Chris Hedges's Blog, page 256

States Bring Price-Fixing Suit Against Generic Drug Makers

BOSTON—Attorneys general from more than 40 states are alleging the nation’s largest generic drug manufacturers conspired to artificially inflate and manipulate prices for more than 100 different generic drugs, including treatments for diabetes, cancer, arthritis and other medical conditions.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Connecticut on Friday, also names 15 individual senior executives responsible for sales, marketing and pricing.

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, a Democrat, said investigators obtained evidence implicating 20 firms.

“We have hard evidence that shows the generic drug industry perpetrated a multibillion-dollar fraud on the American people,” Tong said. “We have emails, text messages, telephone records and former company insiders that we believe will prove a multi-year conspiracy to fix prices and divide market share for huge numbers of generic drugs.”

Tong said the investigation had uncovered a primary reason why the cost of health care — and specifically generic prescription drugs — has been so high in this country.

The surging prices of prescription drugs have drawn the attention of a number of politicians across the political spectrum from President Donald Trump to liberal Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

The new court suit was the second that has been filed in the investigation. The first, filed in 2016, named 18 corporate defendants and two individual defendants. Two former drug company executives entered into settlement agreements and are cooperating with the attorneys general in the investigation.

A spokesman for one of the companies named in the suit, Teva Pharmaceuticals USA Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Israeli-based Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd, said Teva hasn’t engaged in any conduct that would lead to civil or criminal liability.

“The allegations in this new complaint, and in the litigation more generally, are just that — allegations,” Kelley Dougherty, a Teva vice president, said in a statement Saturday. “The company delivers high-quality medicines to patients around the world and is committed to complying with all applicable laws and regulations in doing so.”

Investigators said the drugs covered in the suit account for billions of dollars of sales in the United States.

The suit was filed by 43 states and Puerto Rico with Connecticut taking the lead in the probe.

The suit alleges that for many years these makers of generic drugs had operated under an agreement not to compete with each other and to settle instead for what these companies referred to as a “fair share” of the market to avoid pushing prices down through competition.

But by 2012, the suit says that Teva and the other companies decided to “take this understanding to the next level.” It alleges that “Teva and its co-conspirators embarked on one of the most egregious and damaging price-fixing conspiracies in the history of the United States.”

The suit says that the companies sought not only to maintain their “fair share” of the generic drug market but also to “significantly raise prices on as many drugs as possible.”

To accomplish this goal, the suit says that Teva selected a core group of competitors with which it already had “very profitable collusive relationships,” and developed understandings to lead and follow each other’s price increases.

The suit contends that this resulted in “many billions of dollars of harm to the national economy over a period of several years.”

During a 19-month period beginning in July 2013, the suit says Teva significantly raised prices on approximately 112 different generic drugs and on at least 86 of those drugs colluded with a group it referred to as “high quality” competitors.

The suit says that the size of the price increases varied but was over 1,000% for a number of the drugs.

The suit says that the defendants knew their conduct was unlawful and usually chose to communicate in person or by cell phone “in an attempt to avoid creating a written record of their illegal conduct.”

“When communications were reduced to writing or text messages, defendants often took overt and calculated steps to destroy evidence of those communications,” according to the suit.

The civil suit is asking for a finding that the defendants’ actions violated federal and state antitrust and consumer protection laws and is seeking a permanent injunction preventing the companies from continuing the conduct.

The suit also seeks reimbursement of profits from the actions and damages to be paid to the state agencies and consumers who were harmed by the drug company practices.

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Crutsinger reported from Washington.

Trump Lawyer Giuliani Threatens, Then Abandons, Ukraine Trip

NEW YORK—Democrats denounced a plan by President Donald Trump’s personal attorney to push Ukraine to open investigations that he hopes could benefit Trump politically, saying it was an overt attempt to recruit foreign help to influence a U.S. election.

But lawyer Rudy Giuliani has scrapped plans to visit Ukraine, citing concerns about who he would be dealing with there.

“I’ve decided … I’m not going to go to the Ukraine,” Giuliani told Fox News on Friday night. “I’m not going to go because I think I’m walking into a group of people that are enemies of the president … in some cases enemies of the United States, and in one case an already convicted person who has been found to be involved in assisting the Democrats with the 2016 election.”

Giuliani had said earlier that he would to travel to Kiev in the coming days to urge the government to investigate the origins of special counsel Robert Mueller’s recently concluded probe into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, and the involvement of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.

Joe Biden is the early Democratic front-runner to challenge Trump in the 2020 election. The Biden campaign has denied that Biden or his son, Hunter, did anything improper.

Giuliani’s plan had seemed poised to create an unprecedented moment — a lawyer for the American president seeking foreign assistance in trying to damage political rivals. To Democrats, it was a blatant evocation of Russia’s meddling on behalf of Trump when he defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016

“It’s stunning that the Trump administration is going down the same tragic path they did in 2016 seeking help from a foreign government again to influence an American presidential election. It’s appalling,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He said Trump allies were indicating, “We’re going to do everything short of what’s downright criminal. Ethics don’t matter. Patriotism doesn’t matter.”

Giuliani, a former New York City mayor who often acted as a smokescreen for Trump during the Mueller probe, pushed back against the criticism.

“Explain to me why Biden shouldn’t be investigated if his son got millions from a Russian loving crooked Ukrainian oligarch while He was VP and point man for Ukraine,” Giuliani tweeted at Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who criticized him. “Ukrainians are investigating and your fellow Dems are interfering. Election is 17 months away. Let’s answer it now.”

Giuliani’s trip, first reported by The New York Times, would have been the most high-profile effort yet by Republicans to call attention to growing talking points in conservative circles. They are trying to undermine the special counsel’s investigation, call into question the case against Paul Manafort, Trump’s imprisoned former campaign chairman, and wound Joe Biden.

Trump and Giuliani have urged scrutiny of Hunter Biden and have questions about whether Joe Biden helped oust a Ukrainian prosecutor whose office was investigating the oligarch behind the company that paid Hunter Biden. Some Trump allies have suggested they can tarnish Joe Biden with questions about corruption, founded or not, much like they did to Clinton in 2016.

Giuliani has said he updated the president about his findings on Ukraine, a nation deeply reliant on the Trump administration for U.S. military and financial aid.

“I’m hearing it’s a major scandal, major problem,” Trump said on Fox News recently. “I hope for (Biden) it is fake news. I don’t think it is.”

The president has also tried to push claims that Ukrainian officials tried to help Clinton by focusing attention on Manafort’s business in Ukraine. That attention forced Manafort to resign from the campaign, and he was later convicted of financial crimes and sentenced to prison. Ukrainian officials have denied involvement, but Trump has latched onto the idea that Kiev “colluded” with Democrats and that the origins of Mueller’s probe were fraudulent.

Trump’s re-election campaign distanced itself from Giuliani’s efforts, saying it had nothing to do with the lawyer’s inquiry.

Still, the episode could trigger uncomfortable questions about foreign entanglements for the White House, which is still grappling with the aftermath of Mueller’s inquiry.

Mueller did not conclude that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia and did not determine whether or not Trump obstructed justice.

But House Democrats are pushing the inquiry further on a number of fronts, including issuing subpoenas for the probe’s witnesses and documents. Trump this week announced that he would invoke executive privilege to shield the material, certain to prompt a lengthy legal fight.

Throughout the investigation, Giuliani attacked Mueller’s credibility and often tried to change the public discourse by advancing conspiracy theories about the special counsel or Democratic investigators. In the probe’s final days, he began to zero in on the possible Ukraine connection.

___

Follow Lemire on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@JonLemire

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Associated Press video journalist Padmananda Rama in Washington contributed to this report.

Chinese Envoy Says U.S. Trade Talks Continue After Tariffs Hike

BEIJING—China’s leading envoy to trade talks in Washington says the failure to strike a deal in the tariffs war with the U.S. was “just a small setback” and negotiations will continue despite increases in import duties on American imports from China.

In comments to reporters before he left Washington for Beijing on Friday, Vice Premier Liu He said he was cautiously optimistic but that a deal would require the Trump administration to agree to end the punitive tariffs it has imposed on billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese goods.

In comments carried by China’s state-run CCTV, Liu said the remaining differences are crucial ones having to do with principles, “and we will make no concessions on matters of principle.”

Still, he said he did not believe the negotiations had broken down.

“On the contrary, I think it is just a small setback in the talks between two countries, which is inevitable,” Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV showed him as saying.

Liu said it was “China’s opinion that the tariffs are the starting point of the trade friction and must be totally lifted if a deal is reached.”

The Trump administration raised tariffs on billions of dollars of Chinese goods to 25% from 10% on Friday. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said the U.S. was preparing to expand those tariffs to cover $300 billion of Chinese products that aren’t already facing import taxes, or virtually everything imported from China.

Liu also said the two sides were disagreeing over the amount of goods China would pledge to purchase from the U.S. to help reduce the American trade deficit.

“We think this is a very serious issue and we cannot easily change our minds,” he said.

Liu sought to downplay the scale and impact of the dispute, saying that China was a strong nation and would surmount any problems caused by the conflict.

“We just had differences on the wording in certain documents and we hoped to solve the differences,” he said. “Therefore, we think it unnecessary to make an overreaction to it.”

Bolton Is Spinning Israeli ‘Intelligence’ to Push for War Against Iran

John Bolton has gotten away with a dangerous deception. The national security adviser’s announcement Sunday that the Pentagon has deployed air and naval forces to the Middle East, which he combined with a threat to Iran, points to a new maneuver to prepare the ground for an incident that could justify a retaliatory attack against Iran.

Bolton presented his threat and the deployments as a response to alleged intelligence about a possible Iranian attack on U.S. targets in the Middle East. But what has emerged indicates that the alleged intelligence does not actually reflect any dramatic new information or analysis from the U.S. intelligence community. Instead, it has all the hallmarks of a highly political case concocted by Bolton.

Further underscoring the deceptive character of Bolton’s maneuver is evidence that senior Israeli national security officials played a key role in creating the alleged intelligence rationale for the case.

The new initiative follows an audacious ruse carried out last fall by Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, detailed in Truthdig in February, to cast the firing of a few mortar rounds in the vicinity of the U.S. Embassy and a consulate in Iraq as evidence of an effort by Tehran to harm U.S. diplomats. Bolton exploited that opportunity to press Pentagon officials to provide retaliatory military options, which they did, reluctantly.

Bolton and Pompeo thus established a policy that the Trump administration would hold Iran responsible for any incident involving forces supported by Iran that could be portrayed as an attack on either U.S. personnel or U.S. “interests.”

Bolton’s one-paragraph statement on Sunday considerably broadened that policy. It repeated the previously stated principle that the United States will respond to any alleged attack, whether by Iranian forces or by what the administration calls “proxy” forces. But it added yet another major point to Trump administration policy: “a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force [emphasis added].”

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That language represents an obvious move by Bolton to create potential options for U.S. retaliation against Iran for a real or alleged attack by “proxy forces” on Israeli or Saudi forces or “interests.” Such a commitment to go to war with Iran over incidents related to Israeli or Saudi conflicts should be the subject of a major debate in the press and in Congress. Thus far, it has somehow escaped notice.

Significantly, on a flight to Finland on Sunday, Pompeo repeated the threat he made last September to respond to any attack by “proxy forces” on U.S. “interests.” He made no reference to possible attacks against “allies.”

Bolton and his staff claimed to the news media that what he characterizes as “troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” are based on “intelligence.” Media reports about Bolton’s claim suggest, however, that his dramatic warning is not based on either U.S. intelligence reporting or analysis.

Citing “U.S. officials,” The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the alleged intelligence “showed that Iran drew up plans to target U.S. forces in Iraq and possibly Syria, to orchestrate attacks in the Bab el-Mandeb strait near Yemen through proxies and in the Personal Gulf with its own armed drones.”

But in the very next paragraph, the report quotes an official saying it is “unclear whether the new intelligence indicated operations Tehran planned to carry out imminently or contingency preparations in the case U.S.-Iran tensions erupted into hostilities.”

A Defense Department source said the intelligence showed “a change in behavior that could be interpreted to foreshadow an attack on American forces or interests,” according to The New York Times’ story on the matter. But the source didn’t actually say that any emerging intelligence had led to such a conclusion or even that any U.S. intelligence official has come to that conclusion.

The timing of the alleged new intelligence also suggests that Bolton’s claim is false. “As recently as last week there were no obvious sign of a new threat,” The Wall Street Journal reported. The New York Times similarly reported that “several Defense officials” said “as recently as last Friday they have had not seen reason to change the American military’s posture in the region.”

Normally, it would require intelligence from either a highly credible source within the Iranian government or an intercept of a sensitive communication from Iran to justify this kind of accusation. But no news outlet has brought word that any such spectacular new intelligence has found its way to the White House or the Pentagon.

The Journal’s report revealed, moreover, that Bolton has only a “fresh intelligence assessment” rather than any new intelligence report. That “assessment” is clearly not a product of the intelligence community, which would have taken at least several days to arrive at such a fundamental reinterpretation of Iranian intentions. The mysterious new “assessment” was evidently unknown outside Bolton’s office before Bolton swung into action last weekend.

We now know, in fact, that the sources behind Bolton’s claim were Israel’s national security adviser and intelligence agency. Axios published a report Monday by leading Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, who covers national security for Israel’s Channel 13, revealing that a delegation of senior Israeli officials had given Bolton “information” about “possible Iranian plots against the U.S. or its allies in the Gulf” two weeks earlier.

The Israeli delegation, led by national security adviser Meir Ben Shabbat, met with Bolton and other unnamed officials in the White House, according to Ravid, to discuss possible Iranian plans. Bolton himself tweeted on April 15 about his meeting with Shabbat:

Great meeting with Israeli National Security Advisor Meir Ben-Shabbat today. The close United States-Israel strategic partnership reflects the tremendous strength of the ties between our governments and the citizens of our two allied countries. pic.twitter.com/yEMQaFpHVx

— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) April 15, 2019

Israeli officials told Ravid that they understood that “intelligence, gathered by the Mossad intelligence agency, was part of the reason for Bolton’s announcement.” What Ravid’s official sources told him reveals, however, that what the Israelis provided to Bolton was not really new intelligence at all.; it consisted of several scenarios for what the Iranians might be planning, according one Israeli official.

“It is still unclear to us what the Iranians are trying to do and how they are planning to do it,” the Israeli official told Ravid, “but it is clear to us that the Iranian temperature is on the rise as a result of the growing U.S. pressure campaign against them, and that they are considering retaliating against U.S. interests in the Gulf.”

That revelation explains the lack of evidence of either genuine U.S. intelligence reporting or proper assessment to support Bolton’s statement.

Bolton is an old hand at using allegedly damning intelligence on Iran to advance a plan of aggressive U.S. war. In 2003-04, he leaked satellite photographs of specific sites in Iran’s Parchin military complex to the press, claiming those images provided evidence of covert Iranian nuclear weapons-related experiments—even though they showed nothing of the sort. He then tried to pressure International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei to insist on an inspection of the sites. When ElBaradei finally relented, he found nothing in that inspection to support Bolton’s claim.

Bolton’s deceptive maneuver has the effect of increasing the range of contingencies that would trigger a U.S. strike on Iran and represent a major advance toward his long-declared intention to attack it. More alarmingly, however, some media outlets have reported his claims without any serious questioning.

Given the violent struggles in Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Israel itself, Bolton and the Netanyahu government will be able to portray an incident as an attack by Shiite militias, the Houthis or Hamas on Israeli, Saudi or U.S. “interests,” just as Bolton and Pompeo did last fall. That, in turn, would offer an opportunity for urging Trump to approve a strike against one or more Iranian military targets.

Even more alarming is that both acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan and new CENTCOM commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie have signed up for the Bolton initiative. That means that the Pentagon and military leaders can no longer be counted on to oppose such a war, as they did in 2007, when Vice President Dick Cheney pushed unsuccessfully for a plan to retaliate against a future Iraqi militia attack on U.S. troops in Iraq.

The United States is in danger of falling for yet another war ruse as malignant as those that led Congress and the mainstream media to accept the invasion of Iraq or the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

Cuba to Ration Food in Wake of Economic Crisis

HAVANA—The Cuban government says it will begin rationing chicken, eggs, rice, beans, soap and other basic products in the face of a grave economic crisis.

Commerce Minister Betsy Díaz Velázquez told the state-run Cuban News Agency Friday that various forms of rationing would be employed in order to deal with shortages of staple foods. She blamed the hardening of the U.S. trade embargo by the Trump administration. Economists give equal or greater blame to a plunge in aid from Venezuela.

Food stores in Cuba are government-run and sell products ranging from highly subsidized to wildly overpriced by global standards. She said chicken will now be sold in limited quantities, as will low-priced soap, eggs, rice, beans, lentils and sausages. High-priced goods appear to be unaffected, with the exception of chicken.

The Trump Administration Is Manufacturing an Iran Crisis

What follows is a conversation between professor Larry Wilkerson and Sharmini Peries of the Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

SHARMINI PERIES It’s The Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore. The United States is sending the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln into the Persian Gulf, according to a statement that the National Security Adviser John Bolton released on Monday. Bolton’s statement says that the purpose of the deployment is in response to a number of the troubling and escalatory indications and warnings and to send a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attack on the United States’ interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force. Now, neither the White House nor the Pentagon officials clarified what kind of escalatory warnings had been received by the Trump administration. Now the previous week on Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace, the Iranian Foreign Minister gave an interview in which he accused Bolton of having vested interests in fomenting a war against Iran. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the following.

MOHAMMAD JAVAD ZARIF Mr. Bolton has said publicly before he became National Security Adviser in a rally that was organized by an Iranian terrorist organization that was on the list of terror groups by the United States State Department and Mr. Bolton was on the payroll, that he would celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Tehran with that terrorist organization. He is on the record, after receiving $50,000 to say that. He has said it again as National Security Adviser.

SHARMINI PERIES And when Chris Wallace asked Bolton in a later interview about these allegations, here’s what Bolton said.

JOHN BOLTON It’s completely ridiculous. I think what that interview showed was a carefully prepared propaganda script by the Iranians. This is their effort to try and sow disinformation in the American body politic. The fact is, the president’s policy on Iran has been clear well before I arrived in the administration. It is to put maximum pressure on the regime to get it to change its behavior and I think it’s working and I think that’s what they’re worried about.

CHRIS WALLACE Well, Zarif is right about one thing. In 2017, as he said, you did give a speech to MEK, an opposition group which at one point, not now, but at one point was listed as a terrorist group, in which you talked about regime change in Iran and celebrating in Tehran with MEK

JOHN BOLTON Let me just say, on the MEK, you know who took the MEK off the US list of foreign terrorist organizations? Hillary Clinton, that well-known right-wing Republican.

SHARMINI PERIES Joining me now to discuss all of this is Larry Wilkerson. He is the former Chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell and he’s a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary. Good to have you back, Larry.

LARRY WILKERSON Good to hear your voice, Sharmini.

SHARMINI PERIES All right, Larry. Let’s start with the most recent development here about the aircraft USS Abraham Lincoln going to the Persian Gulf. And of course, also tell us about this exchange between the Foreign Minister and John Bolton about the MEK starting with, what is the MEK?

LARRY WILKERSON I think John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, and a host of other Americans, have been using the MEK as a cash cow since we very stupidly took them off the terrorism list. The MEK is a cult; it is a terrorist cult. There’s no doubt about it, but we seem to have this uncanny knack of calling people terrorists when we don’t like them, and calling them freedom fighters when they are terrorists when we like them. And John Bolton has taken money from these people. I heard it was $30,000 a whack and several whacks, but he’s in a crowd of people who’ve done that. The interview was interesting that he did with Chris Wallace and that Zarif did. Both were performing, as you would expect, diplomats for various states to perform, in this case, John for us and Zarif for Iran. In other words, John’s comment that Zarif was a carefully prepared propaganda script, was absolute nonsense.

If you want to say that, you want to say that as much about John Bolton as you do Zarif. What it was, was two diplomats dueling with one another, one of them with a fairly full deck, and the other one with a deck missing of two cards. And that’s John Bolton because Bolton has said so many things in the past, as you’ve pointed out from time to time, celebrating on the 40th anniversary of the Iran revolution in Tehran with the MEK, for example. That’s what he claimed he would do. Well John, I’m sorry that anniversary has passed, and I haven’t seen you in Tehran. So this is two diplomats dealing with each other and they’re dealing with each other on the script I presuppose that Donald Trump has put out there for him, that Trump wants negotiations. He wants to sit down with Rouhani, Zarif, both of them, whatever, and he wants to resume negotiations so he can leap up from the chair and say, look I got a better deal than President Obama. He wants to do a Kim Jong-un moment with Rouhani and Zarif. He wants to do it really close to the election too because it would be a real kick for him electorally. So Bolton is operating, I think, under that script guidance, if you will, but at the same time, John wants more than that.

John wants regime change. And so, what worries me here, and your talk about the deployment of forces and so forth, and what might be going on with Saudi Arabia and with the UAE and with Israel, really worries me because Trump’s attention to detail is almost nonexistentant. And underneath that inattention, John Bolton—and with regard to Venezuela, for example Marco Rubio, Rick Scott from Florida, Elliott Abrams, and a host of people, are making mischief. While John Bolton and his crew are making mischief with regard to Iran, and that crew might include some of these military forces that are deploying there, if we’re looking for an incident, it’s not going to be hard to manufacture one. If we’re looking for a Tonkin Gulf, if we’re looking for a smoking gun and a mushroom cloud, you know, those kinds of propagandistic things, those kinds of made up things that lead to war, then this is a perfect scenario in which to find something like that. And that worries me. If Bolton’s operating under this inattention of the president and trying to do what he wants to do, that’s of deep concern to me.

SHARMINI PERIES All right. Now, John Bolton in his statement, Larry, indicated that this move of sending the carrier to the Gulf was so that it could protect US interests and US allies. What did he mean by that?

LARRY WILKERSON He’s looking for something. He’s trying to provoke something. He’s looking for an incident. That’s all I can see in it because Iran does not threaten a country to whom we are by Donald Trump’s own proud admission, selling a $100 billion worth of arms to. Iran does not threaten a country that has more of the United States military power arrayed around it, than any other place on the face of the earth— Al Udeid in Qatar, Khalifa in Saudi Arabia, Military City in Saudi Arabia, Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. How can Iran possibly—Americans need to get off the pot and think for a minute. How can this country threaten anything the United States has in the Strait, in the Gulf, or in the region, when we have so much superiority? And Saudi Arabia and other countries allied with us have so much superiority. Israel has so much superiority. It’s all make believe. It’s John Bolton make believe. It’s Mike Pompeo make believe. And the fact that Donald Trump goes along with it, makes him an idiot.

SHARMINI PERIES All right. And finally, Larry, the ongoing sanctions against Iran has caused a situation where people suffering, Iranian people suffering under floods and horrible natural conditions, aren’t able to receive aid at this point through international organizations like the Red Cross because of the economic sanctions. What do you make of that and what’s the precedent for this kind of behavior? Is there a possibility of lifting sanctions at a time of crises like this?

LARRY WILKERSON The precedent, Sharmini, is that this is the most brutal administration in the history of this country. I remember in 2003 when the earthquake hit—bam. You remember that thousands, thousands of casualties. People buried in the rubble. It was horrible. And I remember going into Secretary Powell and I just started to say, we need to send aid. We need to send out help, immediately. And Powell kind of smiled at me and I said, what are you smiling at? And he said, don’t worry about it, Larry; the president’s already on it. This was George W. Bush. We were already on it. We sent firemen. We sent search dogs. We sent search teams. We sent ambulances. We sent food. We sent water. We sent all manner of humanitarian support and we extended it over months in order to help the Iranians recover from that tragic earthquake.

This administration is looking at a country, Sharmini, that has received 70 percent of its annual rainfall in 13 days. Over 1,300 villages and communities have been devastated, flooded. People are in trouble. The government can’t possibly—we’ve been talking about this all along, Bolton talks about this all along, Pompeo talks about it. The government is not competent. It is not competent. That is true. It is not responding. The RGC is not responding. They’re not doing what they should be doing for their people, partly because, if not largely because, they’re incompetent. We should be helping. I have a friend in Salt Lake City, a billionaire, who’s been trying to send a ship full of humanitarian supplies. He can’t even get it through OFAC to send this ship. This is brutal. This is uncharacteristic of America, uncharacteristic of Americans, and we should be ashamed of ourselves for it.

SHARMINI PERIES All right. Larry, thank you very much for that. Looking forward to having you back. And please join me. I’m not going to let Larry go back to his garden until he answers some questions on the Venezuela crises, so bear with me. And Larry, hang in there. We’ll be right back.

Silicon Valley Could Care Less About Earth’s Imminent Demise

Plenty of people and companies have had a hand in leading the globe down the destructive, possibly irreversible path to climate catastrophe. In his New York Times Best Seller “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?,” Bill McKibben, who has written over a dozen books about the environment and has been called “the world’s best green journalist,” fingers the Koch brothers, the Republican Party and fossil fuel companies worldwide, among countless others. This is humanity’s endgame, after all, and in a matter so serious and wide-reaching, there is plenty of blame to go around.

While each of these actors has played their part in our environmental tragedy, however, there’s another culprit that has largely gone overlooked: Silicon Valley. In the global tech capital, McKibben found megamillionaires who are less interested in saving this planet and more invested in finding a new planet to inhabit. And the reasoning behind this destructive desire is even more perverse than many would imagine.

“[Tech barons are] believers in some kind of techno fantasy world, where at least they will be able to survive and prosper,” McKibben tells Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence. “And they’re completely caught up in that world, and not paying much attention to [earth’s destruction]—in fact, they’re abetting it. We learn with each passing day more about the ways that, say, Google’s tools are being used by the oil industry to find yet more hydrocarbons that we can’t burn. … What [tech barons] and the Koch brothers don’t want is society—they don’t want the rest of us in their way. They want to do what they want to do.”

McKibben traces this ideology, prevalent in Silicon Valley as well as other sectors of U.S. society, to such figures as Ronald Reagan, author Ayn Rand and former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who popularized an extremely individualistic worldview about life that reigned for decades.

“That worldview would have been a problem at any time,” McKibben asserts, “but it’s a tragedy at the moment, when we desperately needed government to step in and do something about climate change.”

Scheer maintains that while Republicans and libertarians certainly played a damaging role in this environmental story, Democrats such as Bill Clinton, who not only continued Reagan’s plans but expanded on them, share part of the blame.

“Clinton brought the Democrats along,” McKibben concedes. “He was looking for that third, middle way, whatever he called it. But basically, it was a continuation, and very sad. And that’s why it’s good to see the reaction that’s happening now. I’m just not sure that we [haven’t] waited too long.”

Alarmingly, McKibben, who is credited with bringing climate change to the world’s attention and who helped found the environmental organization 350.org, thinks it may be too late to make significant change to the dystopian trajectory the human race is on. He does, however, find reasons for optimism in the rate at which green energy, such as solar and wind, are becoming increasingly more affordable and widely used.

“[The fossil fuel industry is] going to lose,” McKibben tells Scheer. “I mean, 50 years from now, we’re going to power the whole world on sun and wind, because it’s free. The question is, what kind of world will it be? And if we make that transition quickly, we’ll still have some world left; if we go at our current pace, we’re going to be powering a broken world with solar panels and wind turbines.”

Listen to their full discussion on the environment, gene-editing and other topics related to humanity’s collective suicide. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, the somewhat pretentious title for this show. But the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, no question–Bill McKibben. I could say, arguably, the most important environmental writer in the country. But unquestionably the first person to really bring up the whole issue of climate change. I think we used to call it climate warming or–greenhouse effect–

Bill McKibben: We used to call it the greenhouse effect. I’m so old, that’s what we called it–

RS: Yeah, so that was about 30 years ago, greenhouse effect. You were, what, a kid of 28 or something,

BM: Twenty-eight, mm-hmm.

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RS: A Harvard Crimson, you know, smart guy, came out, went to work for the New Yorker.

BM: Went to work for Mr. Shawn at the New Yorker, yeah.

RS: And then you actually quit in protest when he was forced out.

BM: [Laughs] Yeah.

RS: I like that, that’s good that people are willing to give up a cushy job like that. But Bill McKibben has–well, his most famous book, I think, was The End of Nature. And I thought it should be War On Nature, would be a title. But it’s a subject you revisit in your new book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? And you know, it’s not really a dystopian vision of things, but it certainly raises the possibility of humans being expendable as a presence on the earth. And I want to–you know, there’s a lot to talk about in this book. It’s alarming, and by the way–not just because it’s alarming, because you bring such credibility to it, and such a–and it is extremely well-written, let me just put that out there right now. As somebody who stayed up all night finishing it, I was grateful that it’s so well-written. And it is, as of this coming Sunday of when we’re recording this, a New York Times bestseller. So congratulations; that will ensure that at least some people read it, and that will be helpful. And I just want to begin with the arc of this book. It–OK, it once again lays out a compelling case that we’re really way behind on this question of climate change. It may be hopeless; we may not recover. And then it goes in this odd arc to a question of robots, artificial intelligence, the fantasies of Silicon Valley. And there’s really kind of two sets of problematic, if not demons in this book. One are the libertarians, who informed the old fossil-fuel industry–the Koch brothers and so forth, and Ayn Rand; for those who don’t know her, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and so forth. And there you could really talk about a war on nature. I mean, and you quote from The Fountainhead and so forth, these compelling scenes about the individual man, who–you know, also seems to be at war with women–but also with nature, and how to control nature. And then we move from that old technology of fossil fuel and the Koch brothers; we move to Silicon Valley, where these people are much more enlightened about current social issues, gender, and so forth. But then they harbor all kinds of fantasies of life without humans, and also bringing back a few important humans who can come up with, what, a couple hundred thousand dollars to freeze their bodies, and so forth. So for me, this book, despite being extremely well-written and obviously you’re a good editor–I was troubled by this arc. So take us through it.

BM: Sure. You know, I was thinking back to when I was writing The End of Nature, which as you say was the first book about what we now call climate change. And at the time it was, the book was a warning. Thirty years ago, if you looked carefully, you could tell what was coming. If you talked to the scientists who knew the most about what was going on, it was possible to predict the trouble we were on. But you couldn’t take a picture of it yet; it was still abstract and somewhat distant. I think that the rise of advanced forms of artificial intelligence and of human genetic engineering are also existential threats the way that climate change is. And I think that they’re sort of, right now, where we were with climate change 30 years ago: a place where if you squint, you can tell what’s likely to be coming. And so maybe this time, we might actually think about these things as a society before it was too late, not after.

RS: But I’m trying to understand the fantasy that some super-wealthy person in Silicon Valley might entertain about this. They preserve their body–

BM: Well–take the one that’s most advanced here, human genetic engineering. As you know, in October a Chinese doctor actually produced the first two designer babies that the planet’s ever seen, a pair of twin girls. There’s no mystery about what these guys are planning; they talk about it all the time, the enormous industry that there could be in improving human beings. In producing, allowing you to go into the clinic, as one of these guys after another says–go into the clinic, and with sufficient funds, choose the specs for your new child while they’re in embryo. Tinker with their genes. And I mean, there are obvious practical problems with that. I mean, in a world as unequal as ours, this would obviously etch that inequality into our, you know, very DNA.

RS: You don’t have to cheat on the SATs, you can just redesign the brain to get the perfect score.

BM: Exactly right. It’s the same people who are– [Laughter]

RS: We’re doing this from the University of Southern California, but I didn’t mean to pick on our school.

BM: Well, this is a sensitive subject.

RS: No, because it affected Yale, it affected Stanford, it affected a lot of other places–I think it affected Stanford, I’m not sure.

BM: So that’s part of it. But you know, there’s a much deeper question there. In the end, what worries me is the fragility of very important things. And I think that just as the planet itself turned out to be physically vulnerable in ways that were hard for us to imagine, so human meaning turns out to be vulnerable. Imagine that you’re the child of parents affluent enough to have, say, monkeyed around with your serotonin and dopamine levels when you were in embryo. Which is well within the realm of the possible; not a fantastic idea. And say you reach the age of…you have no idea whether it’s because of something that happened, or because it’s your speck kicking in, you know. And then imagine the kind of things that attend turning people into products. Imagine that you’re a young couple and you go into the clinic and you spend what money you have to get as good a child as you can. And then five years later you’re ready for your second child, and you go back into the clinic, and technology has marched on. And maybe you’ve gotten a little more money anyway, and now you can afford a better set of upgrades. What does that make your first kid? Your first kid is, you know, Windows 2000, the iPhone 6. We–it’s hard for us to imagine that human meaning is something not to be taken for granted, because for the 10,000 years of human history, humans have been largely the same creatures. But it was hard for us to imagine that, you know, we were going to melt half the ice in the Arctic, too, or that we were going to turn the ocean 30% more acidic inside of three decades.

RS: But that’s where I want your help here. And first of all, I’m recommending this book very highly, so I’m not putting it down; it’s–first of all, you have a great sense of humor in this book, which is wonderful to have when somebody’s writing about the possible end of all human life on the planet, and doing so convincingly. You have a great sense of irony, and you know, I don’t know whether–you weren’t at the Harvard Lampoon, you were at the Harvard Crimson, right?

BM: [Laughs]

RS: So you’re a serious person, but you do really make the serious, complex stuff accessible, interesting, so that’s my pitch for the book. However, I want your help in understanding the arc of this book, because I am genuinely confused. On the one hand, we have an image that all life is hanging in the balance, OK. And that we may not be able to do anything about it.

BM: From climate change, yes. Correct.

RS: Yeah, from climate change. On the other hand, we’ve got these very smart people out there–first of all, we have one set of, if not smart, at least successful people, the Koch brothers and others, and what is characterized as libertarians, but mostly the kind of wild followers of Ayn Rand and Mises and von Hayek and so forth, the libertarians. And despite being smart, they’re actually willing to help destroy the planet at a faster rate, and they’ve put a lot of money into elections and things. And so there’s a real important alarm bell sounding here about what’s happened to our democratic process. You quote these people basically saying they don’t believe in democracy, want to destroy the system. So the first half of the book is a compelling argument that these people have put the planet at risk, that they’re irresponsible, they’ve used their money that they’ve gained from exploiting the world’s resources, and they’ve used it to destroy this fragile experiment in representative democracy. So very powerful. Then, we go into your shift from the old industry to the new. And we have these people who believe in artificial intelligence, they believe in–but that part I get. But then they also seem to believe in preserving their bodies so that they can come back. And some of them actually think by the year twenty–was it thirty something?–we may have the means of perpetual life, that we’ll have solved all the medical problems. And I forget, the chief engineer at Google, what’s his name?

BM: Yeah, I’m blocking it at the moment, too.

RS: Oh, OK. [Laughter] But anyway, you quote him compellingly–

BM: Yes, Ray Kurzweil.

RS: Yeah, Kurzweil, and he thinks he’s going to maybe go on forever, you know, and so forth. And yet they’re also contributing to a world in which life may be destroyed. So what do they think, they’re going to come back and live on some other planet that they’ve created?

BM: Well, in fact–

RS: Your book does entertain that. So you know, when I’m reading this–

BM: Funny you should mention that. The one thing all these tech guys have in common is they want to leave. They’re all building rocket ships as fast as they can.

RS: Right. And you spent time with these people in Silicon Valley. And so they’re kind of sanguine, in a way, about the destruction of life on this planet. And you know, aside from everything else, they’re part of the consumer fetish, fetishism that we have in the world, and the waste of resources, and indifference. And you know, sending on the great model of consumption to India and China and everywhere and so forth, so they’re complicit in all this. So–on the other hand, they want to preserve their individual lives [Laughs] and have immortality. So then they have this weird fantasy that they’re going to construct another planet somewhere, another life somewhere, that they will be on. And when you were interviewing these people, these are all very smart people. They also went, like you did, to Harvard, you know. I personally am of the prejudice that Harvard trains crooks for Wall Street and everything else, and has done more to mess up this country than any community college in Kansas. But leaving that aside, these are all bright people, and they present as bright. When you talk to them, and you say isn’t there a disconnect here in your relative indifference to the well-being of life on this planet, and your desire to preserve your own life–what is it going to return to?

BM: Well, I mean, they’re–they’re believers in some kind of techno fantasy world that will, you know, where at least they will be able to survive and prosper. And they’re completely caught up in that world, and not paying much attention to–in fact, they’re abetting it. We learn, you know, with each passing day more about the ways that, say, Google’s tools are being used by the oil industry to find yet more hydrocarbons that we can’t burn. The place–but I think you’re looking for a kind of level of logic that’s not here. You have to look for the emotional logic. What is it that if you’re a tech baron, what is it that you most want? You want to be left alone by the government. That’s been their, that’s been their cry from the beginning. And you know, I mean, what did Mark Zuckerberg say when he started Facebook? “We’re going to move fast and break things.” And boy, have they!

RS: He also said about privacy, “Get over it.”

BM: Yeah. So they don’t want–what they and the Koch brothers don’t want is society–they don’t want the rest of us in their way. They want to do what they want to do. And we live in a world, unfortunately, where in the crucial 30 or 40 years, that view kind of won out. Beginning with Reagan, the view that government was the problem, not the solution; beginning with Maggie Thatcher, declaring that there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals. You know, that worldview would have been a problem at any time, but it’s a tragedy at the moment when we desperately needed government to step in and do something about climate change. It’s a tragedy at the moment when we desperately need regulation of the tech industry. And instead we’re being left, because of this incredibly powerful ideology–I mean, we’re seeing the pushback, finally, against it now. That’s why Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in America, you know. That’s why, finally, the democrats are beginning to show some mild signs of resistance in life, you know. That’s because people are waking up to these things. I worry that we may have waited too long; at least with climate change, we lost what may have been the crucial three decades.

RS: Well, I was going to wait until after our break to push back a little bit on this. But let me just begin it now. The villains, certainly in the first part of your book, are the libertarians. In your book. And I resist that. First of all, it’s like anti-communism or anti-socialism or anti-Semitism or anything–any scapegoating, any simplistic characterization of a whole ideology. Which, you know, I mean, there are–the Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of my favorite organizations, because I’ve written about privacy. And they are basically libertarians, but they actually believe in smaller government [Laughs]. As you quote Adam Smith favorably in your book, if you really believe in a free market, you don’t believe in these big cartels and monopolies. And the big contradiction is, yes, we should regulate Silicon Valley, just as we should regulate the fossil fuel industry. But that was believed by, you know, the Founders of the country, for goodness’ sake. I mean, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. My only–it’s very funny, because for people who don’t understand the sort of history of the libertarian philosophy, I remember as a kid at City College in New York where you had an alcove for every ideology. So you had three different variants of Trotskyists, or Stalinists, or this or that. But you had a libertarian corner, and they were all reading, you know, Ayn Rand and von Mises; this was very much a product of the fifties. And the hero of the male entrepreneur and so forth. And what you point out in your book is, that was not kidding around. That was the big model, and the big–I really had underestimated it in that respect, until I read your book. I mean–and you had people like Alan Greenspan, who did a lot to design our economy, or Bob Moses, who did a lot to destroy New York City as a wonderful place with his highways and freeways. These people–and they did influence people like Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the whole idea of government is the problem, not the solution, and so forth–very dangerous. And the real power of this book is to say, hey, we can’t afford this game anymore. You know, you got to really be able to make decisions on a governmental level in China, India, and here, and we got to stop kidding around. The pushback for me is, you sort of give the democrats and neoliberalism a kind of blank check here.

BM: I just think they’re just kind of, they were supine; that they got, that Reagan set the agenda and really no one has broken out of that mold until–until right now.

RS: [omission for station break] The book is called Falter–you know, I don’t love the title, but I’m glad that it’s on the bestseller list, despite what I thought was an inadequate title [Laughter]–Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? And the reason I say that is, you’re not saying we’re faltering; you’re saying we’re about to go over the cliff. And it’s a pretty grim view, and unfortunately, seems to be a well-documented, accurate, knowledgeable, authoritative book; I mean, this is not a book–you will lose sleep over this book. And rightfully so. But let me push back on the villains here. Because, you know, I think there is a–and you have the libertarians coming up not only with the old fossil-fuel industry, but also obviously in Silicon Valley. And it’s true of any billionaire these days; they’re all going to take Ayn Rand’s argument and justify their greed and corruption and not paying enough taxes and everything else. Because, yes, you know, let the pygmies of government get out of my way and I will create wonders, and it’s a compelling, opportunistic argument. I also believe there are a lot of–just as I believe there are a lot of, there were a lot of sincere socialists, communists, vegetarians, you know, Christians. Lots of people get caught up in these big-idea movements because there’s some principle there. And I do think the pushback against big government, and the respect for privacy and individualism, is valid–as you indicate in your book; I’m not telling you something you don’t know. But it hit me particularly around–and I’m going to go back to my point about the Clintonistas. Because you single out Alan Greenspan, and Alan Greenspan was in the living room with Ayn Rand, and so forth. And you know, the Koch brothers make an easy target, you know; and actually, by the way, as far as pushback, I don’t think we needed to know that his nanny checked his bowel movement, the German nanny. I know it can give an insight, but–but–

BM: It was from Jane Mayer’s wonderful, wonderful book, Dark Money, which I highly recommend.

RS: [Laughs] I know. And OK, I’m just saying–

BM: I thought it was interesting that their nanny, of the Koch brothers–left, left the service of the family to return to Germany when Hitler was elected because she was so happy to go back to the Führer.

RS: Right, OK. As I say, this is pushback, and I think that’s a stretch to somehow connect–and also, there were four Koch brothers, and two went in a different direction somewhat. So they probably had their stools checked by the same nanny. Or maybe they didn’t, maybe she left earlier. But leaving that aside [Laughs]–and I know, there isn’t much inclination to be kind towards the Koch brothers, and so forth. But I do want to say, so Alan Greenspan was caught up in this libertarian ideology, which is very easy to understand if you’re going to be, put yourself at the service of Wall Street and big business that says don’t regulate, let them do their magic and so forth. The opportunism was very obvious. But it wasn’t Ronald Reagan who unleashed Wall Street, it was Bill Clinton and the reversal of Glass-Steagall, you know, the freeing of the banking–I’m not telling you something you don’t know. Reagan actually, because of the Savings & Loan scandal, tightened some banking regulations at the end. It remained for these neoliberals–and yes, it’s nice to mention Bernie Sanders, but he’s not the Democratic Party, and he got wiped out by these people last time.

BM: I think–if you’ll remember, it was Bill Clinton who put Alan Greenspan in for yet another fateful term as head of the Federal Reserve.

RS: Exactly my point, sir, yes.

BM: I’m just saying that this, that to me the key political development of my lifetime was Ronald Reagan’s election. I think that’s what–and I think that Bill Clinton and others just were kind of in the echo of that big bang. And they couldn’t–I mean, in fact, if you think about it, Bill Clinton finished– Reagan, there were things Reagan couldn’t do because the democrats at that point were still in the way. He could–you know, Reagan couldn’t have gotten the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade through; he probably couldn’t have ended welfare as we know it, the way that Clinton did. Clinton brought the democrats along; he was looking for that third, middle way, whatever he called it. But basically, it was a continuation, and very sad. And that’s why it’s good to see the reaction that’s happening now; that’s why it’s good to see Elizabeth Warren and, you know, all kinds of people making the strong, concentrated case that we need to go in a very different direction. I’m just not sure that we’ve waited too long.

RS: But you also have former Vice President Biden, who was very much a part of this neoliberal, Clintonista phenomena, and–

BM: It’s a fascinating tussle, watching it play out now.

RS: OK, but because I respect–I’m not blowing smoke here, I respect you so much. And particularly in this all–all, I mean, huge, compelling area of what we’re going to do to save the planet. And I don’t trust these people, because you know, yes, Alan Greenspan did this and this. But Lawrence Summers, who went on to be head of Harvard, and Robert Rubin, who went to work at Citibank–

BM: You’re not going to find me defending him, I’ve taken on Mr. Summers a good deal over the years.

RS: I know, but I’m just–I’m just, in my A+ review of this book [Laughter]–and for people who are going to go out and buy it now, and hopefully they will, and I’m thrilled that it’s on the bestseller list–I just want to, you know, that’s my job here–

BM: I hear you, absolutely.

RS: You know, go a little bit further. And because, you know, ending welfare–and this fits into the theme of your book. I mean, you know, what we have to be concerned about is giving people a way to live in this world and breathe clean air and so forth. And yet, you know, not have to be assembling iPhones at miserable wages and so forth.

BM: I just want to say, a very good thing that’s happening right now that unites all these questions is what’s going on with the Green New Deal. Because in its attempt to deal with the absolute have-to-deal-with-it physical problem of climate change, it’s talking about much of the kind of political and social reconstruction that you’re talking about. You know, it’s talking about a federal job guarantee; it’s talking about medical care; it’s talking about free college education. Because it understands those as necessary parts of the enormous work, sort of World War II-scale work, that will have to be done to deal with the climate crisis.

RS: Right. And that’s why Bill Clinton’s destruction of the federal poverty program, what’s called welfare reform–which was a fraud from day one when he was governor in Arkansas and he had projects, I’ve discussed that on this show, I don’t want to visit it here. But you know, I’m all for bashing [Laughs] the big corporate libertarians who misuse Adam Smith, and basically defend monopoly capitalism of an extreme kind, rather than really the free market. That’s true of these neoliberals who in fact, you know, champion big government for the super-rich, is really what it is, and screw ordinary people. And I want to bring you to a very important subject in your book relating to climate change, and that’s trade and so forth. And again, if I want to push back a little bit on your book, it’s a bit, to my mind, America-centric. In that, yes, you travel all over the world and you care a lot about Africa, you care a lot about China, you care–you have a world vision, I’m not denying that. But the fact of the matter is, in a country like China or India, they’re really talking about catching up to what we were able to exploit. And then the question is, how can we convince them, how can the world–how can they convince their own people? Because after all, if they can’t deliver in the short run, they’re not going to be around for the long run. And the question is, like with these, I want to just bring up a couple of examples from trade. And you point out correctly in your book that it was Bill Clinton who pushed through NAFTA, right? And you know, the fact is, Donald Trump, whatever we think about him, his rewrite of NAFTA actually puts in a few things there, like a guarantee for people assembling cars in Mexico that are going to be imported duty-free have a $16 wage, and for 45%, that local courts have some control in Canada and the U.S. and in Mexico, and not just corporate-controlled courts, and so forth. So I’m not saying he’s changed the whole thing, but at least finally we have a trade agreement that worries a little bit about the condition of workers. And I want to pick up one, two elements that, we’re going to run out of time, but they’re really critical. One is, it seems to me the big push–because you talk a lot about solar, electric, and that’s all great. But I think the ball game in some ways might be decided by what China is right now doing to try to breathe–as you point out, you can’t breathe–with electric cars, and so forth. And yes, the Trump administration is pulling back on that. I happen to have a Chevy Bolt, I love it, but you can’t go up the 5 here in California and find a place to charge your car, by the way. Even though under Jerry Brown we all were for it, and there were subsidies, but it’s not usable except if you go off on the side roads and take more time. And so China, you know, in these trade agreements–we’re not pushing for understanding why they want to get to a different kind of economy. And India. So that’s one big factor. The other I want to bring up is the controversy you refer to just in a few sentences in your book, of nuclear power. And you mention, and you’ve mentioned in the past, if you get into nuclear power you split the environmental movement in half. And I personally share a lot of the hostility towards the use of nuclear power; I obviously care a lot about the arms race, and so forth. I was in Chernobyl; I think I was the first print reporter, from the United States certainly, in Chernobyl; frightens the hell out of me. But I really wonder, in this bleak world that you’re describing, whether we need to have a serious discussion about the peaceful use of nuclear power.

BM: So this actually, in some ways, goes to both these questions. I actually don’t think it would split the environmental movement. I don’t think the environmental movement’s paying that much attention to nuclear power. I don’t think–and I think the biggest reason for that is, no one’s going to build these things because they’re insanely expensive. You might as well burn $20 bills to generate electricity. A different question is whether we should move fast to try and shut down the ones that still remain in this country. The ones that are already built and paid for, or the Union of Concerned Scientists is saying, maybe let them stay open, as long as we can try and keep them safe for a while, while we’re making this transition. The good news is–and this goes to China and India–the price, the engineers have really done an excellent job. The price of a solar panel has dropped 90 percent in the last decade. It’s now by far the cheapest way to generate electrons around most of the world. So China is quickly retooling, partly because of their smog–they’re putting up renewable energy at a pace we’ve never seen before. The most interesting question, really, is India, which is where China was in terms of energy 15, 20 years ago. It’s beginning to look like India may try to kind of make its great push forward as the first country that really leapfrogs fossil fuel and relies heavily on renewables, just because of the cost. You can generate electricity more cheaply in India, far more cheaply, now with new solar than you can by building coal-fired power plants. It doesn’t mean that the power of the fossil-fuel industry isn’t strong, that they’re not going to try and–in fact, they’re going to lose. I mean, 50 years from now we’re going to power the whole world on sun and wind because it’s free. The question is, what kind of world will it be? And if we make that transition quickly, we’ll still have some world left; if we go at our current pace, we’re going to be powering a broken world with solar panels and wind turbines.

RS: And by the way, I–it’s good to end on an optimistic note here. And I love the section in your book where you discuss Arizona and solar. And you point out, this is a state where its athletics teams are named, you know, the Sun Devils, and you know, the Phoenix Suns–

BM: Phoenix Suns, yes.

RS: –and everything. And yet–and it’s the most obvious place to fuel a whole society on sun, what could be better than Arizona. And yet there was actually pushback from–OK, here, let me say it–these bad [Laughs] Koch brothers and others. And you know, who did–and one–oh, I’m tired of quibbles with your book. [Laughter] But you do mention the ‘18 election, and the fact is, they did lose the House, even though they put a lot of money into it. But I do want to, let me finally put it back to China. I’ve always had a little bit of problem with environmentalists. Because, again, sometimes it seems–like, OK, we had our run, and now the rest of the world can’t have it. And I remember as a much younger person in the early sixties, being a fellow in the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California. And we had, Franz Sherman was a great leader, and so forth. And half the operation was very good academically, and then below us there was the CIA evaluating all the stuff from China. And that’s when Paul Ehrlich came out with his Population Bomb. And the whole argument was, you know, we really have to stop the Chinese from having babies, and I guess the people in India. That’s the real problem in the world, now that we’ve had ours, and so forth. And I felt, you know, well, that’s pretty narrow-minded, unless you give them something else, you know. And the irony is that China then had somewhere between four and 500 million people; it now has closer to 1.4 billion people, so it’s put about another 900 million people on the earth. And there’s no question that those people are living better than the original population did. Now, there’s a cost, a big cost. What I’m saying is, and I feel this should be your next book, kind of a Listen, Yankee!-type book, taking C. Wright Mills’ old title. And say, yes, all of this discussion and concern is well and good, but if we don’t bend trade rules, if we don’t understand this is a global economy–and this goes to your friends at Silicon Valley, or the people you interviewed. And the real question there is, why aren’t they paying 16 bucks an hour? If we can now ask in Mexico that they pay 16. And you know, why aren’t we–through what we’re willing to pay for these iPhones and everything else–supporting an economy in which people can maybe move to alternative energy, maybe have a shorter work week, and so forth? It seems to me the big challenge–and the reason I’m putting, this is my last question I’m putting to you–but you’ve been a moral force in this country for, you know, 30-odd years or so, more so. And it seems to me what well-intentioned liberal folks seem to miss is a little bit of Nimbyism here. You know, hey–what you’re doing over there, aside from the fact that you can’t breathe, is messing up our planet. You know, and I think it has to come with: And we are willing to make sacrifices commensurate with what we’re expecting you to make.

BM: Well, that’s–I mean, you know, I’ve helped start 350.org, which has been the first global climate movement. We work in 181 countries, and it’s people in those countries that do the work. And climate change is the perfect place to be thinking about this, because there’s no way–I mean, they don’t call it global warming for nothing. There’s no way to solve it without everybody playing some role. In fact, the iron law of climate change is, the less you did to cause it, the more you suffer. So that’s in whose interest it is, above all, to figure out how to get everybody off fossil fuel. That’s what we work for all over the planet. So as I say, I’m optimistic about everything except the timing. And my sense of urgency, the reason that I end up in handcuffs a lot and so on, is because we’re moving much too [slowly]…

RS: You know, there are subjects that are visited frequently, you know, and people bring it up all the time. What your book does–and I have to keep stressing the element of humor in it–it’s really, it’s not a scold. It’s a book that says, you know, damn it, this is the ball game. It’s real. But let’s not, you know, think we have all the answers; let’s not think everything we’ve done is right. There are contradictions. But you know, we can get this right. And you know, I hope the human game has not begun to play itself out, because I kind of like this world.

BM: Me too.

RS: OK, you too.

BM: And I want to just say, thank you to you. It’s a pleasure to be closely read by someone with a sense of history. So thank you.

RS: Thank you. All right, and let’s thank our engineers, Kat Yore and Mario Diaz over at KCRW in Santa Monica. Joshua Scheer is the producer of this program. And here at USC, which I took a cheap shot at, but only to say our issues are no different than Yale or the other great universities–

BM: Maybe even Harvard. [Laughter]

RS: Well, I was going to say about Harvard, they don’t have to cheat it, they just bring in their rich people and have been doing it under legacy admission forever. So no, it wouldn’t be “even” Harvard; Harvard’s a major offender. And here at USC, where Victor Figueroa has been our engineer, and of course the Annenberg School has once again made these facilities available to us, and we thank them very much. See you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.

 

The Remarkable Mothers of Social Security

This Mother’s Day, let’s celebrate the remarkable Mothers of Social Security. Without them, this essential program may never have been born. It certainly would be much less successful and effective.

The Mothers of Social Security pushed for an expansive, ambitious program. When necessary, they fiercely resisted men too cautious to embrace their bold vision. All of us benefit immensely from their work—particularly women, for whom Social Security’s modest benefits are especially important.

Best known of Social Security’s many mothers is Frances Perkins, the first female member of a presidential Cabinet in the history of the country. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt first asked Perkins to become Secretary of Labor, she told him that she would only accept his history-making offer if he agreed to fully support her fight for Social Security, as well as other significant measures to increase all of our economic security. He did. True to her principles and values, she was a driving force behind the healthy start of Social Security, from the system’s conception to its birth and its early growth.

A less-known pathbreaker was Dr. Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong, the first tenured female law professor in the country. A Ph.D. economist, she taught both law and economics at Berkeley and authored a landmark treatise, Insuring the Essentials, an exhaustive study of social insurance and minimum wage programs around the world.

Armstrong chaired the Roosevelt administration working group that invented Social Security. Other policymakers, concerned about the constitutionality of Social Security, argued that it should be a state-based program. Armstrong successfully convinced them that only a federal program was workable. When those who oversaw her work contemplated dropping Social Security because they feared it was too big a lift, she leaked their plan to friendly journalists whose exposés got Social Security back on track.

Without Armstrong’s bold leadership and keen intellect, Social Security might not even exist at all today. If that sounds hyperbolic, those same policymakers whom Armstrong outwitted later decided to not propose national, guaranteed health insurance. Cautiously, they decided it was better left for the future. Today, we are still fighting for improved and expanded Medicare for All.

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Other remarkable Mothers included two members of the Social Security Board, which administered Social Security prior to a 1946 reorganization that replaced the Board with a single commissioner. Four other women were members of the 1938 Social Security Advisory Council, whose recommendations to add benefits for wives, widows, and dependent children were enacted into law in 1939.

Perhaps it is in part because these and other women were so important to the birth and early development of Social Security that it is so important to women today. Social Security is essential for virtually everyone, but it is particularly critical for women, as well as people of color, the LGBTQ community, and others who have been discriminated against in the workplace.

Even in 2019, women experience a substantial wage gap. It is commonly reported that, on average, a woman earns just 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man. Yet even that understates the facts. A recent report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research reveals that women today actually earn, on average, just 49 cents for every dollar earned by men.

Moreover, the same report exposes the drastic penalty for taking time out of the paid labor force. Women who take just one year off from work suffer 39 percent lower earnings than women who do not. This is especially detrimental since 60 percent of caregivers are female.

Social Security cannot offset all of the ills of society. However, it does seek to offset, to the extent it can, this kind of discrimination in the workplace. From the beginning, Social Security has employed a progressive benefit formula that provides larger benefits, as a percentage of pay, for those who have lower lifetime earnings.

Social Security is also especially important to women, because on average, women live longer than men. Unlike savings, you can’t outlive Social Security, even if you live to be 110. It’s no surprise that women are approximately two out of every three beneficiaries aged 85 and older.

Moreover, Social Security benefits are indexed to inflation, no matter how high inflation is. That is imperative to prevent benefits from eroding as you age. This automatic inflation adjustment, which needs updating, nevertheless is an extremely important feature for everyone, but particularly women. That is because, without adjustment, inflation causes the erosion of benefits to compound with each passing year.

As good as Social Security is, it can and should be better. Past generations of women and men have fought to improve it. Now it is our turn. Our elected Democratic policymakers in Congress are fighting to expand Social Security.

They are fighting to increase Social Security’s modest benefits for all current and future beneficiaries. They are also fighting for targeted improvements. They want to restore the minimum benefit, which no longer provides a meaningful floor because it has eroded so substantially. They are also fighting to update the method of indexing benefits, because the current method under-measures the cost of living of seniors and people with disabilities, who have, on average, higher medical and other costs.

Updating both the minimum benefit and the automatic inflation index disproportionately benefits women. So do other improvements Democrats in Congress are fighting for. These include providing caregivers credit toward Social Security for their invaluable but unpaid caregiving work, and improving benefits for those who are divorced and widowed.

Historically, forward-looking women and men have improved Social Security for those who would follow. It is so appropriate that today’s Democratic leaders, who are growing more diverse, have taken their place in the fight. Perhaps the best way to celebrate this Mother’s Day is for all of us to commit to fighting to expand Social Security, in memory of those brilliant, hard-driving, creative, and compassionate Mothers of Social Security.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Are Democrats Finally Turning on Charter Schools?

The politics of charter schools have changed, and bipartisan support for these publicly funded, privately controlled schools has reached a turning point. A sure sign of the change came from Democrats in the House Appropriations Committee who have proposed a deep cut in federal charter school grants that would lower funding to $400 million, $40 million below current levels and $100 million less than what the Trump administration has proposed. Democrats are also calling for better oversight of charter schools that got federal funding and then closed.

This is a startling turn of events, as for years, Democrats have enthusiastically joined Republicans in providing federal grants to create new charter schools and expand existing ones.

In explaining this change in the politics of charter schools, pundits and reporters will likely point to two factors: the unpopularity of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, an ardent charter school proponent, and teachers’ unions that can exert influence in the Democratic Party. But if the tide is truly turning on bipartisan support for charter schools, it is the charter industry itself that is most to blame.

Dems Divide on Charters

For years, support for charter schools has been the norm in the Democratic Party.

The Obama administration dramatically expanded federal support for charter schools with the avid support of Democrats in Congress. A slew of Democratic governors, from Andrew Cuomo in New York to former Governor of California Jerry Brown, have been charter champions.

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Candidates in the Democratic Party presidential primary who’ve been highly supportive of charter schools include Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Michael Bennet of Colorado and former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper. Other Democratic presidential contenders who are newer on the scene such as Julian Castro and Beto O’Rourke have connections to charter schools or their supporters.

Even in the first year of the Trump administration, as Democrats rejected the education budget put forth by U.S. Secretary Betsy DeVos, they voted with Republicans for the Trump administration’s increase in funding for the charter school grant program.

But the divergence in charter school politics was certainly visible in 2018 elections when Democrats flipped seven governor seats and brought into office new leaders who expressed strong skepticism of these schools. In races for seats in the U.S. House and in state legislatures, the largely uncontested playing field charter school proponents have enjoyed in nearly two decades of elections was thick with formidable opponents who campaigned against an open-wallet policy for charters.

The growing divide over charter schools in the Democratic Party is a reflection of what’s happening among voters. A recent Gallup survey showed support for charters among Democrats eroding from 61 percent in 2012 to 48 percent, while Republican support remained steady at 62 percent over the same five years.

Now candidates in the Democratic presidential primary are taking cautious approaches to talking about charters. When CNN correspondent Jake Tapper recently asked Booker whether he was “part of the charter school movement,” Booker declined to answer the question directly, responding instead that he is for “solutions.” Tapper replied, “It seems you’re reluctant to say you’re part of the public charter school movement.”

What Happened?

Serious analysts of charter school politics can point to multiple factors that are changing alignments.

The drumbeat of reports revealing corruption, fraud, and blatant profiteering in the charter school industry has certainly penetrated the conversation.

News outlets report the legislation proposed by House Democrats was influenced by a recent analysis which found that as much as $1 billion in federal money was wasted on charter schools that never opened or that closed because of fraud, mismanagement, other issues. That analysis, which I coauthored with Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education, urged the department of education to follow through with recommendations from a 2018 federal audit of charters, a recommendation House Democrats have also taken up.

Concerns over widespread charter school corruption have mushroomed as news of scandals have become near-daily occurrences across the country, including from Arizona, Florida, California, Georgia, Nevada, and New Mexico.

Also, teachers who recently walked off the job to protest unchecked charter expansion in Los Angeles, Oakland, West Virginia, and Jefferson County, Kentucky, have helped to shift the politics of charter schools by pointing out that charters, as they are currently conceived and operated in most places, now pose an existential threat to public school systems.

The politics of charter schools have also changed in the African American community. Urban communities of color that were supposed to be the intended beneficiaries of charter schools have now become intense battlegrounds where expansions of these schools are increasingly strongly contested. When prominent civil rights groups including the national NAACP, the Movement for Black Lives, the Journey for Justice Alliance, and the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools called for a moratorium on the expansion of charter schools and for stronger oversight of these schools, it signaled to Democrats that two of the party’s strongest factions, labor and civil rights groups, have come together on resistance to school privatization.

Charter Schools’ Pogo Moment

But the charter school industry’s worst enemy is undoubtedly itself.

When the whole idea of creating a charter school to serve as a laboratory of innovation for educating special needs students transformed into a movement, and then an industry, the goal changed from a collective effort of local citizens to educate children to become a scourge of low-quality institutions devouring the common good for the sake of its own growth.

While stories of corrupt and low-quality charter schools have become routine in local and national news, the charter industry has continued to argue that government regulation and the ineptness of charter authorizers are the only problems and that there could not possibly be anything wrong with charters themselves.

As numerous research reports continue to reveal charter schools increase segregation of students on the basis of race, income, and ability, the charter industry responded by denying and then ignoring the problem.

“What was once billed as a model for the improvement of traditionally governed public schools,” writes the Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss, “has become a troubled parallel system of privately managed schools with, in many places, patterns of waste, fraud, and segregation.”

In that piece, Strauss includes a lengthy analysis by Burris asking whether charter schools can be rehabilitated and reconnected to their original mission. Her conclusion—after weighing the frequency and seriousness of scandals, the persistent evidence of discrimination and segregation, and the depletion of public school funding—is “a resounding no.”

The fact there are numerous charter schools that do wonderful work will continue to provide fodder for charter fans to refute Burris’ argument. But charter schools will be an increasingly contentious political issue—and deservedly so. In her piece, Strauss points to an observation I made in 2013, that charter school enthusiasts who had concerns about creating good schools had come to a Pogo moment when their search for an enemy had led “to a mirror.” Clearly, six years ago they liked what they saw. Now they’re paying the political consequences for that.

To learn more about school privatization, check out Who Controls Our Schools? The Privatization of American Public Education, a free ebook published by the Independent Media Institute.

Click here to read a selection of Who Controls Our Schools? published on AlterNet, or here to access the complete text.

This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Growing Number of States Call Porn a Public Health Crisis

PHOENIX — More than a dozen states have moved to declare pornography a public health crisis, raising concerns among some experts who say the label goes too far and carries its own risks.

The Arizona Senate approved a resolution this week calling for a systemic effort to prevent exposure to porn that’s increasingly accessible to younger kids online. At least one legislative chamber has adopted a similar resolution in 15 other states.

“It is an epidemic in our society, and this makes a statement that we have a problem,” said Arizona Sen. Sylvia Allen, a Republican who blamed pornography for contributing to violence against women, sexual activity among teens and unintended pregnancies.

Linking those social issues to pornography is “compete fear-mongering,” said Mark Kernes, a senior editor at the trade publication Adult Video News media network. Pornography is harmless entertainment meant for adults, he said. “We’re not really a public-health anything,” Kernes said.

The Arizona resolution that passed Monday doesn’t ban pornography or create any other legal changes, but it could signal future action. Similar declarations have been passed in GOP-controlled states ranging from Tennessee to Montana and been adopted in the Republican Party’s national platform.

Many of the resolutions are based on a model written by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, an anti-porn group that cites research linking it to a range of problems and argues that it’s become too ubiquitous for individuals to combat alone.

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But others say the public-crisis label is a misguided approach.

Research has raised questions about the effect of explicit material on young kids, but links to other often-cited issues like human trafficking are tenuous at best, said Emily Rothman, a community health sciences professor at Boston University.

The resolutions risk creating a stigma for marginalized groups like LGBTQ people and miss a key piece of the puzzle by leaving out calls for more robust sex education for teenagers, she said.

And porn isn’t like a deadly virus, she said.

“If you stub your toe, that might be something you can’t solve yourself, but that doesn’t make it a public health issue,” Rothman said.

Several Arizona Democrats said the state has more important health threats to confront, such as measles, opioids, homelessness and suicide.

Plus, pornography can be part of a healthy sex life for adults, said Albuquerque-based sex therapist David Ley, who sees the resolutions as a backlash against changing attitudes about sexuality.

“It’s just virtue signaling, there’s literally no effect,” he said.

But the legislation could pave the way for future steps, like keeping publicly funded internet at places like schools and libraries from being used to access porn, said Haley Halverson with the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, which is working on new model legislation for states taking those next steps.

“We think these resolutions are really powerful, although they’re non-binding, because they raise awareness and educate the public, and hopefully can lay the groundwork to make more resources available to those people who potentially struggle with pornography,” she said.

Any future steps to restrict access to pornography have to be handled carefully to avoid running afoul of the First Amendment, said David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.

“When you declare it as a public health crisis, people see that as a blank check for the government to do something about it,” he said.

Utah was the first state to pass an anti-porn resolution in 2016. In the years since, lawmakers have passed bills tightening up filters on wireless internet at public libraries and getting out information to parents about controls available at home, said Republican Rep. Todd Weiler, the effort’s sponsor.

Another new state law lets parents sue pornography makers if their kids need treatment for problems related to porn use, though it wasn’t immediately clear whether anyone has made a legal challenge through it.

“We’re trying to shed a light on an issue that some people don’t think it’s OK to talk about,” he said.