AMY GOODMAN: We only have two minutes, and I want to get to the election. When I interviewed you in 2016, you said you wouldn’t support either main-party candidate at the time. What are your thoughts today for 2020? ANGELA DAVIS: Well, my position really hasn’t changed. I’m not going to actually support either of the major candidates. But I do think we have to participate in the election. I mean, that isn’t to say that I won’t vote for the Democratic candidate. What I’m saying is that in our electoral system as it exists, neither party represents the future that we need in this country. Both parties remain connected to corporate capitalism. But the election will not so much be about who gets to lead the country to a better future, but rather how we can support ourselves and our own ability to continue to organize and place pressure on those in power. And I don’t think there’s a question about which candidate would allow that process to unfold. So I think that we’re going to have to translate some of the passion that has characterized these demonstrations into work within the electoral arena, recognizing that the electoral arena is not the best place for the expression of radical politics. But if we want to continue this work, we certainly need a person in office who will be more amenable to our mass pressure. And to me, that is the only thing that someone like a Joe Biden represents. But we have to persuade people to go out and vote to guarantee that the current occupant of the White House is forever ousted.

On July 22, a Facebook employee posted a message to the company’s internal misinformation policy group noting that some misinformation strikes against Breitbart had been cleared by someone at Facebook seemingly acting on the publication's behalf. “A Breitbart escalation marked ‘urgent: end of day’ was resolved on the same day, with all misinformation strikes against Breitbart’s page and against their domain cleared without explanation,” the employee wrote. The same employee said a partly false rating applied to an Instagram post from Charlie Kirk was flagged for “priority” escalation by Joel Kaplan, the company’s vice president of global public policy. Kaplan once served in George W. Bush’s administration and drew criticism for publicly supporting Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court.

Oregon once aimed to be the greenest state in America. Its leaders adopted the nation’s first bottle deposit. They controlled urban sprawl. They declared ocean beaches public property. But in the last four years, Oregon’s most powerful industries have killed, weakened or stalled efforts to deal with climate change, wolf recovery, disappearing bird habitat, cancer-causing diesel exhaust, dwindling groundwater, industrial air pollution, oil spill planning and weed killers sprayed from helicopters. What changed Oregon? Money. Lots and lots of money. […] The consequences of Oregon’s logging practices are clear. State and federal scientists have blamed major population declines in species including the coastal Coho salmon, northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet on timber harvesting and state policies governing it. The Oregon Department of Forestry found 242 plants and animals listed or at risk of listing under the Endangered Species Act as of 2012. The trend was getting worse. Then the state agency, whose mission includes promoting the timber industry, stopped publishing the numbers and deleted past reports from its website.

The latest escalation mirrors growing anti-democratic sentiment in the national GOP. --- In a nutshell, Oregon Republicans are exploiting an arcane constitutional provision in order to exert veto power over legislation developed by the Democratic majority, on behalf of an almost entirely white, rural minority. Five times in the past 10 months, they have simply refused to show up for work, preventing the legislature from passing bills on guns, forestry, health care, and budgeting. The fifth walkout, over a climate change bill, is ongoing. It is an extraordinary escalation of anti-democratic behavior from the right, gone almost completely unnoticed by the national political media. Nevertheless, it is a big deal, worth pausing to consider, not only because it is preventing Oregon from addressing climate change, but because it shows in stark terms where the national GOP is headed. […] Republicans’ objections have been heard and addressed. They just haven’t stopped the bill, and that’s what they want. It was never really about process, it’s about state government doing something they don’t want it to do (pricing carbon) in a state where they believe they ought to have veto power. They believe that rural white people and the kinds of jobs they do are more authentically Oregonian than those of city dwellers working service jobs, and thus they ought to have a greater voice in politics. […] “We must get our way, no matter what” is not a reasonable premise to carry into a dispute in a democracy. […] Republicans don’t just get to arbitrarily decide, as a defeated minority, how the majority’s bills pass, or what form they take. Their enormous sense of entitlement notwithstanding, they don’t get to rewrite the rules of democracy on the fly as it suits them, from bill to bill. […] Oregon has the country’s loosest laws on money in politics, with no restrictions whatsoever on what corporations or individuals can donate to politicians. This has led to a flood of cash into state politics and the steady erosion of the state’s once-proud pollution and environmental laws. Oregon is now first in the country in per-capita corporate donations to politicians; almost half the total money donated to Oregon legislators comes from corporations, far more than comes from unions or individuals. […] There is simply no precedent for what Oregon Republicans are doing, treating walk-outs as routine, using them to prevent passage of what is a fairly milquetoast set of carbon policies (less stringent than in many other states) and even to set the pace of work in the legislature. Democrats have never done anything like this, anywhere. […] This is an extraordinary situation. An overwhelmingly white, rural minority of voters is holding an entire state’s business hostage. Oregon Democrats played by the rules, got more votes, and developed legislation through appropriate channels. Now fewer than a dozen lawmakers, heavily funded by the very industries they are defending, are blocking it, at will, using an anachronistic quirk of the state constitution. There is no conceivable justification for it, no possible democratic rationale. It only makes sense in the context of white supremacy: the notion that rural white Americans are more authentically American than other groups and deserve outsized representation in its politics and veto power over its legislation. It is no surprise that there are copious ties between the Oregon GOP and the far right. Consider TimberUnity, which passes itself off as a grassroots group of rural Oregonian loggers and truckers against the climate bill. At a January 11 “Vanguards of Victory” awards ceremony, the Oregon GOP gave the group an award. […] It’s all an interconnected network in the state: the far-right groups, the GOP, and the resource industries that fund them. Over and over again, this minority is allowed to assert its will at the expense of its fellow citizens, the norms of conduct that hold state government together, and democracy itself — without consequence or accountability. […] For example, have a look at this story from the Associated Press. It is positively surreal in its devotion to the exhausted tropes of mainstream political coverage. The debate in Oregon has become “pitched” and the episode “reveals sharp divisions.” Republicans say this, Democrats say that, he says, she says, the end. Nowhere in the story will the reader be told that Democrats have a supermajority in the legislature. Nowhere will they be told that a small, demographically homogeneous minority is using once-extraordinary measures to routinely thwart the will of the democratically elected majority. Nowhere will they be told that the white minority holding the state hostage has been backed in the past year by the threat of far-right militia violence. Mainstream political coverage, as we’ve seen again and again in the Trump years, is simply incapable of communicating a sense of crisis. There is only one model of story — what each side says, in equal measure — and it only serves to blur and obscure a situation in which one party, not the other, has lurched in a radically anti-democratic direction. (The local coverage from outlets like OPB is much better.) Meanwhile, Democrats in state government wring their hands and cave to Republican demands again and again, as though it is simply a matter of course that a large majority must bend the knee to a small minority. […] In national US politics, as in Oregon, it’s increasingly clear that the population is urbanizing and diversifying and there simply aren’t enough rural and suburban white Christians to constitute a majority anymore. If that demographic — which has now become an intense, all-encompassing political identity — is to maintain its traditional hold on power, it can only do so through increasingly anti-democratic means. In Oregon, that means exploiting the quorum rule and unlimited corporate money. At the national level, it means exploiting rural overrepresentation in the Senate, the electoral college, voter suppression, the filibuster ... and unlimited corporate money. In national politics, as in Oregon, anti-democratic tactics and rhetoric are escalating on the right, but there is little pushback or accountability. They pay no penalty for lying, violating norms, or taking legislative hostages, so they keep doing it, keep escalating. The institutions around them seem unwilling or unable to draw lines in the sand, and when they do, as when Democrats impeached Trump, they find those lines blown aside by partisan unity.

The impeachment trial didn’t change any minds. Here’s why. --- The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the information it needs to make enlightened political choices. If you short-circuit that process by saturating the ecosystem with misinformation and overwhelm the media’s ability to mediate, then you can disrupt the democratic process. What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age. And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable. […] Trump can dictate an entire news cycle with a few unhinged tweets or an absurd press conference. The media cycle is easily commandeered by misinformation, innuendo, and outrageous content. These are problems because of the norms that govern journalism and because the political economy of media makes it very hard to ignore or dispel bullshit stories. This is at the root of our nihilism problem, and a solution is nowhere in sight.

It would be naive to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds.

[The Philippines’] Ferdinand Marcos' greatest trick was convincing people all protesters were communist animals, so when they went missing, few cared. Even after bodies were discovered. These white people & journalists talking about being civil? These were the rich people, the Fil-Chinese, the mestizos in the Philippines who knew they won't be affected by many of Marcos' policies, and therefore could ignore them even as the killings started. Marcos was also adept at convincing regular Filipinos that "as long as you don't commit crimes I won't come for you. I'm only getting rid of the 'filth'." He lied, of course. He jailed his most vocal opponents, people whose businesses he wanted to confiscate for his use.

One way to improve democracy is for more people to appreciate its complex technological underpinnings.

On China’s satirists and what happens to them.

‘The Democracy Gap is a great chasm between this “hearing and deliberative” part of government (what people like to call “Washington”), and the rest of human civilization, and activists — left, right, and orthogonal are beginning to figure this out, and it’s beginning to really tick them off. People are using the internet to become increasingly more organized, but at the same time are becoming more and more disconnected from the mechanics of power inside Washington. Moreover, as the volume of voices grows louder, “Washington” becomes more disconnected — unable to hear the best solutions from the cacophony of noise.’

An International Monetary Fund veteran explains how the US financial situation is like that of a less-powerful nation's developing economy. Oligarchy, corruption, and the financial sector's control of the government — it's not good.