Chris Hedges's Blog, page 267

Democrats Threaten Subpoena if Barr Cancels House Testimony

With Attorney General William Barr reportedly threatening to cancel his scheduled testimony before the House Judiciary Committee this week over objections to the format of the hearing, Rep. Jerry Nadler warned Sunday that he is prepared to issue a subpoena if Barr refuses to appear.

“The witness is not going to tell the committee how to conduct its hearing, period,” Nadler, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told CNN amid reports that Barr took issue with a plan to allow committee lawyers from both parties to question the attorney general.

If Barr refuses to testify, said Nadler, “then we will have to subpoena him, and we will have to use whatever means we can to enforce the subpoena.”

Rep. Jerry Nadler on AG Barr: “The witness is not going to tell the committee how to conduct its hearing, period.” https://t.co/JSffhof1xn pic.twitter.com/vOpCYa1xdp

— The Hill (@thehill) April 29, 2019

Barr, who faced widespread criticism over his handling of the Mueller report rollout, is scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Barr is also slated to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.

According to CNN, which first reported on Barr’s objections to the proposed hearing format in the House, Nadler “wants to allow all members of his panel at Thursday’s hearing to have one round of questioning of five minutes each.”

“He also wants to allow for a subsequent round of questioning of 30 minutes for each side, allowing both parties’ committee counsels to also engage in questioning during their respective turns—which has turned into a key sticking point for the Justice Department,” CNN reported.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee said Barr’s objections are illegitimate.

“Last term multiple members of the Justice Dept sat for HOURS being questioned by staff counsel. Why was it okay for GOP to use staff counsel but not Dems?” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) asked on Twitter.

Dear @TheJusticeDept Barr: What are you afraid of? What are you trying to hide from the American people?

Last term multiple members of the Justice Dept sat for HOURS being questioned by staff counsel. Why was it okay for @GOP to use staff counsel but not Dems?#SundayThoughts https://t.co/tSFCcfuEEB

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) April 28, 2019

Speaking to CNN on Sunday, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) said Democrats are prepared to “fully use our subpoena power.”

“It is not up to Attorney General Barr to tell our committee how to operate, and I will be puzzled if he actually decides not to show,” Dean said.

Joe Biden Has Comcast-Owned MSNBC in the Tank

Joe Biden finally announced on Thursday what everyone already knew. With the release of a three-and-a-half minute promotional video, the former vice president officially threw his name in the ever-expanding ring of Democratic primary contenders seeking to win the opportunity to challenge Donald Trump for the presidency in 2020. Biden has already seen his share of coverage, and was the second-most-mentioned Democratic candidate on cable news during the first three months of 2019.

Biden has pledged that his 2020 campaign won’t take in any direct donations from lobbyists. But on the first night of his official candidacy, Biden hit the suburbs of Philadelphia to attend a $2,800 per person fundraiser at the home of David L. Cohen, the executive vice president and chief of lobbying for Comcast.

Comcast, one of the biggest lobbying spenders in Washington, also owns MSNBC, which has showered Biden with favorable coverage both before and since his announcement.

In March, Nevada lieutenant gubernatorial candidate Lucy Flores published an article in New York Magazine (3/29/19) that described how Biden inappropriately kissed her at a campaign event. Biden has quite a long history of awkward and inappropriate touching, kissing or groping of women and girls.

Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, was one of the first to defend Biden (4/1/19). Brzezinski suggested that Flores’ allegation was politically motivated, citing Flores as a “huge Bernie person,” and asking, “Are we just supposed to take all the words and the fact she said she was violated at face value?” Her guests later that day (4/1/19), former DCCC chief of staff Adrienne Elrod and former CIA and DoD chief of staff Jeremy Bash, seemed to agree that such #MeToo accusations against Biden were “meaningless moments,” and merely baseless finger-pointing from Biden’s political opponents.

Brzezinski continued her defense of Biden the following day and later in the week on Morning Joe, after another woman came forward with allegations of inappropriate behavior (4/2/19, 4/5/19). Brzezinski said that the allegations were “sad,” and that Biden is a “nice guy” and “not a predator.” She continued:

This is ridiculous. The conversation has gotten out of control, and Democrats and those on the left who want to tweet me today and go nuts and get all woke, you’re eating your young. You’re eating those who can beat Trump. You’re killing the very people who have been pushing women ahead, who’ve been fighting for equal pay, who have been doing everything they can to respect women in their lives. We’re going to after Joe Biden for being affectionate to women of all ages, and to men as well? It’s ridiculous.

While he is indeed a frontrunner, defense of Biden as supposedly the only candidate with the ability to beat Trump is frequently parroted by many corporate Democrats (and by totally, definitely well-meaning Republican Party figures as well). MSNBC contributor Mike Barnicle recently re-upped this trope (4/24/19) on the day of Biden’s announcement, though to his credit, Axios’ Jim Vandehei did push back on this narrative.

On the same program, Joe Scarborough castigated Biden detractors, maintaining that they failed to understand the context of Biden’s past support for harsh drug laws, opposition to school integration  and support for the Iraq War. He later added that “it’s easy for you to sit there behind your laptop, drinking your soy lattes in 2019 judging [him] for trying to make the country better.” Sharpton chimed in with further attacks on so-called “latte liberators” and “limousine liberals.”On another Morning Joe panel (4/26/19), MSNBC correspondent Rev. Al Sharpton criticized Biden’s role in drafting and sponsoring the 1984, 1986, 1988 and 1994 crime bills, and his treatment of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Biden recently issued a half-apology phone call 28 years after the fact to Hill, who told the New York Times (4/25/19) that the call “left her feeling deeply unsatisfied.” (Biden continued to dance around giving a full-throated apology to Hill in an appearance on The View—4/26/19.) But despite Sharpton’s misgivings about Biden’s history, he maintained that Biden somehow had the “equipment despite the hurdles” to appeal to both “blue collar white workers” and “black and brown communities.”

But despite his folksiness (Extra!, 4/13), if there is anyone who serves the interests of financial giants who spend most of their time in limousines, it’s Joe Biden. Since the late 1970s, Biden has been the chief defender of the Delaware-based credit card industry in Congress, and played a crucial role in the passage of the 2005 bankruptcy law, which made it harder for Americans to wipe out and restructure unreasonable debts through Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Indeed, credit card company MBNA (formerly owned by Bank of America) was Biden’s second-largest donor throughout his Senate career. When Biden drafted the original version of the bankruptcy bill in 2000, he was strongly opposed by then-Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, who was integral in getting the Clinton administration to block its passage. Biden has also been a consistent supporter of further financial deregulation, such as the Gramm-Bliley-Leach Act, which has been pointed to as a partial cause of the 2008 financial collapse.

Yet Biden’s extremely checkered political history, where he was consistently on the wrong sides of issues like women’s rights, racial equality, financial regulation, drugs and criminal justice, surveillance and war, still doesn’t seem to be enough for the media to deem him damaged goods. In fact, outlets like MSNBC still play up Biden as the most viable candidate, despite the fact that there are others with similarly long tenures in politics who didn’t make Biden’s same mistakes.

Earlier in the year, Alex Altman came on MSNBC to praise Biden’s “electability” (2/21/19), while this week Steve Kornacki devoted a whole segment to prove just how “electable” Joe Biden is for the Democrats in a 2020 matchup against Trump (4/25/19). No other candidate, not even the other front runners, received such a segment from the network.

Indeed, calling Biden the most “electable” candidate is really just code for the most “moderate” or white candidate. Such a designation for Biden discounts the appeal of candidates who are left-wing, female or people of color. In particular, left-wing candidates like Bernie Sanders (the other frontrunner) and Elizabeth Warren are each frequently dogged in corporate media by accusations that they are somehow not “electable” enough.

There is perhaps an underlying logic to these attacks. Warren and Sanders have each called for heightened antitrust regulation. (Amy Klobuchar and Corey Booker have also called for increased antitrust enforcement, but are bit more tepid on the issue than Sanders and Warren.) Big tech companies, agricultural conglomerates, food and beverage companies, banks and telecom companies like Comcast would surely come under the antitrust microscope and be targeted for breakups if one of these candidates were to win the Democratic nomination. Comcast in particular stands out as a major target, considering they have interests in both media content production as well as distribution.

Comcast, along with other internet service providers (ISPs) like Verizon and AT&T, hold what are essentially regional monopolies, where they very rarely directly compete with one another in a given area. As of 2017, almost 80 percent of US households have access to just a single ISP that offers broadband speeds of over 100 mbps. This has a striking impact on US internet users: The nation has just the 20th fastest average internet speed in the world, and, according to the FCC, US consumers pay more for broadband than most other comparable countries. Of course, ISPs are also famous for their unmatched customer service record–Comcast ranks as one of America’s most hated companies year in and year out, along with many other ISPs.

Much of the power of Comcast and other telecom companies to maintain their monopolies can be attributed to the revolving door that shuffles telecom lobbyists in and out of government positions. The current FCC chair, Ajit Pai, is the former general counsel for Verizon, while its past chair, Tom Wheeler, was a longtime telecom industry lobbyist for trade groups with connections to Comcast. Meredeth Attwell Baker, a former FCC commissioner under Obama, joined Comcast just four months after giving the greenlight for Comcast’s merger with NBC Universal. The acquisition marked the beginning of other vertical mergers between content distributors and content producers, including AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, which owns CNN.

During his Senate career, Biden was far from a hawk on antitrust, supporting antitrust exemptions for the soda industry after receiving donations from Coca-Cola. Judging by the Obama administration’s extremely lax antitrust approach, a hypothetical Biden administration would follow the same friendly approach towards corporate interests. Biden hasn’t stayed away from discussing the issue of antitrust so far in his campaign, but he has remarked that big corporations shouldn’t be “singled out.” At a speech last year to the Brookings Institution, he remarked, “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”

Such deference to massive and unpopular corporate monopolies is anathema to both a healthy economy and contrary to the views of most Americans. But potential antitrust targets like Comcast and AT&T have the ability to manufacture positive press for pro-corporate water carriers like Biden through their news properties. Powerful executives like Comcast’s David Cohen might not be shooting out daily emails to MSNBC staff ordering them to promote Biden’s candidacy, but employees will often gravitate towards what their employers want. After all, they are well aware who signs the checks.

Likewise, top MSNBC news personalities exist within the same elite circle of Washington insiders that Biden has inhabited for the past 40 years–in just about every one of the aforementioned segments, one host or guest remarked on their personal relationship with Joe Biden. The insider DC cocktail party circuit doesn’t contain very many people who want to attack their corporate benefactors.

It’s notable that even before its acquisition by Comcast, MSNBC had a history of tacking to the right and a distinct reluctance to challenge entrenched corporate interests. What’s more, the network devotes little interest to economic policy, let alone antitrust, preferring to spend most of its time covering Russiagate.

However, this could change. Since entering the race, Biden has been subject to criticism from his left flank, and will likely remain a target. Sanders recently fired shots at Biden in a fundraising email, calling out his fundraiser with Cohen. Warren added to her long history of criticizing Biden by attacking him for his support of banks and credit card companies during the financial crisis.

However, MSNBC has failed to even mention Biden’s fundraiser with Cohen. I can’t imagine why.

New Group Aims to Harness Political Power of Women

WASHINGTON — Three of the nation’s most influential activists are launching an organization that aims to harness the political power of women to influence elections and shape local and national policy priorities.

Dubbed “Supermajority,” the organization is the creation of Cecile Richards, the former head of Planned Parenthood; Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter; and Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. The group, which describes itself as multiracial and intergenerational, has a goal of training and mobilizing 2 million women over the next year to become organizers and political leaders in their communities.

The effort comes at a moment when women have emerged as perhaps the most powerful force in politics.

Millions of women marched in cities across America to protest President Donald Trump’s election. Women also comprise the majority of the electorate in the 2018 midterm elections, sending a historic number of female candidates to Congress and helping Democrats retake control of the House. A record number of women are also seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including four senators.

Richards, who has long been a force in Democratic politics, said women “feel newly empowered and frankly motivated to take action, including so many women who never thought themselves as an activist before.”

Richards, Garza and Poo spent the past year traveling the country talking to women about how to harness their activism. They found that despite increased energy, many women find getting involved in politics intimidating and are unclear about how to do more than just march or protest.

“Women are mad as hell and we’ve been in resistance mode for two years,” Garza said. “Now it’s time to equip people.”

Supermajority isn’t expected to endorse individual candidates. But the group will help educate women about candidates’ positions on issues including pay equity and affordable child care and push politicians to adopt an agenda akin to what Richards called a “women’s new deal.”

The effort will be aided by Libby Chamberlain and Cortney Tunis, co-founders of the Facebook group Pantsuit Nation, which was started in the closing weeks of the 2016 election for supporters of Hillary Clinton. The online community now has more than 3.5 million female members.

California’s Failed Prison Reform Is Killing Inmates

FRESNO, Calif. — On the night of Jan. 17, 2018, Lorenzo Herrera walked into the Fresno County Jail booking area and sat down for an interview. Yes, he had a gang history, an officer wrote on his intake form. But Herrera, 19, said he did not expect problems with others inside the gang pod he’d soon call home.

His parents had encouraged him to barter for books and newspapers — anything he could to preoccupy himself until his trial on burglary and assault charges. His father, Carlos Herrera, offered advice: “Just be careful, and only trust yourself.”

Herrera survived the violent chaos of the Fresno County Jail for 66 days, including living through a brawl that left another inmate unconscious. Then, on an afternoon in March, jail officers found him strangled.

Herrera didn’t get a trial or a plea deal. He got a death sentence, his parents say. And even now, no one at the jail seems to know what happened.

The evening before Herrera entered the jail, Ernest Brock, 20, was also arrested and booked pending trial. Officers put him in a cell with a psychotic inmate accused of rape who had refused to take medication and was beating his head against the walls. Brock made it three days inside before the cellmate choked him into a coma.

Yet a third inmate arrived soon after Brock, booked for a five-year-old probation violation. Andre Erkins, 30, writhed in pain for hours before dying of previously undetected cardiac disease. The jail staff failed to notice his worsening health until it was too late.

Three bookings within 48 hours. Three young men jailed for different reasons. Three people who walked into the overcrowded Fresno County Jail and left on gurneys, dead or barely alive.

The fates of Herrera, Brock and Erkins set the stage for the deadliest year in at least two decades at the jail, a sprawling complex of jam-packed cells, filled with inmates working their way through a clogged criminal justice system.

Eleven inmates died last year from drug and alcohol withdrawal, suicide, medical complications and murder. Thirteen other people were beaten and hospitalized for multiple days.

The increase in violence and death in Fresno started soon after the state was ordered in 2011 by the U.S. Supreme Court to reduce its prison population. That’s when California officials approved sweeping reforms called “realignment,” shifting responsibility for thousands of offenders from state prisons to county jails.

While decreasing the overload in state prisons, the results in many county jails have been deadly. An investigation by McClatchy and ProPublica has found that many county jails have struggled to handle the influx of violent and mentally ill inmates incarcerated for longer sentences than ever before. As a result, inmates are dying in markedly higher numbers.

No other jail in California has seen a sharper increase in inmate deaths than the Fresno County Jail, whose three buildings house more than 3,000 inmates, mostly in the concrete cube known as the Main Jail in downtown Fresno. In the seven years before the 2011 realignment, 23 inmates died in jail custody, data from the California Department of Justice shows. That figure more than doubled to 47 deaths during the seven years after the state shifted more responsibility to the county jails.

Only one Fresno County inmate killed another in the seven years before realignment. Since then, four have died at the hands of other inmates.

The problem is particularly acute in places like Fresno, Kern and Merced counties, inland stretches of California, where deaths have surged disproportionately, a data analysis by McClatchy and ProPublica found. These less affluent counties in California’s Central Valley watched inmate homicides triple.

In the past seven years, some counties took advantage of the billions of dollars attached to California’s realignment efforts to address overcrowding. Others, the investigation shows, have viewed the changes as a burden.

The Fresno County Jail death toll illustrates how some counties have failed to institute reforms, keep up with federal court orders to improve conditions, and prioritize inmate well-being. As has long been the case, two-thirds of the people kept in jails are accused but not convicted.

Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims said that the county jails hold many dangerous people, and that awful events, including deaths, are almost inevitable. A few years ago, Mims said, an inmate hid a razor blade in his nasal cavity and cut his co-defendant in court.

“How long does it take to inhale a razor blade?” she said. “If you wanted absolutely no assaults on inmates, no assaults on staff, no murders, no suicides you would almost have to have a [guard] assigned to every single inmate or continually have eyes on those inmates.”

However, the state data shows Fresno County recorded far more inmate deaths, and particularly violent deaths, than some larger California jails. For example, Orange County’s jail on average holds twice as many people as Fresno County’s, but it had just one inmate-on-inmate homicide the past seven years. Fresno County had four.

Don Specter, director of the Berkeley, California-based nonprofit Prison Law Office, whose litigation against the state’s prisons spurred the realignment effort, called conditions in most county jails “a mess.”

The problems are compounded because county jails were never meant to accommodate these different inmates with yearslong sentences. County jails also lack effective oversight, especially in monitoring the handling of difficult inmates. And many sheriffs spend minimal amounts on jail health care and safety.

The Fresno County Sheriff’s Office does not segregate people awaiting trial from convicted inmates serving a jail sentence. When more dangerous or mentally ill inmates strain the short-handed staff, every part of the jail deals with the consequences. As the Herrera, Brock and Erkins cases illustrate, this can have a ripple effect throughout the jail. Officers are sometimes slower to conduct rounds, to notice inmates who are gravely sick, to watch fights develop in a gang pod or to isolate psychotic inmates.

Experts say apathy among officials in many of California’s 56 counties with jails has fostered a crisis.

“The sheriffs have been very indifferent to jail conditions,” Specter said. “There’s been a complete lack of action.”

Mims said 2018’s record number of fatalities inside her jail was predictable. In more than two hours of interviews, she repeatedly characterized such deaths as an unfortunate consequence of jail life after realignment and expressed no remorse over her office’s failure to prevent them. At one point she asked reporters for basic details about the fatalities in her own jail.

She also said one of the most “painful” moments of her time in office was releasing inmates during the economic downturn. “Being a peace officer,” Mims said, “you know, you want to keep people locked up.”

Though running a jail is complicated work, inmate deaths should not be dismissed as inevitable, said Marin County Sheriff Robert Doyle, speaking on behalf of the California State Sheriffs’ Association.

“As soon as someone walks in, they’re our responsibility,” he said. Asked if it’s the sheriff’s job to prevent inmate deaths and jail violence, Doyle responded, “Of course.”

The Prison-to-Jail Churn

Fresno County’s jail system has been teeming with prisoners for decades. In 1993, county officials packed 20 people into a cell intended for 12, with inmates sprawled on mattresses between and beneath bunk beds. In one incident, an inmate clogged his toilet with a sheet, causing other cells to overflow with waste when someone flushed.

“By the time we had breakfast, seventy-five people were eating with two inches of human waste on the floor,” one inmate said in a sworn affidavit.

Months before the toilets backed up, a convicted murderer raped and killed a man booked on drug charges. Then-Sheriff Steve Magarian told The Fresno Bee, “The jail is full of dangerous inmates who kill with no notice.”

Lawyers representing Fresno County inmates sued the sheriff’s office in February 1993, alleging cruel and unusual jail conditions that violated the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment. By November, the county settled with inmates and agreed in a consent decree to cap the jail population. When any part of the jail reaches full capacity, the sheriff’s office must release inmates and limit new arrivals. The sheriff is prohibited from having people sleep on the floor.

Though unpopular at first, “the reality is it put some kind of sensibility of operation into the jail,” said Assistant Sheriff Tom Gattie, who oversees Fresno’s jail.

In negotiations, the inmates’ lawyers agreed the sheriff’s office can house three people in a space designed for two. The sheriff is legally allowed to overcrowd the jail, but only to a point.

Then came back-to-back blows for Fresno County. The real estate market crash and recession dried up jail funding as tax revenues shriveled.

Mims was running for a second term as Fresno County sheriff in 2010. She won the top job four years earlier, advocating tough-on-crime policies and denouncing early inmate releases. But facing severe budget shortfalls, Mims laid off several dozen correctional officers. She closed several floors of the jail because she didn’t have enough officers to watch inmates. And the consent decree required Mims to set some of them free.

The inmate population dropped from 2,100 to 1,400 in the first six months of 2010, according to the sheriff’s office jail census data. The sheriff’s office primarily released people charged with misdemeanors or serving sentences for low-level crimes.

While Fresno County struggled with jail crowding and staffing, the state faced increasing pressure on its three dozen prisons. In May 2011, California lost its decades-long legal fight on prison overcrowding. In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court required the state to reduce its prisoner population by 46,000 inmates. Without that dramatic change, there was “a certain and unacceptable risk of continuing violations of the rights of sick and mentally ill prisoners, with the result that many more will die or needlessly suffer,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. “The Constitution does not permit this wrong.”

Instead of releasing prisoners early, the state stopped thousands of new arrivals from going to prison at all.

Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and state lawmakers reduced the number of convicts sent to the prisons. They bundled the first reforms in 2011 into Assembly Bill 109, referred to as realignment. The legislation rerouted people convicted of nonviolent, nonsexual and nonserious crimes to serve sentences in county jails.

Realignment and subsequent sentencing reforms brought relief to state prisons and new burdens for many local governments. To ease the load, counties received billions of state taxpayer dollars to pay for new jail facilities, treatment programs and staff.

Previously, judges could not sentence people to more than a year in county jails. In the reform era, jail sentences extended for years, meaning that sheriffs must provide long-term care for county jail inmates who previously would have gone to prisons.

County jails are not equipped for such strains, said Matt Cate, the former state corrections secretary who helped oversee realignment. In retrospect, Cate said he believes convicts sentenced to five years or more of incarceration should serve that time in prison, not the local jails.

“In some places, the sheriff had no chance,” Cate said. “The place was already crowded, and the place was already old, and the mission was already complex, and the budget was already not very good.”

As some state prisoners’ sentences ended in 2012, and realignment blocked new intakes, the prison population dropped by 20,000 within months.

The opposite occurred in county jails. The number of inmates increased by almost 10,000, to about 82,000.

The release of prisoners has stabilized, but violence has increased. Mims said this has been an unavoidable result of the reforms that now involve longer stays for challenging inmates. “Realignment changed the whole game,” the sheriff said.

Arguably, conditions inside the Fresno County jail should be improving. In 2015, the sheriff’s office agreed to a second consent decree in another class-action lawsuit over jail conditions. The agreement requires the sheriff to hire 127 additional correctional officers to protect and provide services to inmates.

Mims has expanded the jail’s force by roughly 100 officers, court records show, but adding staff has not gone smoothly. Throughout 2017, the sheriff’s office hired 40 new officers but lost 39. Many departures were retirements, replacing experienced officers with rookies.

The churn continued into January 2018.

When Brock, Herrera and Erkins entered the jail, the sheriff’s office was hemorrhaging correctional officers. In March 2018, 13% of the jail positions were vacant.

The deadline for hiring new officers is October, but Mims doubts the office will make the deadline.

“We’re never going to be always 100% compliant,” she said.

And the jail’s issues continue to fester. It had an average daily population of 3,136 inmates in February, 11% higher than the previous February. The number of people incarcerated has exceeded 3,000 for six of the past seven months, within a court-ordered population cap but more than any recent time. About 25% of the current inmates would have previously gone to state prisons, jail records show.

Jail staffers feel overwhelmed at times, said Lt. Russell Duran, a jail officer for 17 years. Staff members talk about the demands of guarding such large populations. The gang members expand their influence in the jail while serving longer sentences, the maximum-security inmates pose a greater threat, those with serious mental illness and those with chronic medical conditions suffer in a place built to temporarily seal them away.

“I’m not gonna lie,” Duran said, “it’s hard to manage.”

The Fresno County Jail is also holding all inmates for much longer periods of time than before realignment. The average length of stay in 2011 was 16 days. That extended to 21 days the following year as prison reform began. It has grown nearly every year since, according to data from the California Board of State and Community Corrections. Inmates stayed in Fresno County 35 days, on average, in 2018.

Even people awaiting trial have idled in jail far longer, with the average pretrial stay doubling from 12 days in 2011 to about 24 days last year.

Jail conditions rarely came up as Mims successfully campaigned for her fourth term last year. She hasn’t faced an opponent since her first race in 2006.

Among the memorabilia adorning Mims’ office is the hard hat she wore Jan. 25, 2018, at a ceremonial groundbreaking for the department’s new $110 million jail. The facility will replace a dilapidated 1947 jail annex, where female inmates are housed, that is dangerous and in disrepair. It will hold 200 fewer people, reflecting realignment’s goal of reform and downsizing.

But it is a temporary fix.

“We’re building it,” Mims said, “with expansion in mind.”

A Psychotic Cellmate

The 48-hour period in which Herrera, Brock and Erkins entered the Fresno County Jail illustrates the failures of county jails since the 2011 realignment. They were not sent to jail because of realignment. But their lives were at increased risk at the troubled facility, in part, because of it.

On Jan. 16, 2018, police found Brock at his grandmother’s house and arrested him on a warrant issued in April 2017 for allegedly possessing child pornography on his computer.

Then 20 years old, Brock lived with his grandmother on the north end of town along the San Joaquin River. He had dropped out of high school and spent his days riding dirt bikes, playing video games and helping his father work at a radiator repair shop. His mother, Tabatha Rankin, said her son loved hiking and fishing but hadn’t figured out what to do with his life.

When Brock was arrested, his family couldn’t afford to post bail. Rankin visited him at the jail the next day. “He seemed to be OK, everything was OK,” she said. “And then the next day was a whole different story.”

Brock had been assigned a frightening cellmate three days after he was arrested. He sounded alarmed in a call to his mother. “He told me there was a guy in there and he was crazy and he needed his psych medicine,” Rankin recalled. She urged her son to report problems to staff.

The sheriff’s office knew of the cellmate’s mental issues.

The cellmate was incarcerated for six months, awaiting trial in a rape case, court records show, and a psychiatrist prescribed medicine for psychosis. The cellmate, then 26, refused to take it.

A judge ordered him moved to a locked state psychiatric hospital so he could be forcibly medicated. It was an urgent matter, the ruling states, because “if the defendant’s mental disorder is not treated with antipsychotic medications, it is probable that serious harm to the physical or mental health of the patient will result.”

He was still awaiting transfer a month later, when Brock was placed in his cell. Admission to a California state hospital often takes months, and in January 2018 the waitlist was more than 1,000 patients long. (Notably, Fresno County’s court sends more inmates to state mental hospitals than almost every other large county in California, The Fresno Bee reported in 2013.)

Whether Brock reported his fears about his cellmate to jail staff is unclear. But on Jan. 19, the cellmate according to the Fresno County sheriff’s office choked his cellmate until he’d squeezed off air to Brock’s brain.

Staff called the Fresno Fire Department and an emergency medical team arrived shortly before 9 p.m. Brock “had trauma to the neck and knuckles,” firefighters reported. Paramedics tried to reopen Brock’s airway and rushed him to the emergency room.

Rankin was unaware of the struggle to save her son. She repeatedly checked the online inmate search tool that evening to see if Brock had been moved to a different, safer cell. No updates popped up, until she saw that her son had been taken to a hospital.

Rankin waited outside until the jail’s lobby opened. She told the front desk staff she “wasn’t going to leave until they told me something.”

A supervising officer assured her “that he was OK,” Rankin remembered. “It was just a little fight that they had gotten into and everything was fine.” Yes, Brock was hospitalized, but Rankin couldn’t visit him unless she first posted bail.

More than an hour later, an officer called to tell her that Brock might not survive. She rushed to his hospital room to find his wrists and ankles cuffed to the bed frame, dark bruises around his throat. He was comatose, but two officers stood guard to ensure he didn’t escape.

“They didn’t know how long he had been without oxygen,” Rankin said. He remained unconscious for two weeks, clinging to life.

When Brock awakened, he couldn’t walk. He had no short-term memory, his mother said, and seemed to have problems with basic mental functions.

Prosecutors dropped the charges against Brock, and Rankin has filed a wrongful injury lawsuit against the sheriff’s office, now scheduled to go to trial next year. Fresno County has denied all wrongdoing in the case.

Today, Brock’s future remains uncertain, his mother said. He still lives with his grandmother, and his family tries to safeguard him.

“There’s always someone there with him,” Rankin said. “He’s never there by himself.”

“No Reason Why That Boy Should’ve Died”

Andre Erkins got into trouble with the law for the first time on Aug. 9, 2012. “While the victim was unloading groceries, Erkins took her purse from her shopping cart,” the arrest report said.

Fresno County prosecutors charged him with felony grand theft and simple assault, and he pleaded guilty in January 2013. A judge sentenced him to two years probation and 240 days in the Fresno County Jail.

When Erkins was released, he tried in his own way to get his life back on track.

He moved to Southern California to start over but failed to give his probation officer advance notice. Then he missed a court date. A judge issued a warrant for his arrest. Erkins knew he was in trouble, but his relationship with longtime friend Natalie Meza was going well.

They had their first child, Joseph, in 2014, and Christiana was born in spring 2016. Erkins stayed home with the kids when Meza worked. She moved to the Sacramento metro area in 2016 to train as a sign-language interpreter, and he joined her for their daughter’s first birthday.

Erkins rarely talked with Meza about his probation violation. But the rest of his family urged him to resolve it.

On Jan. 18, 2018, Erkins rolled through an intersection without stopping while driving Meza to work, with his children in the backseat. An officer pulled him over and ran his name.

Erkins knew he was caught. He told his partner, “I’m going to go. … It might as well be now than later so I can get it done with.”

The officer put Erkins in the police car and told Meza to say goodbye. “I took that opportunity to go and tell him that I love him, that everything’s going to be right,” she said.

A judge on Feb. 5 ordered that he spend four weeks in jail to resolve the theft charge.

But on Feb. 17, Erkins “complained of not feeling well,” according to his autopsy report. He was “sent to the infirmary” and told staff he vomited seven times. Erkins was “interacting with infirmary staff when he collapsed,” after having “seizure like activity,” according to the report.

Jail staff began CPR, and an ambulance whisked him to a hospital five blocks away. He was pronounced dead at 8:37 p.m.

Erkins died a “natural” death caused by atherosclerotic heart disease, ruled the county coroner, who is part of the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office. His heart was slightly enlarged, and some of his arteries were 70% blocked. Investigators said that during his booking, he reported having high blood pressure but wasn’t taking medication.

That is the official version of events. But a cellmate said that doesn’t tell the full story of Erkins’ final hours.

Erkins’ bunkmate remembers trying to get help for him while he suffered for more than 10 hours, apparently unnoticed by correctional officers during hourly checks. Erkins complained of a headache, then vomited and poured sweat, his bunkmate said in a phone interview. (The bunkmate, now serving time in a state prison, requested his name not be used out of fear for his safety.)

“He did not look healthy at all. Pale. … He just looked drained, ” Erkins’ bunkmate said.

Erkins’ speech slurred that evening as they sat at a dayroom table. His lips were turning blue, but he told his bunkmate he had no previous medical problems. “This guy needs medical attention ASAP,” the bunkmate remembered telling an officer. “He’s gonna die!”

Erkins was taken to medical staff some 30 minutes after the inmates alerted the correctional officer, according to Erkins’ bunkmate. Officers locked down the jail five minutes later. Firefighters and emergency medical technicians arrived, loaded Erkins onto a stretcher and wheeled him away.

The bunkmate told his mother, Jennifer Sanders, what he saw. Bothered by the death of an otherwise healthy man in jail on a probation violation, Sanders wrote to officials accusing them of neglect and sent a copy to Erkins’ mom. She signed her letter “a concerned mother and citizen.”

“There was no reason why that boy should’ve died,” she said in a telephone interview.

The morning after Erkins died, an investigator called Erkins’ brother, Deijon, to ask questions about the family’s background and medical history. Deijon Erkins did not know what had happened to Ari, the family nickname for his brother.

“Is he alive?” Deijon Erkins demanded. “He just hesitated, and he’s like, ‘I’m sorry to inform you …’”

Deijon Erkins called Meza, and she scolded him for interrupting her at the McDonald’s where she worked. “What was so important it couldn’t wait?” she wondered.

Ari died, Deijon told her.

Meza said she sobbed in the bathroom stall.

Erkins’ family tried to get lawyers to pressure the sheriff’s office for answers, but they eventually gave up, tangled in the county bureaucracy.

Erkins’ mother, Chrisie Collins, wrote to the court complaining that she was getting the “runaround.” A year later, when contacted about the letter in Erkins’ court file, she said, “Finally, somebody’s paying attention.”

The family created pendants to hold Erkins’ ashes. For Collins, a silver music note filled with his remains travels with her in the car. Meza misses her partner and the better life they were trying to build.

Four-year-old Joseph dealt with the loss of his father through grief counseling, Meza said. Christiana, who recently turned 3, is only beginning to ask questions.

An Unsolved Case

On Jan.17, 2018, Lorenzo Herrera called his parents, Carlos and Anna, to say he was OK but was under arrest.

He and two other young men were accused of smashing into a home southeast of Fresno and fleeing in a pickup. Herrera allegedly pointed a gun at an officer before surrendering.

Herrera was working as a janitor at the local high school, and as far as his parents knew, the only thing he had ever stolen was a family barbeque smoker he used to party with friends and never returned, his father said. Lorenzo Herrera had no previous criminal history, according to court records.

In a jail intake photo, Herrera wore black clothes, his hat turned backward. He held a dry-erase board proclaiming to be a “Northerner” from Reedley, a subsect of the Norteños street gang. He said his moniker was “Rampage.”

His father saw the image as a survival tactic. Self-identifying as a gang member is part of living in the Central Valley and being Hispanic, he said. “My son wasn’t no gang member,” Carlos Herrera said in an interview.

At booking, Herrera was assigned a cell in a Norteños gang pod. Correctional officers observe inmates in six different pods from a glass-encircled observation deck. The feeling is different on the floor. Concrete walls separate the six pods, and some pods contain up to 72 inmates. Some are serving yearslong sentences and others recently arrived and are awaiting their day in court.

Four correctional officers are expected to maintain order among some 200 inmates on the floor. Correctional officers, who do not carry firearms, are required by the state to perform hourly checks. If trouble erupts, they must craft a plan to take back control.

On Feb. 2, two weeks after Herrera arrived, a melee in the gang pod demanded action.

Three correctional officers appear to have been working the crowded sixth floor, and two officers in the security station noticed a group of men walking toward an inmate, according to a sheriff’s office incident report. They saw inmates beating a man under the stairwell.

An officer called for help. A pepper-ball launcher was rushed from the security station. An officer opened the door hatch, pulled a launcher from his leg holster and “instructed all inmates to stop fighting and to get down on the ground,” according to incident reports. That was met with “negative results.”

The officer fired six pepper-ball rounds toward the inmates, forcing them to drop to the floor. At least 18 correctional officers and staff from across the complex flooded into the pod.

An unconscious inmate was whisked to the hospital, and the pod was put on lockdown. The man assaulted “refused to press charges,” jail staff wrote.

In the 66 days Herrera was in Fresno County’s custody, four people were so seriously injured in fights they required multiple-day hospital admissions, according to county records. That’s more than in all the preceding year.

While inside, Herrera spoke to his parents but never mentioned the violence. In one visit, he apologized to his mother for missing Valentine’s Day. “Mom, I’m really sorry. I don’t want to feel like you’re afraid for me. I’m OK. Don’t worry about me,” she said he told her.

About a month after that visit, on March 24, 2018, a correctional officer doing cell checks found Herrera dead on a cell bunk bed. A “man down” call was issued and the staff started CPR. He was pronounced dead about 25 minutes later.

An autopsy determined Herrera had been choked to death, the cause of death “ligature strangulation.”

The phone at Carlos and Anna Herrera’s home rang about 7:45 p.m., and they were asked to come to the jail. During the drive toward downtown Fresno, they wondered if their son would be released.

Instead, they were led into a meeting room and offered a box of tissues.

Lorenzo was dead. And though his killer was in custody, the jail officers were not sure who it was, according to court filings.

Inmates have some control over day-to-day life inside the pod. They’re not supposed to enter another person’s cell, but officers do not keep tabs on who’s coming and going. One officer described it as the “honor system.” Cameras record common areas and can see who enters and exits specific cells, which are not video monitored.

Herrera’s parents have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the sheriff’s office, and a jury trial is scheduled for 2021. The county denies all wrongdoing.

The investigation into Herrera’s death remains open, and no one has been charged. Investigators have interviewed every inmate in the pod at the time of his death, along with every officer on duty.

Detectives were awaiting results from a DNA test of some evidence from the scene, according to a recent court filing.

The prolonged homicide investigation is but one of Mims’ challenges in managing the chaotic Fresno jail. Since the 2015 consent decree, lawyers and prison-reform experts have called for more jail staffing. In meetings with the sheriff’s staff, they examine progress in correcting a jail that has become known for its record of violence and death.

Mims does not attend those meetings and said she instead sends jail administrators to represent her office.

Specter, with the Prison Law Office, said a sheriff’s absence sends a clear message. “One indication of how much they care is whether they show up,” he said.

For her part, Mims has established herself as a voice on national immigration policy. She traveled with President Donald Trump to the U.S.-Mexico border earlier this month to advocate tougher federal enforcement.

Meanwhile, the county jail is grappling again with setbacks. Within the past two months, three dozen correctional officers have retired or quit their posts.

The jail remains filled to capacity.

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Rabbi Says Gun ‘Miraculously’ Jammed in Synagogue Attack

POWAY, Calif.—In the minutes after the gunman fled the scene of a shooting that killed a woman inside a Southern California synagogue, a wounded Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein wrapped his bloodied hand in a prayer shawl and addressed the panicked congregation, vowing to stay strong in the face of yet another deadly attack in a house of worship.

“We are a Jewish nation that will stand tall. We will not let anyone take us down. Terrorism like this will not take us down,” Goldstein recalled telling his congregants after the gunfire erupted Saturday at Chabad of Poway.

Congregant Lori Kaye, 60, was killed in the shooting, which injured Goldstein, 8-year-old Noya Dahan and her 34-year-old uncle, Almog Peretz, authorities said. Hours after the three wounded were released from hospitals, Goldstein described the ordeal at a news conference Sunday outside the synagogue north of San Diego.

Goldstein said he was preparing for a service on the last day of Passover and saw a young man wearing sunglasses standing in front of him with a rifle.

“I couldn’t see his eyes. I couldn’t see his soul,” Goldstein said. He raised his hands to protect himself and lost one of his fingers in the shooting.

And then, Goldstein says, “miraculously the gun jammed.”

The attack Saturday came exactly six months after a mass shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue.

John T. Earnest, 19, surrendered to police after bursting into the synagogue north of San Diego and opening fire as about 100 people were worshipping inside.

Earnest, who had no previous contact with law enforcement, may face a hate crime in addition to homicide when he’s arraigned later this week, San Diego County Sheriff William Gore said. He was being held without bail, and it was unclear if he had an attorney. Police searched Earnest’s house and said he was also being investigated in connection with an arson attack on a mosque in nearby Escondido, California, on March 24.

The 8-year-old victim said she had just finished praying and was getting ready to go play with other children when gunshots rang out. Her uncle rushed her and the other children outside, the girl said.

Her leg was bleeding but doctors told her she didn’t need surgery, she said.

“I was really, really scared,” she said. “I didn’t see my dad. I thought he was dead.”

Her father, 32-year-old Israel Dahan, said he flipped over a folding table as soon as he saw the man enter carrying a long rifle. Then he rushed to get two of his other children to safety.

There were indications an AR-type assault weapon might have malfunctioned after the gunman fired numerous rounds inside, Gore said. An off-duty Border Patrol agent working as a security guard fired at the shooter as he fled, missing him but striking his getaway vehicle, the sheriff said.

Shortly after fleeing, Earnest called 911 to report the shooting, San Diego Police Chief David Nisleit said. When an officer reached him on a roadway, “the suspect pulled over, jumped out of his car with his hands up and was immediately taken into custody,” he said.

Goldstein described Kaye as a “pioneering, founding member” of the congregation and said he was “heartbroken” by her death.

“Lori took the bullet for all of his,” the rabbi said. “She didn’t deserve to die.”

He said that Kaye’s physician husband was called to tend to a wounded worshipper and fainted when he realized it was his wife.

When the gunfire erupted, another worshipper, Shimon Abitbul, said he immediately placed his 2-year-old grandson on the floor and waited for a break in the shooting to grab the boy and sprint away.

Then Abitbul ran back to the shooting scene to try to help a woman he described as having a hole in her chest and who later died, he said Sunday, tears streaming down his face.

Abitbul, who was visiting from Israel and staying with his daughter and her family in Southern California, said he was still coming to grips with the carnage.

“All of us are human beings,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you are Jews or Christians or Muslims.”

Peretz, who was wounded in the leg, was visiting from Israel, staying with family who had moved to California just a few months ago from the Israeli town of Sderot near the Gaza border, a frequent target of rocket attacks by the Hamas militant group. He said a man entered the synagogue and started shooting in all directions.

“I was with my back to the shooter. I heard a shot or two and then turned around to face him and that’s when he fired at me. I ran quickly, picking up a small girl in my hands,” he told the Israeli YNet news site. “He hit me once in the leg and I kept running. I didn’t feel it much since there were so many bullets flying by. I heard them and I saw them right next to me.”

Gore said authorities were reviewing Earnest’s social media posts, including what he described as a “manifesto.”

A person identifying himself as John Earnest posted an anti-Jewish screed online about an hour before the attack. The poster described himself as a nursing school student and praised the suspects accused of carrying out deadly attacks on mosques in New Zealand last month that killed 50 and at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27, in which 11 people were killed.

“It was a hate crime, no doubt about it,” national security adviser John Bolton said on “Fox News Sunday.” He said investigators have not seen any connection between the suspect and other extremist groups.

California State University, San Marcos, confirmed that Earnest was a student who was on the dean’s list and said the school was “dismayed and disheartened” that he was suspected in “this despicable act.””

Several dozen people, many wearing black, gathered on a corner in Poway on Sunday to show their support for the victims and synagogue congregation and to call for an end to hate and violence.

They carried signs reading “no more killing” and “Shalom.” Drivers honked as they passed by. A young boy sat with a cardboard sign reading “we must do better”.

Deb Lira, 71, of San Diego, said she was angry and sickened by the attack in what has long been a peaceful community. “I’m here because I’m Jewish and this is my message,” she said, pointing to a sign that read “never again” and “never forget.”

“I will not be silent,” she said.

There was no known threat after Earnest was arrested, but authorities boosted patrols at places of worship Saturday and again on Sunday as a precaution, police said.

___

Weber reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Elliot Spagat in Poway and Daisy Nguyen in San Francisco contributed to this report.

Socialists Win Spain Election, Far-Right Emerges as Player

MADRID—Spain’s governing center-left Socialists won the country’s election Sunday but must seek backing from smaller parties to maintain power, while a far-right party rode an unprecedented surge of support to enter the lower house of parliament for the first time in four decades.

Voters in Spain had become disillusioned as the country struggled with a recession, austerity cuts, corruption scandals, divisive demands for independence from the restive Catalonia region and a rise in far-right nationalism not seen since Spain’s dictatorship ended in the 1970s.

With 99% of ballots counted, the Socialists led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez won 29% of the vote, capturing 123 seats in the 350-seat Congress of Deputies. The new far-right Vox party made its national breakthrough by capturing 10% of the vote, which would give it 24 seats.

Vox’s success came at the expense of the once-dominant conservative Popular Party, which fell to 66 seats, losing more than half of its representation since the last election in 2016. The conservatives also lost votes to the center-right Citizens party, which will increase its number of seats from 32 to 57.

“We told you that we were going to begin a reconquering of Spain and that’s what we have done,” Vox leader Santiago Abascal said, in reference to the 15th-century campaign by the Spanish Catholic Kings to end Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula.

Vox, which was formed five years ago, has promised to defend Spain from its “enemies,” citing feminists, liberal elites and Muslims among others. Its emergence on the national stage gives Spain five political parties, furthering political fragmentation in a country that was alternately ruled for decades by the Socialists and the Popular Party.

To stay in office, the Socialists and Sánchez must form a governing alliance with smaller parties, including the far-left United We Can led by Pablo Iglesias.

Iglesias said after the vote the he “would have liked a better result, but it’s been enough to stop the right-wing and build a left-wing coalition government,” adding that he’s already offered support to Sánchez.

But Sánchez will still need 15 more seats to reach a majority in the 350-seat lower house of parliament, meaning he may be forced to make pacts with Catalan and other separatist parties — moves that would anger many Spaniards, especially the nationalist Vox supporters.

Pablo Casado, who had steered the Popular Party further to the right to try to stop it from losing votes to Vox, called the ballot the country’s “most decisive” in years. Polls only a week ago showed that about one-third of Spain’s nearly 37 million voters were still undecided.

Turnout in Sunday’s vote was around 75%, up more than 8 points since the previous election in 2016. The vote surge included a huge boost in the northeastern Catalonia region, which has been embroiled in a political quagmire since its failed secession bid in 2017 put separatist leaders in jail while they are tried.

The arrival of Vox in Madrid’s national parliament marks a big shift for Spain, where the far right has not played a significant role since the country’s transition to democracy following the death of dictator Gen. Francisco Franco in 1975.

The Popular Party and the Citizens party had focused their campaigns on unseating Sánchez, hinting they could create a conservative coalition government — with the backing of Vox — like a regional one that recently ousted the Socialists from southern Andalusia.

Speaking Sunday after voting, Sánchez said he wanted a mandate to undertake key social and political reforms.

The prime minister said he wanted “a stable government that with calmness, serenity and resolution looks to the future and achieves the progress that our country needs in social justice, national harmony” and in fighting corruption.

At the Palacio Valdes school in Madrid, voter Alicia Sánchez, a 38-year-old administrator, worried about the influence of Vox.

“I’ve always come to vote, but this time it feels special. I’m worried about how Vox can influence policies on women and other issues. They are clearly homophobic. Reading their program is like something from 50 years ago,” she said.

Having voted in all elections since Spain returned to democratic rule four decades ago, Amelia Gómez, 86, and Antonio Román, 90, said they had little faith in any of the candidates.

“All I want is for whoever wins to take care of the old people,” Gómez said, complaining that together the two of them receive less than 1,000 euros ($1,100) a month in state pensions.

___

Wilson reported from Barcelona.

Richard Lugar, Longtime GOP Senator and Foreign Policy Expert, Dies

INDIANAPOLIS—Former Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican foreign policy sage known for leading efforts to help the former Soviet states dismantle and secure much of their nuclear arsenal, but whose reputation for working with Democrats cost him his final campaign, died Sunday. He was 87.

Lugar died at the Inova Fairfax Heart and Vascular Institute in Virginia from complications related to chronic inflammatory demylinating polyneuropathy, or CIPD, a rare neurological disorder, the Lugar Center in Washington said in a statement announcing his death. The statement said his wife, four sons, and their families were with him “throughout his short illness at the hospital.”

A soft-spoken and thoughtful former Rhodes Scholar, Lugar dominated Indiana politics during his 36 years in the U.S. Senate. That popularity gave him the freedom to concentrate largely on foreign policy and national security matters — a focus highlighted by his collaboration with Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn on a program under which the U.S. paid to dismantle and secure thousands of nuclear warheads and missiles in the former Soviet states after the Cold War ended.

“Every stockpile represents a theft opportunity for terrorists and a temptation for security personnel who might seek to profit by selling weapons on the black market,” Lugar said in 2005. “We do not want the question posed the day after an attack on an American military base.”

He served for decades on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, twice as chairman, where he helped steer arms reduction pacts for the presidential administrations of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, supported an expansion of NATO and favored aid to Nicaragua’s Contra rebels.

“The world is safer from nuclear danger because of him. And so many of us, while falling far short of the standards he set, are vastly better people because of him,” said Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, who spent more than a decade as chief of staff to Lugar.

Lugar tried to translate his foreign policy expertise into a 1996 presidential run, where his slogan was “nuclear security and fiscal sanity.” But his campaign for the GOP nomination went badly from the start. His kickoff rally began just hours after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, and he struggled to build name recognition and support.

“He is not, nor does he try to be, a good ol’ boy,” Rex Early, a former state Republican chairman who worked on many of Lugar’s campaigns, said during the presidential run. “He is not a back-pounder and doesn’t tell funny jokes and have a beer with the boys.”

Lugar tried to counter questions about his demeanor, contending that the presidency is “serious business. The presidency is not entertainment.” But he was chafed at criticism that he was too straight, too smart, too dull.

“I don’t know what that means,” he said. “Is it better to have someone stupid? Or mediocre? Or halfway there?”

He withdrew a year into the race after failing to win a single convention delegate, but not before eerily foreshadowing the threat of terrorism that would become all too real on Sept. 11, 2001. Three of his television ads depicted mushroom clouds and warned of the growing danger of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorist groups.

Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb directed flags across the state to be flown at half-staff to honor Lugar until his funeral, which had not yet been announced. He called Lugar “an always faithful servant to the highest ideals in every walk of his incredible life.”

Lugar’s time as a Washington foreign policy expert was the highlight of a political career that began with his election to the Indianapolis school board in the early 1960s. It was there that he caught the eye of city GOP leaders, who encouraged him to run for mayor in 1967.

He served two terms at the city’s helm, leading the unification of Indianapolis and its suburban communities in Marion County, which solidified the city’s tax base and added so many Republican voters that Democrats weren’t able to win the mayor’s office again for more than 30 years. He was referred to as “Richard Nixon’s favorite mayor” for backing the move of federal programs to local governments. He also started efforts to revive the city’s downtown with the construction of Market Square Arena, which in turn helped bring the Indiana Pacers into the NBA and spurred Indianapolis’ development as a sports city.

He first ran for Senate in 1974, narrowly losing to Sen. Birch Bayh in a Democratic landslide after the Watergate scandal. He ran again two years later and easily unseated three-term Democratic Sen. Vance Hartke, launching a 35-year Capitol Hill career that made him Indiana’s longest-serving senator.

He built a reputation as someone willing to work across the aisle and showed he could buck his party, notably with two major disagreements with President Ronald Reagan.

In 1986, Reagan was inclined to accept the rigged election that would have kept Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in office. But Lugar went to the islands as an election observer and said Reagan was misinformed. Lugar’s stand shifted U.S. support to the ultimate winner, Corazon Aquino, bringing down Marcos.

In another break with Reagan, Lugar pushed through Congress — over the president’s veto — the economic sanctions that Nelson Mandela said played a crucial role in overthrowing white minority rule in South Africa.

His foreign policy work didn’t sit well with everyone. Sen. Jesse Helms ousted him as the top Republican on the foreign relations committee in 1986 as being “too internationalist.”

At home, Lugar remained the Indiana GOP’s most popular figure, trouncing his opponents by winning at least two-thirds of the vote in four straight elections. Democrats considered him so invincible that they didn’t nominate a challenger for the 2006 election.

He was the top Republican on the Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee when he first worked with Obama, taking the then-Illinois senator with him to Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan in 2005 to visit weapon dismantlement sites. He then co-sponsored 2007 legislation with Obama on eliminating stockpiles of shoulder-fired missiles.

Obama frequently cited his work with Lugar during the 2008 presidential campaign as evidence of his bipartisanship and foreign policy experience. Lugar endorsed John McCain but didn’t distance himself from Obama, saying, “I’m pleased that we had the association that Sen. Obama described.”

That changed by the time of Lugar’s 2012 re-election campaign. His tea party-backed challenger, Richard Mourdock, maintained that, “Lugar has clearly lost his way on issues like our raising the debt limit, wasteful earmark spending and massive bailouts of private companies at taxpayer expense.”

Lugar’s campaign ads highlighted his votes against Obama’s “bankrupting” budgets, and the senator said his relationship with Obama was “overhyped.”

But those attacks on his conservatism — combined with voter wariness about his age and long Washington tenure and questions about him not owning a home in Indiana since the late 1970s — led to Lugar’s first defeat since 1974, as Mourdock grabbed 60% of the GOP primary vote.

In conceding defeat, Lugar said he knew some of his positions had been considered “heretical” by some, including his opposition to a ban on earmarks and support for immigration reform.

“I believe that they were the right votes for the country, and I stand by them without regrets,” he said.

After Lugar’s defeat, Nunn, the Democratic senator with whom he worked on nuclear disarmament, suggested that many people may have misinterpreted Lugar’s positions as they accused him of being too liberal.

“Dick Lugar never compromised his principles in anything we did together, nor did I,” Nunn said at the time. “We found ways to work together because we examined the facts and let the facts have a bearing on the conclusions, and I’m afraid in today’s political world too often people start with the conclusions and then hunt facts to justify them.”

The Nunn-Lugar program led to about 7,600 Soviet nuclear warheads being deactivated and the destruction of more than 900 intercontinental ballistic missiles by the time Lugar left office, according to U.S. military figures. The program is credited with removing all nuclear weapons from the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus.

Born April 4, 1932, in Indianapolis, Lugar became an Eagle Scout and graduated at the top of his classes at both Indianapolis Shortridge High School and at Denison University in Ohio. At Denison, he played cello and was the student body co-president with his future wife, Charlene. They married in 1956.

He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, and in 1956 he became a Navy officer, spending time as an intelligence aide for the chief of naval operations. He moved back to Indianapolis in 1960 to help run the family’s food machinery manufacturing business.

A longtime fitness advocate, he sponsored runs in Indiana and even at age 70 completed a 3-mile (4.8-kilometer) competitive race in Washington in just over 28 minutes.

___

Associated Press writer Ken Kusmer contributed to this report.

The $70-Trillion Climate Bill Coming Our Way

The northern reaches of the planet are undergoing very rapid change: the fast Arctic melt means the region is warming at twice the speed of the planetary average.

The loss of sea ice and land snow could tip the planet into a new and unprecedented cycle of climatic change and add yet another $70 trillion (£54 tn) to the estimated economic cost of global warming.

In yet another sombre statement of the challenge presented by climate change, driven by ever-increasing emissions of greenhouse gases from the fossil fuels that power the global economy, British, European and US researchers took a look at two manifestations of warming.

One is the growing levels of ancient carbon now being released into the atmosphere as the Arctic permafrost begins to melt. The other is the reduced reflection of solar radiation back into space as what had once been an expanse of snow and ice melts, to expose ever greater areas of light-absorbing blue sea, dark rock and scrubby tundra.

Abrupt surprises

The concern is with what the scientists like to call “non-linear transitions”. The fear is not that global warming will simply get more pronounced as more snow and ice disappears. The fear is that at some point the melting will reach a threshold that could tip the planet into a new climate regime that would be irreversible, and for which there has been no parallel in human history.

And if so, the costs in terms of climate disruption, heat waves, rising sea levels, harvest failures, more violent storms and more devastating floods and so on could start to soar.

The scientists report in the journal Nature Communications that if the nations of the world were to keep a promise made in Paris in 2015 to contain planetary warming to “well below” 2°C above the average for most of human history by the year 2100, the extra cost of Arctic ice loss would still tip $24 tn.

But on the evidence of national plans tabled so far, the world seems on course to hit 3°C by the century’s end, and the extra cost to the global economies is estimated at almost $70 tn.

“What we are witnessing is a major transport current faltering, which is bringing the world one step closer to a sea ice-free summer in the Arctic”

If the world goes on burning more and more fossil fuels – this is called the business-as-usual scenario – then global temperatures could rise to 4°C above the historic average by 2100. The bill for what the scientists call “the most expensive and least desirable scenario” is set at $2197 tn. And, they stress, their forecast $70 tn is just the extra cost of the melting Arctic.

They have not factored in all the other much-feared potential “tipping points” such as the loss of the tropical rainforests that absorb so much of the atmospheric carbon, the collapse of the great Atlantic current that distributes equatorial heat to temperate climates, the loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet, and other irreversible changes.

As they see it, even to contain global warming to 1.5°C by 2100 could cost a global $600 trillion.

And although the thawing of the permafrost and the opening of the Arctic Ocean would deliver mining and shipping opportunities, any such rewards would be dwarfed by the cost of the emissions from the thawing permafrost, and the reduction of what scientists call albedo: the reflectivity of pristine ice and snow that helps keep the Arctic frozen.

Model-based estimates

Research of this kind is based on vast numbers of simulations of the global economies under a range of scenarios, and the calculations of cost remain just that, estimates based on models of what nations might or might not do. The price economies must pay will be real enough, but the advanced accounting of what has yet to happen remains academic.

But the changes in the Arctic are far from academic, according to a series of new studies of what has been happening, and is happening right now.

●Researchers in California report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have now reconstructed change in the Greenland ice sheet between 1972 and 2018, to estimate the loss of ice.

Fifty years ago, the northern hemisphere’s greatest sheet of ice was losing 47 billion tonnes of ice every year, and by the next decade 50 bn tonnes annually.

Sea levels raised

Since then the losses have risen almost six-fold, and since 2010 the island has been losing ice at the rate of 290 billion tonnes a year. So far, ice from Greenland alone has raised sea levels by almost 14 mm.

●German scientists have looked at the results of 15 years of observations by the Grace satellite system – the acronym stands for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment – which ended in 2018. They calculate that between April 2002 and June 2017, Greenland lost about 260 bn tonnes of ice each year, and Antarctica 140 bn tonnes.

They warn in the journal Nature Climate Change that melting at this rate could accelerate sea level rise to 10 mm a year – faster than at any time in the last 5,000 years – as a direct consequence of a warming climate.

●And the traffic of sea ice across the Arctic ocean has begun to falter, according to German oceanographers. The Transpolar Drift is a slow flow of new sea ice from the Siberian Arctic across the pole to the Fram Strait east of Greenland.

Melting too early

It has its place in the history of polar exploration: in 1893 the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen deliberately sailed his ship the Fram into the ice pack off Siberia and went with the floes across the Arctic.

The Drift is a kind of frozen ocean conveyor that carries nutrients, algae and sediments across the pole. But, researchers say in the journal Scientific Reports, this flow has started to vary. Most of the young ice off the Siberian coast now melts before it can leave its “nursery”. Once, half the ice from the Russian shelf completed the journey. Now, only one-fifth does.

“What we are witnessing is a major transport current faltering, which is bringing the world one step closer to a sea ice-free summer in the Arctic,” said Thomas Krumpen of the Alfred Wegener Institute, who led the study.

“The ice now leaving the Arctic through the Fram Strait is, on average, 30% thinner than it was 15 years ago.”

What Media Got Wrong About the ‘Largest Gang Takedown Ever’

Bronx 120 Report (4/19)

In the immediate wake of the now infamous “Bronx 120 gang raid,” carried out by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the NYPD on the Eastchester Gardens and Edenwald House housing projects in New York City’s Bronx on April 27, 2016, New York media uncritically and predictably repeated the NYPD and federal prosecutors’ claim that all those arrested were “gang members”—a sprawling conspiracy of murderers, drug dealers and gun runners “taken down” by authorities.

As FAIR (5/2/16) noted at the time, the breathless coverage by outlets like the Daily News, New York Post, New York Times and local TV news was a toxic combination of credulous and racist:

The Daily News  (4/28/16) kicked it off with the most salacious and prejudicial headlines:

87 Bronx Gang Members Responsible for Nine Years of Murders and Drug-Dealing Charged in Largest Takedown in NYC History

“Eighty-seven gang members”—every one of them “responsible” for “murders and drug dealing”—no evidence necessary.

No “allegedly,” no quotes around the claims, no question at all that these people—whose faces are forever plastered online as murderers and drug dealers—could possibly be innocent of the crimes in question. The Daily News, based solely on the word of federal prosecutors, left no doubt in the reader’s mind that these people were guilty.

It turns out, however, that even using the most conservative criteria, the majority of those arrested were not “gang members” at all.

A report released Thursday, co-authored by CUNY law professor Babe Howell and CUNY graduate student Priscilla Bustamante, found that more than half of the 120 indicted were never alleged by federal prosecutors to be in a gang. The “largest gang takedown ever,” as The Intercept’s Alice Speri notes (4/25/19), was mostly not about “gang members”:

While the Bronx 120 were all painted as dangerous gang members, the report reveals that fewer than half of them were actually accused of being gang members in prosecutors’ sentencing submissions, including four who contested the allegation in their own submissions. Seventeen people were described as being “associated with” gangs, for instance, because they were selling marijuana in gang territory. Thirty-four were affirmatively described in prosecutors’ submissions as not being gang members at all, and there was no reference to gang membership for 13 others. But that didn’t prevent all 120 from being paraded in front of the media and mostly denied bail as gang members.

It’s important to note that even if all 120 were in a gang, it still wouldn’t have justified the raid or the racist, cartoonish media coverage. Being in a gang, as the report’s co-author Howell pointed out to The Intercept, is “not a crime…. You shouldn’t be prosecuted simply because of association.” Even granting this, however, the primary hook, the main headline, the thing that justified hundreds of military-geared men raiding public housing at 6 AM—that it was all necessary to fight a sprawling “gang”—wasn’t true.

From the Bronx 120 Report

Were there some members in a formal “gang”? Yes, according to prosecutors. But crime-fighting, and by extension the coverage of crime, isn’t a batting average. You don’t get to bat .440, wrongfully smear 56 percent of the people being accused and plastered all over the internet and your front page, and call it a day. As New York activist and frequent FAIR contributor Josmar Trujillo points out, this whole episode should make journalists and editors press pause on the enterprise of taking the NYPD and federal authorities at their word, and the broader panic around “gang raids” in general.

“This report should make us question our knee-jerk reactions around ‘gangs,’” he wrote Thursday in AMNY (4/25/19):

While there is loose talk now of ending mass incarceration, the continued use of conspiracy laws in poor communities of color like an atomic bomb is not justice. We’ve clearly over-criminalized black and Latino youth across the board, but RICO is particularly harsh and inappropriate.

Leading the propaganda charge at the time was US Attorney Preet Bharara, who stood in front of sexed-up war maps of the Bronx that, in the media’s eye, turned public housing occupied mostly by black New Yorkers into a combat zone, justifying the “pre dawn raid.” These were no longer citizens, but combatants; the Bronx projects, a war zone requiring military-like invasion.

“Clearly, not everyone in these areas are in a gang,” the Daily News helpfully clarified.

These propaganda maps were, months prior, provided by the US attorney’s office and NYPD to theDaily News, which created an interactive map so their readers could see which scary gangs lurked in their area. Daily News coverage the day of the raid linked to this widget, so as to strike tech-savvy fear into the hearts of those reading the thrilling “gang raid” coverage.

The reality, it turns out, wasn’t that simple. What the report shows is messy, haphazard overreach by authorities that relied, in part, on a media spectacle that pandered to racist stereotypes and assumptions of guilt. Who knows if the color-coded areas provided by Bharara and the NYPD actually correlated with “gang control”? Since the majority of those arrested in the Largest Gang Takedown Ever weren’t actually in a gang, one can reasonably suspect these maps were just generalized, PR-driven marketing materials.

Indeed, we know, based on emails obtained by reporter George Joseph through FOIA requests, that those who carried out the raid openly discussed the media angle. ICE officials, immediately before and after April 27, praised the PR savvy of the operation. “This takedown will most likely be the largest Gang Takedown ever for the Southern District of New York and generate some significant media attention,” one Homeland Security special agent wrote to a colleague in an April 6 email. “It has more media interest than I can catalogue and the story was picked up worldwide,” another ICE official wrote on April 29, two days after the mass arrests.

These high profile “gang raids” are, above all, PR operations designed to help pad budgets and justify unusually harsh prosecutions. It’s not until years later, after trials and FOIAs and academic reports, that we learn how thin the narrative really was. But by then it’s too late.

Image from The Intercept (4/25/19) showing Preet Bharara pointing out gang “territories.”

Will any of the prosecutors and reporters who oversold the simplistic “gang raid” narrative at the time, unduly smearing the names of dozens of black New Yorkers, be held accountable? Will Preet Bharara, who has since left the US attorney’s office and rebranded himself a woke defender of democracy in the age of Trump, who goes on MSNBC to recite platitudes about the “rule of law,” be asked to justify his role in the smear? Will Daily News reporters Victoria Bekiempis, Thomas Tracyand Larry Mcshane, who didn’t even bother using modifiers like “alleged” or “according to police,” but simply plastered people’s faces on the front page, labeling them “violent hoodlums” and “unrepentant gangbangers,” be asked to explain why they acted as stenographers for this racist sham?

Not likely. Poor black and brown people are, as a matter of course, expendable and unimportant to our media. No one who smeared these people, or called them “gangbangers”—indelibly associating their names and faces with murder and drug-dealing online forever—will be asked to explain, much less account for the harm they caused. Those plastered on the front pages of the Daily News and countless websites are collateral damage, a cost of doing business so careerist reporters and high-status prosecutors-turned-pundits like Bharara can polish their resumes and move on to the next publicity hustle.

Humanity Is Committing Collective Suicide

As Notre Dame burned, as the flames leapt from its roof of ancient timbers, many of us watched in grim horror. Hour after hour, on screen after screen, channel after channel, you could see that 850-year-old cathedral, a visiting spot for 13 million people annually, being gutted, its roof timbers flaring into the evening sky, its steeple collapsing in a ball of fire. It was dramatic and deeply disturbing — and, of course, unwilling to be left out of any headline-making event, President Trump promptly tweeted his advice to the French authorities: “Perhaps flying water tankers could be used to put it out. Must act quickly!” No matter that water from such planes would probably have taken the cathedral’s towers down and endangered lives as well — “the equivalent,” according to a French fire chief, “of dropping three tons of concrete at 250 kilometers per hour [on] the ancient monument.”

Still, who could doubt that watching such a monument to the human endeavor being transformed into a shell of its former self was a reminder that everything human is mortal; that, whether in a single lifetime or 850 years, even the most ancient of our artifacts, like those in Iraq and Syria recently, will sooner or later be scourged by the equivalent of (or even quite literally by) fire and sword; that nothing truly lasts, even the most seemingly permanent of things like, until now, Notre Dame?

That cathedral in flames, unlike so much else in our moment (including you-know-who in his every waking moment), deserved the front-and-center media attention it got. Historically speaking, it was a burning event of the first order. Still, it’s strange that the most unnerving, deeply terrifying burning underway today, not of that ancient place of worship that lived with humanity for so many tumultuous centuries but of the planet itself, remains largely in the background.

When the cathedral in which Napoleon briefly crowned himself emperor seemed likely to collapse, it was certifiably an event of headline importance. When, however, the cathedral (if you care to think of it that way) in which humanity has been nurtured all these tens of thousands of years, on which we spread, developed, and became what we are today — I mean, of course, the planet itself — is in danger of an unprecedented sort from fires we continue to set, that’s hardly news at all. It’s largely relegated to the back pages of our attention, lost any day of the week to headlines about a disturbed, suicidal young woman obsessed with the Columbine school massacre or an attorney general obsessed with protecting the president.

And let’s not kid ourselves, this planet of ours is beginning to burn — and not just last week or month either. It’s been smoldering for decades now. Last summer, for instance, amid global heat records (Ouargla, Algeria, 124 degrees Fahrenheit; Hong Kong, over 91 degrees Fahrenheit for 16 straight days; Nawabsha, Pakistan, 122 degrees Fahrenheit; Oslo, Norway, over 86 degrees Fahrenheit for 16 consecutive days; Los Angeles, 108 degrees Fahrenheit), wildfires raged inside the Arctic Circle. This March, in case you hadn’t noticed — and why would you, since it’s gotten so little attention? — the temperature in Alaska was, on average, 20 degrees (yes, that is not a misprint) above normal and typical ice roads between villages and towns across parts of that state were melting and collapsing with deaths ensuing.

Meanwhile, in the Antarctic, ice is melting at a rate startling to scientists. If the process accelerates, global sea levels could rise far faster than expected, beginning to drown coastal cities like Miami, New York, and Shanghai more quickly than previously imagined. Meanwhile, globally, the wildfire season is lengthening. Fearsome fires are on the rise, as are droughts, and that’s just to begin to paint a picture of a heating planet and its ever more extreme weather systems and storms, of (if you care to think of it that way) a Whole Earth version of Notre Dame.

The Arsonists Arrive

As was true with Notre Dame, when it comes to the planet, there were fire alarms before an actual blaze was fully noted. Take, for example, the advisory panel of scientists reporting to President Lyndon Johnson on the phenomenon of global warming back in 1965. They would, in fact, predict with remarkable accuracy how our world was going to change for the worse by this twenty-first-century moment. (And Johnson, in turn, would bring the subject upofficially for perhaps the first time in a Special Message to Congress on February 5, 1965, 54 years before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal proposal.) As that panel wrote at the time, “Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years…” In other words, the alarm was first sounded more than half a century ago.

When it comes to climate change, however, as the smoke began to appear and, in our own moment, the first flames began to leap — after all, the last four years have been the hottest on record and, despite the growth of ever less expensive alternative energy sources, carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere are still rising, not falling — no firemen arrived (just children). There were essentially no adults to put out the blaze. Yes, there was the Paris climate accord but it was largely an agreement in principle without enforcement power of any genuine sort.

In fact, across significant parts of the planet, those who appeared weren’t firefighters at all, but fire feeders who will likely prove to be the ultimate arsonists of human history. In a way, it’s been an extraordinary performance. Leaders who vied for, or actually gained, power not only refused to recognize the existence of climate change but were quite literally eager to aid and abet the phenomenon. This is true, for instance, of the new president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who came to power prepared to turn the already endangered carbon sink of the Amazon rain forest into a playground for corporate and agricultural destroyers. It is similarly true in Europe, where right-wing populist movements have begun to successfully opposegestures toward dealing with climate change, gaining both attention and votes in the process. In Poland, for instance, just such a party led by President Andrzej Duda has come to power and the promotion of coal production has become the order of the day.

And none of that compared to developments in the richest, most powerful country of all, the one that historically has put more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere than any other. On taking office, Donald Trump appointed more climate-change deniers to his cabinet than might have previously seemed possible and swore fealty to “American energy dominance,” while working to kneecap the development of alternative energy systems.  He and his men tried to open new areas to oil and gas drilling, while in every way imaginable striving to remove what limits there had been on Big Energy, so that it could release its carbon emissions into the atmosphere unimpeded. And as the planetary cathedral began to burn, the president set the mood for the moment (at least for his vaunted “base”) by tweeting such things as “It’s really cold outside, they are calling it a major freeze, weeks ahead of normal. Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming!” or, on alternative energy, “You would be doing wind, windmills, and if it doesn’t if it doesn’t blow you can forget about television for that night… Darling, I want to watch television. I’m sorry, the wind isn’t blowing.”

Among those who will someday be considered the greatest criminals in history, don’t forget the Big Energy CEOs who, knowing the truth about climate change from their own hired scientists, did everything they could to increase global doubts by funding climate-denying groups, while continuing to be among the most profitable companies around. They even hedged their bets by, among other things, investing in alternative energy and using it to more effectively drill for oil and natural gas.

Meanwhile, of course, the planet that had proven such a comfortable home for humanity was visibly going down. No, climate change won’t actually destroy the Earth itself, just the conditions under which humanity (and so many other species) thrived on it. Sooner or later, if the global temperature is indeed allowed to rise a catastrophic seven degrees Fahrenheit or four degrees Celsius, as an environmental impact statement from the Trump administration suggested it would by 2100, parts of the planet could become uninhabitable, hundreds of millions of human beings could be set in desperate motion, and the weather could intensify in ways that might be nearly unbearable for human habitation. Just read David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth, if you doubt me.

This isn’t even contestable information anymore and yet it’s perfectly possible that Donald Trump could be elected to a second term in 2020. It’s perfectly possible that more right-wing populist movements could sweep into power in Europe. It’s perfectly possible that Vladimir Putin’s version of great powerdom — a sagging Russian petro-state — could continue on its present globally warming path well into the future.

Understand this: Trump, Bolsonaro, Duda, Putin, and the others are just part of human history. Sooner or later, they will be gone. Climate change, however, is not part of human history (whatever it may do to civilization as we know it). Its effects could, in human terms, last for almost unimaginable periods of time. It operates on a different time scale entirely, which means that, unlike the tragedies and nightmares of human history, it is not just a passing matter.

Of course, the planet will survive, as will some life forms (as would be true even if humanity were to succumb to that other possible path to an apocalypse, a nuclear holocaust resulting in “nuclear winter”).  But that should be considered small consolation indeed.

Putting the Planet on a Suicide Watch

Consider global warming a story for the ages, one that should put Notre Dame’s near-destruction after almost nine centuries in grim perspective. And yet the planetary version of burning, which should be humanity’s crisis of all crises, has been met with a general lack of media attention, reflecting a lack of just about every other kind of attention in our world (except by those outraged children who know that they are going to inherit a degraded world and are increasingly making their displeasure about it felt).

To take just one example of that lack of obvious attention, the response of the mega-wealthy to the burning of Notre Dame was an almost instantaneous burst of giving. The euro equivalent of nearly a billion dollars was raised more or less overnight from the wealthiest of French families and other .01%ers. Remind me of the equivalent for climate change as the planet’s spire threatens to come down?

As for arsonists like Donald Trump and the matter of collusion, there’s not even a question mark on the subject. In the United States, such collusion with the destroyers of human life on Planet Earth is written all over their actions. It’s beyond evident in the appointment of former oil and gas lobbyists and fellow travelers to positions of power. Will there, however, be the equivalent of a Mueller investigation? Will the president be howling “witch hunt” again? Not a chance. When it comes to Donald Trump and climate change, there will be neither a Mueller Report, nor the need for a classic Barr defense. And yet collusion — hell, yeah! The evidence is beyond overwhelming.

We are, of course, talking about nothing short of the ultimate crime, but on any given day of our lives, you’d hardly notice that it was underway. Even for an old man like me, it’s a terrifying thing to watch humanity make a decision, however inchoate, to essentially commit suicide. In effect, there is now a suicide watch on Planet Earth. Let’s hope the kids can make a difference.