Leads, Loses and Long Shots

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

While most attention in the forthcoming American election is on the presidency, 34 of 100 Congressional Senate seats are also being contested.

Currently, Democrats hold a slim majority in the chamber, controlling 51 seats, thanks to three independents who caucus with them. These include seven of the eight most competitive seats. Republicans hold 49 seats.

There are a handful of states where Democrats represent places where Republicans have consistently won statewide elections, including Montana and Ohio, two states where the GOP is optimistic it will be able to flip control.

What is the state of political play in some of these important races? The results may have a bearing on whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump carries these states.

In Arizona, Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s retirement set up a contest between Representative Ruben Gallego, a progressive, and Kari Lake, a Trump favorite. Lake lost her race for governor in 2022 and then claimed that her Democratic opponent stole the election.

Gallego is less well known outside his Phoenix House of Representatives district, but as a Latino with a Harvard degree and combat experience in Iraq with the Marine Corps, he has the upper hand. He is trouncing Lake in fundraising, giving him more local airtime, and will doubtless prevail.

Maryland, which is reliably Democratic, should not be close. But this race is one to watch because Larry Hogan, the moderate former Republican governor, has decided to run for the Senate seat of Ben Cardin, a Democrat who is retiring. Democrats nominated Angela Alsobrooks, the Prince George’s County Executive.

Hogan aims to convince some of the state’s Democratic voters to split their ticket and choose him as well as voting for Harris. He has distanced himself from Trump and pledges to protect abortion rights if he’s elected. If Alsobrooks wins, which seems likely, she would be the first Black senator from Maryland.

The Senate race in the swing state of Michigan sees former Congressman Mike Rogers, a mainstream Republican and former critic of Trump who later embraced him, face off against Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat who has used her national security credentials to win over swing voters since 2018.

She is also banking on securing strong support from more liberal constituents in and around Detroit. The result in this seat, being vacated by Democrat Debbie Stabenow, who opted to retire, will be a nail-biter.

In Montana, Senator Jon Tester has defied the odds before, but his victories in 2006, 2012 and 2018 all came in strong Democratic cycles. His fight for a fourth term will be considerably tougher, and he will need many ticket-splitters in a state that Trump won by 16 points in 2020. The Republican candidate, Tim Sheehy, is a decorated former Navy SEAL with the wealth to self-finance his campaign; he also has Trump’s backing. This seat may well flip.

The race in Ohio features vulnerable Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown against Republican Bernie Moreno, a businessman who got his start in auto dealerships and then turned to cryptocurrency. A Democrat in a solidly Republican state, Brown has established an image as a stalwart supporter of working-class voters.

Moreno was not the Ohio Republican establishment’s choice. Instead, he was Trump’s pick. A wealthy Colombian-born businessman, his sizable fortune has helped him match Brown, who has a tenuous lead, in spending.

The race in another swing state, Pennsylvania, is between incumbent Democrat Bob Casey and Republican challenger David McCormick, a businessman and Army veteran. It will be very hard to beat Casey but McCormick, the former chief executive of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, is still competitive. Should McCormick win, it would also mean that Trump has carried the state and has probably won the election.

Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin has been courting African American voters with a pitch focused especially on what her party can do for economic opportunity. Her opponent, Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde, who is running to “restore the American dream,” has emphasized economic, immigration, and culture war issues. Hovde holds a narrow lead.

Other states to watch are Florida, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, and Texas, where long-shots may take out their statistically favoured opponents.

 

Cuban Revolution Is Just a Memory

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

On Oct. 18, Cuba’s power grid failed and the entire nation plunged into darkness, a day after the government stressed the need to save electricity in the face of major gasoline shortages and large-scale, regular outages. For weeks, the country has lacked the fuel to run the power grid. It’s come to this.

As a left-wing graduate student back in the late 1960s-70s, I wrote my MA thesis on the Cuban Revolution. I visited the island when it was a truly Communist state, slogans and all. But that, as they say, was long ago. Indeed, given today’s Cuba, it was really very, very long ago.

Regime corruption, economic collapse and public anger are now a part of life. The perpetual blackouts are an apt symbol of a country that is headed for the dark ages. For the first time since the revolution, Cuba is asking international agencies for food aid. The Cuban economy produces little for internal consumption and almost nothing that can be sold abroad for hard currency.

Enormous numbers of civilians are fleeing the island. In July Cuban demographer and economist Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos released data showing that Cuba’s population shrank by 18 per cent between 2022 and 2023.  He calculates that some 8.62 million remain on the island, down from was 11.2 million. People feel trapped and hopeless.

At the same time, the Cuban public has found its voice. Despite the blackouts and the poor connectivity, large numbers of Cubans are venting online. This has turned into an immense chorus of anger and disgust. The public perception of a worsening crime rate finally led the authorities to openly address it on state television. In August, an edition of the nightly talk programme Mesa Redonda was titled Cuba Against Drugs.

Some of these criminals may themselves be government figures. The regime has given up any revolutionary pretensions and has become what ordinary Cubans call a “mafia.” Outwardly, nothing has changed. The worn-out slogans are still piously intoned. The Communist Party, with its repressive apparatus, still dodders on. But it is in charge of ruling a society that has lost all faith in the system, and so those who command power and resources want nothing more than to enjoy the good life and protect themselves against an uncertain future.

Officials fortunate enough to have control over scarce resources like fuel sell these on the black market. The preferred approach is more indirect, however. Following the outbreak of anti-regime protests in July 2021, the government allowed the establishment of private “micro, small, and medium enterprises,” theoretically to open the economy to market forces.

But – no surprise -- most of the 9,000 private enterprises operating in Cuba today are owned by powerful regime figures who then funnel public works contracts to themselves. Most of the money they accrue is converted into dollars and sent illegally out of the country. Yes, a thin crust at the top live in modern comfort. But for all their power and luxury, these people are terrified of the future.

Cuba makes life very hard for journalists and accuses some independent writers of being political activists paid to file reports for American government-funded outlets such as Radio Marti, which are considered hostile, counter-revolutionary platforms by the Cuban government.

In 2021, Cuban journalist and opposition activist Lazaro Yuri Valle Roca was arrested on charges of disseminating enemy propaganda and sentenced to five years in prison. As his health faded, he listened to the implorations of his family and accepted the offer to leave. “My fight was in Cuba for the freedom of the island. I never wanted to leave,” he has stated.

His grandfather Blas Roca Calderio was a labor union journalist and longtime Communist leader prior to the 1959 revolution who held several important posts after Fidel Castro took power, including president of the National Assembly from 1976 to 1981.

For years, Valle Roca and other reporters had worked on the fringes despite independent journalism being effectively outlawed. There was a moment of hope when the Obama administration began engaging with Cuba. But that faded and was replaced by outright hostility and a ruthless crackdown on independent media coverage of opposition voices following mass street protests in July 2021. 

Even those journalists who stuck to the professional guardrails of independence and political neutrality were forced into exile. “Almost all of them were targeted, harassed, or threatened,” according to Ted Henken, a professor at the City University of New York who has written extensively about Cuban media. 

New laws governing “social communication” and “cyberspace security” make it a crime to publish news considered contrary to the “interest of the State.” Cuba’s media policy can be neatly summed up by a famous phrase uttered by Fidel Castro in 1961: “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.”

How long can such a situation continue? Perhaps one anonymous observer provides hope. His simple theory of when Communist regimes collapse is when the true believers die and the people at the top are no longer willing or able to kill for ideals. Raul Castro, the former president and one of the revolution’s heroes, is now 93 years old. Fidel Castro died eight years ago. Miguel Diaz-Canel, their successor, is little more than a bureaucrat born after the revolution. It won’t be long.

 

The Hurdles Facing Egyptian Intellectuals

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Winnipeg] Jewish Post

In the twentieth century, many middle-class Egyptians adopted a cosmopolitan cultural style. They wanted to move the country toward a more liberal and secular state.

But they always came up against, and were unable to surmount, the strength of a very strong Islamic religious culture. In despair, some, despite their own preferences, ended up preferring autocracy to what they considered a backward and dangerous ideology.

In 1952, a revolution brought the Free Officers movement, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, to power. It seemed to have brought a secular quasi-socialist regime to power.

But the undercurrents of politicized religion, though banned by Nasser, did not disappear. The Muslim Brotherhood, which had been founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna and preached a fundamentalist Islamism guarded exclusively by the sharia, was outlawed. Its most prominent theoretician, Sayyid Ibrahim Qutb, was executed in 1966.

But secular movements fell from favour following Egypt’s defeat by Israel in 1967, and the country was transformed into an autocracy following Nasser’s death three years later. From 1981 until 2011, Egypt was ruled with an iron hand by Hosni Mubarak, until popular unrest forced him to step down during the Arab Spring.

Would this herald a new, democratic chapter in Egypt? Would free elections bring about a rebirth of secular politics? The answer was no.

Mubarak’s ouster cleared the way for the Muslim Brotherhood to participate openly in Egyptian politics, and to that end the group formed the Freedom and Justice Party. In April 2012 the party selected Mohamed Morsi to be its candidate in Egypt’s presidential election. Morsi defeated Ahmed Shafiq, a former prime minister under Mubarak, that June.

Morsi soon issued an edict declaring that his authority as president would not be subject to judicial oversight until a permanent constitution came into effect. Although he defended the edict as a necessary measure to protect Egypt’s transition to democracy, mass demonstrations were held against what many saw as a seizure of dictatorial powers.

Worsening economic conditions, deteriorating public services, and a string of sectarian incidents, including attacks on the country’s Coptic Christian minority, strengthened opposition to Morsi’s rule. Clashes between Morsi’s supporters and critics in late June 2013 culminated in massive anti-Morsi protests around the country.

On July 3 the military under the head of the Egyptian Armed Forces, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, removed Morsi from power. A figurehead president, Adly Mansour, was installed, but it was clear that Sisi, who retained the title of defence minister, wielded power.

Sisi claimed that the military had carried out the will of the Egyptian people, as expressed in the anti-Morsi protests, and that the Islamist-dominated administration led by Morsi had put the Muslim Brotherhood’s interests before those of the country.

A month later the Egyptian police and armed forces committed what Human Rights Watch deemed “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.”

Eleven years on, the murder of over 1,000 supporters of the deposed president, known as the Rabaa Massacre, has gone largely unpunished. The Muslim Brotherhood was formally outlawed that September and Morsi was jailed. Prison conditions were harsh, and he was denied adequate medical attention. He died in 2019.

Sisi officially left the military to run for president and was elected in a clearly fraudulent manner in May 2014. He has been re-elected twice since, in March 2018 and again in December 2023, when he was reported to have won with 89.6 per cent of the vote after several opposition figures were prevented from participating. Under his reign, Egypt has degenerated into a police state even more repressive than the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak.

Caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place, Egypt’s pro-democracy and civil society movements jettisoned their long-standing commitments to human rights and the rule of law and enthusiastically supported the return of military rule.

One of those civil society leaders, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, was among Egypt’s most influential intellectual figures. He had spent his career insisting that democracy is the solution both to political authoritarianism and to the allures of religious fundamentalism in the Arab world.

Pushing back against the prevailing view that Islamist groups must be marginalized, he argued that they should be included in the democratic process. He even went so far as to advocate, in an article titled “Toward Muslim Democracies,” that “it will be better for us as democrats, for the Islamists, and for Egypt to enlist Islamists under the flag of democracy.”

He encouraged Egyptians to support this vision and put aside common fears about Islamist movements and had been arrested for his views under Mubarak. Yet even he abruptly became an apologist for authoritarian rule.

The “problem” was that the bulk of the Egyptian masses were unwilling to part with their religious traditions or wholly consign them to the realm of the private. Put another way, if most Egyptians were given the choice between being liberal or being Muslim, they would overwhelmingly select the latter.

Faced with that reality, these intellectuals forged authoritarian alliances to forcibly impose their worldview on an otherwise unwilling populace. When Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were in actual control of the state rather than at its fringes, the liberal secularists chose authoritarian rule. This is the same tragedy found in most of the Arab world.