Chris Hedges's Blog, page 315

Spain’s Socialists Have Big Green Plans for the Country

Spain is already getting 40% of its electricity from renewables, but its Socialist government hopes to nearly double that proportion in a little over a decade.

Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez and his cabinet have approved a draft proposal to get t 74% of the country’s electricity from renewables by 2030, a little over a decade from now, and the government is hoping for 120 gigawatts of green energy by then. It is also hoping that 22% of its vehicles will be electric by then. Madrid is hoping to go down to carbon emissions levels not seen since the 1970s.

Sanchez proposes spending $53 billion on the plans, which will save nearly $80 billion in the cost of importing petroleum and other hydrocarbons.

Spain intends to more than double wind energy from 23k megawatts to 50k MW, and to grow solar PV by a factor of 7. Spain hopes to be using virtually no coal by 2030. The intent is to increase storage capacity by 6 gigawatts, as well, by that year.

Spain is only one of 5 of the 28 members of the European Union who are aiming for 100% electricity generation from renewables by 2050.

These plans are those of a fragile Socialist government and progress could be slowed if the Right gets back in, via snap elections in April. Still, the Socialists are projected to be the biggest party in parliament and may not be reduced to complete irrelevance even if a rightwing coalition can get a majority.

Since many government bids are already being let, and since the price of solar panels and wind turbines is dropping rapidly, the momentum may be difficult to slow. On top of that, Spain has obligations of reducing carbon emissions owing to being in the European Union.

Further, the province of Catalonia and especially the city of Barcelona, are putting in green energy, regardless of what the central government does.

In 2018, sun-powered electricity in Spain nearly doubled, because of a drop in the price of solar panels. That is, the goals discussed above may be far too conservative, and progress toward 100% green energy will likely come faster than the Spanish government now envisages, driven as much by consumers’ desire to save money and improved efficiency and lower prices, i.e. by market mechanisms, even if the government becomes less ambitious.

Meanwhile, the Belearic Islands and 26 other European Union islands are planning to be net carbon zero by 2050, and to begin closing coal fired elecricity plants. After 2035, new car sales must be of electric vehicles. Tourism destinations such as Ibiza will benefit from having green energy, not only in reducing damaging air pollution, but also because holiday makers are starting to shop for green destinations.

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The Time for Medicare-for-All Has Arrived

Last week, as the media focused on President Donald Trump’s North Korea summit in Vietnam and the congressional testimony of his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, a largely overlooked news conference took place, announcing legislation that could save millions of lives. Seattle Democratic Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal introduced the Medicare For All Act of 2019, the latest attempt to pass single-payer health care. Jayapal’s bill has 106 co-sponsors, close to half of the Democrats in the House.

Jayapal is the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest caucus in the House. Among the bill’s co-sponsors was Michigan Democrat Debbie Dingell. She replaced her late husband, John Dingell Jr., who was the longest serving member of Congress in history, holding the seat since 1955. John Dingell, who died in February at the age of 92, was a stalwart backer of single-payer health care, introducing legislation yearly during his 60-year tenure. He was inspired by his father, John Dingell Sr., who held that same congressional seat for the 18 years before his son. Dingell Sr. first proposed single-payer health care in 1943.

With the new Congress this year, the most diverse in history, the 75-plus-year-long effort to secure universal health care may be at a tipping point. Whether or not it passes—considered unlikely with the Senate and White House under Republican control—single-payer health care will undoubtedly be a central issue in the 2020 presidential race.

“Is this a bold and ambitious plan? Damn straight it is, because it has to be,” Jayapal said as she announced the single-payer bill at a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol, standing in the cold, surrounded by colleagues and supporters. “The scale of our health care crisis is enormous, and our plan has to tackle the deep sickness within our for-profit system. … If we can end slavery, if we can give women the right to vote, if we can send a man to the moon, then, God, we can do universal health care for every American.”

Medicare, passed in 1965, is a single-payer national insurance program that pays medical costs for people age 65 and older. Poll after poll confirms its popularity. Simply expanding eligibility from age 65 and over to the day we are born would create a single-payer system comparable to those in most other industrialized countries in the world.

On the rare occasions when “Medicare-for-all” advocates are interviewed on television, they are asked how much it costs. Fair enough, but what about the enormous costs of the current system? Speaking on the “Democracy Now!” news hour Wednesday, Jayapal said: “Our health care system today costs 18 percent of our GDP. In [the next] 10 years, we’re going to be spending $50 trillion on our current health care system. … It’s not like we’re spending all this money and we have better outcomes than the rest of the world. The United States is last among all of our peers in infant mortality rates, in maternal mortality rates, in terms of our life expectancy.”

Economist Robert Pollin at the University of Massachusetts and his colleagues recently released a comprehensive analysis of “Medicare-for-all,” confirming that not only would it not be too expensive, but would actually deliver better outcomes for less money. “Overall U.S. health care costs could fall by about 19 percent relative to the existing system,” they write. The cost savings factor in the increase in demand for health care, as close to 30 percent of people in the U.S. are either uninsured or underinsured and, as a result, simply don’t seek medical treatment when they need it, or preventive care.

Jayapal and her co-sponsors may have an unexpected ally in their quest for Medicare-for-all. In his book titled “The America We Deserve,” published in the year 2000, American businessman Donald J. Trump wrote: “I’m a conservative on most issues but a liberal on this one. We should not hear so many stories of families ruined by health care expenses. We must not allow citizens with medical problems to go untreated because of financial problems or red tape. The Canadian plan also helps Canadians live longer and healthier than America. We need, as a nation, to reexamine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing.”

The president endorsed single payer in 2000, but opposes it now. Whether or not he can be pushed to support it again, Jayapal is moving forward. She has support from Republican business owners and hospital executives, all who know the current for-profit health insurance system costs too much and fails the people of this country. For the increasingly large field of Democratic presidential hopefuls, “Medicare-for-all” has become a defining issue, embraced by many of the announced candidates.

After 75 years of debate, with health care costs spiraling out of control and the quality of medical care falling short of that in single-payer countries, the time is right for Medicare-for-all. It’s a matter of life and death.

The Time for Medicare-for-All Has Finally Arrived

Last week, as the media focused on President Donald Trump’s North Korea summit in Vietnam and the congressional testimony of his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, a largely overlooked news conference took place, announcing legislation that could save millions of lives. Seattle Democratic Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal introduced the Medicare For All Act of 2019, the latest attempt to pass single-payer health care. Jayapal’s bill has 106 co-sponsors, close to half of the Democrats in the House.

Jayapal is the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest caucus in the House. Among the bill’s co-sponsors was Michigan Democrat Debbie Dingell. She replaced her late husband, John Dingell Jr., who was the longest serving member of Congress in history, holding the seat since 1955. John Dingell, who died in February at the age of 92, was a stalwart backer of single-payer health care, introducing legislation yearly during his 60-year tenure. He was inspired by his father, John Dingell Sr., who held that same congressional seat for the 18 years before his son. Dingell Sr. first proposed single-payer health care in 1943.

With the new Congress this year, the most diverse in history, the 75-plus-year-long effort to secure universal health care may be at a tipping point. Whether or not it passes—considered unlikely with the Senate and White House under Republican control—single-payer health care will undoubtedly be a central issue in the 2020 presidential race.

“Is this a bold and ambitious plan? Damn straight it is, because it has to be,” Jayapal said as she announced the single-payer bill at a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol, standing in the cold, surrounded by colleagues and supporters. “The scale of our health care crisis is enormous, and our plan has to tackle the deep sickness within our for-profit system. … If we can end slavery, if we can give women the right to vote, if we can send a man to the moon, then, God, we can do universal health care for every American.”

Medicare, passed in 1965, is a single-payer national insurance program that pays medical costs for people age 65 and older. Poll after poll confirms its popularity. Simply expanding eligibility from age 65 and over to the day we are born would create a single-payer system comparable to those in most other industrialized countries in the world.

On the rare occasions when “Medicare-for-all” advocates are interviewed on television, they are asked how much it costs. Fair enough, but what about the enormous costs of the current system? Speaking on the “Democracy Now!” news hour Wednesday, Jayapal said: “Our health care system today costs 18 percent of our GDP. In [the next] 10 years, we’re going to be spending $50 trillion on our current health care system. … It’s not like we’re spending all this money and we have better outcomes than the rest of the world. The United States is last among all of our peers in infant mortality rates, in maternal mortality rates, in terms of our life expectancy.”

Economist Robert Pollin at the University of Massachusetts and his colleagues recently released a comprehensive analysis of “Medicare-for-all,” confirming that not only would it not be too expensive, but would actually deliver better outcomes for less money. “Overall U.S. health care costs could fall by about 19 percent relative to the existing system,” they write. The cost savings factor in the increase in demand for health care, as close to 30 percent of people in the U.S. are either uninsured or underinsured and, as a result, simply don’t seek medical treatment when they need it, or preventive care.

Jayapal and her co-sponsors may have an unexpected ally in their quest for Medicare-for-all. In his book titled “The America We Deserve,” published in the year 2000, American businessman Donald J. Trump wrote: “I’m a conservative on most issues but a liberal on this one. We should not hear so many stories of families ruined by health care expenses. We must not allow citizens with medical problems to go untreated because of financial problems or red tape. The Canadian plan also helps Canadians live longer and healthier than America. We need, as a nation, to reexamine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing.”

The president endorsed single payer in 2000, but opposes it now. Whether or not he can be pushed to support it again, Jayapal is moving forward. She has support from Republican business owners and hospital executives, all who know the current for-profit health insurance system costs too much and fails the people of this country. For the increasingly large field of Democratic presidential hopefuls, “Medicare-for-all” has become a defining issue, embraced by many of the announced candidates.

After 75 years of debate, with health care costs spiraling out of control and the quality of medical care falling short of that in single-payer countries, the time is right for Medicare-for-all. It’s a matter of life and death.

A Simple Way to Deter Nuclear War

In a matter of minutes, as easily as sending a tweet, a sitting U.S. president could decide to launch a nuclear attack, without anyone else’s approval or authorization. In a matter of minutes, millions of lives would be lost, and millions of futures halted permanently.

At my organization, Physicians for Social Responsibility, we believe that we must prevent what we can’t cure. And there’s no cure for a nuclear war.

No nation on earth, including the United States, would have an adequate emergency response in the event of a nuclear exchange. Most Americans don’t want us to ever engage in a nuclear war, and the vast majority of us certainly don’t want the United States to be the ones to start a nuclear war.

The United States, like every other nation, has a vested interest in avoiding a nuclear conflict.

Yet unlike other countries, we currently have no policy against starting a nuclear war — or what experts call a “No First Use” policy.

This opens the door to a possible preemptive nuclear strike. That weakens our national security, and it puts all our health and safety at risk — for a nuclear war no one (except maybe President Donald Trump and John Bolton) wants.

Luckily, some people in Congress are looking to change the reckless status quo. This year, Rep. Adam Smith and Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced legislation that would establish a “No First Use” policy for nuclear weapons in the United States.

“Our current nuclear strategy is not just outdated — it is dangerous,” said Smith and Warren. “By making clear that deterrence is the sole purpose of our arsenal, this bill would reduce the chances of a nuclear miscalculation and help us maintain our moral and diplomatic leadership in the world.”

No First Use is all the more critical now that vital multilateral arms treaties, like the landmark Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between U.S. and Russia, are being ditched in favor of “out-innovating” everybody else, as Trump put it in his last State of the Union address.

Not content with our already outsized nuclear arsenal, the United States has put the first so-called “low-yield” nuclear weapons into production as well. Misleadingly named, these weapons contain the destructive power of thousands of tons of TNT. To an adversary, they would be visually indistinguishable from high-yield submarine-launched warheads.

If it sounds like a James Bond villain is hard at work manufacturing an absolute worst-case scenario, you’re not far off. But in the real world, we won’t be able to rely on a martini-sipping spy to save the day.

So much is at stake here — not least for young people like me, who didn’t grow up practicing “duck and cover” drills during the Cold War, as if hiding under a school desk would protect any of us in the event of a nuclear attack.

Young people like me didn’t jumpstart a nuclear arms race, but we’ll still pay the price. Our future is still ahead of us. We shouldn’t have to inherit a world threatened by nuclear weapons — or by the sheer expense of them.

A 2017 Congressional Budget Office report estimated that it would cost $1.2 trillion over the next 30 years to update, sustain, and modernize existing nuclear forces. That’s money that could fund vital infrastructure, health care, jobs, housing, and education programs, and much more — money we’re wasting on weapons that would destroy our future.

No one wins a nuclear war. Everyone loses. The United States can and must lead by committing to an official policy of No First Use of nuclear weapons— for all our health’s sake.

There’s a Simple Way to Deter Nuclear War

In a matter of minutes, as easily as sending a tweet, a sitting U.S. president could decide to launch a nuclear attack, without anyone else’s approval or authorization. In a matter of minutes, millions of lives would be lost, and millions of futures halted permanently.

At my organization, Physicians for Social Responsibility, we believe that we must prevent what we can’t cure. And there’s no cure for a nuclear war.

No nation on earth, including the United States, would have an adequate emergency response in the event of a nuclear exchange. Most Americans don’t want us to ever engage in a nuclear war, and the vast majority of us certainly don’t want the United States to be the ones to start a nuclear war.

The United States, like every other nation, has a vested interest in avoiding a nuclear conflict.

Yet unlike other countries, we currently have no policy against starting a nuclear war — or what experts call a “No First Use” policy.

This opens the door to a possible preemptive nuclear strike. That weakens our national security, and it puts all our health and safety at risk — for a nuclear war no one (except maybe President Donald Trump and John Bolton) wants.

Luckily, some people in Congress are looking to change the reckless status quo. This year, Rep. Adam Smith and Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced legislation that would establish a “No First Use” policy for nuclear weapons in the United States.

“Our current nuclear strategy is not just outdated — it is dangerous,” said Smith and Warren. “By making clear that deterrence is the sole purpose of our arsenal, this bill would reduce the chances of a nuclear miscalculation and help us maintain our moral and diplomatic leadership in the world.”

No First Use is all the more critical now that vital multilateral arms treaties, like the landmark Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between U.S. and Russia, are being ditched in favor of “out-innovating” everybody else, as Trump put it in his last State of the Union address.

Not content with our already outsized nuclear arsenal, the United States has put the first so-called “low-yield” nuclear weapons into production as well. Misleadingly named, these weapons contain the destructive power of thousands of tons of TNT. To an adversary, they would be visually indistinguishable from high-yield submarine-launched warheads.

If it sounds like a James Bond villain is hard at work manufacturing an absolute worst-case scenario, you’re not far off. But in the real world, we won’t be able to rely on a martini-sipping spy to save the day.

So much is at stake here — not least for young people like me, who didn’t grow up practicing “duck and cover” drills during the Cold War, as if hiding under a school desk would protect any of us in the event of a nuclear attack.

Young people like me didn’t jumpstart a nuclear arms race, but we’ll still pay the price. Our future is still ahead of us. We shouldn’t have to inherit a world threatened by nuclear weapons — or by the sheer expense of them.

A 2017 Congressional Budget Office report estimated that it would cost $1.2 trillion over the next 30 years to update, sustain, and modernize existing nuclear forces. That’s money that could fund vital infrastructure, health care, jobs, housing, and education programs, and much more — money we’re wasting on weapons that would destroy our future.

No one wins a nuclear war. Everyone loses. The United States can and must lead by committing to an official policy of No First Use of nuclear weapons— for all our health’s sake.

A Surrogate Mother’s Cautionary Tale

Surrogacy—the act of using a surrogate to conceive and bear a child—is on the rise around the world. Defenders of this practice say that everyone benefits from it. But a U.S. woman named Annie (a pseudonym) found out what happens when the relationship between a surrogate and the couple who hope to raise the child goes wrong.

Surrogacy made so much sense to Annie at first. Following a series of bereavements, she and her husband, Pat, felt the need to “bring life into the world again,” she says.

“Pat’s brother passed unexpectedly, and then my cousin, who was like a mom to me, followed by Pat’s cousin, who was found dead in a hotel room; my great uncle; then my aunt,” Annie says. “All of this happened in the span of a year.”

She had four children from a previous marriage, but an ectopic pregnancy left her unable to conceive naturally again. Annie, in her late 30s at the time, was advised to try in vitro fertilization (IVF). She and Pat couldn’t afford that, however.

The couple wasn’t poor, “but time was a factor for us, and we didn’t think that we would be able to come up with that amount of money in a short amount of time,” Annie says.

She was aware of women being hired as surrogates, from the media and through word of mouth. “I began to wonder if that was a good way to pay for the IVF.”

Surrogacy involves inseminating or implanting an embryo into a woman’s uterus. Immediately after giving birth, the surrogate mother is required to give the child to the commissioning parents. Since the 1970s, more than 25,000 babies have been born in the U.S. through surrogacy.

There are two types of surrogacy: altruistic, in which the birth mother bears a baby for another couple simply as a gesture of kindness, and commercial, in which the surrogate is paid.

In the U.K., Canada and Australia, altruistic surrogacy is permitted, but commercial surrogacy is against the law. By contrast, all surrogacy is illegal in France, Germany and Italy. Commercial surrogacy is legal in a number of U.S. states, including California, Illinois, Arkansas, Maryland, Oregon and New Hampshire, as well as Washington D.C., and in New Jersey and Washington, commercial surrogacy laws go into effect this year. But even in states that outlaw commercial surrogacy, payment can be made by way of covering expenses and loss of earnings, which can amount to a full-time salary. In Iowa, for example, surrogates receive between $30,000 to $35,000, plus expenses.

Annie says her decision to become a surrogate was “spur of the moment.” She began checking out advertisements on the website Craigslist, where a number of couples were looking to hire a birth mother. One lived nearby and had already identified an egg donor and chosen a fertility clinic in Chicago where the implant process would take place. The couple planned to use the commissioning father’s sperm. “They were just waiting for someone like me to answer their advertisement,” Annie says. “At that stage, I had no doubts. I thought, ‘What a great gift it would be to have a child for someone who can’t have kids, and in return they pay for my IVF so I can have a baby.’ ”

The couple arranged to meet with Annie and her husband. “At first, we got on fine,” Annie recalls. “We all appeared to want the same thing. It was obvious we could help each other, and everyone seemed pleased to have met.”

They agreed that in return for Annie carrying a baby to term and immediately relinquishing responsibility for it, the commissioning parents would pay $13,000 for one cycle of IVF for Annie. “That was all we wanted,” Annie says. “We did not want to profit in any way, but just pay for the IVF so hopefully we could have our own child.”

The Chicago clinic offered a discount for providing both the embryo transfer for the couple and Annie’s IVF treatment.

Surrogacy is a profitable business in the U.S. But it has come under challenge as feminists and human rights campaigners question the ethics of what is sometimes known as “womb trafficking.”

These critics point to class and racial divisions between surrogates, egg donors and commissioning parents, which often are stark.

Surrogates tend to be working-class women with their own children; many are military wives. Surrogates must have had at least one pregnancy to demonstrate that they can carry a baby to term without complications. They are less inclined to want to keep the baby if they have their own children, the logic goes.

By contrast, an egg donor is more likely to be a college graduate from a more affluent background—features considered attractive to commissioning parents. Advertisements for egg donors are abundant on university and college campuses.

Advocates of commercial surrogacy insist it is a win-win situation: The surrogates are making an informed choice, and the money they earn can be life-changing. But as women like Annie sometimes discover, the process can be fraught with difficulty.

“I didn’t think anything would go wrong,” she says. “Everybody stood to get what they wanted.”

But things soon started to go very wrong. In the state where she lives, surrogacy contracts are enforceable by law.

“When Pat and I suggested getting an attorney to look through our contract, the intended mother got very upset,” Annie says. “She started accusing us of wasting time. So we went ahead and signed the contract.”

In states where commercial surrogacy is legal, surrogates are typically given legally binding contracts to sign, which spell out the agreement between the commissioning parents and the woman who will give birth. Commonly, these contracts include instructions regarding what the surrogate is allowed to eat and drink and which medications she can take during pregnancy; they can forbid smoking, riding a bicycle, having sex, drinking alcohol or going without prior permission to doctor’s appointments (which are paid for and monitored by the commissioning parents).

These contracts can also give the commissioning parents the right to demand the abortion of one or more fetuses in the event of a multiple birth, or to demand that the baby be handed over to the commissioning parents immediately, without even being seen by the surrogate mother.

To prepare her body for the procedure, Annie had to have a series of painful injections.

“Getting my body ready for the embryo was hard. I gained so much weight because of the shots,” she says. “I was left to inject myself with progesterone in my buttocks area and Lupron [an artificial hormone] in my stomach. I didn’t know anything about surrogacy and I didn’t really do any research. I was just looking at the end result of a family having a child they wanted, and for Pat and I to have the child we wanted.”

Annie became pregnant in 2016, after the first embroyo transfer. She discovered that she was expecting twins when she began to bleed six weeks later.

“I called the doctor’s office in Chicago,” Annie says. “The doctor told me to take bed rest and that it was normal, so that’s what I did, until my husband came home from work. I didn’t feel comfortable, so I went to the hospital to check [that] all was OK. The commissioning parents got very upset with me, saying I needed to ask permission before I went to the hospital again.” Annie was not, in fact, violating the contract at this stage. Nowhere in her contract did it say she had to ask for permission from the commissioning parents to attend a doctor’s appointment or hospital.

Trust and communication between the two couples quickly broke down. Annie and her husband decided they did not want to receive IVF treatment from the same clinic that had done the embryo transfer, because Annie wanted to be free of any involvement with the commissioning parents.

When they discovered that an IVF cycle for Annie and Pat would cost more than the discounted rate at the original clinic, the commissioning parents “acted as though we were trying to extort more money from them,” Annie says. “The next thing we knew, the other couple was accusing us of planning on selling the babies on the black market.”

Annie says the commissioning parents began to renege on paying certain expenses they’d agreed to, such as the travel expenses for Pat to join Annie at the clinic in Chicago. They also complained about the increased cost, due to complications, of Annie’s medication to sustain the pregnancy.

“They asked why I couldn’t claim these expenses on my own medical insurance, which was outrageous, because that would mean I would be penalized by my insurance company,” Annie says. “After months of harassment, I got the police involved. I had been called the N-word [Annie is African-American] and my husband a ‘dirty Mexican.’ I couldn’t trust the commissioning parents any more, and did not feel the babies should be raised by people like them.”

Annie did not want to take money for IVF treatment from the commissioning parents, which meant she and Pat had to put their plans to have a baby together on hold.

A few days later, just six months pregnant, Annie went into premature labor and gave birth to twin girls. Eight days later, one of the twins died.

“When I went into labor days later, the last thing on my mind was the contract,” Annie says. “The main thing was to make sure the babies were OK. I was able to hold the babies [which is usually not allowed]. The hospital didn’t know about the surrogacy arrangement. They were so young and so tiny. [The baby who died] was a fighter, and she was gaining weight and we were actually able to hold her and breastfeed her. When we lost [her], it was so hard, but I still had to get up to be there for [the surviving baby]. It was heartbreaking.”

Annie stayed at the hospital for more than two months, sleeping in a room next to the maternity ward, until she was told she had to leave by the attorney of the commissioning parents.

“They had got the courts involved, accusing us of going against the contract and saying that we should not be having a relationship with [the surviving baby],” Annie says. The commissioning parents took the baby away and Annie never saw her again.

A number of surrogate mothers I met in India and the U.S. have spoken about the agony of delivering babies who are immediately taken from them and handed to the commissioning parents, usually in the delivery room.

One of the hardest things about the experience is not knowing how the babies are doing after they are taken away, and yet, at the same time, feeling a huge responsibility and deep connection with them.

“If, years later, I saw something had happened to [the surviving] baby, I would never be able to forgive myself,” Annie says. “Would people blame me for not protecting her?”

The pain of bearing twins, giving birth, and losing one and then the other soon afterwards was unbearable, Annie says. “But not knowing how [the surviving baby] is, or being able to tell her I am here for her, is a terrible thing.”

Two years later, Annie has given up the idea of keeping the baby, and recognizes that she should stay with the parents she has known since she was a few weeks old.

“I’m not a heartless person,” she says. “I know [the baby] has been with them all this time and she doesn’t remember us, so I don’t want to scare her. I don’t want to take her from the only people that she has known. The only thing I want is for this not to happen to anyone else.”

Currently, British surrogates are only allowed only out-of-pocket expenses. Meanwhile, the practice of commercial surrogacy is increasingly being outsourced from the U.S. to countries like India, Ukraine, Thailand and Mexico. In India alone, the annual surrogacy industry is valued at more than $450 million.

In a number of countries, including the U.K., there are moves to legalize commercial surrogacy, which would allow the surrogates to receive a fee, as well as expenses, and give legal rights to the commissioning parents. Lawyers and campaigners lobbying for such changes often use California as a “best practice” model. Barrie and Tony Drewitt-Barlow, for example, a U.K. gay couple who have five children through surrogacy, now run the British Surrogacy Centre of California, which allows British commissioning parents to sidestep current U.K. surrogacy laws.

I asked Annie what she would like to see happen to educate potential surrogates about the realities of the experience.

“I want surrogacy to be illegal,” she says. “If I had known what I know now, I never would have done it.”

After going through such an ordeal in their quest to pay for IVF, Annie and her husband recently discovered they are going to have a baby—without assisted reproductive technology playing a part.

Annie beams as she tells me, “Our beautiful daughter … is due in the spring of 2019, and we could not be happier.”

Trump Creates Border Porn to Reassure Racists

On February 15th, Donald Trump declared a state of national emergency in order to fund his “great, great” border wall without having to go through Congress. There is, of course, no emergency, despite the rape fantasy that the president has regularly tried to pass off as public policy. In speech after speech, including his declaration of that emergency, he has told the same story: the United States needs a border wall to prevent sex traffickers from driving women into the country, bound with duct tape.

“Women are tied up,” he typically says. “They’re bound. Duct tape put around their faces, around their mouths. In many cases they can’t even breathe.”

It’s a scenario he’s only continued to elaborate over time. “They have tape over their mouths, electrical tape, usually blue tape, as they call it. It’s powerful stuff. Not good. And they have three, four, five of them in vans, or three of them in back seats of cars.” As they approach ports of entry, he swears, the vehicles carrying them “get off the road, and they drive out into the desert and they come in, they make a left turn — usually it’s a left, not a right.”

Fact-checkers and experts in border sex trafficking have been quick to insist that they know of no such incidents, however elaborately imagined — not one. Instead, most women and children forced into prostitution, they report, enter the country through legal ports of entry.

Border Patrol headquarters even sent out a request asking agents to provide any evidence whatsoever that might help support the president’s tall tales. None apparently did. It’s worth noting that Trump first added stories of duct-taped women to his border repertoire in early January, not too long after the heartbreaking news broke of the discovery of two Saudi sisters, 16 and 22, found dead in New York City’s Hudson River, duct-taped together. Their deaths were ruled suicides, committed after the United States denied them asylum and ordered them deported to Saudi Arabia, a close American ally. Their bodies even washed up on West 68th Street and Riverside Drive, close to Trump Place Condominiums. (He seems inescapable.)

In any case, one doesn’t need Sigmund Freud to grasp the crude displacement evidently underway here. By narrating the “crisis” on the border in a pornographic manner, painting it as a hellscape ruled by MS-13 murderers and rapists, President Trump is undoubtedly using ever more salacious fables to sublimate guilty desires, as well as his and the nation’s complicity in hellish atrocities.

Currently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has nearly 50,000 migrants in custody. That’s roughly the number of people Canada incarcerates in its entire prison system. And no one knows how many migrant children the U.S. is detaining, except that the number is much higher than the 2,737 listed in court documents. The Department of Health and Human Services can’t even provide journalists with an accurate count: “The total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by immigration authorities is unknown” is all its spokespeople can say.

Many of those children are housed in tent compounds in the desert or vacant Walmarts, forced to eat in shifts and sleep on the floors of chain-link cells covered only by a thin, metallic blanket. In one Florida detention center, children are packed “like sardines” in large halls stacked with bunk beds with little room even to walk. At such places, they are reportedly taunted or even sexually terrorized, either by staff or older migrants. They are overprescribed psychotropic drugs to numb them, given pills to make them sleep, and often refused medical attention when sick.

Border Patrol agents have even reportedly snatched babies from their mothers as they were breastfeeding them. Families have been tear gassed at the border and children have already died in Border Patrol custody (though “custody” is undoubtedly too soft a word to describe what the U.S. is doing to the progeny of nearby republics). “These kids are incarcerated,” said an MSNBC reporter who visited one of the detention complexes.

Some of the incarcerated migrant children are then delivered to a Christian adoption service with links to Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. According to the Associated Press, the Trump administration has all but given up trying to reunite children placed in “sponsor” homes with their actual families, since returning them, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, “would present grave child welfare concerns.”

Make Heaven Weep

Racial and sexual violence on the border has a long history. In Washington’s 1846 war on Mexico, for instance, which established the current boundary between the two countries, state militia volunteers and Army regulars rampaged across that region, burning churches, raping women, and scalping men.

On February 9, 1847, for example, a member of an Arkansas volunteer regiment raped a Mexican woman near the regiment’s camp at Agua Nueva in the state of Coahuila and Mexicans retaliated by killing a U.S. soldier. In response, more than 100 of those Arkansas volunteers cornered a group of war refugees in a cave. Screaming “like fiends,” according to one witness, they raped and slaughtered their victims, even as the women and children among them were “shrieking for mercy.” By the time it ended, scores of Mexicans lay dead or dying on a cave floor thick with clotted blood. Many of them had been scalped. (That’s hardly surprising since more than a few of those U.S. Army volunteers had, in the pre-war years, made their livings on those same borderlands by scalping Apaches for bounty money, or “barbering” them, as one Texan scalp-hunter put it.)

Even before that massacre, General Winfield Scott, commander of U.S. forces, wrote Washington to complain of other atrocities being committed by such volunteers, organized under the command of future president Zachary Taylor. The crimes of Taylor’s men, Scott said, were so heinous they would “make Heaven weep.”

When the war ended, Washington had taken all of Mexico’s northern territories, including all or parts of present-day Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, western Colorado, Utah, and southwestern Wyoming. About 500,000 square miles, home to an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people, had been added to the United States.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Chief Pimp

Sexual violence only continued, committed by members of the Border Patrol (founded in 1924) and other security forces like the Texas Rangers.

Starting in the 1970s, ever more middle-class families in the U.S. began hiring undocumented Mexican women as live-in servants, cooks, maids, and nannies. Many of them found themselves far from home in peonage-like conditions, unable to leave the houses in which they worked. Some of those women quickly found themselves not just trapped, but sexually and emotionally battered. One was locked in a house in Nevada for months, according to a witness: “She worked from sunup to way after dark. She requested that her wages be sent to her father in Mexico. No money was ever sent to her father. This went on for about a year and a half. Then she flipped — she became insane, broke out of the house and ran down the street. That’s when the Border Patrol got her.”

Others were raped by their employers and, if they complained, beaten or told that they would be handed over to the Border Patrol, which came to double as a labor procurement service for wealthy households and large ranchers. During those years, in fact, the Border Patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) were notoriously corrupt, violent federal institutions. In Texas, Border Patrollers worked closely with ranchers, delivering workers to their properties (including one owned by Lyndon Johnson when he was still president), then raiding those properties just before payday and deporting the same workers. “The ranchers got their crops harvested for free, the INS men got fishing and hunting privileges on the ranches, and the Mexicans got nothing,” a New York Times reporter, John Crewdson, wrote.

An investigation into INS corruption revealed that agency officials traded young Mexican women caught at the border to the Los Angeles Rams for season tickets. One such official was known within the INS as the service’s “chief pimp.” Part of his job was to help other officials and politicians, including New Jersey Democrat Peter Rodino (who presided over Richard Nixon’s impeachment in the House of Representatives), “get laid” by arranging visits to Mexican brothels.

In his memoir, a former guard, Tony Hefner, described the INS detention center in Port Isabel, Texas — overflowing in the 1980s with refugees from President Ronald Reagan’s Central American wars — as essentially a rape camp. There, underage Salvadoran women, summoned by the center’s guards and wardens, were forced to dance, watch gore films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and submit to sexual demands. They were given abortion pills in case such encounters resulted in pregnancy.

Human Prey

For decades, the border also gave liberty to nativist fantasies, as vigilantes of one sort or another ran wild there.

In the era after the United States lost its war in Vietnam and began to make its fast turn toward deindustrialization, such fantasies became ever more sadistic. In 1990, for instance, a group of San Diego high school students fashioned themselves into a neo-Nazi paramilitary group, calling themselves the Metal Militia, and began staging “war games” on the border, hunting down and robbing migrants. The spree was notable in that it was covered by a new broadcasting network, Fox, on a show called The Reporters.

Racism and nativism would become Fox News’ bread and butter, but here it went for sensationalism, titling the episode “Human Prey.”  Its host, former Newsday investigative journalist Bob Drury, depicted migrants sympathetically. In a wide-lapelled white blazer, he interviewed one vigilante who estimated that there were about 10 militant groups in the San Diego County area who would “hunt, track, and stalk” migrants for sport. The film crew accompanied one such group as they captured a family, including a baby and a terrified grandmother.

Drury linked this upsurge in border extremism to the end of the Vietnam War: many of the vigilantes were veterans of that war. Others were teenagers who modeled their tactics, including the setting of booby traps, on Vietnam War movies they had seen. The most disturbing portions of Drury’s report were his interviews with vigilantes. Disguised so as not to be recognizable, they expressed unalloyed hate. “Grab a kid,” one said, discussing his favored method of terrorizing migrants, and “nobody is going to do anything.”

Rome at the Colosseum

“Human Prey” helped launch a genre of TV “border patrol porn.” Even before Trump came on the political scene, the National Geographic channel ran five seasons of Border Wars. Since then, more such shows have aired, including Discovery Channel’s Border Live and Netflix’s Border Security. Copying the style of law-and-order series like Cops, these shows offer viewers ride-alongs with Border Patrol agents as they guard the country’s frontier. The set-up is familiar: greenish night-goggle cinematography, Black Hawk helicopters, battered-down doors, and sunrise jeep runs through mesquite scrub. While driving, Border Patrol agents in dark sunglasses hold forth on life, duty, manhood, and their occasional doubts, as an unseen camera films them from the passenger seat or back seat.

One episode from season two of Border Wars, “Lost in the River,” reveals a common, often deadly Border Patrol practice: the use of helicopters and all-terrain vehicles to scatter border crossers, forcing them ever deeper into the dangerous desert or fast-flowing rivers. It’s a game — patrollers play scatter, chase, catch; migrants surrender or die — that pits desperate people with next to no resources against one of the best-funded, high-tech, armed-to-the-teeth law enforcement agencies on earth. “We’ll let him tire himself out. If he wants to run, we’ll let him run,” says one agent. “You kind of have to pick your battles, and I usually pick the one who runs the most… We’ve got bodies running all over the place… It’s a never-ending game for us.”

Some of those migrants are chased back into Mexico, others caught, but many simply disappear and die, either from drowning or dehydration. Those that do make it to the United States go on to work at some of the lowest-paying but essential jobs around: they pick crops, slaughter and pack meat, clean houses, tend to the sick, watch kids — and for the privilege of all this, the federal government has put them through a dystopic death race, which is then transformed into reality-show entertainment for the masses. Watching such spectacles on cable TV, it’s hard not to feel that the United States is now ancient Rome — an empire that, in its later years, held compassion to be a vice — and the whole of that southwestern desert our Colosseum.

Occasionally, these shows humanize immigrants, but only long enough to super-humanize their pursuers. In one Border Wars episode, a group of 24 detained migrants sit around in the cold morning desert air, looking alternately scared and bored. “It tugs at your heart string[s],” says one of the Border Patrollers who chased them down. “When you see people that are in a bad position, you know, it’s tough, it plays on you emotionally as an agent, even though you have a job to do. To keep America safe.” None of these shows, however, reveal what happens off screen, including reports that Border Patrollers gratuitously tackle non-resisting migrants, beat those they catch, piss on their belongings, destroy their sources of drinking water, and deny them humanitarian aid.

If the images that do appear on screen sooner or later come to numb the moral senses and if viewers need to up the ante, they can always click on PornHub, which offers a whole subgenre of actual Border Porn, including actors dressed as border agents and as migrants: “If you are caught, you are fucked,” is the title of one video.

“Like the Sabine virgins,” the New York Herald wrote a century and a half ago about how Mexicans would come to enjoy being ruled by Washington, Mexico “will soon learn to love her ravishers.”

Trump’s Necromancers

Maybe there’s a better metaphor than describing the United States as decadent Rome. Maybe Trump’s wall, whether built or not, is psychologically refashioning the country into a besieged medieval fortress, complete with its own cult of martyrs. As a candidate, Trump campaigned with the victims (or the families of victims) of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, using their grief to stoke grievances. As president, one of his first acts was to establish a government office charged with providing support services to “victims of crimes committed by removable aliens.” (Never mind that such aliens have a lower crime rate here than the general population.) Trump’s never happier than when, at one of his rallies or speeches, he’s able to call the name of someone who had a family member killed or raped by an undocumented immigrant.

A few years before Trump’s election, as Robin Reineke of the Colibri Center for Human Rights has reported, the sort of men who would later become Trump’s followers began showing up at Tea Party conventions with binders full of photographs of migrant corpses, gruesome images of the desiccated remains of those who had died in the desert trying to enter the United States. The anti-migrant activists who displayed such books of the dead claimed they were humanitarians, trying to raise support to build a wall to stop poor migrants from crossing over and so dying. But really they, like the president today, were necromancers, a kind of American priesthood of the lost frontier, offering a new litany of hate and using the fetish pornography of death to reassure racists that their cruelty was actually kindness.

Rep. Omar’s Choice

As a virtual lynch mob moves to chastise Rep. Ilhan Omar over her recent remarks around Israel, the new congresswoman basically has three options before her: (1) Fold; (2) Continue the back and forth of the last several weeks; or (3) Get more specific and expand the public critique.

Fold

Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Omar herself can go largely silent on Israel. She can perhaps even offer a bigger apology than she did before or she can find some other way to draw closer to the establishment. This is a convenient path.

Continue the Current Pattern

Thus far, Rep. Omar has made statements about the Israel lobby and support for Israel that at one level are obviously true:

* “It’s all about the benjamins”: The pro-Israel lobby uses money to further its interests in Congress, just as virtually any other well-funded lobby does;

* “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is ok for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country. And I want to ask, why is it ok for me to talk about the influence of the NRA, of fossil fuel industries, or Big Pharma, and not talk about a powerful lobby.” There are some in the U.S. establishment that have loyalty to Israel rivaling if not exceeding what they have for the United States.

The issue with these statements is that, in addition to being true, they are being read by some to play to ugly anti-Jewish refrains if limited to Jews: They use money to control, they love Israel, not the U.S. The problem with the second readings of them is that they require — at best — a remarkably a high level of sensitivity regarding Rep. Omar’s actual words. This may well be the reason the draft text of the resolution effectively targeting Rep. Omar reportedly doesn’t actually mention her — because they’re not actually referencing her words. As Abba Solomon noted to me: “AIPAC allies should stop hiding behind Jews, and Democratic politicians should stop feigning such sensitivity to Jewish feelings when Zionist lobbying is the subject.” Indeed, some of the readings are akin to being offended by someone saying the word “gypped” — it really is an offensive word to Roma, but it is widely used with hardly anyone blinking an eye.

The sensitivity regarding “dual loyalty” is somewhat ironic considering rather high levels of xenophobia in U.S. discourse, especially regarding things Muslim or now sometimes even Russian. Some of the former has been displayed in how Rep. Omar’s herself has been treated, but it’s far broder. While the draft resolution targeting — but, again, not actually mentioning her — reported mentions “conditions” Muslims have faced after 9/11, it confines it to that. It ignores for example, the incredible scapegoating of Muslims that occurred from the highest public officials and biggest media outlets in the U.S. after the Orlando shooting in 2016 that should have caused a tremendous amount of public scrutiny of politicos, the FBI, the media and how they all work together but which has gone largely down the memory hole.

Still, the current back-and-forth may be alluring for Rep. Omar. It keeps her the center of much attention, but I fear it will likely presage little positive change in U.S. policy or increase the prospects for a just peace in the Mideast. It feels to me rather like how Yasser Arafat acted on occasion, a sort of long-term game of crit-and-retreat that might make for a thrilling, star-studded career but ends up amounting to surprisingly little.

Get Specific, Expand the Critique

It pays to recall this is hardly the first go around with someone trying to stand up to AIPAC. The Israel lobby has targeted numerous representatives before, most obviously Reps. Pete McCloskey, Cynthia McKinney and Earl Hilliard. Also, as even the New York Times recently recalled in a piece about AIPAC now targeting Rep. Omar and other freshmen, it went after Republican Sen. Charles Percy and Rep. Paul FIndley, who literally wrote the book “They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby.”

Former Senator James Abourezk, possibly the most radical senator of the post-World War II era wrote in 2011: “Years ago, when Wolf Blitzer was an AIPAC employee and we appeared together on a panel discussion, he literally shouted at me that, as Americans, AIPAC members had the right to lobby Congress. My response then was the same as it is now: when lobbying is being done for a foreign government, as AIPAC does, it’s wrong.” Grant Smith, author of “Big Israel,” has tracked the history of how AIPAC avoided the law. He writes that In 1962, AIPAC, which actually began as a project of the American Zionist Council, “was ordered to register as an Israeli foreign agent. The Justice Department kept this fact secret until 2010. It has never tried to enforce the order.” Imagine how much more quickly the U.S. Jewish community could have found its own voice rather than be pigeonholed regarding Israel if the law was enforced.

Much of Rep. Omar’s comments to date have been about herself, about her relationship to Jews and Jewish constituents. What they have been insufficiently about is actual Israeli and U.S. government policy towards the Palestinians and others.

For example, talking about U.S. policy being literally “all about the benjamins” is highly dubious. Money is certainly a needed ingredient, but the U.S. government’s backing of Israel more than anything has to do with geopolitics, most obviously Israel effectively crushing Arab nationalism in 1967, preventing the development of the region along lines remotely responsive to the people of the region.

Rep. Omar can highlight such critical aspects. Some are timely: The recent UN report on Israeli atrocities against Palestinians.

Some are long crying out for public discussion: The U.S. government refuses to acknowledge — as a matter of policy — that Israel has nuclear weapons. I know, I’ve asked numerous politicos about this. In 2011, when Mike Pence was on the House Foreign Affairs Committee — the same committee Rep. Omar is on now (and what AIPAC is quite clearly aiming to get her off of) — his response was nearly comical. (If you haven’t already, see for yourself in this video.) But of course Pence wasn’t laughed out of Washington, D.C. or widely derided — he attained the vice presidency.

With Rep. Omar being the center of much attention just now, her highlighting Israeli criminality and nuclear threats to humanity itself could have an immeasurable positive effect. Recall that when George Galloway was at the center of enormous attacks over the alleged “oil for food” scandal in 2005, he turned the tables and derided Sen. Norm Coleman and the entire political class over the Iraq invasion being based on a “pack of lies” to great effect; Coleman would go on to lose his senate seat. (See video.)

Some, including Rep. Omar, ask why people can freely talk about the influence of the NRA and not AIPAC — and it’s a good question, but also ironic: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,” has argued focusing just on the roll of the NRA distracts from the settler colonial origins of the Second Amendment.

Indeed, perhaps the most potentially profound of Rep. Omar’s recent tweets are ones like this: “I am told everyday that I am anti-American if I am not pro-Israel. I find that to be problematic and I am not alone. I just happen to be willing to speak up on it and open myself to attacks.”

This all depends on how you define the U.S. and how you define Israel. I increasingly don’t see countries. I see forces. And what many mean when they talk about a “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel — whether they acknowledged it or not — is the settler colonial pattern they have both followed.

This origins of this connection is examined by Rev. Michael Prior, in an essay titled “The Right to Expel: The Bible and Ethnic Cleansing” for the book “Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return”: “The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ itself, I suggest, is related to a conflation of the biblical notions of ‘unclean’/profane’ with the command to ‘drive out’ the inhabitants of Canaan (Exodus 23-24; Numbers 33; Deuteronomy 33 and Joshua), because, according to the biblical legend, they had defiled themselves by their evil practices (Leviticus 18:24). Uniquely in ancient literature, the biblical legend projects the extermination of the defiled indigenes as a divine mandate. With the authority of its religious provenance that value system has been incorporated into European imperialist ideologies, ‘legitimizing’ the destruction or displacement of indigenous peoples.”

That is, the most gruesome part of the Old Testament was used as justification for settlers in what would become the U.S., killing and robbing the native inhabitants. And the same mentality is now used once again in the land of Canaan. At a very high standard, Rep. Omar cannot claim that she is free from anti-Israel bias if she singles out Israel’s settler colonialism but engages in mythology regarding the U.S.’ settler colonialism and continued imperial politics. This includes a worldwide system of bases, divide-and-rule practices in the Mideast and elsewhere, a renewed explicit commitment to the Monroe Doctrine now targeting Venezuela to mention a few.

She did confront some of this when recently questioning U.S. envoy to Venezuela Elliott Abrams, a criminal abettor of genocide. She questioned Abrams far more strongly than any of the other congressional representatives, but when he claimed the U.S. government wanted democracy, she extraordinarily agreed.

The criminal rot of imperial polices that is highlighted by the U.S.-Israeli “special relationship” rests on lies and ridiculous absurdities and is therefore vulnerable, but it runs deep and it will take a very determined critique to dislodge. Many are now saying #StandWithIlhan, but a huge question is how firmly she will stand.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Sam Husseini’s website.

Top Democrats Are Enabling Climate Catastrophe

What follows is a conversation among journalists Jacqueline Luqman, Eugene Puryear, Norman Solomon and The Real News Network’s Paul Jay. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay.

With all the discussion, debate, news reporting about the Michael Cohen hearings, the Trump scandals, the continuing soap opera in Washington, it’s very difficult to actually spend time focusing on the thing that’s actually the most threatening facing human civilization as we know it.

The climate crisis is without any question the most immediate problem, and it does continuously get lost in the context that the fact this guy is a climate denier, even that kind of gets lost in the fact that he’s involved in corruption scandals and so on. Of course, corporate media doesn’t care much about what’s important, they care about what drives media, but that goes for a large part of the leadership of the Democratic Party as well. But in a recent CNN town hall, and we’ve been covering this, doing segments on Sanders’ CNN town hall, he did speak about climate. And here’s what he said.

SPEAKER: My home, the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland, part of the Delmarva Peninsula, is estimated to be one of the first places in the country to experience the effects of climate change. In fact, with more and more frequent flooding, it already is. What is your plan to help these rural communities in the poorest part of our state to fight climate change?

BERNIE SANDERS: What you’re asking is maybe–you know, a couple years ago, I don’t know if you were moderating, well I don’t know if it was you or CBS, I can’t remember. Somebody asked me, they said, “What is the major national security issue facing this country?” You know what I said? I said, “Climate change,” and people laughed. Wasn’t that funny? Well, people are not laughing now, because they have read the scientific reports and they know that if we don’t get our act together in the next twelve years or so, there’s going to be irreparable damage.

So let me lay it out on the line. We are going to have to not only take on Trump and his deniers, but we are going to have to take on the power of the fossil fuel industry, that is the coal companies and the oil companies and the gas companies. And we are going to have to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy. Now, the good news is that we know how to do that. The technology is there, and that technology will only improve. And here’s the other good news when we make that transformation. We’re going to create millions of good paying jobs, weatherizing our homes, changing our transportation system, moving aggressively into wind and solar and other sustainable energies.

PAUL JAY: So that was Bernie, the greatest national security threat facing us, climate change, something that we barely hear about. Corporate television news almost never even talks about it, and for that matter, the leadership of the Democratic party pays kind of lip service to it. He was talking about the climate deniers, and I think he could have spent a little bit more time talking about the climate denier enablers. And that’s not only corporate media, but it was also, for that matter, the Obama administration had eight years to do something significant and didn’t. Norman?

NORMAN SOLOMON: I think that phrase is quite apt. The climate deniers are augmented by the climate enablers, as you put it, and the enablers are at the top of the Democratic Party in the Congress. And so, when we look at where there are areas for progressives to hammer on the Democratic Party leadership such as it is, I think climate is at the top of the list. We’ve got Pelosi and Hoyer in the House, we have Schumer and Durbin in the Senate, and as you put it, they’re good at the lip service, but this is totally inadequate in terms of anything that is being done by those top Democrats given the threat involved. And I think most clear in the House of Representatives is this new committee. Now let’s face it, if Joe Crowley hadn’t been defeated in a Democratic primary by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, there would be no Select Committee on Climate Crisis. But because of that momentum, a volunteer for Bernie Sanders a few years ago, now in Congress, AOC and that entire push from the grassroots, made the Democratic Party leadership feel compelled to set up what is called the Select Committee on Climate.

And this is where I think, among other areas, there’s a tremendous opportunity for progressives to push hard. And that is that the select committee has been denied the power to subpoena and denied the power to draft legislation. And that’s preposterous. And so, we should be raising hell with the members of that committee who are Democrats appointed by Pelosi, and with Democrats in Congress in general, to say that is not acceptable. That select committee has to stop being a farce and a phony front for taking action and has to be empowered to do so.

PAUL JAY: It’s interesting. AOC didn’t even want to be on that committee. Jacqueline?

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: I didn’t even realize that the committee had no subpoena power and had no power to pass legislation. So this is like the power of these types of mediums, where we do get to share and spread this information. So now that we know and we recognize that yes, we do have to face this crisis head on, now we have to ask, what do we want these people to do? It goes beyond just passing a Green New Deal. What are we demanding our elected officials to do about our local energy companies that are continuing to hike energy rates that are already based on fossil fuels but they aren’t providing any kind of relief for poor residents or middle class residents who just can’t afford to move toward renewable energy solutions or aren’t even offering them? What are our elected officials doing about expanding incentives for people who do drive to access electric vehicles? What are they doing about revamping the industrialized farming industry, not just meat, but also all industrialized farming, to handle the way industrial farms handle waste management? And as well as, what about just reducing waste of food in industrialized farming?

These are some everyday, really simple kind of questions that we need to be asking our elected officials. And I agree with Norman, especially the Democrats, because they’re supposed to be the good guys. We need to be asking them what they’re going to do about these things and when are they going to ask. I really applaud this group of kids who confronted Dianne Feinstein last week. And I think that response from her is very telling of the kind of culture we still have to fight in Washington in regard to this issue and so many others.

PAUL JAY: Yeah, we’ll play that clip of the confrontation with Feinstein here. Eugene, go ahead.

EUGENE PURYEAR: Well, yeah, I agree with a lot of what’s been said. And I think one thing that’s really key in this, and certainly I think Bernie is absolutely right, this is our number one threat, is to continue to concretize to people how these threats start to interweave with other major issues. I mean, for instance, one of the things we’re seeing in coastal communities, and the questioner there of Senator Sanders raised the point that she’s from the Delmarva Peninsula, we’re seeing in a lot of these coastal communities, because of the threats of climate change, their property values are dropping. But what’s based on property taxes? Education funding. And so, coastal communities are actually now struggling with their public education systems because of the implications of climate change.

You talked about trade policy. Well, certainly you see China is now restricting U.S. trash. That was a lot of our sort of “recycling,” which was sent to China. And because of some of the things that have been happening there and their own policies, they’re no longer taking it, which means an increased amount of things are going to incinerators, primarily in black and brown communities, and ruining people’s lives and certainly ruining their health. I think there are a million different things out there that we could do. Even just the reduction in arable land, the challenges to water resources in states of the West and things of that nature that will challenge farmers, so that everyone can really start to get more of a sense of how climate change affects them individually. I think we have a good big picture sense of how it’s affecting us as a species, and I’d like to think that would be enough.

But in the context of what I think is not outright climate denial, but when you talk about the enablers, this idea that of course we can’t deny it, but we have to move slowly or deliberately or whatever it may be, which would actually be akin to a lot of the liberal positioning in the early stages of the civil rights movement. Well yes, you need rights, but we’ve got to do it slowly, we’ve got to do it respectfully of Jim Crow infrastructure. And that collapsed under the weight of, obviously, the mass civil rights movement. And I think the sort of halfway houses are collapsing under the weight of people like these young folks who are challenging Senator Feinstein.

PAUL JAY: Right. The big attack on the Green New Deal coming from Trump and the right is that this is “just an excuse” for more big government. And that phrase, more big government, is just a symbol, a tag word for more socialism, for more planned economy. The problem is two parts to it. Number one, yeah, you’re going to deal with climate change, there’s going to be a planned economy. You have to plan to get off fossil fuel and onto sustainable. That’s going to take government planning, because without doubt, it’s clear the free market is not going to go there. And number two, the fraud of this whole attack on big government and planned economy is that the biggest planned economy already exists, and it’s called the militarization of the American economy and the Pentagon. It’s already a government agency with a trillion dollar a year budget or more which has a planned economy of militarization to the point where they make sure there’s aircraft manufacturing in every single state so that the web of the manufacturing controls politics at practically every level.

Even Bernie Sanders was susceptible to that when they were going to build the F-35 in Vermont. He wound up having to support it, because without the F-35, they would have so many jobs lost. The blackmail and pressure militarization puts on every level of politics. But it’s a big government, if you want to use the word, planned economy. But they don’t talk about that. And why don’t they talk about that? Because they’ve all got their hand in the military industrial congressional complex gravy train, and they don’t care about the hypocrisy of their language. But the problem is, under normal circumstances, and this ties together with the conversation we had earlier about socialism. There would be, sooner or later, a kind of evolution towards more and more socialized solutions one way or the other. But the climate change, we don’t we don’t have that kind of time for like some kind of evolution. Norman, what do you think of all that?

NORMAN SOLOMON: The urgency is such that we need to cast aside all these halfway, supposedly more realistic measures. The idea that market forces can solve this problem is preposterous. The record of cap and trade out here in California is abysmal. We got into this horrific mess largely because of market forces. When you look at, for instance, an editorial that The Washington Post printed a few days ago, an official editorial by the newspaper that is owned by the richest person in the world, Jeff Bezos, they gave a tepid endorsement of the Green New Deal, but said that too much of the resolution that’s been introduced by AOC and backed by many Democrats in Congress, too much of it, they say, goes into other matters. And they argue that because of the urgency of the climate crisis, other concerns like social justice and economic justice, they need to be set aside.

And of course, that’s a corporate view of what should be done, but it’s bass ackwards if you really care about dealing with the climate crisis, because these are not laundry list issues. As Eugene was just referring to, these are integrated, interwoven issues. And we’re never going to roll back this horrific threat of climate change unless we deal with it in an overall way which includes social justice and democracy.

PAUL JAY: All right. Well, it’s a good point to end on for this segment. Thank you for joining us.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Thank you.

EUGENE PURYEAR: Thank you.

PAUL JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

ICE Has Been Keeping Tabs on Anti-Trump Activists

An explosive report from The Nation magazine Wednesday morning showed the federal government spied on progressive activists in New York City.

Emails from February, July, and August 2018 between agents in the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) wing of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) obtained by reporter Jimmy Tobias show a surveillance operation targeted at protests against President Donald Trump’s administration and immigration policies in the city.

On July 31, 2018, for example, ICE’s New York office sent out a spreadsheet to an undisclosed number of recipients that listed a dozen upcoming “anti-Trump” protests that were planned in NYC: pic.twitter.com/ns8ajOTdXj

— Jimmy Tobias (@JamesCTobias) March 6, 2019

Tobias points to three actions in particular that were singled out by HSI:  a February 14, 2018, Ash Wednesday protest by immigrant rights group the New Sanctuary Coalition; a protest outside ICE’s Manhattan offices dubbed the Deportee Suitcase Solidarity March on July 26, 2018; and a July 31, 2018, protest against white supremacist group Identity Evropa organized by Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.).

The latter was included in a list of events sent to agents entitled “Anti-Trump Protest Spreadsheet.”

“Please remain vigilant and aware of your surroundings,” the email said.

In a statement, a spokesperson for ICE told The Nation that while the agency would not comment specifically on the spreadsheet’s methodology, it did feel that agents needed to know about the protests for operations.

“The referenced email was provided to HSI agents for situational awareness should any HSI employees be traveling through those areas,” the spokesperson said, “whether on work or personal time.”

Progressives targeted by the list were skeptical of ICE’s explanations and concerned about the implications of spying on activists.

“How is a list like this compiled? Who makes the distinction that one group makes the cut and another one doesn’t? Is it just a whim? It seems to me to be very dangerous,” Ken Kidd, an organizer with Gays Against Guns, told The Nation. “It is a terrible precedent.”

Some activists were outraged that the surveillance was being done in the first place, especially given the reasoning provided in the emails.

“If they are watching us because we are against the current president’s policies,” said Jody Kuh, an organizer with anti-Trump organization Rise and Resist, which was targeted in the emails, “it is more than a little disturbing.”

“I demand answers,” Rep. Espaillat said in a tweet in response to The Nation‘s reporting.

I find it deeply concerning that ⁦@ICEgov⁩ would label an anti-Semitism event that I hosted in #WashingtonHeights as an anti-Trump event. I demand answers. https://t.co/HWCd9lIykw

— Adriano Espaillat (@RepEspaillat) March 6, 2019

New York University law professor Alina Das, who is a lawyer for the New Sanctuary Coalition, told The Nation that ICE targeting communities for protesting the president sets a dangerous precedent.

“ICE is surveilling our communities based on not only the fact that they are speaking out,” said Das, “but who they are speaking out against.”

That’s the beginning of a slippery slope to the kind of crackdown on speech the country should avoid, Das added.

“The fact that we have an agency as powerful as ICE targeting our communities because they have chosen to speak out against President Trump and his harsh immigration policies should disturb every American who believes this kind of dissent is critical for protecting our democracy,” Das said.