Chris Hedges's Blog, page 323

Chicago Will Elect a Black Woman as Its Mayor for First Time

CHICAGO — A former federal prosecutor and a county board leader will face each other in a runoff to become Chicago’s first black female mayor after leading a large field Tuesday that included a member of the Daley family that has dominated the city’s politics for much of the last six decades.

Political outsider Lori Lightfoot, who was a federal prosecutor in northern Illinois, and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle were the top two vote-getters among 14 candidates, but neither received more than the 50 percent needed to avoid an April 2 runoff. The winner will succeed Mayor Rahm Emanuel to lead the nation’s third-largest city. Emanuel did not seek re-election.

Among those they defeated was William Daley, who has never held major elected office but featured the most famous surname in the race. His father, Richard J. Daley, and brother, Richard M. Daley, held the city’s top job for nearly 43 years of a 55-year span before Emanuel took the oath in 2011. Daley is a former U.S. Commerce secretary who, like Emanuel, served as White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama.

Emanuel ‘s decision not to seek a third term drew some of the biggest names in state and municipal government as would-be successors, along with some political newcomers with strong support, in a transitional election for a lakefront metropolis still struggling to shed its reputation for corruption, police brutality and street violence.

“What do you think of us now?” Lightfoot said Tuesday night to a crowd of her supporters. “This is what change looks like.”

Lightfoot, the first openly gay woman to run for Chicago mayor, has been critical of efforts to reform the Chicago Police Department in the wake of the 2014 fatal shooting of black teenager Laquan McDonald by a white police officer.

Preckwinkle, who leads the county’s Democratic Party, also made a campaign issue out of McDonald’s shooting.

“We may not be at the finish line. But, we should acknowledge that history is being made,” Preckwinkle, who previously served 19 years on the City Council and was a Chicago Public Schools teacher, told her supporters.

“It’s not enough to stand at a podium and talk about what you want to see happen,” she added, taking an apparent shot at Lightfoot. “You have to come to this job with the capacity and the capability to make your vision a reality.”

Turnout was low Tuesday. Jim Allen, spokesman for the Chicago Board of Election, said by late afternoon turnout was around 27 percent of registered voters. The record low for a February mayoral election was 33.8 percent in 2007, when Emanuel was first elected.

“It appears that some voters either just disengaged or are not willing to make a decision until they know who’s in the runoff, assuming there is a runoff,” Allen said.

Businessman Willie Wilson, Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza and activist Amara Enyia, who received financial support from Kanye West and Chance the Rapper, rounded out the top vote-getters.

Although a nonpartisan election, the candidates were all attached in varying degrees to the Democratic Party. The Republican Party has virtually disappeared from the city.

“A problem is the absence of the Republican Party offering a different choice and different ideas,” said DePaul University political scientist Larry Bennett. “Those running are all Democrats, offering odd claims of doing something different.”

The variety of candidates reflected the many issues facing Chicago’s next mayor: poor neighborhoods in need of investment, overwhelming pension debt, low-performing public schools and a crime rate that is often pointed to as among the nation’s worst.

However, an issue that took center stage in the contest is the need to change how business is conducted at City Hall. For some that means an end to pay-to-play, paying off influential politicians in order to do business in the city.

Since 1972, more than two dozen city aldermen have been convicted of crimes related to official duties.

Last month, Edward Burke, a 50-year veteran and former chairman of the City Council’s Finance Committee, was indicted after authorities said a wiretap on his cellphone captured him pressuring executives of a fast-food chain to hire his law firm in exchange for help with permits. Preckwinkle, Mendoza, attorney Gery Chico and Daley all sought to distance their ties to Burke, who had a comfortable lead in his race for re-election on Tuesday.

Reforming the city’s Police Department is a job the winning candidate can’t dodge. A consent decree approved last month by U.S. District Judge Robert Dow Jr. is aimed at tightening supervision, improving training and fixing the department’s disciplinary system.

The decree is the most important consequence of the shooting of McDonald by now-former officer Jason Van Dyke. A video of the shooting sparked demonstrations and resulted in Van Dyke’s murder conviction . Illinois’ attorney general sued the city to force the court’s involvement after years of inaction by the City Council, which dealt with systemic police misconduct in recent years by approving millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements.

Emanuel’s popularity plummeted after release of the McDonald shooting video and he eventually decided not to seek re-election, leading to the scramble to succeed him.

Voters also chose among candidates for the 50-member City Council.

The city has a tradition of having a dominating mayor and a City Council that isn’t aggressive in serving as a separate branch of government, according to Bennett, the political scientist. That has meant the performance of various city departments hasn’t received adequate scrutiny.

Foxconn Played Wisconsin—With Scott Walker’s Help

A newspaper photograph last summer portrayed three guys in suits and ties shoveling dirt. They were Donald Trump, then-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and the chairman of Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics conglomerate.

They were doing a PR groundbreaking for a new Foxconn plant that supposedly would hire thousands of blue-collar workers in Wisconsin to make flat-screen televisions. All three hailed the event as the start of a Made-in-the-USA manufacturing renaissance.

But it was actually a corporate scam.

Walker, who was up for re-election, was giving away a whopping $4 billion from his state’s taxpayers to lure Foxconn. Still, Trump hailed the deal as “the eighth wonder of the world.”

Less than a year later, though — oops — it turns out the three had been shoveling BS.

In January, Foxconn quietly backed away from its promise of all those factory jobs, declaring that “the global market environment” had changed. “In terms of TV,” they said, “we have no place in the U.S.” Having already pocketed much of Walker’s bribe money, Foxconn was downsizing its project from a mass-production blue-collar factory to a much, much smaller R&D operation.

It turns out that the Taiwanese giant has a history of reneging on its grandiose schemes, including failing to deliver on a Pennsylvania factory it promised in 2013.

Still, Foxconn is right that the environment had changed — Walker was defeated in November. Wisconsinites are in an uproar over both his extravagant giveaway and the corporation’s backaway. New Democratic Governor Tony Evers is asking pointed questions. And Trump’s slaphappy zig-zags on tariffs have roiled the whole high-tech market.

So, beware: When you see a picture of politicians shoveling people’s tax dollars into corporate coffers, the only sure thing is that the people are being played for suckers.

America’s Grotesque Inequality Can Only End One Way

Like a gilded coating that makes the dullest things glitter, today’s thin veneer of political populism covers a grotesque underbelly of growing inequality that’s hiding in plain sight. And this phenomenon of ever more concentrated wealth and power has both Newtonian and Darwinian components to it.

In terms of Newton’s first law of motion: those in power will remain in power unless acted upon by an external force. Those who are wealthy will only gain in wealth as long as nothing deflects them from their present course. As for Darwin, in the world of financial evolution, those with wealth or power will do what’s in their best interest to protect that wealth, even if it’s in no one else’s interest at all.

In George Orwell’s iconic 1945 novel, Animal Farm, the pigs who gain control in a rebellion against a human farmer eventually impose a dictatorship on the other animals on the basis of a single commandment: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” In terms of the American republic, the modern equivalent would be: “All citizens are equal, but the wealthy are so much more equal than anyone else (and plan to remain that way).”

Certainly, inequality is the economic great wall between those with power and those without it.

As the animals of Orwell’s farm grew ever less equal, so in the present moment in a country that still claims equal opportunity for its citizens, one in which three Americans now have as much wealth as the bottom half of society (160 million people), you could certainly say that we live in an increasingly Orwellian society. Or perhaps an increasingly Twainian one.

After all, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner wrote a classic 1873 novel that put an unforgettable label on their moment and could do the same for ours. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today depicted the greed and political corruption of post-Civil War America. Its title caught the spirit of what proved to be a long moment when the uber-rich came to dominate Washington and the rest of America. It was a period saturated with robber barons, professional grifters, and incomprehensibly wealthy banking magnates. (Anything sound familiar?) The main difference between that last century’s gilded moment and this one was that those robber barons built tangible things like railroads. Today’s equivalent crew of the mega-wealthy build remarkably intangible things like tech and electronic platforms, while a grifter of a president opts for the only new infrastructure in sight, a great wall to nowhere.

In Twain’s epoch, the U.S. was emerging from the Civil War. Opportunists were rising from the ashes of the nation’s battered soul. Land speculation, government lobbying, and shady deals soon converged to create an unequal society of the first order (at least until now). Soon after their novel came out, a series of recessions ravaged the country, followed by a 1907 financial panic in New York City caused by a speculator-led copper-market scam.

From the late 1890s on, the most powerful banker on the planet, J.P. Morgan, was called upon multiple times to bail out a country on the economic edge. In 1907, Treasury Secretary George Cortelyou provided him with $25 million in bailout money at the request of President Theodore Roosevelt to stabilize Wall Street and calm frantic citizens trying to withdraw their deposits from banks around the country. And this Morgan did — by helping his friends and their companies, while skimming money off the top himself. As for the most troubled banks holding the savings of ordinary people? Well, they folded. (Shades of the 2007-2008 meltdown and bailout anyone?)

The leading bankers who had received that bounty from the government went on to cause the Crash of 1929. Not surprisingly, much speculation and fraud preceded it. In those years, the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald caught the era’s spirit of grotesque inequality in The Great Gatsby when one of his characters comments: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” The same could certainly be said of today when it comes to the gaping maw between the have-nots and have-a-lots.

Income vs. Wealth

To fully grasp the nature of inequality in our twenty-first-century gilded age, it’s important to understand the difference between wealth and income and what kinds of inequality stem from each. Simply put, income is how much money you make in terms of paid work or any return on investments or assets (or other things you own that have the potential to change in value). Wealth is simply the gross accumulation of those very assets and any return or appreciation on them. The more wealth you have, the easier it is to have a higher annual income.

Let’s break that down. If you earn $31,000 a year, the median salary for an individual in the United States today, your income would be that amount minus associated taxes (including federal, state, social security, and Medicare ones). On average, that means you would be left with about $26,000 before other expenses kicked in.

If your wealth is $1,000,000, however, and you put that into a savings account paying 2.25% interest, you could receive about $22,500 and, after taxes, be left with about $19,000, for doing nothing whatsoever.

To put all this in perspective, the top 1% of Americans now take home, on average, more than 40 times the incomes of the bottom 90%. And if you head for the top 0.1%, those figures only radically worsen. That tiny crew takes home more than 198 times the income of the bottom 90% percent. They also possess as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90%. “Wealth,” as Adam Smith so classically noted almost two-and-a-half-centuries ago in The Wealth of Nations, “is power,” an adage that seldom, sadly, seems outdated.

A Case Study: Wealth, Inequality, and the Federal Reserve

Obviously, if you inherit wealth in this country, you’re instantly ahead of the game. In America, a third to nearly a half of all wealth is inherited rather than self-made. According to a New York Times investigation, for instance, President Donald Trump, from birth, received an estimated $413 million (in today’s dollars, that is) from his dear old dad and another $140 million (in today’s dollars) in loans. Not a bad way for a “businessman” to begin building the empire (of bankruptcies) that became the platform for a presidential campaign that oozed into actually running the country. Trump did it, in other words, the old-fashioned way — through inheritance.

In his megalomaniacal zeal to declare a national emergency at the southern border, that gilded millionaire-turned-billionaire-turned-president provides but one of many examples of a long record of abusing power. Unfortunately, in this country, few people consider record inequality (which is still growing) as another kind of abuse of power, another kind of great wall, in this case keeping not Central Americans but most U.S. citizens out.

The Federal Reserve, the country’s central bank that dictates the cost of money and that sustained Wall Street in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 (and since), has finally pointed out that such extreme levels of inequality are bad news for the rest of the country. As Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said at a town hall in Washington in early February, “We want prosperity to be widely shared. We need policies to make that happen.” Sadly, the Fed has largely contributed to increasing the systemic inequality now engrained in the financial and, by extension, political system. In a recent research paper, the Fed did, at least, underscore the consequences of inequality to the economy, showing that “income inequality can generate low aggregate demand, deflation pressure, excessive credit growth, and financial instability.”

In the wake of the global economic meltdown, however, the Fed took it upon itself to reduce the cost of money for big banks by chopping interest rates to zero (before eventually raising them to 2.5%) and buying $4.5 trillion in Treasury and mortgage bonds to lower it further. All this so that banks could ostensibly lend money more easily to Main Street and stimulate the economy. As Senator Bernie Sanders noted though, “The Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world… a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.”

The economy has been treading water ever since (especially compared to the stock market). Annual gross domestic product growth has not surpassed 3%in any year since the financial crisis, even as the level of the stock market tripled, grotesquely increasing the country’s inequality gap. None of this should have been surprising, since much of the excess money went straight to big banks, rich investors, and speculators.  They then used it to invest in the stock and bond markets, but not in things that would matter to all the Americans outside that great wall of wealth.

The question is: Why are inequality and a flawed economic system mutually reinforcing? As a starting point, those able to invest in a stock market buoyed by the Fed’s policies only increased their wealth exponentially. In contrast, those relying on the economy to sustain them via wages and other income got shafted. Most people aren’t, of course, invested in the stock market, or really in anything. They can’t afford to be. It’s important to remember that nearly 80% of the population lives paycheck to paycheck.

The net result: an acute post-financial-crisis increase in wealth inequality — on top of the income inequality that was global but especially true in the United States. The crew in the top 1% that doesn’t rely on salaries to increase their wealth prospered fabulously. They, after all, now own more than half of all national wealth invested in stocks and mutual funds, so a soaring stock market disproportionately helps them. It’s also why the Federal Reserve subsidy policies to Wall Street banks have only added to the extreme wealth of those extreme few.

The Ramifications of Inequality

The list of negatives resulting from such inequality is long indeed. As a start, the only thing the majority of Americans possess a greater proportion of than that top 1% is a mountain of debt.

The bottom 90% are the lucky owners of about three-quarters of the country’s household debt. Mortgages, auto loans, student loans, and credit-card debt are cumulatively at a record-high $13.5 trillion.

And that’s just to start down a slippery slope. As Inequality.org reports, wealth and income inequality impact “everything from life expectancy to infant mortality and obesity.” High economic inequality and poor health, for instance, go hand and hand, or put another way, inequality compromises the overall health of the country. According to academic findings, income inequality is, in the most literal sense, making Americans sick. As one study put it, “Diseased and impoverished economic infrastructures [help] lead to diseased or impoverished or unbalanced bodies or minds.”

Then there’s Social Security, established in 1935 as a federal supplement for those in need who have also paid into the system through a tax on their wages. Today, all workers contribute 6.2% of their annual earnings and employers pay the other 6.2% (up to a cap of $132,900) into the Social Security system. Those making far more than that, specifically millionaires and billionaires, don’t have to pay a dime more on a proportional basis. In practice, that means about 94% of American workers and their employers paid the full 12.4% of their annual earnings toward Social Security, while the other 6% paid an often significantly smaller fraction of their earnings.

According to his own claims about his 2016 income, for instance, President Trump “contributed a mere 0.002 percent of his income to Social Security in 2016.” That means it would take nearly 22,000 additional workers earning the median U.S. salary to make up for what he doesn’t have to pay. And the greater the income inequality in this country, the more money those who make less have to put into the Social Security system on a proportional basis. In recent years, a staggering $1.4 trillion could have gone into that system, if there were no arbitrary payroll cap favoring the wealthy.

Inequality: A Dilemma With Global Implications

America is great at minting millionaires. It has the highest concentration of them, globally speaking, at 41%. (Another 24% of that millionaires’ club can be found in Europe.) And the top 1% of U.S. citizens earn 40 times the national average and own about 38.6% of the country’s total wealth. The highest figure in any other developed country is “only” 28%.

However, while the U.S. boasts of epic levels of inequality, it’s also a global trend. Consider this: the world’s richest 1% own 45% of total wealth on this planet. In contrast, 64% of the population (with an average of $10,000 in wealth to their name) holds less than 2%. And to widen the inequality picture a bit more, the world’s richest 10%, those having at least $100,000 in assets, own 84% of total global wealth.

The billionaires’ club is where it’s really at, though. According to Oxfam, the richest 42 billionaires have a combined wealth equal to that of the poorest 50% of humanity. Rest assured, however, that in this gilded century there’s inequality even among billionaires. After all, the 10 richest among them possess $745 billion in total global wealth. The next 10 down the list possess a mere $451.5 billion, and why even bother tallying the next 10 when you get the picture?

Oxfam also recently reported that “the number of billionaires has almost doubled, with a new billionaire created every two days between 2017 and 2018. They have now more wealth than ever before while almost half of humanity have barely escaped extreme poverty, living on less than $5.50 a day.”

How Does It End?

In sum, the rich are only getting richer and it’s happening at a historic rate. Worse yet, over the past decade, there was an extra perk for the truly wealthy. They could bulk up on assets that had been devalued due to the financial crisis, while so many of their peers on the other side of that great wall of wealth were economically decimated by the 2007-2008 meltdown and have yet to fully recover.

What we’ve seen ever since is how money just keeps flowing upward through banks and massive speculation, while the economic lives of those not at the top of the financial food chain have largely remained stagnant or worse. The result is, of course, sweeping inequality of a kind that, in much of the last century, might have seemed inconceivable.

Eventually, we will all have to face the black cloud this throws over the entire economy. Real people in the real world, those not at the top, have experienced a decade of ever greater instability, while the inequality gap of this beyond-gilded age is sure to shape a truly messy world ahead. In other words, this can’t end well.

Sunrise Movement Turns Up the Heat on Congress

Hundreds of protesters converged Monday at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office in Washington, D.C., to demand support for the Green New Deal resolution. McConnell never appeared, and 42 people were arrested.

The protest was organized by the Sunrise Movement, a youth-oriented environmental group that formed in late 2017. The movement’s profile was boosted last month when two Democrats, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, proposed the New Green Deal legislation to Congress.

PHOTO ESSAY | 6 photosPhoto Essay

Around 10 a.m. on Monday, scores of protesters lined the hallways of the Russell Senate Office Building and filtered into McConnell’s office, demanding that he meet with his constituents. When McConnell failed to show up, the activists launched a series of speeches and ennumerated their demands both inside and outside his office.

The occupation of McConnell’s office capped a week of actions by the Sunrise Movement’s Kentucky chapter. Members had organized other protests at McConnell’s district office but were blocked multiple times from speaking to him. Some high school students from the group even slept in front of his office in Kentucky—on a school night—but were never given a chance to talk to him.

One of McConnell’s critics is Destine Grigsby, a 17-year-old high school student from Louisville. “We came [to D.C.] to demand that he look us in the eyes and admit to us that the $1.9 million he gets from fossil fuel CEOs are more important than our future,” she said Monday in an interview with Truthdig.

Sporting a shirt that read “12 years,” Grisgby said, “We can no longer wait. According to the U.N. Global Climate Report, we have 12 years to remake our economy before we will no longer have a livable future.”

Jenny, another high school student from Louisville, said, “This is our future! Ours! We only have 12 years to clean up, and then that is irreversible. Ecological devastation.”

The concept behind the Green New Deal resolution, and what the Sunrise Movement is pushing, consists of economic stimulus programs that would reduce income inequality while simultaneously fighting climate change. The goal is to get the nation to transition to a zero-carbon economy.

But members of Sunrise, who are aligned with the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, are not just battling climate deniers and fossil-fuel companies with their support of the resolution. They are taking on establishment Democrats, too, whose approach to tackling climate change is, broadly speaking, tantamount to incrementalism.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls the Green New Deal a “green dream.” Some neoliberal legislators are still pushing Obama-era “all-of-the-above” energy strategies. Even some unions—namely the pro-fossil fuel Laborers’ International Union of North America—have called the Green New Deal “unrealistic.”

Monday’s Sunrise demonstration follows last weekend’s viral video altercation in which California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein told young Green New Deal activists in her office that “I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’m doing.” Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, said of that video that “Feinstein was, in fact, demonstrating why climate change exemplifies an issue on which older people should listen to the young. Because—to put it bluntly—older generations will be dead before the worst of it hits.”

According to its website, much like the March for Our Lives movement that organized after the 2018 schoool shootings in Parkland, Fla., the Sunrise Movement is attempting to build an army of young people to make climate change an urgent priority across America and hold elected officials accountable.

Varshini Prakash, co-founder and executive director of the Sunrise Movement, attended the McConnell office action and told Truthdig, “We are trying to build the most powerful youth political force in the history of America.”

“We’re not going away,” Grigsby added. “The Green New Deal needs to happen in this country. Now. Not later.”

The group’s actions and movement-building are fueled not only by trust in scientific data but also by what its members see playing out in their communities. On Monday—the day of their action in Washington, D.C.—Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin declared a statewide emergency due to heavy rainfall and flooding. The Environmental Protection Agency has issued various reports on how climate change will increase flooding and droughts, even in inland states like Kentucky.

On March 15, the Sunrise Movement is planning a Nationwide High School Walkout in support of the Green New Deal.

“Our state governments need to see that [youths] support the Green New Deal,” Grigsby said. “High-schoolers are willing to disrupt their education because it is necessary. Why go to school if I can’t live? Why go to school if I can’t have a healthy life?

Nearly 6,000 Abuse Complaints at Migrant Children Shelters

WASHINGTON — Thousands of accusations of sexual abuse and harassment of migrant children in government-funded shelters were made over the past four years, including scores directed against adult staff members, according to federal data released Tuesday.

The cases include allegations of inappropriate touching, staff members allegedly watching minors while they bathed and showing pornographic videos to minors. Some of the allegations included inappropriate conduct by minors in shelters against other minors, as well as by staff members.

Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., released the Health and Human Services Department data during a hearing on the Trump administration’s policy of family separations at the border. The data span both the Obama and Trump administrations. The figures were first reported by Axios.

From October 2014 to July 2018, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a part of Health and Human Services, received 4,556 complaints. The Department of Justice received an additional 1,303 complaints, including 178 allegations of sexual abuse by adult staff.

Health and Human Services officials said the vast majority of allegations weren’t substantiated, and they defended their care of children.

“We share the concern,” said Jonathan White, a Health and Human Services official who was in charge of the effort to reunify children with their parents, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. “Any time a child is abused … is one time too many. We abide fully with the laws this Congress has passed, and we are very proud of our outstanding track record of full compliance including referring every allegation for investigation. The vast majority of investigations prove to be unsubstantiated.”

The Office of Refugee Resettlement manages the care of tens of thousands of migrant children. More than 2,700 children were separated from their parents over the summer at the border, and were placed in shelters. But most of the children in government custody crossed the border alone.

Children are placed in government custody until they can be released to sponsors, usually a parent or close relative, while awaiting immigration proceedings. The shelters are privately run under contracts with the government.

Youth are held for increasingly longer periods of time, currently about two months. As of the first week of February, more than 11,000 migrant toddlers, children and teens were in federal custody as unaccompanied minors, up from about 2,500 detained children three months after Trump took office. Tens of thousands of children cycle through the system each year.

Sexual abuse allegations are reported to federal law enforcement, though it’s not clear whether anyone was charged criminally. In many cases, staff members were suspended and eventually fired.

Deutch said the data were clearly alarming.

“Together, these documents detail an unsafe environment of sexual assaults by staff on unaccompanied minors,” he said.

Health and Human Services officials say all allegations must be reported to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, child protective services and the FBI, and all allegations involving adults to local law enforcement. The department must cooperate with all investigations.

Facilities must provide training to all staff, contractors and volunteers. Background checks are completed on potential employees, and facilities are prohibited from hiring anyone who has engaged in inappropriate sexual behavior.

Push to Elect Presidents by Popular Vote Gains Momentum

After Hillary Clinton’s bruising 2016 election loss, when she won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College—the second time in five election cycles this outcome has occurred—multiple advocacy groups, the editorial board of The New York Times and some state legislatures renewed calls for abolishing the Electoral College.

Now, as NBC affiliate KUSA reports, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, plans to sign a bill that provides for the state’s nine electoral votes for president to go to the candidate who wins the nationwide popular vote, not to the candidate who wins the most votes in the state.

Eleven other states and Washington, D.C., have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a joint agreement that would give these states’ votes to the national popular-vote winner. The agreement will only be enacted, however, if states collectively representing 270 electoral votes join. Under the Constitution, states can decide how to “spend” their votes, and most award them to the candidate who wins the most votes in the state.

As Deanna Paul explains in The Washington Post, most states tend to lean consistently  Democrat or Republican in their votes for president, and candidates may forego focusing on issues important to those states or heavily campaigning there, thereby creating “a handful of ‘battleground states’ that candidates focus their attention and policies on.”

John Koza, chairman of National Popular Vote, a coalition advocating for state governments to join the compact, explains the problem, telling Paul, “If candidates are behind in a state, they ignore it because they won’t be able to flip it during a three-month campaign. If they’re ahead in a state, they don’t pay attention because they won’t lose it.”

So far, the compact has 172 of the 270 votes necessary for it to take effect. They are from Rhode Island, Vermont, Hawaii, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Washington, New Jersey, New York, Illinois, California and the District of Columbia.

As Sam Brasch reports on NPR, this “Electoral College workaround is gaining momentum in the Mountain West,” where, in addition to Colorado, a popular-vote bill is under consideration in the New Mexico state Senate after winning approval in its House. If passed, Brasch writes, “It would show the plan has momentum outside of the Coastal U.S., especially in places where Democrats have full control of state government.”

Public support for the popular vote is strong, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts poll, which shows 55 percent of respondents in favor, though results vary widely by party. Seventy-five percent of Democrats support moving from the Electoral College to the popular vote; only 32 percent of Republicans support the popular vote.

Brasch notes that it’s unclear whether the compact is constitutional. Because the Electoral College is written into the Constitution, he writes, “Some insist that Congress would have to approve [a change] since it would overhaul national election procedures,” while “[o]ther scholars have argued that states can’t bind their electors to voters outside their boundaries.”

While Koza remains hopeful about the compact’s future, other experts are more cautious. Reed Hundt, chairman and co-founder of Making Every Vote Count, told the Post, “The problem with the compact is getting another dozen states to sign on,” adding, “Republican states haven’t embraced it yet.”

Time to Get on Board With Bernie

On CNN last week, morning host Poppy Harlow interviewed liberal Democratic Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island. Harlow aired a poll showing that socialism is now preferred over capitalism by fully 57 percent of U.S. Democrats. Then she asked Cicilline if this indicates that the Democratic Party is shifting in the direction of socialism.

Cicilline denied any such radical change. He declared all the Democratic presidential candidates besides Bernie Sanders to be capitalists, and said, “I don’t see any movement in the Democratic Party towards socialism at all. I know the president is making that argument; I think it’s a silly one.”

It’s curious that a five-term, liberal House Democrat insists that his party is still true-blue capitalist and is making no “movement toward socialism at all,” even as the percentage of Democratic voters who prefer socialism over capitalism climbs up to 6 in 10.

That might seem like a paradox. It isn’t. The Democratic Party is mainly about big corporate donors, who love capitalism, not its voter base, which prefers socialism.

There is something for the actual left to work with here. Think about it: Six in 10 voters aligned with the political organization that former Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips once rightly called “history’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party” now say they prefer socialism over capitalism. That is a momentous development.

Now, it strikes me, is not the time to be beating up on Bernie Sanders from his radical port-side. Yes, comrades, the Democratic Party is an inherently elitist, fatally flawed vehicle for progressive change. It is a corporate and imperial institution, owned and controlled by the nation’s interrelated and unelected dictatorships of money and empire.

Yes, generations of progressive and leftist activists have found out over and again that “you don’t take the Democratic Party over; it takes you over.” We need to build and expand real people’s movements beneath and beyond the “inauthentic opposition party” (the late political scientist Sheldon Wolin’s dead-on term for the dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats) and U.S. major-party election cycle, which function together as shock absorbers for potentially radical popular anger and “the graveyard of social movements.”

Yes, Sanders is a fake “independent” who is maddeningly unwilling to confront the Pentagon system and the criminal Pax Americana. And yes, he isn’t really a socialist. He isn’t talking about workers’ control of production or of the workplace (where working-age Americans spend most of their waking hours) more broadly. He isn’t demanding the overdue nationalization of the nation’s top, archparasitic financial institutions. He isn’t calling for a general strike or a Gilets Jaunes-style rebellion of the proletariat. He hasn’t joined serious ecosocialists in calling for the Green New Deal he advocates to be funded with massive, required reductions in the U.S. military budget—or for the Green New Deal to be buttressed and protected by government control or takeover of the big banks so that capital can’t just leave the country in response to the demand of environmentally responsible investment.

(While speaking to Cicilline last week, Harlow quoted Democratic Rep. John Delaney of Maryland on how the Democratic Party supposedly now faces a choice between Sanders’ socialism and “a more just form of capitalism.” Delaney is off base. In reality, Sanders is just calling for a more moral capitalism. That’s what Scandinavian-style social democracy and neo-New Deal progressive populism is all about, after all. Sanders is calling for basic progressive reforms, such as single-payer health insurance, progressive taxation of the rich, free college tuition and clean-energy government jobs that are part of the broader Green New Deal. Sanders isn’t lying when he repeatedly says that his demands “aren’t radical.” The more mainstream Democratic candidates—well to the right of the majority progressive public opinion with which Sanders runs in policy accord—have been forced by Sanders and their party’s increasingly “socialist” base to cloak their amoral and Wall Street-captive, neoliberal-capitalist agenda in the populace-manipulating shroud of a “more just capitalism.”)

Fine, but here are six things for understandably angry and alienated leftists to keep in mind going forward.

First, the U.S. electoral system is a two-party regime by design. It has been from the start. And the notion that we are going to get something seriously progressive done via third and fourth presidential candidates under that system is every bit as much of a pipe dream as the notion of lefties seizing power in the Democratic Party.

The high-water mark of third-party, democratic socialist presidential politics in the United States is Eugene Debs getting 6 percent—that’s right, 6 percent, and a great, Christlike candidate to boot—of the popular vote in 1912. And we don’t even elect presidents by popular majority vote in the U.S., anyway.

Want viable third-party candidates for the top elective offices in the U.S.? Buy some yellow traffic vests and hit the streets to join France’s Gilets Jaunes in calling for a new constitution that privileges real, popular sovereignty, bourgeois representative democracy. Demand the establishment of a constituent assembly to draft a new charter with new rules of the electoral game, including (for starters) full public financing and proportional representation, an end to the insane Electoral College, an end to the ridiculous apportionment of two U.S. senators to each state regardless of population, the abolition of gerrymandering, an end to voter suppression and felony disenfranchisement, and the drastic shortening of the campaign season. Without fundamental change in the institutional structure of U.S. electoral politics, which nobody seems to want to talk about beyond small circles, the third-party thing is just another way to waste scarce energy.

Second, if you don’t think it’s a big deal that the word “socialism” is now received favorably by majorities of Democrats and millennials, then you are too damn cynical for your own and the common good. So what if it lacks precise and fully radical definition in the national political culture? Why expect that? Meanwhile, think about it—four interrelated developments have taken the totalitarian fear-sting out of the word for millions upon millions of people living in what is still the world’s most powerful nation: 1) the end of the Cold War; 2) the miserable performance of oligarchic neoliberal capitalism as experienced by most of the majority working-class U.S. population; 3) the transparent absurdity of the American right’s constant redbaiting of almost everything to its left as “socialist;” 4) the remarkable success Sanders experienced running as a self-declared socialist in 2016.

Sorry, hyperalienated cynics, but that is a big freaking deal. It is nothing to sneeze at in a time when capitalism seems determined to turn the entire planet into a giant greenhouse-gas chamber.

Hard-core Sandernistas give Sanders excessive acclaim for legitimizing the word “socialism” in the U.S. The lion’s share of credit belongs to capitalism and to the ironies of its victory over the Soviet Union. Capital’s Cold War triumph helped give free rein to rapacious global capital while depriving the capitalist powers of the tyrannical Stalinist foil that let them easily equate socialism with authoritarian dungeons and totalitarian thought-police.

Still, Sanders has played a significant role in raising the United States’ new democratic socialist potential. His success can help actual socialists to his left advance a more meaningful and genuinely anti-capitalist (not merely and oxymoronic “moral capitalist”) definition of the term.

Third, as I have previously explained here and elsewhere, Medicare-for-all (single-payer health care) is a powerful and sweeping reform, with revolutionary implications for ordinary and working-class people’s ability to fight class rule and its partners: sexism, racism, imperialism, nativism and ecocide.

Fourth, we have no choice but to get behind and then push to the left the Green New Deal, even with its current insufficiently radical formulation in the hands of welcome novices like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The climate-crisis clock is ticking with ever greater ice-sheet melting and rainforest-ruining urgency every day. If environmental catastrophe isn’t averted over the next 10 to 20 years through drastic green policy change within and beyond the United States (the homeland and headquarters of the fossil fuel industry’s almost unimaginably evil project of turning the entire planet into a greenhouse-gas chamber), then nothing else we on the actual left care about is going to matter very much. We’ll just be calling for the more equal sharing out of a poisoned pie, the turning upside-down of a disastrously overheated world. Refusing to get on board with the Green New Deal because it isn’t yet fully anti-capitalist and radically ecosocialist is foolish. It is, in fact, “making the perfect enemy of the good.”

Fifth, we on the actual left should look forward to the debate that a robust new Sanders campaign can force on the Democratic Party. Already the mainstream corporate Dem politicos and pundits are lining up with the standard charge—certain to be lobbed at Sanders again and again as the election cycle deepens—that there’s “just no realistic way to pay for” the supposedly “fantastic,” “unrealistic,” “extreme,” “radical” and “socialist” things (such as single-payer health care, a green jobs programs, free college, expanded Social Security, etc.) that Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez want. This will be a good moment for an actual left to speak up. In accord with the limited vision of the 1967 AFL-CIO-backed Freedom Budget, Sanders will insist that we can afford the good progressive things that most Americans want simply by taxing the wealthy few and their corporations. He’ll hold back from courageously and honestly acknowledging that we’ll have to take huge slices out of that great, unmentionable institutional and budgetary elephant in the room—the Pentagon system—and that we’ll have to institute real popular control over the nation’s financial surplus and thus over its top financial institutions.

That will be bullshit. The truth is that we can’t bring social democracy and a desperately needed World War II-style environmental reconversion about without dismantling the war machine and bringing the nation’s unelected dictatorship of money to heel.

Let the debate proceed.

Sixth, it will be very instructive to millions to watch the dismal, demobilizing and dollar-drenched Democrats knife Sanders and rig the game against his majority-backed, progressive-populist agenda all over again in the 2020 primaries. The Democratic Party’s handlers can be expected to demonstrate again that they prefer to risk losing to the right, even a creeping-fascist, white-nationalist right, over losing to the left, even the very mildly social democratic left, in their own party. Even if they sneak past the GOP this time (as they occasionally do), their likely miserable capital- and empire-captive performance in office will remind millions of citizens who get it that the country needs socialism; that the time is long past when We the People can capture the Democratic Party and wield it for genuinely popular purposes that privilege people over profits; and that we need to embrace an actually left and socialist People’s Party that is intimately linked to great and locally rooted grassroots social movements that function beneath and beyond the election cycle.

An Israeli Teenager Defies His Country’s War Machine

Hilel Garmi’s phone is going straight to voicemail and all I’m hoping is that he’s not back in prison. I’ll soon learn that he is.

Prison 6 is a military prison. It’s situated in the Israeli coastal town of Atlit, a short walk from the Mediterranean Sea and less than an hour’s drive from Hilel’s home. It was constructed in 1957 following the Sinai War between Israel and Egypt to house disciplinary cases from the Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF.

Hilel has already been locked up six times. “I can smell the sea from my cell, especially at night when everything is quiet,” he tells me in one of our phone conversations. I’m 6,000 miles away in Chicago, but Hilel and I have regularly been discussing his ordeal as an Israeli war resister, so it makes me nervous that, this time around, I can’t reach him at all.

A recent high-school graduate with dark hair and a big smile, he’s only 19 and still lives with his parents in Yodfat, an Israeli town of less than 900 people in the northern part of the country. It’s 155 miles to Damascus (if such a trip were possible, which, of course, it isn’t), a two-hour drive down the coast to Tel Aviv, and a four-hour drive to besieged Gaza.

Yodfat itself could be a set for a Biblical movie, with its dry rolling hills, ancient ruins, and pastoral landscape. The town exports flower bulbs, as well as organic goat cheese, and notably supports the Misgav Waldorf School that Hilel’s mother helped found. Hilel is proud of his mom. After all, people commute from all over Israel to attend the school.

He is a rarity in his own land, one of only a handful of refuseniks living in Israel. Each year roughly 30,000 18 year olds are drafted into the IDF, although 35% of such draftees manage to avoid military service for religious reasons. A far tinier percentage publicly refuses to fight for moral and political reasons to protest their country’s occupation of Palestinian lands. The exact numbers are hard to find. I’ve asked war resister groups in Israel, but no one seems to have any. Hilel’s estimate: between five and 15 refuseniks a year.

“I’ve thought the occupation of Palestine was immoral at least since I was in eighth grade,” he told me. “But it was the March of Return that played a large role in sustaining the courage to say no to military service.”

The Great March of Return began in the besieged Gaza Strip on March 30, 2018, the 42nd anniversary of the day in 1976 that Israeli police shot and killed six Palestinian citizens of Israel as they protested the government’s expropriation of land. During the six-month protest movement that followed in 2018, Israeli soldiers killed another 141 demonstrators, while nearly 10,000 were injured, including 919 children, all shot.

“I couldn’t be a part of that,” he said. “I’d rather be in jail.”

However, after 37 days in prison, it was the letter Hilel received from Abu Artema, a key Palestinian organizer of that march, which provided him with his greatest inspiration. It read in part:

“Your decision is what will help end this dark period inflicted on Palestinians, and at the same time mitigate the fears of younger Israeli generations who were born into a complicated situation and a turbulent geographical area deprived of security and peace… I believe the solution is near and possible. It will not require more than the courage to take initiative and set a new perspective, after traditional solutions have failed to achieve a just settlement. Let us fight together for human rights, for a country that is democratic for all its citizens, and for Israelis and Palestinians to live together based on citizenship and equality, not segregation and racism.”

“This letter excited me a great deal,” Hilel said. “It’s Palestinians like Artema who have the true courage, the kind that can only come from the moral authority of those resisting occupation and violent oppression. This type of authority is much stronger than the forces that occupy Palestine.”

After trying yet again to reach him by phone, I send Hilel a Facebook message:

“I hope everything is all right. Call me when you can. By the way, I was listening to this song and it reminded me of you. Stay strong, brother.”

I attach a YouTube video of “The World’s Greatest” by Bonnie “Prince” Billy:

I’m that little bit of hope

With my back against the ropes.

I can feel it

I’m the world’s greatest…”

War Resister to War Resister

As a war resister myself while serving in the U.S. Army — I was protesting America’s unending wars across the Greater Middle East — I’ve wondered a lot about what it means to be one in Israel, a country where an antiwar movement is almost non-existent. My friends in the U.S. who are familiar with the militarization of Israel and the population’s overwhelming supportfor their country’s still-expanding occupation respect what Hilel is doing, but wonder about the political purpose of an essay like this one about a war resister who lives in a country where such creatures are rarer than a snowy day in Jerusalem.

A valid point: the Israeli antiwar movement (if you can even call it a movement at this moment) is a long, long way from making a dent in the occupation, no less ending it, and I wouldn’t want to convey false hope about what such refuseniks mean to the larger question of Palestinian liberation.

Still, I talk to Hilel because I know how much it would have meant to me if someone had contacted me when I was still resisting the Global War on Terror within the 2nd Ranger Battalion nearly 15 years ago. If I had known that there were others like me or at least others ready to support me, it would have made my own sense of isolation during the six months I spent on lockdown inside my barracks less intolerable.

There’s more, though. Each time Hilel and I speak, I feel like I’m the one being energized by the conversation. He’s smart, reads a lot of the books I also read (despite the 22-year age difference between us), and has a passion for rock climbing in the Shagor mountain range. More than anything else, though, he has a kind of energy that I identify only with those who are standing up for a principle, whatever the repercussions for their own future. He exhibits no misgivings about what he’s doing, but somehow remains remarkably grounded in reality.

“It’s hard being rejected by friends and family who have never questioned the occupation,” he tells me in one of our phone conversations. (His English, by the way, is superb.) “Very few in my class agree with what I’m doing. But I believe in what I’m doing. That is the most important thing. Although, who knows, my decision to resist may have a positive ripple effect in a way we can’t appreciate at this point in time.”

He tells me all this in a tone that feels both light and confident, the very opposite of what you might imagine from a teenager who had at that moment been jailed six times in a single year and expected more of the same. His voice is authentic. It’s all his and draws strength from a self-possessed sense of the truth.

Like many, I’ve been exhausted and depressed by Donald Trump’s presidency. His administration represents a dark step back when it comes to social-justice issues around the world and makes me question the time I still spend organizing against America’s endless wars. The ship appears to be sinking, no matter what I do, and since the election I’ve found myself asking why I shouldn’t try to just shut out the world.

In such a context, talking with Hilel has been a tonic for me. After our conversations, the all-too-familiar feelings of depression and hopelessness fade, at least briefly, while his courage and optimism energize me. So part of my urge in writing this piece is to convey that very feeling, hoping others will be energized, too.  It’s a tall order these days, but worth a try.

The Adventures of a Teenage Refusenik

After a week in which my calls frustratingly keep going to voicemail, I finally hear back. “They arrested me again,” he informs me. “I expected it, but wasn’t sure they would come back a seventh time.” Surprisingly, he’s still in good spirits.

The Israeli government distinguishes between pacifists who reject the use of force for any reason and those with “selective conscience,” or those who specifically refuse to fight in protest over the occupation of Palestinian territory. The latter are treated far more severely and are significantly more likely to find themselves in prison.

Hilel’s public declaration — which has been circulating in left-leaning outletsin Israel — on why he continues to refuse military service couldn’t be clearer on where he stands and helps explain why the Israeli government has sent him back to prison so regularly:

“I cannot enlist, because from a very young age I was educated to believe that all humans are equal. I do not believe in some common denominator which all Jews share and which sets them apart from Arabs. I do not believe that I should be treated differently from a child born in Gaza or in Jenin, and I do not believe that the sorrows or the happiness of any of us are more important than those of anyone else… As a person who was born into the more powerful side of the hierarchy between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, I was given the power as well as the obligation to try to fight that hierarchy.”

Refuseniks like Hilel generally spend 20 days in jail. They are then released for a day or two and immediately reprocessed back into prison.

“There is a lot of sitting around in prison. I read a lot. It’s a military prison so I’m in with people who are in trouble for a variety of things while serving in the IDF.” There are different cellblocks (A, B, and C) designated for various infractions — A being the “easiest,” C the “hardest,” according to Hilel:

“I started in A, but worked my way up to C because I continue to refuse to fight. C is where those who commit assaults of varying degree within the IDF are housed. C is used as a threat by the jailors. I was in C for a short time because I wouldn’t tell a group of demonstrators protesting my arrest to disperse. After they left on their own, they sent me back to B.”

I ask him how many protestors there were. “About 50,” he replies, “But they gave me a lot of strength. Atlit, where the jail is, is not a very big town, so to have anyone out there at all was encouraging.”

An increasing number of Israelis oppose the occupation and some have formed groups to help support war resisters. Yesh Gvul, an organization that backs refuseniks like Hilel (and to which he belongs), for instance, first put me in touch with him. Palestinians like Abu Artema are also reaching out to refuseniks. Palestianian and Israeli activists are working to overcome the barriers that divide them, searching for creative ways to connect and organize against the occupation. In December 2018, Israeli activists, including conscientious objectors, held a video meeting with Artema. “Those who refuse to take part in the attacks on the demonstrators in Gaza, who express their natural right to protest against the siege, those who refuse to take part in the attacks on Gaza’s citizens — they stand on the right side of history,” Artema said during the call.

And now, having grown strangely attached to Hilel, I feel a small flood of relief that he’s on the phone with me once again. I ask if we can Skype so that I can actually see him and he promptly agrees. It’s December and he’s wearing a ski hat. He’s sitting in his parent’s kitchen and his eyes glimmer. As he talks, I’m taken back to my own 19-year-old self, to the Rory Fanning who was still trying to fit in, get decent grades, and have fun. I certainly wasn’t taking on my government, which only makes me more impressed that he is.

He and I chat more about his family and his town. Yodfat was once a place governed by a group of people called the Kibbutz (from the Hebrew word kvutza, meaning “group”). Inspired in part by Karl Marx, the Kibbutz movement strove to live communally and maintain deep connections to agriculture. “It’s still a progressive town,” he says, “and most people, at least as lip service, will say they oppose the occupation. However, they see obedience to the current law and general support for the military — even though some of them may admit it’s an undemocratic one — as far more important.”

I ask him about the Boycott Divestment Sanction, or BDS, movement. BDS is Palestinian-led and inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement. It calls on others globally to pressure Israel to comply with international law and end the occupation of Palestine.

“The people of Israel feel isolated from the rest of the world,” Hilel responds. “The government and media constantly remind them how Iran and so many others want to destroy the country. The effects of anti-Semitism echo in everyone’s head. I think BDS only reinforces the idea that the government promotes that Jews are rejected by the world.”

I remind him how an earlier BDS-style movement helped end apartheid in South Africa and ask if he thinks it might be an effective way to end Israel’s system of apartheid, too. “Maybe,” he responds hesitantly. “I haven’t thought about it too much. I could certainly see how it could.” I don’t press the issue, but as ever I’m struck by how open he is, even on a topic that the Israeli government clearly feels deeply threatened by.

As I can see via Skype, the sun is going down behind Hilel. It’s still morning here in Chicago, but six in the evening in Yodfat, so I let him go back to his embattled teenage life.

And I wonder yet again how I’ll write about that life, his dilemmas, and the unnerving world both of us find ourselves in. Then, I’m reminded of how encouraging it felt to have many active-duty soldiers reach out to me over the years after hearing my own story of war resistance. I know that there are surprising numbers of people in the U.S. military who question America’s endless wars, trillion-dollar national security budgets, and the near-robotic thank-you-for-your-service patriotism of so many in this country, because I’ve met or talked to many of them and even seen a few over the years break ranks as I did (and as, in a very different situation, Hilel has done). And obviously there must be many others out there I know nothing about.

News travels fast these days. Support networks like Veterans for Peace and About Face continue to be built up in this country to support soldiers who question their mission. And I know that, in Israel, there are others who think the way Hilel does and are just waiting for an atmosphere of greater support to develop so that they, too, can begin to resist the injustices of their moment and their country. That, of course, is what Hilel has helped accomplish. Stories like his create openings for others to act. Sooner or later, those others, inspired by him and perhaps by similar figures to come, will inevitably follow their lead.

Just as I’m finishing this piece, he suddenly calls to tell me that he’s been released — for good! The Israeli Defense Forces have freed him from his military obligation. At first, a ruling against releasing him came down from a committee of civilians and officers controlled by the IDF, because his refusal to fight stemmed from reasons that were “political” rather than from “conscience.” Later that day, however, a higher-ranking officer overturned that group’s decision and, after his seventh imprisonment, Hilel was suddenly free.

He isn’t sure why the decision was overturned, but perhaps the higher-ups finally concluded that he simply wouldn’t break under their pressure. Quite the opposite, a determined 19-year-old resister might only get more attention if they kept sending him back to jail. His courage might, in fact, motivate others to resist, the last thing the IDF wants right now.

I look forward to staying in touch with Hilel. He tells me he plans on working with disadvantaged youth in Israel for the next two years. I know there are great things in store for him. Interacting with a fellow war-resister across continents and seas these last few months, and seeing him go from prison to freedom in a matter of weeks, has reinvigorated my own tired sprit in ways I had not anticipated when I sent my first note to him.

Trump, Kim Facing Big Challenges at Hanoi Summit

HANOI, Vietnam— After long journeys to Vietnam, U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are in place for their second summit to address perhaps the world’s biggest security challenge: Kim’s pursuit of a nuclear program that stands on the verge of realistically threatening targets around the planet.

Although many experts are skeptical Kim will give up the nuclear weapons he likely sees as his best guarantee of continued rule, there was a palpable, carnival-like excitement among many in Hanoi as the final preparations were made for the meeting. There were also huge traffic jams in the already congested streets.

The two leaders are to meet over two days, first at dinner on Wednesday followed by meetings on Thursday.

Trump arrived late Tuesday in Air Force One after a flight that included refueling stops in England and Qatar. He shook hands with dignitaries on a red carpet that was flanked by members of the Vietnamese armed forces dressed in crisp white uniforms. The route to his hotel was decorated with American, North Korean and Vietnamese flags, and adults and children peered out upper floor windows holding up cellphones to capture Trump’s arrival.

“Tremendous crowds, and so much love!” the U.S. president tweeted.

Kim’s journey to the summit, though shorter, was even more protracted. To get to Hanoi, he took a nearly 70-hour train ride through southern China and then traveled from a Vietnamese border town in his limousine. Hours ahead of his border crossing at Dong Dang, footage from Japanese TV network TBS showed Kim taking a pre-dawn smoke break at a train station in China, a woman who appeared to be his sister, Kim Yo Jong, holding a crystal ashtray at the ready.

In Hanoi, soldiers, police and international journalists thronged the streets outside his hotel and hundreds of eager citizens stood behind barricades hoping to see the North Korean leader. As flags from the three countries fluttered in a chilly drizzle, dozens of cameras flashed and some citizens screamed and used their mobile phones to capture Kim’s rock-star-like arrival.

“I like him,” local resident Van Dang Luu, who works at a nearby bank, said of Kim. “He is very young and he is very interesting. And he is very powerful,” she said. “Trump is not young, but I think he is very powerful.”

Kim ventured out of his locked-down hotel and spent Tuesday traveling around the Vietnamese capital in his armored limousine. With a squad of bodyguards in tow, he visited sections of Hanoi, including his nation’s embassy where a loud cheer went up as he entered the compound.

The leaders first met last June in Singapore, a summit that was long on historic pageantry but short on any enforceable agreements for North Korea to give up its nuclear arsenal.

North Korea has spent decades, at great economic sacrifice, building its nuclear program, and there is widespread skepticism among experts that it will give away that program cheaply.

Trump laid out ultimate goals for both the U.S. and Kim in an appearance before the nation’s governors Monday before leaving Washington: “We want denuclearization, and I think he’ll have a country that will set a lot of records for speed in terms of an economy.”

Trump has praised Pyongyang for ceasing missile tests, and he has appeared to ease up on demanding a timeline for disarmament. Kim is seeking relief from crushing U.S. sanctions.

Even as he tamped down expectations that he’ll achieve big strides toward denuclearization, Trump was still eager to claim an attention-grabbing victory to offset the political turmoil he faces at home.

That eagerness for a victory, however, has spawned worries across world capitals about what Trump might be willing to give up in the name of a win. There seems less mystery about his North Korean counterpart. Survival of the Kim regime is always the primary concern.

Trump was the driving force behind this week’s summit, aiming to re-create the global spectacle of his first meeting with Kim last year.

Four main goals emerged from the first Trump-Kim summit: establishing new relations between the nations, building a new peace on the entire Korean Peninsula, completing denuclearization of the peninsula and recovering U.S. POW/MIA remains from the Korean War.

While some remains have been returned to the United States, little has been achieved on the other points. Korean and American negotiators have not settled on either the parameters of denuclearization or a timetable for the removal of both Korean weapons and American sanctions.

“I’m not in a rush. I don’t want to rush anybody, I just don’t want testing. As long as there’s no testing, we’re happy,” Trump told the governors on Sunday.

As host, Vietnam is eager to show off its huge economic and development improvements since the destruction of the Vietnam War, but the country also tolerates no dissent and is able to provide the kind of firm hand not allowed by more democratic potential hosts.

Climate Feedback Loop Could Create a ‘World Without Clouds’

As people across the globe mobilize to demand bold action to combat the climate crisis and scientific findings about looming “environmental breakdown” pile up, a startling new study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience warns that human-caused global warming could cause stratocumulus clouds to totally disappear in as little as a century, triggering up to 8°C (14°F) of additional warming.

Stratocumulus clouds cover about two-thirds of the Earth and help keep it cool by reflecting solar radiation back to space. Recent research has suggested that planetary warming correlates with greater cloud loss, stoking fears about a feedback loop that could spell disaster.

For this study, researchers at the California Institute of Technology used a supercomputer simulation to explore what could lead these low-lying, lumpy clouds to vanish completely. As science journalist Natalie Wolchover laid out in a lengthy piece for Quanta Magazine titled A World Without Clouds:

The simulation revealed a tipping point: a level of warming at which stratocumulus clouds break up altogether. The disappearance occurs when the concentration of CO2 in the simulated atmosphere reaches 1,200 parts per million [ppm]—a level that fossil fuel burning could push us past in about a century, under “business-as-usual” emissions scenarios. In the simulation, when the tipping point is breached, Earth’s temperature soars 8 degrees Celsius, in addition to the 4 degrees of warming or more caused by the CO2 directly. …

To imagine 12 degrees of warming, think of crocodiles swimming in the Arctic and of the scorched, mostly lifeless equatorial regions during the [Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM]. If carbon emissions aren’t curbed quickly enough and the tipping point is breached, “that would be truly devastating climate change,” said Caltech’s Tapio Schneider, who performed the new simulation with Colleen Kaul and Kyle Pressel.

Quanta Magazine also broke down the study’s key findings in a short video shared on social media:

BREAKING: A new simulation has revealed that global warming could cause stratocumulus clouds to disappear in as little as a century, which would add 8°C (14°F) of extra warming. https://t.co/MbNqDO89bQ pic.twitter.com/doy03rTVBF

— Quanta Magazine (@QuantaMagazine) February 25, 2019

The study elicited alarm from climate campaigners along with calls for the “radical, disruptive changes” to society’s energy and economic systems that scientists and experts have repeatedly said are necessary to prevent climate catastrophe:

New study finds that business-as-usual global warming could produce…a world without clouds. Think about that a minutehttps://t.co/x68PBuhB0B

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) February 25, 2019

The future is radical. We face a stark choice btw radical, disruptive changes to our physical world or radical, disruptive changes to our political and economic systems to avoid those outcomes. The status quo is not one of the options on the table – get it yet “centrists”? https://t.co/M6VCXgAbfv

— Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) February 25, 2019

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has surged from about 280 ppm to more than 410 ppm today. Although concentrations will continue to rise as long as the international community maintains unsustainable activities that generate greenhouse gas emissions, some observers pointed out that atmospheric carbon hitting 1,200 ppm is far from a foregone conclusion.

And, as Penn State University climatologist Michael E. Mann noted, “if we let CO2levels get anywhere near that high we’re already in big trouble.”

That’s just one model — and it’s at co2 levels of 1200ppm (more than 4 x pre-industrial). If we let co2 levels get anywhere near that high we’re already in big trouble… https://t.co/BWSODmOePp

— Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) February 25, 2019

However, as Washington Post climate reporter Chris Mooney concluded in a series of tweets, “the point is not that this scary scenario is going to happen. Given the current trajectory of climate policy and renewables, it seems unlikely. Rather, the key point—and it’s a big deal—is that there are many things we don’t understand about the climate system and there could be key triggers out there, which set off processes that you can’t easily stop.”

In other words, as MIT professor Thomas Levenson put it: “The really terrifying aspect of this research is the reminder that we do not yet know all the ways catastrophic outcomes can emerge from this uncontrolled experiment on our only habitat.”

Smart thread re the no-cloud climate change piece I just tweeted. TL/DR: The really terrifying aspect of this research is the reminder that we do not yet know all the ways catastrophic outcomes can emerge from this uncontrolled experiment on our only habitat. https://t.co/I7BZkcRP0w

— Thomas Levenson (@TomLevenson) February 25, 2019