to switch its water supply had been heavily investigated by the Schuette-era prosecution.
In 2014, Flint needed to borrow nearly $100m to join the proposed Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA), a new regional system that Flint would join as both a customer and part owner. But at the time, the city was broke and at its borrowing limit.
A state-issued environmental order allowed the city to get around its debt limit and access $85m in funding, money earmarked for an “environmental calamity” – in this case, the cleanup of a local lime sludge pit. But the prosecution under Schuette alleged that the money supplied by this order for the cleanup was redirected for other purposes instead allowing Flint to issue tens of millions of dollars in bonds to join the KWA.
The allegedly fraudulent environmental order also mandated that the city of Flint use the Flint River as its water source while the KWA pipeline was under construction. It outlined tens of millions of dollars in upgrades needed for the city’s water plant so that the plant could safely treat Flint River water for residents to drink. The problem: updates were nowhere near completed when the city switched its water supply to the Flint River in April 2014. In addition, a failure to add proper corrosion control chemicals into the Flint River water supply resulted in lead leaching off Flint’s older pipes and poisoning residents’ drinking water.
Speaking before a state government committee in 2018, Andy Arena, former director of the FBI’s office in Detroit, said: “We believe there was significant financial fraud that drove this.” Arena was the chief Flint water investigator under the Schuette-era investigation but was dismissed after Nessel took office. After his firing, Arena revealed that his team were within six months of filing significant financial charges, which he described as “dropping a heavy rock”.
Sources familiar with the Flint criminal investigation told the Guardian that those impending indictments were to be filed as Rico charges. In modern history, Rico charges have been most commonly – but not always – used against members of the mafia and organized crime syndicates.
Documents obtained by the Guardian further confirm Flood’s investigation was looking into potential bribery and racketeering, key cogs of Rico cases. In one petition to subpoena an outside contractor who worked as a KWA project manager, obtained by the Guardian, prosecutors said they had “reasonable cause to believe that corrupt transactions involving certain contractors, the Genesee county drain commissioner’s office, other entities and persons of interest” had occurred. The header of the petition specified that prosecutors were investigating bribery, racketeering and false pretenses.
Despite the original investigation’s momentum, the racketeering investigation vanished after Nessel cleaned house and relaunched the inquiry.
“My position is that Flood was heading in the right direction,” Mays said, who in addition to cooperating with the former prosecution team became a member of the KWA board after the original 2014 bond deal was struck. “I followed the proceedings on the fraudulent bond sale. I know there were Rico charges in the works.”
Multiple sources familiar with the investigation noted that if the financial fraud or Rico charges had been filed, the state of Michigan faced the potential of hundreds of millions in liability over the KWA bond deal - since the attorney general’s office under Schuette ultimately signed off on the allegedly fraudulent administrative order that greenlit Flint to borrow tens of millions to join the KWA. (The order was signed by an assistant attorney general in Schuette’s office.)
“All too prevalent in this Flint water investigation was a priority on balance sheets and finances rather than health and safety of the citizens of Flint,” Schuette said in a statement in 2016. At that time, his office had charged four officials with false pretenses and conspiracy to commit false pretenses for their role in the Flint water crisis.
Asked for comment for this piece, Schuette told the Guardian: “We had a strong team,” going on to refer to Arena and Flood. Schuette added: “We had a very aggressive approach in terms of the charges you’re talking about. I hope there is still a commitment to the people of Flint, and getting them the full justice they deserve.”
After publication of this story, a spokesperson for the current criminal investigation told the Guardian, “When our team assumed responsibility over the Flint water prosecutions, we pursued all viable charges based on an exhaustive review of the entire body of evidence, including the evidence that had not been obtained by the Schuette administration.” The spokesperson went on to say that the evidence reviewed led to the indictments of nine individuals, who are currently in court. “Let me be clear,” they added. “There was no charge that was not evaluated. There was no lead that was not pursued.”
Solicitor Hammoud – in a response received after publication of this story – denied that Rico charges were “impending” at the time Nessel took office: “There were not.”
JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, who along with a third financial firm underwrote the KWA bond deal, could have also faced similar financial penalties for failing to do their due diligence, as outlined in the administrative order that preceded the bond deal, to ensure that necessary upgrades to Flint’s water plant were completed, such that the plant could safely treat Flint River water. In 2020, the banks were sued on behalf of 2,600 Flint children for their “conscience shocking behavior” in financing the deal that led to “dire health consequences to the children of Flint”.
JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo declined to comment.
Why Nessel, who stressed justice for Flint as an attorney general hopeful, and the prosecution team she selected dropped already-filed financial fraud charges against state and city officials is an open question. For many who have extensively followed and studied the Flint water crisis, Nessel’s moves don’t make sense.
“I never understood why the attorney general disrupted the initial investigation, dropped the initial charges, or set a different direction in her new charges that chart a course away from the issues of financing the KWA pipeline,” Peter Hammer, a Wayne State law professor who authored an extensive civil rights report on the Flint water crisis, said.
“Her decisions mean that some of the most important questions relating to the crisis – the political and economic forces driving the KWA pipeline – are not being addressed. This adds a new tragedy for the people of Flint who deserve to know the root causes of their suffering and to hold any financial wrongdoing accountable,” added Hammer.
The Flint water crisis now enters year eight. Both Nessel and Whitmer are standing for re-election. Meanwhile, the population of Flint has fallen to under 95,000 residents, the lowest it’s been in more than a century. Not all of the city’s lead service lines have been replaced and residents’ damaged home plumbing, also damaged from the toxic Flint River water, have not been addressed.
Residents still complain of rashes, hair loss and other ailments from the city’s drinking water.
The Flint criminal investigation under Nessel did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment before publication.
A U.S. aircraft carrier. (photo: Michael W. Pendergrass/Getty Images)
Wow! I’m amazed when I look back on the weeks since I first urged you to contribute to TD in return for a signed, personalized copy of historian Alfred McCoy’s new history of empires, To Govern the Globe! I knew he was popular and happen to think the world of his work myself. Still, I never expected that he would have to sign quite so many copies. Now, here we are in 2022 and below is his latest piece. He’s still willing to sign and personalize more copies of that remarkable book of his for anyone willing to give this site at least $100 ($150 if you live outside the U.S.). So, if the urge strikes you in this new year, just visit our donation page as always — and many thanks! Tom]
Honestly, I wonder why (other than Covid-19) Americans aren’t out in the streets protesting. Oh wait, given that we’ve just “celebrated” the anniversary of January 6th and our world is alive with talk of coming violence against the government in those very streets, not to speak of rising extremism in the U.S. military and potential civil war, let me amend that slightly. I meant something else entirely. After all, like the Trump administration before it, the Biden administration (with the Pentagon and Congress cheering it on) only continues to hike up the pressures for an ever-intensifying new Cold War with China, as Michael Klare reported at this site last week.
And yet here we Americans are, ready to fight it out over masking mandates and a “stolen” election, but not ready to offer a peep of protest as, for the second time in this century, this country heads off into the world all too aggressively armed to the teeth and ready for battle. And just in case you’ve forgotten, the last time around — you know, that Global War on Terror that involved the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq — didn’t turn out particularly splendidly, did it? So why expect a new Cold War with China, the rising power on an endangered planet, with that old cold warrior Russia thrown in for good measure, to turn out any better?
Of course, when there’s so much else to argue about here in an ever more armed fashion, why even bother to consider this country’s global stance, no less protest as our collective fate is being decided elsewhere? However, if you do happen to have a passing few moments in this mad American world of ours, take a little break and check out the latest piece by TomDispatch regular and historian Alfred McCoy, author most recently of To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change. It offers an all-too-vivid look at an imperial American world on its way to hell in a handbasket, while Americans myopically pick at our wounds at home. It may be a new definition of what the end of empire really means in the twenty-first century (if we all even make it long enough to find out).
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Let’s circle that continent to visit just a few of those flashpoints, each one suffused with significance for the future of U.S. global power.
On the border with Ukraine, 100,000 Russian troops were massing with tanks and rocket launchers, ready for a possible invasion. Meanwhile, Beijing signed a $400 billion agreement with Tehran to swap infrastructure-building for Iranian oil. Such an exchange might help make that country the future rail hub of Central Asia, while projecting China’s military power into the Persian Gulf. Just across the Iranian border in Afghanistan, Taliban guerrillas swept into Kabul ending a 20-year American occupation in a frantic flurry of shuttle flights for more than 100,000 defeated Afghan allies.
Farther east, high in the Himalayas, Indian Army engineers were digging tunnels and positioning artillery to fend off future clashes with China. In the Bay of Bengal, a dozen ships from Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, led by the supercarrier USS Carl Vinson, were conducting live gunnery drills, practice for a possible future war with China.
Meanwhile, a succession of American naval vessels continually passed through the South China Sea, skirting Chinese island bases there and announcing that no protests from Beijing “will deter us.” Just to the north, U.S. destroyers, denounced by China, regularly sailed through the Strait of Taiwan; while some 80 Chinese jet fighters swarmed into that disputed island’s air security zone, a development Washington condemned as “provocative military activity.”
Around the coast of Japan, a flotilla of 10 Chinese and Russian warships steamed aggressively across waters once virtually owned by the U.S. Seventh Fleet. And in frigid Arctic oceans way to the north, thanks to the radical warming of the planet and receding sea ice, an expanding fleet of Chinese icebreakers maneuvered with their Russian counterparts to open a “polar silk road,” thereby possibly taking possession of the roof of the world.
While you could have read about almost all of this in the American media, sometimes in great detail, nobody here has tried to connect such transcontinental dots to uncover their deeper significance. Our nation’s leaders have visibly not done much better and there’s a reason for this. As I explain in my recent book, To Govern the Globe, both liberal and conservative political elites in the New York–Washington corridor of power have been on top of the world for so long that they can’t remember how they got there.
During the late 1940s, following a catastrophic world war that left some 70 million dead, Washington built a potent apparatus for global power, thanks significantly to its encirclement of Eurasia via both military bases and global trade. The U.S. also formed a new system of global governance, exemplified by the United Nations, that would not only assure its hegemony but also — or so the hope was then — foster an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity.
Three generations later, however, as populism, nationalism, and anti-globalism roiled public discourse, surprisingly few in Washington bothered to defend their world order in a meaningful way. And fewer of them still had any real grasp of the geopolitics — that slippery mix of armaments, occupied lands, subordinated rulers, and logistics — that has been every imperial leader’s essential toolkit for the effective exercise of global power.
So, let’s do what our country’s foreign policy experts, in and out of government, haven’t and examine the latest developments in Eurasia through the prism of geopolitics and history. Do that and you’ll grasp just how they, and the deeper forces they represent, are harbingers of an epochal decline in American global power.
Eurasia as the Epicenter of Power on Planet Earth
In the 500 years since European exploration first brought the continents into continuous contact, the rise of every global hegemon has required one thing above all: dominance over Eurasia. Similarly, their decline has invariably been accompanied by a loss of control over that vast landmass. During the sixteenth century, the Iberian powers, Portugal and Spain, waged a joint struggle to control Eurasia’s maritime commerce by battling the powerful Ottoman empire, whose leader was then the caliph of Islam. In 1509, off the coast of northeast India, skilled Portuguese gunners destroyed a Muslim fleet with lethal broadsides, establishing that country’s century-long dominance over the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, the Spanish used the silver they had extracted from their new colonies in the Americas for a costly campaign to check Muslim expansion in the Mediterranean Sea. Its culmination: the destruction in 1571 of an Ottoman fleet of 278 ships at the epic Battle of Lepanto.
Next in line, Great Britain’s dominion over the oceans began with an historic naval triumph over a combined French-Spanish fleet off Spain’s Cape Trafalgar in 1805 and only ended when, in 1942, a British garrison of 80,000 men surrendered their seemingly impregnable naval bastion at Singapore to the Japanese — a defeat Winston Churchill called “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.”
Like all past imperial hegemons, U.S. global power has similarly rested on geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, now home to 70% of the world’s population and productivity. After the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan failed to conquer that vast land mass, the Allied victory in World War II allowed Washington, as historian John Darwin put it, to build its “colossal imperium… on an unprecedented scale,” becoming the first power in history to control the strategic axial points “at both ends of Eurasia.”
In the early 1950s, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong forged a Sino-Soviet alliance that threatened to dominate the continent. Washington, however, countered with a deft geopolitical gambit that, for the next 40 years, succeeded in “containing” those two powers behind an “Iron Curtain” stretching 5,000 miles across the vast Eurasian land mass.
As a critical first step, the U.S. formed the NATO alliance in 1949, establishing major military installations in Germany and naval bases in Italy to ensure control of the western side of Eurasia. After its defeat of Japan, as the new overlord of the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, Washington dictated the terms of four key mutual-defense pacts in the region with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia and so acquired a vast range of military bases along the Pacific littoral that would secure the eastern end of Eurasia. To tie the two axial ends of that vast land mass into a strategic perimeter, Washington ringed the continent’s southern rim with successive chains of steel, including three navy fleets, hundreds of combat aircraft, and most recently, a string of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily to the Pacific island of Guam.
With the communist bloc bottled up behind the Iron Curtain, Washington then sat back and waited for its Cold War enemies to self-destruct — which they did. First, the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s shattered their hold on the Eurasian heartland. Then, the disastrous Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s ravaged the Red Army and precipitated the break-up of the Soviet Union.
After those oh-so-strategic initial steps to capture the axial ends of Eurasia, however, Washington itself essentially stumbled through much of the rest of the Cold War with blunders like the Bay of Pigs catastrophe in Cuba and the disastrous Vietnam War in Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, by the Cold War’s end in 1991, the U.S. military had become a global behemoth with 800 overseas bases, an air force of 1,763 jet fighters, more than a thousand ballistic missiles, and a navy of nearly 600 ships, including 15 nuclear carrier battle groups — all linked by the world’s only global system of communications satellites. For the next 20 years, Washington would enjoy what Trump-era Defense Secretary James Mattis called “uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain. We could generally deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, operate how we wanted.”
The Three Pillars of U.S. Global Power
In the late 1990s, at the absolute apex of U.S. global hegemony, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, far more astute as an armchair analyst than an actual practitioner of geopolitics, issued a stern warning about the three pillars of power necessary to preserve Washington’s global control. First, the U.S. must avoid the loss of its strategic European “perch on the Western periphery” of Eurasia. Next, it must block the rise of “an assertive single entity” across the continent’s massive “middle space” of Central Asia. And finally, it must prevent “the expulsion of America from its offshore bases” along the Pacific littoral.
Drunk on the heady elixir of limitless global power following the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington’s foreign-policy elites made increasingly dubious decisions that led to a rapid decline in their country’s dominance. In an act of supreme imperial hubris, born of the belief that they were triumphantly at the all-American “end of history,” Republican neoconservatives in President George W. Bush’s administration invaded and occupied first Afghanistan and then Iraq, convinced that they could remake the entire Greater Middle East, the cradle of Islamic civilization, in America’s secular, free-market image (with oil as their repayment). After an expenditure of nearly $2 trillion on operations in Iraq alone and nearly 4,598 American military deaths, all Washington left behind was the rubble of ruined cities, more than 200,000 Iraqi dead, and a government in Baghdad beholden to Iran. The official U.S. Army history of that war concluded that “an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor.”
Meanwhile, China spent those same decades building industries that would make it the workshop of the world. In a major strategic miscalculation, Washington admitted Beijing to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, bizarrely confident that a compliant China, home to nearly 20% of humanity and historically the world’s most powerful nation, would somehow join the global economy without changing the balance of power. “Across the ideological spectrum,” as two former Obama administration officials later wrote, “we in the U.S. foreign policy community shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking.” A bit more bluntly, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster concluded that Washington had empowered “a nation whose leaders were determined not only to displace the United States in Asia, but also to promote a rival economic and governance model globally.”
During the 15 years after it joined the WTO, Beijing’s exports to the U.S. grew nearly fivefold to $462 billion while, by 2014, its foreign currency reserves surged from just $200 billion to an unprecedented $4 trillion, a vast treasure it used to launch its trillion-dollar “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), aimed at uniting Eurasia economically through newly built infrastructure. In the process, Beijing began a systematic demolition of Brzezinski’s three pillars of U.S. geopolitical power.
The First Pillar — Europe
Beijing has scored its most surprising success so far in Europe, long a key bastion of American global power. As part of a chain of 40 commercial ports it’s been building or rebuilding around Eurasia and Africa, Beijing has purchased major port facilities in Europe, including outright ownership of the Greek port of Piraeus and significant shares in those of Zeebrugge in Belgium, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and Hamburg, Germany.
After a state visit from Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2019, Italy became the first G-7 member to officially join the BRI agreement, subsequently signing over a portion of its ports at Genoa and Trieste. Despite Washington’s strenuous objections, in 2020, the European Union and China also concluded a draft financial services agreement that, when finalized in 2023, will more fully integrate their banking systems.
While China is building ports, rails, roads, and powerplants across the continent, its Russian ally continues to dominate Europe’s energy market and is now just months away from opening its controversial Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline beneath the Baltic Sea, guaranteed to increase Moscow’s economic influence. As the massive pipeline project moved to completion last December, Russian President Putin intensified pressures on NATO with a roster of “extravagant” demands, including a formal guarantee that Ukraine not be admitted to the alliance, removal of all the military infrastructure installed in Eastern Europe since 1997, and a prohibition against future military activity in Central Asia.
In a power play not seen since Stalin and Mao joined forces in the 1950s, the alliance between Putin’s raw military force and Xi’s relentless economic pressure may indeed slowly be pulling Europe away from America. Complicating the U.S. position, Britain’s exit from the European Union cost Washington its most forceful advocate inside Brussels’ labyrinthine corridors of power.
And as Brussels and Washington grow apart, Beijing and Moscow only come closer. Through joint energy ventures, military maneuvers, and periodic summits, Putin and Xi are reprising the Stalin-Mao alliance, a strategic partnership at the heart of Eurasia that could, in the end, break Washington’s steel chains that have long stretched from Eastern Europe to the Pacific.
The Second Pillar — Central Asia
Under its bold BRI scheme to fuse Europe and Asia into a unitary Eurasian economic bloc, Beijing has crisscrossed Central Asia with a steel-ribbed cat’s cradle of railroads and oil pipelines, effectively toppling Brzezinski’s second pillar of geopolitical power — that the U.S. must block the rise of “an assertive single entity” in the continent’s vast “middle space.” When President Xi first announced the Belt and Road Initiative at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University in September 2013, he spoke expansively about “connecting the Pacific and the Baltic Sea,” while building “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”
In the decade since, Beijing has put in place a bold design for transcending the vast distances that historically separated Asia and Europe. Starting in 2008, the China National Petroleum Corporation collaborated with Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan to launch a Central Asia-China gas pipeline that will eventually extend more than 4,000 miles. By 2025, in fact, there should be an integrated inland energy network, including Russia’s extensive grid of gas pipelines, reaching 6,000 miles from the Baltic to the Pacific.
The only real barrier to China’s bid to capture Eurasia’s vast “middle space” was the now-ended U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. To join Central Asia’s gas fields to the energy-hungry markets of South Asia, the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) pipeline was announced in 2018, but progress though the critical Afghan sector was slowed by the war there. In the months before it captured Kabul, however, Taliban diplomats turned up in Turkmenistan and China to offer assurances about the project’s future. Since then, the scheme has been revived, opening the way for Chinese investment that could complete its capture of Central Asia.
The Third Pillar — the Pacific Littoral
The most volatile flashpoint In Beijing’s grand strategy for breaking Washington’s geopolitical grip over Eurasia lies in the contested waters between China’s coast and the Pacific littoral, which the Chinese call “the first island chain.” By building a half-dozen island bases of its own in the South China Sea since 2014, swarming Taiwan and the East China Sea with repeated fighter plane forays, and staging joint maneuvers with Russia’s navy, Beijing has been conducting a relentless campaign to begin what Brzezinski called “the expulsion of America from its offshore bases” along that Pacific littoral.
As China’s economy grows larger and its naval forces do, too, the end of Washington’s decades-long dominion over that vast ocean expanse may be just over the horizon. For one thing, China may at some point achieve supremacy in certain critical military technologies, including super-secure “quantum entanglement” satellite communications and hypersonic missiles. Last October, the chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, called China’s recent launch of a hypersonic missile “very close” to “a Sputnik moment.” While U.S. tests of such weapons, which can fly faster than 4,000 m.p.h., have repeatedly failed, China successfully orbited a prototype whose speed and stealth trajectory suddenly make U.S. aircraft carriers significantly more difficult to defend.
But China’s clear advantage in any struggle over that first Pacific island chain is simply distance. A battle fleet of two U.S. supercarriers operating 5,000 miles from Pearl Harbor could deploy, at best, 150 jet fighters. In any conflict within 200 miles of China’s coast, Beijing could use up to 2,200 combat aircraft as well as DF-21D “carrier-killer” missiles whose 900-mile range makes them, according to U.S. Navy sources, “a severe threat to the operations of U.S. and allied navies in the western Pacific.”
The tyranny of distance, in other words, means that the U.S. loss of that first island chain, along with its axial anchor on Eurasia’s Pacific littoral, should only be a matter of time.
In the years to come, as more such incidents erupt around Eurasia’s ring of fire, readers can insert them into their own geopolitical model — a useful, even essential, means for understanding a fast-changing world. And as you do that, just remember that history has never ended, while the U.S. position in it is being remade before our eyes.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books). His new book, just published, is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.
Trump supporters stand on a Capitol Police armored vehicle as others take over the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
Stewart Rhodes is facing the most serious charges yet in connection with the Capitol riot.
That charge — the most serious yet to come out of the investigation — is one of several in the indictment unsealed Thursday, which alleges Rhodes and his co-defendants brought small arms to the Washington, DC, area; engaged in combat training to prepare for the attack; and made plans to stage quick-reaction forces to support insurrectionists.
Rhodes was taken into custody Thursday in Texas and is among the highest-profile arrests made in the investigation into last year’s attack on the Capitol, although more than 700 people have thus far been arrested and charged in connection with January 6.
Rhodes’s group, the Oath Keepers, is “one of the largest far-right antigovernment groups in the US today,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Founded in 2009, the group’s members have a history of attending protests while heavily armed, clashing with law enforcement, and supporting former President Donald Trump’s baseless election fraud claims.
Thursday’s indictments are also the first seditious conspiracy charges in the investigation so far, and the first the Justice Department has brought in more than a decade. Seditious conspiracy isn’t the same as treason, but it’s also not terribly far off; as former federal prosecutor Laurence Tribe wrote for NBC News on Saturday, the “crime is, in effect, treason’s sibling.”
Specifically, seditious conspiracy occurs when two or more people work together to plan to overthrow the government or prevent the execution of its laws.
In the case against Rhodes and his alleged co-conspirators, the government presented evidence in the charging documents that shortly after the November 3, 2020, election Rhodes told his followers to, “Prepare your mind, body, and spirit” because, “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war.” In December, Rhodes promised a “bloody, massively bloody revolution” should a peaceful transfer of power occur, and in the lead-up to the Capitol riot purchased thousands of dollars’ worth of weapons, ammunition, and related tactical gear.
Other defendants in the case are alleged to have set up paramilitary training groups, and created private Signal groups to discuss their operations, including procuring weapons and establishing a quick reaction force outside the DC area to bring in additional insurrectionists and weapons.
The new indictments are a significant step up from previous charges in the case, which range in seriousness from disorderly conduct to obstructing an official proceeding before Congress, and have so far resulted in sentences up to 41 months in prison. In comparison, seditious conspiracy carries a potential sentence of 20 years in prison.
The indictment is “major news in [the] effort to hold extremists accountable for their role in #Jan6 insurrection,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s anti-government desk told Vox via email. “January 6th was a culmination of years of poor behavior on Rhodes [sic] part. It felt like this was always where he and Oath Keepers were headed, but many of us had hoped that we could have prevented it.”
The new charges also refute the argument that narratives about the January 6 attack are overblown because no participants had yet been charged with sedition. As the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake pointed out on Thursday, Fox News’s Brit Hume had tweeted just hours before Rhodes’s arrest, “Let’s base our view on whether 1/6 was an ‘insurrection’ on whether those arrested are charged with insurrection. So far, none has been.”
Hume’s tweet echoes months of Fox News hosts’ and guests’ attempts, along with other conservatives, to argue that the Capitol riot did not rise to the level of insurrection.
Seditious conspiracy prosecutions are rare and difficult
Seditious conspiracy charges are rare — so rare that, as the SPLC points out, this is just the fourth time in the past 80 years that the statute has been used against right-wing extremists in the US.
In 2010, members of a small Christian militia group in Michigan called the Hutaree were indicted on seditious conspiracy charges, and before that, in the late 1980s, white supremacist militia members in Arkansas were charged with the same crime. In both cases, they were acquitted.
That means the stakes for the Justice Department’s prosecution of Rhodes and his cohort are high, even as lawmakers in Congress continue to seek accountability for January 6 along different avenues. “It’s that significant of a moment,” the SPLC told Vox.
According to a 1993 case, United States v. Lee, proof of a conspiracy rests on establishing that everyone in the conspiracy shares “a ‘unity of purpose,’ the intent to achieve a common goal, and an agreement to work toward that goal”; previous seditious conspiracy cases have failed in part because the government failed to prove that unity, or to establish exactly what defendants were planning to do.
Even when cases are more clear-cut, there are barriers; as historian Kathleen Belew described on Twitter Thursday, cultural and circumstantial factors may have contributed to the 1988 acquittal of the extremists in Arkansas, despite a surfeit of apparent evidence.
“Seditious conspiracy charges against Oath Keepers will seek to show that Jan 6 was not just a ‘protest’ ... but an organized and pre-planned [attack] on American democracy,” Belew tweeted. “The stakes are high, but there are a lot more tools today than existed in 1987-88: an FBI aware of and willing to confront white power and militant right violence; a DOD aware of the problem and taking action; hundreds of journalists telling better and more complete stories.”
In fact — and perhaps in foreshadowing of Thursday’s indictments — the DOJ announced last week it was establishing a unit dedicated to investigating and prosecuting domestic terrorism, shortly after the one-year anniversary of the January 6 attack.
“We have seen a growing threat from those who are motivated by racial animus, as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen told lawmakers.
Thursday’s indictment, however, could help combat that threat. Jonathon Moseley, an attorney for Stewart Rhodes and his co-defendant Kelly Meggs, told Vox in a phone interview that “the Oath Keepers in general have been pretty much stalled in any of their operations during this whole year.”
“So a lot is going to depend on how the trial goes, what the outcome is. If they’re found guilty, they’re going to be sort of a pariah ... so I think a lot is at stake in terms of the viability of the organization and its movement,” Moseley said.
The indictment could also affect the ability of extremist groups to plan an attack like the Capitol riot, Michael Edison Hayden, a SPLC spokesperson and senior investigative reporter, told Vox.
“Extremists are also paying close attention to the use of Signal” — an encrypted messaging app — “in making this arrest,” Hayden said. “So many far-right figures are perpetually chasing an online space to plan in secret and Signal’s presence in Rhodes’ indictment is a very clear warning sign that they don’t have any great options left. It’s an arrest that will likely inspire quite a bit of paranoia.”
Rhodes himself maintained his innocence during an interview with the FBI last year and in a subsequent appearance in Texas early last year, the Guardian reports. “I may go to jail soon, not for anything I actually did, but for made-up crimes,” Rhodes said at the time.
Rhodes has denied in FBI interviews that he ordered members of his group to breach the Capitol building, saying that anyone who did went in only to give medical aid after they heard someone had been shot, and he did not personally breach the Capitol.
Even beyond the futures of Rhodes and the Oath Keepers, the implications for Thursday’s indictments could be far-reaching. More than a year after January 6, 2021, both the DOJ and Congress continue to probe the attack, but the DOJ has far more staying power: If Republicans win back the House in the midterm elections, DOJ’s seditious conspiracy case will continue, but the same can’t be said for the January 6 select committee, which could be hamstrung or dismantled if the balance of power changes in the House next year.
Despite the improved resources and focus on domestic extremism in 2022, the government’s case isn’t necessarily a slam-dunk. It’s still momentous, however: As Belew tweeted, “the outcome of this prosecution will be enormously important if we hope to curb further violent attacks on people, institutions, and democracy itself.”
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
No state has such a force, which Gov. Ron DeSantis wants empowered to arrest voters and others who allegedly violate election laws
The proposed Office of Election Crimes and Security would be part of the Department of State, which answers to the governor. DeSantis is asking the GOP-controlled legislature to allocate nearly $6 million to hire 52 people to “investigate, detect, apprehend, and arrest anyone for an alleged violation” of election laws. They would be stationed at unspecified “field offices throughout the state” and act on tips from “government officials or any other person.”
DeSantis highlighted his plan as legislators opened their annual 60-day session last week.
“To ensure that elections are conducted in accordance with the rule of law, I propose an election integrity unit whose sole focus will be the enforcement of Florida’s election laws,” he said during his State of the State address. “This will facilitate the faithful enforcement of election laws and will provide Floridians with the confidence that their vote will matter.”
Voting rights experts say that no state has such an agency, one dedicated to patrolling elections and empowered to arrest suspected violators. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) announced the formation of a “2021 Texas Election Integrity Unit” in October, but that office is more limited in scope, has fewer than 10 employees and isn’t under the governor’s authority.
“There’s a reason that there’s no office of this size with this kind of unlimited investigative authority in any other state in the country, and it’s because election crimes and voter fraud are just not a problem of that magnitude,” said Jonathan Diaz, a voting rights lawyer at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center. “My number one concern is that this is going to be used as a tool to harass or intimidate civic-engagement organizations and voters.”
Florida’s congressional Democrats expressed similar worries when they asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate “a disturbing rise in partisan efforts at voter suppression” in the state. They took aim specifically at DeSantis’s call for election police.
“Harmful proposals to create new partisan bodies to oversee our voting process are exactly the kind of action that demand oversight as we work to ensure that our voting process is unquestionably trustworthy,” they wrote Thursday in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Unlike many past elections, the 2020 general election in Florida had few problems. The governor touted it as “the gold standard.”
“The way Florida did it, I think, inspired confidence,” DeSantis said on Nov. 4, 2020, hours after the results showed that President Donald Trump had won the state by more than three percentage points. “I think that’s how elections should be run.”
But in the wake of Trump’s ultimate defeat, as he and his supporters spread falsehoods about election fraud nationwide and demanded audits in numerous states, many Republicans in Florida pressed DeSantis to do the same.
Though he resisted an audit, DeSantis signed a controversial bill last year curtailing some voting options that had helped to expand participation. The law — which is being challenged in court, with a trial set to begin Jan. 30 — limits the use of ballot drop boxes, adds requirements to request mail ballots, and bans groups or individuals from gathering absentee ballots on other voters’ behalf.
No legislators have signed on to sponsor DeSantis’s new proposal. House Speaker Chris Sprowls (R) said DeSantis is concerned that existing law enforcement agencies don’t have the expertise necessary to find and prosecute election crimes. Yet he hasn’t embraced the governor’s approach. “We’re going to look at it, we’ll evaluate it and see what happens,” Sprowls said last week.
As with all committees in the Capitol in Tallahassee, Republicans are in the majority on the House Public Integrity … Elections Committee. Neither the committee chairman nor vice chairman returned calls for comment. The panel has not scheduled a hearing on the DeSantis proposal.
Last month, Secretary of State Laurel Lee spoke to a meeting of the Florida Supervisors of Elections association to explain the governor’s plan. Some of the officials who run elections in each of Florida’s 67 counties were alarmed by what they heard. They fear overreach from the executive branch, especially in a year when DeSantis is running for reelection.
Broward County Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott said he’s concerned that the new unit would be “applied in a very partisan way” and certain that his heavily Democratic county would be a target.
“It seems as if this is going to focus on a lot of grass-roots organizations that are out there trying to get people registered to vote, as well as people out there doing petition drives,” Scott said. “I think this is going to lead to people being intimidated if they’re civically involved. I don’t want people to be scared away from doing those kinds of things.”
State Rep. Geraldine Thompson, the ranking Democrat on the House Public Integrity … Elections Committee, thinks the new agency would be a waste of money. In addition to its funding, DeSantis wants $1.1 million for eight new positions in other departments — to address what he describes as a growing caseload of election crimes. The Department of State received 262 election-fraud complaint forms in 2020 and referred 75 to law enforcement or prosecutors. About 11 million Floridians cast ballots for president that November.
“The governor and other officials in Florida said the 2020 election was the most secure and efficiently run election that we ever had,” Thompson said. “So I see absolutely no reason for this elections commission to be established, particularly at the cost that he is proposing.”
Voter fraud is rare, and critics note that state attorneys and local police are already in place to investigate alleged election crimes. The state’s 67 elections supervisors are also trained to look for fraud.
“The bottom line is there is no widespread election fraud in Florida,” said Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren, a Democrat. “It’s a microscopic amount. Elections today are the most secure that they have ever been. This is not a serious policy proposal. This is a door prize for a QAnon pep rally.”
Hans von Spakovsky, an election law expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, supports Desantis’s plan and hopes it becomes a “model” for other states. Investigating election fraud requires special training and commitment that are lacking in many law enforcement agencies, he said. The foundation’s database of election fraud cases nationwide shows only three convictions in Florida in the last three years.
Support for the governor’s proposal should be bipartisan, according to DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw.
“Ensuring that every legal vote counts, as Governor DeSantis strives to do, is the opposite of ‘voter suppression,’ ” Pushaw said via email. “We do not understand why any politician, Democrat or Republican, would be opposed to allocating sufficient resources to ensure our election laws are enforced.”
Cecile Scoon, a lawyer who is president of the League of Women Voters Florida, called an elections security force controlled by a governor an alarming concept.
“So to have your own elections SWAT team, that would be under the direction of the secretary of state, who is under the direction of the governor, is not a comfortable feeling,” Scoon said. “Having governmental officials like this, traveling about overlooking elections just to see if there’s something going on, is very chilling, very scary and very reminiscent of past governmental interference that was directed to Black voters.”
A rally for reparations in Washington, D.C. (photo: Bob Korn/Shutterstock)
“One, it is the right thing to do; two, it is long overdue; and three, because we know it is possible.” Kathy Masaoka
In 1989, the late Democratic Rep. John Conyers of Michigan introduced H.R. 40, The Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans. In April of 2021, the House Judiciary held a historic markup of the act, and in August of the same year, a virtual town meeting was held between leaders of the Black reparations movement, and Japanese American activists to further drive the conversation forward with their allyship.
“Just as Black Americans supported our community’s struggle for redress, we will strive to support and show solidarity with Black people as they fight for reparations today,” 29 year old doctoral candidate and organizer Michael Nishimura shared with NBC News reporters.
While Nishimura might be too young to recall the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians hearings that took place some forty years ago, he is aware of the impact made.
82 year old John Tateishi on the other hand remembers it all too well. At the age of 3, Tateishi was sent to Manzanar, an American internment camp in California. He later became the director of the Japanese American Citizens League, the oldest Asian American civil rights group. While their own movement for reparations began in the 60’s, it wouldn’t be until 1988 that President Ronald Reagan would sign the Civil Liberties act, an act that awarded $20,000 checks to over 80,000 survivors. Tateishi received his check by mail in 1990, and within a year began receiving requests to speak at meetings around Black reparations.
He and other activists and organizations like the JACL began forming alliances with Black reparations movement leaders, partnerships that still exist to this day. Last fall, Japanese American organizations Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress and Nikkei Progressives formed a joint committee to study reparations for Black people in the U.S.
Veteran Japanese American organizer Kathy Masaoka testified last February during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on H.R. 40. “one, it is the right thing to do; two, it is long overdue; and three, because we know it is possible.” she stated.
Dreisen Heath leads the U.S. reparations work for Human Rights Watch and has become the central link between several of the organizations involved. The coalition urging support for H.R. 40 is made up of over 450 organizations committed to the movement. The groups have written letters, organized zoom calls, town halls, and have most recently called for a 12 hour day of action that included three live email and phone-banking sessions.
While President Joe Biden has not made explicit statements that he considers reparations for Black Americans a legislative priority, organizers remain hopeful.
A Russian soldier. (photo: Sergey Volskiy/AFP/Getty Images)
Russia ‘exploring options to ensure security’, Kremlin spokesman says against backdrop of Ukraine tensions.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said last week that he could “neither confirm nor exclude” the possibility of Russia sending missiles or other assets to Latin America.
His remarks came after diplomatic talks between Russia, the United States, NATO and other Western powers failed to produce a breakthrough in the Ukraine crisis.
Asked to comment on Ryabkov’s statement, which the US dismissed as “bluster”, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Monday said Russia was “reviewing different scenarios”.
“For Latin America – we’re talking about sovereign states there, let’s not forget that,” he told reporters on a conference call.
“And, in the context of the current situation, Russia is exploring options that would ensure its security.”
Russia-Belarus military drills
Peskov’s comments came as Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko confirmed on Monday that Russia and Belarus will hold joint military drills next month.
Lukashenko said the exercises on Belarus’s southern and western borders were in response to alleged troop build-ups by Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states – Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia – near his country’s frontiers.
He claimed there are currently more than 30,000 soldiers stationed close to Belarus’s borders.
“These should be normal exercises to work out a certain plan in the confrontation with these forces: the west [the Baltics and Poland] and the south [Ukraine],” state news agency BELTA quoted Lukashenko as saying.
Diplomatic efforts falter
Monday’s developments added to fears of a possible breakout of conflict in Europe, where Russia’s recent troop build-up near Ukraine’s borders has spooked Kyiv and its Western allies.
Russia, which annexed Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula in 2014 and is accused of fomenting a pro-Russian separatist war in the country’s east, has denied having plans to make an incursion into its neighbour.
The Kremlin has instead blamed NATO for undermining the security situation in the region.
It argues the US-headed military alliance is threatening its territory and has demanded it never embrace Ukraine or any other ex-Soviet nations as new members.
Washington has called such demands nonstarters but said that it is willing to negotiate with Moscow about possible future deployments of offensive missiles in Ukraine and putting limits on US and NATO military exercises in Eastern Europe.
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