Chris Hedges's Blog, page 195

Mueller: I Did Not Clear Trump of Obstruction of Justice

WASHINGTON — Robert Mueller on Wednesday bluntly dismissed President Donald Trump’s claims of total exoneration in the federal probe of Russia’s 2016 election interference. The former special counsel told Congress he explicitly did not clear the president of obstructing his investigation.

The televised Capitol Hill appearance, Mueller’s first since wrapping his two-year Russia probe last spring, unfolded at a moment of deep divisions in the country, with many Americans hardened in their opinions about the success of Donald Trump’s presidency and whether impeachment proceedings are necessary.

Republicans and Democrats took divergent paths in questioning Mueller, with Trump’s GOP allies trying to cast the former special counsel and his prosecutors as politically motivated. Democrats, meanwhile, sought to emphasize the most incendiary findings of Mueller’s 448-page report and weaken Trump’s reelection prospects in ways that Mueller’s book-length report did not.

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10 Questions for Robert Mueller



by Bill Blum

They hoped that even if his testimony did not inspire impeachment demands — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has made clear she will not pursue impeachment, for now — Mueller could nonetheless unambiguously spell out questionable, norm-shattering actions by the president.

Yet Mueller by midday appeared unwilling or unable to offer crisp sound bites that could reshape already-entrenched public opinions.

He frequently gave terse, one-word answers to lawmakers’ questions, even when given opportunities to crystallize allegations of obstruction of justice against the president. He referred time again to the wording in his report or asked for questions to be repeated. He declined to read aloud hard-hitting statements in the report when prodded by Democrats to do so.

But he was unflinching on the most-critical matters.

In the opening minutes of the hearing, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, asked Mueller about Trump’s claims of vindication in the investigation.

“Did you actually totally exonerate the president?” Nadler asked.

“No,” Mueller replied.

Though Mueller described Russian government’s efforts to interfere in American politics as among the most serious challenges to democracy he had encountered in his decades-long career — which included steering the FBI after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — Republicans seized on his conclusion of insufficient evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

“Those are the facts of the Mueller report. Russia meddled in the 2016 election,” said Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee. “The president did not conspire with Russians. Nothing we hear today will change those facts.”

Mueller, pressed as to why he hadn’t investigated a “dossier” of claims that the Republicans insist helped lead to the start of the probe, he said that was not his charge.

That was “outside my purview,” he said repeatedly.

Though Mueller declared at the outset that he would be limited in what he would say, the hearings nonetheless carried the extraordinary spectacle of a prosecutor discussing in public a criminal investigation he conducted into a sitting U.S. president.

Mueller, known for his taciturn nature, warned that he would not stray beyond what had already been revealed in his report. And the Justice Department instructed him to stay strictly within those parameters, giving him a formal directive to point to if he faced questions he did not want to answer.

Trump lashed out early Wednesday ahead of the hearing, saying on Twitter that “Democrats and others” are trying to fabricate a crime and pin it on “a very innocent President.”

Trump has made Mueller a regular target of attack over the past two years in an attempt to undermine his credibility and portray him as biased and compromised.

Over the past week, Trump had begun to frequently ask confidants how he thought the hearing would go, and while he expressed no worry that Mueller would reveal anything damaging, he was irritated that the former special counsel was being given the national stage, according to two Republicans close to the White House. They were not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

Long aware of the power of televised images, Trump seethed to one adviser that he was annoyed Democrats would be given a tool to ramp up their investigations — and that the cable news networks would now have new footage of Mueller to play endlessly.

Trump this week feigned indifference to Mueller’s testimony , telling reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, “I’m not going to be watching — probably — maybe I’ll see a little bit of it.”

Mueller is a former FBI director who spent 12 years parrying questions from lawmakers at oversight hearings, and decades before that as a prosecutor who asked questions of his own. He resisted efforts to goad him into saying anything he did not want to say. He repeatedly told lawmakers to refer to his report for answers to specific questions.

Wednesday’s first hearing before the Judiciary Committee focused on whether the president illegally obstructed justice by attempting to seize control of Mueller’s investigation.

The special counsel examined nearly a dozen episodes, including Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey and his efforts to have Mueller himself removed. Mueller in his report ultimately declined to state whether the president broke the law, saying such a judgment would be unfair in light of Justice Department legal opinions that bar the indictment of a sitting president.

The afternoon hearing before the House intelligence committee will dive into ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

On that question, Mueller’s report documented a trail of contacts between Russians and Trump associates — including a Trump Tower meeting at which the president’s eldest son expected to receive dirt on Democrat Hillary Clinton — but the special counsel found insufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy aiming to tip the 2016 election.

___

Associated Press writer Jonathan Lemire in New York contributed to this report.

America Has Passed a Point of No Return

The Great Reckoning

A Look Back from Mid-Century

By Andrew J. Bacevich

[Editorial note: This remnant of a manuscript, discovered in a vault near the coastal town of Walpole, Massachusetts, appears to have been part of a larger project, probably envisioned as an interpretive history of the United States since the year 2000. Only a single chapter, probably written near the midpoint of the twenty-first century, has survived. Whether the remainder of the manuscript has been lost or the author abandoned it before its completion is unknown.] 

Chapter 1

The Launch

From our present vantage point, it seems clear that, by 2019, the United States had passed a point of no return. In retrospect, this was the moment when indications of things gone fundamentally awry should have become unmistakable. Although at the time much remained hidden in shadows, the historic pivot now commonly referred to as the Great Reckoning had commenced.

Even today, it remains difficult to understand why, given mounting evidence of a grave crisis, passivity persisted for so long across most sectors of society. An epidemic of anomie affected a large swath of the population. Faced with a blizzard of troubling developments, large and small, Americans found it difficult to put things into anything approximating useful perspective. Few even bothered to try. Fewer succeeded. As with predictions of cataclysmic earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, a not-in-my-lifetime mood generally prevailed.

During what was then misleadingly known as the Age of Trump, the political classes dithered. While the antics of President Donald Trump provoked intense interest — the word “intense” hardly covers the attention paid to him — they also provided a convenient excuse for letting partisan bickering take precedence over actual governance or problem solving of any sort. Meanwhile, “thought leaders” (a term then commonly used to describe pontificating windbags) indulged themselves with various pet projects.

In the midst of what commentators were pleased to call the Information Age, most ordinary Americans showed a pronounced affinity for trivia over matters of substance. A staggering number of citizens willingly traded freedom and privacy for convenience, bowing to the dictates of an ever-expanding array of personalized gadgetry. What was then called a “smartphone” functioned as a talisman of sorts, the electronic equivalent of a rosary or prayer beads. Especially among the young, separation from one’s “phone” for more than a few minutes could cause acute anxiety and distress. The novelty of “social media” had not yet worn off, with its most insidious implications just being discovered.

Divided, distracted, and desperately trying to keep up: these emerged then as the abiding traits of life in contemporary America. Craft beer, small-batch bourbon, and dining at the latest farm-to-table restaurant often seemed to matter more than the fate of the nation or, for that matter, the planet as a whole. But all that was about to change.

Scholars will undoubtedly locate the origins of the Great Reckoning well before 2019. Perhaps they will trace its source to the aftermath of the Cold War when American elites succumbed to a remarkable bout of imperial hubris, while ignoring (thanks in part to the efforts of Big Energy companies) the already growing body of information on the human-induced alteration of the planet, which came to be called “climate change” or “global warming.” While, generally speaking, the collective story of humankind unfolds along a continuum, by 2019 conditions conducive to disruptive change were forming. History was about to zig sharply off its expected course.

This disruption occurred, of course, within a specific context. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, American society absorbed a series of punishing blows. First came the contested election of 2000, the president of the United States installed in office by a 5-4 vote of a politicized Supreme Court, which thereby effectively usurped the role of the electorate. And that was just for starters. Following in short order came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which the world’s (self-proclaimed) premier intelligence services failed to anticipate and the world’s preeminent military establishment failed to avert.

Less than two years later, the administration of George W. Bush, operating under the delusion that the ongoing war in Afghanistan was essentially won, ordered U.S. forces to invade Iraq, a nation that had played no part in the events of 9/11. The result of this patently illegal war of aggression would not be victory, despite the president’s almost instant “mission accomplished” declaration, but a painful replay of the quagmire that U.S. troops had experienced decades before in Vietnam. Expectations of Iraq’s “liberation” paving the way for a broader Freedom Agenda that would democratize the Islamic world came to naught. The Iraq War and other armed interventions initiated during the first two decades of the century ended up costing trillionsof taxpayer dollars, while sowing the seeds of instability across much of the Greater Middle East and later Africa.

Then, in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina smashed into the Gulf Coast, killing nearly 2,000 Americans. U.S. government agencies responded with breathtaking ineptitude, a sign of things to come, as nature itself was turning increasingly unruly. Other natural disasters of unnatural magnitude followed. In 2007, to cite but one example, more than 9,000 wildfires in California swept through more than a million acres. Like swarms of locusts, fires now became an annual (and worsening) plague ravaging the Golden State and the rest of the West Coast. If this weren’t enough of a harbinger of approaching environmental catastrophe, the populations of honeybees, vital to American agriculture, began to collapse in these very same years.

Americans were, as it turned out, largely indifferent to the fate of honeybees. They paid far greater attention to the economy, however, which experienced its own form of collapse in 2008. The ensuing Great Recession saw millions thrown out of work and millions more lose their homes as a result of fraudulent mortgage practices. None of the perpetrators were punished. The administration of President Barack Obama chose instead to bail out offending banks and large corporations. Record federal deficits resulted, as the government abandoned once and for all even the pretense of trying to balance the budget. And, of course, the nation’s multiple wars dragged on and on and on.

Through all these trials, the American people more or less persevered. If not altogether stoic, they remained largely compliant. As a result, few members of the nation’s political, economic, intellectual, or cultural elites showed any awareness that something fundamental might be amiss. The two established parties retained their monopoly on national politics. As late as 2016, the status quo appeared firmly intact. Only with that year’s presidential election did large numbers of citizens signal that they had had enough: wearing red MAGA caps rather than wielding pitchforks, they joined Donald Trump’s assault on that elite and, thumbing their noses at Washington, installed a reality TV star in the White House.

To the legions who had found the previous status quo agreeable, Trump’s ascent to the apex of American politics amounted to an unbearable affront. They might tolerate purposeless, endless wars, raise more or less any set of funds for the military that was so unsuccessfully fighting them, and turn a blind eye to economic arrangements that fostered inequality on a staggering scale. They might respond to the accelerating threat posed by climate change with lip service and, at best, quarter-measures. But Donald Trump in the Oval Office? That they could not abide.

As a result, from the moment of his election, Trump dominated the American scene. Yet the outrage that he provoked, day in and day out, had this unfortunate side effect: it obscured developments that would in time prove to be of far more importance than the 45th American president himself. Like the “noise” masking signals that, if detected and correctly interpreted, might have averted Pearl Harbor in December 1941 or, for that matter, 9/11, obsessing about Trump caused observers to regularly overlook or discount matters far transcending in significance the daily ration of presidential shenanigans.

Here, then, is a very partial listing of some of the most important of those signals then readily available to anyone bothering to pay attention. On the eve of the Great Reckoning, however, they were generally treated as mere curiosities or matters of limited urgency — problems to be deferred to a later, more congenial moment.

Item: The reality of climate change was now indisputable. All that remained in question was how rapidly it would occur and the extent (and again rapidity) of the devastation that it would ultimately inflict.

Item: Despite everything that was then known about the dangers of further carbon emissions, the major atmospheric contributor to global warming, they only continued to increase, despite the myriad conferences and agreements intended to curb them. (U.S. carbon emissions, in particular, were still rising then, and global emissions were expected to rise by record or near-record amounts as 2019 began.)

Item: The polar icecap was disappearing, with scientists reporting that it had melted more in just 20 years than in the previous 10,000. This, in turn, meant that sea levels would continue to rise at record rates, posing an increasing threat to coastal cities.

Item: Deforestation and desertification were occurring at an alarming rate.

Item: Approximately eight million metric tons of plastic were seeping into the world’s oceans each year, from the ingestion of which vast numbers of seabirds, fish, and marine mammals were dying annually. Payback would come in the form of microplastics contained in seafood consumed by humans.

Item: With China and other Asian countries increasingly refusing to accept American recyclables, municipalities in the United States found themselves overwhelmed by accumulations of discarded glass, plastic, metal, cardboard, and paper. That year, the complete breakdown of the global recycling system already loomed as a possibility.

Item: Worldwide bird and insect populations were plummeting. In other words, the Sixth Mass Extinction had begun.

All of these fall into the category of what we recognize today as planetary issues of existential importance. But even in 2019 there were other matters of less than planetary significance that ought to have functioned as a wake-up call. Among them were:

Item: With the federal government demonstrably unable to secure U.S. borders, immigration authorities were seizing hundreds of thousands of migrants annually. By 2019, the Trump administration was confining significant numbers of those migrants, including small children, in what were, in effect, concentration camps.

Item: Cybercrime had become a major growth industry, on track to rake in $6 trillion annually by 2021. Hackers were already demonstrating the ability to hold large American cities hostage and the authorities proved incapable of catching up.

Item: With the three richest Americans — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet — controlling more wealth than the bottom 50% of the entire population, the United States had become a full-fledged oligarchy. While politicians occasionally expressed their dismay about this reality, prior to 2019 it was widely tolerated.

Item: As measured by roads, bridges, dams, or public transportation systems, the nation’s infrastructure was strikingly inferior to what it had been a half-century earlier. (By 2019, China, for instance, had built more than 19,000 miles of high-speed rail; the U.S., not one.) Agreement that this was a problem that needed fixing was universal; corrective action (and government financing), however, was not forthcoming.

Item: Military spending in constant dollars exceeded what it had been at the height of the Cold War when the country’s main adversary, the Soviet Union, had a large army with up-to-date equipment and an arsenal of nuclear weapons. In 2019, Iran, the country’s most likely adversary, had a modest army and no nuclear weapons.

Item: Incivility, rudeness, bullying, and general nastiness had become rampant, while the White House, once the site of solemn ceremony, deliberation, and decision, played host to politically divisive shouting matches and verbal brawls.

To say that Americans were oblivious to such matters would be inaccurate. Some were, for instance, considering a ban on plastic straws. Yet taken as a whole, the many indications of systemic and even planetary dysfunction received infinitely less popular attention than the pregnancies of British royals, the antics of the justifiably forgotten Kardashian clan, or fantasy football, a briefly popular early twenty-first century fad.

Of course, decades later, viewed with the benefit of hindsight, the implications of these various trends and data points seem painfully clear: the dominant ideological abstraction of late postmodernity — liberal democratic capitalism — was rapidly failing or had simply become irrelevant to the challenges facing the United States and the human species as a whole. To employ another then-popular phrase, liberal democratic capitalism had become an expression of “fake news,” a scam sold to the many for the benefit of the privileged few.

“Toward the end of an age,” historian John Lukacs (1924-2019) once observed, “more and more people lose faith in their institutions and finally they abandon their belief that these institutions might still be reformed from within.” Lukacs wrote those words in 1970, but they aptly described the situation that had come to exist in that turning-point year of 2019. Basic American institutions — the overworked U.S. military being a singular exception — no longer commanded popular respect.

In essence, the postmodern age was ending, though few seemed to know it — with elites, in particular, largely oblivious to what was occurring. What would replace postmodernity in a planet heading for ruin remained to be seen.

Only when…

[Editor’s note: Here the account breaks off.]

The Top 5 Ways to Defeat ICE Agents

The Democrats and the corporate media will breathlessly tell you how Donald Trump is a racist (he is). They’ll relay the gut-wrenching horror of having your family ripped apart by Border Patrol (I’m sure it is). They’ll let you know that keeping children in cages is not what America stands for and not who we are (it kinda is). But despite all of this, they practically never tell everyone how to actually fight back against ICE raids and Border Patrol detentions.

Welcome to the paradoxical sales pitch of the neoliberal morass—“Act like you hate racism while doing almost nothing to stop racist policies that have gone on for decades!”

The reason very few in Congress and the corporate media tell the public how to fight back against the ICE raids they claim to deplore is because the elite ruling class never wants to give average Americans (and undocumented immigrants) the idea that they can question figures of authority. These liberals think it’s feasible to basically exclaim, “The ICE raids are disgusting, immoral and unjust! The president is racist, idiotic and unethical! These detention centers are deplorable, inhumane and not neighborly! But if ICE agents or police or the FBI or Border Patrol agents come to your door, welcome them in and do everything they say so that they can more easily tear up your life. Viva la resistance!”

So here, now, are 5 steps to fight back against ICE raids and deportation.

(1) If an ICE agent comes to your door, do NOT let them in. You have the right to refuse entry unless they have an arrest warrant, which they almost never do. ICE agents are like vampires and swingers—they have to be invited in, but after that, it’s no holds barred.

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Microsoft and the Pentagon Are Quietly Hijacking U.S. Elections



by Lee Camp

The American Civil Liberties Union says that if ICE comes to your door, “Stay calm and keep the door closed. Opening the door does not give them permission to come inside, but it is safer to speak to ICE through the door.”

I find it’s better to speak to any and all authority figures through a door—even if you have to bring said door with you as you walk down the streets of your town. While holding it in front of your face, just yell, “I’m sorry officer, but I can’t hear you through this fine mesquite rustic oak hatchway with double-paned beveled glass!”

Point being, I know it may seem juvenile, but keeping the door closed and hiding under the bed could actually work.

(2) With the door still closed, ask if the agents have a warrant signed by a judge.

If they say they do, it’s going to be tempting to ask them to slide it up their ass. But don’t do that. Instead, ask them to slide the warrant under the door or hold it up to a window so that you can read it. Something you must understand is that ICE agents are tricky little fellas, and they may show you a removal or deportation form while trying to make you think it’s a warrant. (Hell, they may just hold up napkins they got with their burrito from lunch and try to convince you that’s a warrant.) But removal forms, deportation forms, dirty napkins, shiny badges, MVP jerseys, cowboy hats, fingerless gloves and semaphore flags DO NOT allow them to enter your residence.

(3) No matter how much they push you, do NOT sign anything without speaking with a lawyer.

If they ask you to sign something, you are likely signing away your God-given right to a hearing. (It’s not really God-given. It’s more of an old-white-dudes-who-wrote-the-laws-given right to a hearing.)

If agents force their way into your home despite failing to provide a warrant, don’t resist and don’t—I repeat don’t—spray them with spicy ketchup. That just pisses them off. I speak from experience.

(4) If they enter illegally, just keep repeating, “I do not consent to your entry or to your search of these premises. I am exercising my right to remain silent. I wish to speak with a lawyer as soon as possible.”

That’s right: Even if you’re an immigrant or a refugee, you still have a right to remain silent and speak to a lawyer. ICE agents may tell you that you have no rights, but they are wrong. Something you need to know about ICE agents: They’re not all very bright. So just because they tell you something does not mean it’s true.

(5) If you are arrested, you have the right to talk to your consulate and speak to a lawyer.

Keep telling them you want a lawyer. Don’t give up. Treat it as if you were served soup at a restaurant and they forgot to bring you a spoon. Do you just give up after a minute and dunk your face straight into the steaming-hot jambalaya? No. You start getting annoyed, yelling and creating a scene until you receive a spoon and/or lawyer. (A lawyer might be a bit overkill for the spoon situation, but some people take soup very seriously.)

If you are detained by a Border Patrol agent, that’s not the same as being under arrest.

“An immigration officer cannot arrest you without ‘probable cause,’ ” the ACLU points out. “That means the agent must have facts about you that make it probable that you are committing, or committed, a violation of immigration law or federal law.”

To sum it all up, if you ever have to deal with ICE agents: Don’t talk, don’t walk, don’t sign anything and don’t open doors. Don’t help them take away your rights and separate you from your family. Also, don’t resist if they grab you, because they have large guns that they likely have no idea how to use safely.

But you should also have some sympathy for their situation. They’re not the sharpest tools in the kit, and they’re probably suffering from symptoms of steroid abuse, lack of self-confidence, insecurity, mother didn’t hug ’em, brothers picked on ’em, etc. And many of them have hemorrhoids, which they deal with by punching things. Point is, they are having a rough day too. So be cordial! (But don’t speak to them, don’t invite them in, don’t sign anything and don’t help them.)

If you think this column is important, please share it. Also you can sign up for Lee Camp’s free email newsletter here .

This column is based on a monologue Lee Camp wrote and performed on his TV show “ Redacted Tonight .”

The Cheapest Way to Save the Planet Grows Like a Weed

Planting billions of trees across the world is by far the cheapest and most efficient way to tackle the climate crisis. So states a Guardian article, citing a new analysis published in the journal Science. The author explains:

As trees grow, they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving global heating. New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities, a figure the scientists describe as “mind-blowing”.

For skeptics who reject the global warming thesis, reforestation also addresses the critical problems of mass species extinction and environmental pollution, which are well-documented. A 2012 study from the University of Michigan found that loss of biodiversity impacts ecosystems as much as does climate change and pollution. Forests shelter plant and animal life in their diverse forms, and trees remove air pollution by the interception of particulate matter on plant surfaces and the absorption of gaseous pollutants through the leaves.

The July analytical review in Science calculated how many additional trees could be planted globally without encroaching on crop land or urban areas. It found that there are 1.7 billion hectares (4.2 billion acres) of treeless land on which 1.2 trillion native tree saplings would naturally grow. Using the most efficient methods, 1 trillion trees could be restored for as little as $300 billion—less than 2% of the lower range of estimates for the Green New Deal introduced by progressive Democrats in February.

The Guardian quoted Professor Tom Crowther at the Swiss university ETH Zürich, who said, “What blows my mind is the scale. I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.” He said it was also by far the cheapest solution that has ever been proposed. The chief drawback of reforestation as a solution to the climate crisis, as The Guardian piece points out, is that trees grow slowly. The projected restoration could take 50 to 100 years to reach its full carbon sequestering potential.

A Faster, More Efficient Solution

Fortunately, as of December 2018, there is now a cheaper, faster and more efficient alternative—one that was suppressed for nearly a century but was legalized on a national scale when President Trump signed the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018.

This is the widespread cultivation of industrial hemp, the nonintoxicating form of cannabis grown for fiber, cloth, oil, food and other purposes. Hemp grows to 13 feet in 100 days, making it one of the fastest carbon dioxide-to-biomass conversion tools available. Industrial hemp has been proved to absorb more CO2 per hectare than any forest or commercial crop, making it the ideal carbon sink. It can be grown on a wide scale on nutrient-poor soils with very small amounts of water and no fertilizers.

Hemp products can promote biodiversity and reverse environmental pollution by replacing petrochemical-based plastics, which are now being dumped into the ocean at the rate of one garbage truck per minute. One million seabirds die each year from ingesting plastic, and up to 90% have plastic in their guts. Microplastic (resulting from the breakdown of larger pieces by sunlight and waves) and microbeads (used in body washes and facial cleansers) have been called the ocean’s smog. They absorb toxins in the water, enter the food chain and ultimately wind up in humans. To avoid all that, we can use plastic made from hemp, which is biodegradable and nontoxic.

Other environmental toxins come from the textile industry, which is second only to agriculture in the amount of pollution it creates and the voluminous amounts of water it uses. Hemp can be grown with minimal water, and hemp fabrics can be made without the use of toxic chemicals.

Environmental pollution from the burning of fossil fuels can also be reversed with hemp, which is more efficient and environmentally friendly than wheat and corn as a clean-burning biofuel.

Hemp cultivation also encourages biodiversity in the soil, by regenerating farmland that has long been depleted from the use of toxic chemicals. It is a “weed” and grows like one, ubiquitously, beating out other plants without pesticides or herbicides; and its long taproot holds the soil, channeling moisture deeper into it. Unlike most forestry projects, hemp can be grown on existing agricultural land and included as part of a farm’s crop rotation, with positive effects on the yields and the profits from subsequent crops.

A Self-Funding Solution

Hemp cultivation is profitable in many other ways—so profitable that it is effectively a self-funding solution to the environmental crisis. According to a Forbes piece titled “Industrial Hemp Is the Answer to Petrochemical Dependency,” crop yields from hemp can range from $20,000 to $50,000 per acre. Its widespread cultivation can happen without government subsidies. Investment in research, development and incentives would speed the process, but market forces will propel these transformations even if Congress fails to act. All farmers need for incentive is a market for the products, which hemp legalization has provided. Due to the crop’s century-long suppression, the infrastructure to capitalize on its diverse uses still needs to be developed, but the infrastructure should come with the newly opened markets.

Hemp can break our dependency on petrochemicals, not only for fuel but for plastics, textiles, construction materials and much more. It has actually been grown for industrial and medicinal purposes for millennia, and today it is legally grown for industrial use in hundreds of countries outside the U.S.

Just after the nationwide ban established by the Marihuana Tax Act in 1937, an article in Popular Mechanics claimed it was a billion-dollar crop (the equivalent of about $16 billion today), useful in 25,000 products ranging from dynamite to cellophane. New uses continue to be found, including eliminating smog from fuels, creating a cleaner energy source that can replace nuclear power, removing radioactive water from the soil and providing a very nutritious food source for humans and animals. Cannabidiol (CBD), a nonpsychoactive derivative of hemp, has recently been shown to help curb opioid addiction, now a national epidemic.

Hemp can also help save our shrinking forests by eliminating the need to clear-cut them for paper pulp. One acre planted in hemp produces as much pulp as 4.1 acres of trees, according to the USDA; and unlike trees, hemp can be harvested two or three times a year. Hemp paper is also finer, stronger and lasts longer than wood-based paper. Benjamin Franklin’s paper mill used hemp. Until 1883, it was one of the largest agricultural crops (some say the largest), and 80–90% of all paper in the world was made from it. It was also the material from which most fabric, soap, fuel and fiber were made; and it was an essential resource for any country with a shipping industry, since sails were made from it. In early America, growing hemp was considered so important that it was illegal for farmers not to grow it. Hemp was legal tender from 1631 until the early 1800s, and taxes could even be paid with it.

Banned by the Competition?

The competitive threat to other industries of this supremely useful plant may have been a chief driver of its apparently groundless criminalization in the 1930s. Hemp is not marijuana and is so low in psychoactive components that it cannot produce a marijuana “high.” It was banned for nearly a century simply because it was in the same plant species as marijuana. Cannabis came under attack in the 1930s in all its forms. Why? Hemp competed not only with the lumber industry but with the oil, cotton, petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries. Many have speculated that it was suppressed by these powerful competitors.

William Randolf Hearst, the newspaper mogul, owned vast tracts of forest land, which he intended to use for making wood-pulp paper. Cheap hemp-based paper would make his forest investments a major money loser. Hearst was a master of “yellow journalism,” and a favorite target of his editorials was “reefer madness.” He was allied with the DuPont Corporation, which provided the chemicals to bleach and process the wood pulp used in the paper-making process. DuPont was also ready to introduce petroleum-based fibers such as nylon, and hemp fabrics competed with that new market.

In fact, hemp products threatened the entire petroleum industry. Henry Ford first designed his cars to run on alcohol from biofuels, but the criminalization of both alcohol and hemp forced him to switch to the dirtier, less efficient fossil fuels that dominate the industry today. A biofuel-based infrastructure would create a completely decentralized power grid, eliminating the giant monopolistic power companies. Communities could provide their own energy using easily renewable plants.

None of this is news. Hemp historians have been writing about the crop’s myriad uses and its senseless prohibition for decades. (See “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” by Jack Herer, 1992 and “Hemp for Victory: A Global Warming Solution” by Richard Davis, 2009.)

What is news is that hemp cultivation is finally legal across the country. The time is short to save the planet and its vanishing diversity of species. Rather than engaging in endless debates over carbon taxes and Silicon Valley style technological fixes, we need to be regenerating our soils, our forests and our oceans with nature’s own plant solutions.

How John Bolton Bamboozled the Brits Into Conflict With Iran

This piece first appeared in Informed Comment. 

Simon Tisdall at The Guardian explains the difference between Socialist Spain and the disorganized Conservatives in control of UK on foreign policy.

US national security adviser John Bolton tried to hoodwink both of them about the Grace I, a Panamanian-flagged oil tanker carrying Iranian petroleum through the Straits of Gibraltar. Spain monitored the tanker but declined to intervene because it remained in international waters. The EU position has been that unless ships headed for Syria came within 12 nautical miles of the European coast, they were helpless to take action because you can’t interfere with shipping through international waters.

Britain, in contrast, used its naval position in Gibraltar to seize the tanker in international waters on the grounds that it was headed to Syria, against which the European Union had declared an oil embargo.

There were three problems with the British reasoning, presumably that of Jeremy Hunt, British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and defeated candidate for prime minister. (Maybe also painfully inexperienced defense minister Penny Mordaunt, appointed in May):

First, the EU ban on oil sales to Syria concerned only EU member states.

Second, the Grace I was in international waters and seizing it is a form of piracy.

Third, there is no proof it was headed for Syria (which would not have been illegal in international law in any case).

Not only did Spain’s foreign minister, Josep Borrell, not fall for Bolton’s over-excited talking points, but he was withering about the British seizure of the tanker, since Spain does not recognize British claims on Gibraltar in the first place and wants decolonization.

That is, as Tisdall deliciously makes clear, Spain is siding with Iran against Britain on this issue.

Bolton and his fellow hawk secretary of state Mike Pompeo have been upset that the rest of the world did not line up with the US when it breached the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and slapped severe sanctions back on Iran (despite Iran’s faithful adherence to the terms of the deal). Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany (informally for the EU) were also signatories and stuck with the deal. France and Germany are even trying to find financial instruments to allow EU trade with Iran despite US opposition.

For Bolton to trick Hunt into seizing the Grace 1 shifts Britain toward the US side of the ledger and sets up a London-Tehran confrontation. Iran has already taken a couple of British tankers in the Gulf into custody to “inspect” them or on charges of smuggling. The UK is probably not willing to take military action in return, especially if Boris Johnson becomes PM tomorrow [update: he just, on Tuesday]. He has told Trump to his face that Britain won’t support military action against Iran.

But Bolton has tricked London into an adversarial posture toward Iran, with ratcheting tensions. And that is a big win for Iran War hawks around Trump. Trump allegedly believes (according to Jonathan Swan at Axios) that it doesn’t matter if he keeps these rabid dogs around him, because he decides if there is war. But Trump is a fool and does not realize that the hawks can put him in a headlock from which he can only escape by looking manly and taking military action. Trump should ask Jeremy Hunt about that.

 

‘The Great Hack’ Shows How Facebook Got Your Number

When filmmaker Jehane Noujaim and producer made “The Square,” their Oscar-nominated documentary about the 2012 Arab Spring uprising in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, part of their focus was on the power of social media in organizing a virtual public square that unified protesters and enabled free speech. Six years later, their new film, “The Great Hack,” finds the social media public square becoming a public sewer, where vitriol and lies are coin of the realm. Exhibit No. 1 is the sordid saga of Cambridge Analytica, the controversial consulting firm that used unauthorized personal data gleaned from Facebook.

“Cambridge Analytica was practicing voter suppression, different kinds of methods of manipulating the population of these different countries in the Third World and then bringing it back to the U.S. and the U.K. in order to influence those populations,” Amer, the film’s co-director, told Truthdig.

“Facebook should be seen as being part of the largest corporate negligence case in American history,” he said. “The leak of Facebook data of 100 million-plus users—we don’t see it, so we don’t feel it, but what’s happening in the psy-ops world is a new era of colonization. He or she that collects the most up-to-date data on the most people on the planet and shows the ability to influence their behavior, wins.”

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Pro-War Press, Not Cambridge Analytica, Is the Real Scandal



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Facebook's Authoritarian Money Grab



by Jacob Bacharach

It began with The Guardian reporter Carole Cadwalladr, who was investigating Cambridge Analytica’s work on behalf of the Brexit campaign. Former employee Christopher Wylie turned out to be the whistleblower she needed to uncover where company CEO Alexander Nix was getting his vaunted 5,000 data points on every U.S. voter. It was a claim Nix made while working for the  2016 Trump campaign and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign before that.

Wylie appears in an interview, but he was reluctant to commit to the filmmakers. Instead, he recommended that they contact Cambridge Analytica’s former director of business, Brittany Kaiser, who worked on the campaign of former presidential candidate Howard Dean and later for Barack Obama until she was hired by the data firm. At that point, Cambridge Analytica’s board included Trump strategist Steve Bannon and was funded by the Mercer family. While partying in Ibiza on her 30th birthday, Kaiser learned she was being summoned by the Mueller investigation team, having gone from being a witness to becoming a person of interest. It was later revealed that she had met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Cambridge Analytica began as an app, developed by Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan, that distributed a personality questionnaire to users from which researchers gleaned data to build predictive personality profiles. Field-tested on hundreds of thousands of Facebook users, Cambridge Analytica mined personal information not only from those who had filled out the questionnaire, but from all of their friends, who hadn’t. As a result, the company was able to reap data from millions of users.

The company then weaponized the information, first identifying “persuadables” based on the questionnaire, then targeting them with aggressive messaging to get them to vote in a predetermined way. In tight races in the 2016 presidential election, such as those in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, this tactic may have helped tip the balance.

“It’s about transparency,” Noujaim said. “Do people who are taking these quizzes know their personalities are being tested and collected in order for a company to figure out if you are highly neurotic and highly open, and whether you live in a particular state and therefore whether you should be targeted with fear-based ads in order to make you fearful about issues that are exaggerated and cause you to vote in a certain way, or cause you not to vote at all—actual voter suppression tactics? It’s people understanding what the stakes are and what it means to have so many of your decisions, as moral human beings, being influenced by an amoral algorithm that basically wants you to buy more and stay online more.”

The inciting event in the movie, which opens in theaters and on Netflix starting Wednesday, is a lawsuit brought by David Carroll, a professor of media design at The New School in New York. Under British law, Carroll has the right to access whatever personal information Cambridge Analytica has on him. In the end, the company pleaded guilty—not for stealing data or for subversion of the political process, but for defying a government order to hand over Carroll’s data.

The reason the case wasn’t filed in the U.S. is because no U.S. laws were broken. Even so, Cambridge Analytica shut its doors in May 2018, while Alexander Nix continues to be a star within the industry. Even though tech companies are coming under investigation—including Alphabet Inc.’s Google—and some lawmakers and advocates have muttered threats about rolling back liability protections granted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act for platforms that post incendiary third-party messages, no legislation has been proposed yet. That means the 2020 election will likely be a social media free-for-all.

“Right now, data has been completely unregulated,” Amer said. “It’s not Cambridge Analytica’s fault that the American election is the biggest election business in the world. It’s not Cambridge Analytica’s fault that the democratic process has been commoditized, in that you can buy, trade and sell different nodes within it. It’s not Cambridge Analytica’s fault that we all agreed to give up all of our data and privacy in the name of connectivity, in exchange for an admission fee. These are not things that Cambridge Analytica created. Cambridge Analytica is just a company taking advantage of the situation and pursuing the American dream of becoming a billion-dollar company.”

Despite having handed over the personal data of millions of users without their consent, Facebook hasn’t broken any laws either. Nor is it outlawed for withholding information on those who post deliberately incendiary and racist messages. When asked to appear before Parliament regarding Cambridge Analytica’s role in the Brexit campaign, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg refused.

“Facebook has shown that it feels it is above the law of nations,” Amer said. “We should be asking Facebook: Have they incentivized polarization because it keeps people connected and checking more?”

With legal and social acquiescence, personal data from the Department of Motor Vehicles might wind up in the hands of auto insurers, or medical data in the hands of health insurers. “It’s about the pendulum of technology, that we assumed only swung to the side of progress, swinging the other way. The same way that credit scores were so important for accounting in a society based on credit transactions and debt, we’re now entering a place where our data is going to be a barometer for us. And the question is, did we really consent to that?” Amer said. “It’s a constant battle for the hearts and minds, and those who have the leverage and persuasion are always going to be desired in the era of data wars. That’s the new battleground.”

Schools Reject Offer to Pay Students’ Late Lunch Bills, CEO Says

The president of a Pennsylvania school board whose district had warned parents behind on lunch bills that their children could end up in foster care has rejected a CEO’s offer to cover the cost, the businessman said Tuesday.

Todd Carmichael, chief executive and co-founder of Philadelphia-based La Colombe Coffee, said he offered to give Wyoming Valley West School District $22,000 to wipe out bills that generated the recent warning letter to parents.

But school board President Joseph Mazur rejected the offer during a phone conversation Monday, Carmichael spokesman Aren Platt said Tuesday. Mazur argued that money is owed by parents who can afford to pay, Platt said.

“The position of Mr. Carmichael is, irrespective of affluence, irrespective of need, he just wants to wipe away this debt,” Platt said.

Mazur did not return a phone message left at his home. Wyoming Valley West’s solicitor, Charles Coslett, said he did not know what the school board plans to do.

“I don’t know what my client’s intention is at this point,” Coslett said. “That’s the end of the line.”

In a letter sent to papers in the Wilkes-Barre area on Monday, Carmichael said his offer was motivated in part because he received free meals as a child growing up near Spokane, Washington.

“I know what it means to be hungry,” Carmichael wrote. “I know what it means to feel shame for not being able to afford food.”

Carmichael said Tuesday in a phone interview that his offer stands.

“I’m just going to hold on and I’m going to continue to be optimistic and see if we can’t do something,” Carmichael said. “Even if you’re a difficult person, we’re in. What can we do?”

The letters from the school district warned parents that they “can be sent to dependency court for neglecting your child’s right to food,” and that the children could be removed and placed in foster care.

Child welfare authorities have told the district that Luzerne County does not run its foster system that way.

Luzerne County’s manager and child welfare agency director wrote to Superintendent Irvin DeRemer, demanding the district stop making what it called false claims. DeRemer has not returned messages in recent days.

In an editorial Tuesday, the Times-Tribune of Scranton called the threats shameful and an act of hubris. The paper urged lawmakers and the state Department of Education to “outlaw such outlandish conduct by law and regulation covering lunch debt collection.”

Carmichael said he was struggling to understand why district officials would not welcome his help.

“Why prevent it?” he said.

School officials considered serving peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to students with overdue accounts but received legal advice warning against it, the district’s federal programs director, Joseph Muth, has said.

School district officials have said they planned other ways to get the lunch money, such as filing a district court complaint or placing liens on properties.

In the coming school year, Wyoming Valley West will qualify for funding to provide free lunches to all students.

Justice Department Launches Antitrust Probe of Big Tech

The U.S. Department of Justice opened a sweeping antitrust investigation of big technology companies and whether their online platforms have hurt competition, suppressed innovation or otherwise harmed consumers.

It comes as a growing number of lawmakers have called for stricter regulation or even breaking up of the big tech companies, which have come under intense scrutiny following a series of scandals that compromised users’ privacy.

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President Donald Trump also has relentlessly criticized the big tech companies by name in recent months. He frequently asserts, without evidence, that companies such as Facebook and Google are biased against him and conservative politicians.

The Justice Department did not name specific companies in its announcement.

The focus of the investigation closely mirrors a bipartisan probe of Big Tech undertaken by the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. Its chairman, Rep. David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat, has sharply criticized the conduct of Silicon Valley giants and said legislative or regulatory changes may be needed. He has called breaking up the companies a last resort.

Major tech companies already facing that congressional scrutiny declined to comment on the Justice Department’s probe.

Amazon had no comment. Facebook also did not have an immediate comment.

Google directed requests for comments to the testimony its director of economic policy, Adam Cohen, made to the House Judiciary Committee last week. Cohen reiterated the company’s benefits to consumers.

Apple referred to comments from CEO Tim Cook, who told CBS last month he doesn’t think “anybody reasonable” would call Apple a monopoly.

Shares of Facebook, Amazon and Apple were down slightly in after-hours trading.

One antitrust expert believes the DOJ investigation may prompt regulators to interpret U.S. competition law in new ways.

University of Pennsylvania law professor Herbert Hovenkamp said the companies may have been their abusing market power by collectively buying hundreds of startups in recent years to devour their technology and prevent them from growing into formidable rivals.

Traditionally, antitrust regulators have only sought to block acquisitions involving large companies in adjacent markets. But Hovenkamp says U.S. antitrust law is broad enough for regulators to consider the potential damage wrought by relatively small deals, too.

Earlier, the Washington Post reported that the Federal Trade Commission will allege that Facebook misled users about its privacy practices as part of an expected settlement of its 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The federal business watchdog will reportedly find that Facebook deceived users about how it handled phone numbers it asked for as part of a security feature and provided insufficient information about how to turn off a facial recognition tool for photos.

Advertisers were reportedly able to target users who provided their phone number as part of a two-factor authentication security feature.

The FTC didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment. Facebook had no comment.

Pelosi Blasted for Deal That Enables GOP to Thwart Progressive Plan

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may have helped temporarily avert a looming fiscal crisis on Monday by striking a budget deal with the Trump administration, but progressives warned the agreement hands Republicans power to kneecap the next president’s agenda by suspending the debt ceiling until after the 2020 elections.

The debt ceiling is the legislative limit on how much the federal government can borrow. If the ceiling is not raised, the U.S. would risk defaulting on its debts and potentially sparking a global financial crisis.

Former congressional staffers and other critics said that by agreeing to suspend the debt ceiling until 2021, Pelosi gave Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) the ability to extract massive spending cuts and other concessions from a Democratic president in exchange for raising the debt limit.

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The ‘Pelosi Problem’ Runs Deep



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Paul Blest of Splinter wrote Tuesday that “if the eventual Democratic presidential nominee defeats Trump in 2020, this will be one of the things they have to deal with in their first year in office.”

“If you really listen,” Blest wrote, “you can almost hear [Texas Sen.] Ted Cruz yelling on the floor of the Senate that Congress shouldn’t raise the debt limit by one more dollar unless President Bernie Sanders promises to drop his demand for Medicare for All.”

In the lead-up to Pelosi’s agreement with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, a number of commentators called for abolition of the debt ceiling, arguing it is an arbitrary and “absolutely insane” restriction that serves no legitimate purpose.

Citing a Democratic source close to the negotiations, Blest reported that “the possibility of ending the debt ceiling came up and ‘interest was expressed,’ [but] it was decided that it was ‘too difficult’ to do in this particular agreement.”

“The biggest win of Pelosi’s second stint as Speaker so far was holding the line on the government shutdown earlier this year,” Blest wrote. “So, Pelosi knows how to use leverage; she just didn’t push hard enough this time, for whatever reason.”

Adam Jentleson, who served as deputy chief of staff to former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, echoed Blest’s fears about the budget deal in an interview with Bloomberg, which reported Tuesday that 2020 Democratic presidential candidates are “quietly expressing consternation” that the agreement could set them up for a disastrous first year in the White House.

“The timing of it really bugs me,” said Jentleson. “It sets up a crisis of the first year of the next president’s administration. We’re letting them light the fuse on another bomb and place it squarely in the middle of the next president’s first year in office.”

The Democratic leadership, said Jentleson, handed Republicans—who are favored to hold the Senate in 2020—”a major weapon” to completely derail progressive agenda items that 2020 Democrats have placed at the center of their White House bids.

As Jentleson pointed out on Twitter, Republicans weaponized the debt ceiling against former President Barack Obama in 2011:

 

In 2011 Republicans used the debt ceiling to cripple Obama and impose trillions in cuts. Today, Dem leaders agreed to lift the debt ceiling for the remainder of Trump’s presidency but reimpose it in 2021, when Republicans could again use it to cripple a Democratic president. https://t.co/fHH2m25IkB

— Adam Jentleson

American Held by ICE for Almost a Month Finally Released

Francisco Erwin Galicia, 18, an American who was held in immigration custody for almost a month, was released Tuesday afternoon.

“I’m so thankful Francisco is free and he can sleep at home tonight and see his mom,” Claudia Galan, Galicia’s attorney, told The Associated Press.

Galicia, a high school senior, his brother, and a few friends were heading to a college soccer team tryout on June 27 when their car was stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint in Falfurrias, Texas. Border agents asked for papers, and Galicia provided a wallet-sized version of his Texas birth certificate, Texas ID card and Social Security card. U.S. Customs and Enforcement officials detained him anyway, claiming that the documents could be fake. “He’s been here all his life,” Galan told The Washington Post. But, she said, “When Border Patrol checked his documents, they just didn’t believe they were real. They kept telling him they were fake.”

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Galicia was “one of hundreds of American citizens in recent years who, mistakenly targeted by federal immigration authorities, have been forced to prove their citizenship while the threat of deportation hangs over their head,” the Post writes. The Los Angeles Times reported last year that since 2012, ICE has had to release 1,480 people from custody because it turned out they were in fact American citizens.

Galan told the Associated Press that her client was “absolutely” a victim of racial profiling, given that all the occupants of the car were Latinx.

The Post suggests that ICE may not have been able to differentiate between the people in the car who did have legal status, and those who did not. Galicia’s brother, Marlon, does not have legal status, but told the Dallas Morning News that he previously passed Border Patrol checkpoints on school trips with no problems. When he was asked to show travel documents in June, Marlon only had a Texas ID. He was voluntary deported and spoke to the News from Reynosa, Mexico, where he is staying with his grandmother.

“We were confident that we’d be able to pass. We were going to do something good for our futures,” he told the News. “I didn’t imagine this could happen, and now I’m so sad that I’m not with my family.”

The Post reports that Francisco “languished for weeks” in a Customs and Border Patrol facility before being moved to an ICE facility in Pearsall, Texas, where he was finally able to make collect calls to his mother. Complicating his situation was the fact that Galicia’s mother (who is not a U.S. citizen) once took out a tourist visa for him, which erroneously said that he was born in Mexico, Galan said. The Post explains that his mother “took out the tourist visa for her son because she saw it as the only way he could travel back and forth across the border to visit family.”

The Dallas Morning News report got the attention of elected officials, including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who tweeted:

CBP is detaining *American citizens.*

How would you feel trapped in a border camp, where guards wear face masks because the human odor is so strong?

When we allow the rights of some to be violated, the rights of all are not far behind. https://t.co/U4NFQtv8F3

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 23, 2019

Sanjuana Galicia, Francisco’s mother, told the Dallas Morning News that ICE informed her Tuesday afternoon that they had determined Francisco’s documents were valid. “The first thing he said to me was, ‘Mommy, they let me go. I’m free,’ ” Sanjuana said.

Neither ICE nor Customs and Border Patrol responded to the Morning News’ requests for comments on the release. Marlon remains in Mexico.