Chris Hedges's Blog, page 106

11,000 Scientists Warn We’re Headed Toward ‘Untold Suffering’

In an unprecedented step, more than 11,000 scientists from 153 nations have united to warn the world that, without deep and lasting change, the climate emergency promises humankind unavoidable “untold suffering.”

And as if to underline that message, a US research group has predicted that – on the basis of experiments so far – global heating could reduce rice yields by 40% by the end of the century, and at the same time intensify levels of arsenic in the cereal that provides the staple food for almost half the planet.

And in the same few days a second US group has forecast that changes to the world’s vegetation in an atmosphere increasingly rich in carbon dioxide could mean that – even though rainfall might increase – there could be less fresh water on tap for many of the peoples of Europe, Asia and North America.

Warnings of climate hazard that could threaten political stability and precipitate mass starvation are not new: individuals, research groups, academies and intergovernmental agencies have been making the same point, and with increasing urgency, for more than two decades.

New analysis

The only argument has been about in what form, how badly, and just when the emergency will take its greatest toll.

But the 11,000 signatories to the statement in the journal BioScience report that their conclusions are based on the new analysis of 40 years of data covering energy use, surface temperature, population growth, land clearance, deforestation, polar ice melt, fertility rates, gross domestic product and carbon emissions.

The scientists list six steps that the world’s nations could take to avert the coming catastrophe: abandon fossil fuel use, reduce atmospheric pollution, restore natural ecosystems, shift from animal-based to plant diets, contain economic growth and the pursuit of affluence, and stabilise the human population.

Their warning appeared on the 40th anniversary of the first world climate congress, in Geneva in 1979.

Surprising rice impact

“Despite 40 years of major global negotiations, we have continued to conduct business as usual and have failed to address this crisis,” said William Ripple of Oregon State University, one of the leaders of the coalition. “Climate change has arrived and is accelerating faster than many scientists expected.”

Both the warning of catastrophic climate change and the steps to avoid it are familiar. But researchers at Stanford University in the US say they really did not expect the impact of world temperature rise on the rice crop – the staple for two billion people now, and perhaps 5 bn by 2100 – to be so severe.

Other groups have already warned that changes in seasonal temperature and rainfall could reduce both the yields of wheat, fruit and vegetables, and the nutritional values of rice and other staples.

The Stanford group report in the journal Nature Communications that they looked more closely at what climate change could do to rice crops. Most soils contain some arsenic. Rice is grown in flooded paddy fields that tend to loosen the poison from the soil particles. But higher temperatures combined with more intense rainfall show that, in experiments, rice plants absorb more arsenic, which in turn inhibits nutrient absorption and reduces plant development. Not only did the grains contain twice the level of arsenic, the yield fell by two-fifths.

“We have continued to conduct business as usual and have failed to address this crisis. Climate change has arrived and is accelerating faster than many scientists expected”

“By the time we get to 2100, we’re estimated to have approximately 10bn people, so that would mean we have 5 billion people dependent on rice, and 2bn who would not have access to the calories they would normally need,” said Scott Fendorf, an earth system scientist at Stanford.

“I didn’t expect the magnitude of impact on rice yield we observed. What I missed was how much the soil biogeochemistry would respond to increased temperature, how that would amplify plant-available arsenic and then – coupled with temperature stress – how that would really impact the plant.”

And while the rice croplands expect heavier rains, great tracts of the northern hemisphere could see vegetation changes that could have paradoxical consequences. In a wetter, warmer world plants could grow more vigorously. The stomata on the leaves through which plants breathe are more likely to close in a world of higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, meaning less water loss through foliage.

And while this should mean more run-off and a moister tropical world, a team at Dartmouth College in the US report in the journal Nature Geoscience that in the mid-latitudes plant response to climate change could actually make the land drier instead of wetter.

Water consumption rises

“Approximately 60% of the global water flux from the land to the atmosphere goes through plants, called transpiration. Plants are like the atmosphere’s straw, dominating how water flows from the land to the atmosphere. So vegetation is a massive determinant of what water is left on land for people,” said Justin Mankin, a geographer at Dartmouth.

“The question we’re asking here is, how do the combined effects of carbon dioxide and warming change the size of that straw?”

The calculations are complex. First, as temperatures soar, so will evaporation: more humidity means more rain – in some places. As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels soar, driven by fossil fuel combustion, plants need less water to photosynthesise, so the land gets more water. As the planet warms, growing seasons become extended and warmer, so plants grow for a longer period and consume more water, and will grow more vigorously because of the fertility effect of higher carbon dioxide concentrations.

The calculations suggest that forests, grasslands and other ecosystems will consume more water for longer periods, thus drying the soil and reducing ground water, and the run-off to the rivers, in parts of Europe, Asia and the US.

Avoiding the worst

And that in turn would mean lower levels of water available for human consumption, agriculture, hydropower and industry.

Both studies are indicators of possible hazard, to be confirmed or challenged by other scientific groups. But both exemplify the complexity of the challenge presented by temperature rises of at least the 2°C set by 195 nations in Paris in 2015 as the limit by the century’s end; or the 3°C that seems increasingly likely as those same nations fail to take the drastic action prescribed.

The world has already warmed by almost 1°C above the long-term average for most of human history. So both papers shore up the reasoning of the 11,000 signatories to the latest warning of planetary disaster. But that same warning contains some steps humankind could take to avert the worst.

“While things are bad, all is not hopeless,” said Thomas Newsome, of the University of Sydney, Australia, and one of the signatories. “We can take steps to address the climate emergency.”

Mini Mercury Glides Across Sun’s Vast Glare in Rare Transit

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Mini Mercury skipped across the vast, glaring face of the sun Monday in a rare celestial transit.

Stargazers used solar-filtered binoculars and telescopes to spot Mercury — a tiny black dot — as it passed directly between Earth and the sun on Monday.

The eastern U.S. and Canada got the whole 5 ½-hour show, weather permitting, along with Central and South America. The rest of the world, except for Asia and Australia, got just a sampling.

Mercury is the solar system’s smallest, innermost planet. The next transit isn’t until 2032, and North America won’t get another shot until 2049.

In Maryland, clouds prevented NASA solar astrophysicist Alex Young from getting a clear peek. Live coverage was provided by observatories including NASA’s orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory.

“It’s a bummer, but the whole event was still great,” Young wrote in an email. “Both getting to see it from space and sharing it with people all over the country and world.”

At Cape Canaveral, space buffs got a two-for-one. As Mercury’s silhouette graced the morning sun, SpaceX launched 60 small satellites for global internet service, part of the company’s growing Starlink constellation in orbit.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

A Veterans Day Worth Celebrating

Once upon a time, a U.S. president told his people they were fighting “a war to end all wars.” Only a handful of centenarians could possibly remember the false pretexts used to sell the “Great War” to the populace and how that same president imposed draconian “peace” conditions that made the even bloodier second World War all but inevitable. A self-proclaimed progressive, President Woodrow Wilson not only ditched his anti-war credentials but suppressed free speech, the free press under the Espionage Act and civil liberties more generally. Peaceful war opposition became a crime, and many activists were jailed. Sound familiar?

If Lyndon Johnson cynically selling our citizenry the Vietnam War under false pretenses was a tragedy, then George W. Bush’s lies and obfuscations to justify the Iraq War qualified as farce. Next, Barack Obama swiftly disappointed progressives by escalating the Afghan War, helping orchestrate the bombing of Libya back to the Stone Age under the ruse of a “no-fly zone,” and multiplying drone assassinations, all while prosecuting more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined. In this context, Donald Trump’s presidency hardly constitutes a break from history.

Indeed, the legacy of World War I continues to resonate across generations, from the poetry of Robert Graves to the fiction of Ernest Hemingway. Veterans of the conflict celebrated Nov. 11, 1918, as Armistice Day, signifying a final cessation of state violence. Only after the venal governments of the wealthy plunged into World War II was the holiday renamed Veterans Day, and with it died its beautiful, dreamy meaning.

More than a century later, we find the euphemisms and outright deceits used to launch, sustain and normalize our “forever wars” have only multiplied across the nation’s think tanks and corporate media. At various junctures over the past 18 years, the political establishment, like Wilson before it, has defended warfare on humanitarian grounds. Washington now justifies the perpetual “war on terror” as a violent means to protect women’s rights, build democracy and, in George W. Bush’s Manichean words, defeat “evil.”

Few pundits or faux intellectuals ask whether Bush or his successors’ millenarian mission is even possible. Fewer still discern that each president’s rhetoric served only as cover for the true motive of regional hegemony. Of course, “nation-building’s” dirty little secret is this: as in Vietnam and the Middle East, the U.S. military ultimately feels compelled to “bomb villages to save them.” Enabled by a mostly apathetic public, hundreds of thousands of foreigners, mostly civilians, have been killed in our name, along with another 7,000 U.S. troops we claim to adore. The $5.9 trillion in taxes used to finance these conflicts haven’t found their way into the pockets of our soldiers, who are paid just $30,000 a year to kill and die, but have enriched a handful of corporate war profiteers.

America’s wars assume an inertia all their own. The political-media power structure hardly questions why we’re fighting, but that won’t stop elites from praising the “service” and “sacrifice” of the troops this Veterans Day. They’ll use the veterans as props and pawns, as a cudgel to suppress dissent and smear anti-war activism as un-American or worse. It’s an old game we can’t afford to play any longer. Instead, let’s reclaim the true meaning of Armistice Day and forge a more peaceful world.

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Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army major and author. His work has appeared in Harper’s, the L.A. Times, The Nation, Tom Dispatch, the Huffington Post and The Hill. He served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “ Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge .”

Coleen Rowley is a retired FBI special agent and former Minneapolis Division legal counsel who testified to the 9/11 Joint Intelligence Committee inquiry and Senate Judiciary inquiry as a whistleblower, for which she was named one of Time Magazine’s 2002 Persons of the Year.

Both authors will be speaking as part of the University of Iowa Lecture Series beginning at 7:30 p.m. at the Old Capitol on Nov. 11. 

Think Capone When It Comes to Trump’s Impeachment

Is President Donald Trump more like Richard Nixon or Al Capone? That’s not a question many commentators in search of historical analogies will ask as the House begins televised hearings on Trump’s impeachment this week.

But it should be. In my view, the answer to the question is that the legal travails of both Nixon and Capone offer insights that can deepen our understanding of the impeachment inquiry that has been initiated against Trump.

The parallels between Trump and Nixon, of course, are plentiful and obvious. Like Nixon, Trump has used the presidency for personal political gain. Like Nixon, Trump has obstructed Congress in its efforts to carry out its oversight responsibilities, subverting the separation of powers among the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government that forms the bedrock of the U.S. Constitution. And like Nixon, Trump has lied repeatedly about his misconduct.

I’ve been writing about Trump’s inevitable impeachment in this column since December 2016. I’m a big fan of the analogy to Nixon, especially now that the impeachment hearings will begin to air on live TV in the fashion of the Senate’s 1973 Watergate probe.

But no single analogy can capture every aspect of something as momentous as a presidential impeachment. There’s always a need for additional context and comparison. That’s where the question of an analogy to Capone comes in, as there are some clear differences between Trump and Nixon, and some equally powerful traits Trump shares with Capone.

One of the major disparities between Nixon and Trump is the personal character of the two men. Without in any way eulogizing Nixon, our 37th commander in chief was a model citizen compared to our 45th.  Nixon was also a lawyer, highly educated and intellectually rigorous. In the end, when his crimes were exposed and his base of support had eroded, Nixon saw the handwriting on the wall and grudgingly bowed to the rule of law and resigned.

Trump won’t do that. For Trump, rules, including the rule of law, are meant to be broken. Defiance, fueled by a volatile mix of psychopathology, sociopathy and ignorance, is his brand.

In both style and to a certain degree substance, Trump is more mobster a la Capone than politician a la Nixon.

Just last week, in yet another confirmation of Trump’s corrupt business practices, a New York judge ordered the president to pay $2 million in damages to various nonprofit organizations to settle a civil law enforcement action brought against him by the state’s attorney general for misusing donations raised by his now-defunct charitable foundation. Instead of being directed to support public-interest causes, the funds were funneled to promote Trump’s 2016 campaign, pay off his personal debts and purchase a portrait of himself that was subsequently hung at his Doral golf resort outside of Miami, Fla.

The judge also ordered Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump—who were officers of their father’s foundation and were named as defendants in the lawsuit—to receive “fiduciary” (essentially, honesty) training to ensure they never commit similar infractions in the future.

Last week also saw U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman, who sits in the District of Columbia, deliver an extraordinary speech to a gathering of fellow jurists and prominent lawyers, claiming Trump’s rhetoric “violates all recognized democratic norms.”

“We are in unchartered territory … witnessing a chief executive who criticizes virtually every judicial decision that doesn’t go his way and denigrates judges who rule against him, sometimes in very personal terms,” Friedman said. “He seems to view the courts and the justice system as obstacles to be attacked and undermined, not as a coequal branch to be respected.”

As far as we know, Trump has never gone full-Capone and actually ordered one of his capos to literally take out any of his business or political opponents. But lest we forget, during the 2016 campaign, Trump boasted he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody” and not “lose any voters.”

And lest we think Trump was simply waxing hyperbolic, one of the president’s private attorneys told a three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in October that Trump could not be investigated or prosecuted until he leaves office, even if he really did shoot someone on 5th Avenue. The astounding assertion was advanced in support of Trump’s attempt to prevent Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance from obtaining Trump’s income tax returns. The circuit court ruled against Trump on Nov. 4.

The battle over Trump’s tax returns, and what they might reveal about his crooked financial dealings, is reminiscent of the painstaking federal effort to bring Capone to justice. When Capone was finally held to account, it wasn’t for masterminding the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, in which seven of his gangland Chicago rivals were killed, or for the violent extortion and bootlegging empire he had built. The Feds never got Capone for his most heinous offenses. Instead, Capone was arrested, tried, convicted and sent to prison in 1931 for the mundane white-collar crime of income tax evasion.

Still, Capone’s conviction brought his career as a mafioso to a close. After serving his time in custody, Capone was paroled in 1939, suffering from syphilis and early-onset dementia. He died in Florida eight years later, with what his doctor described as the mentality of a 12-year-old child.

As federal prosecutors did with Capone, House Democrats are pursuing a narrow impeachment case against Trump. Thus far, the impeachment inquiry has centered on the bribery/extortion scandal involving the president’s efforts to pressure Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up political dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden in exchange for the release of some $391 million in military aid previously approved by Congress.

The narrow focus of the Trump impeachment probe has disappointed many observers, including some on the left, who want Trump impeached and tried in the Senate for his worst crimes, not just for the Ukraine plot.

Ideally, as I’ve written before, Trump would be brought up on a laundry list of additional charges, including:

Using the presidency for personal economic gain;
Committing campaign finance violations by paying hush money to Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels;
Obstructing justice in connection with the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller;
Abusing the pardon power to reward political allies;
Abusing emergency powers to build his border wall;
Incarcerating undocumented immigrant children in prison settings;
Attempting to strip millions of Americans of health insurance;
Promoting tax reform to benefit the super-rich;
Gutting environmental regulations and pulling out of the Paris climate accord, and
Refusing to enforce the Voting Rights Act and promoting an ideology of white supremacy.

But we don’t live in an ideal world, or anything approximating it. A Ukraine-focused impeachment probe is likely the only one we’re going to get. And it is not without its merits.

Among the virtues of a narrow focus is that it’s easy for its proponents to present, and it’s easy for the public to understand. As long as it succeeds in producing an article of impeachment endorsed by a House majority, a narrowly focused probe deserves to be supported.

To be sure, it is highly doubtful that Senate Republicans will follow the example of Capone’s jury and vote to convict Trump and remove him from office in an impeachment trial conducted in the upper chamber. But if the impeachment case against the president is skillfully prosecuted in the Senate, it will severely damage Trump’s reelection prospects and hasten the demise of his political career, much as the tax-evasion prosecution of Capone brought an end to the career of the most notorious mobster in American history.

Election in Spain Only Deepens Political Uncertainty

MADRID — A general election called to end political deadlock in Spain has only deepened uncertainty about the future of the European Union’s fifth-largest economy and raised the possibility of yet another ballot — the fifth in five years — next year.

No party achieved a clear mandate to govern in Sunday’s vote, which was the second election in seven months and was intended to clear away the stalemate. Further weeks or months of political jockeying now lie ahead.

Incumbent Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s left-of-center Socialists captured the most seats, with 120. But that is far short of a majority in the 350-seat chamber, meaning the Socialists will have to negotiate deals with other parties if they are to govern.

The outcome also threw up a new roadblock: Support surged for far-right party Vox, which was launched just six years ago.

It collected 52 seats, more than double its showing in the last election in April, making it the third largest party in parliament behind the Socialists and the conservative Popular Party, which recovered to collect 88 seats.

Across Europe, far-right parties have made gains in recent years, setting off alarm bells about the bloc’s political direction.

Some analysts put down Vox’s rise to nationalist sentiment stirred up as a result of mass protests by separatists in the wealthy northeastern region of Catalonia. The protests have included recent violent clashes with police that left more than 500 people injured.

The push for Catalan independence, which the national government won’t allow, is Spain’s most serious political issue in decades and shows no signs of abating. Three Catalan separatist parties won a combined 23 seats, one more than in April.

José Ignacio Torreblanca, an analyst and head of the Madrid office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the Catalan separatists helped give rise to Vox.

“The one thing that the Catalans have achieved is to get a radical right equally as radical as they are on the other end, a kind of a mirror thing and with that make everyone’s life more miserable,” he said.

On Monday, Catalan radicals resumed their protests by blocking a major highway crossing the border between France and Spain and promising to keep it closed for three days. French police pushed them back toward Spain and scuffles broke out.

Vox leader Santiago Abascal said Monday that his party won’t support a Socialist government and issued a warning: “We demand that order be restored in Catalonia.”

Contemplating the election outcome and another fragmented parliament, many people on the streets of Madrid were scratching their heads Monday over what would happen next.

“I think we are worse than before: We are more divided,” said Antonio Prados, a 44-year-old police officer. “I don’t know, there’s a possibility to form a government, but I don’t know how they will come up with the numbers.”

Andrew Dowling, an expert on contemporary Spanish politics at Cardiff University in Wales, said Sánchez’s plan to reconfigure parliament to his benefit had backfired, leaving Spain once again at the mercy of an unpredictable political landscape.

“The Spanish Socialist party made a major miscalculation in calling new elections,” Dowling said.

The next step will be for parliamentarians to select a house speaker in the coming weeks and then for talks between King Felipe VI and party leaders to begin so that one of them, most likely Sánchez, will be called on to try to form a government.

Sanchez was meeting with his party leadership later Monday. Party secretary José Ábalos said Sánchez will sound out other party leaders over the coming days and seek to form a government as soon as possible.

Ábalos said the Socialists would not build any coalitions with parties on the right, indicating it would seek support instead from other leftist groups and regional parties.

But Sánchez’s closest political allies, the left-wing United We Can party, fell from 42 to 35 seats. Sunday’s ballot also went badly for the right-of-center Citizens party, which captured just 10 seats in parliament, down from 57 seats in April. Party leader Albert Rivera quit Monday.

In all, 12 parties gained parliamentary representation.

Capital Economics, a London-based research company, said it expected no short-term economic difficulties after Sunday’s vote because Spain’s economy has remained healthy despite the past four years of political gridlock.

But it warned Monday that deep, long-term economic reforms are needed in Spain’s labor markets and pension systems to keep Spain competitive.

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Hatton reported from Lisbon, Portugal. Associated Press reporters Helena Alves in Madrid and Felipe Dana on the France-Spain border contributed to this report.

Bernie Sanders Has More Diverse Support Than You Think

Suburban women, as Nicole Goodkind writes in Fortune, “[were] crucial to President Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and will be equally crucial to his reelection campaign next year.” Recent polling and actual election results, however, show Trump cannot take them for granted, and the same can be said for more centrist Democrats.

Goodkind is referring to data released from the Federal Election Commission and analyzed by the Center for Responsive Politics that reveals women are getting involved in elections earlier than in previous cycles. Fortune reports, “More than 1 million [women] have already donated $131 million itemized to presidential candidates.”

And while there’s no one candidate that’s won the hearts and minds of all women voters, it’s Bernie Sanders who has made the most progress.

“Of all the potential 2020 candidates,” Goodkind writes, “Sanders has taken in the most money from women, raising about $17.1 million in itemized contributions, or 40% of his total funds.”

Many of those women are from the suburbs, the same ones Trump needs to win. Sanders received “over $13 million in small-dollar donations from nearly 280,000 suburban women. Combining small- and large-dollar donations, Sanders earned more than any other presidential candidate amongst suburban women with a total of $15 million from small and large donors alike.”

These numbers challenge the prevailing wisdom that Democrats must be aggressively moderate to win elections, a position that gained traction last week following Democratic state-level wins in Kentucky, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., told The Hill on Friday that candidates in his state won because they “ran on more moderate issues.”

He added that candidates “had very much followed in the traditional Virginia Democratic model of we’re going to give you responsible government, it’s going to be fiscally responsible.”

“I happen to believe that America is a center-right country and that people want us to work across the aisle, and what they’re most interested in is problem solving rather than rhetoric,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who endorsed Joe Biden, explained to The Hill.

Brad Bannon, a Democratic strategist and consultant, isn’t so sure. “This is bad news for Biden, it shows he’s got a problem with the female vote,” he told Fortune, regarding the new data about suburban women. “And when you look at the polls, women are significantly more likely to be voting for [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren or Sanders than Biden.”

Suburban women aren’t the only counterintuitive demographic for a candidate whose supporters are often referred to as “Bernie Bros” and assumed to be young, leftist white men. In addition to Fortune’s reporting, Foreign Policy examined political contributions from U.S. national security agency staff, also using data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Per Foreign Policy:

When combining contribution amounts together, Sanders is the biggest beneficiary of national security support, followed by [Mayor Pete] Buttigieg and Warren. Democratic front-runner Biden and President Donald Trump trail behind those candidates, ranking no higher than third for any one department.

When broken down by sector of government, Buttigieg had the highest support from the State Department and Sanders from the military.

Sanders, The New York Times reported this weekend, “has collected more money from Latino voters than any other candidate in the Democratic field, raising three times as much from the group as Barack Obama did in 2008.”

According to a set of new surveys from The New York Times and Siena College, the Vermont senator is attracting “28% of the Democratic primary vote in six swing states.”

In another poll from a crucial state, California, conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California, 39% of Latinos in California said they prefer Sanders, compared to 21%  for Biden and 5% for  Warren.

Anthony Mercado, a 48-year-old maintenance worker, explained Sanders’ appeal to Latinos to The New York Times: “We’re a community of struggle, and this is a man who knows struggle.. .. Latinos have been promised things and then the winds change. But he’s been saying the same things ever since he started.”

Is There Anything the Media Won’t Blame on Millennials?

In recent times, media have taken a great interest in highlighting and even generating intergenerational fighting. One example is the focus on the “OK boomer” meme, a witty two-word comeback gaining popularity on the internet. “OK boomer” is a pithy, cutting retort millennials (those born between 1981–96) and Generation Z (those “Zoomers” born even later than 1996) give to those born during the baby boom (1946–64). The digital equivalent of an eye roll, it conveys that the speaker considers the person being addressed to be obtuse, stubborn and out of date.

Though it’s today’s youth who are frequently claimed to constitute “Generation Snowflake,” the phrase appears to seriously annoy many, well, boomers, and has generated a great deal of media takes, eager to exploit the meme while it is still fresh (e.g., Today, 10/30/19; NBC News, 11/7/19; NPR, 11/7/19; CNN, 11/8/19). Writing a long self-own in the New York Times (11/2/19), Maureen Dowd described her annoyance at junior colleagues “OK boomer”-ing her to display contempt. The Chicago Tribune’s Heidi Stevens claimed (11/4/19) the formerly fun phrase had turned nasty, and we had collectively killed it. Meanwhile, one Miami Herald columnist (11/5/19) exhorted his fellow oldies with “Get Over It, Boomers! Gen Z Hates Us–That’s the Natural Order of Things.”

But conservative upstate New York radio show host Bob Lonsberry provided undoubtedly the hottest take of all, claiming that “boomer” had become “the n-word of ageism,” suggesting that this sort of “bigotry” towards the older generation had become “acceptable.” He later deleted his comment after receiving a torrent of ridicule. Lonsberry had previously been fired from his job at Rochester, N.Y.’s WHAM radio for referring to local African-American mayor William Johnson as a “monkey.”

The Washington Post (11/4/19) and the New York Times (10/29/19) attempted to describe the meaning behind the new phrase. For the Post, it “encapsulates an increasingly evident divide between Generation Z, millennials and their older counterparts” who “they perceive as out of touch.”

The Times claimed it “marks the end of friendly generational relations,” interviewing some of the young people who helped popularize the phrase, noting the teens “believe older people are actively hurting young people” through the ending of affordable college tuition and their failure to act on climate change.

It quotes one Zoomer:

Everybody in Gen Z is affected by the choices of the boomers, that they made and are still making.…Those choices are hurting us and our future. Everyone in my generation can relate to that experience and we’re all really frustrated by it.

While providing a range of takes, what all these stories obscure, with their focus on intergenerational strife, is the relevance of class as a fundamental divide in American culture. In reality, it was not boomers as a group who prevented meaningful action on climate change, nor was it they who increased college tuitions (FAIR.org, 4/5/17). Those decisions were made by a small group of people at the top of society–in corporate boardrooms and in high office. There is much to be said about how the media’s not-hot-but-perennial takes hide such decisions by pitting generations against one another (Extra!, 3–4/97)–with assertions that Social Security recipients are stealing from the young, and that slashing government budgets is a matter of generational equity.

But the current generational conflict narrative mainly serves to obscure the vast differences in wealth and power between those in the same age cohort. While the current generation is far worse off economically than previous ones, the National Council on Ageing notes that over 25 million Americans aged 60+ are economically insecure, with over a third of senior households broke or in debt at the end of the month. Therefore, by emphasizing age and not class, corporate media are effectively playing generations off against each other, allowing the rich to play divide and rule (FAIR.org, 1/5/16).

This is exactly what USA Today (11/7/19) did in its story about lack of career advancement among younger workers, headlined, “Millennials, Gen Xers to Baby Boomers: Can You Retire So I Can Get a Job Promotion?” This framed the issue as a fight between disgruntled young people angry at an older generation who refuse to retire, rather than one about the inherent structural inequalities of capitalism that inevitably leave the majority in subordinate positions, while failing to provide a social safety net sufficient to allow the elderly to stop working.

Millennials Are Killing Everything

The discussion of the new boomer meme takes the place of–while of a piece with–complaints that millennials are ruining everything (FAIR.org, 10/10/16). One of the many things the young are destroying is the housing market, according to a host of articles. Business Insider (7/30/19) insists that the reason young people are not buying homes is not the out-of-control market, but because they “prefer to rent instead.” And if they do buy, they “don’t want” boomers’ large properties, “preferring smaller houses” (Business Insider, 3/28/19). The smaller the better!

Going further, the Daily Telegraph (3/29/19) claimed that young people don’t like possessing anything whatsoever, arguing the “sharing economy” is great, “allowing millennials to enjoy the benefits of owning” without the “bother” of buying, quoting one source who claimed “ownership nowadays just doesn’t have the glory it used to.” Quartz (8/27/19) claimed this shift had resulted in a new housing model in which the “customer” (i.e., the renter)—not the landlord—is king.” Given that high rents and house prices, crippling student debt and a faltering economy has resulted in nearly a quarter of those under 37 forced to live with their parents, that claim appears debateable.

And that is the problem. This genre of articles ignores, downplays or specifically argues against the idea that young people are often huge losers in the post-crash economy, and many have little to no hope of ever affording a home. But instead of discussing these structural factors, media instead prefer to explain the phenomenon as one of personal choice.

Sometimes, corporate media will blame the young for their own predicament. Picking up on a New York Times article (2/22/16), a very wide range of outlets, including Fox Business (2/25/16), CBC (2/25/16), Business Insider (2/25/16), the Daily Mail (2/25/16) and the Cut (2/26/16) all claimed that millennials were simply too lazy to eat cereal, thus crippling the industry.

A more likely reason for cereal’s poor performance with younger adults is alluded to in the Washington Post (2/23/16): Millennials are so overworked and time-pressed that they have forgone formal meals, instead eating and drinking on the go. Any of these articles could have used the news as a hook to explore the increasingly difficult structural and economic circumstances workers are under. But instead it was used to frame the young as feckless loafers, in a similar manner to how the poor are blamed for their own condition.

The New York Post got more than it bargained for when it published an article (10/26/19) complaining that millennials had killed the power lunch. Emily Kirkpatrick, a millennial Post employee, offered via Twitter (10/30/19) some alternative, undiscussed reasons why her generation might be abstaining from afternoon dining in Manhattan’s top restaurants. She noted that the Post does not provide its staff with lunch hours and that they are expected to be at their desks all the time, “so if you want to blame someone for killing the power lunch,” she said, “you might want to take a look in the mirror first.”

Dividing people by age rather than class has an intrinsic appeal to corporate media outlets owned by the wealthy elite of this country. While there are certainly genuine divides along age lines in Western society, they are all too often promoted in lieu of discussing more relevant class divides, effectively pitting the generations off against one another, leaving those responsible for the current mess laughing all the way to the bank.

The Greatest Scam in History Is Taking Us All Down

It’s a tale for all time. What might be the greatest scam in history or, at least, the one that threatens to take history down with it. Think of it as the climate-change scam that beat science, big time.

Scientists have been seriously investigating the subject of human-made climate change since the late 1950s and political leaders have been discussing it for nearly as long. In 1961, Alvin Weinberg, the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, called carbon dioxide one of the “big problems” of the world “on whose solution the entire future of the human race depends.” Fast-forward nearly 30 years and, in 1992, President George H.W. Bush signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), promising “concrete action to protect the planet.”

Today, with Puerto Rico still recovering from Hurricane Maria and fires burning across California, we know that did not happen. Despite hundreds of scientific reports and assessments, tens of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers, and countless conferences on the issue, man-made climate change is now a living crisis on this planet. Universities, foundations, churches, and individuals have indeed divested from fossil fuel companies and, led by a 16-year-old Swedish girl, citizens across the globe have taken to the streets to express their outrage. Children have refused to go to school on Fridays to protest the potential loss of their future. And if you need a measure of how long some of us have been at this, in December, the Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC will meet for the 25th time.

Scientists working on the issue have often told me that, once upon a time, they assumed, if they did their jobs, politicians would act upon the information. That, of course, hasn’t happened. Anything but, across much of the planet. Worse yet, science failed to have the necessary impact in significant part because of disinformation promoted by the major fossil-fuel companies, which have succeeded in diverting attention from climate change and successfully blocking meaningful action.

Making Climate Change Go Away

Much focus has been put on ExxonMobil’s history of disseminating disinformation, partly because of the documented discrepancies between what that company said in public about climate change and what its officials said (and funded) in private. Recently, a trial began in New York City accusing the company of misleading its investors, while Massachusetts is prosecuting ExxonMobil for misleading consumers as well.

If only it had just been that one company, but for more than 30 years, the fossil-fuel industry and its allies have denied the truth about anthropogenic global warming. They have systematically misled the American people and so purposely contributed to endless delays in dealing with the issue by, among other things, discounting and disparaging climate science, mispresenting scientific findings, and attempting to discredit climate scientists. These activities are documented in great detail in How Americans Were Deliberately Misled about Climate Change, a report I recently co-authored, as well as in my 2010 book and 2014 film, Merchants of Doubt.

A key aspect of the fossil-fuel industry’s disinformation campaign was the mobilization of “third-party allies”: organizations and groups with which it would collaborate and that, in some cases, it would be responsible for creating.

In the 1990s, these allied outfits included the Global Climate Coalition, the Cooler Heads Coalition, Informed Citizens for the Environment, and the Greening Earth Society. Like ExxonMobil, such groups endlessly promoted a public message of denial and doubt: that we weren’t really sure if climate change was happening; that the science wasn’t settled; that humanity could, in any case, readily adapt at a later date to any changes that did occur; and that addressing climate change directly would wreck the American economy. Two of these groups — Informed Citizens for the Environment and the Greening Earth Society — were, in fact, AstroTurf organizations, created and funded by a coal industry trade association but dressed up to look like grass-roots citizens’ action organizations.

Similar messaging was pursued by a network of think tanks promoting free market solutions to social problems, many with ties to the fossil-fuel industry. These included the George C. Marshall Institute, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heartland Institute. Often their politically motivated contrarian claims were presented in formats that make them look like the scientific reports whose findings they were contradicting.

In 2009, for instance, the Cato Institute issued a report that precisely mimicked the format, layout, and structure of the government’s U.S. National Climate Assessment. Of course, it made claims thoroughly at odds with the actual report’s science. The industry also promoted disinformation through its trade associations, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Black Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers.

Both think tanks and trade organizations have been involved in personal attacks on the reputations of scientists. One of the earliest documented was on climate scientist Benjamin Santer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who showed that the observed increase in global temperatures could not be attributed to increased solar radiation. He served as the lead author of the Second Assessment Report of the U.N.’s prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, responsible for the 1995 conclusion that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human impact on the climate system.” Santer became the target of a vicious, arguably defamatory attack by physicists from the George C. Marshall Institute and the Global Climate Coalition, who accused him of fraud. Other climate scientists, including Michael Mann, Jonathan Overpeck, Malcolm Hughes, Ray Bradley, Katharine Hayhoe, and, I should note, myself, have been subject to harassment, investigation, hacked emails, and politically motivated freedom-of-information attacks.

How to Play Climate Change for a Fool

When it came to industry disinformation, the role of third-party allies was on full display at the House Committee on Oversight hearings on climate change in late October. As their sole witness, the Republicans on that committee invited Mandy Gunasekera, the founder and president of Energy45, a group whose purpose, in its own words, is to “support the Trump energy agenda.”

Energy45 is part of a group known, bluntly enough, as the CO2 Coalition and is a perfect example of what I’ve long thought of as zombie denialism in which older players spouting industry arguments suddenly reappear in new forms. In this case, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the George C. Marshall Institute was a leader in climate-change disinformation. From 1974-1999, its director, William O’Keefe, had also been the executive vice president and later CEO of the American Petroleum Institute. The Marshall Institute itself closed in 2015, only to re-emerge a few years later as the CO2 Coalition.

The comments of Republican committee members offer a sense of just how deeply the climate-change disinformation campaign is now lodged in the heart of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans as 2019 draws to an end and the planet visibly heats. Consider just six of their “facts”:

1) The misleading claim that climate change will be “mild and manageable.” There is no scientific evidence to support this. On the contrary, literally hundreds of scientific reports over the past few decades, including those U.S. National Climate Assessments, have affirmed that any warming above 2 degrees Centigrade will lead to grave and perhaps catastrophic effects on “health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth.” The U.N.’s IPCC has recently noted that avoiding the worst impacts of global warming will “require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy… infrastructure… and industrial systems.”

Recent events surrounding Hurricanes Sandy, Michael, Harvey, Maria, and Dorian, as well as the devastating wildfire at the ironically named town of Paradise, California, in 2018 and the fires across much of that state this fall, have shown that the impacts of climate change are already part of our lives and becoming unmanageable. Or if you want another sign of where this country is at this moment, consider a new report from the Army War College indicating that “the Department of Defense (DoD) is precariously unprepared for the national security implications of climate change-induced global security challenges.” And if the Pentagon isn’t prepared to manage climate change, it’s hard to imagine any part of the U.S. government that might be.

2) The misleading claim that global prosperity is actually being driven by fossil fuels. No one denies that fossil fuels drove the Industrial Revolution and, in doing so, contributed substantively to rising living standards for hundreds of millions of people in Europe, North America, and parts of Asia. But the claim that fossil fuels are the essence of global prosperity today is, at best, a half-truth because what is at stake here isn’t the past but the future. Disruptive climate change fueled by greenhouse gas emissions from the use of oil, coal, and natural gas now threatens both the prosperity that parts of this planet have already achieved and future economic growth of just about any sort. Nicholas Stern, the former chief economist of the World Bank and one of the foremost experts on the economics of climate change, has put our situation succinctly this way: “High carbon growth self-destructs.”

3) A misleading claim that fossil fuels represent “cheap energy.” Fossil fuels are not cheap. When their external costs are included — that is, not just the price of extracting, distributing, and profiting from them, but what it will cost in all our lives once you add in the fires, extreme storms, flooding, health effects, and everything else that their carbon emissions into the atmosphere will bring about — they couldn’t be more expensive. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the cost to consumers above and beyond what we pay at the pump or in our electricity bills already comes to more than $5 trillion dollars annually. That’s trillion, not billion. Put another way, we are all paying a massive, largely unnoticed subsidy to the oil, gas, and coal industry to destroy our civilization. Among other things, those subsidies already “damage the environment, caus[e]… premature deaths through local air pollution, [and] exacerbat[e] congestion and other adverse side effects of vehicle use.”

4) A misleading claim about poverty and fossil fuels. That fossil fuels are the solution to the energy needs of the world’s poor is a tale being heavily promoted by ExxonMobil, among others. The idea that ExxonMobil is suddenly concerned about the plight of the global poor is, of course, laughable or its executives wouldn’t be planning (as they are) for significant increases in fossil-fuel production between now and 2030, while downplaying the threat of climate change. As Pope Francis, global justice leader Mary Robinson, and former U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon — as well as countless scientists and advocates of poverty reduction and global justice — have repeatedly emphasized, climate change will, above all, hurt the poor. It is they who will first be uprooted from their homes (and homelands); it is they who will be migrating into an increasingly hostile and walled-in world; it is they who will truly feel the heat, literal and figurative, of it all. A fossil-fuel company that cared about the poor would obviously not be committed, above all else, to pursuing a business model based on oil and gas exploration and development. The cynicism of this argument is truly astonishing.

Moreover, while it’s true that the poor need affordable energy, it is not true that they need fossil fuels. More than a billion people worldwide lack access (or, at least, reliable access) to electricity, but many of them also lack access to an electricity grid, which means fossil fuels are of little use to them. For such communities, solar and wind power are the only reasonable ways to go, the only ones that could rapidly and affordably be put in place and made available.

5) Misleading assertions about the costs of renewable energy. The cheap fossil fuel narrative is regularly coupled with misleading assertions about the allegedly high costs of renewable energy. According to Bloomberg News, however, in two-thirds of the world, solar is already the cheapest form of newly installed electricity generation, cheaper than nuclear, natural gas, or coal. Improvements in energy storage are needed to maximize the penetration of renewables, particularly in developed countries, but such improvements are happening quickly. Between 2010 and 2017, the price of battery storage decreased a startling 79% and most experts believe that, in the near future, many of the storage problems can and will be solved.

6) The false claim that, under President Trump, the U.S. has actually cut greenhouse gas emissions. Republicans have claimed not only that such emissions have fallen but that the United States under President Trump has done more to reduce emissions than any other country on the planet. One environmental reporter, who has described herself as “accustomed to hearing a lot of misinformation” about climate change, characterized this statement as “brazenly false.” In fact, U.S. CO2 emissions spiked in 2018, increasing by 3.1% over 2017. Methane emissions are also on the rise and President Trump’s proposal to rollback methane standards will ensure that unhappy trend continues.

Science Isn’t Enough

And by the way, when it comes to the oil companies, that’s just to start down a far longer list of misinformation and false claims they’ve been peddling for years. In our 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, Erik Conway and I showed that the strategies and tactics used by Big Energy to deny the harm of fossil-fuel use were, in many cases, remarkably similar to those long used by the tobacco industry to deny the harm of tobacco use — and this was no coincidence. Many of the same PR firms, advertising agencies, and institutions were involved in both cases.

The tobacco industry was finally prosecuted by the Department of Justice, in part because of the ways in which the individual companies coordinated with each other and with third-party allies to present false information to consumers. Through congressional hearings and legal discovery, the industry was pegged with a wide range of activities it funded to mislead the American people. Something similar has occurred with Big Energy and the harm fossil fuels are doing to our lives, our civilization, our planet.

Still, a crucial question about the fossil-fuel industry remains to be fully explored: Which of its companies have funded the activities of the trade organizations and other third-party allies who deny the facts about climate change? In some cases, we already know the answers. In 2006, for instance, the Royal Society of the United Kingdom documented ExxonMobil’s funding of 39 organizations that promoted “inaccurate and misleading” views of climate science. The Society was able to identify $2.9 million spent to that end by that company in the year 2005 alone. That, of course, was just one year and clearly anything but the whole story.

Nearly all of these third-party allies are incorporated as 501(c)(3) institutions, which means they must be non-profit and nonpartisan. Often they claim to be involved in education (though mis-education would be the more accurate term). But they are clearly also involved in supporting an industry — Big Energy — that couldn’t be more for-profit and they have done many things to support what could only be called a partisan political agenda as well. After all, by its own admission, Energy45, to take just one example, exists to support the “Trump Energy Agenda.”

I’m an educator, not a lawyer, but as one I can say with confidence that the activities of these organizations are the opposite of educational. Typically, the Heartland Institute, for instance, has explicitly targeted schoolteachers with disinformation. In 2017, the institute sent a booklet to more than 200,000 of them, repeating the oft-cited contrarian claims that climate science is still a highly unsettled subject and that, even if climate change were occurring, it “would probably not be harmful.” Of this booklet, the director of the National Center for Science Education said, “It’s not science, but it’s dressed up to look like science. It’s clearly intended to confuse teachers.” The National Science Teaching Association has called it “propaganda” and advised teachers to place their copies in the recycling bin.

Yet, as much as we know about the activities of Heartland and other third-party allies of the fossil-fuel industry, because of loopholes in our laws we still lack basic information about who has funded and sustained them. Much of the funding at the moment still qualifies as “dark money.” Isn’t it time for citizens to demand that Congress investigate this network, as it and the Department of Justice once investigated the tobacco industry and its networks?

ExxonMobil loves to accuse me of being “an activist.” I am, in fact, a teacher and a scholar. Most of the time, I’d rather be home working on my next book, but that increasingly seems like less of an option when Big Energy’s climate-change scam is ongoing and our civilization is, quite literally, at stake. When citizens are inactive, democracy fails — and this time, if democracy fails, as burning California shows, so much else could fail as well. Science isn’t enough. The rest of us are needed. And we are needed now.

The Billionaire Class Won’t Go Quietly

The extremely rich Americans who are now frantically trying to figure out how to intervene in the Democratic presidential campaign make me wonder how different they are from the animated character who loved frolicking in money and kissing dollar bills while counting them. If Uncle Scrooge existed as a billionaire in human form today, it’s easy to picture him aligned with fellow plutocrats against the “threat” of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

The exceedingly wealthy are usually content to stay in the shadows while their combined financial leverage and media power keep top government officials more or less in line. But the grassroots strengths of the Warren and Sanders campaigns have jolted some key oligarchs into overt action.

“At least 16 billionaires have in recent months spoken out against what they regard as the danger posed by the populist Democrats, particularly over their proposals to enact a ‘wealth tax’ on vast fortunes,” the Washington Post reported over the weekend. Many of those billionaires are “expressing concern” that the populist Democrats “will blow the election to Trump by veering too far left.”

But are those billionaires more worried about a wealth tax that will curtail vast fortunes, or about Trump winning re-election? Are we supposed to believe the far-fetched notion that voters will opt for Trump over the Democratic nominee because they don’t want billionaires to pay higher taxes?

The biggest fear among the billionaire class is not that a progressive Democratic nominee will lose against Trump. The biggest fear is that such a nominee will win — thus gaining presidential muscle to implement measures like a wealth tax that would adversely affect the outsized fortunes of the 0.1 percent.

Such fears are causing a step-up of attacks on Sanders and Warren, and even some early indications of trauma. “Piling on against the wealth tax have been corporate celebrities from Silicon Valley and Wall Street,” the Post reported on Saturday. Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg “suggested Sanders’s call to abolish billionaires could hurt philanthropies and scientific research by giving the government too much decision-making power. . . . Appearing on CNBC, billionaire investor Leon Cooperman choked up while discussing the impact a wealth tax could have on his family.”

Sanders often points to the fact that just three individuals — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett — own as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the U.S. population. Gates has publicly denounced Warren’s proposal for a wealth tax. It shouldn’t surprise us now to learn that earlier this year Bezos urged Bloomberg to run for president. We might call it ruling-class unity — which is a point that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quickly made while campaigning alongside Sanders in Iowa when the news broke.

“Of course!” AOC told a Des Moines Register reporter. “They’ve got class solidarity. The billionaires are looking out for each other. They’re willing to transcend difference and background and even politics. The fact that Bill Gates seems more willing to vote for Donald Trump than anyone else tells you everything you need to know about how far they’re willing to go to protect their excess, at the cost to everyday Americans.”

Moments later, Sanders joked: “Jeff Bezos, worth $150 billion, supporting Mike Bloomberg, who’s worth only $50 billion — that’s real class solidarity.” And Sanders tied in the climate emergency: “When you talk about class warfare within the context of climate change, like Alexandria was just saying, the fossil fuels industry makes billions [and] billions of dollars in profits every single year, and the people who suffer the most are often lowest-income people. But it’s not just low-income people. Family farmers in Iowa and agriculture in Iowa is going to be suffering.”

News of Bloomberg’s looming entry into the Democratic presidential race elicited mass-media awe because of his wealth. A Republican until 2007, Bloomberg didn’t become a registered Democrat until October 2018. His record as New York City’s mayor included hostility toward labor unions in the public sector, support for police use of stop-and-frisk targeting racial minorities, and vocal antipathy toward the Obama administration’s minimal Dodd-Frank regulation of the financial industry. Bloomberg is a mismatch with most Democrats.

For most of this year, Biden seemed the best bet for moguls like Bloomberg. But confidence receded as the Biden for President campaign lost ground — not only because of his continuing “gaffs” and stumbling syntax but also because more information kept surfacing about his actual record while in the Senate from 1973 through 2008.

Further erosion of support for Biden can be expected due to a pair of powerful articles in the current issue of The Nation magazine. An “anti-endorsement” editorial summarizes his career as a servant of establishment power, concluding: “On issue after issue, Biden’s candidacy offers Trump a unique opportunity to muddy what should be a devastatingly clear choice. The Nation therefore calls on Biden to put service to country above personal ambition and withdraw from the race.” And an investigative piece breaks new ground in documenting how Biden and his immediate family have been enmeshed in scarcely legal conflicts of interest and pay-to-play corruption for several decades.

These days, for billionaires trying to line up a new Democratic president, good help is hard to find. Biden is willing as ever but perhaps not able. In effect, seeing Biden falter, Bloomberg is on the verge of cutting out the middleman. At this point, why hope that activation of pro-Biden Super PACs will be sufficient, when Bloomberg can step in and hugely outspend everyone out of his own pocket?

But even if it turns out that Biden has outlived his usefulness to the billionaire class, no one should doubt his unwavering loyalty. Biden offered reassurance during a speech at the Brookings Institution last year. “I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders,” he said. “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble. . . The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”

The first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court would have agreed. John Jay liked to say: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” Now, the rhetoric is quite different. But the reality is up for grabs in the realm we call politics.

The Grounds for Trump’s Impeachment Are Piling Up

This piece originally appeared on Truthout. 

We’re headed for a separation of powers showdown between Congress and the president that will ultimately end up in the Supreme Court.

The Constitution gives Congress the “sole Power of Impeachment.” Yet President Donald Trump has ordered all of his current and former senior advisers to defy congressional subpoenas to testify in the impeachment inquiry. Trump is claiming the subpoenaed witnesses have “absolute immunity” against civil or criminal liability for refusal to provide testimony. However, “absolute immunity” is a creation of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. No court, statute or constitution has ever recognized it.

Some subpoenaed witnesses have obeyed Trump’s command and refused to testify. But others have defied him and testified before the committees of the House of Representatives gathering evidence during the impeachment process.

The committees are investigating a July 25, 2019, phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In that call, Trump made $400 million in military aid, Javelin missiles and a meeting between the two presidents all contingent on Zelensky investigating the 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee and digging up dirt on Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

This quid pro quo, which several witnesses have already documented, could provide the basis for an article of impeachment for abuse of power by Trump. The cover-up of the call, which was attempted by moving the records of it to a secret server, could be the foundation for a second article of impeachment for obstruction of justice. And the presidential orders to witnesses to disobey subpoenas to testify in the impeachment inquiry could constitute a third article of impeachment for obstruction of the impeachment inquiry.

The Constitutionality of Trump’s Refusal Order Is Being Tested in the Courts

On October 25, Charles Kupperman, deputy to former national security adviser John Bolton, was subpoenaed to testify before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). But the same day, Kupperman filed a lawsuit against the House of Representatives; Trump; Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi; Adam Schiff, Chairman of the HPSCI; Eliot Engel, Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs; and Carolyn Maloney, Acting Chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

In his complaint, Kupperman asked the U.S. District Court for the D.C. Circuit to resolve the conflict between the legislative and executive branches and decide whether he must testify.

On October 26, Schiff, Engel and Maloney sent a letter to Kupperman’s lawyers, stating that the subpoena was still in force and the committees would consider Kupperman’s “defiance of a congressional subpoena as additional evidence of the President’s obstruction of the House’s impeachment inquiry.” Such defiance, they wrote, “may also cause the Committees to draw an adverse inference against the President, including” that Kupperman’s “testimony would have corroborated other evidence . . . showing that the President abused the power of his office by attempting to press another nation to assist his own personal political interests, and not the national interest.”

Moreover, the three committee chairs noted,

If such an abuse of authority by the President to muzzle current and former officials from disclosing to Congress evidence of his own misconduct were to stand, it would inflict obvious and grave damage to the House’s capacity to carry out its core Article I functions under the Constitution, including its impeachment inquiry into the President’s actions. This would fundamentally alter the separation of powers that forms the bedrock of American democracy.

On November 6, concerned about the delay Kupperman’s lawsuit would cause, the House of Representatives withdrew the subpoena. The House suggested that Kupperman abide by the decision in a pending lawsuit against former White House counsel Don McGahn. The McGahn litigation will, in all likelihood, resolve Kupperman’s dilemma about whether he is legally bound to testify.

The same legal issues Kupperman raised are at issue in a suit filed by the House Judiciary Committee to enforce its April 22 subpoena of McGahn to testify before Congress about efforts by Trump to obstruct Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. In its complaint, the Judiciary Committee said McGahn was “the most important witness, other than the president, to the key events” that could form the basis for obstruction of justice by Trump. McGahn told Mueller that Trump ordered him to fire Mueller. When McGahn threatened to resign, Trump backed down. After Trump’s firing order became public, Trump tried to get McGahn to falsify evidence and deny it had happened.

Citing the Office of Legal Counsel’s position that a sitting president cannot be indicted, Mueller did not conclude whether Trump committed obstruction of justice, although he set forth 10 possible grounds for obstruction. TheMueller report said that if the Special Counsel’s office “had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, [it] would so state.” Mueller left it to Congress to address Trump’s obstruction of justice through the impeachment process, stating that the “Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a President of wrongdoing.”

During the October 31 oral argument in the McGahn case, U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared highly skeptical of the White House’s claim that current and former top presidential advisers have absolute immunity from congressional subpoenas. Jackson said she would issue a ruling as early as possible.

“Absolute Immunity” Is Not Supported by the Constitution, Case Law or Statute

Trump’s assertion of “absolute immunity” is not supported by the U.S. Constitution or any judicial opinion or federal statute. It reflects only the opinion of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), which is itself a part of the executive branch. Since the 1970s, the OLC has taken the position that “the President and his immediate advisers are absolutely immune from testimonial compulsion by a Congressional committee.”

“Absolute immunity,” as defined by the OLC, is broader than executive privilege. Absolute immunity would relieve a witness from testifying at all. Executive privilege, on the other hand, prevents witnesses from answering specific questions relating to confidential communications. Trump has not invoked executive privilege regarding McGahn’s testimony.

The only court to address absolute immunity rejected it. The issue arose in the 2008 case of Committee on the Judiciary v. Miers, which was brought by the House Judiciary Committee against President George W. Bush’s former White House counsel Harriet Miers for defying a subpoena to testify about the termination of nine U.S. attorneys. The federal district court decided in favor of the House Judiciary Committee, stating, “Clear precedent and persuasive policy reasons confirm that the Executive cannot be the judge of its own privilege and hence Ms. Miers is not entitled to absolute immunity from compelled congressional process.” (The court in that case left open the possibility that it might reach a different result if national security or foreign affairs were at issue.) Nevertheless, the Miers case has no precedential value since it was settled before an appellate court could rule on the issue.

Damaging Testimony Despite Presidential Ban

Those who have already testified, notwithstanding Trump’s order to defy subpoenas, have given damning testimony against him. Here are summaries of some testimonies already provided by key witnesses:

–Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, listened in on the July 25 call. He then twice complained to John Eisenberg, deputy White House counsel for national security affairs, expressing his alarm at Trump’s attempt to get Zelensky to sully his political opponents.

–William Taylor, acting ambassador to Ukraine, testified it was his “clear understanding” that U.S. aid would be withheld until Ukraine began to investigate Joe Biden.

–Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the European Union, initially said he “never” thought there were preconditions on the assistance to Ukraine, but later contradicted his former testimony.

–Kurt Volker, former State Department envoy to Ukraine, testified that he wasn’t aware of a quid pro quo but said that Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, pressured Ukrainian officials to state publicly that they would investigate Trump’s political rivals.

–John Sullivan, deputy secretary of state and Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to Russia, testified that Trump’s requests to Zelensky were improper.

–Timothy Morrison, a senior National Security Council aide who resigned on the eve of his scheduled testimony, testified that he was on a call between Trump and Sondland, during which Trump denied seeking a quid pro quo but proceeded to “insist” that Zelensky publicly announce investigations into the Bidens and other Democrats.

–Fiona Hill, Trump’s former top adviser on Russia, testified that Sondland, Giuliani and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney were leading a dangerous shadow foreign policy. She said there was “wrongdoing” in U.S. foreign policy.

Several witnesses have obeyed Trump’s command and refused to testify. They include John Eisenberg, who is a material witness to the cover-up surrounding the July 25 call. After Vindman expressed his concern about the call, Eisenberg ordered the records of the call transferred to a top-secret computer server used only for the most sensitive government information. Eisenberg is refusing to comply with a subpoena to testify.

Other subpoenaed witnesses who have refused to testify include Mike Ellis, Eisenberg’s deputy; Robert Blair, senior adviser to Mulvaney; Russell Vought, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget; and Brian McCormack, associate director of the White House budget office.

Meanwhile, on November 1, the Office of Legal Counsel issued a guidance stating that subpoenaed executive branch witnesses need not testify in impeachment inquiries “about matters that potentially involve information protected by executive privilege without the assistance of agency counsel.” Witnesses who are testifying before congressional committees in the impeachment inquiry may be accompanied by personal attorneys, but not government ones.

Whether senior presidential advisers enjoy “absolute immunity” if they refuse to comply with a congressional subpoena to testify at an impeachment inquiry will invariably be decided by the Supreme Court. Judge Jackson’s decision in the McGahn case will be appealed to the Court of Appeals and then to the Supreme Court. This may prove to be one of the pivotal separation of powers cases of our time.