Chris Hedges's Blog, page 16

Virus Outbreak Has Earmarks of a Global Economic Crisis

NEW YORK — The coronavirus outbreak began to look more like a worldwide economic crisis Friday as anxiety about the disease emptied shops and amusement parks, canceled events, cut trade and travel and dragged already slumping financial markets even lower.

More employers told their workers to stay home, and officials locked down neighborhoods and closed schools. The wide-ranging efforts to halt the spread of the illness threatened jobs, paychecks and profits.

“This is a case where in economic terms the cure is almost worse than the disease,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “When you quarantine cities … you lose economic activity that you’re not going to get back.’

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As World Scrambles, Experts Warn Virus Is Certain to Spread in U.S.



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The Coronavirus Panic Exposes the Pathology of Nationalism



by Sonali Kolhatkar

The list of countries touched by the illness climbed to nearly 60 on Friday as Mexico, Belarus, Lithuania, New Zealand, Nigeria, Azerbaijan, Iceland and the Netherlands reported their first cases. More than 83,000 people worldwide have contracted the illness, with deaths topping 2,800.

The head of the World Health Organization announced that the risk of the virus spreading worldwide was “very high,” citing the “continued increase in the number of cases and the number of affected countries.”

The economic ripples have already reached around the globe.

Stock markets around the world plunged again Friday. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones index took yet another hit, closing down nearly 360 points. The index has dropped more than 14% since last week, making this the market’s worst week since 2008, during the global financial crisis.

But the impact was just as evident in the hush that settled in over places where throngs of people ordinarily work and play and buy and sell.

“There’s almost no one coming here,” said Kim Yun-ok, who sells doughnuts and seaweed rolls at Seoul’s Gwangjang Market, where crowds were thin Friday as South Korea counted 571 new cases — more than in China, where the virus emerged. “I am just hoping that the outbreak will come under control soon.”

In Asia, Tokyo Disneyland and Universal Studios Japan announced they would close, and events that were expected to attract tens of thousands of people, including a concert series by the K-pop group BTS, were called off. The state-run Export-Import Bank of Korea shut down its headquarters in Seoul after a worker tested positive for the virus, telling 800 others to work from home. Japanese officials prepared to shutter all schools until early April.

In Italy, where the count of 650 cases is growing, hotel bookings fell, and Premier Giuseppe Conte raised the specter of recession. Shopkeepers like Flavio Gastaldi, who has sold souvenirs in Venice for three decades, wondered if they could survive the blow.

“We will return the keys to the landlords soon,” he said.

The Swiss government banned events with more than 1,000 people, while at the Cologne Cathedral in Germany, basins of holy water were emptied for fear of spreading germs.

“It’s not cholera or the black plague,” said Simone Venturini, the city councilor for economic development in Venice, Italy, where tourism already hurt by historic flooding last year has sunk with news of virus cases. “The damage that worries us even more is the damage to the economy.”

Europe’s economy is already teetering on the edge of recession. A measure of business sentiment in Germany fell sharply last week. China is a huge export market for German manufacturers. Weaker business sentiment could lead companies to postpone their investment and expansion plans.

In the U.S., online retail giant Amazon said Friday that it has asked all of its 800,000 employees to postpone any non-essential travel, both within the country and internationally. Officials at the Food and Drug Administration said a U.S. pharmaceutical company was dealing with a shortage of one of its drugs, because production of a key ingredient had been disrupted in China. They would not identify the company or the product.

The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, said that the U.S. economy remains strong, but that policymakers would “use our tools” to support it if necessary.

Larry Kudlow, the top economic advisor to President Donald Trump, told reporters that the selloff in financial markets may be an overreaction to an epidemic whose long-term economic fallout remains uncertain.

“We don’t see any evidence of major supply chain disruptions. I’m not trying to say nothing’s happening. I think there will be impacts, but to be honest with you, at the moment, I don’t see much,” Kudlow said.

But the pain was already taking hold in places like Bangkok, where merchants at the Platinum Fashion Mall staged a flash mob, shouting “Reduce the rent!” and holding signs that said “Tourists don’t come, shops suffer.”

Tourist arrivals in Thailand are down 50% compared with a year ago, according Capital Economics, a consulting firm.

Kanya Yontararak, a 51-year-old owner of a women’s clothing store, said her sales have sunk as low as 1,000 baht ($32) some days, making it a struggle to pay back a loan for her lease. She’s stopped driving to work, using public transit instead. She also packs a lunch instead of buying one and is cutting her grocery bills. The situation is more severe than the floods and political crises her store has braved in the past.

“Coronavirus is the worst situation they have ever seen,” she said of the merchants.

Economists have forecast global growth will slip to 2.4% this year, the slowest since the Great Recession in 2009, and down from earlier expectations closer to 3%. For the United States, estimates are falling to as low as 1.7% growth this year, down from 2.3% in 2019.

But if the disease known as COVID-19 becomes a global pandemic, economists expect the impact could be much worse, with the U.S. and other global economies falling into recession.

“If we start to see more cases in the United States, if we start to see people not traveling domestically, if we start to see people stay home from work and from stores, then I think the hit is going to get substantially worse,” said Gus Faucher, an economist at PNC Financial.

Some saw dollar signs in the crisis. Twenty people were arrested in Italy for selling masks they fraudulently claimed provided complete protection from COVID-19. Police said they were selling them for as much as 5,000 euros ($5,520) each.

Globally, more than 83,000 people have fallen ill with the coronavirus. China, though hardest hit, has seen lower numbers of new infections, with 327 additional cases reported Friday, bringing the country’s total to 78,824. Another 44 people died there for a total of 2,788.

South Korea has recorded 2,337 cases, the most outside of China. Emerging clusters in Italy and in Iran, which has had 34 deaths and 388 cases, have led to infections of people in other countries. France and Germany were also seeing increases, with dozens of infections.

“I think this is a reality check for every government on the planet,” WHO Emergencies Program Director Michael Ryan said Friday after the agency raised its alert level. “Wake up, get ready. This virus may be on its way.”

___

Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann in Washington, Joseph Pisani in New York, Matt Sedensky and Preeyapa Khunsong in Bangkok, Hyung-jin Kim and Tong-hyung Kim in Seoul, South Korea, Foster Klug and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo, Renata Brito and Giada Zampano in Venice, Italy, Angela Charlton in Paris and Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report.

The U.S. Military’s #MeToo Reckoning That Wasn’t

“A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” Everyone who enters the gate at West Point Military Academy must memorize and recite these words on their first day. Failure to follow that protocol, including the “nontoleration clause,” can mean expulsion. Even insufficient adherence to the spirit of said value system can earn one pariah status at the academy. Those who graduate after four years of academics, military training and “character-building” are expected to live by and imbue in their fellow soldiers the seven Army values of Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage. In most official documents, these terms are literally capitalized.

It’s an old system, one that both senior leaders and most junior officers have eagerly preserved. Yet in recent decades, the purportedly unstoppable force of military ethics has met a seemingly immovable object in the form of an entrenched Afghan child-rape culture. Because in that morally trying case, in which senior “leaders of character” regularly told their troopers to ignore the local practice (and occasionally punished those who refused), the U.S. military chose tactical expedience (or desperation) over virtue. And while what unfolded may not technically qualify as a violation of the honor code, tolerance of rape has nonetheless brought disgrace upon the entire U.S. military.

The American-Afghan child sex scandal was briefly a major story in 2015, and it popped up periodically in the mainstream media through 2018. But if this story is slightly dated, it’s still worth remembering that the practice in rural Afghanistan has been an open secret among U.S. soldiers for decades. Heck, I myself was shamelessly invited by local village elders to such a hashish-smoke-filled bacha bazi party just weeks into my deployment back in 2011 (I politely passed). So well-known was this not-so-secret rape culture that soldiers regularly joked about their own (usually tangential) introduction to its existence.

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The Afghanistan Papers Confirm America's Longest War Is a Lie



by Sonali Kolhatkar

Ironically and instructively, this story got little to no attention at the height of the #MeToo movement. In a way, it’s understandable. How does one compare comedian Louis C.K’s  admittedly abhorrent transgressions with a national policy to don veritable blindfolds amid a perennially losing war? Perhaps the more egregious crimes of the just-convicted Harvey Weinstein  offer a better source of comparison.

It’s a weighty question that I’m asking, with few easy answers. But it seems to me that the nation’s willingness to disregard rampant rape overseas, as well as our own attempts to cover the whole thing up, ought to have ranked as a national scandal of the first order. That it didn’t raises serious questions about the foundation and execution of America’s ongoing wars of “freedom advancement.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting that it become U.S. policy to deploy its military anywhere and everywhere another society’s sexual practices don’t jibe with our own, even when they are, by most any measure, deplorable. No matter our intentions, to do so would betray both a demigod-level national ego and smack of the presumptive cultural supremacy that many progressives rightly abhor.

As a practical matter, policing global bad behavior has, historically, proven untenable, unwinnable and, frankly, unaffordable. While traversing the earth to stamp out such deeply unsettling local customs as “honor” killings, state executions of accused female adulterers, and female genital mutilation might feel ethical, it’s certainly not efficacious. Such well-intentioned transnational crusading would get awkward fast, placing Washington at odds with ostensibly key regional allies, either their governments or large segments of their societies.

Pakistan, which has an estimated 1,000 honor killings annually, Saudi Arabia, which still beheads, crucifies or stones women to death for adultery, witchcraft and sorcery, and Egypt, home of Donald Trump’s favorite dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, where 91% of females aged 15 to 49 have undergone some form of genital mutilation, are just a few of the countries on this list. And when was the last time Washington let a little bad behavior by one of “our” autocrats get in the way of its perceived national economic or geopolitical interests?

The blindfold Uncle Sam has donned for decades in Afghanistan raises a question whose answer is so discomfiting and consequential that it should shake the American warfare state to its core: What can be said about a nation that invaded broad swaths of the world to promote a “Freedom Agenda” while instructing its soldiers to tolerate abuse on a massive scale?

I offer two conclusions: The architects of these ongoing wars never meant what they said about freedom, liberty and democracy; and the actual process of this cynical crusading has proven messy at best and hopeless at worst.

Not to give him a pass by any means, but George W. Bush just might have believed his own propaganda. He was one of America’s very worst presidents, responsible for the deaths of perhaps 1 million people. But in hindsight, I think the guy was more sincere than his predecessor, Bill Clinton. Call me a traitor to my political class, but he might even have been more of a true believer than his successor, Barack Obama.

That said, it seems clear that Bush’s foreign policy (and all recent administrations’ overseas agendas, to one extent or another) was dominated by petty Pentagon brass, defense corporation money men and elite national security advisers — in W’s case, a triumvirate brain trust of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney. Together, these groups represent the three Bs — the brains, brawn and billions behind systemic American militarism.

During the Bush years, the three Bs largely worked in the shadows, never buying that freedom malarkey for a second. For these true movers and shakers, this rhetoric provided a polite veneer for a brutal imperial project and a means to an end. Sentimentality might have suited their boss, but these players prayed at the rather secular pulpit of power. It should have been obvious from the start that the “war on terror” was always about profits over purity. Just five days after 9/11, Cheney told us on live TV that to win the not-yet-begun military campaign ahead, the U.S. would “have to work sort of the dark side, if you will.”

As the wars unfolded over the next 20-some years, the executive branch called all the plays, with a clutch assist from the K Street lobbying industry. Congress, the courts and cable TV were reduced to glorified observers, hardly more engaged than a cowed common citizenry.

Each faction had something to gain from recharged imperialism. The brains got to play God and fulfill their twisted, hegemonic dreams to shape the world, all while a sizable evangelical crowd believed the rapture was at hand. Just across the Potomac in Arlington, the brawn got to advance its military priorities, its officers and generals walking freely through the revolving door separating the Pentagon from K Street lobbying firms. As for the billions, these merchants of death have seen their profits soar. No doubt they consider them a fair fee for services rendered to Team Caesar back on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that our hegemonic mission would prove messy, if not completely hopeless. Power-projection and its requisite prolonged military occupations are difficult and morally murky by their very nature. The brawn ought to have grasped this much implicitly. Whether these generals did or even cared are different matters altogether.

In military schools from West Point to the United States Aermy Command and General Staff College to the United States Army War College, students are all but taught to worship at the altar of Carl von Clausewitz, and with good reason. Having observed the horrors of combat in the Napoleonic Wars, the Prussian veteran-turned-military strategist declared existing martial theories formulaic, deductive and utterly inadequate. He concluded that war was chaos, best characterized by friction, fallibility and uncertainty (it was von Clausewitz who coined the phrase “fog of war”). All attempts to fully control combat — the perennial desire of the brains — ultimately leads to naught but frustration and failure.

Regarding America’s still-trucking freedom agenda that isn’t, von Clausewitz might caution: Be careful what you start; you never know what might unfold, or what new, unforeseen problems your actions might induce. Which brings us to  Afghanistan. The child-rape epidemic may be the most nauseating and frankly absurd Frankenstein’s monster of unforeseen quandaries that our foreign policy has yet produced. In Clausewitzian terms, it poses an ethical friction, a moral fog of war.

Because invasions and occupations are inherently messy, the brains have created for the brawn a strategic Catch 22: It can look the other way so as not to alienate prominent Afghan village elders and thereby drive them into the Taliban’s welcoming arms, or it can try to live up to its mission’s lofty rhetoric. In hindsight, expecting all of these armed Boy Scouts to look the other way was always a pipe dream.

If #MeToo taught us anything, it’s that no secret stays in the shadows forever. Cover-ups are eventually exposed; societal blindfolds inevitably slide off. When punishments were meted out to a handful of soldiers who refused to “tolerate” rape, briefly capturing the attention of the media, it was the brawn that was left holding the proverbial bag. The brains, ironically, played dumb and reverted to the tried-and-true excuse that they just defer to the generals on the ground. The billionaires were nowhere to be found. If pressed, their polished PR men stuck to the industry’s stock answer: “We just provide the beans and the bullets — don’t look at us!”

So the story came and went, as all war-related news does these days. Even I shrugged at the time, busy with other research subjects and thinking, regrettably, “What else is new?” What coverage the scandal did get was, predictably, surface-level and mainly missed the relevant point. Discussion centered on what exactly the U.S. military policy toward the repulsive local practice should be, with the usual soap opera-style questions about who was and/or should have been punished. There seemed to be little appetite to reflect on what the scandal suggested about the whole forever-war enterprise, even as the #MeToo movement has demanded we reconsider our patriarchal institutions at home.

We shouldn’t be surprised. For going on two decades, Americans have remained impassive as Uncle Sam and its putative allies have pillaged the region. What’s another human travesty?

Robert Reich: Bernie Sanders Is Not George McGovern

The day after Bernie Sanders’s big win in Nevada, Joe Lockhart, Bill Clinton’s former press secretary, expressed the fear gripping the Democratic establishment: “I don’t believe the country is prepared to support a Democratic socialist, and I agree with the theory that Sanders would lose in a matchup against Trump.”

Lockart, like the rest of the Democratic establishment, is viewing American politics through obsolete lenses of left versus right, with Bernie on the extreme left and Trump on the far right. “Moderates” like Bloomberg and Buttigieg supposedly occupy the center, appealing to a broader swath of the electorate.

This may have been the correct frame for politics decades ago when America still had a growing middle class, but it’s obsolete today. As wealth and power have moved to the top and the middle class has shrunk, more Americans feel politically dis-empowered and economically insecure. Today’s main divide isn’t right versus left. It’s establishment versus anti-establishment.

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Some background. In the fall of 2015 I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina, researching the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the same people I had met twenty years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as some of their grown children. I asked them about their jobs and their views about the economy. I was most interested in their sense of the system as a whole and how they were faring in it.

What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, most said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – at their employers, the government, and Wall Street; angry that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirement, and that their children weren’t doing any better than they did. Several had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession. By the time I spoke with them, most were employed but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before.

I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.” These came from self-identified Republicans, Democrats, and Independents; white, black, and Latino; union households and non-union. Their only common characteristic was they were middle class and below.

With the 2016 primaries looming, I asked which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, party leaders favored Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. But the people I spoke with repeatedly mentioned Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. They said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up,” “make the system work again,” “stop the corruption,” or “end the rigging.”

In the following year, Sanders – a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t even a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primary – came within a whisker of beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, garnered over 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses.

Trump, a 69-year-old ego-maniacal billionaire reality TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party, and lied compulsively about almost everything – won the Republican primaries and then went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America (granted, he didn’t win the popular vote, and had some help from the Kremlin).

Something very big happened, and it wasn’t because of Sanders’s magnetism or Trump’s likeability. It was a rebellion against the establishment. Clinton and Bush had all the advantages –funders, political advisors, name recognition – but neither could credibly convince voters they weren’t part of the system.

A direct line connected four decades of stagnant wages, the financial crisis of 2008, the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party and the “Occupy” movement, and the emergence of Sanders and Trump in 2016. The people I spoke with no longer felt they had a fair chance to make it. National polls told much the same story. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who felt most people could get ahead through hard work dropped by 13 points between 2000 and 2015. In 2006, 59 percent of Americans thought government corruption was widespread; by 2013, 79 percent did.

Trump galvanized millions of blue-collar voters living in places that never recovered from the tidal wave of factory closings. He promised to bring back jobs, revive manufacturing, and get tough on trade and immigration. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing,” he roared. “In five, ten years from now, you’re going to have a workers’ party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in eighteen years, that are angry.” He blasted politicians and financiers who had betrayed Americans by “taking away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families.”

Trump’s pose as an anti-establishment populist was one of the biggest cons in American political history. Since elected he’s given the denizens of C-suites and the Street everything they’ve wanted and hasn’t markedly improved the lives of his working-class supporters, even if his politically-incorrect, damn-the-torpedo’s politics continues to make them feel as if he’s taking on the system.

The frustrations today are larger than they were four years ago. Even though corporate profits and executive pay have soared, the typical worker’s pay has barely risen, jobs are less secure, and health care less affordable.

The best way for Democrats to defeat Trump’s fake anti-establishment populism is with the real thing, coupled with an agenda of systemic reform. This is what Bernie Sanders offers. For the same reason, he has the best chance of generating energy and enthusiasm to flip at least three senate seats to the Democratic Party (the minimum needed to recapture the Senate, using the vice president as tie-breaker).

He’ll need a coalition of young voters, people of color, and the working class. He seems on his way. So far in the primaries he leads among white voters, has a massive edge among Latinos, dominates with both women and men, and has done best among both college and non-college graduates. And he’s narrowing Biden’s edge with older voters and African Americans. [Add line about South Carolina from today’s primary.]

The “socialism” moniker doesn’t seem to have bruised him, although it hasn’t been tested outside a Democratic primary or caucus. Perhaps voters won’t care, just as they many don’t care about Trump’s chronic lies.

Worries about a McGovern-like blowout in 2020 appear far-fetched. In 1972 the American middle class was expanding, not contracting. Besides, every national and swing state poll now shows Sanders tied with or beating Trump. A Quinnipiac Poll last week shows Sanders beating Trump in Michigan and Pennsylvania. A CBS News/YouGov poll has Sanders beating Trump nationally. A Texas Lyceum poll has Sanders doing better against Trump in Texas than any Democrat, losing by just three points.

Instead of the Democratic establishment worrying that Sanders is unelectable, maybe it should worry that a so-called “moderate” Democrat might be nominated instead.

First, They Came for Assange

This piece originally appeared on antiwar.com.

“WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks.”

~ Donald Trump, October 10 2016, Wilkes-Barre, PA

“This WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove.”

~ Donald Trump, October 31, 2016 in Warren, MI

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Back in the day, not so long ago, The Donald loved him some WikiLeaks. He said so on at least five occasions out on the campaign trail – in Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, and Michigan. That was when WikiLeaks, ostensibly at least, served his purposes by releasing hacked DNC emails that were rather unflattering to his opponent, Hillary Clinton. The MAGA crew must’ve agreed with him regarding the Julian Assange-headed web publication at the time: Trump carried all four battleground states, which propelled him into the White House. He’s had more than three years, now, to acclimate to his new digs and, somewhere along the way, pulled a 180 on Assange, whom his administration now labels “an enemy of the state who must be brought down.” So it is that this week, Assange began the fight – perhaps, quite literally, for his life – in the UK against the Justice Department’s stated intent to extradite and try him in the United States.

A journalist, a publisher, has been labeled by the U.S. Government as an “Enemy of America.” Now that’s dangerous language with scary historical precedent in America and abroad. Recall that the term has been used against “unfriendly” press elements by others: the military junta in Myanmar; Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez; Russia’s Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, President Richard “The press is your enemy” Nixon; and, you know, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, for starters. In our own history, press suppression, especially in times of war, is as American as apple pie. During World War I, the (still on the books) 1917 Espionage Act was used to wage all-out combat against any and all critical media sources. Sometimes persecution bordered on the Orwellian absurd. For example, in September 1918, even The Nation was banned from the mail for four days by the US Postal Service simply for criticizing the pro-war labor leader Samuel Gompers.

The relatively muted coverage of this press-freedom fight-of-our-times in the mainstream American media is as remarkable as it is disturbing. But it isn’t surprising. Besides a few brief spikes in coverage – often focused as much on her transgender status or that blatantly accused her of treason – the same can be said of Assange’s alleged co-conspirator, former army intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning. Consider Manning, herself a longtime – and still unfree – political prisoner, collateral damage in the ongoing Assange martyrdom saga.

For her role in passing the documents in question to WikiLeaks, the Obama Justice Department slapped her with a 35-year federal prison sentence – one of the most draconian ever handed down for a leaker. She served seven years before receiving an eleventh-hour communtation (but, notably, not a full pardon) from President Obama. Now, Chelsea, in an admirable, high-risk, display of courage, has refused to testify against Assange. That show of integrity landed her back in jail a time or two, where, notably, she remains at the time of writing.

For his “sins,” Assange likely faces even harsher punishment if extradited to and – almost invariably, in this political climate – convicted in a US court. He could serve 75 years if found guilty on the 18 counts – most under the archaic Espionage Act – he’s been charged with. That’s a long bid. It seems the US Government has lost all sense of scale, maybe even sanity. For example, the just nine convicted perpetrators of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq – a global scandal that, empirically, created far more “terrorists, and thus contributed to more American deaths than anything Assange has been accused of – were all enlisted soldiers, none higher ranking than a staff sergeant. The top prison sentence meted out was ten years; the rest ranged from 0-3 years. Sure, a few officers received verbal or written reprimands – slap-on-the-wrist admonishments, these – and one female brigadier general was relieved and reduced one rank. As for Assange, though, 75 years is warranted? Give me a break.

Some of the more remarkable revelations, so far, from this week’s hearing have involved the totally believable (given the agency’s sordid history) Assange-defense-team claims of US Intelligence (read: CIA) threats and shenanigans against the defendant. These include allegations that U.S.-induced Spanish security company employees conducted surveillance on Assange whilst he was in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and, potentially even discussed kidnapping or poisoning him. It all reads like a bad John le Carre spy novel – which is precisely why I wouldn’t rule it out.

The case against Assange, meanwhile is rather weak. It hinges on vague, furtive, and unproven allegations, according to the administration lawyers, that he “knowingly placed lives at risk,” by publishing the leaked files. Specifically, James Lewis, acting for US authorities, told the court that: “The US is aware of sources, whose redacted names and other identifying information was contained in classified documents published by WikiLeaks, who subsequently disappeared.” Sounds ominous, huh? Well, wait for it – Lewis then continued with the stunning admission: “although the US can’t prove at this point that their disappearance was the result of being outed by WikiLeaks.”

Sounds like hearsay. Isn’t that inadmissible in court? And the US government can’t prove that WikiLeaks had these detrimental effects? Call me crazy, but I was under the silly impression that “proof” was the name of the game in the legal system. Bottom line, even after the egregious record of Intelligence community lies peddled during the run-up to the Iraq War and regarding the CIA torture program (for starters), the American people are expected to just blindly trust these clowns. Count me out.

Furthermore, British law states that extradition may not move forward if the requesting nation’s criminal charges are “politically-motivated,” which, the defense team asserts the case against Assange is. Of course, it is patently politically-motivated. However much the administration’s lawyers deny it – “the lady doth protest too much?” – Assange’s real crime, from the perspective of the government, was to embarrass them by exposing widespread US war crimes and concomitant coverups. All information, mind you, that We the People had a right to know.

What is at stake here, absent any hyperbole, is the very existence of a free press. And, in today’s increasingly globalized information sphere, it matters not, really, that Julian Assange happens to be an Australian national. See, in an even aspirational free society, the benefit of the doubt in such cases ought go to the publisher, the journalist, the writer. As Thomas Jefferson wrote the very year the current US Constitution was crafted, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Given such “radical” – especially for the 18th century – sentiment, can there be much doubt where our third president would (at least theoretically) fall on the Assange issue?

These complaints, mind you, aren’t simply a low-hanging-fruit Trump-swipe either. Saint Obama set the precedent and foundations of press censorship that Trump is now running with. Recall that Obama went after more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all other previous presidents (over the course of a century) combined. Furthermore, his wanna-be, aspirational successor, Joe Biden is on the record calling Assange a “high-tech terrorist.” So, if Obama can be said to have set up the pins, Trump is poised to roll a strike. The Donald has, however, taken matters a dangerous step further that could, in the near future, pose an existential threat to the very existence of permissive publication of sensitive information.

This all sets a rather dangerous precedent. Leakers have long been prosecuted and punished by the US Government. Publishers? Not so often. That’s a line few administrations will cross. Even Espionage Act-enthusiast Obama flinched, and decided not to charge Assange. Regarding the Obama Justice Department’s thinking the Washington Post reported, in 2013, that:

Justice officials said they looked hard at Assange but realized that they have what they described as a “New York Times problem.” If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material, including The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

So, mainstream American publishers – of newspapers, online sites, and even cable news producers – really ought to brush up on their Evelyn Beatrice Hall; you know her oft-quoted, but rarely practiced profession: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Ultimately, it matters not whether one likes Assange, shares his worldview, or even approves of his tactics. The name of the civil libertarian game must instead be a press-sovereignty solidarity that transcends the person of Mr. Assange. Love him or hate him; like WikiLeaks or loathe it; the most powerful American press organizations must close ranks with Assange. Almost assuredly, the Washington Post, New York Times, and the rest of their establishment ilk will not. Mark my words: they will rue the day they didn’t.

For when Trump – or whatever potential monster that follows him – pulls out the legal precedent from a past Assange conviction to prosecute, say, the New York Times, when that paper someday publishes something that embarrasses or angers the governing administration, who will be there to speak up for the nation’s “newspaper of record?” Reflecting on Nazi state oppression and his conclusion that common Germans’ complicity made it possible, Martin Niemoller famously wrote about how:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.

As in mid-20th Century Germany, so today, in 2020 America. Only, let me propose a modified version of Niemoller’s quote that’s highly relevant to the mainstream press:

First they  came for  (that’s right)  Antiwar.com  WikiLeaks. Then WikiLeaks. Then Max Blumenthal’s  The Grayzone …then, well, you know how this ends…

Court Puts Breaks on Move to Make Asylum Seekers Wait in Mexico

SAN DIEGO — Dealing a significant blow to a signature Trump administration immigration policy, a federal appeals court ruled Friday that the government can no longer make asylum-seekers wait in Mexico while their cases wind through U.S. immigration courts.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco also decided to keep another major policy on hold, one that denies asylum to anyone who enters the U.S. illegally from Mexico.

The twin setbacks for the Trump administration may prove temporary if it appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has consistently sided with President Donald Trump on immigration and border security policies.

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The “Remain in Mexico” policy, known officially as “Migrant Protection Protocols,” took effect in January 2019 in San Diego and gradually spread across the southern border. Nearly 60,000 people have been sent back to wait for hearings, and officials believe it is a big reason why illegal border crossings plummeted about 80% from a 13-year high in May.

Reaction to the decision was swift among immigration lawyers and advocates who have spent months fighting with the administration over a program they see as a humanitarian disaster, subjecting hundreds of migrants to violence, kidnapping and extortion in dangerous Mexican border cities. Hundreds more have been living in squalid encampments just across the border, as they wait for their next court date.

Advocates planned to have immigrants immediately cross the border and present the court decision to authorities Friday, with group Human Rights First hand-delivering a copy to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at a bridge connecting Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Lawyers were hoping to get their clients before U.S. immigration court judges.

The decision interrupted some court cases. Immigration Judge Philip Law in San Diego delayed a final hearing on a Honduran man’s asylum case to April 17 after a government attorney couldn’t answer his questions about the effect of ruling, which temporarily halts the policy during legal challenges. The government attorney said she asked her supervisor how to address the ruling and that he didn’t know what to do either.

In El Paso, an administrator came to tell a judge of the ruling as he heard the case of a Central American mother and her partner. The couple cried when they learned they could get into the U.S. with restrictions. The couple and their two young children will be put into government detention to wait and they won’t have to return to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

“Do you guys understand that?” Herbert asked through an interpreter. “There was a pretty significant change in the law in the middle of your testimony.”

The Justice Department sharply criticized the ruling, saying the decision “not only ignores the constitutional authority of Congress and the administration for a policy in effect for over a year, but also extends relief beyond the parties before the court.”

Judge William Fletcher, writing the majority, sided with the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups who argued the policy violates international treaty obligations against sending people back to a country where they are likely to be persecuted or tortured on the grounds of race, religion, ethnicity, political beliefs or membership in a particular social group.

Fletcher agreed the government set the bar too high for asylum-seekers to persuade officers that they should be exempt from the policy and didn’t provide enough time for them to prepare for interviews or consult lawyers. The judges said the government also erred by requiring asylum-seekers to express fear of returning to Mexico to be considered for an exemption, instead of asking them unprompted.

Fletcher quoted at length asylum-seekers who reported being assaulted and victimized in Mexico, saying it was “enough — indeed, far more than enough” to undercut the government’s arguments.

Fletcher was joined by Judge Richard Paez, who were both appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton. Judge Ferdinand Fernandez, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, dissented.

“The court forcefully rejected the Trump administration’s assertion that it could strand asylum-seekers in Mexico and subject them to grave danger,” ACLU attorney Judy Rabinovitz said. “It’s time for the administration to follow the law and stop putting asylum-seekers in harm’s way.”

The U.S. Supreme Court, however, has allowed Trump to divert Defense Department money to border wall construction, backed rules disqualifying more people from green cards if they use government benefits and upheld a travel ban affecting several Muslim-majority countries.

The ruling’s impact will be at least partially blunted by other policies introduced in response to unprecedented surge of asylum-seeking families that peaked last year, many of them from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

In November, the administration began sending asylum-seekers from Honduras and El Salvador to Guatemala, denying them a chance to seek refuge in the U.S. and instead inviting them to apply in the strife-torn Central American nation. Similar agreements with Honduras and El Salvador are set to take effect soon.

Another policy leads Mexicans and Central Americans who fail an initial screening to be rapidly deported without leaving Border Patrol stations. The screening interview is designed to take place in one day and any appeals to an immigration judge within 10 days. Asylum-seekers are given up to 90 minutes to contact a lawyer.

The other measure with far-reaching consequences denies asylum to anyone who passes through another country on the way to the U.S.-Mexico border without seeking protection there first. It took effect in September and is being challenged in a separate lawsuit.

Supporters of the “Remain in Mexico” policy note it has prevented asylum-seekers from being released in the United States with notices to appear in court, which they consider a major incentive for people to come.

Mexicans and unaccompanied children are exempt.

Asylum has been granted in less than 1% of the roughly 35,000 Remain in Mexico cases that have been decided. Only 5% are represented by attorneys, many of whom are reluctant to visit clients in Mexico.

Feds Reject Removal of Northwest Dams That Threaten Salmon

PORTLAND, Ore. — A long-awaited federal report out Friday rejected the idea of removing four hydroelectric dams on a major Pacific Northwest river in a last-ditch effort to save more than a dozen species of threatened or endangered salmon, saying such a dramatic approach would destabilize the power grid, increase overall greenhouse emissions and more than double the risk of regional power outages.

The four dams on the lower Snake River in eastern Washington are part of a vast and complex hydroelectric power system operated by the federal government in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.

Environmental groups who have pushed for years for the dams to come down immediately blasted the report. The three agencies in charge of overseeing the sprawling hydropower system recommended an alternative that includes a variety of strategies, including fine-tuning the amount of water that spills over the dams for fish.

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“Rather than seizing this opportunity to heed the public’s call for working together for a solution that revives salmon populations, the draft plan is built on the same failed approach the courts have rejected time and again,” said Todd True, an attorney for Earthjustice who has represented environmentalists and fishing groups in ongoing litigation over the dams.

“We need a different approach and leadership from elected officials.”

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown has voiced support for demolishing the Snake River dams.

The 14 federal dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers together produce 40% of the region’s power — enough electricity to power nearly 5 million homes, or eight cities roughly the size of Seattle. They also contain a system of locks that allows cities nearly 500 miles (800 kilometers) inland from the Pacific Ocean access to Asian markets via barges that float down the massive rivers to the sea. Roughly 50 million to 60 million tons of cargo navigate the Snake and Columbia river system each year.

Yet the towering dams have proven disastrous for salmon that struggle to navigate past them on human-made fish ladders as they swim upstream to spawn and die after spending most of their lives in the Pacific. Salmon are unique in that they hatch in freshwater streams and then make their way hundreds of miles to the ocean, where they spend years before finding their way back to their natal streams to mate, lay eggs and die.

Snake River sockeye were the first species in the Columbia River Basin listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1991. Now, 13 salmon runs are listed as federally endangered or threatened.

The Columbia River System dams cut off more than half of salmon spawning and rearing habitat, and many wild salmon runs in the region have 2% or less of their historic populations, said Meg Townsend, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity.

“The science shows that pulling out the four lower Snake River dams is the only way to save Columbia river salmon,” she said.

Townsend and other scientists also warn that southern resident orcas are starving to death because of a dearth of the chinook salmon that are their primary food source.

The Puget Sound population of orcas — also called killer whales — was placed on the endangered species list in 2005. A mother orca that carried her dead baby on her back for 17 days brought international attention in 2018 as their numbers have dwindled to 72 animals.

The U.S. government has spent between $15 billion and $17 billion on improved salmon passage over years, but nothing has changed for the salmon, True said. Yet the Pacific Northwest’s power supply and ability to use energy more efficiently have vastly improved in the past 20 years, he said.

The Bonneville Power Administration, which sells the power from the system, “is looking at a very different future than they were 10 years ago, or even five years ago,” True said.

Opponents of dam removal say they want salmon to flourish, but they aren’t sure breaching four major hydroelectric dams will help — and it could instead damage the regional economy and the stability of the power supply.

Reservoirs behind some of the dams allow the Bonneville Power Administration to even out the more erratic power supply from wind and solar by spilling water to generate electricity on short notice. And a move away from low-cost coal plants in the Pacific Northwest has some worried about what the future could hold for ratepayers if the Snake River dams are removed, said Kurt Miller, of Northwest River Partners, which represents community-owned utilities across Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana.

“This is a much, much bigger issue than the Snake River dams. If worldwide salmon populations are doing poorly because of climate change and carbon, does it make sense to tear out 1,000 average megawatts of carbon-free electricity?” he said.

“For so many reasons, it’s bad public policy.”

The report Friday addressed those concerns in its recommendation regarding the dams.

Hydropower generation would decrease by 1,100 average megawatts under average water conditions, and 730 average megawatts under low water conditions, the report said. The risk of a regional power shortages would more than double and the lowest-cost replacement power would be $200 million a year, the report said. Those adjustments would increase the wholesale power rate up to 9.6%, the authors wrote.

U.S. District Judge Michael Simon ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Bonneville Power Administration to revisit the impact of the hydroelectric system in 2016 while overseeing litigation over salmon.

In all, three federal judges have thrown out five plans for the system over the decades after finding they didn’t do enough to protect salmon.

The report Friday is a draft and will be subject to 45 days of public comment. A final report — including the agencies’ final decision — is expected in September.

Insurers Should Support People, Not the Fossil Fuel Industry

On November 8, 2018, I was trapped in my car as embers fell all around me in Paradise, California, and the thought that kept going through my head was, “This can’t be the same fire [that had been reported 10 miles away only two hours before]. Fires can’t move like that.”

I should know: I spent nearly a decade studying wildland fire history, fire ecology and fire behavior in southern California for the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies.

But it was the same fire.

I thought a lot of other things on that cold, windy morning stuck in an endless line of unmoving cars, as the flames engulfed the homes around me. I thought I would never see my wife again. I thought I was going to die.

I didn’t die that day, though 85 people did. But I came away from that experience knowing that climate change isn’t some far-off dystopian prediction that we don’t need to worry about. I met climate change face to face that day. It is real. It is here. And it is happening right now.

Five of the most extreme fires in all of California history have happened in the past two years. In 2017, the Thomas Fire set a record as the largest ever fire in California — only to be surpassed eight months later by the Ranch Fire. In 2017, the Tubbs Fire set a record as the most destructive fire in California history — only to be far surpassed 13 months later by the Camp Fire in Paradise. The 2017 Carr Fire experienced an unheard-of fire tornado with winds of 143 miles per hour — equal to an EF-3 tornado. What fire researchers like myself used to consider to be inconceivable fire behavior has become the new normal.

Before the Camp Fire, I felt that I was safe from the worst impacts of climate change. I was wrong. If you feel that you are safe from climate change, so are you.

“But you had insurance, right? So you’re OK, right?” is something I’ve heard over and over during the past year.

No, we’re not OK.

Despite having what we thought was excellent homeowner’s insurance, having paid for hundreds of thousands in coverage that we are legally owed — our insurer, Nationwide, still refuses to pay us. The only thing that compares to the trauma of the fire is the trauma of having to fight for something that you already paid for. But it turns out that insurers aren’t as “on our side” as their advertising jingles imply.

We ended up leaving our family behind and moving 2,700 miles from home just to have a shot at being able to afford rebuilding our lives with what our insurer “gave” us.

Then I found out our insurer has more than $1 billion invested in fossil fuels. In fact, insurers working in California have more than half a trillion dollars invested in fossil fuels, and many of them provide insurance coverage for fossil fuel infrastructure like coal plants and oil pipelines.

Wait, what?

How does that make sense? How can insurance companies be investing in the very thing that is causing massive losses to their policyholders across the country and around the world?

What, exactly, is their end game?

Insurers are pulling out of California in droves, sending “nonrenewals” to tens of thousands of homeowners, raising rates (for those they don’t cancel) by several hundred percent, or just not writing policies at all for large areas of the state.

What do they think is going to happen to their business if they stop writing policies in the West because of wildfires, in the Midwest because of recurring floods and droughts, and in the South and East because of hurricanes and sea level rise?

What do they think their business is going to be in a world of climate change? Whose side are they on?

Instead of contributing to the very thing that is destroying our communities, insurers should be at the forefront of climate action, working with policyholders to make their homes more resilient, investing in communities — not coal companies — to make needed changes to reduce risk and increase readiness for climate change. In areas where the risk is too high, insurers should be actively helping policyholders to relocate rather than taking a “rebuild or get nothing” attitude. They should stop investing in and insuring fossil fuel companies and projects.

Insurers, in short, should be on our side, not on the side of the fossil fuel industry.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Tony Dunn is a former fire ecologist and fire behavior researcher. He also worked for Pacific Gas & Electric as the director of the Sierra Energy Center in the Sierra Nevada foothills. After the Camp Fire, he relocated to western North Carolina. Follow him on Twitter: @adunnphoto.

Virus Anxiety Triggers Biggest 1-Day Market Drop Since 2011

Worldwide markets plummeted again Thursday, deepening a weeklong rout triggered by growing anxiety that the coronavirus will wreak havoc on the global economy. The sweeping selloff gave U.S. stocks their worst one-day drop since 2011.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled nearly 1,200 points. The S&P 500 has now plunged 12% from the all-time high it set just a week ago. That puts the index in what market watchers call a “correction,” which some analysts have said was long overdue in this bull market, the longest in history.

Stocks are now headed for their worst week since October 2008, during the global financial crisis.

The losses extended a slide that has wiped out the solid gains major indexes posted early this year. Investors came into 2020 feeling confident that the Federal Reserve would keep interest rates at low levels and the U.S.-China trade war posed less of a threat to company profits after the two sides reached a preliminary agreement in January. Even in the early days of the outbreak, markets took things in stride.

But over the past two weeks, a growing list of major companies issued warnings that profits could suffer as factory shutdowns across China disrupt supply chains and consumers there refrain from shopping. Travel to and from China is severely restricted, and shares of airlines, hotels and cruise operators have been punished in stock markets. As the virus spread beyond China, markets feared the economic issues in China could escalate globally.

One sign of that is the big decline in oil prices, which slumped on expectations that demand will tail off sharply.

“This is a market that’s being driven completely by fear,” said Elaine Stokes, portfolio manager at Loomis Sayles, with market movements following the classic characteristics of a fear trade: Stocks are down. Commodities are down, and bonds are up.

Bond prices soared again Thursday as investors fled to safe investments. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell as low as 1.246%, a record low, according to TradeWeb. When yields fall, it’s a sign that investors are feeling less confident about the strength of the economy.

Stokes said the swoon reminded her of the market’s reaction following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“Eventually we’re going to get to a place where this fear, it’s something that we get used to living with, the same way we got used to living with the threat of living with terrorism,” she said. “But right now, people don’t know how or when we’re going to get there, and what people do in that situation is to retrench.”

The virus has now infected more than 82,000 people globally and is worrying governments with its rapid spread beyond the epicenter of China.

Japan will close schools nationwide to help control the spread of the new virus. Saudi Arabia banned foreign pilgrims from entering the kingdom to visit Islam’s holiest sites. Italy has become the center of the outbreak in Europe, with the spread threatening the financial and industrial centers of that nation.

At their heart, stock prices rise and fall with the profits that companies make. And Wall Street’s expectations for profit growth are sliding away. Apple and Microsoft, two of the world’s biggest companies, have already said their sales this quarter will feel the economic effects of the virus.

Goldman Sachs on Thursday said earnings for companies in the S&P 500 index might not grow at all this year, after predicting earlier that they would grow 5.5%. Strategist David Kostin also cut his growth forecast for earnings next year.

Besides a sharply weaker Chinese economy in the first quarter of this year, he sees lower demand for U.S. exporters, disruptions to supply chains and general uncertainty eating away at earnings growth.

Such cuts are even more impactful now because stocks are already trading at high levels relative to their earnings, raising the risk. Before the virus worries exploded, investors had been pushing stocks higher on expectations that strong profit growth was set to resume for companies after declining for most of 2019.

The S&P 500 recently traded at its most expensive level, relative to its expected earnings per share, since the dot-com bubble was deflating in 2002, according to FactSet. If profit growth doesn’t ramp up this year, that makes a highly priced stock market even more vulnerable.

Goldman Sach’s Kostin predicted the S&P 500 could fall to 2,900 in the near term, which would be a nearly 7% drop from Wednesday’s close, before rebounding to 3,400 by the end of the year.

Traders are growing increasingly certain that the Federal Reserve will be forced to cut interest rates to protect the economy, and soon. They are pricing in a 96% probability of a cut at the Fed’s next meeting in March. Just a day before, they were calling for only a 33% chance, according to CME Group.

The market’s sharp drop this week partly reflects increasing fears among many economists that the U.S. and global economies could take a bigger hit from the coronavirus than they previously thought.

Earlier assumptions that the impact would largely be contained in China and would temporarily disrupt manufacturing supply chains have been overtaken by concerns that as the virus spreads, more people in numerous countries will stay home, either voluntarily or under quarantine. Vacations could be canceled, restaurant meals skipped, and fewer shopping trips taken.

“A global recession is likely if COVID-19 becomes a pandemic, and the odds of that are uncomfortably high and rising with infections surging in Italy and Korea,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

The market rout will also likely weaken Americans’ confidence in the economy, analysts say, even among those who don’t own shares. Such volatility can worry people about their own companies and job security. In addition, Americans that do own stocks feel less wealthy. Both of those trends can combine to discourage consumer spending and slow growth.

MARKET ROUNDUP:

The S&P 500 fell 137.63 points, or 4.4%, to 2,978.76. The Dow fell 1,190.95 points, or 4.4%, to 25,766.64. The Nasdaq dropped 414.29 points, or 4.6%, to 8,566.48. The Russell 2000 index of smaller company stocks lost 54.89 points, or 3.5%, to 1,497.87.

In commodities trading Thursday, benchmark crude oil fell $1.64 to settle at $47.09 a barrel. Brent crude oil, the international standard, dropped $1.25 to close at $52.18 a barrel. Wholesale gasoline fell 4 cents to $1.41 per gallon. Heating oil declined 1 cent to $1.49 per gallon. Natural gas fell 7 cents to $1.75 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Gold fell 40 cents to $1,640.00 per ounce, silver fell 18 cents to $17.66 per ounce and copper fell 1 cent to $2.57 per pound.

The dollar fell to 109.95 Japanese yen from 110.22 yen on Wednesday. The euro strengthened to $1.0987 from $1.0897.

___

AP Business Writer Damian J. Troise and Economics Writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report.

More Than 9 Million People Are Freecycling Instead of Buying New

Our global landfills are overwhelmed, and the U.S. shows no signs of slowing its huge contribution to the trash pile-up at home and abroad. The global trash crisis is real, with 2 billion tons of trash produced per year. The U.S. recycles just around 35 percent of its trash, and sits in last place behind all other developed countries when it comes to recycling the solid waste it produces per capita, as calculated by the Waste Generation and Recycling Indexes published in 2019 by the British research firm Verisk Maplecroft.

Deron Beal has been working to curb some of that needless waste for the last 17 years via the Freecycle Network, a nonprofit, volunteer-run, free-gifting website he founded in 2003 with the mission of keeping usable things from getting tossed out. It now claims more than 9 million members around the world.

“We’re very stuff-oriented, aren’t we, in this society?” says Beal, laughing a little.

Beal says part of his original inspiration for founding Freecycle came when he lived in Germany (which tops the charts for best recycling among developed nations) and observed how well federally mandated programs worked to curb waste.

“I realized that there are things I cannot do, and that we, communally, can do together to make a huge positive difference,” he says.

Membership to the Freecycle website is free and serves to connect people with their nearest area group. The project boasts on its website that on average it keeps more than 1,000 tons of trash out of landfills each day, amounting to “fifteen times the height of Mt. Everest in the past year alone, when stacked in garbage trucks.”

With just two employees—Beal and a web engineer—the network runs on volunteers who moderate their local groups, and those groups exist in every major U.S. city and 110 countries worldwide.

“All this community help, pulling together, is really how we’re able to make this work,” Beal says. “We just couldn’t do it without them. We’re able to leverage this volunteer spirit in this amazing way.”

Beal notes that there are both environmental and economic reasons people join their local Freecycle groups, and that membership tends to ebb and flow based on media cycles and economic trends. After the 2009 economic downturn, for example, they saw a spike in memberships.

Freecycle Network is funded through individual donations, Google-generated ads and occasional corporate underwriters—though the network has no current corporate sponsorship. Beal says outside of encouraging volunteer moderators to send press releases to their local newspapers, he’s never done much in the way of advertising or outreach. The network’s growth has been truly grassroots—and doesn’t seem to fall along typical conservative versus progressive party lines.

Beal thinks more than anything else, the magic behind Freecycle’s continuing global growth lives in the way it makes people feel to give and receive.

“Regardless of political inclinations… it feels really good,” he says. “Giving and getting things for free, I think that’s a universal warm and fuzzy right there.”

And he says it’s exciting to him to know that it just takes one person per given area to birth a local Freecycle program.

In Portland, Oregon, that one person is Catherine Spencer-Mills, who retired from a career in IT before coming on board as the city’s sole moderator. She had been a member of Freecycle for some time when an ad for the lead moderator position popped up.

“It’s really not a lot of work, and it’s not very time consuming,” she says. “Not having a lot of money myself, having a family and kids… I like the idea of not always having to pay for things… and it’s kind of nice not putting things in the landfill if you don’t have to.”

Beal says the difference between Freecycle and other sites like Craigslist’s free stuff section is the communal aspect of the network.

“Each group is run by a local volunteer. There [are] no scammers and spammers on Freecycle,” he says. “It’s more of a family-friendly, communal environment.”

And, he says Freecycle treads the line between items that are still useful, but that a thrift store might not be able to actually sell.

Lending and Borrowing

Beal laughs a little when he thinks about the American tendency to want to own all of our own stuff. Owning something that is only going to be used once or rarely is a pretty unsustainable and impractical model compared to sharing or borrowing it.

“There’s a George Carlin skit on stuff, how we buy bigger and bigger houses to hold all our stuff, and we get storage sheds to hold all our stuff when it doesn’t fit in our houses,” he says. And, as Beal is apt to point out, all that individualized purchasing of brand-new items is what really stacks up to our global waste crisis.

Even if we were all living meticulously zero-waste lives, most of our trash problem could still exist, since municipal solid waste, or the waste produced by individual people, only makes up a part of the problem. Industrial waste (including all the materials produced to create new things via mines and factories, packaging to ship them across the world, etc.) is estimated to be a much bigger culprit. While the EPA estimated people in the U.S. produced 267.8 million tons of municipal waste in 2017, the agency put industrial waste at a staggeringly higher mark of about 7.6 billion tons per year in a 2016 report.

This reality is, in part, what inspired Beal to relaunch the website with new features that expand upon the site’s free-gifting mission. The new site will allow members to lend and borrow items within self-appointed friend circles, the idea being to encourage neighbors and friends to share some of the items they can’t find for free—rather than everyone buying their own new everything.

“So, you know, maybe I’ll start up a neighborhood tool-swapping/tool-share group where everybody can share tools with each other, or maybe people want to set up their own little book club where they share books and return them after they’ve read them, or parents of small kids who want to share or gift clothing or toys or other things, or church or school groups might share goods—whatever it is.”

Beal says he does plan to launch a tool-share in his own neighborhood, as a mini beta test of the new feature.

“The average usage life of an electric drill is 15 minutes. What we need is not a drill; we need a hole in the wall—right?” he says.

“It’s in our DNA as walking apes to share in small groups with each other, but we’ve kind of drifted a little ways away from that. It’d be great to get to that core DNA that we have and empower each other through sharing.”

Beal understands that one reason people don’t already do this is because even if you do want to share your tools with your neighbors, you might not get them back right away. They might forget or you might forget, which is why the new site will include a built-in email reminder for any borrowed item, similar to a public library system.

“[The reminder is] not optional; it just happens [automatically]. So there’s no embarrassment involved,” he says.

He adds that the idea to allow members to self-appoint their friend circles, rather than allowing community-wide borrowing, is designed to add another layer of trust to the equation.

“If it’s a complete stranger taking your drill, well, there’s a small chance that he might just walk off with it,” he says. “So you do need that small trusted core you do that sharing with.”

In addition to the lending feature, Freecycle’s new site will also add several new languages, so Freecycle will be translated in 10 languages total.

“Greek, Turkish, Romanian, Hungarian, we got you covered,” he says.

Beal’s ultimate vision is to help more people break from measuring wealth on a purely monetary basis, and bring people back to looking at real use and value.

“There’s an Oscar Wilde quote that kind of fits into all of this,” he says. “We know ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing.”’

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

April M. Short is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California’s weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon and many others.

U.K. Court Blocks Heathrow Expansion Over Climate Concerns

LONDON — Heathrow Airport’s plans to increase capacity of Europe’s biggest travel hub by over 50% were stalled Thursday when a British court said the government failed to consider its commitment to combat climate change when it approved the project.

The ruling throws in doubt the future of the 14 billion-pound ($18 billion) plan to build a third runway at Heathrow, the west London hub that already handles more than 1,300 flights a day.

While Heathrow officials said they planned to appeal, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government indicated it wouldn’t challenge the ruling by the Court of Appeal.

“We won!” said London Mayor Sadiq Khan, a long-time opponent of the project who joined other local officials and environmental groups in challenging the national government’s approval of Heathrow’s expansion plans.

At stake is a project that business groups and Heathrow officials argue is crucial for the British economy as the U.K. looks to increase links with countries from China to the United States after leaving the European Union. Heathrow has already reached the capacity of its current facilities, and a third runway is needed to serve the growing demands of travelers and international trade, they say.

Environmental campaigners, however, challenged the project because of concerns that a third runway would encourage increased air travel and the carbon emissions blamed for global warming. The British government has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions as a signatory to the 2016 Paris Agreement, which seeks to limit temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.

The court upheld the appeal, saying the government had failed to consider its commitments under the Paris Agreement when it approved a national policy on airport capacity in southeastern England that paved the way for a third runway at Heathrow. That policy statement backed the Heathrow project over a competing plan from Gatwick Airport, 30 miles (50 kilometers) south of central London, and a proposal to build a new airport in the Thames estuary east of London.

In a narrowly written opinion, the three-judge panel stressed that it wasn’t ruling on the merits of the Heathrow project. Instead, the court said the national policy statement would be suspended until the government has reviewed the findings in accordance with Britain’s obligations under the Paris Agreement.

“We have not found that a national policy statement supporting this project is necessarily incompatible with the United Kingdom’s commitment to reducing carbon emissions and mitigating climate change under the Paris Agreement, or with any other policy the Government may adopt or international obligation it may undertake,” the court said.

“The consequence of our decision is that the Government will now have the opportunity to reconsider the (national policy statement) in accordance with the clear statutory requirements that Parliament has imposed.”

The Department for Transport said the government wouldn’t challenge the ruling.

“We take seriously our commitments on the environment, clean air and reducing carbon emissions,” the department said in a statement. ”We will carefully consider this complex judgment and set out our next steps in due course.”

Heathrow said the issue raised by court’s ruling is “eminently fixable,” and it will work with the government to resolve the problem. The airport also said it planned to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.

“Expanding Heathrow, Britain’s biggest port and only hub, is essential to achieving the Prime Minister’s vision of global Britain,” the airport said in a statement. “We will get it done the right way, without jeopardizing the planet’s future.”

Thursday’s ruling is just the latest twist in a 13-year battle over increasing airport capacity in and around London.

Choosing a project pits the economic benefits of expansion against the pollution, noise and congestion that it will produce. The issue is so toxic that politicians created an independent commission to weigh the options.

Amid furious public relations battles, the Airports Commission in 2015 backed a third runway at Heathrow. Parliament finally approved the airport policy statement in June 2018.

But things have changed since then. Most notably, perhaps, is Boris Johnson’s election as prime minister last year. Johnson, a long-time opponent of Heathrow expansion, once promised to lie down in front of the bulldozers to prevent construction of the third runway.

Tony Travers, an expert on London issues at the London School of Economics, pointed out that the debate over Heathrow has been going on intermittently since the 1960s and choosing another option to expand airport capacity would take years.

Meanwhile, the government has staked its future on increasing trade with nations outside the EU, and in this context it makes little sense to ignore the Heathrow project.

“Brexit means trade with countries further away than you can get on a train,” Travers said.

The Department for Transportation argued that the Heathrow project would permit an additional 260,000 flights a year and give a 74 billion-pound ($99 billion) boost to the British economy over 60 years.

Tim Alderslade, chief executive of Airlines U.K., an industry body representing U.K.-registered airlines, described Thursday’s decision as “extremely disappointing.”

“The economic prize is enormous if expansion is done right, with airlines ready to respond to the unlocking of new capacity by creating new routes and helping to connect the U.K. to new markets and destinations,” he said.

The court dismissed appeals that dealt with issues such as noise and air pollution raised by Heathrow’s neighbors.

But local campaigners, some of whom have been fighting expansion for decades, popped champagne corks and cheered when they heard the ruling. Many saw it as decisive.

“It surely must be the final nail in the coffin for Heathrow’s attempts to steamroll over local and national opposition to their disastrous third runway plans,” said Gareth Roberts, the leader of Richmond Council, the local government body for a community in the flight path of the proposed runway. “The expansion of Heathrow would be a catastrophe for our climate and environment and for the thousands of Londoners who would be forced to live with the huge disruption it will cause.”