Chris Hedges's Blog, page 170

America’s Anti-Establishment Fury Isn’t Going Away

If you’re feeling anger the political system being rigged to benefit those at the top, a new poll reveals you’re far from alone.

Released Sunday, the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that 70 percent of Americans said they felt “angry because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power.” That figure, based on polling conducted Aug. 10-14, is barely different from the 69 percent who said they felt that way in an October 2015 poll.

“Four years ago, we uncovered a deep and boiling anger across the country engulfing our political system,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, which conducted the survey with the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies. “Four years later, with a very different political leader in place,” said Horwitt, “that anger remains at the same level.”

Other questions asked by the pollsters reveal more pessimism.

Sixty-seven percent said they do not feel confident that our children’s generation will face a better life than ours; that’s up from the 61 percent who felt that way in 2017.

Respondents’ views of race relations were grim as well.

The poll finds that 60 percent believe race relations are bad in the nation. That view was expressed by 56 percent of whites, 81 percent of African Americans, and 61 percent of Hispanics.

Since President Donald Trump took office, 56 percent said race relations have gotten worse. While 47 percent of whites felt that way, 86 percent of African Americans and 74 percent of Hispanics said race relations worsened under Trump.

Views on the issue were markedly different under Trump’s predecessor.

In November 2011, 19 percent said race relations had gotten worse under then-President Barack Obama; 13 percent expressed that view in January 2009.

Some of the new poll’s other findings indicate less gloom.

It also shows that 57 percent of Americans expressed satisfaction with the state of the U.S. economy. Sixty-nine percent also expressed satisfaction with their person financial situation. Despite those views, more than half—56 percent—said they felt “anxious and uncertain because the economy still feels rocky and unpredictable,” causing fears about being able to pay bills.

The Curse of Moral Purity

The continued inability of America’s liberal democratic establishment to address the ills besetting the country—climate change, unregulated global capitalism, mounting social inequality, a bloated military, endless foreign wars, out-of-control deficits and gun violence—means the inevitable snuffing out of our anemic democracy. Overwhelmed by the multiple crises, the liberal elites have jettisoned genuine political life and retreated into self-defeating moral crusades in a vain and futile attempt to deflect attention away from the looming social, political, economic and environmental catastrophes.

These faux moral crusades, now the language of the left and the right, have bifurcated the country into warring factions. Opponents are demonized as evil. Adherents to the cause are on the side of the angels. Nuance and ambiguity are banished. Facts are manipulated or discarded. Truth is replaced by slogans. Conspiracy theories, however bizarre, are incredulously embraced to expose the perfidiousness of the enemy. Politics is defined by antagonistic political personalities spewing vitriol. The intellectual and moral sterility, along with the inability to halt the forces of societal destruction, provides fertile soil for extremists, neofascists and demagogues who thrive in periods of paralysis and cultural degeneracy.

Liberals and the left have wasted the last two years attacking Donald Trump as a Russian asset and look set to waste the next two years attacking him as a racist. They desperately seek scapegoats to explain the election of Trump as president, no different from a right wing that tars its Democratic Party enemies as America-hating socialists and that blames Muslims, immigrants and poor people of color for our national debacle. These are competing cartoon visions of the world. They foster a self-created universe of villains and superheroes that exacerbates the mounting polarization and rage.

“Bourgeois society seems everywhere to have used up its store of constructive ideas,” Christopher Lasch wrote in 1979 in “The Culture of Narcissism.” “It has lost both the capacity and the will to confront the difficulties that threaten to overwhelm it. The political crisis of capitalism reflects a general crisis of western culture, which reveals itself in a pervasive despair of understanding the course of modern history or of subjecting it to rational direction. Liberalism, the political theory of the ascendant bourgeoisie, long ago lost the capacity to explain events in the world of the welfare state and the multinational corporation; nothing has taken its place. Politically bankrupt, liberalism is intellectually bankrupt as well.”

The online magazine Slate recently published a transcript of a town hall meeting between Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, and the Times staff. It was a fascinating window into the hubris and cluelessness of the paper, the ruling elites’ primary news organ, which has spent the last two years shredding its credibility by hyping the investigation by Robert Mueller and the conspiracy theory that Trump was a Russian asset. Here is Baquet on the newspaper’s reporting on Trump:

Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom but, frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice? That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.

The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, “Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.” And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?

I think that we’ve got to change. I mean, the vision for coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier: How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of remarks? How do we cover the world’s reaction to him? How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies? How do we cover America, that’s become so divided by Donald Trump? How do we grapple with all the stuff you all are talking about? How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time? That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years.

Baquet asserts that the journalistic campaign to incriminate Trump as a Russian agent sputtered out and a new campaign—read moral crusade—arose six or seven weeks ago to focus on Trump’s racism. Trump’s racism, of course, did not begin six or seven weeks ago. It is the paper that switched narratives six or seven weeks ago, from one moral crusade to another.

This is not journalism. It is moral purity masquerading as journalism. And it will, like the “Russiagate” conspiracy, be useless to blunt Trump’s support, explain and cope with our innumerable crises or heal the growing divide.

The problem that the paper, along with the Democratic Party and its liberal allies, faces is that it is captive to its corporate sponsors who orchestrated our grotesque income inequality, deindustrialization, out-of-control military machine, neutered media and muzzled scholarship. The paper, therefore, rather than turn on its corporate advertisers and elitist readers, first blamed Russia and now blames white supremacists. The longer such demagoguery continues on the left and the right, the more the country will be torn asunder.

Hannah Arendt in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” pointed out that ideologies are attractive in times of crisis because they reduce and simplify reality to a single idea. While the right wing blames the decline on darker races, the liberal elites blame the decline on Russia or racists. It is the ideology, not experience or fact, that is used “to explain all historical happenings, [to provide] the total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present, and the reliable prediction of the future,” she wrote.

All ideologies demand an impossible consistency. This is achieved by a constant mutation and distortion of reality until it becomes, as the Mueller investigation did, absurdist theater. The result for believers, Arendt wrote, is disorientation, heightened fear and paranoia.

These types of collective self-delusions have always existed in American society, as the historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out. Such self-delusions, he wrote, are “made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary.”

But these self-delusions have usually been confined to the fringes of society, such as, for example, a left wing that made political pilgrimages to the Soviet Union, blissfully ignoring its government’s slaughter of millions of its own citizens, the gulags and the famines, and a right wing that celebrated fascist dictatorships in Spain and later Latin America, overlooking the mass executions, state terror and death squads there.

Collective self-delusions, however, have now been mainstreamed. They are trumpeted by media platforms across the political spectrum and by the political establishment. They are the fodder of Fox News and Breitbart as well as MSNBC and CNN. Jake Tapper and Rachel Maddow, as Matt Taibbi has pointed out, are “liberal” versions of Sean Hannity.

Richard Rorty, with uncanny prescience, wrote in his 1998 book “Achieving Our Country”:

Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book “The Endangered American Dream” is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodern professors will no long be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel “It Can’t Happen Here” may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

The rupture of social bonds, caused by the breakdown of society, income inequality, social stagnation and the disempowerment of the working class, is expressed in innumerable dark pathologies. A fractured public carries out self-destructive behaviors—out-of-control gun violence, opioid addiction and sexual sadism—in an attempt to cope with dislocation, impotence and pain. Moral crusades are an expression of this cultural sickness. They are emblematic of a society in deep distress, unable to cope rationally with the problems besetting it. These crusades always make things worse, for once they are exposed as ineffectual they invariably breed a frightening fanaticism.

High-Stakes Gamble: Iranian Envoy Gets Surprise G-7 Invite

BIARRITZ, France—A top Iranian official paid an unannounced visit Sunday to the G-7 summit and headed straight toward the heart of the city where leaders of the world’s major democracies have been debating how to handle the country’s nuclear ambitions.

France’s surprise invitation of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was a high-stakes gamble for French President Emmanuel Macron, who is the host of the Group of Seven gathering in Biarritz.

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Zarif spent about five hours in Biarritz after his plane touched down at the airport, which has been closed since Friday to all flights unrelated to the official G-7 delegations.

A senior French official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks, said Macron personally informed U.S. President Donald Trump about the invitation to Zarif.

The official noted that Macron and Trump met for two hours Saturday and discussed Iran at length, as well as at the informal group dinner Saturday night.

Another French official said that France “is working in full transparency with the U.S. and in full transparency with European partners.” The Iranian met with Macron as well as diplomats from France, Germany and Britain at the Biarritz city hall, the official said.

Zarif, who is under U.S. sanctions, had been scheduled to go to Asia as part of a tour to seek support for Iran amid the American campaign against it since Trump withdrew the U.S. from Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Trump had not “set preconditions” on negotiations with Iran.

Zarif arrived as fissures emerged among G-7 leaders over how to deal with Iran.

Macron said the leaders agreed during a dinner the night before that the French president could serve as a G-7 messenger to Iran. Trump denied agreeing to anything, and Macron was forced to play down his role and acknowledge Trump’s status as “the president of the world’s number one power.”

The French official also said that based on Saturday night’s dinner, France considers it important to check in with Zarif to continue to bring positions closer together and ease tensions. The official said the French are not “mediators” but think they can contribute to de-escalation.

Macron said he has no formal mandate to speak for the G-7 leaders in delivering a message to Iran, but that he would be able to address the issue in the context of what they agreed to during the dinner.

For several months, Macron has taken a lead role in trying to save the 2015 nuclear accord, which has been unraveling since Trump pulled the U.S. out of the agreement. His office said the G-7 leaders agreed he should serve as a go-between with Iran.

“I haven’t discussed that,” Trump said Sunday morning. He described the dinner as “very, very good” and blamed the media for anything that implied otherwise.

But it seemed from other accounts that the dinner had been tense, with a clear divide between him and the rest of the G-7.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, greeting Macron for a morning meeting, congratulated the French president and shook his hand.

“Well done. Bien joué,” Johnson said, using the French expression for “well played” often uttered in a successful round of cards.

“You did very well last night. My God that was a difficult one. You did brilliant,” he added.

Tristen Naylor, deputy director of the G7 Research Group, described the invitation as “a wild-card move.”

“The risks to the French president were quite large. He could have evoked a very strong and negative reaction from the American president — everything from outright condemnation to actually the American president just saying enough of this and getting on the plane and flying away,” Naylor said.

But the invitation was also something of a mirror of Trump’s own high-stakes diplomacy.

“Something that we’ve learned over the 2 ½ years about the American president is that what works with him, what resonates with him, is surprise, is a big move, something flashy,” he said. “And the French president has taken a page from it, I think, executed a maneuver out of it with great aplomb.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Zarif’s presence was parallel to any G-7 events and that everyone agreed to seek more talks rather than tensions.

She added: “It is absolutely right to explore every possibility, and what we discussed yesterday — which wasn’t a formal assignment for anyone. But Iran certainly should know what we discussed.”

After Zarif left, Macron and Trump had several apparently friendly exchanges as they prepped for the group photo of the leaders.

“Maybe Macron jumped the gun and misinterpreted. But we haven’t been hearing howls of fury from the American delegation. It wouldn’t be surprising if this is something which was, if not green-lighted, then not red-lighted by Washington,” said Francois Heisbourg, adviser at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies and at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research. “This may not be the best of ideas from Washington’s standpoint. But it doesn’t hurt the Americans.”

The G-7 leaders focused much of Sunday on what they can do to boost growth at a time of heightened uncertainty. Manufacturers around the world are smarting from the trade dispute between the U.S. and China , which has led to new import taxes on hundreds of billions of dollars-worth of goods. Businesses don’t know where tariffs will be imposed next.

The White House had said putting the economy on the agenda was Trump’s idea, but the G-7 has for over four decades always included a focus on the economy. It was founded as a response to the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s and the recession that followed.

The backdrop is particularly worrying this year, with the U.S. economy slowing and Germany and Italy close to recession.

Meanwhile, Britain is due to leave the EU in October, and there is no agreement on how it should happen, raising the possibility of a disorderly exit that could wreak havoc for business in Europe.

Johnson said Britain and Europe needed to prepare for that, saying the prospect of a Brexit deal was “touch and go.”

The G-7 summit includes the heads of Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada and Italy as well as a representative of the 28-country EU.

In the nearby town of Bayonne, protesters demanded Macron do more to protect French workers and the planet.

A mix of activists, some wearing yellow vests, carried portraits of the French president as they marched Sunday in solidarity with environmental activists who removed official portraits of Macron from town halls around France earlier this year to protest his climate change policies.

Internationally, Macron is a vocal champion of fighting climate change and has challenged Trump on the issue. At home in France, however, activists accuse him of lagging on promises to wean France from fossil fuels.

___

Associated Press writers Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran; Geir Moulson in Berlin; Angela Charlton in Paris; and Zeke Miller and David McHugh in Biarritz contributed to this report.

As Global Warming Crisis Worsens, DNC Torpedoes Climate Debate

Update: The Democratic National Committee voted Saturday to strike down a resolution that would have allowed for a multi-candidate climate forum.

“Tom Perez just killed the #ClimateDebate,” the youth-led Sunrise Movement said on its Facebook page, referring to the DNC chair.

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Resolution 4 was seen as a compromise from a resolution calling for a presidential primary climate debate, as groups including Sunrise had demanded. That resolution was voted down Thursday at the San Francisco meeting by the DNC’s Resolutions Committee, prompting outrage. Sunrise claimed a “partial victory” when Resolution 4, which would have allowed for a “multi-candidate issue-specific forum with the candidates appearing on the same state, engaging one another in discussion,” passed Thursday.

“We passed a resolution supporting this multi-candidate discussion and party leaders overturned it,” said DNC voting member James J. Zogby in a statement Saturday. “The Democratic Party is supposed to be bottom up, not top down.”

Progressive strategist Dante Atkins shared results of Saturday’s vote on Twitter, and opined that the decision was a mistake for the party and Perez.

Final vote: Resolution 4 was defeated 222-137. Roll call will likely be available week after next, so, after labor day.

—

Corporate Media Get the Story Wrong on the Amazon Fires

Intercept (7/6/19)

More and more media are reporting on fires tearing through the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. There has been a marked increase in fires in Brazil concurrent with an increase in illegal—and climate-disrupting—deforestation, concurrent with President Jair Bolsonaro’s efforts to open the Amazon to mining and logging interests. Criticism of media is coming in, too—mostly for being late to cover fires that have been burning for three weeks in a uniquely critical place. But whenever they do it, corporate media addressing modern day crises like the Amazon fires will never do them anything approaching justice.

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Not as long as they refuse to sustainedly challenge anti-democratic powers like Bolsonaro: When the guy who jokes about being called Captain Chainsaw was emboldening illegal land-grabbing in indigenous and protected territories, the New York Times (10/26/18) was busy worrying if he would “deliver” on his promise to cut social security. (“Markets are optimistic,” we were told.)

More important, given that failure, is the refusal to hand the mic to those who are fighting. Like the Apurinã chief who told the Intercept‘s Alexander Zaitchik (7/6/19) they had seen landgrabs before, but “with Bolsonaro, the invasions are worse and will continue to get worse…. Unless he is stopped, he’ll run over our rights and allow a giant invasion of the forest.” Or the signatories to the Bogota Declaration to the 14th UN Biodiversity Conference, who offered a plan  from 400 ethnic groups across the Amazon basin to form a “sacred corridor of life,” to share ancestral knowledge and showcase alternative modes of development and ways of living (Common Dreams, 11/21/18).

It doesn’t matter so much how many reports corporate media write; if the same people stay at the center of them, the story won’t change.

The Rich Will Not Be Exempt From the Worst of Climate Change

By the close of the century, the United States could be more than 10% poorer, thanks to the economic loss that climate change will impose.

There is bad news too for Japan, India and New Zealand, which will also be 10% worse off in a world that could be 3°C hotter than any temperatures experienced since humans began to build cities, civilisations and complex economies.

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And the news is even worse for Canada, a northern and Arctic nation that could reasonably have expected some things to improve as the thermometer rose: under a “business as usual” scenario in which nations go on burning fossil fuels at ever increasing rates, the Canadian economy could shrink by 13%.

A new study by the US National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts warns that overall the global economy will shrink by 7%, unless the world’s nations meet the target they set themselves at an historic meeting in Paris in 2015, when they agreed an ambition to keep global warming to no more than 2°C above the levels maintained until the Industrial Revolution.

“The idea that rich, temperate nations are economically immune to climate change, or could even double or triple their wealth as a result, just seems implausible”

The factor that tends to govern how bad an economy may be hit is not the global average thermometer rise, but the level of deviation from the historical normal: farmers, business people and government planners tend to bank on more or less foreseeable conditions. But conditions in a hotter world are less predictable.

“Whether cold snaps or heat waves, droughts or floods or natural disasters, all deviations of climate conditions from their historical norms have adverse economic effects,” said Kamiar Mohaddes, a co-author based at the faculty of economics at the other Cambridge, in the UK.

“Without mitigation and adaptation policies, many countries are likely to experience sustained temperature increases relative to historical norms and suffer major income losses as a result. This holds for both rich and poor countries as well as hot and cold regions.

“Canada is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. There are risks to its physical infrastructure, coastal and northern communities, human health and wellness, ecosystems and fisheries – all of which has had a cost.”

Familiar refrain

The planet has already warmed by around 1°C in the last century, with ever more intense and frequent extremes of heat, drought and rainfall. The news that climate change could impose massive costs is not a surprise.

Researchers have been warning for decades that although the switch away from fossil fuels – along with other steps – will be costly, doing nothing will be even more expensive and, for many regions, ruinous.

Studies have warned that both Europe and the United States will pay a heavy price for failing to meet the Paris targets, and the poor in America will pay an even heavier price.

In the latest study, researchers from California, Washington DC, the UK and Taiwan started with data from 174 nations going back to 1960 to find a match between variations from normal temperatures and income levels. They then made computer simulations of what could happen under two scenarios.

Paris makes sense

They made the assumption that nations would adapt to change, but that such adaptations would take 30 years to complete. They then looked at 10 sectors of the US economy in particular, and found that across 48 states, every sector in every state suffered economically from at least one aspect of climate change.

They also found that the Paris Agreement of 2015 – which President Trump proposes to abandon – offers the best business sense. Were nations to contain global warming to the ideal of 1.5°C, both the US and Canada could expect their wealth to dwindle by no more than 2%.

“The economics of climate change stretch far beyond the impact on growing crops. Heavy rainfall prevents mountain access for mining and affects commodity prices. Cold snaps raise heating bills and high street spending drops. Heat waves cause transport networks to shut down. All these things add up,” Dr Mohaddes said.

“The idea that rich, temperate nations are economically immune to climate change, or could even double or triple their wealth as a result, just seems implausible.”

The 400-Year-Old Wound Tearing at the Heart of America

Four hundred years ago this month, the first enslaved people from Africa arrived in Virginia.

Slavery is often reduced to a crime of America’s long-ago past. But enslaved labor created the backbone for America’s capitalistic economy, allowing it to grow into — and remain — the world’s leading economy today.

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The effects of this reliance on unpaid African slave labor is still felt in America’s current racial wealth divide. Today the racial wealth divide is greater than it was nearly four decades ago, and trends point to its continued widening.

Although slavery officially ended in 1865, the unequal treatment of African Americans continued through Jim Crow, red lining, and mass incarceration, among many public policies. Our country’s historic racial wealth disparities continue to be perpetuated and increased by the trend towards extreme inequality in the United States.

To further paint a dire picture, a report released earlier this year by the Institute for Policy Studies found that between 1983 and 2016, the median black family saw their wealth drop by more than half, compared to a 33 percent increase for the median white household.

Our economy is still thriving off the backs of African Americans and other poor people. While black wealth plummets, the number of households with $10 million or more skyrocketed by 856 percent during those years.

On the other end, 37 percent of black families have zero or “negative” wealth, meaning their debts exceed the value of their assets. Just 15 percent of white families are in the same position.

The racial wealth divide is an issue that affects all Americans — and the overall health of our economy.

As the black population increases, low levels of black wealth play a key factor in the overall decline in American median household wealth — from $84,111 in 1983 to $81,704 in 2016. Across all races, the number of households experiencing negative wealth has increased from one in six in 1983 to one in five households today.

Many conversations around the depletion of black wealth point towards false narratives about the work ethic of African Americans. This is a myth — studies show that college-educated black families have less wealth than high school-educated white families. And single-parent white families are twice as wealthy as two-parent black families.

The Institute for Policy Studies concludes that these outcomes are not the result of individual behavior, but the result of black Americans having fewer resources to begin with — resources they’ve been denied for 400 years, ever since the first slaves were kidnapped from Africa and brought to America to provide free, strenuous, and valuable labor.

Employment, income, homeownership, stock ownership, entrepreneurship, and virtually all other economic indicators show stark divides around race. To truly overcome these divides, we need a massive, targeted investment similar to the massive, targeted investments that historically appropriated wealth to white communities.

It’ll take bold structural reform and the political will to finally achieve economic justice for African Americans, because clearly ending slavery wasn’t enough.

By creating a formal commission to study the issue, lawmakers can take a serious look at what reparations for descendants of enslaved Africans in America could look like. Inaction — or worse, repeating the same mistakes that led to this situation — will simply widen the divide and create greater economic instability for the country at large.

Four hundred years later, it’s time to stop putting a temporary bandage on the painful and relevant history of American slavery. It’s time to heal the deep wounds of racism and inequity once and for all.

Not only to finally provide African Americans with the economic equity they deserve, but to ensure the health of our economy for generations to come.

Bernie Sanders’ Green New Deal Is the Hail Mary Our Planet Needs

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ breathtaking Green New Deal, with an advertised price tag of $16.3 trillion, is aimed at nothing less than saving the planet from the worst consequences of global heating.

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The plan aims to create 20 million new, well-paying jobs. It should be noted that one possible outcome of big Federal R&D monies and a rapid shift to renewables would be to revivify the US industrial sector, which has fallen to only 12 percent or so of the US GDP. Although the price tag seems formidable, Sen. Sanders points out that climate inaction will cost $34 trillion (I would add, at the very least) by 2100.

Yuval Rosenberg at the Fiscal Times quotes the response of the centrist Third Way think tank, which appears to represent mainly investment bankers, as criticizing Sanders’ plan on a number of points. They lament that he sidelines nuclear energy and carbon capture, and that his goal of getting rid of gasoline vehicles by 2030 is not realistic. If you reason back from these positions, what is being said is that moving quickly off coal, oil and gas is undesirable. Who would say that? Big coal, big oil and big gas, the profits of which are beloved of investment bankers. Likewise, big nuclear.

So let me explain why the critique from Third Way is pernicious. First, there is no such thing as affordable, safe, carbon capture. It is a unicorn. Even if CO2 could be captured, storing carbon dioxide gas would be extremely dangerous. When CO2 leaked from under a lake in the Cameroons, it killed thousands of people living on its shores.

Second, nuclear energy is useless in our new energy regime. Wind and solar will be the backbone, and they are intermittent. The sun doesn’t shine at night, wind often calms during the day. Until we get Big Battery capacity (which is coming rapidly), you need a baseline source of power that can be easily phased in and out. That is either hydro where it exists, or natural gas. It takes way too long to power down a nuclear plant and then power it back up. It is useless. Not to mention that the nuclear waste cannot be safely disposed of and poses very long term contamination problems. Not to mention that the plants can melt down and damage riparian ecosystems. Worst of all, nuclear-generated electricity costs 11 cents a kilowatt hour. New solar and wind bids are being let for less than 3 cents a kilowatt hour, even cheaper than coal.

As for taking transportation electric quickly, of course that can be accomplished. Maybe it won’t happen in a US dominated by Big Oil, but Sanders intends to push those corporations aside and institute a Federal industrial policy that can make things happen. The analogy is what Franklin Delano Roosevelt accomplished during World War II, when US industrial capacity vastly expanded and 16 million men were mobilized and Social Security was implemented.

These things aren’t as hard as they look, though admittedly it is a massive undertaking. In the US, 17.2 million light vehicles are sold annually, so in ten years that is 172 million. There are 272 mn. light vehicles on the road. So I conclude that the market replaces 64% of the vehicle stock every decade (helped by planned obsolescence). Therefore, if you require that all new vehicles be electric, you’d switch out 64% of the gasoline cars in a decade. (Chine already today makes an $8000 EV; so can Detroit if they’re incentivized). Putting in more public transportation and incentives for using it would make many of the other vehicles redundant. Trade-in incentives could mothball those that are left. The Obama administration already did a small version of this sort of buy-back, taking older polluting gas guzzlers off people’s hands for a rebate on a new vehicle. Trump’s tax cut on billionaires cost trillions, and over a decade his increase in the war budget will also cost trillions. The US spends more on war than the next 14 countries combined, and is expected to spend $7 trillion on “defense” over the next decade, even though we have no peer powers. Nobody thought those things impossible or fantastic.

Britain spends $45 bn. a year on defense and it has 1/4 the population of the US, so that is as though the US spent less than $200 billion a year on the Pentagon. We could go down to that and save a trillion dollars every two years for useful and productive things instead of for bombs to sell the Saudis to drop on Yemeni children. The US military is among the biggest carbon-emitting organizations in the world, so maybe we could cut those emissions, too. Bernie’s plan would be paid for in this way alone in about 32 years.

The plan is set to pay for itself over 15 years in these ways:

Making the fossil fuel industry pay for their pollution, through litigation, fees, and taxes, and eliminating federal fossil fuel subsidies.

Generating revenue from the wholesale of energy produced by the regional Power Marketing Authorities. Revenues will be collected from 2023-2035, and after 2035 electricity will be virtually free, aside from operations and maintenance costs.

Scaling back military spending on maintaining global oil dependence.

Collecting new income tax revenue from the 20 million new jobs created by the plan.

Reduced need for federal and state safety net spending due to the creation of millions of good-paying, unionized jobs.

Making the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share.

The selfish and greedy elites of the US Establishment will attempt to kill this plan just in the same way that they are killing the planet. It will only succeed if the public rallies to it, urgently seeking to limit the damage to their children’s and grandchildren’s lives done by carbon dioxide, methane, and the rest.

 

68 Protesters Detained as Leaders Gather at G-7 Summit

BIARRITZ, France—The Latest on the Group of Seven summit (all times local):

11:05 p.m.

French authorities have detained 68 people taking part in a tense protest near the G-7 summit.

The regional administration says those detained are accused of throwing projectiles, concealing their faces or possessing objects that could be used as weapons.

Police fired tear gas, water cannon and dispersion grenades at a crowd of about 400 mostly peaceful anti-capitalism demonstrators Saturday in the town of Bayonne. The regional administration says no injuries were reported in the skirmishes.

World leaders gathered in nearby Biarritz on Saturday to open the Group of Seven summit.

Security is high, and some yellow vest protesters angry at the French president and economic injustice have threatened action Sunday.

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7:40 p.m.

A French diplomat says President Emmanuel Macron tried to reduce the pressure exerted by President Donald Trump over a new digital services tax the country is imposing on internet giants.

The official, who spoke anonymously in accordance with the French presidency’s customary practices, said Macron told Trump the tax is not an anti-American policy.

During a two-hour working lunch with Trump, Macron stressed the need for every country to be able to tax digital activities.

Trump repeatedly vowed to retaliate against France for the new digital tax the country is imposing on big tech companies that sell online advertising by placing tariffs on French wine imports to the U.S.

The French diplomat said Macron told Trump there was no link to be made between the digital tax and the wine tariffs and tried to convince him there was no point in opening a trade war on that issue.

—By Sylvie Corbet

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7:30 p.m.

France’s Basque country is on the menu for the G-7 summit informal dinner of leaders.

Saturday night’s dinner in the seaside resort of Biarritz features local specialties of the Basque country. According to the menu released by the French president’s office, dinner starts with a contemporary take on a piperade, a dish typically made with tomatoes, onions, green peppers and a dose of the local dried red pepper, known as piment d’Espelette.

The appetizer will be followed by line-caught red tuna, prepared in a style known locally as Marmitako, something like a stew cooked in an earthenware dish traditionally with tomatoes and other vegetables.

The meal ends with local cheeses, and dessert featuring hand selected peaches and a selection of Basque cakes.

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7:10 p.m.

Police have fired water cannon and tear gas at about 400 anti-capitalist protesters blocking roads in a town near the venue of the G-7 summit in southwest France.

A few protesters threw rocks at police but the crowd in Bayonne was largely peaceful, with some activists dancing.

Police responded with warning shots and then water cannon. The incident took place near a bridge barricaded by police as part of extensive security measures around the Group of Summit meeting that opens Saturday.

Earlier Saturday thousands of demonstrators marched peacefully from the area to the Spanish border to demand more action against climate change and economic inequality. U.S. President Donald Trump is among leaders at the summit that runs through Monday.

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6:45 p.m.

A French diplomat says French President Emmanuel Macron outlined details of a French plan to ease tensions with Iran during his working lunch with President Donald Trump at the G-7 summit.

The official, who was speaking anonymously in accordance with the French presidency’s customary practices, said France has been working for several weeks on the plan.

The diplomat said France and the United States share the same interests: preventing a nuclear-armed Iran.

France’s plan would allow Iran to export oil for a limited amount of time. In exchange, Iran would need to fully implement the 2015 nuclear deal, reduce tensions in the Gulf and open talks.

Macron has taken a lead role in trying to save the nuclear accord, which has been unraveling since Trump pulled the U.S. out of the agreement. Russia, along with Britain, Germany and China, remains a part of the accord.

—By Sylvie Corbet

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6:20 p.m.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson says he’ll push Donald Trump to de-escalate the American trade war with China.

As he touched down at the G-7 summit in the French resort town of Biarritz, Johnson was preparing for what will be a closely watched first meeting with the U.S. president. He said he planned to push back particularly on the Amazon fires and would press Trump on the trade dispute with China.

Britain’s economy has taken a beating over Brexit and relies heavily upon global trade, including with China.

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6 p.m.

With Brexit at the top of their agendas, European leaders took advantage of a small window of time before the official start of the G-7 summit.

Boris Johnson, under pressure with the Oct. 31 Brexit deadline approaching, sat down at a small table facing the men and woman whose agreement he needs no avoid a no-deal departure from the European Union.

Already Johnson had traded barbs with the EU Council President Donald Tusk over who would earn the ignominious title Mr. No Deal. Later, he sat with Tusk, Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Italy’s caretaker leader Guiseppe Conte.

Johnson has already met separately this week with Merkel and Macron, who have challenged him to come up with a better alternative to the main sticking point, the deadlock on the Irish border question.

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3:10 p.m.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has touched down in the French seaside resort of Biarritz for his first Group of Seven summit, a gathering where he will meet U.S. President Donald Trump for the first time.

The meeting between the two men is expected to be crucial as Johnson prepares to pull Britain out of the European Union.

Johnson spoke earlier this week with French President Emmanuel Macron, the host of the summit of leaders of the world’s rich democracies, as well as German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Responding to European Council President Donald Tusk’s comment earlier that he didn’t believe Johnson wanted to go down as “Mr. No Deal,” referring to Britain leaving the EU without an agreement, Johnson effectively said their fates were tied over the issue of Ireland.

Johnson said that “if Donald Tusk doesn’t want to go down as Mr. No Deal Brexit, then I hope that point should be born in mind by him too.”

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2:45 p.m.

A march against the Group of Seven summit has ended peacefully, after thousands of activists for various causes walked from southwest France into Spain under heavy security.

Regional police said no arrests or incidents were reported during Saturday’s march from Hendaye in France to Irun in Spain, and estimated some 9,000 people took part.

Protesters came from multiple countries to demonstrate for more action against climate change, for indigenous peoples, free trade deals and other causes. Some wore masks representing G-7 leaders meeting in nearby Biarritz.

Protester Gael Gilles, 30, told The Associated Press, “there is too much inequality in this world and I am here to demonstrate peacefully against this G7 … to tell (the leaders) that they do not go into the good direction on the climate and other things.”

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1:35 p.m.

French President Emmanuel Macron says he’s launching an appeal to all world powers to help Brazil and other South American countries fight the fires burning in the Amazon.

Before the Group of Seven summit, which begins Saturday, Macron thrust the rainforest fires to the top of the agenda. He touched on it again in a national address, which took place just as U.S. President Donald Trump touched down in the French seaside resort of Biarritz.

Macron also called for an end to the trade wars he said are “taking hold everywhere.” Just before Trump left the United States, he again threatened tariffs on French wines in retaliation for a French measure taxing technology companies.

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12:40 p.m.

European Council President Donald Tusk has promised EU retaliation if the U.S. makes good on its threats to impose tariffs on French wine.

Just before leaving for the G-7 summit in Biarritz, France, U.S. President Donald Trump again threatened new taxes on French wine in response to a French measure taxing internet companies.

Tusk said that “the last thing we need and want is confrontation with our best ally, the United States.” But he said France can count on EU loyalty for one of its most valuable exports.

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12:35 p.m.

European Council President Donald Tusk says this year’s Group of Seven summit will be an “unusually difficult” meeting of the leaders of some of the world’s most powerful democracies.

The summit begins Saturday in the southern French resort town of Biarritz. Tusk warned in particular against trade wars, which he said could lead to a global recession. Other threats include climate change, and technology that is developing more quickly than the ability to regulate.

He warned that it could be the last moment to restore unity among the G-7 countries.

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12:25 p.m.

France is pressing the White House to endorse a global pledge at the Group of Seven summit to better fight against the spread of hate speech on the internet.

Cedric O, a French official in charge of digital economy, told reporters that the other six nations in the G-7 have already backed the pledge, as have Google and Facebook.

The U.S. didn’t endorse a similar pledge after the mosque attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, earlier this year. O said the pledge includes a commitment to fight terrorist and hate speech on the internet, transparency on the process, and defense of freedom of expression.

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11:50 a.m.

Hundreds of protesters are marching as Group of Seven leaders arrive in the French resort town of Biarritz.

Protesters planned to cross into Spain from the French border village town of Hendaye. As the march began, they held cardboard signs aloft with pictures of Earth, protesting against climate policies they blame on the world’s G-7 countries.

French President Emmanuel Macron, the host, put the Amazon fires at the top of the agenda for the weekend meeting.

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11:30 a.m.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has arrived for the Group of Seven summit amid escalating tensions with South Korea.

South Korea canceled a deal to share military intelligence, mainly on North Korea, after a trade dispute between the two countries.

Relations between two countries, both allies of the U.S., are at their lowest point since they established diplomatic ties in 1965.

Abe’s plane touched down in the French seaside resort on Biarritz on Saturday morning.

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11:05 a.m.

Germany says that impeding a trade deal between the European Union and South American trade bloc Mercosur won’t help reduce the destruction of rainforest in Brazil.

On Friday, Group of Seven summit host French President Emmanuel Macron threatened to block the recently agreed trade deal with Mercosur, which also includes Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. Ireland joined in the threat.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has made clear she shares Macron’s concern about the fires. But her government said in an emailed response Saturday to a query about the threat to the Mercosur deal that its trade section “includes an ambitious sustainability chapter with binding rules on climate protection,” in which both sides committed to implementing the Paris climate accord.

It added: “the non-conclusion (of the deal) is therefore from our point of view not the appropriate response to what is currently happening in Brazil.”

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10:55 a.m.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says the Group of Seven leaders “cannot be silent” in the face of fires sweeping parts of Brazil’s Amazon and will call for everything to be done to stop fires in the rainforest.

Germany is backing French President Emmanuel Macron’s call to discuss the fires at the weekend’s French-hosted G-7 summit. Merkel said in her weekly video message released Saturday: “Emmanuel Macron is right — our house is burning, and we cannot be silent.”

She said leaders are “shaken” by the fires and that they will discuss “how we can support and help there, and send a clear call that everything must be done so that the rainforest stops burning.”

Amid a series of policy and trade disagreements, which she didn’t address explicitly, Merkel said that “talking to each other is always better than about each other — and the G-7 is an excellent opportunity for that.”

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10:30 a.m.

World leaders and protesters are converging on the southern French resort town of Biarritz for the G-7 summit.

French President Emmanuel Macron is the host of the summit, which begins Saturday and has emptied out the town famed for its beach on the last week of the summer break. He has downplayed any expectations of a unified front from the leaders of the Group of Seven democracies.

U.S. President Donald Trump arrives later in the day. At last year’s meeting, Trump left early and repudiated the joint statement from Air Force One.

At the top of the agenda are climate change – and especially the fires burning in the Amazon – and a global economy teetering on the edge of recession.

Brazilian Troops Deploy to Fight Amazon Fires

RIO DE JANEIRO— Backed by military aircraft, Brazilian troops on Saturday were deploying in the Amazon to fight fires that have swept the region and prompted anti-government protests as well as an international outcry.

President Jair Bolsonaro also tried to temper global concern, saying previously deforested areas had burned and that intact rainforest was spared. Even so, the fires were likely to be urgently discussed at a summit of the Group of Seven leaders in France this weekend.

Some 44,000 troops will be available for “unprecedented” operations to put out the fires, and forces are heading to six Brazilian states that asked for federal help, Defense Minister Fernando Azevedo said. The states are Roraima, Rondonia, Tocantins, Para, Acre and Mato Grosso.

The military’s first mission will be carried out by 700 troops around Porto Velho, capital of Rondonia, Azevedo said. The military will use two C-130 Hercules aircraft capable of dumping up to 12,000 liters (3,170 gallons) of water on fires, he said.

An Associated Press journalist flying over the Porto Velho region Saturday morning reported hazy conditions and low visibility. On Friday, the reporter saw many already deforested areas that were burned, apparently by people clearing farmland, as well as a large column of smoke billowing from one fire.

The municipality of Nova Santa Helena in Brazil’s Mato Grosso state was also hard-hit. Trucks were seen driving along a highway Friday as fires blazed and embers smoldered in adjacent fields.

The Brazilian military operations came after widespread criticism of Bolsonaro’s handling of the crisis. On Friday, the president authorized the armed forces to put out fires, saying he is committed to protecting the Amazon region.

Azevedo, the defense minister, noted U.S. President Donald Trump’s offer in a tweet to help Brazil fight the fires, and said there had been no further contact on the matter.

Despite international concern, Bolsonaro told reporters on Saturday that the situation was returning to normal. He said he was “speaking to everyone” about the problem, including Trump, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and several Latin American leaders.

Bolsonaro had described rainforest protections as an obstacle to Brazil’s economic development, sparring with critics who say the Amazon absorbs vast amounts of greenhouse gasses and is crucial for efforts to contain climate change.

The Amazon fires have become a global issue, escalating tensions between Brazil and European countries who believe Bolsonaro has neglected commitments to protect biodiversity. Protesters gathered outside Brazilian diplomatic missions in European and Latin American cities Friday, and demonstrators also marched in Brazil.

“The planet’s lungs are on fire. Let’s save them!” read a sign at a protest outside Brazil’s embassy in Mexico City.

The dispute spilled into the economic arena when French leader Emmanuel Macron threatened to block a European Union trade deal with Brazil and several other South American countries.

“First we need to help Brazil and other countries put out these fires,” Macron said Saturday.

The goal is to “preserve this forest that we all need because it is a treasure of our biodiversity and our climate thanks to the oxygen that it emits and thanks to the carbon it absorbs,” he said.

In a weekly video message released Saturday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the Group of Seven leaders “cannot be silent” and should discuss how to help extinguish the fires.

Bolivia has also struggled to contain fires that swept through woods and fields. A U.S.-based aircraft, the B747-400 SuperTanker, is flying over devastated areas in Bolivia to help put out the blazes and protect forests.

On Saturday, several helicopters along with police, military troops, firefighters and volunteers on the ground worked to extinguish fires in Bolivia’s Chiquitanía region, where the woods are dry at this time of year.

Farmers commonly set fires in this season to clear land for crops or livestock, but sometimes the blazes get out of control. The Bolivian government says 9,530 square kilometers (3680 square miles) have been burned this year.

The government of Bolivian President Evo Morales has backed the increased cultivation of crops for biofuel production, raising questions about whether the policy opened the way to increased burning.

Similarly, Bolsonaro had said he wants to convert land for cattle pastures and soybean farms. Brazilian prosecutors are investigating whether lax enforcement of environmental regulations may have contributed to the surge in the number of fires.

Brazil’s justice ministry also said federal police will deploy in fire zones to assist other state agencies and combat “illegal deforestation.”

Fires are common in Brazil in the annual dry season, but they are much more widespread this year. Brazilian state experts reported nearly 77,000 wildfires across the country so far this year, up 85% over the same period in 2018.

More than half of those fires occurred in the Amazon region.

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Associated Press journalists Juan Karita in Robore, Bolivia; Victor Caivano in Porto Velho, Brazil; Christopher Torchia in Caracas, Venezuela, contributed to this report.