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some neglect, big on peace

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We’re running headfirst into a Mad Max world

Edwards, CA/USA - September 2018: The annual Wasteland Weekend post-apocalyptic festival takes place in the Mojave Desert where attendees live in a re-creation of the Mad Max films for five days.

Stan Cox

January 13, 2026

[https://www.beloud.com/share?url=https://www.alternet.org/send/mad-max-climate/&title=We%E2%80%99re%20running%20headfirst%20into%20a%20Mad%20Max%20world)

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Let me start by putting things bluntly: Don’t bother to tell Donald Trump, but with his distinct help, we’re doing nothing less than cooking ourselves. Thanks to the continued use of fossil fuels in a staggering fashion and the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, almost half of the world’s population now suffers through 30 additional days of extreme heat annually. Heatwaves roll in thicker and faster every year.

*This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

On average, according to the medical journal The Lancet, 84% of the extremely hot days we’ve faced over the past five years would not have occurred without human-induced climate change that the American president seems intent on making so much worse. Heat-related deaths are already 63% more frequent than in the 1990s. That Lancet article also reported that heat- and drought-related hunger, as well as deaths from wildfire smoke and industrial air pollution, are breaking records globally almost yearly.

Climate Impacts Tracker dubbed 2025 “The Year of Climate Disasters,” noting,

“Flash floods tearing up a Himalayan village in India, hurricanes and wildfires ravaging the U.S., heatwaves and wildfires scorching Europe, record-breaking heat in Iceland and Greenland, torrential rains and floods roaring through Southeast Asia — 2025 marked yet another year of human tragedies, driven by extreme weather events.”

The number of environmental disasters and their destructiveness are only ratcheting up in step with increases in global greenhouse-gas emissions, ever more extraction of key minerals, the ever-greater exploitation of biological resources, and outbreaks of resource wars (most recently with the U.S. assault on Venezuela). All of that is linked to one crucial phenomenon: the single-minded pursuit of economic growth by the owning and investing classes. Not surprisingly, they reap the lion’s share of the benefits from such growth and bear next to none of its devastating consequences.

Though it’s seldom highlighted, the world economy has indeed reached an astounding physical scale. During the past century, resource extraction has doubled every 20 years or so. Indeed, humanity reached a grim milestone in 2021, when the global quantity of human-made mass — that is, the total weight of all things our species manufactured or constructed — surpassed the total weight of all living plant, animal, and microbial biomass on this planet. And worse yet, that mass of human-made stuff continues to grow, year by year, even as the natural world diminishes further.

In other words, our species is vainly striving to circumvent what’s come to be known as Stein’s Law from an aphorism credited to economic guru Herbert Stein: “If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.”

Count on this: at some point, global economic growth will finally have to grind to a halt and shift into reverse. After all, if the corporate and political powers carry on with business as usual, such growth will end in chaotic, violent collapse. (Think Mad Max.) But if the elites can be thwarted and we can dramatically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and other resources in a reasonably well-planned way, we might be able to avoid that fate.

That’s the pitch put forward by the degrowth movement. In essence, it’s a refutation of the “green growth” doctrine. (Green-growthers, ignoring Stein’s Law, claim that technological “innovation” will ensure that economies can continue to grow indefinitely.) In that debate, degrowth finally seems to be getting a leg up. A 2023 survey of nearly 800 climate-policy researchers found that almost three-quarters of them favored degrowth or no growth over green growth.

And here’s the reality the rest of us need to take in: societies could indeed achieve a distinctly better quality of life because of (not in spite of) degrowth, since full-scale restraints on the endless extraction and consumption of fossil fuels could force them to ensure that their limited resources would be used to satisfy basic human needs instead of being wasted on yet more increasing profits for the already wealthy few.

The growth-addled political and economic forces pushing us toward ecological doom are many and formidable indeed. And that makes it ever more important that people in rich, overconsuming countries like ours come to realize how important it is that we stand up to the forces of ecocide, while developing a more realistic vision of the better world that awaits us once we’ve jumped off the growth-by-carbonization bandwagon.

One way to bring that better world into sharper focus is to examine a few of the many miseries and dangers that degrowth would help us alleviate or even leave behind. What follows is just a handful of examples.

Goodbye, War Machine

Topping the list of American institutions and resources that a degrowth economy could starve would be the U.S. military-industrial complex. After all, the Pentagon is actually the largest institutional user of fossil fuels in the world. The greenhouse gases our military emits, even in peacetime, are believed to have a global-warming impact of 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. The Earth can’t handle that any longer.

To begin shrinking our military’s now trillion-dollar annual budget would not only prevent a significant amount of global warming but also save countless human lives and greatly enhance the quality of life in this country and across the planet.

With degrowth, for example, the Defense (not — thank you, Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and crew! —War) Department’s nearly three million employees, who enable the resource-heavy, deadly work of war-fighting, imperialism, and, if the Trump administration gets its way, the suppression of domestic political protest, can find themselves better jobs. After all, employees in all but the top echelons of the military, underpaid and exploited, endure often harsh working and living conditions. Zeroing out the Pentagon would free up a vast workforce to help meet people’s actual needs rather than killing all too many of us on this planet (most recently, at least 115 in the bombing of Venezuelan boats and 40 more in the January 3rd attack on Caracas). And they’d be better off losing those jobs.

Enlisted personnel receive such small paychecks that many are eligible for SNAP (“food stamp”) benefits, even if only 14% apply for them. Among the families of junior enlisted troops, 45% often can’t afford enough food. More than 286,000 of them don’t get an adequate variety or amount of food and, of those, about 120,000 report sometimes skipping meals and eating less than they need for fear of running out of money.

And that’s not all. A nationwide analysis suggested that towns and cities abutting military bases have higher crime rates (19% greater for property crimes and 34% for violent crimes) than similar towns not near such installations.

Worse yet, people living or working in or around military bases are often exposed to dangerous levels of toxic contamination over long periods and can also be plagued by noise pollution. Not surprisingly, studies have also found high rates of hearing loss among the troops. In the United States, almost 15% of active-duty personnel suffer hearing impairment of some sort (and it’s one of the most common health problems among veterans as well).

Dismantling our war machine would also help restore a better quality of life for tens of millions of people elsewhere. Consider the death and misery our military has inflicted during the past six decades on Indochina, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and now the Caribbean Sea, the Eastern Pacific Ocean, and of course Venezuela.

As if that weren’t bad enough, for decades, our military-industrial complex has provided armaments to repressive, murderous regimes around the globe — Israel’sgenocide of the Palestinian people being the most recent example.

Adiós, Vehicular Supremacy

In a much less resource-intensive American society, human needs would also no longer be subordinated to those of gasoline-driven motor vehicles, and our collective quality of life would improve dramatically.

Based on the importance of keeping this planet livable, any ecologically sane society would break free from what Gregory Shill has labeled “automobile supremacy” and that, of course, would be a particularly significant accomplishment for any degrowth movement in the United States or other wealthy countries.

As a start, motor vehicles are regularly among the top 10 causes of death for U.S. residents under the age of 55. Worse yet, pedestrian fatalities, which had been falling for decades, shot up by 71% between 2010 and 2023, while fatalities caused by increasingly taller, heavier, more aggressively armored pickups and SUVs climbed at precisely twice that rate, 142%.

With private gas-driven vehicles largely replaced by extensive transit networks, electric vehicles, and bike and foot traffic, we also won’t have to contend with as many road-raging drivers in armored pickup trucks the size of World War II tanks. We won’t face the health dangers posed by air and noise pollution from vehicle traffic. Our cities will have vastly more green space, because significant parts of the 30% of their soil surface now covered by concrete or asphalt solely to accommodate motor vehicles could be revegetated. And we won’t suffer the extra-blistering summer heat that comes with such over-paving.

With degrowth and the end of automobile supremacy, traffic jams will vanish into the past; we’ll no longer risk being killed while simply walking, biking along a roadway, crossing a street legally, or engaging in lawful, peaceful protest; and everyone will all too literally be able to stop driving everyone else crazy.

Farewell to So Many Other Fossil-Fuelized Plagues

Starving militarism and automobile supremacy of resources, while improving the quality of life of our communities, would also go a long way toward halting the ecological breakdown of this planet while the sources of many smaller-scale dangers and ills would also fade into the past. Taken alone, each might appear insignificant, but cumulatively, such culprits severely degrade the quality of life in our wildly growth-oriented economy. As just one example of something that, with degrowth, we could say “good riddance” to, let me suggest that loud-mouthed neighborhood bully, the leaf blower.

Generating wind speeds approaching those of an EF5 tornado, gas-powered leaf blowers blast out noise at 95 to 115 decibels (two to eight times louder than the safe upper limit set by federal agencies). Electric leaf blowers, while less noisy, still significantly exceed the maximum safe noise level near schools, hospitals, daycare centers, retirement homes, or anywhere else where there are vulnerable people present.

Most gas-powered blowers and other deafening lawn machinery are operated for long hours by commercial landscaping crews, whose ears are just a couple of feet from the roar. Often surrounded by other leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and gas-powered equipment, such workers commonly suffer hearing loss.

The noise of a leaf blower, like that produced by vehicular traffic and wind turbines, is rich in low-frequency sound that carries long distances, easily passing through walls. Exposure to such noise raises the risk of a range of health problems, including sleep disruption, mental stress, high blood pressure, heart ailments, stroke, and immune-system dysfunction.

And keep in mind that the substitution of leaf blowers for perfectly functional rakes is just the tip of the iceberg. Our economy is now chock-full of unnecessary products that diminish the quality of life and would be left in the nearest ditch if energy consumption were deeply reduced.

Hello Again, Night Sky

By ending profligate energy consumption, degrowth could also restore much-loved wonders of nature that the growth economy has stolen from us.

Consider the night sky. Since 2010, in cities and towns, as well as anyplace near them, “skyglow” (a bleaching-out of the night sky that hides stars from view) has been increasing at an astonishing rate of 10% a year.

This surge in light pollution has coincided with the rapid adoption of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for streetlights and other outdoor illumination. Such LEDs produce far more light per watt of energy consumed than older light sources. Unfortunately, companies and municipalities have taken advantage of LED efficiency not by cutting their energy consumption, but by flooding parking lots, streets, billboards, sports fields, and car dealerships with even brighter light.

Most LED lighting now in use is rich in short wavelengths at the “cool-blue” end of the visible spectrum, which ensures that it will be scattered by the atmosphere more efficiently and so produce a rapid increase in skyglow. As a result, stars have all but disappeared from the night sky in cities, suburbs, and nearby rural areas.

Exposure to cool-blue light at night also threatens humans and other species by disrupting our circadian sleep-wake cycle. Among the impacts on human health are gastrointestinal disorders, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even cancer.

A degrowth society dialing down its energy use would not only reduce light and noise pollution but achieve significant advances in environmental justice. Brightly lit industrial and commercial facilities and parking lots are all too often placed in low-income, racialized communities. As a consequence, across the United States, light pollution is more severe in neighborhoods where a larger proportion of the population is Black, Latino, or Asian.

Amid mounting ecological and humanitarian crises and with Donald Trump still in the White House for another three potentially devastating years, the vanishing of the heavens may be regarded as a problem only for astronomers and aesthetes. But such a view badly underestimates how important the starry night sky has proven to be to our culture, scientific progress, and social cohesion. It was an unalloyed good, shared freely and equally by all humanity. And it could be so again if, with degrowth, we put our cities and towns on a dimmer switch.

To be clear, the degrowth movement’s not claiming that the way to prevent ecological and civilizational collapse is simply to play Whac-A-Mole by working our way through individual problems like traffic congestion or light and noise pollution. In fact, the point of degrowth is that societies should leave all such problems, including the potential disaster of climate change, in history’s trash heap. We’d reap myriad benefits by deeply cutting resource use while ensuring that collective sufficiency and justice for all become the focus of our world.

Copyright 2026 Stan Cox

{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 novelEvery Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’sA Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’sIn the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’sThe Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s* They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.}:

Stan Cox

Stan Cox, a TomDispatch regular, is the author, most recently, of Anthopause: The Beauty of Degrowth. His previous books include The Path to a Livable Future and The Green New Deal and Beyond. Find him on X and Bluesky at @CoxStan.

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an tom dispatch long

Trump's new greed deal the ultimate act of destruction the prophets have predicted - Alternet.org

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“The U.S. government is rushing to give away our spiritual home before the courts can even rule — just like it rushed to erase Native people for generations,” said Nosie of Apache Stronghold following the decision. “This is the same violent pattern we have seen for centuries.”

While Trump’s antagonism toward Native sovereignty isn’t surprising, it may be puzzling why his administration is so concerned with the nation’s supply of critical minerals like Oak Flat’s copper. As he’s made clear, Trump believes climate change to be a hoax invented by China, and he’s done his best to impede the growth of the renewable energy sector. Yet, like many of Trump’s other bombastic policy proposals, the undercurrents here appear more driven by ego than by ideology.

Trump’s Not Green But Greed New Deal

If Donald Trump has one defining trait, it’s his need to dominate in almost any imaginable situation. Illustrated by his falsehoods and refusal to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, he not only hates losing (and that’s putting it mildly!) but also refuses to concede defeat. And one thing is certain: the U.S. is losing control over the world’s mineral resources to China.

When it comes to critical minerals, the Chinese not only control most of the mines but also maintain and operate the majority of the world’s processing facilities. No other country comes close in the race for critical minerals. China finances the majority of critical mineral projects worldwide, totaling $57 billion over the past 20 years. It holds 35% of the globe’s reserves, but is responsible for 70% of their extraction and 87% of their processing on this planet.

In contrast, the U.S. relies entirely on China and other places for 12 of the 50 minerals on its “List of Critical Minerals” and is more than 50% dependent on imports for 28 more. Those minerals include metals like aluminum, cobalt, graphite, and lithium. And being “critical” doesn’t mean they are in short supply. For instance, believe it or not, the U.S. already has an excess supply of copper, which makes the proposed mine at Oak Flat all the more unnecessary and insidious. Adding to the absurdity, China’s Chinalco conglomerate holds almost 15% of Rio Tinto, so mining Oak Flat will, in the end, still benefit the Chinese.

While Biden’s Department of Energy allocated $19.5 million to increase domestic production of such minerals, $43 million to enhance battery technologies for EVs, and another $150 million to build processing facilities, that amount pales in comparison to China’s $230 billioninvestment in its EV market from 2009 to 2023 alone. Unsurprisingly, China now accounts for 62% of the world’s EVs and 77% of the batteries that power them. And it’s not just about the green tech. All those minerals shipped from China (80% of the U.S. supply) are also used as components for Artificial Intelligence and in the work of carmakers, aerospace companies, the defense industry, and others.

We know Trump doesn’t care about the climate or green energy policies, which he’s called a “scam.” Still, he understands that whoever commands those resources has the power to navigate the future of the global economy. Today, 30% of the world’s energy is produced by renewables (up 10% since 2010). Although fossil fuels still dominate, green energy is set to grow 90% by 2030. Nothing that Trump does can alter this trajectory — and now he evidently wants in.

On April 24th, the Department of the Interior, after being prodded by Trump, announced that it would eliminate environmental reviews and fast-track the development of oil, gas, and critical minerals on public lands.

“The United States cannot afford to wait,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement. “We are cutting through unnecessary delays to fast-track the development of American energy and critical minerals — resources that are essential to our economy, our military readiness, and our global competitiveness.”

Burgum was sounding the alarm, even if there was no real bell to ring. After all, the U.S. already has more fossil fuels than it knows what to do with. Weeks earlier, amid Trump’s escalating tariff war, China had retaliated by threatening to end shipments of critical minerals to the United States, all but flatlining Trump’s hopes of reinvigorating the American manufacturing sector.

There were, however, a couple of problems with Burgum’s edict (and Trump’s emergency energy decree that preceded it). First, it takes a significant amount of time to get a mine up and running (on average, 16 years), and it’s not always environmental reviews that are to blame. You need to find the resource, gather investors, and build out the necessary infrastructure, which may include roads and other facilities. None of this will happen quickly enough to offset China’s threat, even without environmental reviews. Second, although the U.S. does have a wealth of critical minerals in its backyard, it doesn’t maintain the processing facilities needed to handle them. Mining a bunch of new metals without refinement centers is an exercise in futility, akin to pumping millions of gallons of oil without the refineries to turn it all into gasoline.

Even so, this reality hasn’t stopped the over-eager Trump, who worked to cut a deal with Ukraine for access to its mineral wealth and has his sights set on nabbing Greenland’s as well. No doubt, Elon Musk, who has long criticized the U.S. for lagging behind China when it comes to mineral dominance, has been advising Trump to get a move on, even if it’s too late.

That MAGA Energy

What such critical mineral mining means for the future of the climate remains uncertain. Yet, as Trump has made clear, his insistence that the U.S. should open public lands for exploration isn’t about reducing carbon emissions at all. In fact, he’s hellbent on increasing them. It’s about bolstering U.S. capitalism, enriching mining companies, and, well, Making America (and undoubtedly Donald Trump) Great Again....

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AN 4 24

Recently, you may have noticed that the hot weather is getting ever hotter. Every year the United States swelters under warmer temperatures and longer periods of sustained heat. In fact, each of the last nine months — May 2023 through February 2024 — set a world record for heat. As I’m writing this, March still has a couple of days to go, but likely as not, it, too, will set a record.

*This story originally appeared on TomDispatch.

Such heat poses increasing health hazards for many groups: the old, the very young, those of us who don’t have access to air conditioning. One group, however, is at particular risk: people whose jobs require lengthy exposure to heat. Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that about 40 workers died of heat exposure between 2011 and 2021, although, as CNN reports, that’s probably a significant undercount.

In February 2024, responding to this growing threat, a coalition of 10 state attorneys general petitioned the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to implement “a nationwide extreme heat emergency standard” to protect workers from the kinds of dangers that last year killed, among others, construction workers, farm workers, factory workers, and at least one employee who was laboring in an unairconditioned area of a warehouse in Memphis, Tennessee.

Facing the threat of overweening government interference from OSHA or state regulators, two brave Republican-run state governments have stepped in to protect employers from just such dangerous oversight. Florida and Texas have both passed laws prohibiting localities from mandating protections like rest breaks for, or even having to provide drinking water to, workers in extreme heat situations. Seriously, Florida and Texas have made it illegal for local cities to protect their workers from the direct effects of climate change. Apparently, being “woke” includes an absurd desire not to see workers die of heat exhaustion.

And those state laws are very much in keeping with the plans that the national right-wing has for workers, should the wholly-owned Trump subsidiary that is today’s Republican Party take control of the federal government this November.

We’ve Got a Plan for That!

It’s not exactly news that conservatives, who present themselves as the friends of working people, often support policies that threaten not only workers’ livelihoods, but their very lives. This fall, as we face the most consequential elections of my lifetime (all 71 years of it), rights that working people once upon a time fought and died for — the eight-hour day, a legal minimum wage, protections against child labor — are, in effect, back on the ballot.

The people preparing for a second Trump presidency aren’t hiding their intentions either. Anyone can discover them, for instance, in the Heritage Foundation’s well-publicized Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, a “presidential transition” plan that any future Trump administration is expected to put into operation.

As I’ve written before, the New York Times’s Carlos Lozada did us a favor by working his way through all 887 pages of that tome of future planning. Lacking his stamina, I opted for a deep dive into a single chapter of it focused on the “Department of Labor and Related Agencies.” Its modest 35 pages offer a plan to thoroughly dismantle more than a century of workers’ achievements in the struggle for both dignity and simple on-the-job survival.

First Up: Stop Discriminating Against Discriminators

I’m sure you won’t be shocked to learn that the opening salvo of that chapter is an attack on federal measures to reduce employment discrimination based on race or sex.

Its author, Jonathan Berry of the Federalist Society, served in Donald Trump’s Department of Labor (DOL). He begins his list of “needed reforms” with a call to “Reverse the DEI Revolution in Labor Policy.” “Under the Obama and Biden Administrations,” Berry explains, “labor policy was yet another target of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) revolution” under which “every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and others, including pro-life views.”

You may wonder what it means to advance “classifications” or why that’s even a problem. Berry addresses this question in his second “necessary” reform, a call to “Eliminate Racial Classifications and Critical Race Theory Trainings.” Those two targets for elimination would seem to carry very different weight. After all, “Critical Race Theory,” or CRT, is right-wing code for the view that structural barriers exist preventing African Americans and other people of color from enjoying the full rights of citizens or residents. It’s unclear that such “trainings” even occur at the Labor Department, under CRT or any other label, so their “elimination” would, in fact, have little impact on workers.

On the other hand, the elimination of “racial classifications” would be consequential for many working people, as Berry makes clear. “The Biden Administration,” he complains, “has pushed ‘racial equity’ in every area of our national life, including in employment, and has condoned the use of racial classifications and racial preferences under the guise of DEI and critical race theory, which categorizes individuals as oppressors and victims based on race.” Pushing racial equity in employment? The horror!

Berry’s characterization of CRT is, in fact, the opposite of what critical race theory seeks to achieve. This theoretical approach to the problem of racism does not categorize individuals at all, but instead describes structures — like corporate hiring practices based on friendship networks — that can disadvantage groups of people of a particular race. In fact, CRT describes self-sustaining systems that do not need individual oppressors to continue (mal)functioning.

The solution to the problem of discrimination in employment in Project 2025’s view is to deny the existence of race (or sex, or sexual orientation) as a factor in the lives of people in this country. It’s simple enough: if there’s no race, then there’s no racial discrimination. Problem solved.

And to ensure that it remains solved, Project 2025 would prohibit the Equal Economic Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, from collecting employment data based on race. The mere existence of such “data can then be used to support a charge of discrimination under a disparate impact theory. This could lead to racial quotas to remedy alleged race discrimination.” In other words, if you can’t demonstrate racial discrimination in employment (because you’re enjoined from collecting data on the subject), then there’s no racial discrimination to remedy. Case closed, right?

By outlawing such data collection, a Republican administration guided by Project 2025 would make it almost impossible to demonstrate the existence of racial disparity in the hiring, retention, promotion, or termination of employees.

:{Right-wingers in my state of California tried something similar in 2003 with Ballot Proposition 54, known as the Racial Privacy Initiative. In addition to employment data, Prop. 54 would have outlawed collecting racial data about public education and, no less crucially, about policing. As a result, Prop. 54 would have made it almost impossible for civil rights organizations to address the danger of “driving while Black” — the disproportionate likelihood that Black people will be the subject of traffic stops with the attendant risk of police violence or even death. Voters soundly defeated Prop. 54 by a vote of 64% to 36% and, yes, racial discrimination still exists in California, but at least we have access to the data to prove it.}:

There is, however, one group of people Project 2025 would emphatically protect from discrimination: employers who, because of their “conservative and religious viewpoints… including pro-life views,” want the right to discriminate against women and LGBTQ people. “The President,” writes Berry, “should make clear via executive order that religious employers are free to run their businesses according to their religious beliefs, general nondiscrimination laws notwithstanding.” Of course, Congress already made it clear that, under Title VII of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, “religious” employers are free to ignore anti-discrimination laws when it suits them.

But Wait, There’s More

Not content with gutting anti-discrimination protections, Project 2025 would also seek to rescind rights secured under the Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA, which workers have enjoyed for many decades. Originally passed in 1938, the FLSA “establishes minimum wage, overtime pay, recordkeeping, and child labor standards affecting full-time and part-time workers in the private sector and in Federal, State, and local governments,” according to the Department of Labor.

Perhaps because the federal minimum hourly wage has remained stuck at $7.25 for a decade and a half, Project 2025 doesn’t launch the typical conservative attack on the very concept of such a wage. It does, however, go after overtime pay (generally time-and-a-half for more than 40 hours of work a week), by proposing that employers be allowed to average time worked over a longer period. This would supposedly be a boon for workers, granting them the “flexibility” to labor fewer than 40 hours one week and more than 40 the next, without an employer having to pay overtime compensation for that second week. What such a change would actually do, of course, is give an employer the power to require overtime work during a crunch period while reducing hours at other times, thereby avoiding paying overtime often or at all.

Another supposedly family-friendly proposal would allow workers to choose to take their overtime compensation as paid time off, rather than in dollars and cents. Certainly, any change that would reduce workloads sounds enticing. But as the Pew Research Center reports, more than 40% of workers can’t afford to, and don’t, take all their paid time off now, so this measure could function as yet one more way to reduce the overtime costs of employers.

In contrast to the Heritage Foundation’s scheme, Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a genuinely family-friendly workload reduction plan: a gradual diminution of the standard work week from 40 to 32 hours at the same pay. Such proposals have been around (and ridiculed) for decades, but this one is finally receiving serious consideration in places like the New York Times.

In deference to the supposedly fierce spirit of “worker independence,” Project 2025 would also like to see many more workers classified not as employees at all but as independent contractors. And what would such workers gain from that “independence”? Well, as a start, freedom from those pesky minimum wage and overtime compensation regulations, not to speak of the loss of protections like disability insurance. And they’d be “free” to pay the whole tab (15.3% of their income) for their Social Security and Medicare taxes, unlike genuine employees, whose employers pick up half the cost.

Young people, too, would acquire more “independence” thanks to Project 2025 — at least if what they want to do is work in more dangerous jobs where they are presently banned. As Berry explains:

“Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs. Current rules forbid many young people, even if their family is running the business, from working in such jobs. This results in worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous job.”

The operative word here is “adults.” In fact, no laws presently exclude adults from hazardous work based on age. What Berry is talking about is allowing adolescents to perform such labor. Duvan Tomás Pérez, for instance, was a 16-year-old who showed just such an “interest” in an inherently dangerous job: working at a poultry plant in Mississippi, where he died in an industrial accident. The middle schooler, a Guatemalan immigrant who had lived in the United States for six years, was employed illegally by the Mar-Jac Poultry company. If there are “worker shortages in dangerous fields,” it’s because adults don’t want to take the risks. The solution is to make the work less dangerous for everyone, not to hire children to do it.

We’re Gonna Roll the Union Over

Mind you, much to the displeasure of Project 2025 types, this country is experiencing a renaissance of union organizing. Companies that long thought they could avoid unionization, from Amazon to Starbucks, are now the subject of such drives. In my own world of higher education, new unions are popping up and established ones are demonstrating renewed vigor in both private and public universities. As the bumper-sticker puts it, unions are “the folks who brought you the weekend.” They’re the reason we have laws on wages and hours, not to speak of on-the-job protections. So, it should be no surprise that Project 2025 wants to reduce the power of unions in a number of ways, including:

• Amending the National Labor Relations Act to allow “Employee Involvement Organizations” to supplant unions. Such “worker-management councils” are presently forbidden for good reason. They replace real unions that have the power to bargain for wages and working conditions with toothless pseudo-unions.

• Ending the use of “card-checks” and requiring elections to certify union representation. At the moment, the law still permits a union to present signed union-support cards from employees to the National Labor Relations Board and the employer. If both entities agree, the union wins legal recognition. The proposed change would make it significantly harder for unions to get certified, especially because cards can be collected without the employer’s knowledge, whereas a public election with a long lead time gives the employer ample scope for anti-union organizing activities, both legal and otherwise.

• Allowing individual states to opt out of labor protections granted under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act.

The measures covered here are, believe it or not, just the highlights of that labor chapter of Project 2025. If put into practice, they would be an historically unprecedented dream come true for employers, and a genuine nightmare for working people.

Meanwhile, at the Trumpified and right-wing-dominated Supreme Court, there are signs that some justices are interested in entertaining a case brought by Elon Musk’s SpaceX that could abolish the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal entity that adjudicates most labor disputes involving federal law. Without the NLRB, legal protections for workers, especially organizing or organized workers, would lose most of their bite. Despite the court’s claim to pay no attention to public opinion, its justices would certainly take note of a resounding defeat of Donald Trump, the Republicans, and Project 2025 at the polls.

A New “Contract on America?”

The last time the right wing was this organized was probably back in 1994, when Newt Gingrich published his “Contract with America.” Some of us were so appalled by its contents that we referred to it as a plan for a gangster hit, a “Contract onAmerica.”

This year, they’re back with a vengeance. All of which is to say that if you work for a living, or if you know and love people who do, there’s a lot on the line in this year’s election. We can’t sit this one out.

REBECCA ?

an tom d 2 23

Steve Fraser: The Republicans Face Off Against... Yes, Communism!

Recently, at a well-publicized dinner, our former president — the one who encouraged a coup d’état to keep himself in power after losing an election — expressed his latest fear. “The problem we have,” he said ominously, “is that we are headed toward communism. We are beyond socialism. A lot of people say, ‘Well, not really.’ Of course we are.” And then he added, “If you do something spectacular, they don’t talk about it. If you do something not so good, they’ll make it into a travesty. If the other side does something bad, really bad, you’ll never find it. There’s never been a period of time like that in our country’s history.And that’s the way communism starts. And… we’re not gonna let it happen.”

OMG! A new red scare in America, as in my childhood when anti-communism was a part of everyday Republican politics? Did someone revive the Soviet Union when none of us were looking? Have Xi Jinping’s confederates infiltrated this country’s business class? Who could even begin to explain it? Hmm, let’s see… how about TomDispatch regular and historian Steve Fraser, author of Mongrel Firebugs and Men of Property: Capitalism and Class Conflict in American History, who (like Donald Trump and me) lived through those red-scare years of the 1950s.

Admittedly, running against Communism was once the norm in America. With that in mind, take a little voyage of — dare I call it nostalgia? — with Fraser and meditate a bit on what a truly strange world we now live in, one of remarkable extremes of weather, income inequality, and politics. After all, one of our two major parties has gone certifiably mad (and, at least in some parts of the country, that very madness has attracted voters in a big-time fashion).

Oh, and I think I can already hear Marjorie Taylor Greene calling me a “liar” for what I just wrote… or is that my imagination? Who can tell anymore? Tom

The Specter of “Woke Communism”:How Corporate America Became the Bogeyman of Today's Anti-Communist Crusaders

Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and perhaps the next president of the United States, is waging war against something he and many others on the right identify as “woke communism.” DeSantis even persuaded the Florida legislature to pass a Victims of Communism law, mandating that every November 7th (the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia), all public schools in the state must devote 45 minutes of instruction to the evils of the red menace.

You might reasonably ask: What menace? After all, the Soviet Union fell apart more than 30 years ago and, long before that, communist parties around the world had dwindled in numbers and lost their revolutionary zeal. The American Communist Party was buried alive nearly three-quarters of a century ago during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s.

How then can there be a muscular rebirth of anti-communism when there’s no communism to face off against? The Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank, explains the paradox this way: the powers that be of the present moment, including “education, corporate media, entertainment, big business, especially big tech, are to varying degrees aligned with the Democratic Party which is now controlled by Woke Communism.”

All clear now? A “cold civil war”is afoot, so we’re assured by DeSantis and crew, and if we don’t act quickly, “woke communism will replace American justice… the choice is between liberty or death.”

Naturally, Donald Trump has joined the chorus, declaiming that the Democratic Party functions as a cover for “wild-eyed Marxists.” People like Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, formerly considered proud defenders of capitalism, are now censored as socialists. Steve Bannon, right-wing populist organizer and one-time Trump adviser, has attacked the Business Roundtableand venture capitalists like Larry Fink of Blackrock, the largest asset management firm in the world, because he’s determined to defend a “government of laws, not Woke CEOs.”

At the January gathering of the Republican National Committee, angry thatRonna McDaniel had held onto her position as its chairperson, right-wing activist Charlie Kirk put the matter in stark class terms: “The country club won today. So, the grassroots people who can’t afford to buy a steak and are struggling to make ends meet, they just got told by their representatives at an opulent $900/night hotel that ‘We hate you.’”

How surpassingly odd! Somehow, the “spectre” invoked nearly 200 years ago by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto, reflecting his urge to see the exploited and impoverished mobilized to overthrow capitalism, now hangs out at country clubs, corporate boardrooms, and the White House — all the redoubts of capitalism.

Listen to DeSantis. At a rally in Sarasota during the 2022 midterm elections, he got his loudest applause for denouncing corporate America — and not just for assaulting the Walt Disney company’s criticism of the state’s “don’t say gay” policy. He went after Wall Street, too, noting that the “masters of the universe are using their economic power to impose policies on the country that they could not do at the ballot box” and promising to “fight the Woke in corporate America.” A recent Gallup poll signals that he might be onto something, since the percentage of Republicans unhappy with big business has soared.

Once upon a time, anti-communism was the ideology of a ruling class under siege, warning that its enemies among hard-pressed farmers and industrial workers were intent on destroying the foundations of civilized life: private property, the family, religion, and the nation. Now, of all the unlikely suspects, anti-communism has become part of the ideological arsenal aimed at those very dominating elites.

Bankers and Bolsheviks

What happened? There’s certainly a history here. Start with Henry Ford, a folk hero to millions of Americans during the early decades of the twentieth century. He not only invented the Model T Ford but also helped articulate a new version of anti-communism. He was a notorious antisemite, even publishing a book in 1923 called The International Jew that warned of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. (It became a bestseller.)

Antisemitismhad long traded on the stereotype of the Jew as Shylock, the usurious, heartless banker. Ford, who also hated bankers, sought something far grander than classic antisemitism. As he came to see it, the International Jew was conspiring not just with the titans of high finance but with their supposedly inveterate enemies, the Bolsheviks, whose tyranny in Russia was but a foretaste of the future. In America, as he saw it, financiers were secretly plotting with the Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party to make war on capitalism, an unholy alliance of Wall Street, Jewish financiers, and the Kremlin, the Rothschilds and Lenin, seeking to unravel the very moral fiber of western civilization.

Together, so this line of thought went, they plotted to saturate a hard-working, family-centered, patriarchal, sexually orthodox, racially homogenous, god-fearing capitalist society with soul-destroying hedonism, allowing the bankers to make money and the Bolsheviks to find their way to power. After all, communists were atheists, who held the traditional patriarchal family in contempt, believed in both woman’s equality and racial equality, and felt no loyalty to the nation. Similarly, bankers worshipped Mammon, who had no homeland.

According to the automaker, evidence of this conspiracy of moral subversion lay in plain sight. After all, the commies were peddling pornography through their control of the movie business, while — it was the prohibition era — they saturated the country in bootleg gin. Because they were also the masterminds behind the publishing industry, they arranged an endless flow of sex and sensationalism in newspapers, magazines, and pulp novels. And “Jewish jazz,” bankrolled by the same circles, was on its way to becoming the national music, its rhythms an open invitation to the lewd and lascivious.

In the years just preceding Ford’s antisemitic outburst, the Palmer raids, conducted by United States Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer during and following World War I, had imprisoned and deported thousands of radical political activists, only heightening the panic about a coming communist revolution in America. But no one before Ford had ever imagined communists combining forces with the ruling class they presumably were out to overthrow. That was the bizarre eye-opener of a disturbed and disturbing moment and, mad as it was, should once again sound eerily familiar.

From Anti-Communism to Anti-Capitalism

That imaginary league of Bolsheviks and bankers would remain an undercurrent of popular superstition, while anti-communism began to mutate, coming to have ever less to do with communist movements and ever more with a perverse form of anti-capitalism.

As the giant corporation run by faceless functionaries in suits and ties along with vast government bureaucracies supplanted old-style family capitalism, a whole galaxy of moral and social certitudes about self-reliance, frugality, independence, upward mobility, and piety came under assault. The new order, capitalism on steroids, left a beleaguered and angry world of “little men” in its wake, overwhelmed by a sense of material and spiritual dispossession.

In the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal response to the Great Depression would only reignite the dark fantasies of Ford’s conspiracy-mongering. In those years, populist demagogue Father Charles Coughlin (known as the “radio priest” thanks to his charismatic weekly sermons listened to by millions) preached about how corporate capitalism was “privately sustaining in some instances the worst elements of Communism.” Coughlin grew increasingly hostile to the New Deal. Its bureaucracies, he claimed, meddled in family life, while its regulatory reforms were a disguised version of “financial socialism.” In 1936, he and fellow demagogues formed the Union Party to try (unsuccessfully) to stop Roosevelt’s reelection.

In the eyes of that radio priest, another antisemite by the way, Roosevelt was nothing less than America’s Lenin and his New Deal “a broken-down Colossus straddling the harbor of Rhodes, its left leg standing on ancient Capitalism and its right mired in the red mud of communism.”

Joseph McCarthy vs. The Establishment

Though Ford’s and Coughlin’s outpourings were infected with a deep strain of antisemitism, the invective ofWisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose name became synonymous with mid-twentieth century anti-communism, McCarthyism was not. He was after bigger game, namely the whole WASP establishment.

The Cold War with the Soviet Union provided the ostensible context for McCarthy’s ravings about “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.” But his focus was far less on the Russians and far more on the upper-crust mandarins running the post-New Deal state.

Traitors to their class, as he saw it, figures like Secretary of State Dean Acheson or international banker John McCloy were, he insisted, closet communists. Yet, gallingly, they also hailed from the most privileged precincts of American society, places like the elite prep school Groton, Harvard, and Wall Street. McCarthy would mock their cosmopolitan associations, their Anglophilia, their gilded careers as international financiers and the heads of major corporations. He would typically portray Averell Harriman, the scion of a railroad and banking family (and a future governor of New York), as “a guy whose admiration for everything Russian is unrivaled outside the confines of the Communist Party.”

The notorious Senate “hearings” he held and the McCarthyism he promoted would prove potent enough to ruin the lives of countless teachers, writers, trade unionists, civil-rights activists, performing artists, journalists, even librarians who lost their jobs and worse, thanks to his infamous inquisitions. And in those years, much of the Republican Party would mimic his message.

Few were safe from such fulminations and McCarthy was anything but alone in delivering them. For instance, the son of a former president, Senator Robert Taft, known as “Mr. Republican” and a leader from the party’s midwestern heartland, was often hailed as its future presidential nominee. Running in the 1952 primaries, he told his supporters in Ohio that “if we get [Dwight D.] Eisenhower, we will practically have a Republican New Deal Administration with just as much spending and socialism as under [President Harry] Truman.” When he lost the nomination to the former World War II commander, Taft would rage that “every Republican candidate for president since 1936 has been nominated by Chase Bank.”

The imagery of tea-sipping, silk handkerchiefs, and silver spoons that spiced McCarthy’s savage depiction of the supposedly left-wing establishment pointed to a subtle shift in the political center of gravity of the anticommunist crusade. While the economic throw-weight of those capitalists-cum-communists remained in the crosshairs of the McCarthyites,cultural matters tended to take center stage.

Although the moral dangers of a supposedly communist-influenced New Deal-style state still preoccupied the senator and his legions of followers, his archetypical enemy came ever more to resemble Coughlin’s: not just left-leaning intellectuals but Ivy League financiers, bankers with “grouse-hunting estates in Scotland,” whom they saw as an aristocracy of destruction.

Liberty or Death in the Time of “Woke Communism”

Oscillating with the ups and downs of the economy, that version of anti-capitalism regularly masqueraded as anti-communism. And all these years later, “woke capital,” the target of so much Trumpublican fury, is once again being labeled a communist phenomenon. That’s because so many Fortune 500 companies, leading banks, and mass-media outfits have had to come to terms with racial and gender equality, sexual and marital choice, and multicultural diversity — with, that is, the latest version of secularism generally.

Coca-Cola and Delta have even criticized Republican state voter suppression laws. As early as 2015, corporate opposition forced Republicans in Indiana and North Carolina to back off anti-gay and anti-transgender legislation. In 2019, more than 180 CEOs posted a full-page ad in the New York Times announcing that restrictions on abortion were bad for business. A year later, Goldman Sachs established a $10 million fund to promote racial equality to “honor the legacy of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery.” After the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, more than 50 companies said they would no longer contribute to the eight Republican senators who objected to certifying the presidential election.

Moreover, dominant financial and business interests depend on the various agencies of the state to subsidize profits and stabilize the economy. This feeds a government apparatus that has long been the bête noire of anti-communists. When the Covid-19 pandemic took down the economy, the 1% thrived, enraging many on the right as well as the left.

Refugees from the social revolutions in Venezuela and Cuba, who have gathered in significant numbers in Florida, no doubt resonate to the latest anti-communist dog whistles of Governor DeSantisin a way that echoes the sentiments aroused in the old days by the Bolshevik Revolution. But what really fires up the passions of Republicans is the tendency of modern capitalism to make peace with (and profit from) the social, racial, and more recently environmental upheavals of the last half-century. Resentment about this continues to ferment in right-wing circles.

The Republican Party now claims to be “standing between capitalism and communism.” But the capitalism it promotes — of the self-reliant entrepreneur, the pious family patriarch, the free-booting version of commerce that depended on racial and gender inequalities and brooked no interference from the state — has been on the defensive for a long time.

Yes, the DeSantis-style anti-communists of today do worry about the possible appeal of socialism to young people, but in real life, the “communism” they face off against is modern capitalism, or what one right-wing wit termed “capitalism with Chinese characteristics.” “Woke capital” or, if you’re the governor of Florida, “woke communism,” has indeed seized power.

Ironically, the woke-communist persuasion may be loony about “communism,” but they are unintentionally right that capitalism is indeed the problem. Capitalism exploits millions of workers, devours the environment, creates obscene inequalities in income and wealth, depends on war and the machinery of war, poisons the well of democracy, incites resentments, and destroys any instinct for social solidarity. But count on one thing: the wet dreams of today’s anti-communists when it comes to restoring some superannuated, idealized form of small-town capitalism are harmful fantasies of the first order. Indeed, they have already done much damage, and Governor DeSantis and crew will only make things far worse.

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jan 6 bolosonaro //

https://www.alternet.org/american-insurrectionists-crossed-rubicon-history/

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https://www.alternet.org/military-industrial-complex-racket-tamed/

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Recently, I was talking with a senior enlisted colleague about why so few top-ranking officers are willing to speak truth to the powerless (that’s you and me) even after they retire. He mentioned credibility. To question the system, to criticize it, to air dirty laundry in public is to risk losing credibility within the club and so to be rejected as a malcontent, disloyal, even “unbalanced.” Then, of course, that infamous revolving door between the military and giant weapons makers like Boeing and Raytheon simply won’t spin for you. Seven-figure compensation packages, like the one current Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin gained from Raytheon after his retirement as an Army general, won’t be an option. And in America, who doesn’t want to cash in while gaining more power within the system?

Quite simply, it pays so much better to mouth untruths, or at least distinctly less-than-full-truths, in service to the powerful.And with that in mind, here, at least as I see it, are a few full truths about my old service, the Air Force, that I guarantee you I won’t be applauded for mentioning. How about this as a start: that the production of F-35s — an overpriced “Ferrari” of a fighter jet that’s both too complex and remarkably successful as an underperformer — should be canceled (savings: as much as $1 trillion over time); that the much-touted new B-21 nuclear bomber isn’t needed (savings: at least $200 billion) and neither is the new Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (savings: another $200 billion and possibly the entire Earth from doomsday); that the KC-46 tanker is seriously flawed and should be canceled (savings: another $50 billion).

Now, tote it up. By canceling the F-35, the B-21, the Sentinel, and the KC-46, I singlehandedly saved the American taxpayer roughly $1.5 trillion without hurting America’s national defense in the least. But I’ve also just lost all credibility (assuming I had any left) with my old service.

Look, what matters to the military-industrial complex isn’t either the truth or saving your taxpayer dollars but keeping those weapons programs going and the money flowing. What matters, above all, is keeping America’s economy on a permanent wartime footing both by buying endless new (and old) weapons systems for the military and selling them globally in a bizarrely Orwellian pursuit of peace through war.

How are Americans, Ike’s “alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” supposed to end a racket like this? We certainly should know one thing by now: the MIC will never check itself and Congress, already part of it thanks to impressive campaign donations and the like by major weapons makers, won’t corral it either. Indeed, last year, Congress shoveled $45 billion more than the Biden administration requested (more even than the Pentagon asked for) to that complex, all ostensibly in your name. Who cares that it hasn’t won a war of the faintest significance since 1945. Even “victory” in the Cold War (after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991) was thrown away. And now the complex warns us of an onrushing “new cold war” to be waged, naturally, at tremendous cost to you, the American taxpayer....

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https://www.alternet.org/disarm-weapons-of-mass-disinformation/

Andy Kroll: Weapons of Mass Disinformation

Only the other day, the Internet got even darker or perhaps I mean dizzier. And I’m sure you know just what I’m thinking about. Elon Musk, not long ago the richest, and now the second-richest plutocrat on this planet — if only they lived on Pluto — and Mr. Free Speech (unless he doesn’t like it!) got into an imbroglio with various reporters on Twitter.

Of course, in a world where a set of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of our former president as a superhero, astronaut, and Top Gun-style pilot (“amazing ART of my Life & Career”) sold out in a day for $4.5 million, nothing is too strange. And hey, what can possibly go wrong when purchasing those fabulous non-funges (??) for $99 puts you in a lottery to win a dinner at Mar-a-Lago? Travel expenses on you, of course! (Maybe it’s time for me to figure out how to make some NFTs of my life & career, thrilling superhero shots of an old man in a cluttered room sitting in front of a computer screen.)

Anyway, I’m sure you noticed how Elon Musk advanced his free-speech platform by suspending the accounts of technology journalists from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, The Intercept, and other places for violating “Twitter rules” by “doxxing” him — that is, treating him in a way he didn’t like. At least in part, it had to do with a website run, as the Timeswrote, by “a 20-year-old college student and flight tracking enthusiast who had used Twitter to post updates about the location of Mr. Musk’s private plane using publicly available information.” All of this led to — you guessed it! — controversy and ever more publicity for that billionaire, including criticism from the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, which he probably loved. (He reinstated most but not all of the accounts only a day later.)

It seems all too appropriate to me to leave the last word on this incident not to some reporter, but to the New Yorker‘s brilliant satirist Andy Borowitz who began his piece on the subject this way:

Shortly after Twitter suspended accounts that were tracking billionaires’ private planes, including Elon Musk’s, a new poll shows that most people who seek Musk’s precise location are doing so to avoid him. The poll, from the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, reveals that a visceral fear of encountering Elon Musk is what drives eighty-nine per cent of those who follow his movements.

Now, as the end of this strange year approaches, I’d like to turn you over to Andy Kroll, whose new book, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, offers a dazzling and dizzying journey into the darkest, most conspiratorial corners of the Internet. Let him leave Elon Musk in the dust (or do I mean “dox”?) of our world and take you to a planet where darkness truly does reign supreme. Tom

Lessons Learned in the Internet’s Darkest Corners:A Plea for Real Connection in a “Connected” Era

We all do it. Make little snap judgments about everyday strangers as we go about our lives. Without giving it a second’s thought, we sketch minibiographies of the people we pass on the sidewalk, the guy seated across from us on the train, or the woman in line in front of us at the grocery store. We wonder: Who are they? Where are they from? How do they make a living? Lately, though, such passing encounters tend to leave me with a sense of suspicion, a wariness tinged with grim curiosity. I think to myself: Is he or she one of them?

By them, I mean one of the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of “people” I encountered during my many forays into the darkest recesses of the Internet. Despite the staggering amount of time many of us spend online — more than six-and-a-half hours a day, according to recent research — we tend to haunt the same websites and social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, CNN, Reddit, Google) again and again. Not me, though. Over the past five years, I’ve spent more hours than I wish to count exploring the subterranean hideaways and uncensored gathering spaces for some of the most unhinged communities on the Internet.

Call it an occupational hazard. Only recently, I published my first book, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, an investigative political thriller that opens with the 2016 street murder of a 27-year-old who had worked for the Democratic National Committee. In the absence of a culprit, Seth Rich’s killing got swept into the fast-flowing conspiratorial currents of that year’s presidential race, a contest that pitted an unabashed conspiracy theorist, Donald Trump, against a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who had been the subject of decades’ worth of elaborately sinister claims (with no basis in reality). For my book, I set out to understand how a senseless crime that took the life of a beloved but hardly famous mid-level political staffer became a national and then international news story, a viral phenomenon of ever more twisted conspiracy theories that reached millions and all too soon became a piece of modern folklore.

To do so, I traced the arc of those Rich conspiracy theories back to their origins. In practical terms, that meant hundreds of late nights spent huddled over my desk, eyes fixed on my computer screen, clicking and scrolling my way through a seemingly endless trail of tweets, memes, posts, and videos. The Internet is, in some ways, like an ancient city, its latest incarnation resting atop the ruins of so many civilizations past. I came to think of myself then as an online archeologist digging my way through the digital eons, sifting through archived websites and seeking out long-vanished posts in search of clues and answers.

Or maybe I was a waste handler, holding my nose as I picked through piles (or do I mean miles?) of toxic detritus that littered old versions of social media sites you’d know like Twitter and Reddit, and others you probably don’t, like 4chan, 8kun, and Telegram. It was there that I encountered so many of them, those faceless users, the ones I might have passed on the street, who, with the promise of anonymity, had felt unburdened to voice their unfiltered, often deeply disturbing selves. It was all id, all the time.

Who were these people? I couldn’t help but wonder whether they actually believed the stuff they wrote. Or was it all about the thrill of saying it? In an unnervingly boundless online world, were they testing the boundaries of the acceptable by one-upping each other with brazen displays of racism, misogyny, or antisemitism (just to start down the list)?

Firing up my laptop and venturing into those noxious places was like entering an inside-out world impervious to logic and critical thinking. They had their own language — losers were “cucks,” loyal foot soldiers “pedes,” and Hillary Clinton was Hillary “Klanton” — and they operated with their own sets of elaborate but twisted rules and hierarchies. After a few hours of studying such “conversations,” a form of vertigo would set in, a spinning sensation that made me get up from my desk and clear my head with a walk or a conversation with a real human being.

Now that the book is published, I don’t spend much time in those disturbing online worlds. Still, every once in a while, I can’t help checking in — old habits die hard — despite the horrors I saw there while gathering material for my book. What nags at me even now — in fact, it haunts me in some way — is the knowledge that there were real people behind those toxic accounts. The same people you might sit next to on a bus without having the slightest suspicion of just how disturbed they were and what a disturbing world they were helping create or elaborate. That knowledge still weighs on me.

Weapons of Mass Disinformation

A confession: on a few of those late nights spent in the online ruins, I caught myself starting to nod along with some of the wild-eyed nonsense I was reading. Maybe I found a particular Reddit thread surprisingly convincing. Maybe the post in question had sprinkled a few verifiable facts amid the nonsense to make me think, Huh? Maybe my sixth cup of coffee and lack of sleep had so weakened my mental safeguards that madness itself began to seem at least faintly reasonable. When I felt such heretical thoughts seep into my stream of consciousness, I took it as a sure sign that I should log off and go to bed.

Thinking back on those moments, I admit that the first feeling I have is pure and utter embarrassment. I’m an investigative reporter. I make a living dealing in facts, data, and vetted information. Heck, my first job in journalism was as a full-time, trained fact-checker. I should be impervious to the demented siren song of conspiracy theories, right?

The correct answer is indeed: right. And yet…

I realize now that, on those disturbing long nights at the computer, I was more than an avid journalistic explorer of online content. I had immersed myself — and immersion is what the Internet does best. It’s the gateway point to a seemingly infinite number of rabbit holes. Who hasn’t clicked on a Wikipedia entry about, say, the making of the atomic bomb only to check the time, realize that two hours had slipped by, and you’re now watching a YouTube video about the greatest comebacks in baseball history with no memory of how you got here in the first place?

That frictionless glide from one post to the next, video after video, tweet upon tweet, plays tricks on the mind. Spend enough time in that realm and even the most absurd theories and narratives start to acquire the patina of logic, the ring of reason. How else to explain the sheer number of QAnon adherents — one in five Americans, according to an analysis by the Public Religion Research Institute — who believe that a secret cabal of pedophile elites, including Tom Hanks and Oprah, run the world, or that the Earth is indeed flat, or that the moon landing more than half a century ago was faked, no matter what news broadcaster Walter Cronkite might have said at the time?

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that conspiracy theories weren’t a fixture of American life before the Internet came along. Quite the opposite: for as long as we humans have existed, we’ve dreamt up elaborate theories and fables to explain the inexplicable or, increasingly in our time, the otherwise all too explicable that we refuse to believe. Some of the founders of this country were unashamedconspiracy mongers. What those delirious late nights at the computer led me to believe, however, is that tools for spreading such fantastical theories have never been more powerful than they are today and they’ve entered our politics in an unnerving fashion (as anyone paying attention to the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol knows).

Put simply, we don’t stand a chance against the social media companies. Fueled by highly sophisticated algorithms that maximize “engagement” at all costs by feeding users ever more inflammatory content, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest of them don’t simply entertain, inform, or “connect” us. As New York Timesreporter Max Fisher writes in his book The Chaos Machine, “This technology exerts such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity, and is so pervasive in our lives, that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another. The effect, multiplied across billions of users, has been to change society itself.”

Spending so much time burrowing into such websites, I came away with a deep sense of just how addictive they are. More than that, they rewire your mind in real-time. I felt it myself. I fear that there’s no path out of our strange, increasingly conspiratorial moment, filled with viral lies and rampant disinformation, without rewriting the algorithms that increasingly govern our lives.

The Lost Art of Saying Hello

Still, I’m under no illusion that Tweets and memes can adequately explain the schisms in American life and this country’s descent into a more embittered, polarized, us-versus-them cultural moment. Nor can Donald Trump, who is as much a product of the strange Internet world of conspiracies as a cause of it. They are, in fact, the ever-more-virulent symptoms of a country in which it’s not enough to disagree with your opponents. You also have to demonize them as subhuman, criminal, and alien, while, in the process, doing genuine harm to yourself.

In what still passes for the real world, how else to explain the prominence of conspiracy theories like QAnon or the current far-right trend of accusing someone, especially anyone who disagrees with you, of being a “groomer”? Or how do you account for the existence of a seemingly inextinguishable belief now lurking in our world that one of the country’s prominent political families, the Clintons, are also prolific serial killers who have slaughtered dozens, if not hundreds of people? Or the explosion of those baseless claims I spent all that time exploring about the murdered Seth Rich, claims that would haunt his family for years, denying them even the space to grieve for their own son?

No amount of late-night online sleuthing was going to provide an answer to the larger social ills afflicting this country. Indeed, the more time I spent online, the greater the chasm appeared — so vast, in fact, that I began to wonder whether it could ever be bridged. Nor is this a malady that can be dealt with by politicians or governments, important as they are. It runs even deeper than that.

When I think about the root causes of such societal drift, I return to a phrase I read in a 2021 study that described a “national friendship decline.” According to that survey, “Americans report having fewer close friendships than they once did, talking to their friends less often, and relying less on their friends for personal support.” The data wasn’t all grim. More than four in ten respondents said that they had made a new friend during the pandemic. Still, the lockdowns and self-isolation of these Covid years had exacerbated what the survey’s authors called a “loneliness epidemic.”

When I think about those endless Twitter rants and Reddit screeds I encountered, I envision lonely people hunched over their computers in empty apartments, posting and scrolling madly (sometimes in the most literal sense) deep into the night. Loneliness and social isolation, of course, can’t explain away all the mad conspiratorial rants you find on the Internet, nor are they the sole cause of the brittle, increasingly dangerous state of American politics. But it’s so much easier to resent and rage against a perceived enemy if you’ve never met them or anyone like them, so much easier to cast the other side as the out-group or the villain if you’ve never shared a meal or a coffee or a phone call with them.

I mention that “loneliness epidemic” only to underscore my belief that healing the schism in our culture and politics will require something more difficult and yet simpler than major policy reforms or electing a new generation of officials. Don’t get me wrong: both of those are needed, on both sides of the proverbial aisle. Today’s politics too often resemble a race to the bottom, as politicians rush to outflank their rivals and whip up their constituencies (often using social media to do it). All the while, powerful interest groups, their lobbyists, and a growing billionaire class shape (or sink) the kinds of wholesale changes needed to reboot our political system.

Yet our problems run deeper than that — and the solutions can’t be found in Washington, D.C.

One answer is finding ways to knit back together an unbearably frayed nation. Neighborhood groups, book clubs, sports leagues, civic associations, labor unions, religious groups, whatever it is, the surest way out of this stubborn conflict must come through the simplest of gestures — human connection. The lost art of saying hello.

Tech executives love to talk about the value of “connection” and their goals of “connecting” the world. Almost two decades into the social media era, we should know better than to believe thoseempty paeans used as cover for the relentless pursuit of profits.Now more than ever, it’s time to step away from those weapons of mass disinformation.

I don’t care much for New Year’s resolutions, but if I did, I would say: let’s make 2023 the year of logging off. Get to know your neighbors and colleagues. For my part, I’ll work on not thinking of those everyday strangers, or even those tiny avatars on the Internet, as them. Instead of fearing them, I’ll think I say hello.

klare

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/green-diplomacy-united-states-china/

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/stupidest-act-in-human-history/

long analysis war AGW

rajan Menon: Our Global (Dis)Order and Climate Change

Someday, Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine may be rated as the stupidest act in human history. In case you hadn’t noticed (and if so, where the hell have you been living?), our planet’s in genuine crisis. Flooding, drought, melting ice sheets, and storms have only grown increasingly severe in recent years — and the way to take your mind off all that? Well, why not invade your neighbor and, as TomDispatch regular Rajan Menon makes clear today, pour yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? Brilliant! Truly brilliant!

As that old song went: “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.” But what is it bad for? The answer, in a sense, is simple enough: so very much. And yet, call us all eerily hooked on war and preparations for more of it. And I’m not just thinking about the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, now destroying so much, killing so many, and creating staggering numbers of refugees. I’m thinking, for instance, about a recent story ABC News broke, indicating that the U.S. is now committed to building new facilities at Tindal Air Base in northern Australia that could house up to six B-52 nuclear bombers for a mere $100 million (a veritable steal!). From there, those planes would be able to reach China with their devastating payloads. Again, a brilliant decision to heighten the possibility of nuclear war (something that, if Vladimir Putin had done it, would have left Washington up in arms).

I mean, what better moment for the two greatest greenhouse gas emitters of today and, in the case of the U.S., the greatest in history not to communicate on the subject of global warming, while communicating oh-so-obviously with their weaponry. (The Chinese cut off climate talks with the U.S. last month.)

And as for that $100 million (no less the full billion going into building up American “defenses” across the northern part of Australia), what if the U.S. had given those funds to one of the poor countries that doesn’t have the necessary cash to begin financing its switch to non-greenhouse-gas-emitting energy? Not a chance, of course, and though United Nations head António Guterres has termed the sort of behavior now going on “collective suicide,” who’s paying the slightest attention to him?

Still, take a moment to pay a little attention to Menon, only recently back from Ukraine, who lays out just why that war qualifies right now as a true act of madness on Planet Earth. Tom

Fighting a War on the Wrong Planet:What Climate Change Should Have Taught Us

Washington’s vaunted “rules-based international order” has undergone a stress test following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and here’s the news so far: it hasn’t held up well. In fact, the disparate reactions to Vladimir Putin’s war have only highlighted stark global divisions, which reflect the unequal distribution of wealth and power. Such divisions have made it even harder for a multitude of sovereign states to find the minimal common ground needed to tackle the biggest global problems, especially climate change.

In fact, it’s now reasonable to ask whether an international community connected by a consensus of norms and rules, and capable of acting in concert against the direst threats to humankind, exists. Sadly, if the responses to the war in Ukraine are the standard by which we’re judging, things don’t look good.

The Myth of Universality

After Russia invaded, the United States and its allies rushed to punish it with a barrage of economic sanctions. They also sought to mobilize a global outcry by charging Putin with trashing what President Biden’s top foreign policy officials like to call the rules-based international order. Their effort has, at best, had minimal success.

Yes, there was that lopsided vote against Russia in the United Nations General Assembly, the March 2nd resolution on the invasion sponsored by 90 countries. One hundred and forty-one nations voted for it and only five against, while 35 abstained. Beyond that, in the “global south” at least, the response to Moscow’s assault has been tepid at best. None of the key countries there — Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa, to mention four — even issued official statements castigating Russia. Some, including India and South Africa, along with 16 other African countries (and don’t forget China though it may not count as part of the global south), simply abstained from that U.N. resolution. And while Brazil, like Indonesia, voted yes, it also condemned “indiscriminate sanctions” against Russia.

None of those countries joined the United States and most of the rest of NATO in imposing sanctions on Russia, not even Turkey, a member of that alliance. In fact, Turkey, which last year imported 60 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Russia, has only further increased energy cooperation with Moscow, including raising its purchases of Russian oil to 200,000 barrels per day — more than twice what it bought in 2021. India, too, ramped up oil purchases from Russia, taking advantage of discounted prices from a Moscow squeezed by U.S. and NATO sanctions. Keep in mind that, before the war, Russia had accounted for just 1% of Indian oil imports. By early October, that number had reached 21%. Worse yet, India’s purchases of Russian coal — which emits far more carbon dioxide into the air than oil and natural gas — may increase to 40 million tons by 2035, five times the current amount.

Despite the risk of facing potential U.S. sanctions thanks to the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), India also stuck by its earlier decision to buy Russia’s most advanced air-defense system, the S-400. The Biden administration eventually threaded that needle by arranging a waiver for India, in part because it’s seen as a major future partner against China with which Washington has become increasingly preoccupied (as witnessed by the new National Security Strategy). The prime concern of the Indian leadership, however, has been to preserve its close ties with Russia, war or no war, given its fear of a growing alignment between that country and China, which India sees as its main adversary.

What’s more, since the invasion, China’s average monthly trade with Russia has surged by nearly two-thirds, Turkey’s has nearly doubled, and India’s has risen more than threefold, while Russian exports to Brazil have nearly doubled as well. This failure of much of the world to heed Washington’s clarion call to stand up for universal norms stems partly from pique at what’s seen as the West’s presumptuousness. On March 1st, when 20 countries, a number from the European Union, wrote Pakistan’s then-prime minister Imran Khan (who visited Putin soon after the war began), imploring him to support an upcoming General Assembly resolution censuring Russia, he all too typically replied: “What do you think of us? Are we your slaves… [Do you take for granted] that whatever you say we will do?” Had such a letter, he asked, been sent to India?

Similarly, Celso Amorim, who served as Brazil’s foreign minister for seven years during the presidency of Luis Inacio “Lula” de Silva (who will soon reclaim his former job), declared that condemning Russia would amount to obeying Washington’s diktat. For his part, Lula claimed Joe Biden and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky were partly to blame for the war. They hadn’t worked hard enough to avert it, he opined, by negotiating with Putin. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa blamed Putin’s actions on the way NATO had, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, provocatively expanded toward Russia’s border.

Many other countries simply preferred not to get sucked into a confrontation between Russia and the West. As they saw it, their chances of changing Putin’s mind were nil, given their lack of leverage, so why incur his displeasure? (After all, what was the West offering that might make choosing sides more palatable?) Besides, given their immediate daily struggles with energy prices, debt, food security, poverty, and climate change, a war in Europe seemed a distant affair, a distinctly secondary concern. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro typically suggested that he wasn’t about to join the sanctions regime because his country’s agriculture depended on imported Russian fertilizer.

Leaders in the global south were also struck by the contrast between the West’s urgency over Ukraine and its lack of similar fervor when it came to problems in their part of the world. There was, for instance, much commentary about the generosity and speed with which countries like Poland and Hungary (as well as the United States) embraced Ukrainian refugees, having largely shut the door on refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. In June, while not mentioning that particular example, India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, highlighted such sentiments when, in response to a question about the European Union’s efforts to push his country to get tougher on Russia, he remarked that Europe “has to grow out of the mindset that [its] problems are the world’s problem, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problem.” Given how “singularly silent” European countries had been “on many things which were happening, for example in Asia,” he added, “you could ask why anybody in Asia would trust Europe on anything at all?”

The West’s less-than-urgent response to two other problems aggravated by the Ukraine crisis that hit the world’s poor countries especially hard bore out Jaishankar’s point of view. The first was soaring food prices sure to worsen malnutrition, if not famine, in the global south. Already in May, the World Food Program warned that 47 million additional people (more than Ukraine’s total population) were going to face “acute food insecurity” thanks to a potential reduction in food exports from both Russia and Ukraine — and that was on top of the 193 million people in 53 countries who had already been in that predicament (or worse) in 2021.

A July deal brokered between Ukraine and Russia by the U.N. and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did, in fact, ensure the resumption of food exports from both countries (though Russia briefly withdrew from it as October ended). Still, only a fifth of the added supply went to low-income and poor countries. While global food prices have fallen for six months straight now, another crisis cannot be ruled out as long as the war in Ukraine drags on.

The second problem was an increase in the cost of both borrowing money and of debt repayments following interest rate hikes by Western central banks seeking to tamp down inflation stoked by a war-induced spike in fuel prices. On average, interest rates in the poorest countries jumped by 5.7% — about twice as much as in the U.S. — increasing the cost of their further borrowing by 10% to 46%.

A more fundamental reason much of the global south wasn’t in a hurry to pillory Russia is that the West has repeatedly defenestrated the very values it declares to be universal. In 1999, for instance, NATO intervened in Kosovo, following Serbia’s repression of the Kosovars, even though it was not authorized to do so, as required, by a U.N. Security Council resolution (which China and Russia would have vetoed). The Security Council did approve the U.S. and European intervention in Libya in 2011 to protect civilians from the security forces of that country’s autocrat, Muammar Gadhafi. That campaign, however, quickly turned into one aimed at toppling his government by assisting the armed opposition and so would be widely criticized in the global south for creating ongoing chaos in that country. After 9/11, the United States offered classically contorted legal explanations for the way the Central Intelligence Agency violated the Convention Against Torture and the four 1949 Geneva Conventions in the name of wiping out terrorism.

Universal human rights, of course, occupy a prominent place in Washington’s narratives about that rules-based world order it so regularly promotes but in practice frequently ignores, notably in this century in the Middle East. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was aimed at regime change against a country that posed no direct threat to Russia and therefore was indeed a violation of the U.N. Charter; but so, too, was the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, something few in the global south have forgotten.

The War and Climate Change

Worse yet, the divisions Vladimir Putin’s invasion has highlighted have only made it more difficult to take the necessary bold steps to combat the greatest danger all of us face on this planet: climate change. Even before the war, there was no consensus on who bore the most responsibility for the problem, who should make the biggest cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, or who should provide funds to countries that simply can’t afford the costs involved in shifting to green energy. Perhaps the only thing on which everyone agrees in this moment of global stress is that not enough has been done to meet the 2015 Paris climate accord target of ideally limiting the increase in global warming to 1.5 degrees Centigrade. That’s a valid conclusion. According to a U.N. reportpublished this month, the planet’s warming will reach 2.4 degrees Centigrade by 2100. This is where things stood as the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference kicked off this month in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

As a start, the $100 billion per year that richer countries pledged to poor ones in 2009 to help move them away from hydrocarbon-based energy hasn’t been met in any year so far and recent disbursements, minimal as they have been, were largely in the form of loans, not grants. The resources the West will now have to spend just to cover Ukraine’s non-military needs for 2023 — $55 billion in budgetary assistance and infrastructure repairs alone, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky — plus soaring inflation and slower growth in Western economies thanks to the war make it doubtful that green commitments to poor countries will be fulfilled in the years to come. (Never mind the pledge, in advance of the November 2021 COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference, that the $100 billion goal would be met in 2023.)

In the end, the surge in energy costs created by the war, in part because Russia’s natural gas supplies to Europe have been slashed, could prove the shot in the arm needed for some of the biggest emitters of carbon dioxide and methane to move more quickly toward wind and solar power. That seems especially possible because the price of clean energy technologies has declined so sharply in recent years. The cost of photovoltaic cells for solar power has, for instance, fallen by nearly 90% in the past decade; the cost for lithium-ion batteries, needed for rechargeable electric vehicles, by the same amount during the last 20 years. Optimism about a quicker greening of the planet, now a common refrain, could prove valid in the long run. However, when it comes to progress on climate change, the immediate implications of the war aren’t encouraging.

According to the International Energy Agency, if the Paris Agreement’s target for limiting global warming and its goal of “net zero” in global emissions by 2050 are to prove feasible, the building of additional fossil-fuel infrastructure must cease immediately. And that’s hardly what’s been happening since the war in Ukraine began. Instead, there has been what one expert calls “a gold rush to new fossil fuel infrastructure.” Following the drastic cuts in Russian gas exports to Europe, new liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities — more than 20 of them, worth billions of dollars — have either been planned or put on a fast track in Canada, Germany, Greece, Italy, and the Netherlands. The Group of Seven may even reverse its decision last May to stop public investment in overseas fossil-fuel projects by the end of this year, while its plan to “decarbonize” the energy sectors of member countries by 2035 may also fall by the wayside.

In June, Germany, desperate to replace that Russian natural gas, announced that mothballed coal-fired power plants, the dirtiest of greenhouse-gas producers, would be brought back online. The Federation of German Industry, which opposed shutting them down well before the war started, has indicated that it’s already switching to coal so that natural gas storage tanks can be filled before the winter cold sets in. India, too, has responded to higher energy prices with plans to boost coal production by almost 56 gigawatts through 2032, a 25% increase. Britain has scrapped its decision to prohibit, on environmental grounds, the development of the Jackdaw natural gas field in the North Sea and has already signed new contracts with Shell and other fossil-fuel companies. European countries have concluded several deals for LNG purchases, including with Azerbaijan, Egypt, Israel, the United States, and Qatar (which has demanded 20-year contracts). Then there’s Russia’s response to high energy prices, including a huge Arctic drilling project aimed at adding 100 million tons of oil a year to the global supply by 2035.

U.N. Secretary-General António Gutteres characterized this dash toward yet more hydrocarbon energy use as “madness.” Using a phrase long reserved for nuclear war, he suggested that such an unceasing addiction to fossil fuels could end in “mutually assured destruction.” He has a point: the U.N. Environment Program’s 2022 “Emissions Gap Report” released last month concluded that, in light of the emissions targets of so many states, Earth’s warming in the post-Industrial Revolution era could be in the range of 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2100. That’s nowhere near the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious benchmark of 1.5 degrees on a planet where the average temperature has already risen by 1.2 degrees.

As the Germany-based Perspectives on Climate Group details in a recent study, the Ukraine war has also had direct effects on climate change that will continue even after the fighting ends. As a start, the Paris Agreement doesn’t require countries to report emissions produced by their armed forces, but the war in Ukraine, likely to be a long-drawn-out affair, has already contributed to military carbon emissions in a big way, thanks to fossil-fuel-powered tanks, aircraft, and so much else. Even the rubble created by the bombardment of cities has released more carbon dioxide. So will Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction, which its prime minister estimated last month will cost close to $750 billion. And that may be an underestimate considering that the Russian army has taken its wrecking ball (or perhaps wrecking drones, missiles, and artillery) to everything from power plants and waterworks to schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings.

What International Community?

Leaders regularly implore “the international community” to act in various ways. If such appeals are to be more than verbiage, however, compelling evidence is needed that 195 countries share basic principles of some sort on climate change — that the world is more than the sum of its parts. Evidence is also needed that the most powerful countries on this planet can set aside their short-term interests long enough to act in a concerted fashion and decisively when faced with planet-threatening problems like climate change. The war in Ukraine offers no such evidence. For all the talk of a new dawn that followed the end of the Cold War, we seem stuck in our old ways — just when they need to change more than ever.

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"We have no facilities for that.” dr in EU

adam hochshield

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/the-crushing-of-american-socialism/

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10 22 something rotten

...Two Books to Help Us See the Lies

Two recent books help us see that spin for what it was. In Because Our Fathers Lied, Craig McNamara, Robert’s son, reflects on his father’s dishonesty about the Vietnam War and the reasons for it. Loyalty was perhaps the lead one, he writes. McNamara suppressed his own serious misgivings out of misplaced loyalty to two presidents, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, while simultaneously preserving his own position of power in the government.

Robert McNamara would, in fact, later pen his own mea culpa,admitting how “terribly wrong” he’d been in urging the prosecution of that war. Yet Craig finds his father’s late confession of regret significantly less than forthright and fully honest. Robert McNamara fell back on historical ignorance about Vietnam as the key contributing factor in his unwise decision-making, but his son is blunt in accusing his dad of unalloyed dishonesty. Hence the title of his book, citing Rudyard Kipling’s pained confession of his own complicity in sending his son to die in the trenches of World War I: “If any question why we died/Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

The second book is Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars, edited by Andrew Bacevichand Danny Sjursen. In my view, the word “misguided” doesn’t quite capture the book’s powerful essence, since it gathers 15 remarkable essays by Americans who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and witnessed the patent dishonesty and folly of those wars. None dare speak of failure might be a subtheme of these essays, as initially highly motivated and well-trained troops became disillusioned by wars that went nowhere, even as their comrades often paid the ultimate price, being horribly wounded or dying in those conflicts driven by lies....

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/donald-trumps-tyrannical-supreme-court/

tom dis, intro omitted]

...Historically speaking, however, the Warren Court was the exception, not the one cobbled together by Donald Trump and effectively, if not officially, presided over by Justice Clarence Thomas. The Supremes were born to be bad.

Enshrined in the Constitution

From the beginning, the Supreme Court was conceived as a bulwark against excessive democracy, as indeed was the Constitution itself.

During the years leading up to the 1787 constitutional convention in Philadelphia, the country was in a chronic state of upheaval. Local insurrections against heavy taxation, land and currency speculators, and merchant-bankers had called into question the security and sanctity of private property. Local legislatures proved vulnerable to take-over by the hoi polloi who felt free to cancel debts, print paper money, stop evictions, and oust elites from their accustomed positions of power.

Various impediments to this kind of “mobocracy” were baked into the Constitution, including the electoral college for presidential votes and the indirect election of senators by state legislatures (until the 17th amendment was ratified in 1913). The Supreme Court was just another such obstacle.

Founding Father James Madison typically saw that court as protection against “factious majorities” at the state and local level that might threaten the rights of property-holders. Fearing “passionate majorities,” he went so far as to propose a joint executive-judicial council with veto power over all legislation.

That idea went nowhere. Still, the principle of “judicial review” — the power of the court to have the last say on the constitutionality of legislation — although not made explicit in the Constitution was implicit in the way the founding fathers sought to reign in democratic impulses. French author Alexis de Tocqueville in his nineteenth-century classic, Democracy in America, typically recognized the special status accorded to judicial elites, describing them as America’s “high political class.“

At first, the Supreme Court’s services weren’t needed as a guardian of vested interests and its presence was muted indeed. It met in the basement of the Capitol and, between 1803 and 1857, struck down only two federal statutes. (Compare that to the 22 it struck down between 1992 and 2002alone.)

The court would, however, establish an enduring reputation for conservatism thanks to its infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision.By a 7-2 majority, the justices declared all Black people — free or enslaved — to be non-citizens. They also ruled that, even if a slave made his or her way to a free state, he or she would remain the property of the slave owner and declared that no territory under U.S. jurisdiction could prohibit slavery.

Dred Scott is generally considered to be the most egregious decision in the court’s 250-year history. That ruling was, however, in keeping with its basic orientation: to side with propertied interests, not the unpropertied; slave-owners, not slaves; and industrialists and financiers rather than with those who worked for and depended on them.

Gatling-Gun Injunctions and Yellow Dog Contracts

After the Civil War, the court became ever more aggressive in defending the interests of the powerful. There was a need for that as, once again, the powerless threatened the status quo.

Reconstruction — the period immediately after the Civil War when the Federal government imposed martial law on the former Confederate states — empowered ex-slaves to militantly exercise their rights to full civil and political equality under the 14th and 15th amendments. Desperate farmers in the Midwest, on the Great Plains, and in the South were then mobilizing to protect themselves from predatory banks, railroads, and commodity speculators. Industrial workers were engaged in pitched battles with their employers, confrontations that elicited widespread sympathy in cities and towns across the country.

“Passionate majorities” needed chastening and the court met the challenge. It launched an era, much like our own, of “judge-made law” that would last from the late 1880s into the 1920s.

Early on, the Supremes declared a civil rights act unconstitutional. Later, in Plessy v. Ferguson, they made segregation constitutionally legitimate via the doctrine of “separate but equal” and so helped restore elite white rule in the South.By ensconcing segregation, they also ended the hopes aroused by the Populist movement for an alliance of black and white rural poor against predatory banks and landlords.

The populist fervor of that era led some state legislatures to adopt laws regulating railroad rates and the fees charged by grain-elevator operators, while challenging corporate monopoly power over the vital necessities of life. Initially, the court tread carefully. Soon enough, however, the justices shed that reticence, using the power of judicial review to wipe such laws off the books. With a distinct touch of irony, they concluded that, in the eyes of the law, corporations were indeed persons and so entitled to the very civil rights guaranteed to ex-slaves by the 14th amendment (“rights” presumably denied them under state regulatory statutes).

Regulating business, the justices suggested, was tantamount to confiscating it. As one railroad lawyer had argued before the court, such regulation was “communism pure and simple.”From that same perspective, the court found a federal law establishing an income tax unconstitutional. (It took the 16th amendment, passed in 1913, to make the income tax national law.)

Industrial capitalism accumulated its wealth by subjecting the lives of millions of workers to abject misery: poverty, overwork, danger, disease, and profound indignity. It would prove a bloody affair, igniting confrontations between workers and their bosses more violent than anywhere else in the western world. As those workers began organizing collectively, their middle-class allies occasionally succeeded in passing relevant laws for minimum wages, outlawing child labor, putting a ceiling on the work hours an employer could enforce, and making the workplace safer or, at least, compensating those injured on the job.

The justices of the Supreme Court, some of whom had once been lawyers for the railroad, iron, and steel industries, knew just what to do in response to such democratic challenges to the prerogatives of capital. While the right to strike might be honored in theory, the court issued injunctions to stop such strikes from happening so often that the era became known (after the early machine gun of that time) for its “Gatling-gun injunctions.” That term was used in part as well because such rulings could be enforced by the Army or its state militia equivalents, not to mention the imprisonment and heavy fines often involved. During one such bloody encounter, William Howard Taft, then an Ohio judge, later president, and finally chief justice of the Supreme Court, complained that federal troops had “killed only six of the mob as yet. This is hardly enough to make an impression.”

To rub yet more salt in the wound, such injunctions were often justified under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.Originally designed to break up monopolies, it would be used far more frequently to bust strikes (and sympathy boycotts) on the grounds that they were “conspiracies in restraint of trade.” The court repeatedly enjoined “secondary boycotts“; that is, supportive actions by other unions or groups sympathetic to striking workers. It also struck down a Kansas statute that banned “yellow dog contracts” — agreements promising that they would never join a union that many workers were forced to sign on being hired.

Laws that attempted to ameliorate the harshness of working-class life were treated with similar disdain. New York state, for example, passed one banning cigar making in tenement workshops as a danger to workers’ health. The court saw otherwise, treating such tenement dwellers as independent contractors who had freely chosen their way of life.

New York also tried to limit the hours bakers could work to 10 a day and 60 a week. At the time, they were normally compelled to work 75 to 100 hours weekly in ill-ventilated cellars of tenement bakeries where breathing in the flour was a danger to their lungs. The justices begged to differ. In Lochner v. New York— named after the bakery owner who sued the state — they refused to recognize any threat to the well-being of bakers who, in the eyes of the court, had freely contracted to work on those terms. They were after all as free as their employers to strike a bargain or choose not to work.

The freedom of contract was then the reigning judicial orthodoxy, inherited ironically enough from the long struggle against slave labor. Unlike slavery, free labor allegedly enjoyed an equality of standing in any contractual relationship with an employer. Laws or unions which interfered with that “freedom” were rendered nugatory by the Court and it didn’t matter how obvious it was that the imputed equality between owners of capital and the men and women compelled to work for them was illusory.

The only laws of that sort which passed muster were those protecting women and child laborers. The justices considered such workers inferior and dependent, and so, unlike men, unable to freely enter into relations of contractual equality. In the case of women, there was the added danger of jeopardizing their maternal role. Still, consider it an indication of just how reliant businesses had then become on child labor that even a federal law that controlled the ages and hours children could work was, in the end, struck down by the Supreme Court.

The Court v. the People

By the turn of the twentieth century, the outcry against “judge-made law,” the willful manipulation of the Constitution to shore up endangered bastions of wealth and power, had grown ever stronger. Some more recent scholars have found the court’s rulings then not as one-sided as its reputation suggests, but contemporaries certainly didn’t share those doubts.

When the Supreme Court overturned an income tax law, a dissenting justice vividly described its decision as a “surrender to the moneyed classes.“

Similarly, in 1905, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes broke with his colleagues when they ruled in the Lochner case, noting that “the 14th amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.” (Spencer was then the world’s foremost proponent of social darwinism and a staunch defender of free-market economics.) A few years later, future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis cuttingly noted that “to destroy a business is illegal. It not illegal to lower the standard of the working man’s living or to destroy the union which aims to raise or maintain such a standard. A business is property… A man’s standard of living is not property.”

Other voices were also being raised in alarm over the coming of a “judicial oligarchy.” Politicians from former president Theodore Roosevelt to perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs began denouncing “the rogue court.” When he ran again for president in 1912 as the candidate of the Bull Moose, or Progressive Party, Roosevelt declared that the people are “the ultimate makers of their own Constitution” and swore that Americans would not surrender that prerogative to “any set of men, no matter what their positions or their character.” His rival for the party’s nomination, Wisconsin senator Robert LaFollette, typically offered this observation: “Evidence abounds that… the courts pervert justice almost as often as they administer it.” There existed, he concluded, “one law for the rich and another for the poor.“

Calls for reform back then should sound eerily familiar today.Populist presidential candidate James Weaver urged that Supreme Court justices be elected and lifetime terms abolished. A bill introduced in Congress proposed that a majority of both houses should have the power to recall and remove a judge from office. Another demanded a super-majority of justices — seven out of nine — be required to invalidate a law. Roosevelt argued that there should be popular referenda on the court’s decisions. The Socialist Party demanded that the Supreme Court’s power to review the constitutionality of federal laws be done away with and all judges elected for short terms.

Still, the court prevailed until the Great Depression of the 1930s. President Franklin Roosevelt, however, passed new laws regulating business and finance, as well as a national minimum wage and maximum-work-hours statute, while legalizing the right to join a union. Together with yet another uprising of beleaguered industrial workers in those years, this would shift the balance of power. Even then, the Supreme Court justices at first succeeded in nullifying key pieces of Roosevelt’s economic recovery legislation, while Democrats at the time, (as today), talked about adding new justices to the court.

In the end, however, the national trauma of capitalism seemingly on the verge of collapse, the weight of changing public opinion, and the aging out of some of the justices ended the dominion of the Lochner court.

“The Race Question”

During the long years of opposition to that court, little of the criticism touched on “the race question.” How to account for that? From the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century to Roosevelt’s New Deal, Americans were preoccupied with “the labor question” (as it was then called) — that is, how to deal with the great social divide between capital and labor opened up by industrialization.

The silence when it came to the no less striking racial bias of the Supreme Court speaks to an ubiquitous national blindness on matters of racial justice then. Of course, segregation was settled law at the time. In the words of a justice deciding the Plessy case, white supremacy was “in the nature of things.” (Sound familiar?) So, too, the relative weakness of mass movements addressing the racial dilemma during the Lochner court years was striking, making the issue easier to ignore.

The Supreme Court’s original responsibility was, as James Madison once put it, to guard against the “tyranny of the majority.” African-Americans were, of course, a long-tyrannized minority.

However, on that subject the Lochner court went AWOL, even by its own standards. If the “minority” in question happened to be a corporation, it, of course, needed the court’s protection. Not so fortunate were millions of ex-slaves and their descendants.

Eventually, a different Supreme Court, the one overseen by Chief Justice Earl Warren, faced the “race question.” Indeed, it expanded civil rights and civil liberties generally by making racial segregation illegal in public schools, increasing the constitutional rights of defendants, outlawing state-sponsored school prayer, and creating the groundwork to legalize abortion.

Times had changed. Civil rights for African-Americans (about which Roosevelt’s New Deal did little) became an increasing concern during and after World War II. Growing civil rights organizations and a then-powerful labor movement began to press the issue ever harder. By the time the Warren Court made its celebrated 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, race had become a “question,” just as the “labor question” had in the New Deal era.

Before then, pressure alone, however muscular, had not produced a shift in the high court’s approach as the Lochner court so amply demonstrated. Segregation had, after all, become entrenched as a way of life endorsed by local white legislatures. Southern commercial interests in particular — plantation owners, textile manufacturers, and raw material producers — depended on it.

Beyond those circles, however, segregation had become increasingly repellent in a culture ever more infused with the multi-ethnic sympathies and cosmopolitanism of the New Deal era. In beginning the dismantlement of legal segregation, the Warren court would not, in fact, threaten the country’s central institutions of power and wealth which, if anything, had by then come to find American-style apartheid inimical to their interests.

Justice is supposed to be nonpolitical, but that has never been the case. What was once termed the “counter-majoritarian” mission of the court — to discipline “passionate majorities” — produced great wrongs in the era of the gatling-gun injunction as had also been true earlier. The Warren court, however, was the exception. It achieved the very opposite results, even as it relied on the same constitutional logic (the civil rights enshrined in the 14th amendment) the Lochner court had in thwarting mass movements for justice and equality.

Today’s Supreme Court is more than Donald Trump’s creation. It’s the result of a long counter-revolution against the political, economic, and cultural reforms of the New Deal, as well as of the labor, civil rights, women’s, and gay liberation movements of the last century.

Sadly, those are the “passionate majorities” the court now seems all too determined to squelch and in that it stands in a long American tradition, though one most of us had forgotten in the Warren years. One thing should be obvious by now: if the country is ever to live up to its democratic and egalitarian promise, the tyranny of the Supreme Court must be ended.

===

https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/6473#ftn45

The

United States Supreme Court and Business Elites: Gilded Age Origins of Modern American Liberalism1

Paul Kens

https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.6473

...

Reaction and Response to Munn

56

For railroad leaders, who placed much more faith in appellate courts than in elected legislatures, the majority decision inflicted a brutal blow. They had dreamed that the decision would establish an unequivocal right to be free of government regulation. More realistically, they hoped it would produce a doctrine that the reasonableness of government rates and regulations was inherently a judicial question and that courts would presume that rate regulation was an unconstitutional form of confiscation. Instead, the Supreme Court’s decision in Munn reaffirmed the right of state legislatures to regulate.

• 43 . R. Harris to Schuylar Colfax, March 12, 1877. R. Harris out-letters, president’s office, CB& Q, N (...)

57

John Jewett, one of the attorneys for Munn and Scott, warned that the opinion “has sent a chill of apprehension through the very heart of the business enterprise of the nation.” (Jewett, 1975, 662) Robert Harris, president of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, also detected a dire omen in Munn. Ignoring the fact that the nation was still in the throngs of an economic depression that began in 1873 and that the depression was caused in part by overexpansion of railroads and other railroad practices, he blamed the Court’s decision for the drop in value of railroad stock. Harris predicted that the Court “has turned over this vast property to the whim of a legislative committee.” “If this is good law,” he complained, “then corporate property is the only property that has no protection [from legislative interference].”43

58

Reformers, as would be expected, found comfort in the decision. Two years later delegates to the California constitutional convention pointed to Munn as proof that they had the authority to regulate railroad rates and fares. (Debates, 1870, I-377) And, even a decade later, a reform minded governor of Minnesota reminded the legislature that while the expediency of railroad regulation might be doubted, the right of the state to regulate was no longer in question. (Cortner, 1993, 22-23) Editors of the Minneapolis Tribune were even more confident. “The power to regulate roads has been confirmed by the United States Supreme Court in the Granger Cases, there is no turning back and the ground will never be retraced.” (Cortner, 1993, 38)

59

The second part of the Tribune’s observation would prove to be wrong. By the mid 1890s the Court would reject Munn and replace it with a doctrine of substantive due process that took inspiration from Field’s dissent. This new doctrine would give much of what railroad and corporate leaders had wanted. Under it all state regulation of rates would be suspected of being a confiscation of property that violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court would thus become the final arbitrator of the validity of rates. Reflecting a distrust of the democratic process, the Court would start from a presumption that rate regulation violated individual liberty. It would also develop a narrow definition of the police powers of the state—that range of legitimate state authority to interfere with liberty. (Ely 1995, 57-127) Because of its emphasis on entrepreneurial liberty this new doctrine is often referred to as laissez-faire constitutionalism.

• 44 . See, New State Ice Company v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262 (1932) ; Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502 (1 (...)

60

Although laissez-faire constitutionalism did not become entrenched until more than a decade afterward, constitutional history tends to treat Munn as a steppingstone in the development of that doctrine. Interest in the case tends to be directed toward Waite’s “affected with public interest” formula.44 Modern treatment of the case also highlights Waite’s concession that some regulation may violate due process, and Field’s dissent that all legislation should be presumed to do so. Chief Justice Waite’s biographer points out that instead of being remembered as a victory for public regulation, Munn is thus more often viewed as the ideological forerunner to an era that emphasized economic liberty and saw the Court as a bulwark protecting business against interference of state regulation. (Magrath, 1963, 192-93) From this perspective it is common to conclude that the Court quickly moved away from the Munn doctrine. It is also commonly, and mistakenly, believed that Munn immediately came under attack from attorneys for railroad, industrial, and financial interests.

• 45 . Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886). There is considerable contr (...)

61

It was not until after four new justices joined the Court in the early 1880s, however, that attorneys for the corporate and business elite increased their efforts. They achieved some measure of success in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), which came to stand for the proposition that corporations are persons for purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment.45 Even then they failed to obtain the kind of constitutional protections from government regulation that their clients wanted.

62

For more than a decade the Court continued to refuse to equate regulation with confiscation. It refused to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment as providing a general restriction on government regulation of business. In cases challenging the validity of regulations it continued to rely on the antebellum legal tradition that emphasized the right of the community as a limit on property. The ideas and theories that corporation and business attorneys pressed were gradually becoming part of constitutional discourse, but their elevation to constitutional doctrine would have to wait until after the Waite era. (Kens 2010, 110-25)

• 46 . Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway Company v. Minnesota, 134 U.S. 418 (1890) ; This stateme (...)
• 47 . Smyth v. Ames, 169 U.S. 466 (1898).

63

It was not until after Chief Justice Waite died and was replaced by Melville W. Fuller in 1888 that the Court subtly revised Munn’s presumption of the validity of state legislation in the Minnesota Milk Rate Case of 1890. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Blatchford said, “The question of the reasonableness of a rate charged for transportation by a railroad company is eminently a question for judicial investigation.”46 Then, in the 1898 case Smyth v. Ames, it added force to the idea that regulation was a form of confiscation when it ruled that the due process clause guaranteed that businesses receive a fair return on the value of the property it employs for the public convenience.47 At the same time the Court began to hone a theory called “liberty of contract” that subjected all regulation, not just ratemaking, to the challenge that it violated the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (Ely, 1995, 83-110)

Conclusion

64

The modern narrative of constitutional history tends to treat Munn as a steppingstone in the evolution of laissez-faire constitutionalism. But analyzing Munn in its own context puts a different spin on the majority decision. It demonstrates that the Munn majority, while concerned about the American constitutional tradition relating to liberty, was even more influenced by another constitutional tradition that runs equally deep. It was a tradition that emphasized popular sovereignty and that placed property rights in the context of balancing individual freedom and the needs of a democratically governed society. From this perspective Munn, instead of being a steppingstone for development of a doctrine that emphasized economic liberty, might better be described as a last gasp for the antebellum legal tradition that emphasized rights of the community as a limit on property.

65

Last gasp may be something of an exaggeration, however. From the perspective of long-term history it is true that the Supreme Court eventually did move away from Waite’s reasoning and rejected the constitutional tradition based on popular sovereignty for a doctrine that idealized an absolutist right of property. Instead of balancing property right against right of the community it used a model of individual right versus government power, and it narrowly defined the reach of that power. But the demise of the Court’s respect for the rights of the community was more of a drawn out sigh than a sudden gasp.

===

mention 1866?

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/amerindiquar.39.3.0243

The Corporation and the Tribe

Joanne Barker

American Indian Quarterly

Vol. 39, No. 3 (Summer 2015), pp. 243-270 (28 pages)

Published By: University of Nebraska Press

https://doi.org/10.5250/amerindiquar.39.3.0243

===

an 6 22

robert Lipsyte, Take My Gun, Please

The introduction you’re reading right now is already out of date or we wouldn’t be in the United States of 2022. I mean, we live in a country where, for years now, there have been more guns than people. According to the latest figures (for 2018!), almost 400 million of them and only 330 million or so of us. Oh, and by the way, of those nearly 400 million, an estimated nearly 20 million (and rising) are AR-15 military-style assault rifles. And we’re also in a country where mass shootings (those in which at least four people are struck by bullets, whether or not they die) have all too literally become everyday matters. As I was starting this introduction, there were already 243 of them this year; in other words, more than one a day so far and, sadly, the year is young. Just a day or so later, three more had been added, including a bloody shootout in the streets of Philadelphia where three people died and 12 were wounded. The bloodiest of them — as recently in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas — are truly grim but increasingly normal events.

And the shooters only seem to be getting younger in a country where, in 44 states anyone 18 or older can buy more or less anything that kills, especially those highly militarized rifles the two 18-year-olds in Buffalo and Uvalde used to such deathly effect. And no matter who dies or how, it seems that the Republican Party will put its stamp of approval on unfettered gun ownership in a big way. Take it as a lesson of our moment that Chris Jacobs, a first-term Republican congressional representative from Buffalo, once endorsed by the National Rifle Association, recently came out in support of a federal assault-weapons ban. He then faced an instant backlash from within his party and, under intense pressure, decided not even to run for his seat again this year.

So, it’s good to have the second of what promises to be an ongoing series of autobiographical pieces from TomDispatch regular (as well as former sportswriter and columnist for the New York Times) Robert Lipsyte. Think of him as offering here a little inside information from his own past on what it feels like to be a young man in this country packing a weapon, while your emotions and sense of manliness run wild. Tom

A Country Armed to the Teeth –And Strutting Toward the Apocalypse

The gun I carried on the streets of New York City in the late 1960s was a Beretta, similar to the pistol James Bond packed in the early Ian Fleming novels. It was a small, dark beauty that filled me with bravado. I was never afraid when I had it in my pocket, which is why I’m so very afraid now.

I was packing it illegally, but I knew that a white man in a suit and tie was unlikely to be stopped by the police and frisked, even in a city with some of the strictest gun laws in the country — laws that may soon be swept away if the Supreme Court continues what seems to be its holy war on democracy. In fact, its justices are expected to rule this month in a case that challenges New York’s constitutional right to deny anyone a permit to carry a firearm. That state’s current licensing process allows only those who can prove a “special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community.” That means you can’t pack heat just because you want to feel stronger and braver than you are or because you feel threatened by people who look different from you.

It also means that you can’t enjoy the privileges of the past. In his history of gun rights in this country, Armed in America, Patrick Charles quotes this from a piece in a 1912 issue of the magazine Sports Afield: “Perfect freedom from annoyance by petty lawbreakers is found in a country where every man carries his own sheriff, judge, and executioner swung on his hip.”

Sadly enough, carrying such firepower is thrilling, oppressive, and often leads to calamity as hundreds of police officers and the would-be neighborhood defender George Zimmerman, the killer of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, found out. It was something I, too, came to understand. Let me tell you how.

The Hunter

The Beretta was not my first gun. That was a .22 bolt-action Savage Arms rifle that my favorite uncle insisted I needed to grow into true manhood. My dad was against harboring a gun in the house, but the masculinity argument must have swayed him. He had been too old for the Army and not having served disturbed him. Uncle Irving was his best friend and a World War II vet.

I was around 12 years old, about the age most kids in gun-owning families are first armed. I was an avid fan of the Western movies of that era, which were always resolved by a gunfight. The idea of owning a gun, that symbol of manhood, genuinely excited me. Somehow, because there were so many rules and restrictions, target practice became a duty, as well as a guilty pleasure. (Many years later, I spoke with an Army sergeant who described shooting as unlimited orgasms for less than six cents each.)

In my early teens, I enjoyed plinking away in the woods, knocking off cans and bottles (Indians and outlaws, of course) until the inevitable need to actually kill something became uncontainable. I had to test myself. I was a responsible kid and heeded my dad’s ban on shooting at birds and squirrels, even rattlesnakes, but I finally begged permission to go after the rabbit pillaging mom’s vegetable garden.

I got it on the first shot!

And that was the beginning of my conflict.

It just didn’t feel as good as I had dreamt it would, even though my hunting partner, my kid sister, cheered, while my parents appeared both dismayed and impressed. In death, the marauder of our food supply turned out to be just a hungry little bunny.

Was there something missing in the experience or maybe in me, I wondered? Where was the joy I expected in actually gunning something down? Nevertheless, I paid lip-service to what I thought I should have felt, turning the backyard ambush into the equivalent of an Ernest Hemingway safari, a tale told heroically until it became satirical. (Hemingway was my generation’s avatar of toxic masculinity in literature and in life. And, of course, he killed himself with a gun.)

My sister and I skinned our prey and kept those dried-out rabbit’s feet for years. But ever since, the idea of hunting, if nothing gets eaten, seemed noxious to me and, as the years passed, I began to think of sport hunters as the leatherette men, a gang of poseurs.

Though I kept that rifle, I never fired it again.

The Shootist

Covering police stories early in my newspaper career, I found myself regularly around guns that were almost never drawn on duty, weapons worn by men and women mostly discomforted by their weight and bulge. But I found that I was still fascinated by them. It was only the idea of using them for hunting that bothered me then, not guns themselves.

Still, weapons training in the Army in 1961 turned out to be no fun. The instructors were even more restrictive than Dad and I proved to be a mediocre shot at best.

Basic training turned out to be boring and disappointing. I had, at least, hoped to get myself in better shape and work on some of those manly arts that were still on my mind, like hand-to-hand combat. But that didn’t happen. After basic, I was dumped into clerk/typist school, the Army’s numbing attempt to teach soldiers to be all they could be by doing paperwork. The secretarial training drove me so crazy that I went on sick call and started spending nights in the beer garden at Fort Dix, which only made everything worse.

Then, one night, en route to getting wasted again, I wandered into a free shooting range sponsored by the National Rifle Association (NRA). Oh, joy!

Unlimited orgasms, rifles and handguns, jolly instructors. I was still gripped by the fantasy of manly fun. The next thing I knew, I had joined the NRA by mailing in a card from one of its magazines. My mood lifted and, incredibly, I graduated at the top of my clerk/typist class. I then floated through the rest of my six-month active-duty enlistment in the Army information office, trigger-happy all the way.

Back in civilian life, writing sports stories for the New York Timesin the early 1960s, I discovered that my manhood credentials were unassailable, especially to the guys I now think of as the Bystander Boys. Those were the everyday dudes who genuflect to alpha males, especially the sports heroes they assumed I drank with. Those were specious creds, although it would take me years more to figure that out. Back then, I wasn’t yet paying attention to the various kinds of faux manhood that were around me everywhere. Quite the opposite, I was living my own version of it. Especially when I got my beautiful little Beretta.

My frat house roommate Marty, a naval officer, brought back one for each of us from a Mediterranean cruise. It fit our fantasy lives then. After all, we’d both studied combat judo with a drunken ex-Marine on a tough street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. We were both delusional apprentice badasses at a time when actor Humphrey Bogart was considered a profile in manhood. We liked the way he smoked and handled a gun in his films. In addition, we had both read the James Bond novels and were proud that 007’s early pistol of choice, the Beretta, was now ours, too.

The Gunslinger

To say that I felt bigger and harder with the Beretta in my pocket is true, even if it reduces the experience to a phallic cartoon (which, of course, is just what it was). But there was more. It was proof that I was neither weak, nor soft, and didn’t have to feel as vulnerable as I actually did covering stories on the mean streets of the city. It meant I could walk at night in the South Bronx assuming that I’d be able to respond to anything, that I would never have to run or surrender my wallet to some teenaged mugger.

So went my weaponized imagination then. I felt primed for action. I was daring the world, strolling through New York with what I took to be the pigeon-toed rolling swagger of that classic star of so many cowboy and war movies, John Wayne. I even began to fancy that I projected a dangerous aura that would intimidate anyone with bad intentions toward me.

Soon enough, I knew, that feeling of invulnerability would have to be tested. The emotional weight of that gun seemed to demand it. I would have to use it and it wouldn’t be on a rabbit this time.

I felt feverish with the desire for (and terror of) engagement. I suspect that a kind of temporary insanity set in, that I was gun crazy, drowning in testosterone — and the memory of that gives me a feeling for the state of mind of the mad boys now regularly slaughtering people in our country. And here was the strangest thing in retrospect: I don’t remember ever thinking that I didn’t really know how to use that gun, that I’d had no training with it, never even fired it. And in those days, there was no YouTube to show me how.

And then came one lunatic night on Manhattan’s lower East Side. For a magazine story, I was shadowing a young doctor who worked for a non-profit group visiting sick kids in their squalid rooms. Nervous that the drugs and syringes he was carrying in his medical bag might make him a target, he was hugging the shadows of the dark street as we made our way to his car, half a block away. Suddenly, a group of loud young men appeared, drinking beer. The doctor grabbed my arm. He wanted to duck back into the building we had just walked out of.

Filled with bravado, however, I pulled him along, my other hand in my pocket. I was suddenly on fire in a way that reminded me of my teen self and the rabbit. No punks were going to chase me off that street. I glared at them. They glared right back, but then separated so we could walk quickly through them to our car. I promptly flopped into the passenger seat, suddenly exhausted, wiped out by my own stupidity, my own madness.

Just thinking about it now, almost 60 years later, my spine tingles, my muscles lock, and I feel a deep sense of shame, especially for endangering that young do-good doctor. And the possible outcome, had I done something truly stupid? I imagine the gun snagging on my pocket lining as I tried to pull it out for the first time and shooting myself in the foot or, far worse, shooting someone else. I never carried a gun again.

The Unarmed

When I gave the Beretta back to Marty, I told him only a piece of the truth. I said I was afraid of getting busted with it in a city with such rigorous gun laws. I promised to visit the pistol in California, where he would soon be living. And I did. I shot it there for the first time at a commercial range, along with Marty’s new .45. He was rapturous, but I was just going through the motions. There was no excitement or pleasure. I had changed.

I was done with guns and felt like a fool for ever thinking differently. But because of my experience I do understand why, in this thoroughly over-armed land of ours, so many others consider such weaponry (and far more powerful and deadly versions) so important to who they are. Having experienced a sense of that identity myself, I don’t look down on them for it. And I understand that behind the mostly male pleasure in being armed can lie complex feelings. As historian Adam Hochschild noted in the New York Review of Books several years ago:

The passion for guns felt by tens of millions of Americans also has deep social and economic roots. The fervor with which they believe liberals are trying to take all their guns away is so intense because so much else has been taken away.

Even more troubling is that many of them believe they will need those guns for defense against the rampaging gangs (calling themselves militias?) that would rise after the possible collapse of American democracy as we’ve known it, which any number of armed men don’t trust to protect them anyway. (Thank you, Donald Trump, most Republicans, and, alas, my old benefactor the NRA!)

Is stocking up on AR-15s and thousands of rounds of ammunition paranoia or preparation? While a Beretta would never be enough, it turns out that such lesser guns have done most of the damage to Americans. Mass murders with military-style automatic rifles, especially school shootings, have reaped so much of the attention, but it’s been handguns that have killed far more Americans every year, most often via suicide (which is why it’s so sad to see so many of us increasingly arming ourselves to the teeth).

More than half of the 45,222 gun-related deaths in 2020, the last year for which we have solid statistics, were suicides, while “only” (yes, put that in scare quotes) 513 of them were thanks to mass shootings, defined as an incident in which four or more people are shot, even if no one is killed.

Handguns, not long guns, were involved in 59% of the 13,620 deaths classified as murders that year as well, while assault rifles were involved only 3% of the time. So banning those military-grade weapons, manufactured to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible, while distinctly a sane idea amid this mounting firearms insanity of ours, would probably have little real effect on our proliferating gun culture. Given the politics right now, it’s hard to imagine any administration attempting to begin the disarming of America.

Unfortunately, it’s easier to imagine a future government eager to build that arsenal to ever more destructive extremes, both at home among individuals and throughout the world as arms merchants, the ultimate in gun culture.

It’s not hard to imagine this country strutting all too manfully toward the apocalypse with more than a Beretta in its pocket."

===

an 6 22

Blowback for the Twenty-First Century:Remembering Chalmers Johnson

Once upon a time, long, long ago — actually, it was early in the year 2000 — I was involved in publishing Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. It had been written by the eminent scholar of Asia, former CIA consultant, and cold warrior Chalmers Johnson. I was his editor at Metropolitan Books. In its introduction, using a word Americans were then (as now) all too uncomfortable with, he bluntly summed up his professional life by labeling himself “a spear-carrier for empire.” And he described the origins of his book’s title this way:

Officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented [the term blowback] for their own internal use… [It] refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or ‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal arms merchants’ often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.

Ominously enough, he added, “All around the world today, it is possible to see the groundwork being laid for future forms of blowback.” On page 10, he brought up — and remember he was writing this as the previous century ended — the name of “a former protege of the United States,” one Osama bin Laden. In the 1980s, that rich young Saudi had been part of Washington’s secret war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, forming a group to battle the Russians that he called al-Qaeda (“the Base”) to battle the Red Army. By the time Chalmers wrote his book, the Russian war there was long over, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and bin Laden had turned against Washington. He was then believed responsible for the bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. On page 11, Chalmers added that such “retaliation” for American acts was “undoubtedly not yet at an end in the case of bin Laden.”

He summed things up this way: “Because we live in an increasingly interconnected international system, we are all, in a sense, living in a blowback world.”

Sadly, that remains even truer today and, if Chalmers could return from the dead, I have no doubt that he would have much to say about how we now find ourselves on the ultimate blowback planet.

Blowback in a Sole-Superpower World

To use an all-too-appropriate word, given what he was writing about, his book bombed. Boy, did it! The reviewer at the New York Times dismissed it as “marred by an overriding, sweeping, and cranky one-sidedness.” And it sold next to no copies. It was dead in the water, until, 18 months later… yes, I’m sure you’ve already guessed what I’m about to write next… on September 11, 2001, those towers in New York City came down and the Pentagon was clobbered.

Suddenly, Blowback was on every bookstore bestseller table in America. As Chalmers would mention in his new introduction to the 2003 paperback, Metropolitan Books had to reprint it eight times in less than two months to keep up with demand.

In that volume, he had done something deeply unpopular at the time of publication (except among fringe groups on the left). He had called our country an empire — an imperial power intent on maintaining a staggering military presence globally in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and before the rise of China. A common term used in Washington at the time was the “sole superpower” on planet Earth. And he pointed out, ominously enough, that even without official enemies of any significance, thanks in part to its global imperial presence, Washington had “hollowed out our domestic manufacturing and bred a military establishment that is today close to being beyond civilian control.” He added tellingly that it “always demands more” and was “becoming an autonomous system.” In addition, the post-Vietnam, post-draft, “all-volunteer” military was, he pointed out, increasingly “an entirely mercenary force.” Worse yet, he saw the growth of American militarism at home as another form of blowback from this country’s overextension abroad. (Sound familiar in 2022?)

He warned that the collapse of the Soviet Union in the wake of the war in Afghanistan should have been a warning to Washington. Even more ominously, at a moment when this country’s foreign-policy establishment considered us the “indispensable nation” (Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s phrase), he suggested that we were already experiencing “imperial overextension” and on the long downward slope that all empires experience sooner or later.

And keep in mind that all of this was written before 9/11; before President George W. Bush and crew launched devastatingly ill-fated invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; before this country’s civilian population became — as the nightmare at Uvalde reminded us recently — armed to the teeth with military-style weaponry. It was long before Donald Trump and before the Republican Party was transformed into something unrecognizable. It was well before Congress became essentially incapable of passing anything of significance for most Americans, even as it was instantly capable of providing $54 billion in aid and arms for the Ukrainians and endless funds for the Pentagon.

President Blowback

Just last month, 22 years later, I reread Blowback. Chalmers is, of course, long gone. (He died in November 2010.) But with the news of these last years and what may be on the horizon in mind, I couldn’t help thinking about how he would have updated the book, were he still here.

As a start, I doubt he would have been particularly surprised by Donald Trump. In June 2005, reintroducing a piece he had done for TomDispatch in 2003 on the scourge of militarism, he was already writing: “The American governmental system is no longer working the way it is supposed to. Many distinguished observers think it is badly damaged in terms of Constitutional checks and balances and the structures put in place by the founders to prevent tyranny.”

And as I added in that same 2005 introduction, reflecting Chalmers:

In September 2003, only four months after [President George W. Bush’s] ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment on the USS Abraham Lincoln, it was already evident to some of us that neocon dreams of establishing a robust Pax Americana on the planet were likely to be doomed in the sands of Iraq — but that, in the process, the American constitutional system as we’ve known it might well be destroyed.

Yes, the possibility of our system spinning downward toward some version of tyranny wouldn’t, I suspect, have surprised him. Of course, he didn’t predict Donald Trump. (Who did?) But if anyone could have imagined this country “governed” — and I put that in quotes for obvious reasons — by a billionaire grifter and TV impresario who thought not just unbearably well of, but only of himself, it was Chalmers. Had he been here in 2016, when that bizarre figure ran for president, as he’d been dreaming about doing since at least 2011, and won, I’d put my money on his not being even slightly taken aback. Nor, I suspect, would he have been surprised when the economic inequality that helped Trump to victory only grew ever more rampant in his years in office, while billionaires began to multiply like fleas on a rabid dog.

Honestly, if you think about it for a moment, it’s hard not to imagine The Donald’s success as another version of blowback. In fact, he’s almost inconceivable without the sort of imperial mess Chalmers had in mind and that this country did such a splendiferous job of encouraging with its disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and its never-ending war on terror. If it weren’t for the mess that our military machine made of the world in this century (and the money it gobbled up in the process), his rise would be hard to imagine. He now seems like the cause of so much, but honestly, as I wrote during the election campaign of 2016 referring to the disease then in the news: “Perhaps it would be better to see Donald Trump as a symptom, not the problem itself, to think of him not as the Zika Virus but as the first infectious mosquito to hit the shores of this country.”

He certainly marked another key moment in what Chalmers would have thought of as the domestic version of imperial decline. In fact, looking back or, given his insistence that the 2020 election was “fake” or “rigged,” looking toward a country in ever-greater crisis, it seems to me that we could redub him Blowback Donald. (Of course, that “B” could also stand for Blowhard.) And given the present Republican Party, as well as the growing evidence that this country’s political system could be coming apart at the seams, it’s hard not to think that Chalmers was onto something big as the last century ended.

Of one thing I’m sure. He wouldn’t have been slightly shocked to discover that, these days, just about the only thing Congress can agree upon across party lines is the annual raising of the Pentagon budget to levels that now match the military budgets of the next 11 countries combined.

Twenty-First-Century Blowback

In the back of my mind, while rereading his book, I kept wondering how else Chalmers might have updated it in 2022. And what came to mind repeatedly was that potentially ultimate subject, climate change.

Now, Chalmers certainly had a sense of the environmental damage the American empire was already causing, but climate change was not yet on his mind. Recently, to my surprise, I came across a passing reference to it in something I wrote but never published in the 1990s and was surprised I even knew about it then. Still, in this century, as I became ever more aware of it and wrote and published ever more about it at TomDispatch, I came to believe that it would indeed be potentially devastating for humanity. For years, though, I didn’t quite grasp that it would be so in my own lifetime.

Back then, I imagined it as largely a phenomenon of the future, not something for which you could find evidence in the news daily (whether identified as such or not). Yes, at some point I realized, for instance, that South Asia might be more susceptible to climate extremes than many other areas. Still, I hadn’t expected that I would live to see springtime weather with temperatures in the range of 115 to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, or that such horrific and, without air conditioning, increasingly deathly warmth would be followed by devastating flooding. Or that such extremes would grow more common so quickly.

Nor, honestly, had I expected a wave of record July temperatures (and humidity) here in the northeast U.S. and across much of my own country this very May (it hit 95 degrees on a recent day in Philadelphia!). Nor did I imagine that the Southwest and West would be embroiled in a megadrought the likes of which hasn’t been seen on this continent in at least 1,200 years, with devastating, often record-setting fires, blazing in New Mexico and elsewhere ever earlier in the year. Or the unprecedented severe drought *and* record flooding in parts of Brazil and Argentina. Or the staggering burning and flooding in Australia. Or the unparalleled floods in recent years in China, Germany, and other countries.

I hadn’t imagined that every spring I’d see more or less the same spring article predicting another terrible, if not record, Atlantic hurricane season. Or that I’d hear about a May hurricane of record strength hitting the Pacific coast of Mexico.

And of course, that’s just to start down what seems like an increasingly endless list. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned those three rare tornadoes in Germany or the record May heat wave in Spain, or… but why go on? You get the idea. In fact, you or people you know are undoubtedly living that very reality, too, in some daunting fashion — and at this moment, thanks to the war in Ukraine and endless other distractions, the world is only burning yet more fossil fuels promising so much worse to come.

To return to Chalmers Johnson, if you think about it for even 30 seconds, climate change has obviously become the greatest blowback event in human history — with almost unimaginably greater climate chaos likely to come.As he would undoubtedly have noted, if you’re living in the most significant blowback nation in human history, since no other country has put more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than the United States, you’re truly facing — to cite the subtitle of his book — “the costs and consequences of American empire” and, of course, of the imperial oil companies that continue to have such a hand in (mis)shaping our world.

Worse yet, in this century, that newest of imperial powers, China, has already outstripped this country in terms of the fossil-fuelization of this planet’s atmosphere. (Yet another classic case of imperial overstretch in the offing.)

Talk about decline! These days it almost seems to precede imperial rise. Yikes!

And so many years later, just to out-Chalmers the master himself, let me offer another prediction: if the Republicans sweep into Congress in 2022 and Blowback Donald or one of his act-alikes sweeps (or even creeps) into the White House in 2024, consider that the potential end of the American story, since it would ensure that, for years to come, nothing would be done to stop the ultimate version of blowback.

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2/22

Imagine that you were experiencing all of this (and by this, I mean our lives right now) as if it were a novel, à la Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. The famed author of Robinson Crusoe — Defoe claimed it had been written by the fictional Crusoe himself — was five years old in 1665. That was when a year-long visitation of the bubonic plague decimated London. It probably killed more than 100,000 of that city’s residents or 15% of its population. As for Defoe, he published his “journal” in 1722, 57 years later. He wrote it, however, as if he (or his unidentified protagonist) had recorded events as they were happening in the way that all of us, whatever our ages, have been witnessing the ravages of the many variants of Covid-19 in our own all-too-dismantled lives.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

Still, give Defoe credit. As a grown-up, he may not have lived through the worst version of a plague to hit that capital city since the Black Death of 1348. He did, however, capture much that, four centuries later, will seem unnervingly familiar to us, living as we are in a country savaged by a pandemic all our own. We can only hope that, 57 years from now, on a calmer planet, some twenty-first-century version of Defoe will turn our disaster into a memorable work of fiction (not that Louise Erdrich hasn’t already taken a shot at it in her new novel, The Sentence). Sadly, given so much that’s happening right now from the mad confrontation over Ukraine to the inability to stop this world from heating to the boiling point, that calmer future planet seems unlikely indeed.

Call me a masochist, but at 77, in relative isolation in New York City as the omicron variant of Covid-19 ran wild — hitting a peak here of 50,000 cases a day — I read Defoe’s novel. All too much of it seemed eerily familiar: stores shutting down, nightlife curtailed, people locked in their houses, others looking desperately to none-too-wise figures for any explanation but a reasonable one about what was happening to them. And so it went then and so it’s largely gone now.

I mean, a passage like this one on the way so many Londoners reacted to the plague should still ring a bell, no?

“…[N]ow led by their fright to extremes of folly… they ran to conjurers and witches, and all sorts of deceivers to know what should become of them (who fed their fears, and kept them always alarmed and awake on purpose to delude them and pick their pockets)… running after quacks and montebanks… for medicines and remedies; storing themselves with such multitudes of pills, potions, and preservatives, as they were called, that they not only spent their money but even poisoned themselves beforehand for fear of the poison of the infection.”

Hey, in our time, from key figures on the right we’ve heard far too much about what Defoe referred to, so many centuries ago and all too ironically, as “infallible preventive pills against the plague.” After all, our previous president recommended that Americans use the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine against Covid-19. (“‘I think people should [take hydroxychloroquine],’ he told reporters at a White House press briefing on Saturday. ‘If it were me, in fact, I might do it anyway. I may take it… I have to ask my doctors about that. But I may take it.'”) Similarly, Fox News and various Republicans continued to plug the use of the anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin, normally given to livestock, as a miracle cure. (Neither of those drugs was anything of the sort, of course.)

In a way, in these last two years, so many of us have felt almost Robinson Crusoe-like, stranded on our own islands in the middle of a hell on Earth. We are, it seems, whatever our ages, the Covid generation, living either in painful isolation or in shoulder-to-shoulder danger of the scariest kind. But here’s the even stranger thing: Defoe and his compatriots suffered only one terrifying illness, the bubonic plague, known in earlier years as the Black Death for the black sores or “buboes” it caused on necks, in armpits, and in the groin.

To my mind, there is one thing that makes us different. We’ve been suffering through not one, but two plagues or pandemics in this country. Anyone in a Defoe-like mood would, I suspect, have to write two journals of the plague years to cover this painfully all-American moment of ours.

In one, as in Defoe, a spreading, shape-shifting disease would be our common enemy. After all — and we may be anything but done — Covid-19 in all its variants has so far killed, by my rough estimate, one of every 300 Americans and, according to the New York Times, one of every 100 of us who is 65 or older. Though the official figure for deaths stands at a staggering 886,000 Americans and continues to rise by a couple of thousand a day, the real total is undoubtedly well over a million by now, in itself a stunning disaster.

And yet, in this same period, we’ve been living through another kind of pandemic as well. Think of it as a rabid political pandemic also ravaging the country and, worse yet, using the first pandemic as a kind of growth hormone.

Pandemic Two

Here’s the strange thing: Covid-19 has gotten in the way of so much that matters in our individual lives — from school to socializing to making a living — and yet, all too bizarrely, it’s changed so little that mattered, politically speaking, especially to the Trumpian part of America. Yes, sometimes it’s shut down much and shut off much else. Yet, ravaged by illness, the political world has, if anything, revved up in a remarkably disastrous fashion.

And for that, you can’t only blame the Republicans or the Trumpists among them. After all, it’s eerily true at the international level as well, with the Biden administration acting as if, in the midst of both that global pandemic and a round of unprecedented climate-change disasters, we were still on an all-too-familiar Cold War planet. The crisis in Ukraine? Honestly, you’d think we were back in the literal Cold War and that no pandemic had ever hit this world, as the Biden administration threatens to send more U.S. troops, ships, and planes to the very edges of the Soviet Union… whoops, sorry, I meant Vladimir Putin’s Russia. No matter that we’re no longer talking about possible war in distant Afghanistan or even Iraq, but in the European heartland and between nuclear-armed powers still being devastated by a disease whose ability to slaughter has, in this country, left the casualties of the Civil War in the dust of history.

Of course, after a fashion, we’ve experienced something like this before. To put this aspect of our lives in perspective, it’s worth remembering that, in a world long after Daniel Defoe’s but significantly earlier than ours, parts of humanity fought their way through the end of World War I undaunted by the great influenza, the pandemic of that moment, then sweeping the planet. It got its name, the “Spanish Flu,” ironically enough, from a country in Europe that remained neutral during that disastrous conflict and so was the first not to experience the plague, but to openly publish information about it which would, in the end, kill an estimated 50 million people worldwide!

Meanwhile, the America that delivered con man and bankuptee Donald Trump to the White House in 2016 has seemingly only been energized by the Covid disaster. So, think of the ongoing Trumpian movement as this country’s second pandemic. After all, the Republicans of the Trump era and their “base” seem all too ready to rather literally tear this country apart. That, over these last two years, has meant among other things fighting anyone who might try to deal in a reasonable fashion with the first pandemic (even, in an armed and dangerous fashion, with the governor of Michigan in response to her Covid lockdown measures).

From unmasking to refusing to be vaccinated, from ignoring social distancing to denouncing vaccine mandates, Trumpian America has taken up the pandemic as its issue du jour and run madly (and I do mean madly) with it, often followed by significant parts of the population. And mind you, it’s no happenstance that, during these Covid years, gun sales in this country, already high, soared to record levels,while gun violence seemed to reach pandemic heights all its own. Meanwhile, in the White House was a president who himself was a Covid superspreader, a leader who, on returning from a Covid-19 hospital stay, proudly ripped his mask off on a White House balcony. Meanwhile, increasingly armed right-wing militias and white nationalist groups like the Oath Keepers and the Boogaloo Boys are seeking to speed the way to a societal collapse.

Politically, as became clear indeed on January 6, 2021, our second pandemic has only continued to grow ever fiercer, ravaging this country in its own fashion. After all, in the wake of that striking attempt by militia members, white nationalists, and Trumpian supporters to destroy the U.S. Capitol (and most of those inside it), polls suggest that ever more Republicans have come to believe violence is a reasonable means, if not the only one, to make this country their own. Wild talk of everything from insurrection to civil war has only grown as the Republican Party in these years increasingly became, both in Congress and outside it, a cult of no.

Are More Variants on the Way?

And here’s the strangest thing of all, our two pandemics continue to mix and match ever more deeply and bizarrely at ever more levels. In the process, they’ve fed voraciously off each other. To see the way Covid-19 has all-too-literally fed off Trumpian America, you only have to check out the death rates in areas that voted for The Donald in 2020 versus those that voted for Joe Biden. On average, they’re almost three times as high. Worse yet, in the Trumpiest — that is, reddest — parts of the country, that figure is nearly six times as high. Keep in mind that we’re talking about dead Americans here. And in that context, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to know that, among Democrats, vaccination rates are far higher than among Republicans. Duh!

Meanwhile, on pandemic-related issues ranging from masking to social distancing, misinformation about Covid-19 to violent opposition to vaccine mandates, the second pandemic, the Trumpian one, has fed off the first in its own version of infecting America. The new Republican Party, its legislators and governors, have come to rely on issues like forbidding mask mandates in schools or vaccine mandates in businesses (or simply refusing to wear masks at all), while opposing almost any kind of shutdown vis-a-vis the pandemic to gain strength. And their power has increasingly been built on acts meant to enhance the lethal effects of Covid-19, which means that functionally they’ve been murderers. In other words, when it comes to the Republican Party and ever more of its followers, we’re talking about a violent cult of no that seems intent on taking this country apart at the seams.

In that context, there’s one obvious question to ask about either of the pandemics plaguing the United States right now: Do new variants lurk in our future? When it comes to Covid-19, we simply don’t know if omicron will sweep everything else away and, like the Spanish flu, become a milder ongoing endemic disease. Unfortunately, on a planet where the inhabitants of significant regions are still remarkably unvaccinated, the spawning of deadly new variants remains a real possibility and living in an ongoing pandemic world remains an all-too-conceivable future reality.

If only one could hope that the equivalent of the first option above was a significant possibility for our other pandemic — that it might recede into the national woodwork, becoming an endemic but relatively minor strain of American politics. However, there, as well, new variants seem all too imaginable. Of course, the present strain of it, whose heartland now lies in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, remains remarkably alive and well, heading into the elections of 2022 and 2024. It’s true that an aging Donald Trump, already booed at one of his own rallies last year for his position on vaccines, could end up ceding or losing election ground to a fiercer, younger version of himself like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, or some other variant we have yet to see.

All of this remains unknown. The only thing we can be sure of right now is that we live in an America ever more divided and devastated by those two pandemics. On an increasingly sickly planet, our future, in other words, remains up for grabs.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/harbingers-of-doom/

am agency pwr

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tom d an 1021

It was supposed to be the greatest transition of modern times.

Practically overnight, a dirty, inefficient, and unjust system that encompassed 11 time zones was to undergo an extreme makeover. Billions of dollars were available to speed the process. A new crew of transition experts came up with the blueprint and the public was overwhelmingly on board. Best of all, this great leap forward would serve as a model for all countries desperate to exit a failed status quo.

That's not what happened.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Russia emerged from its wreckage as the largest successor state, government officials in the newly elected administration of Boris Yeltsin teamed up with a cadre of foreign experts to chart a path into a post-Soviet system of democracy and free markets. The West offered billions of dollars in loans while the Russians generated more funds through the privatization of state assets. With all those resources, Russia could have become an enormous Sweden of the east.

Instead, much of that wealth disappeared into the pockets of newly minted oligarchs. During the 1990s, Russia suffered an economic catastrophe, with the equivalent of $20 to $25 billion leaving the country every year and the gross domestic product (GDP) falling nearly 40% between 1991 and 1998. The Soviet Union once had the second-largest economy on earth. Today, thanks only to a reliance on Soviet-era fossil-fuel and arms-export industries, Russia hovers just outside the top 10 in total economic output, ranking below Italy and India, but still manages only 78th place — that is, below Romania — in per-capita GDP.

The failures of the Russian transition can be chalked up to the collapse of empire, decades of economic decay, the vengeful triumphalism of the West, the unchecked venality of local opportunists, or all of the above. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss such a cautionary tale as a mere historic peculiarity.

If we're not careful, the Russian past could well become humanity's future: a transition bungled, a golden opportunity squandered.

After all, the world is now poised to spend trillions of dollars for an even more massive transition, this time from a similarly dirty, inefficient, and unjust economy based on fossil fuels to… what? If the international community somehow learns the lessons of past transitions, someday we will all live in a far more equitable, carbon-neutral world powered by renewable energy.

But don't bet on it. The world is slowly replacing dirty energy with renewables but without addressing any of the industrial-strength problems of the current system. It should remind us of the way the Russians replaced state planning with free markets, only to end up with the shortcomings of capitalism as well as many of the ills of the previous order. And that's not even the worst-case scenario. The transition might not happen at all or the decarbonization process could be so endlessly drawn out over decades as to be wholly ineffectual.

The proponents of Green New Deals promise win-win outcomes: solar panels and wind turbines will produce abundant energy cheaply, the climate crisis will abate, workers will leave dirty jobs for cleaner ones, and the Global North will help the Global South leapfrog into a gloriously Green future. In reality, however, transitions of such a scale and urgency have never been win-win. In the case of Russia's transition from communism, nearly everyone lost out, and the country is still suffering the consequences. Other large-scale transformations of the past — like the agrarian and industrial revolutions — were similarly catastrophic in their own ways.

In the end, perhaps a key part of the problem lies not just in the flawed status quo, but in the mechanism of transition itself.

Pyramids of Sacrifice

Transitions can have harsh, even genocidal consequences. Just ask the Neanderthals.

Oh, sorry, you can't. They were wiped out 40,000 years ago in the great transition to modern homo sapiens. Those early hominids left behind some bones, a few tools, and a small percentage of DNA in the contemporary human genome. Neanderthals might have died out because of inbreeding or due to climate change. More likely, they were killed off by our ancestors over thousands of years of conflict. Poor Neanderthals: they were among the eggs that had to be broken to make the omelet that's us.

The fate of the Neanderthals is extreme, but not unique. Whenever humans take a great leap forward, they tend to do so over an enormous pile of bones.

Take the agrarian revolution, which spelled the end for hunter-gatherers, except for those who survived in isolated areas like the Amazon rainforest. On the plus side, humanity received the gift of civilization in the form of politics, trade, and literacy. On the negative side, as anthropologist Jared Diamond argued in a famous 1999 Discover article, the Neolithic transformation spawned disease, malnutrition, and gross economic inequality. It was, Diamond concluded, "the worst mistake in the history of the human race."

Ten thousand years later, humanity might have committed the worst mistake in the history of the planet. Sure, the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century eventually led to extended lifespans, food enough to feed the world, and TikTok. But the application of modern science and engineering to economic affairs also set in motion a ruinous despoliation of the planet. More ominously, as everyone who has gazed at the "hockey-stick" graph of carbon emissions knows, the industrial revolution marked the first time that humans, perhaps irrevocably, began changing this planet's climate by burning fossil fuels at an ever more staggering rate.

The new religion of economic growth at any cost also exacted a human toll. Children were put to work in the "dark satanic mills" of the early factories; a new proletariat was consigned to lives nasty, brutish, and short; and millions died as colonialism cut a huge swath of destruction through the global south. The oligarchs of the time, enriched by plunder and exploitation, created a Gilded Age of astounding economic inequality that, despite the best efforts of trade unions and social democrats, has made a striking reappearance in our own Age of Billionaires.

Though critical of the cruelties of capitalism, communists turned out to worship the same god of economic growth. Leaders from Vladimir Lenin onward firmly believed that state-led modernization and coercive tactics would enable new communist states to out–produce any capitalist country. Yet, in telescoping decades of industrial modernization into a few short years, their efforts to surpass the West magnified the horrors visited upon local populations. The collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union in the 1930s led to around 10 million deaths, while the similar Great Leap Forward in China that began in 1958 cost the lives of as many as 45 million people. As the bodies piled up, the communist 1% — a new class of Party officials and their cronies — orchestrated their own personal leap forward.

For sociologist Peter Berger, communism and capitalism both adopted a "sacrificial" conception of development in which myths of "progress" and "growth" claimed their share of victims, much as Aztec priests had once used ritual murder to propitiate the gods and save their civilization. In his book Pyramids of Sacrifice, Berger writes that the "elite almost invariably legitimates its privileged position in terms of alleged benefits it is bestowing or getting ready to bestow upon 'the people.'" More often than not, however, these promised benefits accrue to the elite, not the masses.

Which brings us again to the "great transitions" of the 1990s, in which countries that had gone down the road to communism doubled back to take the turn-off for capitalism. The losses for Russia in the 1990s were nothing like the horrors of collectivization. Still, aside from a small number of people who made out like bandits, virtually all other Russians took a step backward as the costs of transition fell disproportionately on pensioners, blue-collar workers, and farmers. As a result, in the early 1990s, one-third of Russians dropped below the poverty line. Due to a combination of alcoholism and unemployment, the life expectancy of Russian men suffered an extraordinary decline from 63 years in 1990 to 58 years in 2000. Disillusionment with liberalization helped to boost popular support for Vladimir Putin, a politician who has skillfully capitalized on those thwarted hopes. Hisapproval ratings still remain relatively high so many years later, even though only 27% of Russians believe that their economic situation today is better than during Soviet times.

The rest of the former Soviet bloc suffered similar, though less severe, dislocations. In Poland, the first country to experiment with the "shock therapy" of an overnight transition to capitalism, the winners came to be known as Poland A, a younger, more well-educated, predominantly urban elite that successfully surfed the waves of change. Poland B — the older, less educated, more rural "losers" of that transition — would eventually exact their revenge at the ballot box by supporting the decidedly anti-liberal Law and Justice Party, which has ruled the country since 2015. Throughout the region, an Eastern Europe B has helped bring similar right-wing populists to power in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, and Slovenia.

Disenchantment with such liberal transitions notwithstanding, those countries benefited from something that wasn't available to Russia: the European Union (EU). A continuous flow of capital, and the provision of technical assistance on governance and the rule of law eventually enabled Eastern European countries to outperform their Russian neighbor. A large gap still separates much of Eastern Europe from the wealthier West, but the average Russian can only dream of the life of a second-class EU citizen.

Both of these experiences of transition offer valuable lessons for what may come next.

The Green New Deal

If you take the statements of the world's governments at face value, almost everyone is now treating climate change very seriously and nations globally are feeling the heat to declare carbon-neutrality by 2050 (or sooner). In August, articles about the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), emphasizing that global warming is "widespread, rapid, and intensifying," were accompanied by terrifying photos of its real-world effects: the wildfires in California and Siberia, the disastrous flooding in Germany and China, the record-setting temperatures in Canada and Sicily, and that's just to start down a list of climate disasters. Your head — or indeed, your entire body — would have had to be in the sand to ignore the emergency sirens going off all around you.

Nonetheless, despite such obvious warning signs of so much worse to come, the world has not, in fact, accelerated its pace of decarbonization. The next major climate-change conference is scheduled for Glasgow at the beginning of November, but the globe's leading economies are all still falling painfully short of the commitments they made in Paris nearly six years ago. More horrifying yet, the IPCC reports that, even if countries were meeting those commitments, they would, by 2030, result in a mere 1% reduction in carbon emissions from 2010 levels. To avoid the worst-case scenarios of an overcooked planet, those emissions would have to be cut by nearly 50% within the next nine years. Only a couple of countries are preparing for such a dramatic transformation.

The time for modest reforms is long past. A radical cut in carbon emissions can't be accomplished simply by banning drinking straws, ramping up production of electric cars, or even planting a billion trees. To meet the climate-change challenge will require a transformation comparable to the agrarian or industrial revolutions. But if those earlier system changes are guideposts, the losers of this next great leap forward will be legion.

Various "just transition" proposals are designed, at least on paper, to avoid such an enormous human toll. For a start, a "fair-share" approach would require the transfer of trillions of dollars to help the Global South keep fossil fuels in the ground while shifting to renewable energy. A similar approach within nations would provide the "losers of transition"– from coal miners to those on fixed incomes — with targeted assistance to "go green."

Alas, such an approach runs counter to current practices. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, for instance, the international community did not implement a "fair share" approach. The wealthiest countries largely cornered the market on vaccines, and poorer countries have had to rely on a trickle of handouts. Moreover, despite the unprecedented opportunity provided by the Covid crisis to begin to act on the next coming disaster, climate change, governments have generally failed to allocate recovery funds to finance any kind of major economic transformation. In the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan of 2021, for example, a mere $50 million went to environmental justice grants, while $8 billion went to airports. Similarly, fully one-tenth of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill now making its way (or not) through Congress is devoted to improvements to roads and bridges, which will only reinforce America's love affair with cars, SUVs, and trucks.

And where is the necessary shift of resources to the Global South to help with its transition? Back in 2009, rich countries had already promised to mobilize $100 billion for such climate financing by 2020. They're still $20 billion short and the assistance has come mostly in the form of loans, not grants, only deepening the dependence and indebtedness of the Global South.

Worse yet, richer countries have been at least modestly reducing their own carbon footprints at the expense of poorer countries by relocating polluting industries to the Global South or substituting carbon-intensive imports for domestic production of the same. Although China continues to boost its share of domestic renewable sources of energy, it's been financing 70% of all coal-fired power plants built globally (though its leader, Xi Jinping, recently pledged to end this practice). The European Union is actually phasing out coal power — which China is emphatically not doing — even as it continues to rely on high-carbon imports from coal-using countries like Russia, Turkey, Morocco, and Egypt.

To combat such a shift of carbon emissions from north to south — and protect its own less carbon-intensive industries — the European Union has proposed a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which penalizes imports of cement, fertilizer, steel, and the like based on the amount of carbon emitted in their production. HittingRussia the hardest, this tariff would indeed push that country toward a "greener" manufacturing process for its Europe-bound products. However, countries in the Global South that don't have the resources to upgrade their export industries would be left out in the cold.

This lack of resources in the Global South is compounded by debt. The poorest nations are devoting nearly $3 billion a month to servicing their debts, diverting resources that could otherwise go into a transformation of energy and industrial infrastructure. Bridging this divide would require large-scale debt forgiveness; equitable debt-for-climate swaps; or, more ambitiously, an Organization for Emergency Environmental Cooperation that would marshal trillions of dollars in public financing to pay for the entire world to transition to clean energy.

Here, the experience of Eastern Europe is relevant. The European Union's transfer of resources, training, and technology from west to east helped cushion the transition that so devastated Russia. Although not enough to prevent the rise of Eastern Europe B, the EU's modest generosity at least gestured toward the kind of solidarity economics that the Global North needs to adopt in any future climate negotiations with the Global South. If there is to be belt-tightening to shrink the global carbon footprint, those who can most afford to lose the weight should step forward.

Such schemes address the all-important question of equity. But there's an elephant in the room that's so far gone unmentioned. And that beast is only getting bigger.

A Rising Tide

All the major transformations of the past were predicated on rapid economic growth, whether the increasing food production of the agrarian revolution or the incorporation of the Soviet Union into the industrialized world through its Five-Year Plans. Most versions of the Green New Deal adhere to the same growth paradigm, with electric cars filling the roads and more sustainably produced widgets circulating through the global economy.

Even as richer countries promise to shrink their carbon footprints, however, they still imagine that they can maintain their overall way of life and export that lifestyle to the rest of the world. But this high-energy lifestyle of computers, air conditioners, and electric SUVs depends on the Global South. By one estimate, the Global North enjoys a $2.2 trillion annual benefit in the form of underpriced labor and commodities from there, an extraction that rivals the magnitude of the colonial era. Moreover, the cobalt and lithium necessary for batteries for electric cars, the gallium and tellurium in solar panels, the rare-earth elements needed for wind turbines are predominantly mined in the Global South and their extraction is likely to come at a huge environmental cost.

The high-growth assumptions of the current system reappear under the rubric of "Green growth," promulgated by old-style industrialists in new Green clothing. During the transition from communism in the 1990s, "red capitalists" were well-placed in the old system to profit under the new dispensation. Today, a class of "green capitalists" have similarly emerged to enjoy huge profits from the early days of a putatively post-carbon economy — Elon Musk in the world of electric cars, billionaires like Robin Zeng and Huang Shilin with lithium-ion batteries, and Aloys Wobben when it comes to wind turbines. Huge sums of money are now available for the sketchiest of projects, from "blue hydrogen" to the sea-bed mining of rare-earth minerals.

Big profits minus serious regulatory oversight equals the possibility of big-time malfeasance. Fraud was rampant in European wind farms in the 1990s, while renewable energy companies in the Global North have been implicated in bribery schemes in the Global South. The additional bonanza of Green funds through recovery, infrastructure, or transition programs — like the one-time financial resources made available by Russian privatization — could easily disappear into dubious private ventures, bureaucratic black holes, or the swamplands of corruption.

A rising tide, it was once said, would lift all boats: economic growth would lead to general prosperity. But a "rising tide" now has a different meaning in a climate-changing world. The planet can no longer support that kind of growth, whatever its color.

The next transformation must be different from its precursors when it comes to both economic expansion and social equity. We can't simply grow our way out of this predicament, nor should we sacrifice millions of human beings in the process. Despite the enormous economic and political gaps that separate people around the world, we have to somehow join hands across vast differences to leapfrog over the fossil-fuel economy. United we transform or united we fall.

Copyright 2021 John Feffer

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/trump-response/?rs=182

Now that we're all unmasking and the economy seems set to roar into the 2020s, what will we remember about how disastrously, how malignantly, the Trump administration behaved as the pandemic took hold? And will anyone be held to account for it?

The instinct to forget pandemics, as I've pointed out when it came to the 1918 "Spanish flu," has historically been strong indeed. In these years, the urge to forget official malfeasance and move on has, it turns out, been at least as strong. Washington's failure to investigate and bring to account those who led the nation and ultimately the world into the folly of the Iraq War may be the most egregious recent example of this.

In the end, that's why I wrote my new book Virus — to memorialize a clear and accessible historical record of the deliberate and deadly decision-making that swept us all into a kind of hell. I had the urge to try to stop what happened to us from being instantly buried in the next round of daily reporting or, as appears likely now, relegated to the occasional voluminous government or foundation report on how to do things better.

In the early months of 2020, as rumors of distant death morphed into announcements of an imminent pandemic, followed by a patchwork of state and local lockdowns, most Americans were too stunned by daily events to absorb the bigger picture. Memories of those days still click by like surreal snapshots: prepper shopping, toilet-paper hoarders, forklifts moving bodies into refrigerated trucks, and a capricious leader on TV night after endless night talking about quack cures, his own ratings, and how he "liked the numbers low." Meanwhile, he left desperate states to compete with each other for badly needed protective gear.

What looked like chaos or ad hoc decision-making by an improbably elected fraudster president was, in fact, deeply rooted in ideology; specifically, in the belief that the job of the government was neither to exercise leadership, nor activate government agencies to assist the American people. It was to promote private industry and its profits as the solution to anything and everything pandemic.

That ideology led to profiteering, politicized science, and mass death. Now, as the pandemic wanes (at least for the time being, though not necessarily for the unvaccinated) in this country, it deserves an investigation. Somewhere between almost 600,000 and more than 900,000 Americans have died so far from Covid-19, a significant number of those deaths unnecessary, as even the former administration's medical expert, Dr Deborah Birx, has said.

The virus arrived in America after the Trump administration — steered by right-wing Heritage Foundation policy wonks and their donor-class comrades — had already laid waste to key agencies like Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control. Their instant response to the pandemic was to similarly sideline government emergency-management experts, put inexperienced 20-something volunteers in charge of finding and distributing protective gear, and circulate lists of possible suppliers — one of whom, typically enough, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with no medical contracting experience, snagged a cool $86-million contract from the state of New York for ventilators he would never deliver.[// kodak?]

While most of the country hunkered down in a state of stunned paralysis, a faction of Trumpworld recognized the pandemic not for what it took away — human lives and livelihoods — but for what it offered. The chaos of the moment allowed them to road-test their dream system, to prove once and for all that the forces of supply and demand, the instinct to make a buck, could do a better job managing a natural disaster than the government of the United States and its bureaucrats.

Is any of this likely to be investigated? Will anyone be held accountable for what appears to have been a response deliberately mismanaged by religious zealots and crony capitalists, crews equally cynical about expertise, science, and the government's ability to prevent or ameliorate disaster?

What We Don't Know About the Trump Pandemic Disaster

Here, as a start, is a rundown of where inquiries into that disaster now stand.

Buried in the alphabet soup of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act is the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), established in March 2020 to keep track of the federal money (by now $5.5 trillion) that was to be spent on the pandemic. It's a consortium of agency inspector generals, headed by Michael Horowitz, a career Department of Justice lawyer. His name will be familiar to anyone who followed the Trump-Russia investigations. He produced a report in 2019 that — to the dismay of Trump's supporters — failed to conclude that the FBI had begun investigating connections between Vladimir Putin's Russia and the Trump campaign without legal cause and as a political dirty trick.

PRAC is authorized to conduct oversight of pandemic-related emergency spending of any sort. Its inspector generals have already issued nearly 200 pandemic-related oversight reports and charged 474 people with trying to steal more than $569 million. (Details in its quarterly reports are available online.)

While PRAC has been genuinely nonpartisan in its acts, its focus so far has been on the small fry of the pandemic era, not the truly big fish. In its most recent semi-annual report, for example, it makes clear that 55% of its charges had to do with fraud in the Paycheck Protection Program and 40% were related to fraudulent unemployment assistance claims. Among the bigger PRAC successes: charging a Texas man in a $24-million Covid-relief fraudulent loan scheme last October and seven men in another fraud scheme in which they used their ill-gotten pandemic gains to buy, among other things, a Porsche and a Lamborghini.

The CARES Act also authorized the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to monitor the federal response to the pandemic. Its most recent semi-annual report included 16 recommendations in selected public-health areas like testing, vaccines, and therapeutics, only one of which has so far been implemented. A source at the GAO told me that a report on some contracting irregularities can be expected this summer.

So far, such government self-assessments have shown little appetite for dealing with the true cronyism, profiteering, and disastrous politicization of the federal pandemic response by Trump's minions. Among the schemes begging for a deeper look is Operation Airbridge. Led by the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, it was an attempt to use federal funds to underwrite the air-shipping costs of private companies in an effort to speed the delivery of the kinds of personal protective equipment that were in such short supply last spring. That unorthodox effort included large no-bid contracts granted to a small group of private health-care companies without restrictions on pricing or even on where the desperately needed products were to be delivered.

In the spring of 2020, as hospital workers began popping up on social media and network news programs clad only in garbage bags and makeshift or reused face masks, sometimes in tears and pleading for help, the White House maintained its focus on private enterprise as the way out of the disaster. The administration called for volunteers to staff what would become another public/private bonanza, the White House Covid-19 Supply Chain Task Force, also helmed by Trump family fixer, Jared Kushner.

We don't know what, if anything, Kushner's group actually accomplished. The audacity of the former administration's disregard for federal rules and regulations coupled with the scale of the no-bid contracts they issued certainly attracted political pushback at the time. Democrats and civil-society groups in Washington filed requests for more information about how such contracts had eluded federal guidelines, and where the supplies actually went.

It's possible, however, that we may never know.

Ventilating Money

In April 2020, a group of Democratic senators led by Elizabeth Warren, citing the administration's secrecy, opened an investigation into the operation. They sent a letter to the six Operation Airbridge beneficiary health-care giants — Cardinal Health, Concordance, Henry Schein, McKesson, Medline, and Owens & Minor — requesting explanations for reports of "political favoritism, cronyism, and price-gouging" in the ongoing supply effort. "Taxpayers have shelled out tens of millions of dollars on this secretive project and they deserve to know whether it actually helped get critical supplies to the areas most in need," Warren said that June.

Three of the six suppliers did, in the end, give the senators copies of memorandums of agreement (MOAs) indicating that they "had complete discretion about how to distribute supplies across hotspot counties" and that "nothing in the MOAs appears to prevent a supplier from sending all of its supplies designated for hotspots to just a single customer in one of the hotspots." The government hadn't, in fact, put any kind of conditions on the cost for that protective equipment and the Trump Justice Department would insist that it was none of its business how suppliers arrived at the prices they charged for it.

Using taxpayer funds to grease private enrichment was, of course, a Trump family tradition, going back to the Eisenhower years when Donald's father, Fred, fleeced the government of millions of dollars in loans aimed at housing World War II veterans. Hauled down to Capitol Hill to explain himself, the New York builder was unrepentant, arguing that a loophole in the law allowed for his private gain and, under such circumstances, only a fool would have left all that money on the table.

What, from the outside, came to look like White House-inspired chaos — of which Operation Airbridge was just one example — should, in fact, be seen as a deliberate effort to disengage the federal government and leave the blame and the logistics problems to Covid-afflicted states, at the time mostly run by Democrats.

On March 24, 2020, for instance, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo begged the federal government to help get more ventilators for what was clearly going to be a surge of coronavirus patients. (New York City's health-care system was already overwhelmed by then.) At the time, hooking patients up to ventilators seemed like the best way to go, though doctors later realized that, for many patients, the tricky disease could be foiled earlier with anticlotting and steroid medication.

"How can you have New Yorkers possibly dying because they can't get a ventilator?" asked Cuomo. Three days later, Trump tweeted, "General Motors must… start making ventilators, now! Ford, get going on ventilators, fast!"

Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer for tech firms like Google, tweeted back at the president, "We can supply ICU ventilators, invasive and non-invasive." Within days, he turned up on a list vetted by Kushner's team of volunteers and, at their recommendation, officials in New York closed a deal with him.

The only problem: Oren-Pines had no ventilators and had never been in the medical supply business. When he failed to deliver on the $86 million deal, Wells Fargo froze his account and New York canceled the order, demanding the money back, though by summer 2020, it had yet to collect a final $10 million.

The Great Forgetting?

In addition to making various large or politically well-connected health-care companies far wealthier, the administration also lavished staggering billions on a small group of Big Pharma firms for Operation Warp Speed, the project it backed to develop vaccines and medicines to treat Covid-19. Those contracts, too, were written outside normal government channels and the companies themselves were chosen by a panel of industry insiders without any oversight. Many of them stood to (and did) profit from the soaring stock prices of those firms when the news about clinical trial successes was released.

In November 2020, to launch an investigation into that situation, Senator Warren teamed up with Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) to request copies of all federal contracts for Covid-19 therapeutics and vaccines. "The American people," they stated, "deserve to know that the federal government is using their tax dollars to develop Covid-19 medical products at the best possible price for the public — not to line the pockets of wealthy companies by cutting corners in consumer protection, pricing, and quality."

Warren raised questions about a Department of Health and Human Services deal with Gilead Sciences for the pandemic therapeutic remdesivir (part of the "cocktail" of drugs administered to Donald Trump and other Republican insiders like Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani when they got Covid). HHS had indeed acquired a large supply of remdesivir at an exorbitant cost to American taxpayers and Gilead itself would charge American hospitals $3,200 per treatment for it, $860 more than its price in other developed countries.

In addition to Warren, who sent a letter to the administration requesting information on HHS's pricing negotiations with Gilead for the drug, other people also stood up. Whistleblower Dr. Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA), for instance, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that Dr. Robert Kadlec, a Trump HHS political appointee, had engaged in multiple schemes to funnel contracts to politically connected companies — and that this had begun even before the pandemic was even a reality. According to Bright, Kadlec then pushed him out of the government, despite the fact that federal law officially protects whistleblowers.

In his complaint, among other things, Bright alleged that in 2017, a Kadlec friend and Big Pharma consultant pressured the agency to maintain a contract with a company owned by a friend of Jared Kushner's, even after an independent review determined it should be cancelled. Bright testified before Congress, and the fate of his whistleblower suit remains to be litigated.

As for the rest of the inquiries, so far, money and power appear to have eluded the investigators. It's unclear whether Senator Warren's and Representative Porter's requests met with any response from the former administration, or even whether they've continued their inquiry into Big Pharma and no-bid contracting. They have made no further announcements and neither office replied to requests for updates.

You won't be surprised to learn, I'm sure, that the name "Jared Kushner" is so far not to be found in GAO or PRAC reports.

The best chance for public accountability — if not legal liability — might be the House of Representatives, especially its Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, launched in April 2020.The Trump administration blew off its subpoenas for former HHS Secretary Alex Azar and then-CDC Director Robert Redfield to testify in December 2020, and blocked documents and witnesses related to politicized data, testing, and supply shortages, among other areas of inquiry. But the subcommittee did manage to expose emails from Trump political appointees, revealing efforts to skew CDC data. It is also investigating some whopping no-bid or sole-contractor deals that the former administration cut with preferred businesses. One was a $354-million four-year contract awarded on a non-competitive basis to PHLOW, which was incorporated in January 2020 to manufacture generic medicines to fight Covid. It's the largest contract ever awarded by BARDA and includes a 10-year option worth $812 million.

And the House has continued to seek transparency. According to a Brookings House Oversight Tracker, as of March 2021, 30% of congressional oversight letters and 40% of its hearings were related to the federal government's pandemic response. But there are signs that the Biden administration, while more cooperative, is not eager to force agencies to comply with requests the previous administration ignored.

My sense is that the emergency created by the insurrection at the Capitol last January and the desperate need of the new Biden administration to have palpable policy achievements in order to do well in election 2022 has taken the steam out of any inclination to dig deeper into the profiteering, cronyism, political scheming, and chaos with which the Trump administration met the Covid-19 virus. It went far deeper than an article like this can possibly indicate, leaving so many hundreds of thousands of potentially unnecessary deaths in its wake.

Think of it as a memory hole, still brimming with schemes and money.

Copyright 2021 Nina Burleigh

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the 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.

Nina Burleigh**, aTomDispatch regular, is a journalist of American politics and the author of six previous books. Her seventh, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic (just published by Seven Stories Press) is a real-life thriller that delves into the official malfeasance behind America's pandemic chaos and the triumph of science in an era of conspiracy theories and contempt for experts.

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post 1/6 vets

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/america-goes-to-war/

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/market

war of the world

...

Remember that, long before Covid-19 hit, the financial crisis of 2008 was met by a multi-trillion-dollar Wall Street bailout. At the same time, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to zero, while purchasing U.S. Treasury and mortgage bonds from the very banks that had sparked the disaster. Its own assets then rose from $870 billion to $4.5 trillion between August 2007 and August 2015.

On the other hand, the U.S. economy never quite reached a growth level of, on average, more than 2% annually in the years after that near collapse, even as the stock market regained all its losses and so much more. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, aided by an ultra-loose monetary policy, steadily rose from a financial-crisis low of 6,926 on March 5, 2009 to 27,090 by March 4, 2020, which was when Covid-19 briefly trashed its rally.

However, within a month of the market dip that followed widespread shutdowns, its climb was refortified by similar but larger maneuvers, as Federal Reserve policy was once again deployed to save the rich under the auspices of saving the economy. Rally 2.0 took the Dow to a new record of 30,606.48 as 2020 closed.

On the other side of reality, I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that, according to recent Federal Reserve reports, the U.S. wealth gap continued to widen dramatically as economic inequality increased yet again in 2020 thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. That's because the health and economic devastation it inflicted affected low-wage service workers, low-income earners, and people of color so much more than the upper-middle class and elite upper class.

Meanwhile, as 2020 ended, the richest 10% of Americans owned more than 88% of the outstanding shares of companies and mutual funds in the U.S. The top 1% also controlled more than 88 times the wealth of the bottom 50% of Americans. Simply put, the less you had, the less you could afford to lose any of it. Indeed, the combined net worth of the top 1% of Americans was $34.2 trillion (about one-third of all U.S. household wealth), while the total for the bottom half was $2.1 trillion (or 1.9% of that wealth).

And yet, American billionaires scored monumentally during the pandemic,due particularly to their lofty position in the stock market. The planet's 2,200 or so billionaires got wealthier by $1.9 trillion in 2020 alone and were worth about $11.4 trillion in mid-December 2020 (up from $9.5 trillion a year earlier). Twenty-first-century tycoons like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos raked it in specifically because of all the money pouring into shares of their stock. Even bipartisan congressional stimulus measures meant for necessary relief turned into a chance to elevate fortunes at the highest echelons of society.

If you want to grasp inequality in the pandemic moment, consider this: while the market soared, more than 25.5 million Americans were the recipients of federal unemployment benefits. The S&P 500 stock market index added a total of $14 trillion in market value in 2020. In essentially another universe, the number of people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic and didn't regain them was about 10 million. And that figure doesn't even count people who can't go to work because they have to take care of others, their workplace is restricted, or they're home-schooling their kids.

The Martians and the Inequality Gap

In The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells evokes a species — humanity — rendered helpless in the face of a force greater than itself and beyond its control. His depiction of the grim relationship between the Martians and the humans they were suppressing (meant to remind readers of the relationship between British imperialists and those they suppressed in distant lands) cast an eerie light on the power and wealth gap in Great Britain and around the world at the turn of the twentieth century.

The book was written in the Gilded Age, when rapid economic growth, particularly in the United States, bred a new class of "robber barons." Like the twenty-first-century version of such beings, they, too, made money from their money, while the economic status of workers slipped ever lower. It was an early version of a zero-sum game in which the spoils of the system were increasingly beyond the reach of so many. Those at the top ferociously accumulated wealth, while the majority of the rest of the population barely got by or drowned.

A crisis of inequality had been sparked by the Industrial Revolution itself, which started in England and then crossed the Atlantic. By the late nineteenth century, America's "robber barons" were insanely wealthy. As economist Thomas Piketty wrote, there was a steeper increase in wealth inequality during the Gilded Age than ever before in American history. In 1810, the top 1% of Americans held 25% of the country's total wealth; between 1870 and 1910 that share leapt to 45%.

Today, the top 1% of Americans possess more wealth than the whole of the middle class, a phenomenon first true in 2010 and still the reality of our moment. By 2018, about 75% of the $113 trillion in aggregate U.S. household assets were financial ones; that is, tied up in stocks, ETF's, 401Ks, IRAs, mutual funds, and similar investments. The majority of nonfinancial assets in that mix was in real estate.

Its ultra-loose policies made it cheaper to borrow money, but not as attractive to invest it in low-interest-rate, less risky securities like Treasury bonds. As a result, the Fed incentivized those with extra money to grow it through quicker, often riskier investments in the stock market or real estate. By 2020, there were bidding wars for suburban houses by urbanites seeking refuge from coronavirus-stricken cities with all-cash offers, something beyond the reach of most traditional buyers.

Even before the pandemic, only the richest 20% of American households had recovered fully (or, in the case of the truly wealthy, more than fully) from the financial crisis. That's mostly because since that crisis, fewer households had participated in the stock market or owned real estate and so had no chance to capitalize on increases in the values of either.

Much of the appreciation in stock market and real-estate values has been directly or indirectly related to the Fed's actions. By the end of December 2020, its balance sheet had increased by $3.164 trillion, reaching a total of $7.35 trillion, 63% more than its book at the height of the decade following the 2008 disaster.

Though Congress passed two much-needed Covid-related stimulus packages that extended unemployment benefits, while offering two one-off payments and a Paycheck Protection Program support for smaller businesses, the impact of those acts paled in comparison to the tax breaks and power of investment the stock market provided the well-off and corporate kingpins.

While markets leapt to record highs, poverty in the United States also rose last year from 9.3% in June to 11.7% in November 2020. That added nearly eight million Americans to the ranks of the poor, even as America's 659 billionaires held double the wealth of the 165 million poorest Americans.

The Martians Are Here

The gap between incoming and outgoing federal funds rose, too. The U.S. deficit increased by $3.3 trillion during 2020. The size of the public debt issued by the Treasury Department reached $27.5 trillion. Total federal revenue was $3.45 trillion, while the corporate tax part of that was just $221 billion, or a paltry 6.4%. What that means is that in an ever more unequal America, 93.6% of the money flowing into the government's till comes from individuals, not corporations.

And though many larger and mid-size corporations filed for bankruptcy protection due to coronavirus related shutdowns, the brunt of absolute closures hit smaller local businesses — from restaurants to hair salons to health-and-wellness shops — much harder, only exacerbating economic disparity at the community level.

In other words, the real problem when it comes to inequality isn't the total amount of taxes received versus money spent in a time of crisis, but the composition of federal revenue that's wildly out of whack (something the pandemic has only made worse). Take the defense sector, for example. The U.S. government doled out $738 billion to the Pentagon for fiscal year 2020. The contracts to defense-related private companies in the last year for which data was available, fiscal year 2018, totaled roughly 62% of a full defense budget of $579 billion, or $358 billion. Now imagine this: that amount alone dwarfed the total of all corporate taxes flowing into the U.S. Treasury in 2019.

....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/american-empire/

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sliding toward apocalypse: There's no returning to normal after Trump

John Feffer TomDispatch

November 15, 2020

Imagine for a moment that Hillary Clinton had won the presidential election in 2016.

Imagine, in other words, that the "blue wall" of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had held firm four years ago. Claiming election fraud, Donald Trump...

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/climate-change-future/

war burkina fasso, [tigre ...] more drown meditt

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an 1120

vote for doom: Trump is defeated — but the state of chaos remains

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10/20 tom disp failled state US

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/donald-trump-response/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/a-vote-for-the-apocalypse

tom E

It was August 2017 and Donald Trump had not yet warmed up to Kim Jong-un, North Korea's portly dictator. In fact, in typical Trumpian fashion, he was pissed at the Korean leader and, no less typically, he lashed out verbally, threatening that country with a literal hell on Earth. As he put it, "They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen." And then, just to make his point more personally, he complained about Kim himself, "He has been very threatening beyond a normal state."

Only a year and a half later, our asteroidal president would, of course, say of that same man, "We fell in love." Still, that threat by an American leader to — it was obvious — launch a nuclear strike for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nearly obliterated in August 1945 was memorable. The phrase would, in fact, become the title of a 2018 bestselling book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," by journalist Michael Wolff. Two years later, amid so many other threatening phrases from this president, "fire and fury" has, however, been left in history's dustbin, largely forgotten by the world.

"This is not an act of God"

Too bad, since it seems so much more relevant now that California, Oregon, and Washington, not to speak of a Southwest already officially in a "megadrought," have experienced the sort of apocalyptic fire and fury (and heat and smoke) that has turned daytime skies an eerie nighttime orange (or yellow or even purple, claims a friend of mine living in the San Francisco Bay Area). We're talking about a fire and fury that's forced cars to put on their headlights at noon; destroyed towns (leaving only armed right-wing militants behind amid the flames to await imagined Antifa looters); burned millions of acres of land, putting hundreds of thousands of Americans under evacuation orders; turned startling numbers of citizens into refugees under pandemic conditions; and crept toward suburbs and cities, imperiling the world as we've known it.

In the wake of the hottest summer on record in the Northern Hemisphere,we are, in other words, talking about the sort of apocalyptic conditions that the president undoubtedly had in mind for North Korea back in 2017, but not even faintly for the U. S. of A; we're talking, that is, about a burning season the likes of which no one in the West has ever seen before, a torching linked to the overheating of this planet thanks to the release of fossil-fuel-produced greenhouse gasses in ever greater quantities. In fact, as Washington Governor Jay Inslee pointed out recently, we shouldn't even be talking about "wildfires" anymore, but about "climate fires" whose intensity has already outpaced by years the predictions of most climate scientists. (Or, as Inslee put it, "This is not an act of God. This has happened because we have changed the climate of the state of Washington in dramatic ways.")

Significant hunks of the American West have now been transformed into the natural equivalent of furnaces, with fires even reaching the suburban edges of Portland, Oregon (which, for days, had the worst air quality of any major urban area on the planet), and promising a future in which cities will undoubtedly be swept up in such conflagrations, too. Admittedly, Donald Trump didn't threaten to launch "fire and fury like the world has never seen" against Portland (though he did send federal agents there to snatch peaceful protesters off its streets and continues to insult and threaten that city's mayor). If anything, as the fires scorched those states to a crisp, he did his best to avoid the subject of the burning West, as in these years more generally he's largely treated climate change (that "hoax") like... well, a pandemic that should be ignored while America stayed "open."

And it's not a subject he's been grilled on much either, not until recently when Western governors began laying into him over his stance on climate change. To offer just one example, as far as I can tell, Bob Woodward, the Washington Post editor and court chronicler of presidents who, for months, had unparalleled access to Trump and grilled him on so many subjects, never bothered to ask him about the most important, most dystopian, most apocalyptic future Americans face. And mainstream Democrats didn't do much better on the subject while those fires were building to a crescendo until Joe Biden finally called the president a "climate arsonist." He added, aptly enough, "If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?"

There's no question that, at the beck and call of the fossil-fuel industry, Donald Trump and his demonic crew have worked without qualms or remorse to ensure that this would be a fiery and furious America. Freeing that industry of restrictions of every sort,withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, opening up yet more areas for oil drilling, wiping out environmental safeguards, and even (at the very moment when the West was burning) appointing a climate-science denier to a top position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the president and his crew proved themselves to be pyromaniacs of the first order.

Of course, the heating of this planet has been intensifying for decades now. (Don't forget, for instance, that Barack Obama presided over a U.S. fracking boom that left people referring to us as "Saudi America.") Still, this president and his top officials have put remarkable energy (so to speak) into releasing yet more carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. And here's the strange thing: they made it deep into the present apocalyptic moment in the West without — Greta Thunberg and climate change protesters aside — being held faintly accountable for their urge to fuel the greatest danger humanity faces other than nuclear weapons. In fact, as is increasingly obvious from the torching of the West, what we're beginning to experience is a slow-motion version of the nuclear apocalypse that Trump once threatened to loose on North Korea.

In an all-too-literal fashion, The Donald is indeed proving to be history's "fire and fury" president.

And don't for a moment think that there was no warning about the over-the-top burning now underway in this country. After all, in 2019, parts of Australia were singed to a crisp in a way never before seen, killing at least 25 humans and possibly more than a billion animals. And that country, too, was headed by a climate-change denier, a man who once brought a piece of coal to parliament and handed it around while soothingly telling other legislators, "Don't be afraid, don't be scared." In addition, in recent years, the Arctic (of all places) has been smoking and burning in an unprecedented fashion, heating its permafrost and releasing staggering amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Oh, and this June, the temperature in a small town in Siberia crossed the 100-degree mark for the first time.

By the way, Russia, too, is run by a leader who until recently was a climate denier.I mean, what is it about the urge of so many of us in such a crisis to support those dedicated to quite literally destroying this planet as a livable place for... well, us? (Hey there, Jair Bolsonaro!)

Our very own firenado

An almost unimaginable near-half-century ago on a different planet, I lived in San Francisco. I can still remember the fog rolling in daily, even during summer in one of the coolest, breeziest cities around. Not this year, though. On September 6th, for instance, the temperature there broke 100 degrees, "crushing" the previous record for that day. In Berkeley, across the Bay, where I also once lived long, long ago, it hit 110. As a heat wave swept the state (and the West), temperatures near Los Angeles soared to a record-breaking 121 degrees (almost challenging overheated Baghdad, Iraq, this year), while reaching 130 degrees in the aptly named Death Valley— and that's just to start down a list of soaring temperatures across the West from the Canadian to the Mexican borders.

As those fires filled the skies with smoke and ash, turning day into the eeriest of nights, a smoke cloud the likes of which had never before been seen appeared over the coastal West. Meanwhile, firenadoes were spotted and the ash-filled air threatened terrible things for health. As has been true for the last 46 years, I'm thousands of miles away from my old Bay Area haunts. Still, I regularly check in with friends and TomDispatchauthors on that coast, some aged like me and locked in their homes lest the smoke and ash, the air from hell, do them in. Meanwhile, their cars are packed to go, their evacuation checklists ready.

My heart goes out to them and, really, to all of us (and, above all, to those to whom we oldsters will be leaving such a blazing, tumultuous world).

Sadly, among the endless scandals and horrors of the Trump era, the greatest one by far scandalized all too few for all too long among those who officially matter on this beleaguered planet of ours. Even in 2016, it should have been obvious enough that a vote for Donald Trump was a vote for the apocalypse. Give him credit, though. He made no secret of that fact or that his presidency would be a fossil-fueled nightmare. It was obvious even then that he, not climate change, was the "hoax" and that this planet would suffer in unique ways from his (ad)ministrations.

And in every way imaginable, Donald Trump delivered as promised. He's been uniquely fiery and furious. In his own fashion, he's also been a man of his word. He's already brought "fire and fury" to this country in so many ways and, if he has anything to say about it, he's just gotten started.

Don't doubt for a second that, should he be losing on November 3rd (or beyond, given the mail-in vote to come), he'll declare electoral fraud and balk at leaving the White House. Don't doubt for a second that he'd be happy to torch that very building and whatever, at this point, is left of the American system with it before he saw himself "lose."

Since he is, in his own fashion, a parody of everything: a politician, a Republican, an autocrat, even a human being, he sums up in some extreme (if eerily satiric) fashion human efforts to destroy our way of life in these years. In truth, fiery and furiously fueled, he's a historic cloud of smoke and ash over us all.

By his very nature, to use those 2017 nuclear words of his, he is "threatening beyond a normal state." Think of him as the president from hell and here I mean a literal hell. Four more years of him, his crew, and the fossil-fuelized criminals running the major oil, gas, and coal companies who are riding his coattails into profit heaven and planetary misery are the cast of a play, both comedy and tragedy, that none of us should have to sit through. He's our very own firenado and — it's not complicated — four more years of him will consign us to a hell on Earth of a sort still only faintly imaginable today.

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Why Trump is so eager to bring back professional sports

President Donald J. Trump waves to the crowd after participating in pre-game ceremonies Saturday, Dec. 8, 2018, at the Army-Navy NCAA College football game at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

Written by Robert Lipsyte / TomDispatch April 23, 2020

As controversies about the “reopening” of America loom over our lives, nothing seems as intrinsically irrelevant — yet possibly as critically important — as how soon major spectator sports return.

If sports don’t trump religion as the opiate of the masses, they have, until recently, been at least the background music of most of our lives. So here’s my bet on one possible side effect of the Covid-19 pandemic to put in your scorebook: if the National Football League plays regular season games this fall, President Trump stands a good chance of winning reelection for returning America to business as usual — or, at least, to his twisted version of the same.

That’s why he announced at a recent daily coronavirus briefing-cum-rally his eagerness to bring professional sports back quickly. Though it was Major League Baseball that he mentioned — “We have to get our sports back. I’m tired of watching baseball games that are 14 years old” — the sport that truly matters to him is football, the only major mass entertainment (other than Trumpism) that endorses tribalism and toxic masculinity so flagrantly and keeps violence in vogue. Football supports Trump in its promotion of racial division, the crushing of dissent, and the spread of misinformation, inequality, and brutality.

Whether or not the president can survive the loss of the 2020 baseball season — already poisoned by last year’s Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal — is up for grabs. Certainly, the proposed plan to turn stadiums in the Phoenix, Arizona, area into the sports equivalent of a vast movie set for the games of all 30 major league teams (to be played without fans) seems far-fetched at best.

But football, now the true national pastime, is another matter.

In sports terms, as in so much else in coronaviral America, these are desperately deprived times, even for casual fans. There will be intense pressure — and not only from the president’s base — for that sport’s return. For many people, mostly men, it’s the sustaining soap opera that has always carried them into the next week and the one after that, a porn-ish escape hatch from work and family, a currency of communication with other men, an eternal connection to a non-demanding hive.

Games for Lives?

Without professional (or even college) sports right now or realistically in the near future, fans feel even more unmoored in lives that, for all of us, are distinctly adrift. As they become edgier, it’s a reasonable bet (or at least my hope) that they will also become more open to questioning Trump’s mismanagement — or, to put it more bluntly, sacrifice — of their lives. Recent polls already seem to reflect this, with the latest Gallup Poll showing the steepest approval decline of his presidency.

The president, I suspect, fears just this, though perhaps, in the end, the hole in everyday life where sports once was may only reinforce fans’ sense (like the president’s) that the games are too important not to bring back, safety be damned. Certainly, Trump and other Republican politicians have already been willing enough to forfeit lives to boost their reelection chances.

The values and sensibilities of football are, of course, Trumpist in nature. That’s why former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s demonstration against racism — performed in a kind of public isolation — elicited such a harsh reaction from the president in the now-distant pre-pandemic era. That’s why the sport’s billionaire owners, predominantly Trump donors, shunned Kaepernick (although some of their teams could have used his skills). They didn’t dare to, or care to, give him another platform, not in an era when “president” and “racism” were becoming synonymous.

Even more tellingly, in an understandable but still disappointing me-first display, few of Kaepernick’s fellow players, most of whom are also African-American, supported him publicly. After years of being celebrated as America’s “warriors” and “role models,” they came up desperately short when it counted. Compare them to healthcare workers and other front-line heroes of this pandemic and you’ll realize just how far short they fell of even the most modest form of everyday bravery.

Not that, when it comes to pro sports, football was such an outlier. As activism goes, baseball, a sport that once produced transcendent progressive heroes like Jackie Robinson, Jim Bouton, and Curt Flood, has been eerily quiet in recent years. It’s a sport that the president has paid relatively little attention to — except for suggesting recently that Pete Rose, banned from baseball for life for betting on the Cincinnati Reds while he was that team’s manager, should be allowed into its Hall of Fame.

How Trumpian was that? Such betting is, of course, strictly forbidden for active players and managers who are obviously privy to inside information. But, hey, does disregarding inconvenient rules to profit from a privileged position ring any bells these days in Washington?

Trump has, in fact, been uncharacteristically silent on the recent revelation that during the 2017 season, the World Series winners, the Houston Astros, concealed a video camera in center field to steal the pitching signs of opposing teams. That’s also illegal. Major League baseball punished the team by suspending its manager and general manager for a year, imposing a $5 million fine on its owners, and taking away its first- and second-round draft picks in 2020 and 2021.

For some fans and commentators, the Astros’ punishment was too severe or too mild. Opposing players, feeling victimized by the scheme, thought specific Astros should have been penalized, too. Yet such cheating is hardly new. In 1951, the “shot heard round the world,” a famed home-run that won the National League pennant for the New York Giants and sent them to the World Series, was linked to the stealing of signs from the Brooklyn Dodgers through a hand-held telescope. Only the technology has improved.

A Changing National Pastime

Once baseball’s opening day passed without a pitch this April, proof that the plague was winning, the Phoenix Plan was floated. It would require all major league players and employees to be sequestered in that area and continually tested at a moment when tests might still not be universally available. But, hey, haven’t VIP Jocks always gone to the head of the line? (Actually, a massive study of 10,000 Major League Baseball employees, from players to popcorn vendors, being conducted by Stanford University and the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory to find out how many contracted and may have recovered from the virus has already gotten access to such testing kits at a time when even some front-line workers can’t get them!)

For those who think this country needs baseball now to raise its depressed spirits, you might consider a cautionary historical precedent, the Summer of Swat of 1998. As the country reeled from the revelation of President Bill Clinton’s sexual liaison with a White House intern and with his impeachment just around the corner, a feel-good legend was born. A white man and a brown man rose in friendly rivalry to break the 37-year-old record of 61 home runs by Roger Maris, who, in turn, had bested Babe Ruth’s famed 60 in 1927.

The good-natured competition between Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals (who won with 70 homers) and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs (66) was, at the time, celebrated as a balm that should soothe the country. And perhaps for many fans it did indeed serve as a comforting distraction in a difficult political moment.

But that summer’s golden glow soon faded as both players were reported to have taken steroids to muscle up. McGwire would admit it years later; Sosa would not. (A dark-skinned Dominican, he further complicated his legend by bleaching his skin to whiten himself, as if in anticipation of the Trumpian racial preferences to come.) Their contemporary, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, would eventually become the single-season home run leader with 73, but has never shaken rumors that he, too, used steroids.

Nor did baseball ever fully recover its sense of primacy as the national pastime or its sense of righteousness as one of America’s first major institutions to integrate. In fact, the sport is still overwhelmingly white and skewed toward an older audience, as well as slow and outdated in an era of tweeting speed.

Which is why, whether or not baseball opens this season in a vast sports self-isolation experiment, the key to President Trump’s future lies in his perverse relationship with the National Football League. That goes back more than 30 years to the moment he tried unsuccessfully (as with so many other business ventures) to elbow his way into the sport. Give him credit, though: ever attuned to the public mood, he did sense the rise of a new national pastime.

Bet On This

One reason for the NFL’s growing popularity is the way it uses college football as its minor leagues and early showcase for pro players (though possibly not this fall). For a passionate pro football fan, it’s a pleasure to see the stars of tomorrow in the making. Of course, the famously corrupted higher education sports market is a happy NFL partner and crime may pay after all, as it often does in the Trump league. In a recent commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nathan Kalman-Lamb of Duke opines that high-revenue men’s football and basketball “will become more valuable than ever as an enticement to lure steep tuition from students.”

And here’s an innovation that the president would glory in, one that would make post-pandemic football an even greater success: the addition of real-time nationwide legal gambling on games. Just imagine the sort of Trump-donor dollars that would be stacked up to support such a future industry. After all, estimations are that illegal gambling on pro and college football is already a $93 billion business. Legal or not, it’s an integral part of the fan experience (though in the post-pandemic world there will be a lot less money in so many pockets to gamble with).

The dream of easily accessible, high-tech legal gambling has been lurking on the sidelines for years. All that’s necessary to make it come true is for Congress to reverse the 1992 Professional & Amateur Sports Protection Act, the federal law that bans it in most states. And the pandemic moment may prove perfect for just that, for “reopening” football in a new and even more Trumpian way, allowing fans to sit at home and bet what money they have left on games in progress: Will that field goal attempt split the uprights? Will Tom Brady in his new Tampa Bay Buccaneers uniform make that crucial third-down conversion?

However, to reopen pro football, as the president would wish, to make life seem “normal” again, stadiums might have to remain empty (or partially empty). Imagine, for instance, if San Francisco had actually beaten Kansas City (which it didn’t) in the Super Bowl on the first Sunday in February and the expected championship parade had followed a few days later, drawing a million people to that city’s streets. It might have proved an early version of Mardi Gras (a 2020 coronaviral disaster of a get-together).

Of course, social distancing will be inconceivable for football players and the results all too predictable in a world in which Covid-19 is likely to hang around for a long, long time. From the huddle to tackling, the game is, in every way, a potential disease transmitter. The only example of social distancing (besides Kaepernick kneeling alone) I can even remember might have been the 1958 West Point football team, which fielded a “lonesome end,” Bill Carpenter. On every play, he set himself up near the far sideline in an innovative formation. He never even joined the huddle and that team went undefeated.

If it proves impossible to stage football games, given social-distancing rules, the inevitable sport of the future is already waiting in the wings. Just under the radar of most of the middle-aged and elderly, especially those without access to children, is a fiercely contested, already commodified, fan-friendly industry with championships, heroes, endorsement contracts, and a ready market for expensive gear. I’m thinking, as you may have guessed, of competitive online video games, or esports.  (Think of it as the revenge of the nerds.) No matter what Donald Trump does, sooner rather than later they’re likely to replace the old up-close-and-contagious live games.

It’s not hard to imagine a future in which individual competitors, regional and national teams, leagues, or even some version of the Olympics, would be watched by millions on streaming platforms on home screens and, once social distancing becomes a historical footnote, on the screens of sports bars as well, if not theaters and arenas. While combat games like Fortnite and Call of Duty, along with sports knock-offs like Madden and NBA Live, currently dominate esports, the future will undoubtedly include brainier fare that will turn art, architecture, banking, diplomacy, music, and maybe even poetry into online competitions even Nike and Google could sponsor.

Esports already supports ESPN-style commentary. There might even be room someday for a new reality show about them hosted by a motor-mouthed, pumpkin-headed former one-term president.

Who needs football after all? It would, in fact, be the definition of madness to launch a football season in a coronaviral world. But that doesn’t mean Donald Trump won’t push for just that. The advisory board he appointed for the reopening of sports includes, as my colleague Dave Zirin points out, “a group of brigands defined by their lack of care in normal times for the safety and well-being of their employees.”

It’s Trump’s dream team because, to win in November, he needs an America in which the National Football League is back in business big time. For him it’s open arms for the NFL, which could mean open season on the rest of us.

Robert Lipsyte, a TomDispatch regular, was a sports and city columnist for the New York Times. He is the author, among other works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, 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.

Copyright 2020 Robert Lipsyte

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Before zeroing in on Ukraine, however, let’s consider just a few of Giuliani’s other foreign ventures. Since leaving office as New York’s mayor, through Giuliani Partners, the Bracewell & Giuliani law partnership, and (after 2016) the giant law firm of Greenberg Traurig, along with Giuliani Security & Safety and Giuliani Capital Advisers, the former mayor has pulled in millions of dollars working on behalf of foreign clients, including highly controversial ones. Among those deals, contracts, and maneuvers, before and after Trump became president and hired his old friend Rudy to serve as his personal attorney in 2018, Giuliani has been involved in a far-flung series of deals: he’s been a paid lobbyist in Romania; had a cybersecurity contract inQatar; had deals in Colombia, Argentina, and El Salvador; worked shadow diplomacy (with a business angle) with Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro; operated in Japan, Serbia, and Guatemala; and that only begins to tell the story.

Consider Turkey, starting in 2017. Back then, when Lieutenant General Michael Flynn was forced to resign after just a few weeks as national security advisor, it turned out that he had quietly (and without reporting it) been working on behalf of Turkey’s autocratic government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, during the 2016 election campaign. Erdogan was disturbed by the presence of a dissident, Fethullah Gulen, in the United States. As an unregistered advocate for Turkey, Flynn lobbied in 2016 to have the United States expel Gulen and send him back to Turkey. Early the next year, Flynn was gone, but no fear, Rudy Giuliani promptly took up the same cause. He began urging President Trump to extradite Gulen to Turkey, where Erdogan was accusing him of having plotted an attempted coup d’état. (In the end, Gulen wasn’t expelled.)

Given Giuliani’s ability to mix policy with business, you won’t be surprised to learn that he was also enmeshed in more lucrative efforts in Turkey. At around the same time, he was lobbying Trump to endorse a prisoner swap involving one of his clients, an Iranian-born Turkish gold trader named Reza Zarrab whom the FBI had arrested in 2016 on charges of money laundering and trying to do an end run around economic sanctions on Iran. According to the New York Times,Zarrab had been working with Halkbank, a major Turkish bank with close ties to Turkish Finance Minister Berat Albayrak who is also President Erdogan’s son-in-law, to “funnel more than $10 billion in gold and cash to Iran.”

At first blush, it might seem odd for Giuliani to offer his services on behalf of an Iranian expat accused of trying to break U.S. sanctions whose family, it turned out, had close ties to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Curious, yes, but for Giuliani, business is business and there were bucks to be made. That he would use his connections to the Oval Office in an ultimately unsuccessful appeal for his client is even odder, given that Giuliani is otherwise a militant hardliner when it comes to demanding the overthrow of the Iranian government....

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/how-the-cowardice-of-the-obama-administration-foreshadowed-the-impunity-of-trump/

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How the cowardice of the Obama administration foreshadowed the impunity of Trump

Written by Rebecca Gordon / Tom Dispatch February 18, 2020

On February 5th, the Senate voted to acquit President Donald J. Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. In other words, Trump’s pre-election boast that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not “lose any voters” proved something more than high-flown hyperbole. (To be fair, he did lose one Republican “voter” in the Senate — Mitt Romney — but it wasn’t enough to matter.)

The Senate’s failure to convict the president will only confirm his conception of his office as a seat of absolute power (which, as we’ve been told, “corrupts absolutely”). This is the man, after all, who told a convention of student activists, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president. But I don’t even talk about that.” Except, of course, he does.

The day after the Senate vote, a decidedly unchastened Trump spoke at a National Prayer Breakfast, brandishing a copy of USA Today whose banner headline contained a single word: “Acquitted.” After disagreeing with the prayerful suggestion offered by Arthur Brooks, former head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute (and a couple of millennia earlier by one Jesus of Nazareth), that we should love our enemies, the president promptly accused both Mitt Romney and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of inadequate prayerfulness. He lumped Romney in with people “who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong” and accused Pelosi, not for the first time, of lying when she says she prays for him.

Trump’s endless boasting about his invulnerability can certainly be blamed on the dismal swamp of his own psyche, but there’s another at least partial explanation for it — and it lies in the country’s collective failure to hold anyone responsible for crimes committed since 2001 in the “war on terror.” If one administration can get away with confining detainees in coffinlike boxes and torturing them in myriad other ways, why shouldn’t a later one go unpunished for, to take but one example, putting migrant children in cages?

Forward, Not Backwards

In 2009, Barack Obama prepared to enter the Oval Office promising to end the worst excesses of the previous administration’s war on terror. Although he did close the CIA’s detention centers and prohibit torture, he also quickly signaled that no one would be held accountable for the already well-documented practice of torture promoted by the administration of George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney. A week or so before Obama’s inauguration, the president-elect was already assuring ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos that, although there would be prosecutions if “somebody has blatantly broken the law,” on the whole he believed “that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

In particular, Obama was concerned that government operatives should not be hampered in the future by fear of prosecution for past acts sanctioned by top officials:

“And part of my job is to make sure that, for example, at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders.”

As it turned out, they need not have worried. On April 17, 2009, as Carrie Johnson and Julie Tate reported in the Washington Post, “President Obama and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. reassured CIA employees anew yesterday that interrogators would not face criminal prosecution so long as they followed legal advice.” As Holder put it, “It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department.”

The legal advice in question had been contained in a series of infamous memos written by that department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) between 2002 and 2005. In them, the legal definition of torture was “clarified” for a nervous attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, and the CIA. One memo, drafted by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and signed by Assistant Attorney General for the OLC Jay Bybee, explained that to “constitute torture” under the law, physical pain “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” To meet the legal definition of psychological torture, mental suffering “must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.”

Not surprisingly, despite the previous administration’s stamp of approval on what were euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a three-year investigation by the Obama Justice Department into CIA interrogation practices came to a whimpering end in August 2012, when Holder announced that the only two remaining torture cases, both of which involved deaths in U.S. custody, would be dropped.

A year earlier, as Glenn Greenwald reported in the Guardian, Holder had decided not to prosecute anyone in 99 other cases of “severe detainee abuse.” The two remaining cases concerned the death by torture and hypothermia of Gul Rahman in the CIA’s notorious Salt Pit prison in Afghanistan in 2002 and that of “Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in CIA custody after he was beaten, stripped, had cold water poured on him, and then [was] shackled to the wall” at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Among those Holder presumably chose not to charge were the men responsible for designing and implementing the protocols that led to Rahman’s death, along with tortures like waterboarding and “walling” (the slamming of the back of a prisoner’s head repeatedly into a wall). Thus ended any hope of holding torturers legally accountable in the United States of America, early proof of the kind of impunity that has, in the Trump years, spread elsewhere.

Torturer Redux

Shortly before Donald Trump’s recent triumph in the Senate, one of those “extraordinarily talented people” hailed by President Obama resurfaced in a courtroom not as a defendant, but as a hostile witness. James Mitchell was called to the stand by the defense at pre-trial hearings at the Guantánamo detention facility in Cuba, the offshore prison for detainees in the war on terror set up by the Bush administration in 2002. In the dock almost 18 years later are five men, long held there, who have been accused of involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The most notorious is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, often described as 9/11’s “mastermind.”

Mitchell is one of the two psychologists — the other being John “Bruce” Jessen — who designed the CIA’s main torture program. He has the honor of being considered the inventor of waterboarding, a series of techniques aimed at producing water-induced suffering that have formed part of the armamentarium of torturers for centuries. (Perhaps “reinventor” would be the more accurate term.) Mitchell was, in fact, the first person to perform waterboarding in the war on terror, as well as being the architect of walling, of confining victims in tiny boxes, and of a variety of other grim “enhanced interrogation techniques” first employed at CIA “black sites” set up around the world in those years.

Called by defense attorneys to describe the torture their clients endured, a “defiant” Mitchell told the courtroom, “I’d get up today and do it again.”

As New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg explained, Mitchell was not actually talking about what he did to any of the five defendants in the dock at Guantánamo, although he did torture some of them. He was referring to the first prisoner to be waterboarded under the CIA torture program, Saudi national Abu Zubaydah who was waterboarded a total of 83 times over the course of a single month. President George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, claimed (falsely, as it turned out) that he was “if not the number two, very close to the number-two person in” al-Qaeda and that he had run an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.

In fact, as the Obama administration acknowledged in 2010, Abu Zubaydah was never even a member of that group, let alone one of its key lieutenants. Captured in a joint CIA-FBI operation in Pakistan in 2002, he would be shuffled between CIA black sites for the next four-and-a-half years, including the Agency’s secret “Strawberry Fields” site at Guantánamo. In part because of what the CIA did to him, Abu Zubaydah remains imprisoned there to this day. According to CIA recommendations, he is never to be “placed in a situation where he has any significant contact with others and/or has the opportunity to be released.”

Nevertheless, Mitchell oversaw the 83 times Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded in a single month at a CIA black site in Thailand, during which he came close to death by drowning. On one of those occasions, as the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 report on CIA torture revealed, he was observed to be “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.”

Not unlike our president, Mitchell seems to be deeply hurt by what he perceives as unfair criticism. “You folks have been saying untrue and malicious things about me and Dr. Jessen for years,” he complained to defense attorneys at the Guantánamo hearing. People may have said mean things about him, but in reality, far from being held accountable for torture, James Mitchell has luxuriated in his impunity, earning royalties from his book Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying To Destroy America and giving speeches arranged through the Worldwide Speakers Group (which advertises him as “psychologist, CIA interrogator, author”) at $15,000 to $25,000 a pop.

Nor did Mitchell fare poorly while employed by the CIA.  In fact, the Agency paid the company Mitchell and Jessen formed $81 million for their work. In addition, their contract included language guaranteeing that the U.S. government would cover any legal costs they incurred as a result of that work through the year 2021. This would turn out to come in handy when, in 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the two of them on behalf of three of their victims: Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed ben Soud, and the family of Gul Rahman, the detainee who had died of exposure to cold at the Salt Pit. Mitchell and Jessen settled the case in 2017 for an undisclosed sum, also paid by the U.S. government.

It Never Gets Easier

You’d think it would get easier over time. For almost two decades, I’ve been writing about torture. By now, you might imagine that I’d be at least somewhat desensitized to details about and descriptions of it. Instead, each time I dive into that cesspool, it appears even more disgusting and frightening.

If it’s hard for me, someone who has never been tortured and has spoken face-to-face with only a few torture survivors, imagine what it must be like for those who have survived the Bush-era torture programs, which went on for an unknown number of years. Actually, you don’t have to do too much imagining, since their testimony about how such abuse affected some of them and how lasting those effects were is available. In 2016, New York Times reporters Matt Apuzzo, Sheri Fink, and James Risen published a series of articles under the title “How U.S. Torture Left a Legacy of Damaged Minds.”

One of those profiled was Suleiman Abdullah Salim, a plaintiff in the ACLU suit against Mitchell and Jessen.A Tanzanian native, Salim was picked up in Mogadishu, Somalia, and turned over to U.S. operatives for reasons that remain murky. It’s most likely he was a victim of mistaken identity (and he wouldn’t have been the only such prisoner in the war on terror). We know, at least, that the Americans who bundled him onto a plane were expecting a Yemeni Arab and someone with much lighter skin. He ended up in Afghanistan at a black site he recalls as “the Darkness,” which was, in fact, the Salt Pit. There he was beaten, walled, shackled in complete darkness, exposed to relentless loud music, confined in a coffinlike box, repeatedly hung by the wrists — once for 48 hours straight — and drenched at times with ice water until he feared he was drowning.

Eventually, the CIA moved Salim to a prison at Bagram Airbase outside the Afghan capital, Kabul. In 2008, he was turned loose in Afghanistan with only the clothes he was wearing. The International Red Cross arranged a flight home to Zanzibar, Tanzania, where he still lives, haunted by the Darkness.

In 2010, the Times‘ Risen wrote, “Dr. Sondra Crosby of the Boston University School of Medicine, a physician, a Navy reservist and an expert on torture, was asked by Physicians for Human Rights, a New York-based group, to evaluate Mr. Salim.” She found that he was emaciated “like a skeleton” and “plagued by profound distress, inability to eat, and inability to sleep.” Risen’s report continues:

“‘He describes himself as a ghost walking around the town,’ she added. She noted other symptoms: flashbacks, short- and long-term memory loss, distress at seeing anyone in a military uniform, hopelessness about the future and a strong avoidance of noise. ‘He reports that his head feels empty — like an empty box,’ she said.”

The Times series also chronicled the suffering of another plaintiff in the case against Mitchell and Jessen: Mohamed ben Soud. He, too, was held at the Salt Pit, where his ordeal involved many of the same torture methods Salim had endured. Today, he has full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder. “He is racked with self-doubt and struggles to make simple decisions. His moods swing dramatically,” reported the Times.

First, Do No Harm?

The pre-trial hearings at Guantánamo have also revealed the rarely discussed role of doctors and other medical workers in the U.S. torture program. Apparently the reason we know that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times is that, as James Mitchell testified in January, a doctor was indeed present inside the torture chamber and used a little metal click-counter to keep track. According to the Times’s Rosenberg, however, doctors

“did more than count waterboarding sessions. Government investigations and evidence in the pretrial hearings of the men… show doctors conducted ‘rectal rehydration,’ carried out rectal cavity searches, and examined swollen feet and legs of captives who were sleep deprived for days by being shackled in painful positions.”

There is undoubtedly more to be uncovered about the role of medical personnel at the CIA’s global black sites. Indeed, there is more to be uncovered about all the ways in which detainees were stripped not only of their human rights but, at least in the minds of their tormentors, of their very humanity. At one point in his testimony, for instance, Mitchell turned to the attorney for Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the five 9/11 defendants. Speaking of Charlie Wise, the CIA interrogation chief and the rest of his crew, Mitchell said, “Looks like they used your client as a training prop.” According to the Guardian’s Julian Borger, in fact, under Wise’s leadership, “trainees had to use each of their techniques on Baluchi and other inmates in order to earn certification.”

And Mitchell himself used Abu Zubaydah as a demonstration prop, so bigwigs at the CIA would be implicated in what he was doing. Borger reports that “he waterboarded Abu Zubaydah even though he was quite sure the detainee had no actionable intelligence to surrender. It was done purely as a demonstration for the agency VIPs.”

The Price of Impunity

Thanks to the cowardice of the Obama administration, no CIA officer or any higher official in the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, no psychologist, no doctor, no one at all has yet been held accountable for the years of torture practiced on a global scale in the war on terror. Donald Trump himself, of course, got elected while publicly proclaiming about waterboarding that “I like it a lot” and he reportedly considered Gina Haspel’s black-site torture experiences a positive part of her resume when considering her for CIA director. Mitchell, of course, continues to make speeches and collect his royalties. George W. Bush has been rehabilitated as a kindly portrait painter.

Is it really so surprising, then, that we now have a man in the Oval Office who believes he has “the right to do whatever I want as president”? The history of the twenty-first-century war on terror suggests that, if he doesn’t have the right, he certainly appears to have the power.

Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author most recently of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, 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.

Copyright 2020 Rebecca Gordon

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-is-just-a-symptom-of-our-decline-but-hes-proven-to-be-the-symptom-from-hell

no lnx many

Trump is just a symptom of our decline — but he’s proven to be the symptom from hell

Written by Tom Engelhardt / TomDispatch December 23, 2019

Here’s the question at hand — and I guarantee you that you’ll read it here first: Is Donald Trump the second or even possibly the third 9/11? Because truly, he has to be one or the other.

Let me explain, and while I do, keep this in mind: as 2019 ends, thanks to Brexit and the victory of Boris Johnson in Britain’s recent election, the greatest previous imperial power on this planet is clearly headed for the sub-basement of history. Meanwhile, that other superpower of the Cold War era, the Soviet Union, now Russia, remains a well-sauced Putinesca shadow of its former self. And then, of course, there’s the country that, not so long ago, every major American politician but Donald Trump proclaimed the most exceptional, indispensable nation ever.

As it happens, the United States — if you didn’t catch the reference above — has been looking a bit peaked lately itself. You can’t say that it’s the end of the road for a land of such wealth and staggering military power, enough to finish off several Earth-sized planets. However, it’s clearly a country in decline on a planet in the same condition and its present leader, Tariff Man, however uniquely orange-faced he may be, is just the symptom of the long path to hell in a handbasket its leadership embarked on almost three decades ago as the Cold War ended.

Admittedly, President Trump has proved to be the symptom from hell. To give him full credit, he’s now remarkably hard-at-tweet dismantling the various alliances, agreements, and organizations that U.S. leaders had assembled, since 1945, to make this country the Great Britain (and beyond) of the second half of the twentieth century and that’s an accomplishment of the first order.

And keep in mind the context for so much of this: it’s happening in a country that may be experiencing an unprecedented kind of inequality. It’s producing billionaires at a staggering clip with just three men already possessing wealth equivalent to that of half the rest of the population; this, mind you, at a moment when the globe’s 26 richest people reportedly are worth as much as half of everyone else, or 3.8 billion people. And this in a world in which, as the income of that poorest half of humanity continues to decline, the wealth of billionaires increases by $2.5 billion a day and a new billionaire is minted every two days.

Had all of this not already been so and had a sense of decline not been in the air, it’s inconceivable that those heartland white Americans who had come to feel themselves on the losing end of developments in this country would have sent a charlatan billionaire into the White House to represent them (or at least to give the finger to the Washington establishment). And all this on a planet that itself, in climate terms, appears to be in unprecedented decline.

Think of the above as part of what’s come down, metaphorically speaking, since those towers in New York fell more than 18 years ago.

Looking Back on 9/11

It’s in this context that we should all look back on what truly did come down that Tuesday morning in September 2001, an all-American day of the grimmest sort. That was, of course, the day when this country was attacked by 19 suicidal hijackers, most of them Saudi, using American commercial jets as their four-plane air force. They, in turn, were inspired by a man, Osama bin Laden, and his organization, al-Qaeda, part of a crew of radical Islamists that Washington had backed years earlier in an Afghan War against the Soviet Union. In response to the events of that day — though it seems unimaginable now — we could have joined a world already in pain, one that had experienced horrors largely unimaginable in this country until that moment, in a kind of global solidarity.

Instead, responding to the destruction of those towers in Manhattan and part of the Pentagon, the Bush administration essentially launched a war against much of the planet. They soon dubbed it a “Global War on Terror,” or GWOT, and key officials almost instantly claimed it would have more than 60 countries (or terror groups in them) in its sights. Eighteen years later, the U.S. is still at war across a vast swath of the globe, involved in conflict after conflict from the Philippines to Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq to northern Africa and beyond. In the process, that GWOT has produced failed state after failed state and terror group after terror group, enough to make the original al-Qaeda (still going) look like nothing at all. And of course, in all these years, the U.S. military, hailed here as “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known” (and similar formulations), lacks a single decisive (or even modest) victory. Meanwhile, everywhere, yet more towers, real or metaphorical, continue to fall; in fact, whole cities in the Middle East now lie in rubble.

The top officials of President George W. Bush’s administration would, at the time, mistake 9/11 for a kind of upside-down stroke of luck, the perfect excuse for launching military operations, including invasions, geared to the ultimate domination of the planet (and its key oil supplies). Via drones armed with missiles and bombs, they would turn any president into an assassin-in-chief. They would, in the end, help spread terror groups in a fashion beyond imagining on September 12, 2001, while their never-ending wars would displace vast numbers of innocent people, creating a refugee crisis of a kind not seen since the end of World War II when significant parts of the planet stood in ruins. And all of that, in turn, would help spark, on a global scale, what came to be known as the “populist right,” in part thanks to the very refugees created by that GWOT. The response to what came down on 9/11, in other words, would create its own hell on Earth.

Who knew back then? Not me, that’s for sure. Not when I started what became TomDispatch 18 years ago, feeling, in the wake of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, that something was truly wrong with our world, that something more than the World Trade Center might be in the process of coming down around all our ears. I can still remember the feeling in those weeks, as I saw the mainstream media’s focus narrow drastically amid nationwide self-congratulatory celebrations of this country as the greatest survivor, dominator, and victim on the planet. I watched with trepidation as we began to close down to the world, while essentially attempting to take all the roles in the global drama for ourselves except greatest evil doer, which was, of course, left to Osama bin Laden.

I still remember thinking then that the Vietnam years had been the worst and most embattled in my lifetime, but that somehow this — whatever it turned out to be — would be so much worse. And yet whatever I was sensing, whatever I was imagining, wouldn’t prove to be the half of it, not the quarter of it.

If you had told me then that we were heading for Donald Trump’s version of American decline and a corrupt global gilded age of unprecedented proportions, one in which showmanship, scam, and self-serving corruption would become the essence of everything, while god knows what kinds of nightmares — like those subprime mortgages of the 2007 economic meltdown — were quietly piling up somewhere just beyond our view, I would have thought you mad.

The Second 9/11

All these years later, it’s strange to feel something like that moment recurring. Of course, in this elongated Trumpian version of it, no obvious equivalent to those towers in New York has come down. And yet, over the three years of The Donald’s presidency, can’t you just feel that something has indeed been coming down, even as the media’s coverage once again narrowed, this time not to a single self-congratulatory story of greatness and sadness, but to one strange man and his doings.

If you think about it, I suspect you can feel it, too. Looking back to 2016, mightn’t you agree that Donald Trump rather literally embodied a second 9/11? He certainly was, after a fashion, the hijacker-in-chief of that moment, not sent by al-Qaeda, of course, but… well, by whom? That is, indeed, the question, isn’t it? Whom exactly did he represent? Not his famed “base,” those red-hatted MAGA enthusiasts at his endless rallies who felt they had gotten lost in the shuffle of wealth and politics and corruption in this country. Perhaps, of course, the al-Qaeda of that moment was actually another kind of terrorist crew entirely, the one-percenters who had mistaken this country’s wealth for their own and preferred a billionaire of any sort in the White House for the first time in history. Or maybe, as a presidential hijacker first class, Donald Trump simply represented himself and no one else at all. Perhaps he was ready to bring a whole system to its knees (just as he had once bankrupted those five casinos of his in Atlantic City), as long as he could jump ship in the nick of time with the loot.

On that first 9/11, those towers came down. The second time around, the only thing that came down, at least in the literal sense, was, of course, The Donald himself.  He famously descended that Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race in June 2015, promoting a “great wall” (still unbuilt years later and now, like everything The Donald touches, a cesspool of corruption) and getting rid of Mexican “rapists.”

From that moment on, Donald Trump essentially hijacked our world. I mean, try to tell me that, in the years since, he hasn’t provided living evidence that the greatest power in human history, the one capable of destroying the planet six different ways, has no brain, no real coordination at all. It’s fogged in by a mushroom cloud of largely senseless media coverage and, though still the leading force on the planet, in some rather literal fashion has lost its mind.

No wonder it’s almost impossible to tell what we’re actually living through. Certainly, in a slo-mo version of 9/11, Donald Trump has been taking down the nation as we’ve known it. Admittedly, unlike Bolivia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and other such places on this increasingly unsettled planet of ours, true civil strife has (yet) to break out here (though individual mass shootings certainly have). Still, the president and some of his supporters have begun talking about, even threatening, “civil war” for our unsettled future.

On the first 9/11, the greatest power in history struck out at the planet. The second time around, it seems to be preparing to strike out at itself.

Was 11/9 the original 9/11?

Perhaps this is the time to bring up the possibility that September 11, 2001, might not really have been the first 9/11 and that Donald Trump might actually be the third, not the second 9/11.

In a sense, the first 9/11 might really have been 11/9. I’m thinking, of course, of November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall, that symbol of the Cold War, a divided Europe, and a deeply divided world, suddenly began to be torn down by East and West Germans. Believe me, in our nation’s capital, it was an event no less unexpected or shocking than September 11, 2001. Until that moment, Washington’s political class and the crew who ran the national security state had continued to imagine a future dominated by a never-ending Cold War with the Soviet Union. The shock of that moment is still hard to grasp.

Looked at a certain way, that November the people had hijacked history and Washington’s response to it would be no less monumentally misplaced than to the 2001 moment. Once the key officials of George H.W. Bush’s administration had taken in what happened, they essentially declared ultimate victory. Over everything. For all time.

With the U.S., the last standing superpower, ultimately victorious in a way never before imagined, history itself seemed to be at an end. The future was ours, forever, and we had every right to grab it for ourselves. The world in which so many of us had grown up was declared over and done with in a wave of self-congratulatory backslapping in Washington. The planet, it seemed, was now our oyster and ours alone. (And if you want to know how that turned out, just think of Donald Trump in the White House and then read Andrew Bacevich’s new book, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.)

It’s in this context that Trump’s could be considered the third hijacking of our era. Given his sense of self, his might even be thought of not as the 1% hijacking moment, but as the .000000001% moment.

And be prepared: the next version of 9/11, however defined, is guaranteed to make Osama bin Laden and his 19 hijackers look like so many pikers. Depending on what tipping points are reached and what happens after that on our rapidly warming planet, so much could come down around humanity’s ears. And if so, that moment in 2015 when Donald Trump rode an escalator down into the presidential contest to the tune of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” will look very different — because it will be far clearer than it is even now that he was carrying a blowtorch with him.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, 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.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/the-foreign-policy-money-trail-in-washington-how-middle-eastern-powers-fund-government-think-tanks-and-influence-us-legislation/

The 2016 elections awakened Americans to a startling reality: the country’s political system is ripe for foreign interference. The Russians took full advantage of social media with bot armies and through unregistered foreign agents. While their influence garnered considerable attention and has led to increased enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), one area has remained largely off the congressional and media radar screens. Yet it remains a vital part of the way other governments try to influence policy in this country: the foreign funding of think tanks.

This story originally appeared at Tom Dispatch.

Most Americans undoubtedly have little idea what a think tank actually does. Having worked at two of them myself, it’s fair to say that even those of us who have labored inside these basic building blocks for policymaking in Washington are often still trying to figure out just what many of them do. Still, whether you know it or not, you’ve certainly seen think-tank employees on cable news, heard them on the radio, or read their op-ed pieces.

After all, think tanks are homes for so many of the “experts” who are the go-to sources for media coverage of foreign and domestic policy topics on just about any day — and are often key go-to sources for those making policy in Washington, too). You know, the former Department of Defense official you caught on NBC News discussing Iran or the Middle Eastern expert you saw quoted in Newsweek critiquing the Trump administration’s policies there. Outside the public eye, members of Congress and executive branch officials rely heavily on think tanks for expertise on a wide range of issues, for key congressional testimony, and even for quite literally helping craft public policy.

Those who run Washington generally trust the inhabitants of think tanks of their political bent to provide the intellectual foundations upon which much of public policy is built. At least in some cases, however, that trust couldn’t be more deeply misplaced, since cornerstones of the ever-expanding think-tank universe turn out to be for sale.

Every year foreign governments pour tens of millions of dollars into those very institutions and, though many think tanks are tax-exempt non-profits, such donations often turn out to be anything but charitable gifts. Foreign contributions generally come with critically important strings attached — usually a favorable stance toward that country in whatever influential work the think tanks are doing. In other words, those experts you regularly read or see on screen, whose scholarship and advice Washington’s politicians and other officials often use, are in some cases being paid, directly or indirectly, by the very countries on which they are offering advice and analysis. And here’s the catch: they can do so without ever having to tell you about it.

The Money Trail From Foreign Governments to Think Tanks

“I’ve never had to worry in my years at CAP about an analyst or me saying X, Y, and Z and worry about a funding source. Never thought about it. Never,” explained Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress (CAP). He was speaking at aMiddle East Institute (MEI) event in January entitled “The Role of Think Tanks in Shaping Middle East Policy.” MEI President Paul Salem echoed this sentiment, noting that funding, particularly foreign government funding, shouldn’t ever shape a think tank’s work. “Independence,” he proclaimed, “is sacred.”

Such comments, like the events themselves, are just the norm in Washington think-tank life — unless, that is, you follow the money, in which case they seem both striking and supremely ironic. On any given day, Washington is, in fact, awash in foreign-policy events at think tanks. There, experts convene to publicly discuss just about every topic you’d want to hear about — except one, of course: their funding. And that is what made the Katulis-Salem exchange particularly interesting. What they and their follow panelists never mentioned at an event extolling the importance of think tanks in helping craft political Washington’s Middle East policies was this: both CAP and MEI have received millions of dollars from authoritarian governments in the Middle East.

MEI has publicly reported receiving millions from Saudi Arabia and lesser amounts from the Persian Gulf states of Oman and Qatar. By far its largest donor, however, seems to have been the United Arab Emirates (UAE), reportedly making a “secret” $20 million contribution to that think tank, earmarked to “hire experts in order to counter the more egregious misperceptions about the region” and “to inform U.S. government policymakers.” In other words, in the spirit of that MEI panel title, the UAE’s funding was explicitly designed to shape that think tank’s — and so U.S. — policy considerations.

While hardly in that $20 million range, CAP has also publicly reported receiving at least $1.5 million from the UAE.

And keep in mind that those two think tanks are hardly the only ones receiving donations from countries in the Middle East. The Center for a New American Security, for instance, received $250,000 from the United Arab Emirates to produce a study on the need for the U.S. to export military-grade drones to countries like… the UAE. That think tank’s subsequent report on the topic notes that the U.S. doesn’t export drones to the UAE and other countries, but should because “this reluctance to transfer U.S. drones harms U.S. interests in tangible ways.” Never mind that a third of those killed in drone strikes in the devastating war in Yemen are civilians.

The Brookings Institution received a $14.8 million donation from Qatar. In fact, according to a New York Times analysis, nearly all of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington have accepted money from authoritarian regimes in the Middle East or elsewhere. And that, in turn, is just the tip of the iceberg, since think tanks are not legally required to publicly disclose their funding.

Charity or Influence Buying?

If think tanks are to be believed, the money they receive from such funders changes little. Recent events at a number of think tanks, including the Center for American Progress and the Middle East Institute, should, however, give pause to anyone who assumes that such institutions are by their nature insulated from the influence of foreign funders.

Recently, serious questions have been raised about whether CAP’s ties to the UAE, itself a close ally of the Saudi royals, contributed to its awkward response to the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist and Saudi citizen Jamal Khashoggi in that Kingdom’s embassy in Istanbul, Turkey.  Following that killing, CAP released a response condemning the Saudis for their involvement in Khashoggi’s murder, but not calling for specific consequences to punish the Kingdom.

According to reporting by the Intercept’s Ryan Grim, such consequences were stripped from the statement by a CAP staffer who just happened to be Brian Katulis. Then, in December, CAP largely sat on the sidelines as the Senate passed a historic resolution to end U.S. involvement in the devastating Saudi-UAE war in Yemen. At the MEI event in January, Katulis dismissed those giving “energy and dynamism” to “the Yemen debate” for ignoring “the full complexity of the challenges.” Jamal Khashoggi’s name wasn’t even mentioned.

Despite MEI head Salem’s claim that “independence is sacred,” there’s reason to question how independent scholars can be when their work is, at least in part, dependent on foreign funding. In at least one case, for instance, Salem’s institute published the work of Fahad Nazer, who was directly on the Saudi payroll. While earning $7,000 a month as a foreign agent for Saudi Arabia, Nazer wrote several pro-Saudi articles for both think tanks and mainstream media outlets, including one for MEI that made no mention of his financial ties to the Saudis. That March 2018 article did, however, encourage yet more U.S. support for the country’s ruling crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who, Nazer wrote, would “be good for Saudi Arabia, the United States, and the world.”

Just seven months later, bin Salman would reportedly authorize the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi and, in January 2019, Nazer himself would become the official spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

Blurred Lines and Lack of Transparency

Nazer’s case also illustrates a growing pattern of interactions between think tanks that receive foreign funding and the registered foreign agents of those countries. In fact, Emirati foreign agents last year reported contacting think tanks at least 85 times, according to an analysis of Foreign Agents Registration Act filings for a forthcoming report on the Emirati lobby in the U.S. by the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy, which I direct.

Perhaps not surprisingly, CAP’s Katulis and MEI were among the top think-tank contacts for UAE’s foreign agents. According to 2018 filings, Katulis was contacted at least 12 times by the Harbour Group, which the UAE paid more than $5 million in 2018 to “influence U.S. policy,” according to the firm’s FARA filings. Katulis was a particular focus for them because he was helping to organize a “study tour” in which think-tank experts would take a luxurious trip to both the UAE and Saudi Arabia. That group also contacted MEI at least 14 times on behalf of the UAE, directing most of its efforts towards a “speaking engagement at MEI” for the Emirati ambassador to the U.S., the same man who had directed that “secret” $20 million contribution to the institute.

Under current law, it is perfectly legal for think tanks that receive funding from foreign governments to also work with foreign agents registered to represent those very governments. FARA includes an exemption for those engaged in “bona fide… scholastic, academic, or scientific pursuits.” Like many parts of the FARA statute, it’s not at all clear what “bona fide” means, but think tanks are presumably exempt from registration if they meet this threshold.

While the work done by both think tanks and registered foreign agents can sometimes overlap, the two are worlds apart on one critical score: transparency. Under FARA, registered foreign agents are required to disclose a considerable amount of what they do, including whom they’re working for, how much they’re being paid, and whom they’re contacting, as well as when and where they do it, on behalf of foreign principals like the United Arab Emirates. And most of that information is available online. Anything they distribute on behalf of a foreign backer must also include a “conspicuous statement” to let anyone know that what they’re reading is being distributed on behalf of a foreign principal.

Think tanks receiving funding from foreign sources are, however, not required to do any of the above.

As is appropriate during tax season, most of this should, in the end, be blamed on the Internal Revenue Service. Think tanks usually operate as tax-exempt organizations and, according to the IRS, “a tax-exempt organization is generally not required to disclose publicly the names or addresses of its contributors set forth on its annual return.”

While MEI and CAP do both disclose their funding sources on their websites — for which they should be commended — many think tanks do not. And few, even among those that do, mention any potential conflicts of interest that might be reflected in their published reports or the speeches and media appearances of their members. Even more worrisome, a Project On Government Oversight investigation by Lydia Dennett found numerous examples of think-tank experts not reporting or mentioning financial ties to foreign governments when testifying before Congress. Hiding such potential conflicts of interest is likely to leave the public and policymakers with the impression that they’re hearing truly objective experts, when they may, in fact, be taking testimony from someone who is functionally or literally on the payroll of a country with a deep stake in what they’re telling Congress.

If think tanks are to remain credible sources of foreign-policy expertise, such ties must, at the very least, be laid bare.

A first step would simply be to require think tanks to publicly disclose any foreign funding they receive, something easily done by amending the IRS code. In addition, just as registered foreign agents are required to include a “conspicuous statement” letting readers know they’re working on behalf of a foreign power, think tanks should have to fully disclose their funding sources and any potential conflicts of interest in all their written products, as well as at speaking engagements, especially testimony before Congress. It should also be incumbent upon the media to do a better job of vetting sources. Sure, journalists are extraordinarily busy, but if a simple Google search can reveal that the Middle East “expert” you’re quoting is being paid by a country in the Middle East, it behooves you to tell your readers that.

Finally, transparency is essential, but it’s well past time for think tanks themselves to focus on the track records of the countries they’re getting money from. The Brookings Institution did just that by cutting ties with the Saudis shortly after the murder of Khashoggi and, soon after, MEI, too, announced that it would decline any further funding from the Saudi government. More recently, and following the questions raised about CAP’s involvement with the United Arab Emirates, that think tank announced that it would no longer accept UAE money. As a CAP spokesperson said, “It’s just the right thing to do.”

CAP, MEI, and Brookings are, however, the exceptions.  Most think tanks haven’t done “the right thing” and dropped funding from autocratic regimes. Nor are they likely to voluntarily increase transparency about that funding. The burden then falls on Congress to enact reforms ensuring that senators and representatives will know when the expert they’re hearing discuss a specific country or the region it’s in is being paid by that very same country. Failure to act could leave Americans asking a simple and uncomfortable question: Which country is buying U.S. foreign policy today?

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