Chris Hedges's Blog, page 192

Europe Is Acting Like Climate Change Is No Big Deal—Even as It Melts

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment. 

The heat wave that has swept Europe and given Paris the weather of Madras is certainly embroiled in human-caused climate change. The severity and frequency of such extreme weather is exacerbated by the 2.4 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide human beings have spewed into the atmosphere since about 1750, by burning coal, petroleum and natural gas.

A certain amount of global heating is now already in the pipeline, since the full effects of the carbon dioxide, a powerful and dangerous heat-trapping gas, are not yet being felt. The oceans are very deep and very cold, and so will warm only over centuries, as the circulating water is exposed to the surface. But you have to think about global heating as a video game with 15 levels (each level being a degree Fahrenheit).

We can immediately stop burning fossil fuels, and we can play level one or level two, which have challenges but are not that difficult. But if we go on opening the CO2 fire hydrant and putting fountains of the stuff up there, then we’ll have to play levels 3 or 4, which are really hard. If you and your friends are playing, some of them will be kicked out of the game, their avatars flashing “dead,” only it won’t be their avatars, it will really be them fleeing rising seas or extreme hurricanes and some of them ending up dead. And, well, if you still don’t get the message you’ll have to play levels 6 or 7, which almost nobody wins without incurring severe drawbacks. And if you decide you really, really want to play level 15, then you’re talking billions displaced and hundreds of millions dead.

So here are the top 5 things Europe is doing (it is the US and lots of other places, as well, not just Europe) that are ka-RA-zy in the light of what we now know.

1. Poland, the Czech Republic and even Germany are actually still planning to build new coal plants. Coal when burned emits twice as much CO2 as natural gas, and a new coal plant is more expensive than a solar or wind installation in most places. New coal plants. Europe, are you crazy?

2. At a June 20 summit, European leaders could not agree on the goal of zero CO2 emissions by 2050. Actually, 2050 is way too late. May 2035 would keep us playing at level 3. But they can’t even agree on 2050. Europe, are you crazy?

3. No European countries are meeting their Paris climate goals. Even relatively carbon-free Sweden is only achieving 77% of them. No wonder Paris has Madras’s weather. Europe, are you crazy?

4. Only 3% of vehicles sold in Europe outside Norway (there it is 33%) are electric. But vehicle emissions account for about a fourth of the CO2 Europe is putting into the atmosphere. Norway got its high numbers with tariff abatements for buying an EV such as a Tesla. Tax policy works. But almost nobody has a pro-EV tax policy. Europe, are you crazy?

5. Wind farms are a proven and reliable source of electricity when combined with other sources. Iowa gets over a third of its electricity from wind. But last year no new wind farms were installed in 12 European countries, in part because of “permitting problems.” Permitting problems while Europe melts? Are you crazy?

6. European publics still elect climate change denialists to high office. Europe, are you crazy?

The New York Times Is Oblivious to the Student Debt Crisis

Why are Democratic candidates going on about student loan debt? Why, the problem is practically solved already!

That’s the message of a piece in The Upshot (7/24/19)—the New York Times‘ project aimed at “examining politics, policy and everyday life in new ways”—written by Kevin Carey, who directs education policy at the New America foundation. (New America’s higher education program is largely funded by Bill and Melinda Gates.)

According to the New York Times‘ Upshot (7/24/19), Democratic candidates are proposing solutions to a student debt problem that has largely already been solved.

“It’s Easy to Forget, but a Program to Forgive Student Loans Already Exists,” is the headline. The subhead clarifies: “Democrats are campaigning to fix an issue that is already starting to resolve itself for many teachers and other public servants.”

After outlining proposals by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for large-scale forgiveness of student loans, Carey writes:

What’s strange about the new crop of proposals is that the Department of Education already has a public service loan forgiveness program, called PSLF, which President George W. Bush signed into law in 2007.

Sure, Carey admits, almost no one who applies for this program has their debts forgiven:

In the 18 months after borrowers with a decade of service in government or nonprofit jobs first became eligible in 2017, 73,554 people applied to have their student loans wiped out. And 73,036 were turned down—a rejection rate of 99.3 percent.

But that’s a problem that’s going to work itself out over time, Carey explains at great length—applicants will figure out over time how to make themselves eligible for this extremely convoluted program. The bottom line, writes Carey:

Nearly half of the $870 billion in outstanding Direct Loans — the kind that are eligible for loan forgiveness — is being repaid through income-driven plans, the kind that are eligible for loan forgiveness. And one in four American workers is in a job eligible for the forgiveness program.

So nearly half of $870 billion in debt is eligible for loan forgiveness, and one in four workers have jobs that qualify them for that program. If you do the math, that’s very roughly $100 billion that could theoretically be forgiven—or about 6 percent of the $1.6 trillion in outstanding student debt.

The upshot, according to Carey: What are these candidates belly-aching about?

Democrats competing to help teachers and other public servants with loans may be about to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to fix a problem that is already on the way to being solved.

Or 6 percent of it, anyway.

The Great Flood

In 2017, Chris Hedges wrote about American society’s refusal to confront climate change and sea rise. Now, in a month when a hurricane flooded parts of Louisiana and other states and when the Mississippi and some other rivers were at menacing levels, Truthdig reposts that Sept. 10, 2017, column. A new article by Hedges will appear Aug. 12 after he returns from vacation.

How many times will we rebuild Florida’s cities, Houston, coastal New Jersey, New Orleans and other population centers ravaged by storms lethally intensified by global warming? At what point, surveying the devastation and knowing more is inevitable, will we walk away, leaving behind vast coastal dead zones? Will we retreat even further into magical thinking to cope with the fury we have unleashed from the natural world? Or will we respond rationally and radically alter our relationship to this earth that gives us life?

Civilizations over the past 6,000 years have unfailingly squandered their futures through acts of colossal stupidity and hubris. We are probably not an exception. The physical ruins of these empires, including the Mesopotamian, Roman, Mayan and Indus, litter the earth. They elevated, during acute distress, inept and corrupt leaders who channeled anger, fear and dwindling resources into self-defeating wars and vast building projects. The ruling oligarchs, driven by greed and hedonism, retreated into privileged compounds—the Forbidden City, Versailles—and hoarded wealth as their populations endured mounting misery and poverty. The worse it got, the more the people lied to themselves and the more they wanted to be lied to. Reality was too painful to confront. They retreated into what anthropologists call “crisis cults,” which promised the return of the lost world through magical beliefs.

“The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present,” philosopher and psychologist William James wrote, “and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose.”

We are entering this final phase of civilization, one in which we are slashing the budgets of the very agencies that are vital to prepare for the devastation ahead—the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, along with programs at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration dealing with climate change. Hurricane after hurricane, monster storm after monster storm, flood after flood, wildfire after wildfire, drought after drought will gradually cripple the empire, draining its wealth and resources and creating swathes of territory defined by lawlessness and squalor.

These dead zones will obliterate not only commercial and residential life but also military assets. As Jeff Goodell points out in “The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilized World,” “The Pentagon manages a global real estate portfolio that includes over 555,000 facilities and 28 million acres of land—virtually all of it will be impacted by climate change in some way.”

As this column is being written, three key military facilities in Florida are evacuated: the Miami-area headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military operations in the Caribbean and Latin America; the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, in charge of operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia; and the Naval Air Station in Key West. There will soon come a day when obliteration of infrastructure will prohibit military operations from returning. Add to the list of endangered military installations Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, the U.S. missile base in the Marshall Islands, the U.S. naval base on Diego Garcia and numerous other military sites in coastal areas and it becomes painfully clear that the existential peril facing the empire is not in the Middle East but in the seas and the skies. There are 128 U.S. military installations at risk from rising sea levels, including Navy, Air Force, Marine and Army facilities in Virginia. Giant vertical rulers dot the highway outside the Norfolk naval base to allow motorists to determine if the water is too deep to drive through. In two decades, maybe less, the main road to the base will be impassable at high tide daily.

Cities across the globe, including London, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Lagos, Copenhagen, New Orleans, San Francisco, Savannah, Ga., and New York, will become modern-day versions of Atlantis, along with countries such as Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands and large parts of New Zealand and Australia. There are 90 coastal cities in the U.S. that endure chronic flooding, a number that is expected to double in the next two decades. National economies will go into tailspins as wider and wider parts of the globe suffer catastrophic systems breakdown. Central authority and basic services will increasingly be nonexistent. Hundreds of millions of people, desperate for food, water and security, will become climate refugees. Nuclear power plants, including Turkey Point, which is on the edge of Biscayne Bay south of Miami, will face meltdowns, such as the accident that occurred in the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan after it was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami. These plants will spew radioactive waste into the sea and air. Exacerbated by disintegration of the polar ice caps, the catastrophes will be too overwhelming to manage. We will enter what James Howard Kunstler calls “the long emergency.” When that happens, our experiment in civilization might approach an end.

“The amount of real estate at risk in New York is mind-boggling: 72,000 buildings worth over $129 billion stand in flood zones today, with thousands more buildings at risk with each foot of sea-level rise,” writes Goodell. “In addition, New York has a lot of industrial waterfront, where toxic materials and poor communities live in close proximity, as well as a huge amount of underground infrastructure—subways, tunnels, electrical systems. Finally, New York is a sea-level-rise hot spot. Because of changes in ocean dynamics, as well as the fact that the ground beneath the city is sinking as the continent recovers from the last ice age, seas are now rising about 50 percent faster in the New York area than the global average.”

A society in crisis flees to the reassuring embrace of con artists and charlatans. Critics who ring alarm bells are condemned as pessimists who offer no “hope,” the drug that keeps a doomed population passive. The current administration—which removed Barack Obama’s Climate Action Plan from the White House website as soon as Donald Trump took office—and the Republican Party are filled with happy climate deniers. They have adopted a response to climate change similar to that of the Virginia Legislature: ban discussion of climate change and replace the term with the less ominous “recurrent flooding.” This denial of reality—one also employed by those who assure us we can adapt—is driven by fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries that along with the rich and corporations fund the political campaigns of elected officials. They fear that a rational, effective response to climate change will impede profits. Our corporate media, dependent on advertising dollars, contributes to the conspiracy of silence. It ignores the patterns and effects of climate change, focusing instead on feel-good stories about heroic rescues or dramatic coverage of flooded city centers and storm refugee caravans fleeing up the coast of Florida.

Droughts, floods, famines and disease will eventually see the collapse of social cohesion in large parts of the globe, including U.S. coastal areas. The insecurity, hunger and desperation among the dispossessed of the earth will give rise to ad hoc militias, crime and increased acts of terrorism. The Pentagon report “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States Security” is blunt. “Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,” it grimly concludes.

But as Goodell points out, “In today’s political climate, open discussion of the security risks of climate change is viewed as practically treasonous.” When in 2014 then-Secretary of State John Kerry called climate change “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction” and compared it to the effects of terrorism, epidemics and poverty, the right-wing trolls, from John McCain to Newt Gingrich, went into a frenzy. Gingrich called for Kerry’s resignation because “a delusional secretary of state is dangerous to our safety.”

James Woolsey, the former head of the CIA, wrote in a climate change report for the Pentagon titled “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign-Policy National Security Implications of Global Climate Change”:

If Americans have difficulty reaching a reasonable compromise on immigration legislation today, consider what such a debate would be like if we were struggling to resettle millions of our own citizens—driven by high water from the Gulf of Mexico, South Florida, and much of the East Coast reaching nearly to New England—even as we witnessed the northward migration of large populations from Latin America and the Caribbean. Such migration will likely be one of the Western Hemisphere’s early social consequences of climate change and sea level rise of these orders of magnitude. Issues deriving from inundation of a large amount of our own territory, together with migration towards our borders by millions of our hungry and thirsty southern neighbors, are likely to dominate U.S. security and humanitarian concerns. Globally as well, populations will migrate from increasingly hot and dry climates to more temperate ones.

We will react like most patients with a terminal disease as they struggle to confront their imminent mortality. The gradual diminishing of space, perception and strength will weaken our capacity to absorb reality. The end will be too horrible to contemplate. The tangible signs of our demise will be obvious, but this will only accelerate our retreat into delusional thinking. We will believe ever more fervently that the secular gods of science and technology will save us.

As Goodell writes, “People will notice higher tides that roll in more and more frequently. Water will pool longer in streets and parking lots. Trees will turn brown and die as they suck up salt water.” We will retreat to higher ground, cover our roofs with solar panels, finally stop using plastic and go vegan, but it will be too late. As Goodell writes, “even in rich neighborhoods, abandoned houses will linger like ghosts, filling with feral cats and other refugees looking for their own higher ground.”

The water will continue to rise. “It will have a metallic sheen and will smell bad,” Goodell writes. “Kids will get strange rashes and fevers. More people will leave [low areas]. Seawalls will crumble. In a few decades, low-lying neighborhoods will be knee-deep. Wooden houses will collapse into a sea of soda bottles, laundry detergent jugs, and plastic toothbrushes. Human bones, floated out of caskets, will be a common sight. Treasure hunters will kayak in, using small robotic submersibles to search for coins and jewelry. Modern office buildings and condo towers will lean as salt water corrodes the concrete foundations and eats away at the structural beams. Fish will school in the classrooms. Oysters will grow on submerged light poles. Religious leaders will blame sinners for the drowning of the city.”

The damage suffered by Houston, Tampa and Miami is not an anomaly. It is the beginning of the end. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

Robert Mueller Did Not Do His Job

This piece first appeared on Truthout. 

During Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s televised appearances before the House Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, he testified to facts that amount to lawbreaking by Donald Trump. Contrary to Trump’s mantra of “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION,” Mueller affirmed that his 448-page report did not exonerate the president or reach a conclusion about whether Trump committed obstruction of justice.

The Mueller team found “substantial evidence” of the elements required to convict Trump of obstruction of justice. But, constrained by a Justice Department rule forbidding the indictment of a sitting president, Mueller’s report did not conclude whether Trump actually committed the crime.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler asked Mueller, “And your investigation actually found, quote, ‘multiple acts by the president that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian interference and obstruction investigations.’ Is that correct?” Mueller answered, “Correct.”

Those acts, according to the Mueller report, include “efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

When Democratic Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell inquired whether the president’s efforts were largely unsuccessful because the people around him refused to obey his orders, Mueller replied, “Correct.” But Mueller also confirmed that an attempt to obstruct justice can be a crime even if it doesn’t succeed.

Mueller’s Failure to Subpoena Trump

During his 22-month investigation, Mueller did not interview Trump and did not subpoena him to compel his attendance. Mueller told Nadler that Trump refused a request to be interviewed even though the special counsel and his team told the president’s lawyer that “an interview with the president is vital to our investigation” and “it is in the interest of the presidency and the public for an interview to take place.”

Democratic Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney asked Mueller why he didn’t subpoena Trump. Mueller said they negotiated with Trump for a little more than a year. As they neared the end of the investigation with little success in getting the interview, they declined to use their subpoena power because Trump would fight it and they wanted to expedite the end of the investigation.

Maloney queried, “Did you have sufficient evidence of the president’s intent to obstruct justice, and is that why you didn’t do the interview?” Mueller responded, “We had to make a balanced decision in terms of how much evidence we had, compared to the length of time.” That entails balancing “how much evidence you have, does it satisfy the last element against how much time are you willing to spend in the courts litigating the interview with the president.”

When he said “the last element,” Mueller was referring to the intent to obstruct, which is the third element necessary to prove obstruction of justice. The crime of obstruction of justice requires (1) an obstructive act (2) connected with an official proceeding (3) with an intent to obstruct.

Mueller’s failure to subpoena Trump was a mistake. John Dean, White House counsel during the Watergate scandal, criticized Mueller because he didn’t vigorously pursue Trump’s testimony. Appearing on CNN, Dean speculated that Mueller wouldn’t have gone after the Nixon tapes because it would take too long. It was the court order to produce those tapes that led to Nixon’s resignation.

There is no substitute for an in-person confrontation to determine whether a person is being truthful. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying to a grand jury.

An interrogation of Trump by the special counsel could have made a significant difference in the findings of the report. Mueller admitted that Trump’s written responses to the special counsel’s questions were “certainly not as useful as the interview would be.” When asked whether Trump “wasn’t always being truthful” when he provided written answers, under oath, to the special counsel’s questions, Mueller replied “I would say generally.”

Mueller should have subpoenaed Trump a couple of months after the investigation began.

While the Democrats on the committees queried Mueller about the contents of his report, the Republicans did not question the facts. They focused on the origins of the Russia investigation and tried to discredit Mueller’s methodology. GOP Rep. James Sensenbrenner asked Mueller why he spent 182 pages analyzing obstruction of justice if he didn’t make a traditional prosecutorial decision. Mueller replied that you don’t know where it will go until you investigate and the Justice Department regulation says you can continue an investigation even if you don’t indict.

Mueller testified that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” to help Trump win the election. He said, “We did not address ‘collusion,’ which is not a legal term. Rather, we focused on whether the evidence was sufficient to charge any member of the campaign with taking part in a criminal conspiracy. It was not.” Mueller said his team believes their investigation “was hampered by Trump campaign officials’ use of encryption communications” and “the deletion of electronic messages.”

The Mueller report, however, did not determine whether Trump committed obstruction of justice. “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state,” the report says. “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Mueller Passes the Baton to Congress

Mueller’s report “determined that there was a sufficient factual and legal basis to further investigate potential obstruction-of-justice issues involving the President.”

Although he wouldn’t use the word “impeachment” during his testimony, Mueller alluded to it. His report says, “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

The power of impeachment lies with the House of Representatives and the process begins in the House Judiciary Committee. If a majority of the House votes to impeach, the case moves to the Senate for trial. Two-thirds of the senators must agree to convict and remove the president from office.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has thus far resisted launching impeachment proceedings, opting instead to continue the process of holding committee hearings on Trump’s culpability. Pelosi, however, told The New York Times that the Mueller hearing “is a crossing of a threshold in terms of the public awareness of what happened and how it conforms to the law — or not.” She added, “I do believe that what we saw today was a very strong manifestation — in fact, some would even say indictment — of this administration’s code of silence and their cover-up.”

The House Judiciary Committee is pursuing enforcement of its subpoena of former White House counsel Donald McGahn to testify publicly at a hearing. Shortly after Trump learned that Mueller was investigating him for criminal activity, the president ordered McGahn to fire Mueller. McGahn refused and threatened to resign. Trump backed down. McGahn is a key witness to obstruction of justice by Trump.

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin told The New York Times, “The case for impeachment based on the Mueller investigation has been now publicly crystallized and articulated.” Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal concurs. “What became clear today was that this is a groundbreaking moment,” she said. “This now has allowed us to break open what was stuck in the Mueller report.”

The number of House members who favor impeachment has climbed above 90 since the Mueller hearings.

As the congressional hearings continue to unfold, the public will become increasingly aware of Trump’s criminal responsibility and popular support for impeachment will grow.

Child Detentions Are Part of a Terrifying Larger Plan

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the Grimms’ fairy tale Hansel and Gretel. Terrified by cruel conditions at home, the brother and sister flee, winding their way, hungry and scared, through unknown woods. There, they encounter an old woman who lures them in with promises of safety. Instead, she locks one of them in a cage and turns the other into a servant, as she prepares to devour them both.

Written in nineteenth-century Germany, it should resonate eerily in today’s America. In place of Hansel and Gretel, we would, of course, have to focus on girls and boys by the hundreds fleeing cruelty and hunger in Central America, believing that they will find a better life in the United States, only to be thrown into cages by forces far more powerful and agents much crueler than that wicked old woman. In the story, there are no politics; there is only good and bad, right and wrong.

Rather than, as in that fairy tale, register the suffering involved in the captivity and punishment of those children at the U.S.-Mexican border, the administration has chosen a full-bore defense of its policies and so has taken a giant step in a larger mission: redefining (or more precisely trying to abolish) the very idea of human rights as a part of the country’s identity.

Last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left no doubt: the reality of those children locked in cages, deprived of the most basic needs, and brazenly abused by the administration he works for has been an essential part of the Trump team’s determination to abandon human rights more generally. That willingness to leave children unprotected is part of a far larger message, not merely an unfortunate byproduct of ill-thought out and clumsy actions by an overwhelmed border police force.

Children in Detention Camps

The story of the children at the border is indeed gruesome. The United States has long had migrants pushing at its southern border, often in larger numbers than at present. In fact, since the 1980s, the numbers crossing that border exceeded one million in 19 different years. While the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) continues to estimate that current immigration rates are on track to exceed one million by September, many other experts don’t think it will even happen this year.

What’s genuinely new with the current border crossings is the number of children among the migrants. According to Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan’s sobering recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, 72% of all border enforcement actions in May were associated with unaccompanied children and family units. And while last month the government officially stopped its cruel policy of separating families, leaving many of those children (even toddlers and babies) alone in custody, Vox reports that “at any given time, for the past several weeks, more than 2,000 children have been held in the custody of U.S. Border Patrol without their parents.”

The conditions in the camps, strewn along the U.S. borderlands from Arizona to Texas, are shameful and fall most harshly on those very children. A recent Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report, issued in redacted form just days before the July 4th holiday celebrating the birth of this country as a beacon of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” described the staggering squalor and danger at such confinement facilities. There, children were often deprived of changes of clothes, beds, hot meals, toothbrushes, soap, showers, even adequate medical attention. Other eyewitness accounts have provided graphic details on the nature and scale of the deprivation, showing us children in soiled diapers, living with the stench of urine, sleeping on concrete floors, many weeping. On the somewhat more civilized floor of the Senate, members were told of children sleeping outside, exposed to the elements, and of the spoiled food at the camps.

Add to this the emotional toll that family separations have wrought on thousands of young people, as a new report issued by the House of Representatives Oversight Committee reveals and as others have documented. An El Paso immigration lawyer visiting one facility, for instance, described seeing a young boy who had scratched his own face until it bled. There are first-hand accounts by visitors to the camps of children trying to choke themselves with the lanyards from their own identification cards and others who dreamed about escaping by jumping out of windows high above the ground.

No wonder at least seven children have died while in such circumstances and many more are suffering from lice, scabies, chickenpox and other afflictions. Yet when doctors from the American Association of Pediatricians traveled to the camps to offer their help, their services were refused. Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights, herself a pediatrician, has labeledthe situation of the migrants “appalling” and noted that “several U.N. human rights bodies have found that the detention of migrant children may constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that is prohibited by international law.” Others have been less circumspect, explicitly comparing the treatment of the children to torture.

It’s hard not to assume that, however overwhelmed CBP may be, at least some of this treatment is intentional. Why else turn away doctors offering help or refuse supplies of donated aid sent by worried citizens? Why arrest a humanitarian aid volunteer who gave food and water to two ill and desperate undocumented Central American migrants and tried to get them medical help? The administration acknowledges that the overall situation is dire, but its officials on the spot have basically thrown up their hands, complaining that they have been “overwhelmed” by the situation they created, are “not trained to separate children,” and are powerless to address the problem of scarce resources.

While those on the ground have claimed helplessness in the face of the challenge, the rest of the administration refuses even to admit to the appalling conditions. (“They are run beautifully,” said President Trump of the border facilities, blaming the Democrats for any problems there.) Instead, top officials have repeatedly called the disgracefully unacceptable acceptable. Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who bore responsibility for creating much of the mess, assured Congress that the children were “well taken care of,” claiming that “we have the highest standards.” Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions echoed her words. “The children,” he insisted, “are well cared for. In fact, they get better care than a lot of American kids do.”

In court, Department of Justice lawyer Sarah Fabian refused to admit that the absence of soap, a toothbrush, a bed, and sleep constituted unsafe and unsanitary conditions, the legal standards applying to the detention of migrant children. The U.S. Border Patrol chief for the El Paso region callously remarked, “Twenty years ago, we were lucky if we had juice and crackers for those in custody. Now, our stations are looking more like Walmarts, with diapers and baby formula and all kinds of things, like food and snacks.” Vice President Mike Pence highlighted the refusal to acknowledge reality recently by calling the two camps he visited, neither solely for children, but one housing families, examples of “compassionate care… care that every American would be proud of.”

Really? In whose world are filth, disease, and persistent emotional cruelty acceptable? In what America is the brutal incarceration of children not a violation of founding principles? In what America is rejecting the advances in protections that have been a hallmark of U.S. and international policy since the Second World War standard operating procedure? Since when do American officials just throw up their hands and declare defeat (as a kind of victory of cruelty) rather than muster their best talents, energies, and resources to confront such a problem? The answer, of course, is in Donald Trump’s America. And don’t for a moment think that this is just a matter of the piling up of unintended consequences. It’s not.

A Declaration of Inhuman Rights

Recently, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered some insights into the mindset of such an administration when it comes to the country’s longstanding embrace of the very idea of human rights. Soon after July 4th, he announced the creation of a new Commission on Unalienable Rights at the State Department. Its purpose, he claimed, was to rethink the spread of human rights protections as a part of American foreign policy. The very idea of rights, Pompeo insisted, had spun out of control. “Human-rights advocacy has lost its bearings and become more of an industry than a moral compass,” he said, wagging his finger at 70 years of history. “‘Rights talk’ has become a constant element of our domestic political discourse, without any serious effort to distinguish what rights mean and where they come from.”

Rather than expand rights further, he explained, the country would do well to return to (his idea of) the context of the founding fathers and explore just what they really meant in their classic writings. Essential to his goal, experts suggested, was rolling back abortion rights. A remarkable number of the commission members were, in fact, known for their anti-abortion positions and this should have surprised no one, since the State Department had already withdrawn all health assistance from international organizations that offer abortion counseling and care. In doing so, it expanded what, in priorRepublican administrations, were more modest restrictions on abortion-related care. Striking as such a global anti-abortion-rights position might be, however, Pompeo’s urge seems far grander. His goal is evidently to unilaterally reject the evolution of human rights that has prominently defined the country since the post-World War Two era, and that has been an essential piece of American democratic rhetoric since its founding.

To begin the process, Pompeo promptly misappropriated the very language of the Declaration of Independence to promote an agenda explicitly calling for the removal of rights. “My hope,” he announced, “is that the Commission on Unalienable Rights will ground our understanding of human rights in a manner that will both inform and better protect essential freedoms — and underscore how central these ideas are not only to Americans, but to all of humanity.” As the rest of his comments showed, he was invoking the freedom to deprive others, exclude others, and cause hardship for others. Placed alongside the border realities, it was a testament to the administration’s determination to erase rights from the nation’s identity. Putting a fine point on his goals, Pompeo added that, in his view, human rights and democracy were distinctly in opposition to each other. As he pungently put it, “Loose talk of ‘rights’ unmoors us from the principles of liberal democracy.”

Pompeo’s attempt to recast the founders’ intent in the context of today’s cruelty may be the most full-throated articulation to date of what this administration has been up to. The ongoing mistreatment of children at the border, a story that has lasted for well over a year, suggests that the spirit of Pompeo’s Declaration of Inhuman Rights has long been on the agenda. He had one thing right, however: those border camps do seem to belong to another place and time, one that preceded the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, another document he invoked, intending to reshape American adherence to it.

The New Status Quo

This is hardly the first time the Trump administration has revealed its cynicism over democracy. Redefining the very purpose of “liberal democracy,” as I wrote more than a year ago, had been part of its mission since the beginning. In its first 18 months, the administration removed the language of democracy from the mission statements of many of its departments, including the phrase “nation of immigrants” from that of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Still, after two and a half years of reorienting the executive branch of government away from equal protection under the law, the equal right to vote, and a respect for the very idea of welcoming immigrants, Pompeo’s “commission” may be the most brazen conceptual act yet when it comes to erasing the language of human rights from the country’s identity.

It’s in this still-developing context that the migrant children crisis should be understood. It should be seen as a graphic version of the insistence of this administration on changing the very meaning of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the modern age. For Pompeo (as for his president), the evolution of the country towards more rights for more people is nothing but a mark of shame. How far back would he take us? To before the Civil War?

No wonder, on learning each day’s news from the border, it’s easy to feel we’ve entered a dismal fairy tale from an age of ogres and witches, where the forces of evil and ill will have taken charge and the prospect of saving helpless children seems as irretrievably long gone as those crumbs eaten by the birds following Hansel and Gretel on their grim journey into the witch’s lair. Attacking the most vulnerable among us — infants, toddlers, young children, teens — leaves little room for doubt. This administration is determined to undo the country’s commitment to human rights and so change its identity in a way that should concern us all.

MSNBC’s Anti-Sanders Bias Is Getting Truly Ridiculous

When MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah (7/21/19) said that Bernie Sanders “made [her] skin crawl,” though she “can’t even identify for you what exactly it is,” she was just expressing more overtly the anti-Sanders bias that pervades the network.

MSNBC‘s Mimi Rocah (7/21/19) explaining how Bernie Sanders makes her “skin crawl.”

The hostility is so entrenched, in fact, it seems to have corrupted MSNBC’s mathematical reasoning and created a new system of arithmetic. The cable news network has repeatedly made on-air and online mistakes about Sanders’ polling and other numbers—always to his detriment, and never with any official correction.

Here are some new rules MSNBC seems to follow when it comes to math and Bernie Sanders.

1. 49 < 48      

Result: Sanders goes from second to “fourth” place.

MSNBC made a handy graphic for a poll on July 7 that showed 2020 match-ups against Trump among Democratic voters. The list was in descending order of candidates’ polling numbers—except for Bernie Sanders, whose name is placed under Warren’s and Harris’s, though he polls higher than both of them. (If the list is ordered by the margin between the candidate and Trump, Sanders would be in third place, behind Harris.)

MSNBC (7/7/19)

2. 5 >7

Result: Sanders goes from second to “third” place.  

Lest you think this was an isolated incident, MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki placed Sanders’ name below Warren’s on July 15, when he was “reporting” on a poll put out by the Washington Post and NBC (MSNBC’s parent company.) Once again, the order of the names is descending by poll numbers—except for Bernie Sanders’, which is, once again, placed below where it should be. This time, Sanders is placed below Warren, though he polls higher than she does (both in the percentage who say they would vote for each candidate and the spread over Trump). This same order is used in the online story’s headline (7/14/19), which says, “Trump Trails Biden, Warren and Sanders in New NBC News/Wall Stree Journal Poll.”

MSNBC (7/15/19)

But it gets worse. It was misleading to have Sanders’ name after Warren’s in the graphic, but an absolute error or lie to say Warren was second, which Kornacki, who was talking about a poll conducted by his own company, did. I had to re-watch the video to make sure I wasn’t missing something, but Kornacki does indeed say (at 1:09): “Elizabeth Warren, she’s been running second place, she is running second place on the Democratic side. She leads Trump by 5 points.” Then Kornacki shows the person who is actually in second place and says, “Bernie Sanders, he leads by 7 points.”

3. +5 = -5. 

Result: Sanders “loses” ten points. 

Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd (5/24/19) showed a graphic claiming that Sanders had gone down 5 points in a Quinnipiac poll. Todd got the absolute value right, he just got the value sign wrong: Sanders didn’t go down by 5 in the poll, he went up by 5 — a 10-point difference.

 

MSNBC (5/24/19)

Quinnipiac (4/30/19)

Quinnipiac (5/21/19)

4. 25 = 28 

Result: Sanders goes from first to “second” place. 

After an April Monmouth poll showed Sanders polling at 27 percent among non-white voters and Biden polling at 25 percent, Velshe and Ruhle (4/29/19) showed a graphic which somehow added three points to Biden’s numbers, putting him in “first” place.

MSNBC (4/29/19)

Monmouth (4/23/19)

 

5. Less than $200 = 0

Result: Sanders goes from a candidate with one of the best records with female donors to one of the “worst.” 

Rachel Maddow on April 29 did a segment (and tweeted) about a study on the gender of campaign donors. Unfortunately, she forgot to say the study she cited only looked at donors who gave $200 or more. After praising Gillibrand for “doing the best in terms of targeting female donors,” Maddow urged her viewers to

look at the other end of the spectrum! Just strikes me as unsustainable. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg…. Look at them! Both of them are raising twice as much money from male donors as they are from female donors. 66 and 67 percent of your donations are from dudes? Dude!

MSNBC (4/29/19)

The same Open Secrets report Maddow was citing explained that its results were skewed: Since

Sanders has the  highest amount of money coming from small donors…at 74 percent…[and] generally only donations above $200 are itemized…the gender landscape of small donations are absent.

In fact, according to Sanders’ communications director, 46 percent of the 525,000 people who contributed to Sanders’ campaign during the first quarter were women. “It is virtually certain,” she tweeted, “that more women have donated to our campaign than any other.”

Rachel Maddow: You’re a Rhodes scholar, have a nightly news show, earn $7 million a year, and missed or failed to disclose that the study only looked at wealthier dudes and dudettes? Dude!

6. 23 minutes = 5 minutes

Result: Sanders goes from highlighting his opposition to racism and sexism  to “not mentioning” them. 

In March, MSNBC’s Alex Whit hosted a panel to discuss Bernie Sanders’ March 2 campaign kickoff speech.  Panelist and MSNBC political analyst Zerlina Maxwell said: “I clocked it. He [Bernie Sanders] did not mention race or gender until 23 minutes into the speech.”

As Sanders surrogates, journalists, organizers, activists and people on Twitter pointed out, Sanders most definitely mentioned race and gender  five minutes into his speech, when he said “the underlying principles of our government” will “not be racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and religious bigotry.” Sanders starts his speech 31 seconds after he gets on stage so, to be charitable to his critics, he doesn’t mention gender or race until 5:31.

Maxwell, a former Hillary Clinton staffer, though MSNBC didn’t mention that when they introduced her, did delete a tweet which had said, “OK 23 minutes in Bernie finally mentions race and gender.” But she was far from contrite:

I’ve rewatched since yesterday and while I can acknowledge that I missed the passing line at 6 minutes I stand by my point since talking about criminal justice is not the same thing as talking about race and gender and if you don’t get why Bernie won’t win….again.

Sanders spoke about race and gender outside of the context of criminal justice, which anyone who watched or rewatched the speech would know. But accuracy seems not seem not to be the point so much as it is putting down a candidate who makes your “skin crawl,” for reasons that you can’t quite explain. Citizens, including the ones MSNBC claims to speak for, deserve better.

Robert Reich: The Real Reason We Need to Impeach Trump Immediately

This piece first appeared on RobertReich.org.

In today’s political climate, the question of whether or not to impeach the President of the United States is often thought of in political terms.

But there is a much deeper concern at the heart of the question.

An impeachment inquiry in the House is unlikely to send Trump packing before Election Day 2020 because Senate Republicans won’t convict him. And it’s impossible to know whether an impeachment inquiry will hurt or help Trump’s chances of being reelected.

Does this mean impeachment should be off the table? No. There’s a non-political question that Congress should consider: Is enforcing the United States Constitution important for its own sake — even if it goes nowhere, even if it’s unpopular with many voters, even if it’s politically risky?

Every child in America is supposed to learn about the Constitution’s basic principles of separation of powers, and checks and balances.

But these days, every child and every adult in America is learning from Donald Trump that these principles are bunk.

By doing whatever he could to stop the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, including firing the head of the FBI, Trump told America it’s okay for a president to obstruct justice.

Goodbye, law.

By issuing a blanket refusal to respond to any congressional subpoena, Trump is saying Congress has no constitutional authority to oversee the executive branch. He’s telling America that Congress is a subordinate branch of government rather than a co-equal branch.

Forget separation of powers.

By spending money on his “wall” that Congress explicitly refused to authorize, Trump is saying that Congress no longer has any constitutional authority over spending.

Goodbye, checks and balances.

By unilaterally shuttering the government in order to get his way, Trump told us he has the constitutional right not to execute the laws whenever it suits him.

Farewell, Congress.

By directing the Attorney General, the Justice Department, the FBI and the Secretary of the Treasury to act in his own personal interest rather than in the interests of the American people, Trump is saying that presidents can run government for themselves.

Adios, Constitution.

By unilaterally threatening to cut off trade with the second-largest economy in the world, Trump is telling us he has sole authority to endanger the entire American economy. (Make no mistake: If he goes through with his threat, the U.S. economy will go into a tailspin.)

The core purpose of the Constitution is to prevent tyranny. That’s why its Framers distributed power between the president, Congress and the judiciary. That’s why each of the three branches was designed to limit the powers of the other two.

In other words, the Framers anticipated the possibility of a Donald Trump.

Fortunately, they also put in a mechanism to enforce the Constitution against a president who tries to place himself above the law and to usurp the powers of the other branches of government.

Article I, Section 2 gives the House of Representatives the “sole Power of Impeachment.” Article I, Section 3 gives the Senate the “sole Power to try all Impeachments.”

Trump surely appears to be usurping the powers of the other branches. Under these circumstances, the Constitution mandates that the House undertake an impeachment inquiry and present evidence to the Senate.

This may not be the political thing to do. But in order to safeguard our democracy, it is the right thing to do.

 

Campaign Cocktail: Pence Stiffs Aspen, Barr’s Death Wish, Enter Mayor Alex

Campaign Cocktail: News and notes on the 2020 election race.

Pence Blows Into Aspen, Blows County Budget

The Aspen (Colorado) Daily News reports that the local sheriff is bound and determined to get Republicans to reimburse Pitkin County for $24,000 in security expenses incurred when Vice President Mike Pence hosted a $35,000-per-couple fundraiser Monday. Pence left town without making arrangements to pay the bill.

So far, Sheriff Joe DiSalvo has been stonewalled, as has the local media, in attempts to get answers from the White House and the Colorado Republican National Committee.

This seems to be how the Trump administration does business. The Center for Public Integrity reports: “City governments from Arizona to Pennsylvania say the president’s political committee has stiffed them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars” for security-related expenses.

Barr Injects the Death Penalty Into 2020 Race

State by state, America is turning away from capital punishment. But the Trump administration may be calculating that killing people for their crimes is still a political winner.

Will Weissert of The Associated Press writes: “The issue took on unexpected urgency on Thursday when the Justice Department announced that it will begin executing federal death row inmates for the first time since 2003, again raising the political stakes on a topic that’s rarely been a Democratic strength.”

Attorney General William Barr’s decision could spell trouble for Democrats in 2020. Although support for the death penalty is nearing historic lows, nationwide polls conducted in 2018 show a majority is still in favor, including about 75% of Republicans.

Weissert notes that Michael Dukakis lost the 1988 election in part because he opposed the death penalty, and Bill Clinton won in 1992 after embracing it. This time around, all but one of the 24 Democratic presidential candidates oppose it, including front-runner Joe Biden, who reversed his long-held position Tuesday. Opponents say executions disproportionately affect people of color, minorities and the poor. “A life sentence compared to a death penalty sentence depends on where you live, who your lawyer is and the color of your skin,” said Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a 2020 contender.

Related Articles











Death Penalty Debate Takes a Turn Toward Sanity



by Bill Blum

















The Death Penalty Is Getting Even Crueler



by

There’s also a harrowing debate over exactly how to do the killing. Executions have been performed with mixed results using lethal chemical injections. The Justice Department now favors a single injection of pentobarbital, a drug used to euthanize animals.

The five men whose deaths the Justice Department has ordered are Daniel Lewis Lee, Lezmond Mitchell, Wesley Ira Purkey, Alfred Bourgeois and Dustin Lee Honken. Their crimes all involve the murder of children, and their executions are scheduled between Dec. 9 and Jan. 15.

The lead paragraph of Garrett Epps’ story for The Atlantic states the issue with eloquence:

During the late-13th-century siege of Valencia, Spain, legend relates, Doña Jimena Díaz strapped the corpse of her husband—the legendary warrior El Cid—to his horse to lead his disheartened troops. Perhaps not since that incident has a group of fighters bound itself so tightly to a cadaver as the Trump-era conservative legal movement, which has clasped capital punishment to its bosom while the nation, unevenly but unmistakably, turns away from it in disgust.

The AP’s Weissert quotes Bee Moorhead, a death penalty opponent in Texas:

“It’s shocking that, at this point, the federal government would be taking what feels like a giant step backward. … It is in the mold of a bunch of other policies that are devoid of the concept of mercy in a way that this country is just not used to.”

The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer puts it more bluntly: the cruelty is the point.

After Mayor Pete, Mayor Alex?

The progressive energy that supercharged the Democrats’ 2016 Blue Wave is now driving the party further left. That puts some powerful, moderate Congress members in the 2020 crosshairs.

Example: Richard Neal. He is being challenged by Alex Morse, the mayor of Holyoke, Mass., who believes Neal isn’t moving fast enough to get his hands on Donald Trump’s tax returns. As House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Neal is in a strong position to force the issue, but Morse and many progressives believe he’s dragging his feet.

Alex Morse

Richard Neal

Like “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg, now a contender for president, Morse is young (30) and openly gay. First elected mayor at 22, he has won re-election three times.

“There’s an urgency to this moment in Massachusetts’ 1st District and our country, and that urgency is not matched by our current representative in Congress,” Morse said Monday in announcing his campaign to replace 30-year incumbent Neal. “[W]e can no longer settle for small, incremental and compromising progress. We need to be on offense.”

But Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis., Neal’s colleague on Ways and Means, said the chairman is acting judiciously. “He is part of the solution, not the problem.”

Rudy Giuliani and Ukraine, Redux

Speaking of notable mayors, the man they once called “America’s Mayor” is again up to his eyeballs in controversy. A pair of operatives reporting to Rudy Giuliani are alleged to have worked privately with Ukraine officials to weaponize the 2020 election in favor of President Trump. It’s not the first time Giulani has been linked to campaign shenanigans involving Ukraine.

From BuzzFeed News: “Reporting directly to Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, two operators waged a brazen back-channel campaign that could thrust another foreign country to the center of the next U.S. election.”

Barr Injects Death Penalty Into the 2020 Race

News and notes from the 2020 election campaign:

State by state, America is turning away from capital punishment. But the Trump administration may be calculating that killing people for their crimes is still a political winner.

Will Weissert of The Associated Press writes: “The issue took on unexpected urgency on Thursday when the Justice Department announced that it will begin executing federal death row inmates for the first time since 2003, again raising the political stakes on a topic that’s rarely been a Democratic strength.”

Attorney General William Barr’s decision could spell trouble for Democrats in 2020. Although support for the death penalty is nearing historic lows, nationwide polls conducted in 2018 show a majority is still in favor, including about 75% of Republicans.

Related Articles











Death Penalty Debate Takes a Turn Toward Sanity



by Bill Blum

















The Death Penalty Is Getting Even Crueler



by

















New Hampshire Becomes 21st State to Abolish the Death Penalty



by Donald Kaufman

Weissert notes that Michael Dukakis lost the 1988 election in part because he opposed the death penalty, and Bill Clinton won in 1992 after embracing it. This time around, all but one of the 24 Democratic presidential candidates oppose it, including front-runner Joe Biden, who reversed his long-held position Tuesday. Opponents say executions disproportionately affect people of color, minorities and the poor. “A life sentence compared to a death penalty sentence depends on where you live, who your lawyer is and the color of your skin,” said Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a 2020 contender.

There’s also a harrowing debate over exactly how to do the killing. Executions have been performed with mixed results using lethal chemical injections. The Justice Department now favors a single injection of pentobarbital, a drug used to euthanize animals.

The five men whose deaths the Justice Department has ordered are Daniel Lewis Lee, Lezmond Mitchell, Wesley Ira Purkey, Alfred Bourgeois and Dustin Lee Honken. Their crimes all involve the murder of children, and their executions are scheduled between Dec. 9 and Jan. 15.

The lead paragraph of Garrett Epps’ story for The Atlantic states the issue with eloquence:

During the late-13th-century siege of Valencia, Spain, legend relates, Doña Jimena Díaz strapped the corpse of her husband—the legendary warrior El Cid—to his horse to lead his disheartened troops. Perhaps not since that incident has a group of fighters bound itself so tightly to a cadaver as the Trump-era conservative legal movement, which has clasped capital punishment to its bosom while the nation, unevenly but unmistakably, turns away from it in disgust.

The AP’s Weissert quotes Bee Moorhead, a death penalty opponent in Texas:

“It’s shocking that, at this point, the federal government would be taking what feels like a giant step backward. … It is in the mold of a bunch of other policies that are devoid of the concept of mercy in a way that this country is just not used to.”

The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer puts it more bluntly: the cruelty is the point.

After Mayor Pete, Mayor Alex?

The progressive energy that supercharged the Democrats’ 2016 Blue Wave is now driving the party further left. That puts some powerful, moderate Congress members in the 2020 crosshairs.

Example: Richard Neal. He is being challenged by Alex Morse, the mayor of Holyoke, Mass., who believes Neal isn’t moving fast enough to get his hands on Donald Trump’s tax returns. As House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Neal is in a strong position to force the issue, but Morse and many progressives believe he’s dragging his feet.

Alex Morse

Richard Neal

Like “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg, now a contender for president, Morse is young (30) and openly gay. First elected mayor at 22, he has won re-election three times.

“There’s an urgency to this moment in Massachusetts’ 1st District and our country, and that urgency is not matched by our current representative in Congress,” Morse said Monday in announcing his campaign to replace 30-year incumbent Neal. “[W]e can no longer settle for small, incremental and compromising progress. We need to be on offense.”

But Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis., Neal’s colleague on Ways and Means, said the chairman is acting judiciously. “He is part of the solution, not the problem.”

Rudy Giuliani and Ukraine, Redux

Speaking of notable mayors, the man they once called “America’s Mayor” is again up to his eyeballs in controversy. A pair of operatives reporting to Rudy Giuliani are alleged to have worked privately with Ukraine officials to weaponize the 2020 election in favor of President Trump. It’s not the first time Giulani has been linked to campaign shenanigans involving Ukraine.

From BuzzFeed News: “Reporting directly to Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, two operators waged a brazen back-channel campaign that could thrust another foreign country to the center of the next U.S. election.”

Pence Blows Into Aspen, Blows County Budget

The Aspen (Colorado) Daily News reports that the local sheriff is bound and determined to get Republicans to reimburse Pitkin County for $24,000 in security expenses incurred when Vice President Mike Pence hosted a $35,000-per-couple fundraiser Monday. Pence left town without making arrangements to pay the bill.

So far, Sheriff Joe DiSalvo has been stonewalled, as has the local media, in attempts to get answers from the White House and the Colorado Republican National Committee.

This seems to be how the Trump administration does business. The Center for Public Integrity reports: “City governments from Arizona to Pennsylvania say the president’s political committee has stiffed them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars” for security-related expenses.

Harold Bloom’s Tragic Confession

“Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism”

A book by Harold Bloom

Writing about the provocative literary critic Harold Bloom is an intimidating affair. Everything about Bloom is daunting, particularly his noxious public persona. He will occasionally try to conceal it by condescendingly addressing his interviewer as “dear.” He rarely seems to notice whom he is speaking with, or what they are feeling. He can erupt into long passages of Shakespeare, Whitman or Yeats from memory—a circus act of stunning recall as he approaches 90. But unlike critics such as the late Lionel Trilling or Daniel Mendelsohn for whom literary criticism is a tool to examine the crucial moral, social, and political questions of our time, Bloom insists that literature be studied purely for aesthetics.

In the 1960s, the New Criticism, which since has taken hold at most American universities, came into vogue, insisting that literature be reexamined through multiple lenses so that new interpretations and voices would flourish. Elaborate curriculums looked at literature through different prisms: gay, feminist, Marxist, deconstructionist and others. Bloom was enraged. He spent decades lambasting the New Criticism, refusing to have anything to do with these critics and labeling them derisively as “the school of resentment.” Many resented his elitism.

Bloom was born in 1930 to a poor Orthodox Jewish household in the East Bronx, one of five children. He lost faith early in the Jewish God when he accidentally stumbled on the poetry of Hart Crane. He fell in love with Crane’s enthusiasm for life, his belief in the possibility of ecstatic pleasure, and his overall exuberance. This was in stark contrast to Bloom’s childhood, which he confesses was a lonely time.

Although God was out of the picture, a spiritual hunger remained. For a time, when he was friends for a brief stint with an elderly Gershom Scholem, he was intrigued by mysticism, hopeful it might offer him something the Jewish God did not. He often said he was appalled by the very notion of Yahweh, whom he described as an “uncanny, dangerous, altogether outrageous God,” who seemed to take a perverse pleasure in appearing when he was least needed and disappearing when he was needed most.

In his newest book, “Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism,” Bloom promised to shake off the polemical battles that have shadowed him for years. He pledged to include never-revealed autobiographical snippets. He wanted to share with his readers his recent reevaluations of some of his most beloved writers. He only partially delivers.

Click here to read long excerpts from “Possessed by Memory” at Google Books.

There are stunning passages from literature that have moved him for decades. There is poetry, prose, and criticism from John Milton, Dr. Samuel Johnson, William Collins, Thomas Gray, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburn, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and James Merrill. Bloom meditates on the Hebrew prophets, the Kabbalah, Psalms, Job, the Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes. And of course, his beloved Shakespeare.

But Bloom’s insights don’t resonate deeply. He is too obsessed with comparing and contrasting, rather than allowing his responses to touch us deeply. He repeats his theory that poets always wrestle with the work of the poets that have come before them, either unconsciously or consciously, and then struggle to find their own voice in reaction to what has come before. There is something anti-transformative about his assertions, often tangled up with incomprehensible jargon.

Bloom still teaches at Yale and claims he has finally learned to better listen to his students. He tells them to select a piece of writing they love, sit under a tree, and chant the lines to truly “possess” it. He does this himself at night when sleep fails him. The practice sparks repressed memories: “Vividly I saw myself, a boy of three, playing on the kitchen floor, alone with [my mother] as she prepared the Sabbath meal. She was born in a Jewish village, and I was happiest when we were alone together. As she passed me in her preparations I would reach out and touch her bare toes, and she would rumple my hair and murmur her affection for me.” But then Bloom stops. He moves away from memory as though it might devour him. Bloom has confessed that during a serious midlife crisis, he underwent Freudian therapy for a year and a half and found it to be a dismal failure. The analyst thought Bloom was using their sessions as a performance venue. Although Bloom writes sneeringly while recounting this, it is one of the more startling revelations we learn about him.

About Shakespeare however, Bloom is nothing short of reverential: “My religion is the appreciation of high literature. Shakespeare is the summit. Revelation for me is Shakespearean or nothing.” He admits that much about the Bard still bewilders him. In a moment of rare vulnerability, Bloom admits he longs for more life. Bloom explains his theory of “self-otherseeing,” which allows one to glimpse parts of one’s self that are hidden from conscious view. “Self-otherseeing” also describes “the double-consciousness of observing our own actions and offerings as though they belong to others and not to ourselves.” Bloom insists that Shakespeare’s characterizations of Hamlet, Iago, Cleopatra and Falstaff use “self-othering,” and by watching them we inadvertently learn to think more seriously about ourselves. But he doesn’t show us how this has applied to him, only the declaration that it does so. We are left mystified and dubious.

Recently, chanting Walt Whitman to himself at night—he describes Whitman as “our repressed voice,” a loosener and liberator whose fearlessness embraces every living moment—Bloom brought forth an almost feverish recollection from over 70 years ago. There was a young lady of 17 with lustrous long red hair. They were students at Cornell and took long walks together, picking apples that she would transform into a delicious applejack. And then, as with his mother, Bloom stops. We learn nothing else about the girl, what transpired, or what this memory meant to him on this restless night. He has already moved on, to his infatuation with Proust’s “privileged moments” and “sudden ecstasies of revelation,” which bring back to Bloom his dead parents whom he misses dearly.

For the briefest of moments, a veil lifts, and he speaks about wanting more time, not wanting to die. He shyly admits that he needs more time to make peace with the difficult reality that he is merely “a reader and a teacher, and not a creator.” It is a tragic confession. How excruciating it must be to revel in creative genius yet not possess the gift to create.

Ultimately Bloom cannot change into anything other than who he has always been—masterful and monstrous. He seems to sense he has moved out of favor in many circles but chooses not to dwell upon why. Instead, he continues as he always has: writing and teaching his handpicked “elite” students at Yale—part of the unique arrangement he has made with the university. He has led a long, cloistered, and entitled life. The aloneness he described as a child seems to have shrouded his adult life as well. I wonder if he questions this aloneness in his darkest moments. I would guess that he does not dwell too deeply upon it, perhaps afraid of answers he doesn’t wish to confront.

I also wonder whether Bloom would relinquish his status as an intellectual of the highest order to feel for one day the exuberance and passion of Hart Crane. What would he be willing to let go of to actually feel intimately the joy and euphoria that so seduces him in his imagination?