Chris Hedges's Blog, page 302

Jordan Peele Makes Cutting Commentary Extra Scary in ‘Us’

Surely more than once while dreaming, you’ve been aware that you’re in a dream, inside it and outside at the same time. Sleep scientists call such self-aware reveries “lucid dreams.”

So when I describe “Us,” Jordan Peele’s intelligent and unnerving new film, as a “lucid nightmare,” you’ll get my drift. It’s a nightmare you are immersed in while watching yourself watch it.

Like Peele’s directorial debut “Get Out,” the new film—a variation on the theme of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”—is simultaneously a horror movie, a satire of horror movies and an American parable. It takes place in Santa Cruz, Calif., and chronicles a home invasion of the summer house owned by the Wilsons, played by Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke, as the intruders freak out their pubescent daughter and pre-teen son.

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In every meaning of the expression, the Wilsons are not alone. Everyone in town appears to have a double who wears a red jumpsuit and wields an unusually large pair of scissors.

“Us” produces the effect of punching the solar plexus while jolting the frontal lobe and, sometimes, provoking laughter. In other words, it scared the bejesus out of me while giving me time to reflect on why I was so scared, and left me breathless from that sock in the gut and the occasional belly laugh, so that I didn’t know whether my screams were of terror or laughter. As with most effective horror films, the pace here is alternately snail-slow and lightning-bolt abrupt.

Peele’s weighty film stands on the slim shoulders of Nyong’o, whose parallel performances as both the survivor of a childhood trauma and her spectral lookalike are respectively poignant and primal. As the ineffectual husband, Duke’s purpose is to provide the kind of comic relief perfected by the director in his work as one half of Comedy Central’s “Key & Peele.” At times, Duke seems like he’s in another movie—not to mention another universe. Yet there are moments when his dead-eye comic spin and Nyong’o’s dead-serious riposte make for something tonally fresh.

Who—or what—are the invaders? They are unlike those in the 1956 version of “Body Snatchers,” out to replace the bodies of individualist Americans with those of groupthink Soviets. The new invaders literally and figuratively are shadow images of those above, rising from abandoned train lines underneath the Santa Cruz boardwalk. “They look like some effed-up performance art,” one character says.

All but one communicates in guttural sounds and feral body language. The one who can communicate in words talks about the people from under, humanoids that seem like survivors of a failed social or medical experiment, like laboratory rats or rabbits or those used for the Tuskegee experiments. She alludes to how they were “tethered without direction.” Tethered to those above, as in slaves? Arising from below, as in the underclass?

While Peele’s sophomore feature is not as fully realized as his debut, it is far more ambitious in its goals. Alas, the exquisite tension of its opening scenes slackens by the payoff. Still, long after the film’s closing credits, the social criticism Peele infuses in “Us” continues to haunt.

Harvard Profiting From Photos of Slaves, Lawsuit Says

BOSTON—Harvard University has “shamelessly” turned a profit from photos of two 19th-century slaves while ignoring requests to turn the photos over to the slaves’ descendants, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday.

Tamara Lanier, of Norwich, Connecticut, is suing the Ivy League school for “wrongful seizure, possession and expropriation” of images she says depict two of her ancestors. Her suit, filed in Massachusetts state court, demands that Harvard immediately turn over the photos, acknowledge her ancestry and pay an unspecified sum in damages.

Harvard spokesman Jonathan Swain said the university “has not yet been served, and with that is in no position to comment on this complaint.”

At the center of the case is a series of 1850 daguerreotypes, an early type of photo, taken of two South Carolina slaves identified as Renty and his daughter, Delia. Both were posed shirtless and photographed from several angles. The images are believed to be the earliest known photos of American slaves.

They were commissioned by Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz, whose theories on racial difference were used to support slavery in the U.S. The lawsuit says Agassiz came across Renty and Delia while touring plantations in search of racially “pure” slaves born in Africa.

“To Agassiz, Renty and Delia were nothing more than research specimens,” the suit says. “The violence of compelling them to participate in a degrading exercise designed to prove their own subhuman status would not have occurred to him, let alone mattered.”

The suit attacks Harvard for its “exploitation” of Renty’s image at a 2017 conference and in other uses. It says Harvard has capitalized on the photos by demanding a “hefty” licensing fee to reproduce the images. It also draws attention to a book Harvard sells for $40 with Renty’s portrait on the cover. The book, called “From Site to Sight: Anthropology, Photography, and the Power of Imagery,” explores the use of photography in anthropology.

Among other demands, the suit asks Harvard to acknowledge that it bears responsibility for the humiliation of Renty and Delia and that Harvard “was complicit in perpetuating and justifying the institution of slavery.”

A researcher at a Harvard museum rediscovered the photos in storage in 1976. But Lanier’s case argues Agassiz never legally owned the photos because he didn’t have his subjects’ consent and that he didn’t have the right to pass them to Harvard. Instead, the suit says, Lanier is the rightful owner as Renty’s next of kin.

The suit also argues that Harvard’s continued possession of the images violates the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.

“Renty is 169 years a slave by our calculation,” civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, one of Lanier’s lawyers, said in an interview. “How long will it be before Harvard finally frees Renty?”

Lanier says she grew up hearing stories about Renty passed down from her mother. While enslaved in Columbia, South Carolina, Renty taught himself to read and later held secret Bible readings on the plantation, the suit says. He is described as “small in stature but towering in the minds of those who knew him.”

The suit says Lanier has verified her genealogical ties to Renty, whom she calls “Papa Renty.” She says he is her great-great-great-grandfather.

If given the photos, Lanier said she would tell “the true story of who Renty was.” But she also hopes her case will spark a national discussion over race and history.

“This case is important because it will test the moral climate of this country, and force this country to reckon with its long history of racism,” Lanier said at a news conference outside the Harvard Club of New York City.

Crump, her attorney, added that the case could allow Harvard to “remove the stain from its legacy” and show it has the courage “to finally atone for slavery.”

Lanier alleges that she wrote to Harvard in 2011 detailing her ties to Renty. In a letter to Drew Faust, then Harvard’s president, Lanier said she wanted to learn more about the images and how they would be used. She was more explicit in 2017, demanding that Harvard relinquish the photos. In both cases, she said, Harvard responded but evaded her requests.

The school has used the photos as part of its own effort to confront its historical ties to slavery. At the 2017 conference called “Universities and Slavery: Bound by History,” referenced in the lawsuit, Harvard printed Renty’s portrait on the program cover and projected it on a giant screen above the stage.

In the image, Renty stares hauntingly into the camera, his hair graying and his gaunt frame exposed.

Lanier, who was in the audience at the event, said she was stunned by a passage in the program that described the origins of the photo but seemed to dismiss her genealogical findings. It said that the photo was taken for Agassiz’s research and that “while Agassiz earned acclaim, Renty returned to invisibility.”

The suit alleges that “by contesting Ms. Lanier’s claim of lineage, Harvard is shamelessly capitalizing on the intentional damage done to black Americans’ genealogy by a century’s worth of policies that forcibly separated families, erased slaves’ family names, withheld birth and death records, and criminalized literacy.”

Judge Blocks Oil, Gas Drilling Over Climate Change

BILLINGS, Mont.—A judge blocked oil and gas drilling across almost 500 square miles (1,295 sq. kilometers) in Wyoming and said the U.S. government must consider climate change impacts more broadly as it leases huge swaths of public land for energy exploration.

The order marks the latest in a string of court rulings over the past decade — including one last month in Montana — that have faulted the U.S. for inadequate consideration of greenhouse gas emissions when approving oil, gas and coal projects on federal land.

U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras in Washington appeared to go a step further than other judges in his order issued late Tuesday.

Previous rulings focused on individual lease sales or permits. But Contreras said that when the U.S. Bureau of Land Management auctions public lands for oil and gas leasing, officials must consider emissions from past, present and foreseeable future oil and gas leases nationwide.

“Given the national, cumulative nature of climate change, considering each individual drilling project in a vacuum deprives the agency and the public of the context necessary to evaluate oil and gas drilling on federal land,” Contreras wrote.

The ruling coincides with an aggressive push by President Donald Trump’s administration to open more public lands to energy development.

It came in a lawsuit that challenged leases issued in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado in 2015 and 2016, during President Barack Obama’s administration.

Only the leases in Wyoming were immediately addressed in Contreras’ ruling. It blocks federal officials from issuing drilling permits until they conduct a new environmental review looking more closely at greenhouse gas emissions.

The case was brought by two advocacy groups, WildEarth Guardians and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

WildEarth Guardians climate program director Jeremy Nichols predicted the ruling would have much bigger implications than a halt to drilling in some areas of Wyoming, assuming the government does what Contreras has asked.

“This is the Holy Grail ruling we’ve been after, especially with oil and gas,” Nichols said. “It calls into question the legality of oil and gas leasing that’s happening everywhere.”

Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon criticized the ruling, saying carbon emissions shouldn’t be reduced at the expense of workers who provide reliable and affordable energy.

“Bringing our country to its knees is not the way to thwart climate change. We need solutions not grandstanding,” said Gordon, a Republican.

Federal officials were reviewing the court ruling to determine its implications and had no further comment, BLM spokeswoman Kristen Lenhardt said.

Emissions from extracting and burning fossil fuels from federal land generates the equivalent of 1.4 billion tons (1.3 billion metric tons) annually of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, according to a November report from the U.S. Geological Survey. That’s equivalent to almost one-quarter of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.

Companies paid more than $6.5 billion to produce oil, gas and coal from federal lands and waters in 2017, according to the most recent government figures. The money is split between the federal government and states where the extraction occurs.

Kathleen Sgamma with the Western Energy Alliance, which lobbies on behalf of the oil industry, said the BLM already was analyzing emissions appropriately under rules set up during the Obama administration.

Following previous court rulings over climate change, the BLM has gone back and reconsidered the effects of fossil fuels and then re-affirmed its approvals of projects.

That could happen again in this case, with further studies done before drilling is allowed to proceed, said Harry Weiss, an environmental lawyer based in Philadelphia whose clients have included oil and gas companies.

“This decision should not be interpreted as a ban on leasing activities,” Weiss said. “The court is not ruling on whether it’s thumbs up or thumbs down. The court is simply grading how the administration did analyzing the issues.”

___

Gruver reported from Cheyenne, Wyoming.

The Future of Climate Authoritarianism Is Now

It was the kind of headline one might encounter in the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin or Kim Stanley Robinson. Last month, citing a new study from the British science journal Nature, Quanta Magazine’s Natalie Wolchover explored the possibility of human-caused global warming forging a world without stratocumulus clouds by the end of the century. This would raise the temperature of the planet an additional 8 degrees Celsius (14.4 F)—double the increase for which we’re currently on pace.

“To imagine 12 degrees of warming,” Wolchover notes, “think of crocodiles swimming in the Arctic and of the scorched, mostly lifeless equatorial regions during [prehistoric times].”

While the scenario outlined in Quanta and other dangers posed by feedback loops remain, for the time being, purely hypothetical, the age of climate chaos we have entered is all too real. By 2050, the U.N. projects that there will be as many as 200 million climate refugees across the globe. That number could climb to as high as 1 billion if we fail to take radical action to reduce carbon emissions. To put those numbers in perspective, the Syrian civil war that has so roiled the West had produced 5 million refugees as of 2016. As David Wallace-Wells observes in his haunting “The Uninhabitable Earth,” we are not witnessing a “new normal” but something far more terrifying: “That is, the end of normal; never normal again.”

“We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure,” he writes. “The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as a human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead.”

Since its publication last month, Wallace-Wells’ book has drawn comparisons to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” and with good reason. Both explore the unique havoc we are wreaking on the environment, through carbon emissions in the former and our use of pesticides in the latter. And both are before-and-after publications that demand urgent government action—or so one hopes in the case of “The Uninhabitable Earth.”

Of course, climate change is already transforming our politics in ways we never imagined and might not yet grasp. Consider far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s recent meeting with Donald Trump at the White House. “Today, we don’t even have to gaze into the future, or trust that it will be deformed by climate change, to see what that would like,” Wallace-Wells writes. “In the form of tribalism at home and nationalism abroad and terrorism flaming out from the tinder of failed states, that future is here, at least in preview, already. Now we just wait for the storms.”

Last week, before a gunman driven by paranoia over immigrant “invaders” opened fire on a pair of mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, I spoke with Wallace-Wells over the phone about the twin fates of climate and capitalism, the Green New Deal and the power of panicking about global warming. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Jacob Sugarman: In “The Uninhabitable Earth,” you note that the fat part of the bell curve—the most likely outcome by the end of the century—indicates that we’ll experience a 3-degree Celsius [5.4 F] temperature increase by the end of the century. For readers who maybe aren’t that well-versed in the science, can you explain what that means for the planet?

David Wallace-Wells: I think it might actually be more helpful to look at 2 and 4-degree temperature increases, which is the difference between a best-case scenario and business as usual. At 2 degrees, the U.N. estimates we will have 200 million refugees at least, possible as many as 1 billion, which would be as many people as live in North and South America combined. I think those numbers are a little high, but the fact that they’re in the hundreds of millions at all should terrify us.

Many of the biggest cities in the Middle East and South Asia would be unbelievably hot, and that threshold may be reached as soon as 2050, which means the populations of a number of megalopolises would not be able to move around safely. They certainly couldn’t walk outside without incurring some kind of lethal risk, and that could threaten to make huge regions of the equatorial band uninhabitable by any definition that we use today, even if it would be technically habitable.

Most people think that somewhere north of 2 degrees [3.6 F], maybe 2.1, 2.2 degrees, would be a tipping point, and that ice melt would be irreversible. If we lost all of the ice sheets, it could raise sea levels by 200 feet, possibly more. So that’s what we’re looking at with conventional decarbonization, by which I mean just retiring dirty energy and replacing it with clean energy. There’s some reason to think that with negative emissions technologies, we may be able to get below 2 degrees, but I think that those hopes are sort of unrealistic.

The track that we’re currently on, which would raise temperatures by 4 degrees Celsius [7.2 F] or more by the end of this century, would mean $600 trillion in global damages. That would gobble up all the wealth that exists in the world today. It would mean a global [gross domestic product] that was at least 20 percent smaller, possibly 30 percent smaller, than the global economy would be without climate change. That’s 10 times the size of the Great Recession, only it would be permanent. Countries in the equatorial band would have the very possibility of economic growth completely wiped out by climate change. Large parts of the world that we now think of as bread baskets would turn into something much less productive. [Individual regions] could be hit by as many as six natural disasters driven by climate change at once, and the frequency of these disasters would be twice what it is today, possibly more than that.

JS: To what extent is climate change to blame for the resurgence of authoritarianism across the West? Do you agree with The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer that Donald Trump is the first demagogue of the Anthropocene?

DWW: I guess I would say that if you were looking at the political world and trying to make projections about how climate change would transform our politics, you would probably imagine somebody like Trump, or Bolsonaro in Brazil, or even something like Brexit in the U.K. Our intuition about increasing resource scarcity will produce more energy around zero-sum politics, rather than positive-sum politics, and the retreat of nations into a more nativistic self-interest. Causality is complicated, so I’m a little reluctant to declare Trump the first demagogue of the Anthropocene, but I think we’re likely to see, at least in the short-term, more political actors who resemble Trump in those ways. And this is distressing, not just on a humanitarian and moral level, but because it will make it that much harder to take collective action.

JS: Which do you think poses a greater threat to the other—capitalism or climate change? Or are their fates inextricably bound at this point?

DWW: When we talk about capitalism and climate change, we’re talking about two systems that are so large, we can’t really ever adequately comprehend them properly, right? My personal politics continue to drift left, but when I look around the world, I see social democratic countries that are behaving just as poorly with regard to carbon and climate change as the most aggressively capitalistic ones. Even truly socialistic countries are behaving abominably on climate.

Still, I tend to think that the existing economic system has superpowered our lust for new products and material comforts, and entrenched some powerful corporate interests that are invested in the continued burning of fossil fuels in ways that have made it really difficult for us to take action. Obviously these corporations, and the policymakers who have failed to regulate them, share a greater responsibility for climate change than you or I do. But I also think it’s a little simplistic to think that these actors are singularly responsible for the plight of the planet, and that people like us are on the side of light and good.

As to how we’ll ultimately evolve, I would say that the likeliest outcome is a world that remains recognizably capitalistic but is reshuffled in profound ways by the forces of climate. Every country will move differently—some will move in totally opposite directions—but I suspect [the majority] will be oriented around the principle of profit and economic growth, even as growth will become harder and harder to achieve.

On a more individual level, it seems unlikely that we’ll have a total retreat from the values of self-improvement and material comfort that have come to dominate both the affluent West and much of the planet over the last few decades. But that doesn’t mean they’ll continue to do so indefinitely. I think we can expect all kinds of responses on a community and humanitarian level, including those [centered] around the principles of eco-socialism.

JS: We may not be on the side of light and good, but your book is very effective at explaining why individual consumer choices can never offer a solution to climate change. Why do you think this misperception is so pervasive? Is this simply a byproduct of how the media frames the issue, or are there other factors at play?

DWW: I think the media are more of an agent for neoliberal forces within the culture, which redirect political energy towards consumption. In a time of widespread if not majoritarian political discontent, these forces allow markets to continue to thrive unopposed. In some ways, they’re actually valuable. I think people should live according to their political principles, and if that means avoiding certain products or certain categories of products, that’s for the good. That may even add up to some amount of market pressure that has a political impact, which is good too.

The problem is that too many people believe they can leave their political mark on the world through their consumer choices. I don’t just mean whether you’re vegan or eat meat, whether you buy a lot of airplane tickets or stay home, but even what kind of movies you watch and pop you listen to. Beyoncé is probably a political force for good in the world, but [buying] her music is not politics.

JS: While we’re on the subject of billionaires, how do you account for their increasing fascination with space exploration? Both Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have expressed a desire to fund such projects, seemingly in lieu of trying to preserve life on earth.

DWW: This new plutocratic class is not just enormously well-capitalized, but its members seem to see themselves as world historical figures, with almost godlike ambitions. They have accumulated fortunes that were previously only available to nation-states, and operate in quasi-political and regulatory independence, without all that much tax burden. Faced with the existential crisis of climate change, which the nations of the world are proving inadequate to the task of solving—at least at the moment—you’d think these billionaires would feel compelled to act, if only to satisfy their own egos. I don’t have a good answer for why that hasn’t happened.

[In an abstract sense], they are interested in the survival of the human species. They are really worried about asteroid impacts, and talk a lot about colonizing other planets as a way of hedging our bets against that kind of catastrophic event. But an asteroid is not going to hit us in the next 30 years. We can see enough of outer space to know that. And we are about to be hit by an equivalent impact here on earth in exactly that time frame, which is also, we should say, a time frame that all of these people will live to see. Bill Gates has made significant investment in the [development] of carbon-capture technologies, [but most of] the people who have meaningful resources to help us are not. They don’t even really seem to be interested in thinking about how they could.

JS: Jay Inslee, the governor for Washington, has made climate change the centerpiece of his presidential bid. It seems unlikely that he can win, but what kind of utility can a campaign like that have?

DWW: I think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has transformed the [Democratic Party’s] climate politics in ways no one would have anticipated even a couple of years ago, [but] I’ll say two things about Jay Inslee: One is almost certain to happen, and the other one is much less clear. The first is that he’s sure to make the issue more central to the primary campaign. If he’s ever on a debate stage, even if he’s [just] campaigning, he’s going to force all of the candidates to talk about climate change more directly. This has already happened to a certain extent with the Green New Deal. There are still major questions about its [implementation], and how its authors might achieve the goals they set out in that document, but the fact that virtually every major democratic presidential candidate has endorsed legislation of that scale and ambition is a major, major change.

In the more speculative realm, I think it’s quite possible that he makes himself an appealing vice presidential pick for whomever does win the nomination. For all of his climate activism, which is laudable, he’s [still] a white, business-friendly technocrat, with executive experience, and you can imagine that being useful on a demographic level [if nothing else]. On top of that, I think it’s quite possible that he establishes a kind of climate constituency that other democratic candidates would want to scoop up.

JS: It’s true that a plurality of Democratic hopefuls have backed the Green New Deal, although I wonder just how committed they really are. Should support for the bill be a litmus test of any 2020 presidential candidate?

DWW: Given how nebulous it is, I see no reason why not. You’re not really committing to anything that’s all that hard. I think once the Green New Deal evolves into meaningful legislation, which may not actually happen until we have a front-runner who can shape the proposal with their own vision, things will get more difficult, because there will be trade-offs and compromises, particular things emphasized and particular things de-emphasized. But as for the basic proposition that we should build a climate policy out of what the U.N. says that we need to do, and that we should make sure that the policy benefits the people most in need and protect those most likely to suffer from climate change, there’s really no excuse for not endorsing it.

JS: There’s a strong temptation in liberal circles, particularly with a climate denialist like Trump in office, to blame the big bad Republican Party for our current predicament. Can you explain why that idea is at least somewhat misguided?

DWW: I think fossil fuel companies are evil. I think their campaigns of disinformation and denial over the last few decades are unconscionable and criminal. And I think that the way that those interests have conquered the Republican Party, turning it into a force for climate inaction and, in many cases, outright denial, is a feature of that villainy. I certainly wouldn’t want to excuse the Republicans themselves; their behavior has been completely gross.

But climate denial is really only in the United States. There’s a little bit of it in the U.K. There’s a little bit of it in Russia. No party in the world is as resistant to the intellectual proposition of climate change and the need for climate action as the American Republican Party is. Yet basically no country in the world is doing better than we are with emissions. So I think that the problem is just bigger and thornier than Republican opposition, and obviously that the path to aggressive climate policy in the U.S. should run through the legislatures. Those legislatures have been captured by [corporate] interests, but I don’t think that the reason that we are where we are with emissions, either in the U.S. or globally, is because of the evil of the Republican Party. I think it’s because collectively, we have been really reluctant to take action of any kind.

We forget that the Democratic Party had total control of the government for 18 months, starting in 2009, and did not act. I say this as someone who was cheering Obama on in those years. I had not yet really woken up to the scale of this threat and thought it was a totally reasonable calculation to prioritize health care after the stimulus package. I certainly don’t feel that way now, but I also think that we have to understand that no one has acted as aggressively on this issue as the crisis demands. Blaming a single party for the global problem is a little bit of a red herring that may allow us to feel better about our own inaction.

JS: When you first published your piece in New York Magazine, you were accused by some of engaging in alarmism. How do you respond to those criticisms, and can you make the case for panicking about climate change?

DWW: I would say the reception was mostly positive, but a vocal minority of scientists  took issue with it on two fronts. One was that they thought it was irresponsible factually, and the other was more at the level of rhetorical strategy. I did not consider the first set of criticisms to be valid. In response, we quickly published a fully annotated version of the piece that showed where everything had been sourced, which demonstrated that while some of my reporting may have been news to [many of] those who were reading the article, it was all coming from pedigreed journals and established scientists.

The rhetorical question is a different argument. I think that I’m more sympathetic to the people who took issue with it on those grounds, even though I totally disagree with them. If the science is terrifying, if it tells us that at 4 degrees of warming, we could have a global GDP that is 30 percent smaller than it would be without climate change, if it says that we would have more than twice as much war as we have today, if it says that we could have at least hundreds of millions of climate refugees and possibly more, if it says that our grain yields could be half as full as they are today, and we would have to feed 50 percent more people, I think it is [our responsibility] to tell the truth and not to shy away from it in the name of rhetorical strategy.

The more that I learned about the story, the more I saw that this really would require, as the U.N. says, a global mobilization on the scale of World War II. That is not something that is on the table at all politically right now, and I think we need a political awakening to make it happen. Fear can be one way that we shake people from their complacency. When Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring,” it was criticized for being hyperbolic and alarmist, but it led very directly to the ban on DDT, and indirectly to the establishment of the EPA. Obviously, those are huge victories for the environmental movement, and they were achieved because she fucking terrified us.

JS: It seems increasingly easy to succumb to a kind of “climate futilitarianism,” which is not your phrase but one that you very artfully employ in your book. How do we resist that impulse when our president still questions the cause of global warming and our Democratic leadership is bullying child protesters?

DWW: I think we need to have a vision for a path forward that at least makes use of these intuitions, because they’re only going to get more widespread over the coming decade. We don’t want to be in a place where our climate activism is considered vacuous or naïve, because it’s so discordant with the world unfolding on the nightly news. There’s a need for optimism, too. I don’t think we can just say, “The world is over. The world is ending.” I don’t feel that it is. I mean, I think it’s really important to understand that we will find a way to live in these new conditions, however harrowing they get. And it will always be the case that we can write the story of the future of the climate, even if we get to a really hellish level of warming.

But we don’t want to get to a hellish level of warming. We want to take action sooner than that, and so we want to take control of those levers as quickly as we can, with as much force as we can. I think we want as many people on board as possible, and that means reaching them however they can be reached, including through panic and alarm.

There’s Nothing Progressive About Kamala Harris’ Record as a Prosecutor

What follows is a conversation between journalist Branko Marcetic and Thomas Hedges of the Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

KAMALA HARRIS: I stand before you today to announce my candidacy.

THOMAS HEDGES: On January 21, Kamala Harris announced she was running for president in 2020. Now, more than a month later, she’s emerged as one of the Democratic party’s frontrunners.

However, she’s currently facing strong criticism, especially for her career as a tough-on-crime prosecutor in California. But between her Senate win in 2016 and her announcement to seek the presidency in January, she started to support measures in line with the progressive agenda figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez have advanced. From tackling bail reform, to supporting the Green New Deal, to even backing Medicare for All, Harris is taking positions that past establishment candidates like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama wouldn’t have taken. So where does she really stand?

BRANKO MARCETIC: My sense of her has always been that she was someone who suddenly had an eye on higher office, and the role that she wanted to take to that was to be a tough prosecutor.

THOMAS HEDGES: Branko Marcetic, a contributor to Jacobin magazine, who wrote one of the most extensive profiles of Kamala Harris back in 2017, says that Harris’s recent progressive rhetoric is a form of compensation for a lifetime of enacting tough-on-crime policies Democratic voters no longer think are fair.

BRANKO MARCETIC: And so basically the piece I wrote was looking at how much current rhetoric really aligns with her past policies, the answer being not all that much.

Having gotten their political education in the ’90s and 2000s, which is the kind of high point of Democratic centrism and the third way, her politics are very much of that era, where the way you defeat the right is by basically trying to triangulate and take some of their positions so you can peel off right-wing voters.

THOMAS HEDGES: Marcetic argues that Harris’s whole career has been a balancing act between garnering popular support and gaining the trust of the establishment, and the first stark example of that was in 2004, when she had just been elected as district attorney of San Francisco, and had refused to seek the death penalty for a man who had killed a police officer. It was a stance for which she was heavily criticized, including by U.S. Senator and former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein. In later years, however, it was something she really didn’t speak about or continue to challenge, even though she ran on an anti-death penalty platform. In fact, 10 years later, she reversed her position, and even appealed a federal judge’s conclusion that the death penalty was unconstitutional.

Her explanation was that while she was personally opposed to capital punishment, her job as a prosecutor was to enforce the will of the voters, the majority of whom had voted for the death penalty. That explanation might have been plausible, if it weren’t for the fact that in 2008 California faced the same exact situation with regards to banning gay marriage.

SPEAKER: And a battle that’s too close to call is over the future of same sex marriage.

THOMAS HEDGES: As with the death penalty, voters had approved a ban on gay marriage in the state. And again, as with the death penalty, a federal judge later ruled that referendum to be unconstitutional.

KAMALA HARRIS: I think that Prop 8 is, as the court has declared, unconstitutional.

THOMAS HEDGES: However, Harris chose not to defend the referendum on banning gay marriage.

KAMALA HARRIS: Think about it conceptually, it’s just wrong.

THOMAS HEDGES: Proving that she was, indeed, selective on which issues she was willing to fight for.

BRANKO MARCETIC: Which I think was a very obvious kind of play, I think, for her later Senate run, was her showing, feeding something to the Democratic base, which at that time was I think a lot more occupied with something like Proposition 8 and gay rights, as they rightly should have been. But I think there was less talk about criminal justice reform.

The fact that she refused to seek out the death penalty when she was under a lot of political pressure when she first came in as DA, I think, is is definitely a good thing. But the fact that she continued to defend it after, I think, shows the limits of how far someone like her can really–especially if they want to get ahead politically–how far they can really buck the system. I suspect, I should say, that perhaps that could have been a sort of a learning experience for her, where she got this tremendous amount of criticism for refusing to put this man to death, and so she then later had to sort of prove that she, you know, she’s not going to be someone who follows through on her anti-death penalty principles, and how she’s saying she’s going to hold to what the law is.

THOMAS HEDGES: After the death penalty controversy in 2004, Kamala Harris becomes much more conservative. In the following years she would help pass legislation that reported arrested, undocumented juveniles to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

SPEAKER: It’s been called the toughest law in America.

THOMAS HEDGES: She would not only defend the three strikes law, which is a highly punitive law that puts someone behind bars for life if he or she simply commits both one violent felony and has two previous convictions, but Harris would also make her support for the law a centerpiece of her 2009 campaign for re-election.

BRANKO MARCETIC: She ran to the right of her Republican opponent on that, who actually wanted to get rid of the three strikes law.

THOMAS HEDGES: She would fight to protect the practice of civil asset forfeiture, and more specifically the ability for police to seize profits before charges were even filed. She also famously fought to keep Daniel Larson, a man who was wrongfully convicted of burglary in 1999, in jail even after a judge reversed his conviction due to a lack of evidence.

BRANKO MARCETIC: The Daniel Larson case is basically someone who was arrested and convicted for saying that he didn’t do–mostly his offence was he had a weapon. He was on probation, and he had a knife on him. And the police found that. He had incompetent, kind of, legal representation. He was in jail for a number of years, and he ended up being freed by a judge who decided that what had happened to him was manifestly unjust. And Harris appealed that.

THOMAS HEDGES: There was also the case of Kevin Cooper, a black man who was imprisoned in 1983 for a horrific mass murder incident in California.

SPEAKER: New DNA evidence could impact the future of an inmate who has been on death row for more than 35 years.

THOMAS HEDGES: After his trial and sentencing, however, new evidence came out suggesting the police had maybe framed Cooper. But despite Cooper’s petitions for a revisitation of the case, Kamala Harris’s office objected. Cooper is still in prison today, but with renewed pressure, California Governor Gavin Newsom has finally ordered new DNA tests.

SPEAKER: Newsom wants current DNA tests done on hair, blood, and fingernail scrapings.

THOMAS HEDGES: It was only after an explosive New York Times investigative report that Harris publicly supported the new DNA testing in a Facebook post, but failing to acknowledge that she’d been a barrier to the testing in the past.

BRANKO MARCETIC: There’s also, I think, something that’s kind of come onto the fore a little more in recent months is her policy of prosecuting truant–well, the parents of truant kids–as a sort of back-to-school encouragement policy. Except, you know, instead of using a carrot, it’s using a very punitive stick.

KAMALA HARRIS: A friend of mine actually called me and he said “Kamala, my wife got the letter. She freaked out. She brought all the kids into the living room, held up the letter. Said ‘If you don’t go to school, Kamala’s going to put you and me in jail.’”

BRANKO MARCETIC: Basically, she wanted to threaten parents with jail if their kids didn’t turn up to school, which obviously is a policy that is going to disproportionately affect minority communities; the same minority communities that she is, I think, trying to now appeal to and present itself as something of a champion for.

THOMAS HEDGES: Even as late as 2013, Harris continued not only to defend her tough-on-crime philosophy, but make fun of the emergent movement against the crisis of mass incarceration.

KAMALA HARRIS: We all have these posters in our closet that is attached to a stick.

BRANKO MARCETIC: She on stage, and she kind of mocks this kind of, this activist impulse, less prisons more schools.

KAMALA HARRIS: And we run around with these signs. Build more schools, less jails. Build more schools, less jails. And we walk around everywhere. Build more schools–we protest. Build more schools, less jails.

BRANKO MARCETIC: She does it in this very, kind of, like, very mocking way, where the idea is that these people, these activists, are not serious.

KAMALA HARRIS: There’s a fundamental problem with that approach, in my opinion. And it’s this. I agree with that, conceptually. But you have not addressed the reason I have three padlocks on my front door.

BRANKO MARCETIC: You know, she talks about how we all we all have these placards in our closets. We all used to be activists. But if you really want to be in the real world, you want to be a serious person, you have to forget that kind of soft-headed nonsense, and you know, the way to go is by really prosecuting people.

KAMALA HARRIS: So part of the discussion about reform of criminal justice policy has to be an acknowledgement that crime does occur.

BRANKO MARCETIC: I mean, that’s not really smart on crime. And I would say that that’s not even a realistic thing. That’s a fantasy, the idea that you can just keep locking people up and solve anything. It’s a fantasy that is driven by political considerations, because that–for her, for someone of her generation, that was seen as the ticket to political power, was to show that you were tough.

THOMAS HEDGES: Similarly, she mocked her Republican opponent for supporting the legalization of marijuana a year later in 2014, during the race for attorney general of California.

RON GOLD: My position is it needs to be legalized.

SPEAKER: Ron Gold, the Republican candidate for attorney general, wants to tax and regulate the use of marijuana for recreational purposes.

RON GOLD: Colorado is already beginning to prove to everybody that there is sufficient taxable base.

SPEAKER: We asked California’s current top cop Kamala Harris for her position on this controversial issue.

SPEAKER: But your opponent Ron Gold has said that he is for the legalization of marijuana recreationally. Your thoughts on that?

KAMALA HARRIS: I think that he is entitled to his opinion.

BRANKO MARCETIC: She laughed at the idea. That was her reaction. She laughed, because it was such a ridiculous idea. Now she’s asked about smoking pot on the Breakfast Club.

KAMALA HARRIS: There are a lot of reasons why we need to legalize.

SPEAKER: Have you ever smoked?

KAMALA HARRIS: I have.

SPEAKER: OK.

KAMALA HARRIS: And I inhaled. I did inhale. Again, and I inhale.

BRANKO MARCETIC: To me it’s the height of hypocrisy to now be bragging about using drugs illegally while refusing to even countenance the idea of legalizing that drug. So many people have been having the book thrown at them by the criminal justice system.

THOMAS HEDGES: The contradictions in Harris’s record touch other issues as well. In 2011, for example, she was lauded when she reached a $25 billion settlement with too-big-to-fail banks for their roles in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. But she was also heavily criticized for not going as far as many say she should have. California was the epicenter of the crisis, and yet Harris made no effort to put even a single executive behind bars. And in 2017, the Intercept divulged a 2013 memo prosecutors from her office had sent her, saying that it had “uncovered evidence suggestive of widespread misconduct” at OneWest Bank, where current Treasury Secretary Steve Menuchin had been the CEO.

BRANKO MARCETIC: Harris’s offices had actually advised to go after Steve Mnuchin’s bank, OneWest, that had engaged in really flabbergasting criminality. Basically, really, just stealing people’s houses, in many cases. And she did not do that. Who knows why? As The Intercept pointed out, Mnuchin, OneWest, had donated to her. Whether that’s why, or whether it’s more to do with a sort of caution or timidity to take on, you know, moneyed interests, powerful moneyed interests, it’s hard to say, at this point.

THOMAS HEDGES: On environmental issues she’s taken a similar approach. She has a strong track record when it comes to holding polluters accountable. And as DA in San Francisco, she created a team whose sole purpose was pursuing cases of illegal dumping and air pollution. But she’s been reluctant to speak out and support the Green New Deal, supporting the idea of it but not explicitly endorsing it.

BRANKO MARCETIC: I think we sort of see a similarity in that with her recent comments on Medicare for All, where she had first said that yes, she was in favor of abolishing private insurance, and then she got a wave of criticism from the right and the Democratic Party. And she immediately, very quickly, backtracked on that. She said afterwards, you know, Medicare for All, single payer, can mean a lot of things. It could mean a public option; it could mean this, it could mean that. I mean–which is not true. A public option, single payer, are very different things. Basically it’s, she’s, I think, now sort of walking back a little bit from the Medicare for All vision that’s outlined in the Sanders bill, and sort of saying, well, you know, it could be other things, too. There could be a lot of ways that we get to single payer. Which is not strictly true.

THOMAS HEDGES: On foreign policy, Harris tends to be silent. But when she does speak up, she’s nakedly hawkish. She’s a strong apologist for Israel, and spoke at AIPAC’s conference last year, going so far as to compare the civil rights movement in Selma to Israel’s struggle for nationhood today.

BRANKO MARCETIC: It certainly seems like the donor base, the large donor base that was supporting Clinton has migrated towards Kamala Harris. She did a fundraiser in Hollywood not too long ago where a bunch of Clinton donors, you know, these sort of entertainment moguls showed up to be there. 2017, she was reported to be going to fundraisers with former Clinton donors in Martha’s Vineyard, I believe. You can definitely make the case that she’s sort of, Harris is kind of the torchbearer passed on from Hillary Clinton. Many of the same donors and establishment opinion is behind her.

THOMAS HEDGES: Kamala Harris is part of a camp of politicians in Washington who have built their credentials on the increasingly outdated idea that Democratic voters want tough-on-crime liberals in office. But it’s clear Harris is struggling to switch gears and rework her image to appeal to the more progressive wing of the party that supported Bernie Sanders in the last elections. A recent poll even suggests that among black primary voters, Harris trails Sanders 2:1. In the end, Harris, along with other establishment Democrats like Cory Booker and Joe Biden, seem to be frantically trying to salvage their political careers.

BRANKO MARCETIC: Politicians like Harris, Biden, Booker, they must feel like the rug has been pulled out from under them. Harris, like all these other politicians, now are scrambling to to make up for their past records. But it’s very hard to run away from your history; especially someone like Harris, or someone like Biden. They have decades worth of things they’ve done that now look very bad when inspected.

May Asks for Delay of Brexit Until June 30

BERLIN — The Latest on Britain’s departure from the European Union (all times local):

4:40 p.m.

France’s foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, has set three criteria that Britain must meet if British Prime Minister Theresa May is to be granted a Brexit extension.

Speaking at the National Assembly ahead of the meeting of EU leaders in Brussels on Thursday where May’s request for an extension to the country’s departure date from March 29 to June 30 will be discussed, Le Drian warned that the country would likely crash out of the bloc without a deal if the conditions are not met.

He said that the May must convince leaders that “the purpose of the delay is to finalize the ratification of the deal already negotiated” and that the deal agreed last November “won’t be renegotiated.”

He also said that the short delay request has to be conditioned on the U.K. not participating in the European parliamentary elections from May 23-26.

___

3:25 p.m.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis says his country is ready to approve Britain’s request for a delay to its scheduled departure from the European Union.

According to Czech public radio, Babis told lawmakers in the lower house of Parliament a ‘no-deal’ Brexit “would be the worst possible outcome” and that the “best solution would be a second referendum in Britain whose result would keep Britain in the EU.”

He said that voters in the Brexit referendum of June 2016 when Britain narrowly voted to leave the EU, were influenced by “disinformation.”

___

3:05 p.m.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman is welcoming the fact that Britain has finally made a “clear request” about how to proceed on Brexit, but isn’t saying how Germany will respond.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has asked the EU for Britain’s departure to be delayed from March 29 to June 30, but said she wasn’t prepared to delay Brexit any further.

A delay will need approval from all 27 other EU leaders, and they are meeting at a summit in Brussels starting Thursday.

Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, told reporters in Berlin: “We welcome the fact that there is now a clear request from Britain.”

Seibert said that the request “will certainly be discussed intensively” at the summit, but wouldn’t offer an opinion ahead of the talks. He said Germany remains convinced that a no-deal Brexit “would be in no one’s interest.”

___

2:55 p.m.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, says Britain should leave the EU by the start of elections to the European Parliament on May 23 if the country is not taking part.

That’s earlier than the request British Prime Minister Theresa May has made. In a letter to the EU, May wants EU leaders to back an extension to the Brexit date from March 29 to June 30.

An EU Commission official said Juncker told May in a telephone call that “the withdrawal has to be complete before May 23,” the first day of the European elections.

The official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the situation, said that if the deadline comes later Juncker warned May that “we face institutional difficulties and legal uncertainty.”

He insisted EU elections would have to be held in Britain if a June 30 date was asked for.

The 27 EU nations meeting in a summit Thursday need to back an extension to the deadline unanimously.

___ By Raf Casert in Brussels.

___

2:30 p.m.

French government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux says a delay to Britain’s scheduled departure from the European Union can be considered but only on condition that British Prime Minister Theresa May “provides guarantees.”

Speaking following a weekly Cabinet meeting, Griveaux said May must express to EU leaders in Brussels at a summit on Thursday “what purpose” lies behind her delay request.

“We cannot speculate on any scenario”, he said.

Earlier, May formally, via a letter, asked the EU to delay the scheduled Brexit date from March 29, until June 30 following Parliament’s failure to vote for the withdrawal agreement that she negotiated with the bloc.

___

1:15 p.m.

Prime Minister Theresa May has asked the European Union to delay Britain’s departure from the European Union until June 30.

The U.K. is currently due to leave the bloc in nine days, but Parliament has twice rejected May’s divorce deal with the EU.

May told European Council President Donald Tusk in a letter seeking the extension that she intends to try a third time to get the deal approved.

A delay to Brexit needs approval from all 27 remaining EU member states, who are meeting in Brussels on Thursday.

___

9:55 a.m.

British Prime Minister Theresa May is preparing to ask the European Union for a short delay to the country’s divorce from the European Union.

Britain’s Press Association is citing sources in the prime minister’s office as saying May will write to EU leaders on Wednesday to formally request “a bit more time.” Parliament last week voted for a three-month delay to the end of June, but some EU leaders have suggested another two years might be necessary.

Education Secretary Damian Hinds told the BBC on Wednesday that a shorter delay is the right option.

Hinds says the process has already gone on for more than two years, “and I think people are a bit tired of waiting for Parliament to get our act together and get the deal passed.”

___

9 a.m.

The head of the European Union’s executive branch says a decision on a delay to Brexit is unlikely at this week’s EU summit and the bloc’s leaders may have to meet again next week.

British Prime Minister Theresa May is expected to ask the EU for a delay to Brexit, currently scheduled for March 29, ahead of an EU summit starting Thursday. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said that he hadn’t received a letter as of Wednesday morning.

Juncker told Germany’s Deutschlandfunk radio: “My impression is … that this week at the European Council there will be no decision, but that we will probably have to meet again next week.”

He added that “Mrs. May doesn’t have agreement to anything, either in her Cabinet or in Parliament.”

___

Follow AP’s full coverage of Brexit at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit

Bloomberg Is Becoming a Marketing Tool for the Pentagon

You may not know it, but bloated Pentagon budgets are actually “progressive.” Or so says a recent opinion piece in Bloomberg News (3/17/19), “Progressives Should Learn to Love the Pentagon Budget,” by Hal Brands.

Bloomberg identifies Brands as the “Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.” “Kissinger” is ominous enough, but surely Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments is some innocuous, wonky academic institution, no?

In a piece explicitly defending bloated military budgets, however, perhaps it would be useful to know what exactly the “Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments” is.  We can start by reading this section taken directly from their website (unabridged):

Below is a list of organizations that have contributed to our efforts over the past three years.

Aerojet Rocketdyne
Army Strategic Studies Group
Army War College
Austal USA
Australian Department of Defence
BAE Systems Inc.
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Chemring Group
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
Department of the Navy
Embassy of Japan
Fincantieri/Marinette
Free University Brussels
General Atomics
General Dynamics—National Steel and Shipbuilding Company (NASSCO)
Harris Corporation
Huntington Ingalls Industries
Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies
Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force
Kongsberg Defense Systems, Inc.
L3 Technologies, Inc.
Lockheed Martin Corporation
Maersk Line, Limited
Metron
National Defense University
Navy League of the United States
Northrop Grumman Corporation
Office of the Secretary of Defense/Office of Net Assessment (ONA)
Office of the Secretary of Defense/Office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE)
Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment (AT&L)
Polski Instytut Spraw Miedzynarodowych (PISM)
Raven Industries
Raytheon Company
Sasakawa Peace Foundation
Sarah Scaife Foundation
SEACOR Holdings
Secretary of Defense Corporate Fellows Program
Smith Richardson Foundation
Submarine Industrial Base Council
Taiwan Ministry of National Defense
Textron Systems
The Boeing Company
The Doris & Stanley Tananbaum Foundation
The Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation
United Kingdom Royal Air Force

Brands is a senior fellow at an organization funded almost entirely by those with a clear interest in the upcoming $750 billion defense budget Brands is pushing for. While we don’t have a tax filings for CSBA since Brand was hired there, and thus we do not know his specific income, the average senior fellow at the organization, as of its last tax filing, makes just under $300,000 a year.

They can call it whatever they wish—”think tank,” “nonprofit,” “Center”—but by any objective metric, this organization is just a lobbying entity for the weapons industry and Western militaries. A cursory glance at their policy briefs reveals they, unsurprisingly, always support more spending on weapons systems. Unlike other weapons-funded lobbying groups such as Center for Strategic and International Studies (FAIR.org, 8/12/16), they don’t even bother throwing some banks or soda companies in there to give the appearance of being anything other than a weapons industry trade group. (Don’t be fooled by the “Sasakawa Peace Foundation”—that’s an organization founded by far-right Japanese business executive Ryoichi Sasakawa, who was jailed as a war crimes suspect after World War II, and who once described himself as the “world’s richest fascist”—Time, 8/26/74.)

Setting aside its disqualifying conflicts of interest, Brands’ piece is an assortment of sophistry about how weapons systems create middle-class jobs for Americans. Given that any meaningful definition of “progressive” must take into account the 95 percent of the world who are not Americans—e.g., those on the other end of these weapons systems and military occupations—the column rests its premise on a massive category error.

One passage in particular displays a rather goofy notion of what “progressive” means (emphasis added):

The progressive critique misses the fact that military spending already serves progressive ends. Yes, defense spending benefits the executives who run major defense contractors, just as infrastructure spending benefits the executives of companies that build highways and airports and schools. But the Pentagon budget also serves as a huge jobs program and source of economic security for the middle class. This includes the roughly 2 million people who serve either on active duty or in the reserves and 730,000 civilian employees. The vast majority of them qualify as middle class and enjoy precisely the sort of healthcare and other benefits progressives seek to provide for the population as a whole.

See, if only all 330 million Americans could work in the military industry, building bombs and F-35s, no one would die due to preventable disease or an inability to afford chemotherapy. To Brands, the most “progressive” vision for society is the Klingon Empire—a perpetual war state where service to large-scale mechanized violence is the cost of survival. The idea that healthcare could, maybe, not be tethered to exporting weapons, occupation, hundreds of military bases, CIA dirty tricks and bombings is simply not an option. Progressives’ only hope: piggyback off US imperialism which evidently, to Brands, is simply a law of nature like ocean tides or entropy.

Brands also suggests that you can’t have trade except at gunpoint:

Defense spending produces massive positive spillovers in the form of national security and the ability to protect access to the global commons – critical to promoting U.S. trade and improving living standards at home.

And he says that what progressives should be worrying about as a “long-term threat to America’s ability to invest in infrastructure, education and other progressive priorities is not the Pentagon,” but “runaway entitlement spending.”

New York’s Eric Levitz (3/18/19) does a good job debunking Brands’ argument, such as it is, and his piece is well worth reading. But it’s not totally clear how useful it is to assume good faith from someone with such deep, undisclosed conflicts. We learned years ago to dismiss out of hand experts funded by the tobacco industry commenting on the effects of smoking, or climate scientists funded by big oil; why, exactly, do we take at all seriously organizations like CSBA when they comment on military budgets, and broader questions of US militarism, while receiving the vast bulk of their funding from those with a vested interest in bloating the US military machine?

The reason is, compared to the fossil fuel industry and tobacco, the military-think tank complex’s mercenary experts are 100-fold more intertwined into the US bipartisan consensus. It’s a product of ubiquity and professional courtesy borne from having influence with both Democrats and Republicans, rather than just the increasingly fringe and anti-science GOP.  From an ontological standpoint, there’s little difference between experts on the take pushing cigarettes and those on the take pushing weapons; it’s simply a matter of scope and sophistication.

In addition, Brands’ Bloomberg bio omits Brands is also a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, which also receives sizable funds from the weapons industry. While its funders are not posted on its website, Rightwing Web, a website that monitors the influence of right-wing funding, does report that

major supporters listed in the group’s 2012 annual report include Boeing, Piasecki Aircraft… Historically, FPRI has also benefited from the largesse of conservative foundations. Between 1985 and 2005, FPRI received nearly $5 million from the Lynde and Harry Bradley, John M. Olin, Earhart, Smith Richardson and Sarah Scaife Foundations, among others.

A variation on the Inexplicable Republican Best Friend (FAIR.org, 2/26/19), Brands––a career conservative whose recent output includes columns in Bloomberg downplaying Elliott Abrams’ laundry list of war crimes (2/20/19) and calling for a “new Cold War” in Latin America (2/10/19) and a 34-page paper in Journal of Strategic Studies making “The Case for Bush Revisionism” (7/28/17)––is here to tell progressives what’s good for them; in this case, supporting the funding of massive, expensive weapons systems. The fact that he’s potentially paid hundreds of thousands of dollars from a group funded almost exclusively by weaponsmakers and US and foreign militaries isn’t disclosed.

Laundering conflicts of interests through “think tanks” isn’t a new phenomenon for the media, and it’s one FAIR has documented for years (e.g., 5/17/17, 3/7/18), but perhaps editors can explain what exactly groups like “Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments” are, who funds them, or what their political leanings may be. These militaristic propaganda outfits are specifically designed to sound boring and Official and Serious, so the average reader won’t make the connection between their funding sources and their ideological end product.

Perhaps an enterprising editor, not wanting to collaborate in this transparent scam, will break convention and actually make clear to the reader what 20 seconds of Google would show: that these columns are written by people directly invested in the continued bloating of the Pentagon and function in effect, if not intent, as little more than marketing tools for industries and armies that build, stock and use weapons systems.

American Empire Killed the Prospect of Peace

“Veni, Vidi, Vici,” boasted Julius Caesar, one of history’s great military captains. “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed that famed saying when summing up the Obama administration’s military intervention in Libya in 2011 — with a small alteration. “We came, we saw, he died,” she said with a laugh about the killing of Muammar Gaddafi, that country’s autocratic leader. Note what she left out, though: the “vici” or victory part. And how right she was to do so, since Washington’s invasions, occupations, and interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere in this century have never produced anything faintly like a single decisive and lasting victory.

“Failure is not an option” was the stirring 1995 movie catchphrase for the dramatic 1970 rescue of the Apollo 13 moon mission and crew, but were such a movie to be made about America’s wars and their less-than-vici-esque results today, the phrase would have to be corrected in Clintonian fashion to read “We came, we saw, we failed.”

Wars are risky, destructive, unpredictable endeavors, so it would hardly be surprising if America’s military and civilian leaders failed occasionally in their endless martial endeavors, despite the overwhelming superiority in firepower of “the world’s greatest military.” Here’s the question, though: Why have all the American wars of this century gone down in flames and what in the world have those leaders learned from such repetitive failures?

The evidence before our eyes suggests that, when it comes to our senior military leaders at least, the answer would be: nothing at all.

Let’s begin with General David Petraeus, he of “the surge” fame in the Iraq War. Of course, he would briefly fall from grace in 2012, while director of the CIA, thanks to an affair with his biographer with whom he inappropriately shared highly classified information. When riding high in Iraq in 2007, however, “King David” (as he was then dubbed) was widely considered an example of America’s best and brightest. He was a soldier-scholar with a doctorate from Princeton, an “insurgent” general with the perfect way — a revival of Vietnam-era counterinsurgency techniques — to stabilize invaded and occupied Iraq. He was the man to snatch victory from the jaws of looming defeat. (Talk about a fable not worthy of Aesop!)

Though retired from the military since 2011, Petraeus somehow remains a bellwether for conventional thinking about America’s wars at the Pentagon, as well as inside the Washington Beltway. And despite the quagmire in Afghanistan (that he had a significant hand in deepening), despite the widespread destruction in Iraq (for which he would hold some responsibility), despite the failed-state chaos in Libya, he continues to relentlessly plug the idea of pursuing a “sustainable” forever war against global terrorism; in other words, yet more of the same.

Here’s how he typically put it in a recent interview:

“I would contend that the fight against Islamist extremists is not one that we’re going to see the end of in our lifetimes probably. I think this is a generational struggle, which requires you to have a sustained commitment. But of course you can only sustain it if it’s sustainable in terms of the expenditure of blood and treasure.”

His comment brings to mind a World War II quip about General George S. Patton, also known as “old blood and guts.” Some of his troops responded to that nickname this way: yes, his guts, but our blood. When men like Petraeus measure the supposed sustainability of their wars in terms of blood and treasure, the first question should be: Whose blood, whose treasure?

When it comes to Washington’s Afghan War, now in its 18th year and looking ever more like a demoralizing defeat, Petraeus admits that U.S. forces “never had an exit strategy.” What they did have, he claims, “was a strategy to allow us to continue to achieve our objectives… with the reduced expenditure in blood and treasure.”

Think of this formulation as an upside-down version of the notorious “body count” of the Vietnam War. Instead of attempting to maximize enemy dead, as General William Westmoreland sought to do from 1965 to 1968, Petraeus is suggesting that the U.S. seek to keep the American body count to a minimum (translating into minimal attention back home), while minimizing the “treasure” spent. By keeping American bucks and body bags down (Afghans be damned), the war, he insists, can be sustained not just for a few more years but generationally. (He cites 70-year troop commitments to NATO and South Korea as reasonable models.)

Talk about lacking an exit strategy! And he also speaks of a persistent “industrial-strength” Afghan insurgency without noting that U.S. military actions, including drone strikes and an increasing reliance on air power, result in ever more dead civilians, which only feed that same insurgency. For him, Afghanistan is little more than a “platform” for regional counterterror operations and so anything must be done to prevent the greatest horror of all: withdrawing American troops too quickly.

In fact, he suggests that American-trained and supplied Iraqi forces collapsed in 2014, when attacked by relatively small groups of ISIS militants, exactly because U.S. troops had been withdrawn too quickly. The same, he has no doubt, will happen if President Trump repeats this “mistake” in Afghanistan. (Poor showings by U.S.-trained forces are never, of course, evidence of a bankrupt approach in Washington, but of the need to “stay the course.”)

Petraeus’s critique is, in fact, a subtle version of the stab-in-the-back myth. Its underlying premise: that the U.S. military is always on the generational cusp of success, whether in Vietnam in 1971, Iraq in 2011, or Afghanistan in 2019, if only the rug weren’t pulled out from under the U.S. military by irresolute commanders-in-chief.

Of course, this is all nonsense. Commanded by none other than General David Petraeus, the Afghan surge of 2009-2010 proved a dismal failure as, in the end, had his Iraq surge of 2007. U.S. efforts to train reliable indigenous forces (no matter where in the embattled Greater Middle East and Africa) have also consistently failed. Yet Petraeus’s answer is always more of the same: more U.S. troops and advisers, training, bombing, and killing, all to be repeated at “sustainable” levels for generations to come.

The alternative, he suggests, is too awful to contemplate:

“You have to do something about [Islamic extremism] because otherwise they’re going to spew violence, extremism, instability, and a tsunami of refugees not just into neighboring countries but… into our western European allies, undermining their domestic political situations.”

No mention here of how the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq spread destruction and, in the end, a “tsunami of refugees” throughout the region. No mention of how U.S. interventions and bombing in Libya, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere help “spew” violence and generate a series of failed states.

And amazingly enough, despite his lack of “vici” moments, the American media still sees King David as the go-to guy for advice on how to fight and win the wars he’s had such a hand in losing. And just in case you want to start worrying a little, he’s now offering such advice on even more dangerous matters. He’s started to comment on the new “cold war” that now has Washington abuzz, a coming era — as he puts it — of “renewed great power rivalries” with China and Russia, an era, in fact, of “multi-domain warfare” that could prove far more challenging than “the asymmetric abilities of the terrorists and extremists and insurgents that we’ve countered in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and a variety of other places, particularly since 9/11.”

For Petraeus, even if Islamic terrorism disappeared tomorrow and not generations from now, the U.S. military would still be engaged with the supercharged threat of China and Russia. I can already hear Pentagon cash registers going ka-ching!

And here, in the end, is what’s most striking about Petraeus’s war lessons: no concept of peace even exists in his version of the future. Instead, whether via Islamic terrorism or rival great powers, America faces intractable threats into a distant future. Give him credit for one thing: if adopted, his vision could keep the national security state funded in the staggering fashion it’s come to expect for generations, or at least until the money runs out and the U.S. empire collapses.

Two Senior Generals Draw Lessons from the Iraq War

David Petraeus remains America’s best-known general of this century. His thinking, though, is anything but unique. Take two other senior U.S. Army generals, Mark Milley and Ray Odierno, both of whom recently contributed forewords to the Army’s official history of the Iraq War that tell you what you need to know about Pentagon thinking these days.

Published this January, the Army’s history of Operation Iraqi Freedom is detailed and controversial. Completed in June 2016, its publication was pushed back due to internal disagreements. As the Wall Street Journal put it in October 2018: “Senior [Army] brass fretted over the impact the study’s criticisms might have on prominent officers’ reputations and on congressional support for the service.” With those worries apparently resolved, the study is now available at the Army War College website.

The Iraq War witnessed the overthrow of autocrat (and former U.S. ally) Saddam Hussein, a speedy declaration of “mission accomplished” by President George W. Bush, and that country’s subsequent descent into occupation, insurgency, civil war, and chaos. What should the Army have learned from all this? General Milley, now Army chief of staff and President Trump’s nominee to serve as the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is explicit on its lessons:

“OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] is a sober reminder that technological advantages and standoff weapons alone cannot render a decision; that the promise of short wars is often elusive; that the ends, ways, and means must be in balance; that our Army must understand the type of war we are engaged with in order to adapt as necessary; that decisions in war occur on the ground in the mud and dirt; and that timeless factors such as human agency, chance, and an enemy’s conviction, all shape a war’s outcome.”

These aren’t, in fact, lessons. They’re military banalities. The side with the best weapons doesn’t always win. Short wars can turn into long ones. The enemy has a say in how the war is fought. What they lack is any sense of Army responsibility for mismanaging the Iraq War so spectacularly. In other words, mission accomplished for General Milley.

General Odierno, who commissioned the study and served in Iraq for 55 months, spills yet more ink in arguing, like Milley, that the Army has learned from its mistakes and adapted, becoming even more agile and lethal. Here’s my summary of his “lessons”:

* Superior technology doesn’t guarantee victory. Skill and warcraft remain vital.

* To win a war of occupation, soldiers need to know the environment, including “the local political and social consequences of our actions… When conditions on the ground change, we must be willing to reexamine the assumptions that underpin our strategy and plans and change course if necessary, no matter how painful it may be,” while developing better “strategic leaders.”

* The Army needs to be enlarged further because “landpower” is so vital and America’s troops were “overtaxed by the commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the decision to limit our troop levels in both theaters had severe operational consequences.”

* The Iraq War showcased an Army with an “astonishing” capacity “to learn and adapt in the midst of a war that the United States was well on its way to losing.”

The gist of Odierno’s “lessons”: the Army learned, adapted, and overcame. Therefore, it deserves America’s thanks and yet more of everything, including the money and resources to pursue future wars even more successfully. There would, however, be another way to read those lessons of his: that the Army overvalued technology, that combat skills were lacking, that efforts to work with allies and Iraqi forces regularly failed, that Army leadership lacked the skills needed to win, and that it was folly to get into a global war on terror in the first place.

On those failings, neither Milley nor Odierno has anything of value to say, since their focus is purely on how to make the Army prevail in future versions of just such wars. Their limited critique, in short, does little to prevent future disasters. Much like Petraeus’s reflections, they cannot envision an end point to the process — no victory to be celebrated, no return to America being “a normal country in a normal time.” There is only war and more war in their (and so our) future.

The Undiscovered Country

Talk of such future wars — of, that is, more of the same — reminded me of the sixth Star Trek movie, The Undiscovered Country. In that space opera, which appeared in 1991 just as the Soviet Union was imploding, peace finally breaks out between the quasi-democratic Federation (think: the USA) and the warmongering Klingon Empire (think: the USSR). Even the Federation’s implacable warrior-captain, James T. Kirk, grudgingly learns to bury the phaser with the Klingon “bastards” who murdered his son.

Back then, I was a young captain in the U.S. Air Force and, with the apparent end of the Cold War, my colleagues and I dared talk about, if not eternal peace, at least “peace” as our own — and not just Star Trek’s — undiscovered country. Like many at the time, even we in the military were looking forward to what was then called a “peace dividend.”

But that unknown land, which Americans then glimpsed ever so briefly, remains unexplored to this day. The reason why is simple enough. As Andrew Bacevich put it in his book Breach of Trust, “For the Pentagon [in 1991], peace posed a concrete and imminent threat” — which meant that new threats, “rogue states” of every sort, had to be found. And found they were.

It comes as no surprise, then, that America’s generals have learned so little of real value from their twenty-first-century losses. They continue to see a state of “infinite war” as necessary and are blind to the ways in which endless war and the ever-developing war state in Washington are the enemies of democracy.

The question isn’t why they think the way they do. The question is why so many Americans share their vision. The future is now. Isn’t it time that the U.S. sought to invade and occupy a different “land” entirely: an undiscovered country — a future — defined by peace?

Coal Tax Cut Endangers Funds for Black Lung Treatment

COEBURN, Va.—Former coal miner John Robinson’s bills for black lung treatments run $4,000 a month, but the federal fund he depends on to help cover them is being drained of money because of inaction by Congress and the Trump administration.

Amid the turmoil of the government shutdown this winter, a tax on coal that helps pay for the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund was cut sharply Jan. 1 and never restored, potentially saving coal operators hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

With cash trickling into the fund at less than half its usual rate, budget officials estimate that by the middle of 2020 there won’t be enough money to fully cover the fund’s benefit payments.

As a surge of black lung disease scars miners’ lungs at younger ages than ever, Robinson worries not only about cuts to his benefits, but that younger miners won’t get any coverage.

“Coal miners sort of been put on the back burner, thrown to the side,” Robinson said recently, sitting at his kitchen table in the small Virginia town of Coeburn, near the Kentucky border. “They just ain’t being done right.”

President Donald Trump, who vowed to save the coal industry during the 2016 campaign, has repeatedly praised miners. At an August rally in West Virginia filled with miners in hard hats, he called them “great people. Brave people. I don’t know how the hell you do that. You guys have a lot of courage.”

Trump made no mention of restoring the 2018 tax rate in his proposed budget released in mid-March.

The White House said in a statement Tuesday that “President Trump and this administration have always supported the mining industry by prioritizing deregulation and less Washington interference.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose home state of Kentucky is third in the nation in coal production, told a reporter from Ohio Valley ReSource in October the tax rate would “be taken care of before we get into an expiration situation.”

That didn’t happen. McConnell spokesman Robert Steurer didn’t repeat that pledge this week; rather, he wrote in an email, “benefits provided through the Black Lung Disability Fund continue to be provided at regular levels” and that McConnell “continues to prioritize maintaining and protecting the benefits.”

Trump and McConnell have reaped large contributions from the coal industry, according to the political money website Open Secrets.

Trump received more than $276,000 during the 2016 presidential election from political action committees and individuals affiliated with coal companies. His inaugural committee received $1 million from Joe Craft, CEO of Alliance Resource Partners in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and $300,000 from the Murray Energy Corporation, the nation’s largest privately owned coal-mining company.

McConnell received more than $297,000 in coal industry donations since 2014, when he was last up for election.

Congress established the trust fund in 1978. Until the rate expired, money came from an excise tax of $1.10 per ton on underground coal and 55 cents on surface-mined coal that brought in $450 million last year. Rates fell to about 50 cents and 25 cents when lawmakers failed to act on its Dec. 31 expiration date.

The fund provides health benefits and payments to about 25,000 retired miners. Most worked for companies that are now bankrupt. Many, including Robinson, struggle to breathe as their lungs are slowly stifled by tiny dust and particles trapped there.

Robinson was 47 when he was diagnosed, part of a wave of younger miners that doctors and experts say have been swept up in a new black lung epidemic in Appalachia. Robinson, now 53, and others who depend on the fund are disappointed in McConnell and other leaders who typically enjoy miners’ support.

“I just feel that Mitch McConnell has let the citizens of Kentucky down, especially the miners,” said Patty Amburgey, whose husband, Crawford, died of black lung disease at age 62 in 2007. She draws a monthly widow’s payment through his black lung disability benefits. “And now there’s an epidemic of black lung.”

Dr. Brandon Crum has watched that epidemic unfold at his Pikeville, Kentucky, radiology clinic. In less than four years, Crum has seen 200 miners diagnosed with a severe form of black lung disease, called pulmonary massive fibrosis. The nation had 31 such diagnoses in the 1990s, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

“We’re looking at men in their 30s and 40s on oxygen, being evaluated for lung transplants,” Crum said. “Those are usually middle-age individuals with younger families, so it affects their wives, a lot.”

His findings were published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a December 2016 report that showed a shockingly high level of severe black lung cases at his clinic.

Amburgey, of Letcher County, Kentucky, said there will be fewer benefits for the growing number of younger miners with black lung if the fund is depleted. Robinson said he’s now worried the trust fund’s “pot of money will dry up.”

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and other coal-state Democratic senators are pushing a bill to shore up the fund by restoring the larger tax for 10 years. Manchin said in a statement that lawmakers “cannot continue to allow these solutions to be put off again and again.” That bill is in a Senate finance committee.

The mining industry supported the increased tax rate’s expiration, calling the effort to maintain it an unnecessary tax increase. The National Mining Association, which speaks for the industry, says the lower rate “will be sufficient to cover monthly benefit costs for the fund.” The group argued extending the rate would lead to job losses.

The May 2018 GAO report contradicts that claim, saying the fund’s beneficiaries could multiply “due to the increased occurrence of black lung disease and its most severe form, progressive massive fibrosis, particularly among Appalachian coal miners.”

The increase in younger black lung sufferers will put more pressure on the fund, as the industry continues to shrink.

“I think people always thought they would get (black lung) if they worked long enough in the mines, but I think it’s a disease they thought would affect them at the end of their life, in their 70s or 80s,” Crum said.

Amburgey says Trump reneged on his pledge to support miners.

“Mr. Trump promised that he would bring the mines back and take care of the miners, and that is not happening,” she said. “He promised us a snowball in July.”

Special Counsel Zeroed In on Cohen Early, Documents Show

NEW YORK—Hundreds of pages of court records made public Tuesday revealed that special counsel Robert Mueller quickly zeroed in on Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer, in the early stages of his Russia probe.

The heavily blacked-out records, released by a judge at the request of news organizations, show that Mueller was investigating Cohen by July 2017 — much earlier than previously known.

That was two months after Mueller was appointed to investigate Moscow’s election interference and practically a year before an FBI raid on Cohen’s home and office.

The full scope of Mueller’s interest in Cohen is not clear from the documents, which include search warrant applications and other records. More extensive files from the special counsel investigation remain under seal in Washington.

But the documents made public Tuesday show that Mueller’s investigators early on began looking into possible misrepresentations Cohen made to banks to shore up his financially troubled taxi business.

They were also initially interested in money that was flowing into Cohen’s bank accounts from consulting contracts he signed after Trump got elected. Prosecutors were looking into whether Cohen failed to register as a foreign agent.

Some of the payments he received were from companies with strong foreign ties, including a Korean aerospace company, a bank in Kazakhstan and an investment firm affiliated with a Russian billionaire.

By February 2018, though, the records show Mueller had handed off portions of his investigation to federal prosecutors in Manhattan. And by the spring of 2018, those prosecutors had expanded their investigation to include payments Cohen made to buy the silence of porn star Stormy Daniels and a Playboy centerfold, both of whom claimed to have had affairs with Trump.

The newly released documents indicate authorities continue to probe campaign violations connected to those hush money payments. Nearly 20 pages related to the matter were blacked out at the direction of a judge who said he wanted to protect an ongoing investigation by New York prosecutors.

Where that investigation is headed is unclear. But prosecutors have said Trump himself directed Cohen to arrange the hush money. The president has denied any wrongdoing.

Cohen ultimately pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations over those payments. He also pleaded guilty to tax evasion, making false statements to banks and lying to Congress about Trump’s plans to build a skyscraper in Moscow. He was not charged with failing to register as a foreign agent.

He is scheduled to begin serving a three-year prison sentence in May.

Lanny Davis, an attorney for Cohen, said Tuesday that the release of the search warrants “furthers his interest in continuing to cooperate and providing information and the truth about Donald Trump and the Trump Organization to law enforcement and Congress.”

The FBI raided Cohen’s Manhattan home and office last April — the first public sign of a criminal investigation that has proved an embarrassment for Trump.

The newly released records show that several months earlier, in July 2017, Mueller’s office got a judge to grant him authority to read 18 months’ worth of Cohen’s emails.

In their investigation, Mueller’s prosecutors also obtained Cohen’s telephone records and went so far as to use a high-tech tool known as a Stingray or Triggerfish to pinpoint the location of his cellphones.

FBI agents also scoured Cohen’s hotel room and safe deposit box and seized more than 4 million electronic and paper files, more than a dozen mobile devices and iPads, 20 external hard drives, flash drives and laptops.

Both Cohen and Trump cried foul at the time over the raids, with Cohen’s attorney calling them “completely inappropriate and unnecessary” and the president taking to Twitter to declare that “Attorney-client privilege is dead!”

A court-ordered review ultimately found only a fraction of the seized material to be privileged.

Tuesday’s release of documents came nearly six weeks after U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III partially granted a request by several media organizations, including The Associated Press, that the search warrant be made public because of the high public interest in the case.

But he ordered certain material withheld, acknowledging prosecutors’ concerns that a wholesale release of the documents “would jeopardize an ongoing investigation and prejudice the privacy rights of uncharged third parties.”

“The unsealed records provide significant insight into the investigations of Michael Cohen and serve as an important safeguard for public accountability,” AP’s director of media relations, Lauren Easton, said Tuesday.

David E. McCraw, vice president and deputy general counsel for The New York Times, which initiated the request for the documents, said he is hopeful Pauley will approve the release of additional materials in May after the government updates the judge on its investigation.

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For more in-depth information, follow AP coverage at https://apnews.com/TrumpInvestigations