Chris Hedges's Blog, page 167

Neocolonialism Will Spell the Amazon’s Demise

The 2019 G7 summit in Biarritz unnecessarily handed Brazil’s Neofascist Bolsonaro a propaganda coup with which to rally his dwindling support. With his approval falling to record lows and facing international attacks of unprecedented intensity, their colonial-sounding rhetoric allowed him to appear heroically nationalistic, a defender of Brazilian sovereignty over the Amazon, when in reality he and his government are fully geared to serve the interests of foreign capital in true comprador tradition.

Jair Bolsonaro is effectively the G7’s guy. He and his Chicago School Economy minister Paulo Guedes are implementing an ultra-neoliberal economic platform from which Brazil is sold off for the price of a Banana. There should be no doubt about who the practical rather than rhetorical defenders of sovereignty are on the political spectrum.

Former PCdoB Senator for Amazonas, Vanessa Grazziotin, took aim at Bolsonaro on social media following the G7 summit:

Yet here we are, and a President whom NATO powers helped come to office via their support for the coup against Dilma Rousseff and imprisonment of Lula da Silva, has returned the favour, with an opportunity for their corporations to exploit Brazil to an extent not seen since the colonial era as depicted in Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, and near future as envisaged by the subjects of Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett’s Thy will be done.

The G7’s cursory offer of $22 million US dollars is not money that Brazil actually needs, the country has $385 billion in reserves. The key failure of this thinking is the notion that the Amazon fires are some kind of tragic accident. It is not through oversight, incompetence or “failure to act” that the rainforest is in flames, it is a deliberate, planned and genocidal deforestation strategy, from which G7 companies are themselves in line to benefit.

A leaked presentation by Washington DC lobbyists close to the Trump administration shows US companies being recruited to exploit the Amazon, from the Mining, Agribusiness and Gas/Chemical industries. A myriad of G7-based companies are already directly benefitting from the far-right Brazilian Government’s policies. Justin Trudeau will be unlikely to mention the Brazilian operations of Canada’s notorious Mining sector, and from the United  States – Cargill, Monsanto, Boeing, Chevron, Exxon Mobil have all gained enormously from the post-Coup governments of Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro. There is even talk from Paulo Guedes to merge Banco do Brasil with Bank of America.

Scepticism over the G7’s rhetoric is unfortunately well founded. The idea of selling off tracts of the Brazilian Amazon to corporations for its own protection (note that the proposed G7 initiatives specify the Brazilian Amazon rather than the entire Amazon) emerged in 2006. Then UK Foreign Secretary under Tony Blair, David Milliband, addressed an environmental conference in Mexico and effectively proposed a corporate-led internationalisation of the rainforest.

This had its origins earlier that year, when Swedish millionaire Johan Eliasch, an environmental consultant to Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, and former deputy treasurer of the UK Conservative Party, had bought 400,000 acres of Brazilian rainforest for £8m pounds (which has greatly increased in value since). Off the back of this initiative, Eliasch founded the organisation “Cool Earth” with the objective of finding buyers for tracts of Amazon land. This dovetailed with the concept of carbon credit, where companies buy areas of forest to offset their emissions elsewhere. (His company Gethal was later fined by environmental agency Ibama for illegal logging and use of land). In an article in the Sunday Times, Maurice Chittenden wrote: “Eliasch is part of a growing trend towards ‘green colonialism’. Rich people with chequebooks instead of pith helmets, charities and trusts, who are buying vast swathes of the Third World or ‘renting’ the timber rights to stop trees being cut down. It is a breakaway from the methods that have characterised the international conservation movement for the past 50 years.”

It was this line that caused discomfort within the Lula government, and understandably so. Worse still, they had not even been consulted on the proposal beforehand. Back then there were legal limitations on foreign ownership of Brazilian land. Bolsonaro’s Government moved immediately to abolish them during his first months in office, as he did to decimate protections for indigenous peoples’ territory.

The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald posted on Twitter: “one valid grievance the Brazilian Right has about the Amazon is anger over other countries – the US and in Western Europe – who already developed industrially & are destroying the planet, now demanding Brazil save them by not exploiting its own internal resources.”

But hostility to meddling Foreign Governments and NGOs is not confined to Brazil’s conservatives. The developmentalist left echo many of these sentiments for different reasons. They believe that the G7 do not want Brazil to develop and wish it to remain an exporter of cheap commodities – a glorified plantation economy. Thus Amazonian nationalism spans political boundaries. In 2010 Lula criticised demonstrations promoted by Greenpeace and Avatar director James Cameron against the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Dam project, as green colonialism – a gringo protest intended to hurt the electoral campaign of his successor Dilma Rousseff.

The fall in deforestation under Lula’s Workers Party was lauded internationally as a success story, yet the standoff with Greenpeace continued, and they began to campaign on non-environmental issues under Dilma Rousseff’s first mandate. This even extended to bringing activists from the US to give lectures on innovative protest strategies during the 2014 election year. The road to Bolsonaro was paved with good intentions.

The history of foreign ambitions for the Brazilian Amazon and its riches is well documented.

In 1927, Henry Ford, then the richest man in the world, bought a large tract of land, around 12,000 km², in the state of Para, deep within Brasil’s Amazon Rainforest. Greg Grandin’s excellent book on the subject depicts one man’s deluded attempt to enforce his will on the natural world. Fordlândia, as the settlement was named, quickly became the site of a struggle between an industrialist and the most complex ecological system on the planet.

Ford’s early successes in imposing routine and even American midwestern culture such as square dances on indigenous workers made way as it slowly transformed into a raucous “tropical boomtown” before falling into abandon.

Around a decade ago, a mocked up page purporting to be from US high-school textbook showed a map which labeled the Amazon as an internationally administrated area. This spread around Brazil on the social network of the day Orkut, and was never completely debunked, returning zombie-like every few years to circulate on newer platforms. For native English speakers, its spelling mistakes and strange diction left no doubt that it was fake, but the real question was: did it actually reflect international opinion?

Such “Internationalisation of the Amazon” is being dismissed as a military dictatorship-era fantasy, now revived by Bolsonaro in a desperate answer to foreign outrage over the rainforest.

The problem is that this type of Amazonian nationalist sentiment has at its core an awareness of very real historic and ongoing designs on the region’s resources which it is naive to ignore, and a “resource nationalism” abhorred by the State Department and Wall Street.

This August 2009 State Department cable, a scene-setter for National Security Adviser General James Jones’ visit acknowledges Anti-US sentiment amongst Brazilians ahead of the 2010 elections:

Thus the problem is not genuine concern over the sovereignty of the Brazilian Amazon, it is the identities of whom are now talking about it. To make a defence of Brazilian sovereignty in the current context you could appear in alignment with those you oppose politically and morally, thus few are. But it must be made.

A few weeks before the Amazon fires exploded onto every front page and news network around the world, Foreign policy magazine, which had previously run columns normalising Bolsonaro and insisting that he represented no threat to Brazil or its democracy, published an article by Stephen M. Walt headlined: “Who will invade Brazil to save the Amazon?”.

These extreme talking points have at the very least revived a trope that “Brazil cannot be trusted as guardians of the Amazon”, and this now re-emerges in countries which actually, even actively supported the torching of Brazilian democracy. Right now, as the Amazon burns, progressive Democratic Members of Congress have requested clarification from the US Department of Justice’s on its role in Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to power.

In essence, do we really trust those who did nothing to help Brazil defend its democracy from fascism, foreign governments in the service of extractive corporations, or their think-tank lackeys, to protect the Amazon and its peoples?

Instead, this wave of indignation and fear around the world should be channeled into helping the inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest and progressive Brazilians defend it themselves. To do this we must support their struggle to root out and extinguish the political cause of this catastrophe.

Boris Johnson Is Pushing Britain Into the Abyss

What follows is a conversation between The Nation’s Don Guttenplan and Marc Steiner of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

JEREMY CORBYN, LABOUR PARTY LEADER: Suspending Parliament is not acceptable. It’s not on. What the Prime Minister is doing is this sort of smash and grab on our democracy.

REPORTER: Your critics will say, this is an insult to democracy and denying the MPs the time they need to debate and possibly vote on Brexit.

BRITISH PRIME MINISTER BORIS JOHNSON: No. Well, that’s – that is completely untrue. If you look at what we’re doing, we’re bringing forward a new legislative program.

PROTESTORS: Save our democracy. [inaudible]. If you shut down the Parliament, we shut down the streets. If you shut down the Parliament, we shut down the streets.

MARC STEINER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Marc Steiner. Good to have you with us.

Well, as you just heard, right-wing mania seems to be infecting the minds of political leaders all across the globe, and I’m not talking at this moment about anyone who resides in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This time I’m talking about the man who resides at 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who asked Queen Elizabeth II to suspend Parliament beginning next week through October the 14th, effectively shutting down any opposition to Johnson’s move for Brexit— deal or no deal. It has caused outrage with opposition members and members of his own Conservative Party. How can they just shut down Parliament? What does that mean politically? Is it legal? Where does it come from? And what could be the result?

Well, we’re joined now by Don Guttenplan. Don Guttenplan is, who for years was The Nation correspondent in London, and is now Editor of that magazine. Don, welcome. Good to have you with us.

DON  GUTTENPLAN: Great to be here, Marc. Great to be here. And yes, as you’ve said, I lived in London until June, for 25 years.

MARC STEINER: 25 years! I said a little while. That’s a long while.

DON  GUTTENPLAN: That was a long while. I saw this cliff edge approaching, but I didn’t believe we’d ever actually get there, and we’re not there yet. [crosstalk]

MARC STEINER: Talk about what you mean. What do you think politically is going on? He wants Brexit, deal or no deal, pushing this through. He told folks, as you know, we just want to push our agenda through. Talk about what the politics are here.

DON  GUTTENPLAN: Okay. There are a couple of things to bear in mind. One is that nothing’s actually happened yet.

MARC STEINER: Right, right.

DON  GUTTENPLAN: Johnson sent the queen a letter, and she said okay. And what he’s asked is for her to suspend Parliament starting next week essentially, or at the latest next week.

MARC STEINER: Right.

DON  GUTTENPLAN: Next week is next week. And as we all know in politics, a week is an eternity, so a lot can happen before then. But what he wants to do—Well, that’s the surface game. The deeper game, and this is one of the things that is worth bearing in mind about Boris Johnson, is that one of the things you learn in going to Eton, where he was educated, is to treat everything in life as a game. And that has disadvantages in terms of seriousness and purpose, or perhaps your moral bearings. But it does have an advantage in that if you treat everything in life as a game, then you always know what game you’re playing. That’s where Johnson an advantage over, for example, Theresa May, his predecessor as Prime Minister, and maybe even over the Europeans who are watching this with a mixture of horror and perhaps some [inaudible] because the Brexit negotiations have always been a game of chicken.

It’s always been about heading towards the cliff edge, for those of you who remember Rebel Without a Cause, with your foot on the accelerator, but with one hand on the door. And the first person to bail loses, except if the second person to bail ends up going over the cliff. But of course, the way to win in chicken is to convince your opponent that you are willing to go over a cliff. That’s what this letter to the queen is about. It’s about signaling to the Europeans that Johnson has his foot on the accelerator and that if they don’t want this to happen, they’d better come up with something more and better, and conspicuously more and better than the deal that took months for his predecessor, Theresa May, to negotiate.

MARC STEINER: Well, it seems that from what I’ve been reading, that Jeremy Corbyn wanted to introduce into Parliament a no-confidence vote, and that could have something to do with it as well. I mean—

DON  GUTTENPLAN: Yeah, there could be an election. That’s the other non-surface game that’s being played here, is the timing of the election. For readers who—For readers, sorry.

MARC STEINER: That’s okay.

DON  GUTTENPLAN: I edit a magazine, so I think about readers. But for viewers who want a deeper dive into all of this than we’re going to have time for today, I would look at Stephen Bush who is the New Statesman‘s correspondent, who’s been terrific on Brexit from the beginning. He points out that you have three options for timing an election. You can have an election after Brexit and after a no-deal Brexit when all of the sort of consequences begin to bite. or you can have an election before you’ve delivered Brexit. In which case, the Tory Party risks losing not only the people who don’t want to no-deal Brexit, but the people who do want Brexit and are frustrated that they haven’t delivered it.

So between those alternatives, it may be that the least worst alternative for Johnson is to have an election right after you’ve crashed out, which is probably as soon as Corbyn’s no-confidence vote would have a chance to be considered, but before the consequences have had a chance to bite. So partly, it’s about that too. But the other thing that’s worth noting is what the speaker said. So you said, is this legal?

MARC STEINER: Right.

DON  GUTTENPLAN: Well, unlike the United States, which is a constitutional republic, Britain doesn’t have a written constitution. One of the things that we Americans can be glad about this week is that we do have one because this is the kind of mess that happens when you don’t have one. So in the absence of a written constitution specifying what Parliament can and can’t do, parliament is sovereign. It can agree to do anything it wants.

The problem for Johnson is that parliament in its current make up is unlikely to agree to do what he wants, which is to exit the European Union without a deal. So part of this is about his machinations to get around that, but proroguing Parliament, which he’s asked the queen to do, is not – I mean, it has been done before. It’s not something that’s never been done, but it’s a big deal. And to do it when you don’t have a government majority, and when you are trying to avoid a vote that you would probably lose, is a bigger deal.

I mean, there is quite a bit of justification in people who see this and are labeling this as a coup. If this happens, and he is allowed to prorogue Parliament, and then Britain does crash out while Parliament is in recess, or after it’s been abolished – or not abolished, but suspended. That’s appropriate [crosstalk].

MARC STEINER: Suspended, right. Right.

DON  GUTTENPLAN: Suspended. That probably could be legitimately described as a coup. It’s certainly a way of getting around all of the parliamentary, not constitutional, but parliamentary checks that are supposed to keep things like this from happening. But speaker John Bercow called this a “constitutional outrage.” His opinion as the speaker doesn’t amount to all that much since he doesn’t have that much power, but the power he does have, which may be really important in the next five days, is the power to control Parliament’s timetable. So in other words, by calling this a constitutional outrage—And remember, Bercow, although he doesn’t get along with Johnson, and indeed a lot of Tories don’t like him, is still titularly a member of the Tory Party.

MARC STEINER: That’s what I thought. Right.

DON  GUTTENPLAN: This is not a Corbyn supporter calling it this. It’s a member of the Tory Party calling it this. By saying that, he’s essentially signaling to Brexit’s opponents that if they can get their act together and come up with a constitutional strategy for stopping this suspension, and indeed forbidding a Brexit while Parliament, for example, is suspended, that he will give them time to debate that. He is not opposed to the forces that are trying to stop this.

MARC STEINER: Two quick questions before you have to run and we have to close out here. On the one hand, I mean, because if this does go through, they don’t come back until 14th, he wants to announce the thing by the 17th of October to have this no-deal Brexit. I mean if that happened, that could have really an amazing fallout in terms of economic distress for Britain itself.

DON  GUTTENPLAN: Oh, it would be a disaster. I mean, people are talking about running out—People with diabetes may not be able to get insulin. They’re going to have to search every truck of the thousands of trucks that goes through Calais and Dover every day, which means they’re going to be lines and queues going all the way from Calais to Paris on the French side, and going all the way from Dover to London on the British side. You may see panic buying in the supermarkets. I mean, the police are preparing for civil disorder on a fairly large scale. It could be a disaster, but it’s far from certain that it’s going to happen. And again, you’re in a car and you’re heading to the cliff. What happens if you go off the cliff? It’s a disaster.

MARC STEINER: Right.

DON  GUTTENPLAN: What do you have to convince your opponent? That you’re going to go off the cliff, or that you’re more willing to risk going off the cliff than they are. And of course, it’s not just a disaster for the British economy. Remember, Britain is the market for 40% of the German car manufacturers, so that’s part of what this is about. This is about convincing the Europeans that if they don’t deliver a significant change, they’re going to go over the cliff with the British economy.

MARC STEINER: Don, you’re astute and very bright and you’ve been in Britain for 25 years. You’re not prescient though, but what are your thoughts about what might happen over the next week? I mean, how do you think this might play out? You’ve covered their politics for a while.

DON  GUTTENPLAN: Well, I still think going out without a deal is probably the most likely outcome. I don’t think that going out without a deal and proroguing Parliament is the most likely outcome. But you have to remember that there are really only three options on the table. One option is to stop the clock by rescinding the Brexit motion. There is no parliamentary majority for that and Johnson, who’s the Prime Minister, doesn’t want to do that.

The other option is to accept the deal that Theresa May already negotiated, and that the Europeans have already said yes to, so all the British have to do is say yes. That’s been tested to destruction and it’s clear that there is no parliamentary majority for that, even though the last time it came for a vote, Boris Johnson voted for it.

And then the third option is crashing out without a deal. And the problem for people who live in Britain or people who care about Britain is that that option, crashing out without a deal, is the default setting. That’s what’s going to happen if nothing else happens.

MARC STEINER: And finally here, looking into, as I talked about there in the opening, the right-wing mania. Whether you’re looking at what’s happening here with Brexit and Boris Johnson, or we had earlier today The Washington Post reporting about Donald Trump saying that he could just literally break the law to build the wall and do whatever he wanted to do, and damn the torpedoes, and I’ll pardon you if – don’t worry about it. Bolsonaro’s madness in Brazil at the moment.

DON  GUTTENPLAN: Yeah.

MARC STEINER: There is a dynamic here politically across the globe that is fairly frightening.

DON  GUTTENPLAN: I think there is not just one dynamic, but pardon me for being old fashioned, there is a kind of a dialectical dynamic going on here.

MARC STEINER: Yes, I would say so, right.

DON  GUTTENPLAN: One thing that’s happening is that our democratic mechanisms and structures aren’t delivering to people the change that they both desperately want and feel that they desperately need, whether that’s genuine economic revival in the United States, or whether that’s a relationship with Europe that people in Britain are willing to live with, or whatever. What you have is sort of this undemocratically imposed austerity that’s been going on since – for a decade, and it shows no signs of lifting. So that’s created space.

The failure of existing institutions and representative democracy to respond to people’s desperation is what’s created the space for these kinds of shortcuts where the approach that says, damn the torpedoes, we’re going to do what we want because we’ve got to do something. That’s what Trump and Bolsonaro, and Modi in India, and Orban in Hungary, and Johnson in Britain, are all profiting from. That’s the space that’s created the opening for them.

MARC STEINER: Well, Don, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate the time. I know it’s a busy day. Don Guttenplan is the Editor of The Nation and joined us here on The Real News. Don, thank you so much.

DON  GUTTENPLAN: Great to be with you, Marc. Thanks.

MARC STEINER: I’m Marc Steiner here for The Real News Network. Thank you all for joining us. Take care.

Corporate Media Does Mauna Kea a Grave Disservice

Thousands of Native Hawaiians and their supporters have been congregating since July 15 at the base of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano and mountain on the island of Hawaii. Known in Hawaiian as the kia’i, the protectors—a term the group prefers to “protesters”—seek to deter construction of the $1.4 billion Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), the largest telescope in the Northern Hemisphere. Business owners and state officials promise the telescope will provide jobs, educational opportunities and high-resolution astronomical imagery.

The protectors’ mobilization stems from a number of concerns about the vulnerability of the mountain to the effects of a new, 18-story telescope, as well as a fight for Indigenous self-determination in the face of colonialist control. Mauna Kea is an environmentally sensitive conservation district; it’s also sacred in Native Hawaiian traditions and religions, remaining one of the few bastions of Indigenous cultural preservation and sovereignty in the state.

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The current demonstrations at Mauna Kea are the culmination of decades of state land mismanagement and broken promises over the mountain, dating back to 1968, when the state leased the mountain to the University of Hawaii. Since then, Mauna Kea has been prized by astronomers for its high altitude and lack of atmospheric pollution, leading to the construction of 21 telescopes within 13 observatories. The TMT would be the 22nd telescope; the Washington Post (7/18/19), Associated Press (7/16/19) and other outlets have erroneously tallied the telescopes at 13.

National media coverage of the protectors’ struggle accelerated around 2014 and 2015, when the kia’i first assembled at Mauna Kea in opposition to the TMT, preventing its construction. Yet this reporting fell woefully short.

A New York Times piece headlined “Seeking Stars, Finding Creationism” (10/20/14) called opposition to the Mauna Kea telescope a “turn back toward the dark ages.”

“In 2014 and 2015,” corporate media outlets “were obsessed with this idea of science versus culture, as if our kupuna [elders] haven’t practiced applied science,” Kaniela Ing, a Mauna Kea protector and Hawaii Community Bail Fund manager, told FAIR. At that time, as Marisa Peryer recently noted for the Columbia Journalism Review (7/29/19), CNN (8/27/15) published an article headlined “Science and Religion Fight Over Hawaii’s Highest Point.”

Other coverage was outright condescending. In 2014, the New York Times (10/20/14) called the protectors’ movement “creationism,” ridiculing activists’ claims that the telescope was a profit-seeking venture, omitting the TMT’s status as an LLC funded largely by multibillionaire Intel founder Gordon Moore’s philanthropic organization. The article dismissed the cooperation between Native Hawaiians and environmentalists as a “marriage of convenience,” condemning the protectors for “waging skirmishes against science.”

Peryer also cited a New York Times editorial (5/2/15) portraying the TMT as an innocent scapegoat caught in the middle of a battle dating back to the US’s 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom. The piece lamented that “coexistence may never satisfy the core group of protesters who have been demanding the total erasure of technology from Mauna Kea’s peak.”

Many kia’i agree that media outlets have been more careful in recent months to avoid such facile binaries. Still, protectors face the challenges of specious narratives.

One of these relates to portrayals of public support of the TMT. A 2018 poll from the Honolulu Star-Advertiser indicated that 77 percent of respondents, and 72 percent of Native Hawaiian respondents, supported the construction of the TMT. The poll was referenced in various local and national media outlets, in addition to the Star-Advertiser: Hawaii News Now (7/21/19; 7/22/19), Hawaii Public Radio 7/29/19), AP (3/26/18), HuffPost (10/31/18) and the New York Times (7/10/19).

It’s imperative, however, to consider whose opinion was sought. The Star-Advertiser surveyed a total of 800 registered voters, only 78 of whom were Native Hawaiian; notably, Native Hawaiians have historically been subjected to voter suppression. “There were all these internally invalid measures of how this poll could really have any weight,” Uahikea Maile, a Mauna Kea protector and assistant professor at the University of Toronto, told FAIR. “I’m fearful of the misrepresentation, because it’s obviously disproportionate to the reality of the situation.”

The Washington Post (7/17/19) adapted an AP story for its “KidsPost” feature by adding a more propagandistic headline.

Mischaracterization of the protectors took other forms. The Associated Press(7/16/19), for example, reported that protesters were “bullying” supporters of the telescope, a claim that the protest’s organizational structure and tactics directly contradict. The story was republished on NBC News (7/17/19) and in the Washington Post, under the headline “Native Hawaiians’ Protests Stop Researchers From Studying the Skies.”

The Associated Press (8/10/19) propagated a similar narrative in an article headlined “Amid Protest, Astronomers Lose Observation Time.” The story bemoaned astronomers’ reported loss of some 2,000 hours of viewing time at Mauna Kea’s existing telescopes in light of the protests. It also paraphrased astronomers’ statements that the resistance had denied them “regular, guaranteed access to their facilities, which puts their staff and equipment at risk.”

According to veteran Mauna Kea protector Kealoha Pisciotta, who was quoted in the Associated Press article, astronomers weren’t blocked by the kia’i; rather, their employers ordered them to descend the mountain. Astronomers “haven’t been blocked from the beginning. When they were allegedly blocked, it was really their own choice, because the observatories made their staffs stay down” amid the demonstrations, Pisciotta told FAIR. “They tried to argue that they were losing science because of us. How can you say it’s because of us? You’re the ones who ordered your people down. Not us.”

Pisciotta also noted that media coverage has muted the cultural and religious significance of Mauna Kea. “For a long time, the Associated Press [7/16/19, 7/18/19], everybody,” including USA Today (8/21/19), “kept using the words ‘some Hawaiians’” in reference to who holds the mountain sacred. “At one point, we said, ‘It’s not ‘some Hawaiians.’ We are the majority.’”

She added that Native Hawaiians’ right to ascend the mountain for “subsistence, cultural and religious purposes” is enshrined in the Hawaii State Constitution. Despite this, state government temporarily denied cultural practitioners access to the mountain in mid-July, later permitting them one vehicle to ascend the mountain per day (Big Island Video News, (8/9/19).

As the protests continue, outlets report that the kia’i and TMT supporters are at an impasse, and suggest that negotiations might allow the project to proceed on Mauna Kea (Hawaii News Now, 7/25/19; NBC News, 8/18/19; Honolulu Civil Beat, 7/31/19). “What is tragic,” the aforementioned 2015 New York Times editorial cried, “is the missed opportunity for shared understanding.”

While proposals to compromise might appear fair, protectors say, they dismiss the historical context in Hawaii of colonialism and the usurpation of Indigenous land that continues today. Thus, these suggestions elide the stark power asymmetry between historically disenfranchised and marginalized Native Hawaiians and the billion-dollar, state-backed TMT project.

“The point that that misses is there’s not anything to negotiate. Either the Mauna is sacred or it’s not. When you talk about these issues, how do you compromise that?” said Kenneth Lawson, a Mauna Kea protector and law professor at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

“We have shared the mountain since 1968,” said Pisciotta. “It’s our temple, it’s our church, it’s our house of worship.”

At the heart of the Mauna Kea action is thus a challenge not only to a telescope, but to capital and the pursuit of unmitigated industrial growth at any cost. It’s no wonder, then, that when corporate-owned media are tasked with examining this movement, their limitations rear their heads.

“Is the advancement of a certain field of science worth the further disenfranchisement, the pain of a marginalized group?” asked the Bail Fund’s Ing. “I think that’s a valid question for the media, but [the media] scrapes the surface of what this is really about.”

Trump Guts Methane Restrictions in Latest Assault on Climate

Amid dire scientific warnings that the international community must act immediately to slash greenhouse gas emissions, President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is reportedly set to take another step in the opposite direction Thursday by unveiling a rule that would gut restrictions on the fossil fuel industry’s methane pollution.

According to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the proposed rule change Thursday, the EPA’s plan would scrap regulations requiring the oil and gas industry to “install technologies that monitor and limit leaks from new wells, tanks and pipeline networks and to more frequently inspect for leaks.”

“It would also forestall legal requirements that would have forced the EPA to set rules on emissions from thousands of pre-existing wells and industry sites,” the Journal reported.

Environmentalists reacted with outrage to the new proposal. “This administration is ultimately driven by sociopathic disregard for our future,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch.

Earthworks policy director Lauren Pagel called the rule “reckless” and said it will “impact millions of families living with oil and gas air pollution in their backyards.”

“President Trump once again signaled his ignorance towards the science of climate crisis and his indifference towards public health,” said Pagel.

The Trump administration expects the rule, which must go through a 60-day public comment period, to take effect early next year. The rollback was immediately praised by the American Petroleum Institute, a major trade group representing the fossil fuel industry.

Because of methane’s potency—some estimates suggest the greenhouse gas has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide—environmentalists and scientists have warned the Trump administration’s efforts to gut methane regulations could have disastrous consequences.

“This is extraordinarily harmful,” Rachel Kyte, United Nations special representative on sustainable energy, said of the Trump administration’s proposed rule change. “Just at a time when the federal government’s job should be to help localities and states move faster toward cleaner energy and a cleaner economy, just at that moment when speed and scale is what’s at stake, the government is walking off the field.”

Trump administration officials, and the president himself, have gleefully touted the White House’s success in ramping up American production of methane-emitting natural gas, which Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy Steven Winberg infamously described as “molecules of U.S. freedom.”

During the G20 summit in Japan in June, Trump said he is “not willing” to take action to curb greenhouse gas emissions because such a move would harm corporate profits.

A report published earlier this year by Oil Change International in collaboration with over a dozen other environmental groups warned that U.S. fossil fuel production has the potential to single-handedly imperil global efforts to combat the climate crisis.

“Right now, we’re on a sinking boat, and instead of just scooping water out, we must take immediate action to patch the hole where it’s gushing in,” said Patrick McCully of the Rainforest Action Network. “This means we must put a full-stop to fossil fuel expansion, or we all sink into climate chaos.”

Greta Thunberg, Frances Crowe and a Passing of the Torch

Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, sailed into New York Harbor Wednesday after an occasionally harrowing, two-week trans-Atlantic voyage. Greta walks the walk, living her life with as small a carbon footprint as she can. She decided to forgo flying as part of that commitment, so, in order to make it from Europe to North America, she sailed on a zero-emissions racing yacht. The day before Greta’s arrival, on Tuesday, another activist ended a remarkable voyage. Frances Crowe, a lifelong peace activist, died at home in Western Massachusetts, surrounded by her family, at the age of 100. Frances was a firebrand, a nonviolent warrior for justice, arrested countless times protesting war, nuclear weapons, nuclear power plants and more. The departure of one elder activist on the eve of the arrival of one so young symbolizes, bittersweetly, the passing of a torch.

Frances was born just months after World War I ended. “My mother told me she took me to my first march when the soldiers came home,” she wrote in “Finding My Radical Soul,” her memoir. “I was only a baby, but I have always had the feeling that war has defined my life.” Her husband, Tom, was a medical doctor. Speaking on the “Democracy Now!” news hour in 2005, she described a pivotal moment in her life, Aug. 6, 1945, the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima:

“I was a bride. My husband was in the Medical Corps in the Army. He had told me a few weeks before that he had heard rumors that we were developing this incredible weapon. He was at sea when we dropped the bomb, but I was alone in our apartment in New Orleans. When I heard it on the radio, I unplugged the iron, left the place mat that I was ironing and went out looking for a peace center in the streets of New Orleans.”

From that day, at the age of 26, until she died, Frances Crowe never relented in her pursuit of peace and justice. She was a war tax resister, refusing to pay taxes to support the sprawling Pentagon budget. She opposed South African apartheid and U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s and in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s. She climbed fences into the Seneca Army Depot, and was arrested for pouring her own blood on a newly built Trident nuclear submarine just before it was launched in Connecticut.

Wednesday, at Manhattan’s North Cove Marina, a vessel of a different kind arrived. Hundreds of young climate activists cheered as Greta disembarked, standing on terra firma for the first time in two weeks. “The ground is still shaking for me,” she said as she opened her press conference.

“The climate is an ecological crisis, a global crisis, the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced,” she said. “If we don’t manage to cooperate, to work together despite our differences, then we will fail. … Let’s not wait any longer. Let’s do it now.”

We first met Greta at the U.N. climate change summit in Katowice, Poland, last December. She explained then on “Democracy Now!” that, because of her Asperger’s, “I work a bit different. I see things in black and white. I guess I saw the world from a different perspective.” She focused intently on the worsening climate crisis, even suffering debilitating depression around the age of 11. “I got out of that depression by promising myself that I’m going to do everything I can to change things,” she said Wednesday.

That determination led her to launch a school strike for the climate, skipping school every Friday to stand in front of the Swedish parliament, demanding action to prevent catastrophic climate change. Her protest spread, quickly going global. Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren around the globe have participated in their own, local school strikes for the climate. This Friday, Greta will join kids in New York at their monthly strike outside the United Nations. A global strike for the climate, expected to be one of the largest global protests in history, will take place on Sept. 20. After that, Greta will make her way, using “a lot of trains, buses and probably even sailing,” she explained, to the next U.N. climate change summit in Santiago, Chile, in December.

Greta’s work as an activist is just beginning. She is a living example of what Frances Crowe said not long ago: “There is something else also to life, the joy of struggle, that not enough people have tasted. The joy of community, and the joy of cooperation, instead of competition; these are the values that I want to perpetuate and talk about to young people.”

Gillibrand Says She’s Ending 2020 Presidential Bid

WASHINGTON — Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand is dropping out of the presidential race as a campaign that once looked poised to ride strong #MeToo credentials to formidability was instead plagued by low polling and major fundraising struggles.

The 52-year-old New York senator said Wednesday that she was suspending her campaign. That comes after failing to meet minimum thresholds for required numbers of donors and polling to qualify for the September Democratic debate in Houston.

“I know this isn’t the result that we wanted. We wanted to win this race,” she said in an online video. “But it’s important to know when it’s not your time.”

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Let's Stop Trying to Predict Who Can Beat Trump



by Sonali Kolhatkar

















Some Inconvenient Truths for 2020 Democrats



by

Gillibrand topped an incumbent Republican in a conservative part of upstate New York to get to the U.S. House in 2007, and was appointed to the Senate two years later, filling the seat vacated by Hillary Clinton, who was tapped to be U.S. secretary of state. Gillibrand later easily retained the seat during a 2010 special election, as well as in 2012 and 2018.

Vocal in the Senate on curbing sexual harassment and promoting equal pay for women and family leave, Gillibrand made those and her staunch defense of abortion rights the core of her presidential bid. She stood out in the crowded field by becoming the first Democratic presidential hopeful to declare that she’d only appoint judges to the Supreme Court who consider the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide settled law, though most of her competitors quickly followed suit.

After forming an exploratory committee in January and formally entering the race by calling President Donald Trump a “coward” in a March speech delivered near the New York City skyscraper bearing his name, Gillibrand began with $10.5-plus million left over from her 2018 Senate campaign in her presidential campaign account.

That seemed like more than enough resources for the long haul. But Gillibrand was the first Senate Democrat in December 2017 to call for Minnesota Sen. Al Franken’s resignation amid numerous allegations of sexual misconduct, and she has said for months that that alienated donors and some voters in his neighboring, make-or-break Iowa.

Many of her Senate colleagues seeking the Democratic presidential nomination — including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kamala Harris of California and Bernie Sanders of Vermont — followed her lead in calling for Franken to step down before he quit in January 2018. But Gillibrand has continually faced more questions than others about being too quick to condemn him.

Speaking in Manhattan in July, Gillibrand said she didn’t regret urging Franken’s resignation but argued that female senators were being blamed more than their male colleagues for a decision that Franken himself ultimately made.

“Women are asked to hold accountable their colleagues. The men are not,” Gillibrand said. “It’s outrageous. It’s absurd.”

A record 100-plus women were elected to Congress in 2018, and #MeToo seemed to provide a clear lane for 2020 success. Gillibrand failed to catch fire, though, despite embracing feminist issues. This month, she visited St. Louis, home to Missouri’s lone remaining abortion clinic, to decry efforts by Republican-controlled legislatures around the country to restrict abortion — after previously visiting Georgia’s state capital for the same purpose.

During a Fox News town hall in June, Gillibrand said, “We want women to have a seat at the table,” and when moderator Chris Wallace responded, “What about men?” Gillibrand shot back with one of the most memorable lines of her campaign: “They’re already there — do you not know?”

The two-dozen-plus Democratic presidential field had already begun to winnow before Gillibrand’s announcement. U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell of California left the 2020 race in July, followed by former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts earlier this month.

The Key to a Sustainable Economy Is 5,000 Years Old

We are again reaching the point in the business cycle known as “peak debt,” when debts have compounded to the point that their cumulative total cannot be paid. Student debt, credit card debt, auto loans, business debt and sovereign debt are all higher than they have ever been. As economist Michael Hudson writes in his provocative 2018 book, “And Forgive Them Their Debts,” debts that can’t be paid won’t be paid. The question, he says, is how they won’t be paid.

Mainstream economic models leave this problem to “the invisible hand of the market,” assuming trends will self-correct over time. But while the market may indeed correct, it does so at the expense of the debtors, who become progressively poorer as the rich become richer. Borrowers go bankrupt and banks foreclose on the collateral, dispossessing the debtors of their homes and their livelihoods. The houses are bought by the rich at distress prices and are rented back at inflated prices to the debtors, who are then forced into wage peonage to survive. When the banks themselves go bankrupt, the government bails them out. Thus the market corrects, but not without government intervention. That intervention just comes at the end of the cycle to rescue the creditors, whose ability to buy politicians gives them the upper hand. According to free-market apologists, this is a natural cycle akin to the weather, which dates all the way back to the birth of modern economics in ancient Greece and Rome.

Hudson counters that those classical societies are not actually where our financial system began, and that capitalism did not evolve from bartering, as its ideologues assert. Rather, it devolved from a more functional, sophisticated, egalitarian credit system that was sustained for two millennia in ancient Mesopotamia (now parts of Iraq, Turkey, Kuwait and Iran). Money, banking, accounting and modern business enterprise originated not with gold and private trade, but in the public sector of Sumer’s palaces and temples in the third century B.C. Because it involved credit issued by the local government rather than private loans of gold, bad debts could be periodically forgiven rather than compounding until they took the whole system down, a critical feature that allowed for its remarkable longevity.

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by Ellen Brown

















Pelosi Blasted for Deal That Enables GOP to Thwart Progressive Plan



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The True Roots of Money and Banking

Sumer was the first civilization for which we have written records. Its notable achievements included the wheel, the lunar calendar, our numerical system, law codes, an organized hierarchy of priest-kings, copper tools and weapons, irrigation, accounting and money. It also produced the first written language, which took the form of cuneiform figures impressed on clay. These tablets were largely just accounting tools, recording the flow of food and raw materials in the temple and palace workshops, as well as IOUs (mainly to these large public institutions) that had to be preserved in writing to be enforced. This temple accounting system allowed for the coordinated flow of credit to peasant farmers from planting to harvesting, and for advances to merchants to engage in foreign trade.

In fact, it was the need to manage accounts for a large labor force under bureaucratic control that is thought to have led to the development of writing. The people willingly accepted this bureaucratic control because they viewed the gods as having decreed it. According to their cuneiform writings, humans were genetically engineered to work the fields and the mines after certain lower gods tasked with that hard labor rebelled.

Usury, or the charging of interest on loans, was an accepted part of the Mesopotamian credit system. Interest rates were high and remained unchanged for two millennia. But Mesopotamian scholars were well aware of the problem of “debts that can’t be paid.” Unlike in today’s academic economic curriculum, Hudson writes:

Babylonian scribal students were trained already c. 2000 BC in the mathematics of compound interest. Their school exercises asked them to calculate how long it took a debt at interest of 1/60th per month to double. The answer is 60 months: five years. How long to quadruple? 10 years. How long to multiply 64 times? 30 years. It must’ve been obvious that no economy can grow in keeping with this rate of increase.

Sumerian kings solved the problem of “peak debt” by periodically declaring “clean slates,” in which agrarian debts were forgiven and debtors were released from servitude to work as tenants on their own plots of land. The land belonged to the gods under the stewardship of the temple and the palace and could not be sold, but farmers and their families maintained leaseholds to it in perpetuity by providing a share of their crops, service in the military and labor in building communal infrastructure. In this way, their homes and livelihoods were preserved, an arrangement that was mutually beneficial, since the kings needed their service.

Jewish scribes, who spent time in captivity in Babylon in the sixth century B.C, adapted these laws in the year or jubilee, which Hudson argues was added to Leviticus after the Babylonian captivity. According to Leviticus 25:8-13, a Jubilee Year was to be declared every 49 years, during which debts would be forgiven, slaves and prisoners freed and their property leaseholds restored. As in ancient Mesopotamia, property ownership remained with Yahweh and his earthly proxies. The Jubilee law effectively banned the outright sale of land, which could only be leased for up to 50 years (Leviticus 25:14-17). The Levitican Jubilee represented an advance over the Mesopotamian “clean slates,” Hudson says, in that it was codified into law rather than relying on the whim of the king. But its proclaimers lacked political power, and whether the law was ever enforced is unclear. It served as a moral rather than a legal prescription.

Ancient Greece and Rome adopted the Mesopotamian system of lending at interest, but without the safety valve of periodic “clean slates,” since the creditors were no longer the king or the temple, but private lenders. Unfettered usury resulted in debt bondage and forfeiture of properties, consolidation into large landholdings, a growing wedge between rich and poor, and the ultimate destruction of the Roman Empire.

As for the celebrated development of property rights and democracy in ancient Greece and Rome, Hudson argues that they did not actually serve the poor. They served the rich, who controlled elections, just as rich donors do today. Taking power away from local governments by privatizing once-communal lands allowed private creditors to pass laws by which they could legally confiscate property when their debtors could not pay. “Free markets” meant the freedom to accumulate massive wealth at the expense of the poor and the state.

Hudson maintains that when Jesus Christ preached “forgiveness of debts,” he was also talking about economic debt, not just moral transgressions. When he overturned the tables of the money changers, it was because they had turned a house of prayer into “a den of thieves.” But creditors’ rights had by then gained legal dominance, and Christian theologians lacked the power to override them. Rather than being a promise of economic redemption in this life, forgiveness of debts thus became a promise of spiritual redemption in the next.

How to Pull Off a Modern Debt Jubilee

Such has been the fate of debtors in modern Western economies. But in some modern non-Western economies, vestiges of the debt write-off solution remain. In China, for instance, nonperforming loans are often carried on the books of state-owned banks or canceled rather than putting insolvent debtors and banks into bankruptcy. As Danny McMahon wrote in June in an article titled “China’s Bad Data Can Be a Good Thing”:

In China, the state stands behind the country’s banks. As long as authorities ensure those banks have sufficient liquidity to meet their obligations, they can trundle along with higher delinquency levels than would be regarded safe in a market economy.

China’s banking system, like that of ancient Mesopotamia, is largely in the public sector, so the state can back its banks with liquidity as needed. Interestingly, the Chinese state also preserves the ancient Near Eastern practice of retaining ownership of the land, which citizens can only lease for a period of time.

In Western economies, most banks are privately owned and heavily regulated, with high reserve and capital requirements. Bad loans mean debtors are put into foreclosure, jobs and capital infrastructure are lost, and austerity prevails. The Trump administration is now aggressively pursuing a trade war with China in an effort to level the playing field by forcing it into the same austerity regime, but a more productive and sustainable approach might be for the U.S. to engage in periodic debt jubilees itself.

The problem with that solution today is that most debts in Western economies are owed not to the government but to private creditors, who will insist on their contractual rights to payment. We need to find a way to pay the creditors while relieving the borrowers of their debt burden.

One possibility is to nationalize insolvent banks and sell their bad loans to the central bank, which can buy them with money created on its books. The loans can then be written down or voided out. Precedent for this policy was established with “QE1,” the Fed’s first round of quantitative easing, in which it bought unmarketable mortgage-backed securities from banks with liquidity problems.

Another possibility would be to use money generated by the central bank to bail out debtors directly. This could be done selectively, by buying up student debt or credit card debt or car loans bundled as “asset-backed securities,” then writing the debts down or off, for example. Alternatively, debts could be relieved collectively with a periodic national dividend or universal basic income paid to everyone, again drawn from the deep pocket of the central bank.

Critics will object that this would dangerously inflate the money supply and consumer prices, but that need not be the case. Today, virtually all money is created as bank debt, and it is extinguished when the debt is repaid. That means dividends used to pay this debt down would be extinguished, along with the debt itself, without adding to the money supply. For the 80% of the U.S. population now carrying debt, loan repayments from their national dividends could be made mandatory and automatic. The remaining 20% would be likely to save or invest the funds, so this money too would contribute little to consumer price inflation; and to the extent that it did go into the consumer market, it could help generate the demand needed to stimulate productivity and employment. (For a fuller explanation, see Ellen Brown, “Banking on the People,” 2019).

In ancient Mesopotamia, writing off debts worked brilliantly well for two millennia. As Hudson concludes:

To insist that all debts must be paid ignores the contrast between the thousands of years of successful Near Eastern clean slates and the debt bondage into which [Greco-Roman] antiquity sank. … If this policy in many cases was more successful than today’s, it is because they recognized that insisting that all debts must be paid meant foreclosures, economic polarization and impoverishment of the economy at large.

Corporate Media Has Bowed to Trump on Trade

The New York Times (8/10/19) ran an article this month with a headline saying that the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders faced a major problem: “How to Be Tougher on Trade Than Trump.” Serious readers might have struggled with the idea of getting “tough on trade.” After all, trade is a tool, like a shovel.  How is it possible to get tough on a shovel?

While this headline may be especially egregious, it is characteristic of trade coverage that takes an almost entirely Trumpian view of the topic. Trump portrays the issue as one of some countries, most obviously China, benefiting at the expense of the United States. The media take a somewhat different tack on this country versus country story, but they nonetheless embrace the nonsense Trumpian logic.

For Trump, at least in his rhetoric, the trade deficit is the central measure of winners and losers. In the case of China, its huge trade surplus with the United States ($420 billion, or 2.1 percent of GDP in 2018) makes it Trumpian enemy No. 1. The trade deficit certainly is a problem for US workers, but this doesn’t mean that China is winning at the expense of the United States because of “stupid” trade negotiators, as Trump puts it.

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Trump Never Had a Grand Strategy for China



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The US trade deficit with China was not an accident. Both Republican and Democratic administrations signed trade deals that made it as easy as possible to manufacture goods in China and other countries, and then export them back to the United States.

In many cases, this meant that large US corporations, like General Electric and Boeing, outsourced parts of their operations to China to take advantage of low-cost labor there. In other cases, retailers like Walmart set up low-cost supply chains so that they could undercut their competitors in the US market.

General Electric, Boeing, Walmart and the rest did not lose from our trade deficit with China. In fact, the trade deficit was the result of their efforts to increase their profits. They have little reason to be unhappy with the trade deals negotiated over the last three decades.

It is a different story for workers in the United States. As a result of the exploding trade deficit, we lost 3.4 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2007, 20 percent of the jobs in the sector. This is before the collapse of the housing bubble led to the Great Recession. We lost 40 percent of all unionized jobs in manufacturing.

It is also important to point out—contrary to what you generally read in the paper—the loss of manufacturing jobs in this seven-year period was not part of a longer downward trend. There had been only a modest decline in manufacturing employment over the prior three decades. The claim that we suddenly saw massive job loss in this sector due to automation, which just happened to coincide with the explosion of the trade deficit, is what economists refer to as “nonsense.”

This job loss not only reduced the pay of manufacturing workers, but as these displaced workers flooded into other sectors, it put downward pressure on the pay of less-educated workers more generally. This is a pretty awful story, but it is not a story of China tricking our stupid negotiators; it is a story of smart negotiators who served the people they worked for well.

For some reason the media always accept the Trumpian narrative that the large trade deficits the US runs with China and most of the rest of the world were the result of other countries outsmarting our negotiators, or at least an accidental result of past trade deals. They neversay that large trade deficits were a predictable outcome of a trade policy designed to serve the wealthy.

There is a lot at stake in the myth that ordinary workers were hurt as just an accidental byproduct of globalization. The story is that it just happens to be the case that hundreds of millions of people in the developing world are willing to do the same work as our manufacturing workers for a lot less money.

Yeah, that’s a sad story, but there are also millions of smart ambitious people who are willing to do the same work as our doctors, dentists, lawyers and other professions for a lot less money than our professionals make. But our professionals, who are winners in the global economy, along with the big corporations, got their good fortune because they rigged the process, not because of anything inherent in the nature of globalization. (Yes, this is a major point in my [free] book Rigged: How the Rules of Globalization and the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.)

The fact that trade is a story of winners and losers within countries rather than between countries is especially important now that our trade conflicts are entering a new phase, especially with China. While not generally endorsing Trump’s reality TV show tactics, most reporting has taken the position that “we” have genuine grounds for complaint with China.

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The complaints don’t center on the undervaluation of China’s currency, which is a problem for manufacturing workers. Rather, the issue that takes center stage is the supposed theft by China of “our” intellectual property.

Although this sort of claim is routinely asserted, in fact the overwhelming majority of people in the United States have never had any intellectual property stolen by China. In reality, the complaint is that companies like Boeing, GE, Pfizer and Merck are upset about China not respecting their patent and copyright claims, and they want the rest of us to have a trade war to defend them.

While these companies would be hugely outnumbered if it were a question of putting goals in trade policy to a vote, they can count on strong support in the media on both the opinion pages and, more importantly, the news pages. The issue is entirely framed in their favor, and dissenting voices are as likely to be heard as in the People’s Republic of China.

Trade reporters will never even apply the same logic to the alleged theft of intellectual property that they always apply to the United States getting lower-cost imports from China. In the latter case, reporters and economists routinely give us the happy news that cheaper imports increase the purchasing power of people in the United States. This is supposed to be especially good for those at the bottom, who are now able to buy lower cost clothes, shoes and other items at Walmart.

Imagine we had some reporters and economists who valued consistency. China’s “theft” of the intellectual property of US corporations will mean that we have new products using artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies available to us at lower prices. The same will be true with prescription drugs, software and other sectors where the trade warriors claim that China is not fairly compensating our corporations.

This would hurt the US corporations that allegedly are having their intellectual property stolen. It would also likely mean fewer jobs and lower pay for the highly educated workers employed by these companies to produce intellectual property. But just as manufacturing workers were expected to make sacrifices for the greater good in the last decade, there is no reason that we shouldn’t expect sacrifices from this more privileged group of workers in the next decade.

Incredibly, the simple logic of the gains from trade story is altogether absent from news reporting and opinion pieces on the topic. Rather, we get a jingoistic rally-round-the-flag sort of discussion that would make Donald Trump proud.

It would be great if trade reporters could get a bit more serious and give some thought to winners and losers from trade policy, and not pretend that everyone in the United States is in the same boat. But that is probably asking too much from the media. Instead, we are likely to get more pieces pushing Democrats to get tough on shovels.

What’s Behind America’s Racial Wealth Gap?

What follows is a conversation between author Mehrsa Baradaran and Jacqueline Luqman of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: This is Jacqueline Luqman with The Real News Network.

The racial wealth gap is finally being discussed seriously in this election cycle and in the country. And some people are even citing the history of slavery, racism, and discrimination that created the racial wealth gap. One of the key factors in the creation of this phenomenon of the racial wealth gap is housing policy. Or more specifically, there is a link between the ability white people have historically had to own property and homes that have accumulated value and created wealth, that they were able to pass down to future generations, that black people were not allowed to enjoy equally.

Joining me to talk more about this issue, some of the policies that created it, and potential policies that could finally tackle it, is Professor Mehrsa Baradaran. Professor Baradaran is a Professor of Law at UC-Irvine Law School, and the author of The Color of Money and How the Other Half Banks. Professor Baradaran, thank you so much for joining me today.

MEHRSA BARADARAN:  Thank you so much for having me. I love your network and I’m always happy to talk to you.

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Trump May Be a White Nationalist, but American Racism Is Bipartisan



by Paul Street

















What the Right Gets Embarrassingly Wrong About Slavery



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JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Well, let’s dig into this topic because there is so much, and I want to connect as many dots as we possibly can.

MEHRSA BARADARAN: Sure.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: I want to start with, why should we focus on policies that address the racial wealth gap specifically, and not just the general economic inequality that all Americans are concerned about? Because the areas that are being discussed as economically distressed, are economically distressed for specific reasons, so could you explain that a little bit?

MEHRSA BARADARAN: Yeah. I mean, this whole class versus race debate I feel like is this boogeyman that people say, “Well, why isn’t it everybody?” And I think we have a race-based class system in the US. And so, every time you want to talk about the racial wealth gap, you get a cohort of people saying, “Well, isn’t it just class?” And by the way, it’s the same cohort of people that doesn’t want to talk about class, ever. So I mean, those arguments for me I think are just a way to shut down this conversation. But why talk about specifically the black-white racial wealth gap, and not generally poverty, or generally racism, and things like that? And the reason is because we have had an economic system, a housing system, a school system, a credit system, that has specifically excluded black populations through housing, through student loans, through credit, through businesses, from the wealth accumulation of whites. And whiteness has been defined differently throughout time. And so we can go through the history of whiteness, but all of it has been built on an anti-blackness.

And so, I think we need to talk about the racial wealth gap if we’re going to understand any of the sort of anti-poverty movements in this country. We have to talk about the racial wealth gap if we’re going to talk about housing, or schools, or anything like that. You can’t understand why we have the gaps that we do and the inequalities that we do until you understand it was all based on anti-black racism and segregation. And this racial wealth gap was created purposefully. It was maintained over time through policies that were federal, state and local. And it is still ongoing, and it still self-perpetuates now without added inputs.

And I also want to be clear that, though I talk a lot about fixing the racial wealth gap through housing and through a variety of different policies, I think what is the most important policy thing that we can do is to talk about reparations in a serious methodological way. Just to measure the harms done, to look at the theories of justice that would justify a solid and robust reparations program, and just start to go down that road. But there’s a lot that could be done also just focusing on housing before we get there.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: And you bring up a good point because you bring up the discussion of reparations and the need to methodically study the harm done, the impact of the harm done, and the lasting legacy of the harm done, which incidentally or not incidentally, is what the House bill H.R. 40 does. That has always been the focus of H.R. 40. People mistake it as a piece of legislation that’s literally going to cut a check for black people. But no, it is literally to do exactly what you just said: to embark upon the methodical, scientific, historical, data-driven study of not just slavery, but the impacts of Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, all those other things. So that’s a great aside that I’m so glad you brought up.

MEHRSA BARADARAN: Absolutely. And I think when you talk about reparations to people, I mean, I think they want to immediately go to, “How does it work?” But I see that as step four or five or six, right? Step one is we need to just catalog the ways in which wealth was extracted, that wealth was deprived for these communities, that there was exploitation and exclusion. Measure that, measure the benefits to those who excluded and exploited, and then measure the harm. So that’s step one and two.

Step three is to look at, what are the possible theories of justice? I mean, I teach contracts. I teach contracts damages, and there’s a variety of ways that we talk about justice. You can compensate people if you breach a contract, which the US government has breached its contract to the black population over, and over, and over again, right? They did it with the Native American treaties also, but they have done it with black populations without recognition that they had any duties and that they were violated. So what does that breach entail? How do you make it right? How do you make a remedy? So when we talk about contracts, we talk about, okay, do you compensate for the wrongs? Do you make them whole? What does that look like? Do you look at unjust enrichment? What did you gain unjustly through slavery, through Jim Crow, through segregation? How do you measure that?

We talk about all of these other aspects and theories of justice. Just apply that here and say, “What does that look like to make people whole for slavery, for Jim Crow, for segregation? And how do we do that?” And we know how to do this stuff. It’s not rocket science and it’s not totally out of the realm of possibility. I mean, you see—Recently I was at the DOJ. And Wells Fargo, when it gets by violations for racial discrimination, the DOJ comes down hard on them, takes a fee of about $7 billion or something like that, and they put it in a pot to be used in the community to give down payments. So this is, it’s not exactly like, “You harmed a certain set of people through racially discriminatory policies, and your remedy is going to be to create a fund of some sort to pay back different people, but within that same community.”

And so we do this stuff all the time in law. And a lot of times in this reparations context, you see people just holding up barriers like, “Oh, we can’t do that. The people aren’t alive,” blah, blah, blah. And that’s fine. It’s never been a barrier before. So that’s just reparations. Back to racial wealth gap policy, I think you can look at the ways in which the racial wealth gap currently self-perpetuates, so this is in disparate housing, disparate schooling, disparate credit, and to remedy those different segments of the credit-banking sort of economy, and sort of lower the gaps.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: So specifically focusing on housing in this conversation because it has been argued by several experts. I think Forbes Magazine has pointed this out. Certainly the study that was published last year by Duke University that recognized that housing is a significant, or the disparity in housing is a significant contributor to the racial wealth gap because of the way certain groups of people were able to benefit from owning land and housing, and other groups of people were not.

And as you said, compensating people for harm done has been something that has been done and continues to be done when, in the example you used, when Wells Fargo discriminates against people and the federal government goes after them and extracts a fine from them. Recently, have there been efforts— and by recently, I do mean in the past 40 years— have there been policy efforts to address, even on the surface, the legacy of this unequal housing policy? And have they worked and why haven’t they?

MEHRSA BARADARAN: There has not. There has not been a single active policy to remedy the disparate housing policies. There have been policies like the Fair Housing Act that was passed in 1968 to prohibit discrimination against African Americans or other minorities. And those are fine, but that’s about sort of pegging violations and saying … That’s where the DOJ actions come in. It’s about enforcement, so stop discriminating. However, as you know, you can have disparate impact on housing. So you can create zoning restrictions. You can suck wealth out of communities. You can segregate as long as you’re not doing it racially, but you’re doing it because of—Places where you put certain public housing, or where you don’t allow certain building spaces in certain communities, then that doesn’t count, right?

So I think, going back to the original sort of 1968 debate over fair housing, everyone understood that it was either about—You have this, starting in the 1930s, as you know about redlining, right, and you have just the two different housing sectors. One is tenants. You’re paying rent. You’re living in an apartment. It’s segregated. It’s cramped. You’re just kind of being put in this place. You’re not getting a mortgage. You’re not getting credit. In the white suburbs, you’re building wealth, you’re getting credit, all of that stuff. Those things were incredibly consequential. What we’ve never done is say, “Okay, we did this race-based housing market, now let’s fix it.”

How do you do that? You either put capital into the segregated black spaces, so that’s a reparations program. There’s a couple – like CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, in 1968 passed a bill that would create a World Bank-type thing within the black spaces that would just be capitalized by Treasury and just put money back in, right? So this was a reparations-style thing that almost got passed. But then Nixon obviously puts that stuff away. The other is integration. In MLK’s coalition, people like George Romney and Robert Kennedy actually coming up with integration programs, and this would be actually giving people homes wherever they want it, right? Or building nice places within integrated spaces. And that got shut down quickly by Richard Nixon, who understands that he is elected to stop integration, to stop school integration and housing integration.

And so what we have today is a housing policy where white families pay to live in all-white spaces and have all-white schools. I mean, we essentially have –  everything comes down to housing in this country, class specifically. And educational access and social capital and all of that stuff, it’s whether you can buy a million-dollar house in some suburb in DC and send your kids to the best schools in the country. And if you can’t, you’re sort of on this different track, and your house is not going to gain in value. The schools are not going to be as well-funded because the funding comes from local taxes. You’re not going to have the social capital because the businesses don’t have enough capital to thrive. So all of that I think, it’s not just housing, but housing is a root cause and it’s all interrelated. Yeah.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: So you brought up Richard Nixon and he’s an important, I think, figure in this conversation because an initiative that may have begun with him, continues to be perpetrated. Allegedly, to address this issue of housing inequality at least, or at least resolving the issue of economically depressed neighborhoods, right? So Nixon introduced this thing called “opportunity zones” in opposition to the proposals for economic redress for people centered around housing. He introduced this idea of opportunity zones, where basically investment, private investors would be given tax breaks to invest in these economically depressed neighborhoods. And this has been perpetuated ever since Nixon. As a matter of fact, the Trump administration has a new policy that’s centered around opportunity zones. Does this work? Does this work to address this, especially racial inequality in the housing market?

MEHRSA BARADARAN: No. And let me clarify, because I wrote – I mean, my book is centered around this, Nixon’s idea, and he was not the first person that called it “opportunity zones.” He called it “black capitalism.”

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Ah.

MEHRSA BARADARAN: And the idea is this. You’ve got reparations, one group, so the Black Power groups that were demanding reparations, and you’ve got another coalition demanding integration. And instead, he sort of goes the middle or nothing. He’s not going to give anything. And what it is, is, “I will co-opt the language of the Black Power movement asking for black power.” And what they meant by black power is sovereignty within the black spaces, capital, and redress, right? But what Nixon meant is, “We’re going to maintain the segregated economy and the segregated housing system, and we’re going to do this thing where we try to coax private entities to come in and build businesses and make loans and stuff in that community.” So then it morphs into enterprise zones in the Reagan era. He calls it “enterprise zones.” And then Clinton actually doubles down on this also, he calls it “enterprise zones.” It used to be called “the black ghetto” because it was understood that it was forced segregation. And over time, that term gets whitewashed and it becomes an entrepreneurship zone, an enterprise zone, and an opportunity zone.

And so this opportunity zone program of Trump’s leads directly back to Nixon. And what it was, was a decoy from actual policy. It’s not capital, and it’s not integration. It’s not real. It is just a way to give tax incentives and sort of goodies to private equity firms to come in and build in those spaces. The community does not get the equity. So the best-case scenario is gentrification and displacement, right? So [crosstalk]

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: That’s the best-case scenario?

MEHRSA BARADARAN: The best-case scenario is that a community gets revitalized, right? That’s the point. And what does that mean? A Whole Foods comes in, Starbucks comes in, all of that stuff. There’s no effort to pass that equity onto the people, right? The people who live there. So the best-case scenario with revitalization is what happens in Harlem or in Brooklyn. I’m from New York, so we’ve seen this happen. And the tenants, who don’t own the land, get displaced. And the people that gain the equity are the first comers, right? The sort of – we call them yuppies, professionals. The people who can come in and buy, and then turn over and sell.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Wow. So the best-case scenario in regard to these kinds of investment in distressed communities isn’t a best-case scenario for the people who live there. It’s a best-case scenario for the investors. So, all right. This is – we don’t have a lot of time left, but I need to ask you about your proposal, which is called the 21st Century Homestead Act. I want to ask you about why the proposal will work differently from this idea of opportunity zones, and economic zones, and private investment that we just talked about. But could you go into, really quickly, the reason the title is important? Because, historically, it absolutely is.

MEHRSA BARADARAN: Yeah. So I want to make sure, I mean, the Homestead Act was hugely problematic in a lot of ways. One is that it kicked Native Americans off their land, it was environmentally not great, and it excluded black families. But I’m using this because it did build white wealth, and I want to do it right this time, right? So I think hearkening back to this era of white affirmative action and policies that give white people land and money, right, the Homestead Act and the FHA are two, to do them differently this time. I think that’s why it’s important to use those terms to say, when people say, “This is crazy.” And the response is, “Well, we did this before. We just did it for the – we did it for white people and not everyone else.”

So the idea of the Homestead Act is to revitalize communities, but to give the land to the residents of the communities first. So Baltimore did try to do a Dollar Homes program a while back. The problem was that the banks wouldn’t lend for improvements because the property values were so low, and they couldn’t get the appraisals to come in at anywhere near the price. And so, my Homestead Act, you would get the land for free and you would get improvements, all provided by a grant administered by the federal government and the city itself.

And so the qualifying individuals would be anyone who’s lived in a redlined community for the past five to 10 years, a formerly redlined segregated community. They’ve got a bunch of different restrictions. We’re trying to get at not just the people in that area who have lived there. So we’re not trying to target investors, no gentrifiers. It’s just the locals who live there. You get a home, you get an improved home, and you’re paying less than you would in rent, and you get to own the home as it sort of increases in value. And you get to have that equity as the place revitalizes.

So along with the home, there’s also a jobs programs. I mean, akin to the New Deal, akin to the FHA, you can’t just give people a home and say, “Okay, just pay for it.” There’s also got to be a jobs program that comes along with it. So what do you do? So I’ve got a variety of different ways that cities can create jobs. And the easiest way would be to do  what the government already does— a lot of VA hospitals and Energy Department loans and things like that. And the idea would be to couple one of those projects or facilities with an area that needs this revitalization. So whether it’s Baltimore or Detroit, Dayton, Ohio, anywhere that is a formerly segregated space that still has retained a largely black population, as opposed to places that were segregated and are now gentrified, right? So places in St. Louis where it used to be a black population and now it’s all gentrified. So you would actually go to, let’s say Ferguson as opposed to inner city St. Louis, and within Ferguson. That’s where you would do the handover of property.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: This is really an amazing proposal, not because it’s groundbreaking because it really isn’t. Because as you said, Professor Baradaran, we’ve done this before. This country has done this before. It just wasn’t done for black people. It wasn’t done for Native people. And we are finally broaching the topic of doing this for people who were left out in the beginning. Of course, there’s so much more to get into about this topic, but we just scratched the surface today. And unfortunately, we don’t have any more time. But I would love to continue this topic not just on the urban/suburban focus that a lot of these proposals, whether they worked or not, have been geared toward, but also the impact of the same kind of racist policies that have had on black farmers, and how land value and the accumulation of wealth through land has also impacted black people in rural areas. But for now, Professor Baradaran, I thank you so much for coming on today and talking to me about this subject.

MEHRSA BARADARAN: Thank you so much for having me. And if anyone’s curious, there’s a lot more information in the book. It’s hard to talk fast and cover everything, but I kind of wrote it all down, and I hope that people find it useful.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: I am absolutely sure they will. I did. I highly recommend Professor Baradaran’s work. I’m absolutely being very biased right now as a journalist, but I thank you all for watching. This is Jacqueline Luqman from Baltimore with The Real News Network.

Democracy Watchdog Warns FEC Is Courting ‘Disaster’

The Federal Elections Commission was left without a quorum Monday when vice chairman Matthew Petersen, the fourth member of the already depleted agency, resigned, just months before the 2020 election cycle kicks into gear with the primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire.

At three members, the FEC is left toothless and without the power to even convene meetings—much less enforce the rules.

The FEC can no longer:

Conduct meetings

Issue fines

Make rules

Conduct audits

Vote on the outcome of investigations https://t.co/ZVYyGLvZs7

— Joe Yerardi (@JoeYerardi) August 26, 2019

“The timing couldn’t be worse,” wrote Mother Jones reporter Russ Choma. “The 2020 election is predicted to be the most expensive election in history, and a raft of unresolved questions are facing the FEC when it comes to how to enforce rules to keep foreign influence out of American democracy.”

Elections expert and University of California-Davis professor Rick Hasen told Choma that the FEC was already running at historically ineffective levels in the Trump era, but at least operating with a quorum allowed it some ability to protect the democratic process.

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“Even if the Democrats and Republicans on the commissioners would deadlock on ordinary enforcement matters, there is at least a chance they could come together in an emergency to help ensure the integrity of the 2020 campaign,” said Hasen.

In a statement, Common Cause president Kate Hobert Flynn said Petersen’s resignation, and the lack of interest on the part of President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in filling the commission’s empty seats, were a danger to the country.

“Americans deserve an FEC willing and able to enforce the laws passed by Congress to protect the integrity of our elections and the President must nominate new commissioners who will serve as the cops on the beat,” said Flynn. “While the agency may have fallen short of fulfilling its duties in recent years, to leave the FEC without a quorum to act would court disaster.”

Think Progress explained the role of Washington’s two most powerful Republicans:

President Donald Trump has made little effort to appoint new commissioners since taking office. But the one nomination he has made—pro-Trump attorney Trey Trainor of Texas—has been waiting for a confirmation hearing since September 2017.

McConnell has dubbed himself the “grim reaper,” blocking virtually all legislative action in the United States Senate and focusing almost exclusively on confirming Trump’s nominees. But the Federal Election Commission has been a notable exception.

In a statement, FEC chairwoman Ellen Weintraub said the agency would be ready and willing to do whatever was necessary to continue its mission, irrespective of quorum or enforcement.

“The FEC will still be able to shine a strong spotlight on the finances of the 2020 campaign,” said Weintraub.