Chris Hedges's Blog, page 313

Plane Makes Emergency Landing at Newark, 189 Passengers Evacuated

NEWARK, N.J.—Smoke reported on board an Air Transat flight forced an emergency landing Saturday at a New Jersey airport, where the 189 passengers were evacuated by emergency slides.

Air Transat Flight 942 was on its way from Montreal to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when it reported a possible fire in the cargo hold and was diverted to Newark Liberty International Airport at 8:30 a.m. Saturday, a Federal Aviation Administration representative said.

The Boeing 737 landed and remained on the runway while airport firefighters responded, and passengers evacuated via emergency slides, she said. Passengers were then taken by bus to the terminal.

Two of the 189 passengers reported minor injuries, neither related to smoke, and one was taken to a hospital to be examined, said Steve Coleman, deputy director of media relations at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. No fire was found and the cause of the smoke remains under investigation, he said.

“Our 189 passengers’ safety is our top priority and they were evacuated promptly upon landing,” said Debbie Cabana, Air Transat marketing director. Another aircraft was to be sent to Newark to operate the flight to Fort Lauderdale, she said.

Both runways were closed during what Newark Liberty called an “airport emergency,” but officials later announced that flights had resumed.

Congress Neglects Puerto Rican Food Stamp Recipients

With hurricane relief funding stalled in Congress due to opposition from the Trump administration, Puerto Rico has reportedly started slashing food stamps in an attempt to preserve the life-saving program.

The move could harm as many as 1.4 million Puerto Ricans—including hundreds of thousands of children and elderly people.

“This is not about politics—this is literally about people’s lives and their ability to feed their children and their elders in Puerto Rico,” Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, told The Washington Post. “The need is still there.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) issued an urgent call for congressional action in response to news of the cuts.

“Puerto Rico needs food assistance funding due to the hurricanes which devastated the island. Some 1.4 million U.S. citizens will face large cuts to their food assistance benefits, 230,000 will lose the benefits entirely,” Sanders tweeted. “We must act now to end this crisis.”

Puerto Rico needs food assistance funding due to the hurricanes which devastated the island. Some 1.4 million U.S. citizens will face large cuts to their food assistance benefits, 230,000 will lose the benefits entirely. We must act now to end this crisis. https://t.co/oN0boeLPbE

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) March 8, 2019

Food stamp use soared in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island and—according to one study—may have killed as many as 6,000 people.

Due to lack of assistance from the federal government, Puerto Rican officials are reportedly cutting food stamps to pre-hurricane levels.

“For a senior citizen who lives alone, their benefits have dipped from $194 per month to $112 per month,” Buzzfeed reported, citing Puerto Rican authorities. “A family of four with a monthly income of around $2,000 has seen their benefits drop from $649 per month to $410 per month.”

Socorro Rivera, executive director of the San Juan non-profit La Fondita de Jesús, told the Post that “a lot of people will have severe problems” if the Congress and the Trump administration do not act quickly to provide relief.

“It is dangerous. People don’t have enough money to buy food already,” Rivera said.

The reductions in food stamp assistance come just over a month after the Trump administration dismissed as “excessive and unnecessary” House Democrats’ plan to provide $600 million in funding for Puerto Rico’s Nutritional Assistance Program (NAP).

According to the Post, the White House is now backing a broad Republican proposal that includes $600 million in food stamp aid to Puerto Rico, but there is no vote scheduled on the measure.

“Puerto Rico’s food stamp program is uniquely dependent on periodic help from Congress, though the island does not have a voting representative in either the House or Senate, or a say in presidential elections,” the Post reported. “Even if approved by Congress, the additional $600 million allocation would only fund the island’s food stamps program until September 2019.”

Valeria Delgado Rivera, 28, is worried she will not be able to get lunch for her & her daughter. The hurricane cut her hours at a restaurant in half

“The only help I get for buying food is from this program," she said. "Of course I’m scared.”https://t.co/tQn2tWPohE

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) March 8, 2019

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), more than 300,000 children could be effected by the food stamp cuts.

“The fact that we’ve had to reduce benefits to those that need it the most is alarming,” George Laws-García, deputy director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, told Buzzfeed. “Puerto Ricans are being treated unequally and that is unfair.”

Amazon Lobbies to Exempt Employees From Labor Protections

OLYMPIA, Wash. — Many of Amazon’s Seattle-area employees would be exempt from new labor protections in a bill passed by the state Senate after lobbyists for the tech giant pushed to change a key threshold in the rules.

The protections would partially prohibit non-compete clauses — controversial agreements used by tech companies and others to block employees from going to work for competitors or launching rival startups.

Lawmakers say Amazon lobbied to have the income threshold set at a level that would likely exempt many workers in Seattle.

The effort came as the company has expanded its presence in the state capital, where its spending has tripled in recent years.

The bill passed the Washington state Senate Tuesday with the salary threshold set at $100,000 – the level sought by Amazon. Employees above the threshold would be exempted from the labor protection. The original wage threshold in the measure was about $180,000.

The median salary for Amazon employees in Seattle is about $113,000, according to Glassdoor.com, a company that tracks top firms.

Other provisions require some protections for workers making more than $100,000, including an 18-month limit on any non-compete clauses they sign and a requirement that employees must be compensated while they are barred from working. The original proposal

The measure now heads to the state House for consideration.

Millions of U.S. workers sign non-compete agreements. A handful of states, including California, prohibit such agreements.

Other companies joined talks surrounding the Washington state bill, as well as groups such as the Association of Washington Business and the Washington State Hospital Association.

They were concerned with retaining trade secrets and intellectual property some but remained open to blocking the use of non-compete agreements for lower-paid workers.

Democratic Sens. Marko Liias of Lynwood and Rep. Derek Stanford of Bothell, sponsors of the House and Senate versions of the bill, said Amazon made the lower threshold a priority.

“They have a lot of clout,” Stanford said. “Amazon was saying, if it’s above this number, we’re opposed.

Amazon held off on endorsing a previous measure over the same issue, even after Microsoft signed off, Stanford said.

Stanford, who submitted an amendment to lower the threshold in his bill to the level requested by Amazon, said it came down to simple arithmetic: The opposition of a major employer in the state would turn votes against the bill.

Amazon defended its lobbying effort.

“Like any other business, we work with elected officials so they understand how proposed regulations will impact our more than 50,000 employees and the growth of our business in the state,” company spokesman Aaron Toso said.

Republican Sen. Curtis King of Yakima voted for the measure and later said the threshold was appropriate and would help businesses safeguard their intellectual property while accommodating low-wage workers.

Amazon’s push on the bill came after the company tripled spending on lobbying in the state capital, in conjunction with a more assertive stance toward city governments around the country.

Last year, the company joined an aggressive effort that helped repeal a business tax in Seattle.

In 2017, the company dangled high-paying jobs and billions of dollars in investment as incentives for cities to host its new headquarters. Municipalities quickly turned to tax breaks and other lucrative incentives to lure the company.

In Washington state, the company’s spending on lobbyists jumped from $114,000 in 2014 to $358,000 in 2016, according to Amazon’s filings with the state Public Disclosure Commission. It spent $679,000 in 2017 and $333,000 in 2018.

That puts it behind Microsoft but ahead of Google and Facebook in spending on lobbying in the state.

International Women’s Day: Strikes, Protests and Holidays

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Marches and protests were held Friday across the globe to mark International Women’s Day under the slogan #BalanceforBetter, with calls for a more gender-balanced world.

The day, sponsored by the United Nations since 1975, celebrates women’s achievements and aims to further their rights.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told a commemoration at U.N. headquarters in New York that “remarkable progress on women’s rights and leadership” in recent decades has sparked a backlash from “an entrenched patriarchy.”

And he warned that “nationalist, populist and austerity agendas add to inequality with policies that curtail women’s rights and cut social services.”

“I do not accept a world that tells my granddaughters that economic equality can wait for their granddaughter’s granddaughters,” Guterres said. “I call for a new vision of equality and opportunity so that half the world’s population can contribute to all the world’s success.”

Millions of others around the world demanded equality amid a persistent salary gap, violence and widespread inequality.

____

EUROPE

Police in the Ukrainian capital Kiev detained three people as far-right demonstrators tried to provoke activists protesting domestic and sexual violence.

About 300 people gathered on Mykhailivska Square in central Kiev on Friday for the women’s rights demonstration. Several dozen far-right demonstrators stood nearby, holding placards reading “God! Homeland! Patriarchy!” and “Feminism is destroying Ukrainian families.”

In Spain, where women’s rights have become one of the hot topics in the run-up to a general election next month, many female employees didn’t show up to work Friday. Others also halted domestic work or left to men the care of children and ill or elderly people.

In the evening, cities across the country lit landmark buildings with purple lights as hundreds of thousands poured into the streets.

“We are getting killed and we are getting lower salaries for being women, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Sara Baladron, a 27-year-old pharmacist joining the protest in central Madrid.

In neighboring Portugal, the Cabinet observed a minute of silence Thursday as part of a day of national mourning it decreed for victims of domestic violence. Portuguese police say 12 women have died this year in domestic violence incidents — the highest number over the same period in 10 years.

Pope Francis hailed the “irreplaceable contribution of women” to fostering peace.

“Women make the world beautiful, they protect it and keep it alive,” the Argentine Jesuit said.

Francis has vowed to give more decision-making roles to women in the Catholic Church, where the priesthood —and therefore the highest ranks of authority— is reserved for men. Some feminists bristle at Francis’ frequent use of the term “feminine genius” and his focus on women as mothers.

In Germany, topless feminist protesters went to one of the country’s most famous red-light districts in Hamburg and pulled down a metal barrier wall intended to keep out women — other than prostitutes.

A half-dozen women belonging to the Femen activist group had the slogan “No brothels for women” written on their bare back in black lettering.

Legally, all women are allowed to enter the street, but in reality most women obey the signs saying, “Entry only for men 18+.”

In France, the first Simone Veil prize went Friday to a Cameroonian activist who has worked against forced marriages and other violence against girls and women. Aissa Doumara Ngatansou was married against her will at age 15 but insisted upon continuing her studies as a young wife. She has since turned her attention to victims of Boko Haram extremists.

The French award is named for the trailblazing French politician and Holocaust survivor Veil, who spearheaded the fight to legalize abortion.

Meanwhile in Russia, International Women’s Day is a public holiday but it mostly lauds gender roles that are now outdated. As is his custom every year, President Vladimir Putin gave a speech thanking women for their patience, good grace and support.

“You manage to do everything: both at work and at home and at the same time you remain beautiful, charismatic, charming, the center of gravity for the whole family, uniting it with your love,” Putin said.

___

LATIN AMERICA

Women in Argentina were galvanized to take to the streets after a bill that would have legalized abortion was rejected by lawmakers last year. They prepared for a large march from Congress to the country’s historic Plaza de Mayo square later Friday, during which they were set to protest against violence.

Rallies against violence against women in Argentina, held under the slogan “Not One Less,” have drawn multitudes in the past.

“We have achieved a change of era. Sexist violence is no longer accepted, abuses are not accepted, neither is street harassment … there are many things that have changed,” said Marta Dillon, an activist and one of the founders of the “Not One Less” movement.

In Puerto Rico, hundreds clad in purple T-shirts protested to demand safer housing as the U.S. territory struggles to recover from Hurricane Maria, while others held up signs with the names of more than 20 women reportedly killed by their partners on the island last year.

Amid the protests, Gov. Ricardo Rossello signed an executive order that would in part create a special agency to intervene in domestic violence cases and establish preventive police patrols around the homes and workplaces of women awarded protection orders.

Meanwhile, similar scenes played out in other South American countries.

Hundreds of women in Bolivia rallied in main cities, carrying giant undergarments bearing messages such as, “underwear of an irresponsible and abusive father” and “underwear of a child molester,” as Chilean women also demanded access to free and safe abortions.

And in nearby Ecuador, President Lenin Moreno took the day to announce the creation of a bonus of about $300 per month for the children of victims of femicides.

The bonus will help an estimated 88 orphans.

____

ASIA

In India, hundreds of women marched on the streets of New Delhi demanding an end to domestic violence, sexual attacks and discrimination in jobs.

Boys are prized more than girls in India. Thousands of Indian women are killed — often doused in gasoline and burned to death — every year because the groom or his family feel the dowry of the bride is inadequate.

Political parties in India have for years been promising 33 percent of seats for women in the country’s Parliament, but they have yet to enact legislation to that effect.

In Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, several hundred men and women carried colorful placards calling for an end to discriminative practices such as the termination of employment for pregnancy and exploitative work contracts.

“Our action today is to urge (the government) for our right to a society that’s democratic, prosperous, equal and free from violence,” said Dian Trisnanti, a labor activist. Girls and women in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, have equal access to education but face higher unemployment, lower wages and poorer working conditions than men.

Both Koreas marked the day. In the South, women wearing black cloaks and pointed hats marched against what they describe as a “witch hunt” of feminists in a deeply conservative society.

College student Noh Seo-young said that South Korea struggles to accept that women are “also humans” and that women have to fight until they can “walk around safely.”

In the North, where Women’s Day is one of the few national holidays that is not explicitly political in nature, people dressed up for family photo shoots or bought roses for their mothers or wives at the many small, bright orange street stalls in central Pyongyang that sell flowers.

____

NORTH AMERICA

U.S. President Donald Trump honored International Women’s Day with a presidential message, saying that the U.S. celebrates women’s “vision, leadership, and courage,” and reaffirms its “commitment to promoting equal opportunity for women everywhere.”

On the eve prior, U.S. first lady Melania Trump saluted women from 10 countries for their courage. The recipients of the International Women of Courage Award included human rights activists, police officers and an investigative journalist.

“Courage is what divides those who only talk about change from those who actually act to change,” Mrs. Trump said at a ceremony Thursday that was also attended by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Pompeo separately recognized women in Iran for protesting the requirement that they wear a head covering known as a hijab in public and a Ukrainian activist who died in 2018 after she was attacked with sulfuric acid.

___

AFRICA

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who named one of the world’s few “gender-balanced” Cabinets last year, told a gathering that “women are the pillars of the nation and the least recognized for their sacrifices.”

In Nigeria, the U.S. Embassy hosted talks on sexual harassment that included a founder of the recent #ArewaMeToo campaign among women in the country’s conservative, largely Muslim north. And in Niger, first lady Aissata Issoufou Mahamadou oversaw the awards in the Miss Intellect Niger contest.

Women protested against gender-based violence in Kenya’s capital.

“We haven’t gotten to a stage where women are comfortable to come out and say, ‘I was sexually abused,'” said protester Esther Passaris. “So what we need to do is slowly, slowly grow.”

Biology Is Not Destiny

“The Independent Woman: Extracts from  The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir”

A book translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. Annotated and introduced by Martine Reid

“The Second Sex,” a two-volume classic by French writer Simone de Beauvoir, was published in 1949 and quickly became an eminent—some contend the preeminent—book in the pantheon of 20th century feminist and existentialist writings. Like the biologist Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (1962), “The Second Sex” kindled a revolution across the Western world that is ablaze today in the global quest for women’s human rights, as witnessed by the January 2017 Women’s March on every continent, including Antarctica. De Beauvoir’s core proposition animates every page: The subordination and inequality of women is not our fate by reason of our biology; it is a gendered construct of society that has been accepted as natural (by most men and women) for millennia.

Like a sower scattering seeds, de Beauvoir planted an abundance of critical thinking that fed the feminist revolution in consciousness and activism of the 1960s and ’70s—popularly known as the Second Wave of Feminism. As with all radical social movements, debates and challenges ensued and persist. But the iconic message irrevocably lives: Biology is not destiny. The reduction of women to the feminine, sexualized lesser sex is an artifice constructed of vested prejudices that deprive women (and the world) of our fullest existence.

A small book of selected extracts from “The Second Sex” has now been released under the title “The Independent Woman.” It offers a trail studded with gems of insight, from which I cull a few to comment on today’s events, findings and social thinking regarding girls and women. Entwined within the extracts are a radical timelessness of feminist analysis and the shortcomings of a period piece.

“Humanity is male,” writes de Beauvoir, “and man defines woman not in herself, but in relation to himself: she is not considered an autonomous being. … [T]he male sex sees her essentially as a sexed being. … He is a Subject. … She is the Other.” Here, however, she is not referring explicitly to widespread sexual violence against women, including stalking, sexual harassment, rape, pimping and exploitation of women in prostitution, lack of reproductive freedom and other violations of women’s bodies, psyches and souls. Rather she is signifying the condition of women: essentialized since birth into domestic and passive feminine roles and, as her contemporary Virginia Woolf wrote in “A Room of One’s Own,” serving “all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

De Beauvoir then describes the tangled web in which women, unlike any other oppressed group, live intimately with their oppressors and often collude in their own oppression: “They live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests and social conditions to certain men—fathers and husbands—more closely than to other women.” She describes with great nuance the detritus of inequality among intimates, banalized in popular culture as the “battle between the sexes.”

Click here to read long excerpts from “The Independent Woman” at Google Books.

Her prescription for liberation and equality is straightforward: Do what self-realized men have done. Seek a comparable education and aspire to excel. Set high goals for yourself in work and career; don’t fall prey to self-limiting messages from home, school, the workplace, society and your own internalized version of sex-based inferiority. Stellar messages to girls and women, but are they sufficient?

A recent nationally representative poll of 1,000 U.S. children and adolescents 10-19 reveals that while many girls and young women have sought and achieved substantial gains in precisely these prescriptions for achieving fulfillment, a riptide of sexual objectification persists, as if to undermine their pursuit of equality and excellence. “For me,” responded 13-year old Hiree Felema, “it’s important to be intelligent and confident. For women, in society, I think people just want you to be attractive”—an insight echoed by many girls surveyed. Girls reported as much interest in math and science as boys and slightly more in leadership, yet they did not feel equal with respect to their bodies. Three-quarters of teenage girls felt judged for their looks and unsafe as a female, including from sexual predators online. Many reported boys asking for nude photos, daily hearing sexual comments or jokes from boys in school and from men in their families. And, interestingly, girls felt more pressure to be kind than boys did, reflecting society’s stubborn, sex-based stereotypes of what is valued in women but not necessarily in men.

In 2017 the Pew Charitable Trust surveyed 4,573 Americans about what society values and (and doesn’t) in men and women. “Power,” “leadership,” and “honesty” were positive attributes in men, whereas “power” and “ambition” were largely seen as negative in women. “Compassionate,” “kind” and “responsible” were qualities viewed positively for women, while “emotion” and “compassion” largely ranked negatively for men. Just half of respondents chose “independence” in women and “caring” in men as positive traits. “Beauty” was valued for women, while “provider,” exclusively for men. Two hopeful results among the otherwise timeworn gender-based stereotypes: “Brain” was valued in women; and “sexism,” negatively in men.

In the confirmation hearings of then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, we had a riveting view of the outfall of privilege for entitled men who pander in unrestrained displays of anger, self-righteousness and ambition over the moderated self-presentation of women. Had Dr. Christine Blasey Ford “spoken with the same tone and flippancy [as Kavanaugh], she would have been described as unstable or combative,” notes former Republican governor of New Jersey, Christine Todd Whitman. Her prescription: Increase the number of women in leadership roles (something that white, married conservative women—identifying more with white men than other women—appear reluctant to do, judging from their voting patterns).

Since “The Second Sex,” the ascendancy of women has proven to be both more challenging than just imitating successful, “autonomous” men, as even aspiring 11- and 12-year-old girls know, and more complex than de Beauvoir proposed. Recent studies of women in leadership in public and private sectors have concluded that women in high-level positions and on boards deal more effectively with risk, focus more strategically on long-term priorities, and are more successful financially. Experimental studies of women and men negotiating post-conflict agreements have found that all-male groups take riskier, less empathetic and more aggressive positions, and they break down more quickly than negotiations that include women. Further, men are more satisfied with decisions made when women are involved than with all-male groups.

Parsing these findings, many women, educated like men and in comparable positions of influence, integrate qualities of their socialized development—compassion, not acting rashly or aggressively, a sense of responsibility—as assets into their leadership. In other words, they set more integrated, smart and nuanced goals for themselves than merely imitating men, and have succeeded where men have not.

The lesson in this, insufficiently probed in “The Second Sex” as reflected in “The Independent Woman,” is that men need to work as hard and as persistently for their liberation from masculinism (especially the normative sexual objectification of women) as women have strived for our equality. As the Buddhist critic and teacher Lama Rod Owens writes, “Like white people challenging whiteness, it is men who must do the work of understanding that a significant portion of our identity is based on a toxic, patriarchal masculinity.” [We need] “a widespread divestment in patriarchy and a complete interrogation of the ethics of power. We all have work to do.”

Reaching our full human capacity is the task of both sexes. If that were achieved, the world—riven with wars, endangered by nuclear weapons and climate change, rent by increasing economic inequality and declining democracy, under almost exclusive male leadership—will have a far better chance of survival.

Men their rights and nothing more: Women their rights and nothing less.—Susan B. Anthony, 1868

Bill Shine Resigns as White House Communications Director

WASHINGTON — Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive who took over as President Donald Trump’s communications director last summer, exited the White House on Friday, the latest person to step away from a job that has become a revolving door within the turbulent West Wing.

Shine will join the president’s Republican re-election campaign, the White House said in a laudatory statement that quoted Trump and other top White House officials.

When Shine joined the administration, he was viewed as an experienced hand whose television experience could help shape Trump’s message. But like others before him, Shine was forced to grapple with a president who preferred to run his own communications strategy via tweet. In recent weeks, Trump had expressed frustration that Shine had not done more to improve his press coverage, said two people close to the president who were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The announcement took many in the West Wing by surprise, though there were signs of unrest lately. Shine did not join Trump on his high-stakes trip to Vietnam for a summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Still, Trump said in a statement: “We will miss him in the White House, but look forward to working together on the 2020 Presidential Campaign, where he will be totally involved.”

Shine was Sean Hannity’s top producer for several years at Fox News Channel, rising to network leadership when founding chief executive Roger Ailes was forced out following sexual misconduct allegations. Shine wasn’t accused of such misdeeds, but he was named in lawsuits as someone who tried to keep a lid on allegations of bad workplace behavior instead of trying to root it out.

He was known as Ailes’ operations man and enforcer, the one who tried to put his boss’ directives into action.

Shine’s work at Fox, and the close relationship the network has with the Trump White House, was given new attention this week through a lengthy story in The New Yorker magazine. That article led to the Democratic National Committee saying it would not partner with Fox on any debates involving 2020 presidential contenders.

Shine called his eight-month stint in the White House “the most rewarding experience of my entire life.”

Shine succeeded Hope Hicks as communications director. Others who served in that role were Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted just 11 days, Sean Spicer and Mike Dubke.

Elizabeth Warren Declares War on Big Tech

Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced on Medium on Friday her intention for “big, structural change” to the tech sector  if she’s elected president in 2020. Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said that her administration would break up tech giants Facebook, Google and Amazon.

Her broad plan proposes ways to reduce tech giants’ political and economic power, prioritizing ways to allow smaller businesses to compete in the marketplace. She would pass legislation saying that companies that make more than $25 billion annually from services such as Google Search, Amazon Marketplace and Google Ad Exchange would be designated as “platform utilities.” They would be barred from sharing data with third parties or owning a company that uses their platforms, which would stop Google and Amazon from prioritizing their own products in search results.

Warren also said she would appoint regulators who would use existing antitrust laws to undo mergers. For example, Amazon’s ownership of Whole Foods, Facebook’s ownership of Instagram and Google’s ownership of smart home tool manufacturer Nest would be undone.

Facebook, Amazon, and Google have vast power over our economy and democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition and tilted the playing field in their favor. Time to break up these companies so they don’t have so much power over everyone else. #BreakUpBigTech https://t.co/2rWT0wJ8vD

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) March 8, 2019

Warren wrote in the Medium post:

I want a government that makes sure everybody — even the biggest and most powerful companies in America — plays by the rules. And I want to make sure that the next generation of great American tech companies can flourish. To do that, we need to stop this generation of big tech companies from throwing around their political power to shape the rules in their favor and throwing around their economic power to snuff out or buy up every potential competitor.

Julia Salazar, a New York State senator and Democratic Socialist, said in a statement that she supported the proposal. “I’m glad to see the dangers of monopolistic market power being taken seriously by a leading presidential candidate,” she said, adding, “Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other pro-Amazon politicians need to see the danger of sublimating all facets of our daily lives into a single all-encompassing company, which is clearly Amazon’s business model.”

The proposal would apply to Apple as well.

Elizabeth Warren's team has confirmed to me that her proposal would apply to Apple.

Per a spokesperson:
"They would have to structurally separate – choosing between, for example, running the App Store or offering their own apps." https://t.co/2C6ZFZ6AU2

— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) March 8, 2019

Brian Feldman, a writer at New York Magazine, said that the proposal could allow for more government accountability in the tech sector. “At the very least, it might force tech companies to make some disclosures, if not publicly, at least to regulators, about how their systems work,” he said. Opaque algorithms purport to be fair, but they are known to show the bias of the people that build them. “Some adjudication of whether these ‘objective’ systems are unfair would be helpful,” Feldman said.

Warren explained the way large tech companies often wield their power:

With fewer competitors entering the market, the big tech companies do not have to compete as aggressively in key areas like protecting our privacy. And some of these companies have grown so powerful that they can bully cities and states into showering them with massive taxpayer handouts in exchange for doing business, and can act — in the words of Mark Zuckerberg — “more like a government than a traditional company.”

Senate Democrats Urge IRS to Focus on Big-Time Tax Cheats

In a letter on Friday , a group of prominent senators — including Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., 2020 presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as well as Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. — urged IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig to increase the agency’s focus on large tax and financial crimes.

As ProPublica has documented with a series of articles, the IRS is a shadow of its former self, the result of a near decade-long campaign by Republicans in Congress to starve the agency of funds. The agency’s enforcement staff has dropped by more than a third. That has been a boon to the rich and to tax cheats in particular, who have benefited from a collapse in audits, collections and criminal tax prosecutions.

As we reported, and as the senators noted in their letter, the story has been different for the poor, as the IRS has devoted a disproportionate number of its audits to taxpayers who receive the earned income tax credit, one of the government’s largest antipoverty programs.

The senators acknowledged that the budget cuts have badly weakened the agency, but they argued that ProPublica’s stories, together with government watchdog reports, show the IRS could use its limited resources more effectively.

The widening circle of investigations surrounding President Donald Trump has highlighted the weakness of tax enforcement, as we explained last October. Paul Manafort hid income overseas for years, and Michael Cohen dodged taxes through the simplest means imaginable (by lying to his accountant and the IRS) without consequence. It was only after the Robert Mueller’s team and other federal prosecutors began scrutinizing Trump’s circle that their crimes were discovered. The senators say that such examples of “exposure of criminal activity only resulting from investigations pursued for other matters” prove that the IRS can do more. “We urge you to strengthen enforcement efforts at the IRS, including focusing on tax code violations and financial crimes that may be linked to money laundering,” they wrote.

The IRS will not get a budget increase anytime soon. After a 34-day government shutdown, Congress and Trump struck a deal to fund the government for the next seven months. For the IRS, the deal included a cut from last year’s budget. In real terms, the enforcement portion of the agency’s budget is down by 23 percent since 2010.

Will things change next year? That’s in part up to Rettig. Last year, Republican congressional staffers told us that lawmakers might respond favorably if Rettig asked for more funds. So far, Rettig has not made any clear statements about whether he believes the IRS needs more money to do its job.

One Solution to Climate Change No One Is Talking About

It was a nightmarish Iowa blizzard in 1998 that made Seth Watkins rethink the way he farmed.

Before then, he’d operated his family business—he raises livestock alongside hay and corn crops for feed—pretty much as his parents had, utilizing practices like monocropping and unseasonal calving cycles, methods designed to cheat nature. The blizzard, which imperiled the lives of many newly born calves that year, made him realize there must be a better way to steward the land and the animals on it — methods more attuned to the natural scheme of things.

In the 20 years since, Watkins has shepherded in a number of major changes—such as prairie strips, cover crops and rotational grazing—that prevent soil erosion, curb toxic nitrate and phosphorus runoff into nearby waterways, stimulate the biodiversity of the local ecosystems, and improve soil moisture and nutrient content, all the while increasing profits, he said.

These regenerative farming practices also achieve one other key outcome — they improve the soil’s ability to sequester carbon. This is something that brings practical impacts at the local economic level. But soil carbon sequestration also has the potential to tackle one of the single greatest threats to humanity: anthropogenic climate change.

“Carbon is life,” said Watkins. “Carbon really does belong in the soil where it sustains us.”

The science is in: From increased wildfire damage and the threats from rising sea levels, to ocean acidification and the impacts on human migration patterns, the effects of global warming are already being keenly felt. To prevent these developments from turning potentially catastrophic, we must stop the planet from warming 1.5°C above pre-industrial figures, say the world’s climate experts. To do this, global carbon emissions must decrease by about 49 percent from 2017 levels by 2030. Carbon output must be squashed to zero by around 2050. As an indication of how difficult this is going to be, greenhouse gas emissions rose last year in the United States.

Much of the conversation surrounding what to do has our heads turned skyward—reduced emissions from power plants, for example. Many companies are also vying to produce the first to-scale, commercially viable negative emissions technology—one that sucks and stores away more CO2 than it uses.

But a growing number of experts say we need to look downward, arguing that the carbon sequestering capacity of the soil under our feet has the potential to help tackle and reverse, perhaps significantly, human-caused global warming. That’s because soil holds about three times more carbon than the atmosphere. But the way humans have cultivated and managed the planet over millennia—think industrial farming practices and drainage of wetlands—has led to the loss of huge quantities of carbon from the soil. Different estimates pin this number at anywhere from 130 gigatons—one gigaton is a billion metric tons—to 320 gigatons of carbon lost.

So, with a fundamental shift in the way we cultivate the world’s soils to revitalize their carbon content, it is “possible that we could make a major dent” in atmospheric CO2 levels, said Marcia DeLonge, senior scientist in the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. DeLonge is far from alone in her thinking.

A recent National Academy of Sciences report discusses how “uptake and storage” of carbon by agricultural soils could be ready for “large-scale deployment.” But the report also warns of the limited rates of carbon uptake by “existing agricultural practices.” And while much research still needs to be done to understand the degree to which soil can sequester more carbon, the myriad “co-benefits” from better land use practices—like improved farm productivity and reduced environmental impacts—means it’s time to give “serious attention” to the issue, DeLonge said.

“Soil can hold a lot of carbon. It can hold a lot more [than it is]. Just how much more is a matter of more research,” she added. “But we can’t be dilly-dallying anymore. We need to be assessing the landscape for opportunities, and then start to take some action.”

Carbon belongs in the soil

Carbon is an essential ingredient of healthy soil, helping it maintain its structure, and water and nutrient content. So, how does it get there? Conventional wisdom has been that carbon is transferred to the soil through decomposing plant and animal debris. But cutting-edge research in soil science is revealing a much more complex set of circumstances at play. One example of this is an evolving understanding of the “liquid carbon” pathway, which describes the way in which liquid carbon—in the form of dissolved sugars formed during photosynthesis—is passed through roots into the soil to support the complex microbial life there.

“We know that organic matter in the soil is super important in terms of promoting crop growth via several mechanisms,” said Lisa Schulte Moore, a professor in the Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management at Iowa State University. Indeed, carbon levels are an important function of soil’s water-absorbing potential, for example. According to the NRDC, a 1 percent increase in soil organic matter enables each acre to hold onto an additional 20,000 gallons of rainfall (though that finding is dependent on a number of variables, like soil texture).

“You have the fostering of a whole food-web of life in the soil that can help make nutrients available to the crop,” Schulte Moore added. “[While] a third way by which soil organic matter helps promote crop growth is by promoting structure that facilitates root growth.”

Given the symbiotic relationship between soils and the vegetation they sustain, soil carbon loss happens all sorts of ways, deforestation being a prime example. We’re already losing about 18.7 million acres of forests per year. One international study finds that, under Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, the deforestation rate of the Amazon could triple. At least 33 percent of global wetlands had been lost as of 2009, a recent paper suggests. A certain portion of the world’s grasslands has also been lost to desertification, which is when lands are stripped of their productivity due to things like drought and inappropriate farming methods (though there remain divided opinions as to the exact amount of grassland lost through human practices).

In the U.S., industrial farming practices like monocropping and routine tillage have led to the massive erosion of topsoil, where most of the carbon is stored. “Those practices are things that can be easily avoided,” said Roger Aines, chief scientist of the energy program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “When we’re dealing with sensitive soils, like in these wetlands and peat soils, you shouldn’t plow them or dig them up. When you’re dealing with soils that could blow away, you should keep a cover crop.”

That said, there is movement away from industrial agriculture toward regenerative farming methods, as evinced by the “4 per 1000” initiative launched by the French in the wake of the Paris Climate Conference in 2015. The overarching thrust of this initiative? That an increase by 0.4 percent a year in soil carbon content would “halt the increase in the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere related to human activities.” Same here in the U.S., where a farm in Northern California, for example, eschews plowing and weeding and all chemical or organic sprays in favor of a compost-intensive model. It apparently produces 10 times the average per-acre income of comparable California farms.

Holistic grazing—a method of farming that ties livestock production to the cycles of nature, all the while minimizing bare ground and maximizing plant mass—is an “extremely valuable tool” in the fight against climate change, said Karl Thidemann, co-founder and co-director of Soil4Climate, a non-profit advocating for different land use practices. “I’ve been to many grazers who have begun using this practice,” said Thidemann. “All of them have told me how important it has been to their financial situation, and to the environment and to the ecology of these areas.”

Charles Eisenstein is a teacher and writer focusing on themes of civilization and the human cultural evolution. In his most recent book, “Climate: A New Story,” he discusses syntropic agriculture, which has revitalized devastated areas of land in Brazil, turning them into thriving agroforests, all within the space of 30 years. “Part of my work involves challenging the basic direction of human civilization,” he said. “And I think the change that the current ecological crisis is leading us into goes that deep.” The problem, added Eisenstein, will be in enacting these sorts of changes in time to make a difference.

Indeed, Seth Watkins discussed how, in Iowa, there’s a prominent vein of thinking, grounded in the Bible, which encourages farmers there to manage intensively every inch of their land. “Something I’ve asked myself is, ‘how do we start having these conversations in church basements?’” said Watkins. “I don’t know what happens when we die for sure, but what I’ve studied about it is that we’re supposed to try to do the best we can with what we have. We’ve got to be good stewards of the land.”

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Liberals Are Digging Their Own Grave With Russiagate

“This new Cold War [is] more dangerous than the preceding Cold War,” Professor Stephen Cohen tells Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.” Cohen, a professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University, has a new book out that addresses the possibility of a U.S.-Russia armed conflict in the near future. Part of the current rejection of the Kremlin that has brought the two nations to this dangerous brink, according to Cohen, is rooted in the U.S. political elites’ desire to maintain their ability to determine the world order. When Vladimir Putin was first elected, the professor explains, it became immediately obvious that he wanted Russia to take part in shaping “how the world is structured.”

“Since then, [there’s a] sense that America doesn’t have a free hand any longer … but I don’t think our establishment has ever gotten used to this reality,” says Cohen. “And a lot of the catastrophes we see, including the wars, is a kind of Don Quixote tilting at these windmills with war, because the world’s not conforming to what Washington thinks it ought to be. Nor will it ever, any longer.”

Joining the two is Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, to discuss the neo-McCarthyism that has been unleashed by Russiagate and what the journalist calls “Trump derangement syndrome” that leads liberals to buy into hysteria surrounding Russia so long as it serves an anti-Trump agenda. While vanden Heuvel argues that the American left is making significant progress on domestic issues, even progressive leaders such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren “have to some extent bought into this new Cold War.”

Highlighting the dangers of the current anti-Kremlin hysteria, the journalist posits that in the upcoming general election, however, “you’re going to see people moving ideas forward on the foreign policy front that will not be Trumpian, but will be first principle of restraint, realism, anti-intervention, not policing the world and understanding that endless war is a disaster.”

Listen to Cohen, vanden Heuvel and Scheer discuss in depth both the dangerous as well as hopeful paths the U.S. is headed down as it grapples with its domestic and foreign policy under the shadow of a new Cold War, and “new [progressive] insurgencies” continue to make headway despite the American establishment’s firm grip on power and a wave of neo-McCarthyism that threatens to censor dissent. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. And in this case, Stephen Cohen, a professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University. And he’s joined by his wife, a very famous journalist, Katrina vanden Heuvel, who is the editor of The Nation magazine, the oldest continuing publishing political journal. And Stephen Cohen has written a book with a really alarming headline: “War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate.” And we are doing this interview on the day when Michael Cohen is testifying in the Congress, and talking about, he doesn’t quite say that Trump was a Manchurian candidate from Russia, but he says there was some influence, and wink wink, and so forth. Let’s just start with that, Stephen Cohen. Your book really examines this phenomenon of our society now dominated by a red-baiting hysteria that you say even exceeds the worst moments of the Cold War, [and] has brought us dangerously close to a military confrontation with the main rival nuclear power. How do you do red-baiting without a Red? Or am I reading Putin wrong, is he really a secret KGB commie?

Stephen Cohen: Well, from the beginning Putin has said he is, and presented himself as—and more or less governed almost 20 years as—certainly a non-communist, and I would say an anti-communist. So as I was working on this book, roughly since the Ukrainian crisis of 2014—and the book ends quite late, at the end of 2018—two questions kept running through my mind. Why is it that throughout my lifetime, American presidents were not only supported but encouraged to deal with the communist leaders of the Kremlin, particularly regarding nuclear weapons and other security issues, and keep us safe? They were communist leaders. But today, Putin, who sits in the Kremlin, is an anti-communist. And when President Trump went to meet with Putin—it was in Helsinki in July last year, I think—it was called treason. So it was OK to deal with the communists, but it’s not OK to deal with the anti-communist. The second question that comes to my mind, and is threaded through this book indirectly and then directly, the Democratic Party—but not only—have so embraced this phenomenon of Russiagate, whose, let’s be candid, core allegation is that Trump is somehow beholden to the Kremlin, or the Kremlin put him in power. I can find no evidence for that, but it’s become a kind of urban or Washington myth. So I asked myself this rhetorical question: do the people who pursue Russiagate, which keeps Trump from dealing with the Kremlin leader the way every American president has tried to do since Eisenhower, would these Russiagaters prefer to try to impeach Trump to averting war with Russia? And increasingly it seems, whether these Russiagaters are aware of it or not, the answer is yes. And that’s why I think this new Cold War is—one reason why I think it’s more dangerous than the preceding Cold War, which our generation, Bob, and our kids, survived.

RS: And I want to include Katrina in this. You are a Soviet, or a Russia expert in your own right. You studied at Princeton, you studied the language—

Katrina vanden Heuvel: You know what I studied at Princeton? I studied McCarthyism. But it’s interesting, because I do think we’re witnessing a kind of resurgence of neo-McCarthyism, which was very much tied up with anticommunism. And I’m struck by that, and I’m struck by the liberal, progressive complicity in violating, nullifying their first principles in what I call sometimes “Trump derangement syndrome.” At The Nation, we try to be careful not to be reflexively anti-Trump. It’s easy to be anti-Trump; let’s admit, he’s put us on the cusp of a new arms race, withdrawing from the INF. But at the same time, you know, The Nation believes in restraint, in withdrawing from Afghanistan, from Syria, in talks with South Korea, North Korea,which many Democrats railed against. We believe that withdrawal from Afghanistan on its own terms is an important step, and is not just a gift to Putin, as so many Democrats said. So I just believe that cold wars are lousy for progressives; they’re lousy for women, men, and children, but they fatten the defense budgets, they empower war parties on both sides, they close space for dissent, they close space for independent groups. And you’re right, Steve and I have lived in Moscow off and on, certainly since ‘85, Gorbachev years. And I have seen how [the] previous Cold War, if not narrowed, shut down the space for exchange, for dialogue. And so it’s a very Alice in Wonderland, scrambled politics moment, which I know you feel.

RS: Yeah, in a sense it’s not, though. In a sense, if you think of the U.S. as an imperial power that has adopted the conceit that we represent the major civilizing force in the world, and the center of democracy and freedom, and we have pretty much a monopoly on any good ideas, and so forth—and can do no wrong—that would be a pretty good summary of the dominant mindset at this point. It is consistent with the period you studied, McCarthyism. And the contradiction of the original Cold War, not the current Cold War with Russia, is it was based on an obvious, fraudulent notion that communism was internationalist rather than nationalist. Now, you’ve written some very important books about that, Stephen Cohen. And the irony is, the Sino-Soviet dispute was a reality before the Chinese communists even came into power; Yugoslavia had broken away, there weren’t any two communist governments in the world that really were on friendly terms. And yet, the idea that somehow as you point out, even being an ex-communist, the hold is so powerful, it’s like belonging to some weird religious sect. Now, the basic question I want to ask you as a professional, as a leading academic, how do your colleagues, how do the experts consistently get this wrong? How did they not know that Russian communism, like Chinese communism, like Vietnamese communism, was an intensely nationalist phenomenon?

SC: Well, I was lucky. I grew up in Kentucky; I went to Indiana University, and at Indiana I met a man whom I think was certainly the greatest Russia expert—Russianist, generally—of his generation, Robert C. Tucker. And Bob, my mentor and then my friend at Princeton for many years, always saw Russian communism in Russia’s own tradition, and as a form of Russian nationalism. So he was never taken in by this sense that Russian communism had this appetite to control the world. It had an appetite to make Russia great again, so to speak; that was its mission, certainly after Lenin. Because after Stalin destroyed essentially the founding fathers of the Bolshevik revolution, it was—communism, Russian communism, which was kind of a misnomer—was transformed into a new ideology. And state nationalism—that’s the important point, state nationalism—was at the pivot. And that is a very long Russian tradition. So now let’s flash to Putin. He’s hated in this country as was no communist leader in my lifetime. After Stalin, certainly. And I think the poisons of anti-Putinism has become merged with the loathing for Trump into some kind of toxic phenomenon that is crippling American diplomacy, certainly Trump himself, and is a grave danger, and is not going to end with Trump. I mean, we’re going to have to figure a way to overcome it.

But Putin comes to power in nineteen-ninety, ah, in 2000, excuse me, basically the head of a ruined Russia; the decade after the end of the Soviet Union was ruination in Russia. So Putin’s first mission is to pull Russia back together. And you could argue he did so in too many authoritarian ways; historians will have to sort that out. But for Putin, the restoration of Russia as a stable, prosperous order at home and a great world power abroad, that was his historic mission, written on the wind, so to speak. It could be no other way. If his name wasn’t Putin, the mission would have been the same. What happened at this moment is that in our elites, who make our foreign policies and run our media, after the weak, needy, alcoholic Yeltsin who governed Russia, semi-governed, president of Russia during the 1990s, they had gotten used to a subservient Russia. At most, a junior partner of the United States. So if we bombed Serbia, as Clinton did in 1999, Russia’s traditional little ally—so what. Russia grumped, but it couldn’t do anything about it. And if we expanded NATO from Berlin all the way to Russia’s borders, as has now happened, even though we promised the last Soviet leader we would never do that—we have the documents, that’s not an urban legend, it was all clear—Russia could do nothing about it. And suddenly comes Putin, who says enough is enough. And he says something very simple, publicly at international security conferences, when Senator McCain and others were there. He said the era of the one-way road is over. You will now deal with Russia as you do with all other great powers. We will make concessions and you will make concessions. It will be a two-way road.

And the hating on Putin, I think, grows out of the assumption—you allude to it, Bob—that after the end of the Soviet Union, one country would decide the so-called world order. Liberal—it wasn’t liberal, it wasn’t much of an order, and it wasn’t world. But we said this is an order, and it’s our order, and then Putin says no, there are a lot of countries that have a right to say how the world is structured, and Russia’s one of them. That was such a shock, such a disappointment. I can give you one example, and I’ll quit. Nicholas Kristof, an influential columnist for the New York Times, wrote very early on, I think within 18 months to two years after Putin came to power, that he was gravely disappointed because—now listen to what he wrote—Putin did not turn out to be a sober Yeltsin. That is, Yeltsin had limited utility because he was drunk and sick. What they wanted was Yeltsinism without Yeltsin, with a sober leader. And Putin was anything but that. And since then, the sense that America doesn’t have a free hand any longer—and it’s not just Russia, it’s China, it’s the BRICs nations, and many others—but I don’t think our establishment has ever gotten used to this reality. And a lot of the catastrophes we see, including the wars, is a kind of Don Quixote tilting at these windmills with war, because the world’s not conforming to what Washington thinks it ought to be. Nor will it ever, any longer.

RS: [omission for station break] We’re back with Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen Cohen, and we’re talking about the “War With Russia?” with a question mark, Stephen Cohen’s book. There is nothing controversial in your book, with all due respect. And yet you’re being attacked all over the place. Why? Because to use Al Gore’s phrase, you’re dealing with an inconvenient truth. And the inconvenient truth, as I see it, is it’s convenient for the Democrats to blame Putin for their failure in the elections. So the inconvenient truth is Hillary lost the election because she was a lousy candidate and represented conservative politics at a time when populism was what the country needed, and Bernie Sanders was defeated. We’ve also got a case now of Trumpwashing. Whatever the U.S. has done, the torture of prisoners, the invasion of countries irrationally, anything—we have Trumpwashing. You know, you mention Trump, everything else goes. So I want to turn to Katrina here, because it seems to me the left is at the weakest position that it’s been in my lifetime. And I’ve been around a long time. We don’t have a peace movement. So if Trump does something sensible, like trying to negotiate with North Korea instead of invading, and doing it in a country that we also leveled, like we leveled Vietnam, and he’s there, we don’t see Trump as a peacemaker, we don’t—you can’t even read a straight news story on AP or anywhere else without every other paragraph contradicting whatever the president said.

KVH: So, let me take issue with you, though. I don’t think the progressive left is at its weakest moment in terms of bold domestic issues. You know, the Green New Deal, $15 minimum wage, Medicare-for-all was just introduced in the House today. I do think Congress, there are some good people like Representative Ro Khanna of California, who has, for the first time since 1973 there’s been an invocation of the War Powers Act around Yemen. And I think that’s important, that Congress find some way to reassert its role in matters of war and peace. I do think that there is the beginning of an understanding that we need to build—maybe it’s transpartisan, but a transpartisan foreign policy of restraint and realism. And there are people who are beginning to work on that. It is a minority position, and sadly the leading candidates I admire at the moment, [Elizabeth] Warren and Bernie Sanders, have to some extent bought into this new Cold War. Bernie Sanders talks about an axis of authoritarianism.

No one is for authoritarianism, but the way he’s defining it is in sync with the foolhardy national defense strategy, which has, as you know in the last months, decided America’s main enemies are Russia and China. Not the global War on Terror, which had never been a war. So there’s a lot of work to be done, Bob, but I do think that this election, 2020, you’re going to see people moving ideas forward on the foreign policy front that will not be Trumpian, but will be first principle of restraint, realism, anti-intervention, not policing the world, and understanding that endless war is a disaster. By the way, how do you democratize our foreign policy and reduce a crazily bloated defense budget if you’re on a Cold War footing? I would like to ask the candidates that question.

RS: You don’t, and that’s my whole point.

KVH: But I do think there’s an enormous energy and climate crisis. And Jerry Brown, who’s now chair of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, former governor of California, I think is committed, as are others working with him, to fuse that energy, which is very much a generational energy, to build it out into a peace and justice movement as well. And I think that would be—anti-nuke, anti-nuke, anti-climate crisis. I think there’s possibility in that.

RS: When I say I’ve never been in this sort of irrational climate, I remember the original Cold War quite well. And we had a real enemy. You know, whatever you thought about it, there were communist governments that for whatever reason, correct or incorrect, thought they were in a major life-and-death struggle with the west; so did the western leaders. The irrationality of the moment is that the only people around who adhere to an ideology that is associated with that original Cold War are the people who are producing all of these products that we buy at Costco and Walmart. The ideology-bashing turned out to be incorrect; communism turned out to be quite adaptive to the modern world, and actually the most energetic capitalists in the world right now are the communists. And Donald Trump, amazingly enough, predicts that oh, if we can cut a deal with North Korea, they’ll go on to be one of the big, booming economies in the world. And what’s irrational, and the reason I challenge—not, you know, yes, Donald Trump has terrible manners and he has reactionary positions and he, you know, I’ve even called him a neofascist if we want to do name-calling. But the fact of the matter is that in foreign policy, Donald Trump is assuming—not always, not around Iran and certainly not around Venezuela—but assuming kind of as moderate a position as one would have gotten from Hillary Clinton.

What I am concerned about is that even though we were able to have a peace movement—and people like Dr. Martin Luther King were able to say stop killing those Vietnamese, even though they’re communist they don’t threaten us and we can make peace with them, and he turned out to be right—you can’t get a rational discussion about Putin, who actually has advocated fairly sensible positions. I don’t think he did anything terrible in Syria, I think he helped bring matters to a resolution and helped deal with the refugees. So I’m saying something very serious from my point of view. I think we’re in a moment of madness where you cannot count on the establishment to be rational in its own terms.

SC: So there’s two things here that need to be discussed. Are there people anywhere near where policy is made who share our concerns? We have in our own minor, maybe ineffectual way, tried to identify a handful of American politicians who share our views, and encourage them to do two things. To speak clearly and loudly, and to band together. It’s too easy to pick ’em off—look what happened to Tulsi Gabbard, whose foreign policy views are very good. And as soon as she utters them, NBC publishes a big attack on her on its website, accusing her of being the Kremlin puppet or something. So this is the new red-baiting, right? The Kremlin puppet. I’ve been called that, Katrina’s been called that. Anybody who challenges what you and I are worried about is a Kremlin puppet. We’ve got to get past that. Dealing with Trump is a big problem, but it’s an American political problem; I mean, it’ll sort itself out depending on what the Democrats do or don’t do. Learning to live with Putin, as you say, Bob, is really astonishing. Because Putin has not been an aggressive leader, he’s been a reactive leader; he’s constantly reacting. But let me give you one example, because I think all of us should think about it. Let’s go to Syria.

So Putin said to Obama, I think it was around 2014, he said it to him diplomatically through the foreign ministers and personally when they met. He said, look, we have a choice now. Either Assad, the leader, official leader of Syria, will occupy Damascus, or the Islamic State will occupy Damascus. For Russia, and Damascus is kind of our backyard, there are 7,000 ISIS fighters carrying Russian passports. We’re in this, whether we like it or not, and they’ve said when we kill the heathen in Syria, we’re going to come home and kill the heathen in Russia. This is vital for us.

So he says to Obama, Putin says, join us. Join us in Syria. This is the citadel today of international terrorism. Let’s fight together in Syria. And Obama is kind of back and forth on this, back and forth, and Obama pulls back. Whether he was thwarted in Washington, he was irresolute, or he didn’t understand international affairs, or he just didn’t like Russia. So that moment was lost. But that example Putin gave is a Russian way of thinking that we can’t avoid. Who will occupy Damascus? The Islamic State, or Assad? I mean, it isn’t going to be Hillary Clinton that’s going to rule Damascus.

Real leaders make real choices in a real world, and the problem with the Washington policy elite is they urge on us choices in a world they’ve imagined that doesn’t exist, with choices that do not exist. So to me, this is the most troubling part. The Russians have become, under Putin, I guess what you’d call the realist international thinkers. And they see so much opportunity for American-Russian cooperation. And we have become intensely ideological—Trump’s made it worse, but before Trump—and unable to think about Russia the way we did the Soviet Union. When communists—people who called themselves communists, they weren’t much of communists—but it was understood that this was a great power with nuclear weapons, and that if we were going to be safe, we were going to have to have rules of the game, and this meant negotiations and summits. And we didn’t call it treason. I think at the moment that the real problem with the dangers of the new Cold War—and the book argues why it’s so much [more] dangerous than the one we survived—that not all, but most of the basic problems are in Washington, not in Moscow. Because we still have, I think—Putin wanted this for 15 years, I’m not sure he believes it’s possible today—we had an eager and willing partner for a new détente in Moscow. And he was rebuffed repeatedly, and no leader can be wrong for too many years and retain his position. So Putin has to watch his back, too.

RS: Bouncing off what you just said, whether we’re liberals or conservatives or whatever, we have an obligation as intellectuals, as journalists—I am supposed to be objective about Trump. That’s what I’m supposed to do. I am supposed to struggle. So we do have our views of history, our views of what’s important, and so forth. So the real question with Trump right now is this—and he is a polarizing figure, and he’s you know, boorish—

KVH: Deeply, deeply, yeah.

RS: The manners are incredible. He’s the ugly face of America—we all know that. But the fact is, we don’t have a force for peace, for rational understanding. I know there are progressive signs, I’m not dismissing them. But there are intimidating forces. And you have it—I’m not going to speak about The Nation, I can tell you what Truthdig, the publication I edit, you know—I had to beg people the last few days to put the story on that Trump went to Vietnam and is negotiating peace. Peace matters, give peace a chance.

KVH: Peace matters. We have a terrific correspondent, Tim Shorrock, who has taken on the Democrats in these last months, who treat the opening to North Korea as something seditious, when in fact you seize opportunities for dialogue and diplomacy where you can find them. I do think there’s been a nullification of first principles among progressives and liberals because of Trump derangement syndrome, whatever you want to call it. But I also think we will look back at this time, and look back at the shameful complicity of the media political establishment in this madness. It is an all-American trait to have a robust debate, at least I believe so. We’ve had one hand clapping, the narrative about Russia, about Putin, about U.S.-Russian relations has been so flattened, perverted, and demonized that we have lost not only the peace and justice movement—which I think will come back around nuclear issues, which are rising again.

But part of what’s happened is the shock of the Trump election, and as you rightly said, the inability of the Democratic Party or progressives to look deeply into America’s own pathologies, to blame it on Trump or Putin, is very dangerous. But we need to understand that the establishment, I believe, understands how discredited, how bankrupt it is. But I think the big fight for the future is how you build a different, alternative foreign policy, articulate it clearly, take it to the country—a country, by the way, which is not in sync with the elites, Bob. You know that, that disconnect has been there for years. On the eve of 2018, the midterms, Russiagate for example, or the menace of Russia didn’t even rank as one of the top 25 or 30 issues. And if polling shows, Americans seek an end to these endless wars without victory. They seek diplomacy, they believe their leaders—catch this—exhaust all possible means, alternatives before going to war. So I think we’re at a moment, a turning point, and the struggle is on to ensure that a discredited, bankrupt establishment doesn’t lead the way forward, but what a progressive left can build is also going to demand a lot of discipline. And not being baited, or so focused on Trump that you abet him instead of abetting peace and justice and other possibilities.

SC: Here’s where Katrina and I get into a conflict that probably doesn’t really exist, but rhetorically we’ve gotten into it. I think the situation is terribly, terribly dangerous with Russia. And we can talk about the new nuclear weapons, the new nuclear arms race. The Dr. Strangeloves on both sides are talking about usable nuclear weapons now, because they claim they can control the radiation fallout. I mean, this is someplace we haven’t really been, at least not in 30 or 40 years. So the situation is perilous; the demonization of Putin, the demonization of Trump, traditional diplomacy has broken down, contacts are being criminalized. So we’re at this crucial moment. In 1935, George Bernard Shaw visited Stalin. And he said to Stalin, you know, your literature is not very good; Soviet literature should be a lot better. And Stalin said, these are the only writers I have. Trump’s the only president we’ve got now. Hate him all you want, and we’ve got him for two or six years—we can’t wait. Now, Katrina thinks that the focus should be on building movements from below, working with voters—

KVH: Well, Congress playing a role.

SC: All right. That’s all correct. But we don’t have time, so I keep thinking every day, because we found them—you remember, Bob—we found them finally in the Senate for the most part during Vietnam. We were out there by ourselves, and suddenly we’ve got four or five, not only McCarthy, but there were a whole bunch of them suddenly in the Senate that rebelled against their own president, and not only Democrats. So I’m thinking, as Katrina likes to say “transpartisan,” I’m looking across the political spectrum, looking for politicians whose voice might get in the mass media—where we have been shut out, by the way. I used to write regularly for the New York Times op-ed page; I can’t get on there. Looking for politicians who will talk about what we’re talking about in an urgent way. And you find them in strange place; I mean, I am drawn to Rand Paul, the senator from my own state of Kentucky, not because we’re both from Kentucky, but because on these foreign policy issues, he is correct. So is Tulsi Gabbard. So are other people, maybe only five or six—Ro Khanna of California. But we need voices at the top, because leaders change foreign policy. That’s our tradition, for better or worse. And so we really do need a leader now, and we are without a leader at the moment.

KVH: I don’t disagree. I think you need inside outside. You need the energy, the movement, the pushing, the social movements, but you need allies inside. I certainly, certainly agree with that.

RS: I think there’s something rotten at the core of this. You said, what about the U.S.? And I think this is a society that is in crisis and cannot face it. And this whole Russiagate, this whole hysteria is a way of avoiding a serious inquiry into what ails us. The clarity of the moment requires recognizing this rot at the core. And at the core is this notion of American exceptionalism. It came up in the presidential election; here’s Donald Trump saying he’s going to make America great again, and Hillary Clinton said it’s always been great. Right there, you had the problem. If we are such an exceptional nation, and all the major crimes have been done by other people, then we are to be trusted with the planet’s future. And that means denying all of the really horrible problems we had in our own system, going back to the destruction of the native culture that was here, slavery, you go right through the whole list.

So we were at a point, actually, where we were beginning to examine ourselves. That’s what the populism of the left and the right was all about. Let’s take a hard look at who we are, how do we fit into this more complex world, what needs improvement. And that means examining your security agencies, the flow of information. We had whistleblowers stepping forward, telling us about our government spying on us. We had the military-industrial complex being examined, why do we need it, what is it doing.

And what I think is at work here is this, again, Trumpwashing—suddenly the FBI, they’re virtuous. The CIA doesn’t lie to us. The NSA doesn’t lie to us. Anytime the U.S. is involved in the world, it must be on the side of the angels. And so the most powerful nation in the world that can really seal the future of the planet will go on as an unexamined phenomenon now, not responsible for any major problems. That is the mood of the moment. And what they will do, as you point out, is redbait or McCarthy-bait anybody who gets in the way of that narrative.

SC: Bob, the problem with the way you formulate it is—and even if it’s true, and I probably agree with about 75 percent of it—that it’s too all-embracing, it’s too sweeping, it’s too beyond the reach of solution, it’s too existential. We need to identify the issues that imperil us the most, and we need to find people to address them. The only major successful electoral politician that I’ve come across, who shares probably 75 percent of what you say, is your own former governor Jerry Brown. We don’t agree with him about everything, but on these basic issues, he agrees there’s a problem. He’s 80 years old, but if I could pick one candidate who has the concerns we have, and the experience governing—because we don’t need any more presidents who have never governed. If I could wish myself a candidate tomorrow, even though he’s 80 years old—but we’ve got, everybody else is in their seventies, I mean other people who are at the top. But he really thinks along these lines, partly because he’s a reader.

KVH: Steve is quite traditional in a sense, going to a candidate after you kind of gave a jeremiad about the crisis. I think you’re right to some extent, Bob, but I also think you’re talking about the establishment, you’re talking about a media that treats left-wing populism almost like a dead fish. I think there’s a disconnect in this country, and I think millions of Americans, without learning it from the New York Times or the gatekeepers, know there’s a crisis in this country, and they’re trying to find ways to see another way. And that, to me, is hopeful: that there is a change, there’s a new generation, there are new insurgencies. Maybe not at the scale commensurate with the problem, but they’re existing without an establishment willing to work with them. In fact, there’s a suppression of these insurgent forces, yet they keep coming. They keep coming from different directions.

RS: I mean, I just—what is frightening about the moment is scary not because progressives aren’t stronger or weaker, or the next election or this candidate. It’s that we’ve lost common sense. And so we are at a moment here now where everyone wants Congress to get Trump! Get him, and knock him out! And whether we have a reasonable trade agreement with China, or whether we can get rid of nukes in North Korea, or what are we really going to do about climate change—because if you don’t have good trade agreements with China, you’re not going to control the burning of coal or anything else, you know. And so there are serious problems out there, and we have a mood of giddiness, of nuttiness, where you don’t discuss these things. They’re seen as a distraction. And I want to offer one last point. We had the renegotiation of NAFTA, OK? Trump did talk about, he wanted to get rid of NAFTA, change it. I only bring this up because people are looking for daylight, positive, or what have you. Trump has been negotiating with China, and this goes to American exceptionalism now. Are we going to let him go to the next stage, as Japan did, where it isn’t all dependent upon poorly paid women assembling iPhones, OK?

And so with this NAFTA agreement, I want to end on a positive note, and again let me get in trouble here by saying something positive about Trump. In that, whether he did it or some aide stuck it in, for the first time in a trade agreement we say if you’re going to make a car in Mexico and bring it into the United States duty-free, 45 percent of that car has to be made by people who are making 16 bucks an hour. If we did that for China in these trade negotiations now, including maybe the right to unionize, the right to take it to local courts, which didn’t happen under the old NAFTA and so forth—we’d have an economic revolution in those countries. And you could forget about the border.

If people could make a decent wage on the Mexican side of the border, they’re not going to want to come over to this side. There’s no discussion of it. There’s no discussion of the nuclear arms race, which you were bringing up with Jerry Brown. What does it mean that we suddenly abandon an arms [agreement]? I’ll tell you, another subject, the third rail one that we haven’t talked about. If there was a foreign power that interfered in this election, it was Israel. No one dares mention that!

KVH: Bob, to say “nobody” is dissing Truthdig, is dissing The Nation—

RS: No, I shouldn’t say “no one,” obviously—yeah.

KVH: There is a network, and I do think that a younger generation—and Steve has found this watching YouTube and others—there’s a younger generation getting their news from alternative sources. We still need to take on the big gatekeepers, because they police and vilify. But come on, I mean, there are openings which I think you know that they exist.

RS: Yes—OK, I just want to complete the thought, though, of—I’m talking about individual courage, now, aside from how you build movements. That’s what we ask of our intellectuals, of our journalists, of our political spokespersons. I have—OK, very few people have pointed out—and by the way, I think Israel has the right to assert its views. I think Netanyahu can come to Congress and say whatever he wants. But it was breaking with tradition. He attacked Obama on his most important foreign policy victory, which was the arms deal with Iran, which I happen to support. I think it would be really unwise to destroy it. OK. However, that’s what Israel wanted.

So my last question to you is when I look at this situation, the reason I say it’s so nutty, Professor Cohen, it seems to me Putin is the guy who got screwed over whatever he was hoped to be gained by Trump winning. Russia still has sanctions; NATO’s still moving very close to their heartland. Arms control agreements are being torn asunder. And so as opposed to, for instance, Israel, which got Trump’s foreign policy vis-a-vis Iran, for example, is Netanyahu’s policy, what did Putin get from this?

SC: Well, and he’s criticized for that. I mean, first of all, the Kremlin did not do anything to help put Trump in the White House. There’s zero evidence. Moreover, there are maybe a half a dozen major newspapers in Russia that are close to the Kremlin. So if you want to know what the debates are inside the Kremlin, inside the 30 or 40 people, “the collective Putin” as he’s called in Russia, you read these newspapers. And during the electoral presidential campaign in 2016, in these Russian newspapers was a grave uncertainty of which candidate would be better for Russia, Trump or Clinton.

Russia has traditionally preferred the candidate they know, the devil they know. And they assumed that Mrs. Clinton would turn out to be just another American who would talk tough about Russia, but would do business. And they liked her husband. After all, they gave him $500,000 for a speech in Moscow about that time, talk about exchanging money. They worried about Trump; they didn’t mind some of the things he said, but they thought he was kind of off the wall and unpredictable. And the Kremlin doesn’t like unpredictability, particularly when it’s trying to rebuild Russia.

So there’s no evidence that they helped Trump; there’s not clear evidence that they actually preferred Trump. I mean, this was a debate that went on. So a lot of this is made up in the United States and projected. You used the word “optimist” before; I end by adapting an adage that Russian intellectuals like to use when asked if they’re optimist or pessimist about this situation. And they say like this: well, a pessimist thinks things cannot possibly get worse. And an optimist knows they can.

RS: Well, that’s a good note on which to end this. I want, first of all, I want to thank Katrina vanden Heuvel for being here, and I want to make it very clear I think The Nation magazine has been the most important political magazine this country has had in its long history. What is it now, a hundred and—

KVH: A hundred and fifty-four years. Thank you, Bob.

RS: A hundred and fifty-four years. And I want to say, as someone who’s read it for a—

KVH: And written for it.

RS: And written for it for a good 60 years or so, I don’t think it’s ever been in better hands than it has been under you. And I mean that not as a form of flattery.

KVH: Thank you.

RS: I know just how difficult it is to represent an independent, progressive voice at this time in our history, and I applaud you for keeping The Nation open. And I do want to once again commend this book, in closing, Stephen F. Cohen, “War With Russia?” It’s Hot Books, and it’s an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing. And if you really want to get a fresh view of this debate, this is the one book you ought to read. “War With Russia?”—it is a question mark—From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate. That’s it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. Our engineers are Kat Yore and Mario Diaz at KCRW. Joshua Scheer and Isabel Carreon are the producers of Scheer Intelligence. And we’ll see you next week.