Chris Hedges's Blog, page 339

Airport Workers Plan Protests Over Possibility of Another Shutdown

With congressional negotiators still working on a deal to keep the federal government open after the current stopgap funding measure expires on Friday, Feb. 15, airport workers are already planning mass protests for next Saturday in case the government shuts down again.

Air traffic controllers and other airport employees were widely credited for creating the pressure that ended the longest shutdown in American history last month, and Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) president Sara Nelson told New York Magazine on Friday that workers are gearing up to mobilize if congressional negotiators fail to reach a deal—or if President Donald Trump unilaterally scuttles any agreement.

As New York Magazine‘s Sarah Jones reported, “Nelson says that the union will be out leafleting in airports in 80 major cities next week ahead of Saturday’s demonstrations.”

“We are also working very hard to get information out to all of our members about what’s at stake,” Nelson told New York Magazine. “We need people to fully understand what the issues are so that we can be prepared to respond potentially with withholding our service, if that’s what it takes to stop a continuation of the shutdown.”

According to Jones, the AFA is not alone in preparing to mobilize if the government shuts down again, once more putting the pay of hundreds of thousands of federal workers at risk:

Nelson cites the American Federation of Teachers as ‘a very strong ally’ in addition to Unite Here, which represents many federal subcontractors who have still not received backpay for paychecks withheld during the shutdown. Reached by phone on Friday afternoon, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, told New York that AFT is ‘very concerned’ about the shutdown’s impact on both the aviation industry and its unions. ‘We are working together to do what is impossible to do alone,’ she said.

As Common Dreams reported, air traffic controller unions warned throughout the previous government shutdown that forcing airport employees to work without pay dramatically increases flight safety risks.

On the day the government shutdown ended last month, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) halted flights into New York’s LaGuardia Airport, citing air traffic controller shortages caused by the shutdown.

Speaking to In These Times on Friday, Nelson—who called for a general strike during the previous funding lapse—emphasized how truly “dangerous” a continuation of the government shutdown would be.

“We’re going to continue running as fast as we can right up to February 15, so that we can take action immediately on February 16 if necessary,” Nelson said.

Elizabeth Warren Launches 2020 Presidential Campaign

Vowing to take on a “rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) officially launched her 2020 presidential campaign in Lawrence, Massachusetts on Saturday with a call for bold reforms to America’s dysfunctional economic and political status quo.

Noting that President Donald Trump is an alarming symptom of America’s political crisis, but not its cause, Warren declared that “we can’t afford to just tinker around the edges—a tax credit here, a regulation there.”

“Our fight is for big, structural change,” said the Massachusetts senator, who throughout her speech invoked popular policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, a wealth tax, and ambitious criminal justice reform.

During her remarks, Warren repeatedly lambasted the fundamental injustice of a polical system that rewards those with the deepest pockets at the expense of the most vulnerable.

“If you don’t have money and you don’t have connections, Washington doesn’t want to hear from you,” Warren said. “That is corruption, plain and simple, and we need to call it out.”

“Rich guys have been waging class warfare against hardworking people for decades,” the senator added. “I say it’s time to fight back.”

As remedies to America’s deep-seated political and economic crises, Warren proposed a wide array of reforms, including overturning Citizens United, barring members of Congress from accepting lobbyist donations, and scrapping “every single voter suppression rule that racist politicians use to steal votes from people of color.”

Warren also vowed to spend no time “sucking up to a bunch of big donors on Wall Street” and promised to run a campaign free of PAC money and billionaire donations.

“Millions and millions and millions of families are struggling to survive in a system that has been rigged,” the senator said. “We are here to say enough is enough.”

Watch Warren’s first campaign event below:

How the Media Uses Venezuela’s Poverty to Demonize Leftist Leaders

Socialism—whatever that means—is in vogue right now. A recent Gallup poll (8/13/18) found that a majority of millennials view socialism favorably, preferring it to capitalism. Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in the United States, while new leftist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (AOC) policies of higher taxes on the wealthy, free healthcare and public college tuition are highly popular—even among Republican voters (FAIR.org,1/23/19).

Alarmed by the growing threat of progressive policies at home, the establishment has found a one-word weapon to deploy against the rising tide: Venezuela. The trick is to attack any political figure or movement even remotely on the left by claiming they wish to turn the country into a “socialist wasteland” (Fox News, 2/2/19) run by a corrupt dictatorship, leaving its people hungry and devastated.

Leading the charge have been Fox News and other conservative outlets. One Fox opinion piece (1/25/19) claimed that Americans should be “absolutely disgusted” by the “fraud” of Bernie Sanders and Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, as they “continue to promote a system that is causing mass starvation and the collapse of a country,” warning that is exactly what their failed socialist policies would bring to the US. (Back in the real world, while Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez identify as socialists, Warren is a self-described capitalist, and Booker is noted for his ties to Wall Street, whose support for his presidential bid he has reportedly been soliciting.) A second Fox News article (1/27/19) continues in the same vein, warning that, “At the heart of Venezuela’s collapse is a laundry list of socialist policies that have decimated its economy.”

In an article entitled “Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and the Starving Children of Venezuela,” the Washington Examiner (6/15/17) warned its readers to “beware the socialist utopia,” describing it as a dystopia where children go hungry thanks to socialism. The Wall Street Journal (1/28/19) recently condemned Sanders for his support of a “dictator,” despite the fact Bernie has strongly criticized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and dismissed Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, as a “dead Communist dictator” (Reuters, 6/1/16).

More supposedly centrist publications have continued this line of attack. The New York Times’ Bret Stephens (1/25/19) argued: “Venezuela is a socialist catastrophe. In the age of AOC, the lesson must be learned again”—namely, that “socialism never works,” as “20 years of socialism” has led to “the ruin of a nation.” The Miami Herald(2/1/19) cast shame on Sanders and AOC for arguing for socialism in the face of such overwhelming evidence against it, describing the left’s refusal to back self-appointed president Juan Guaidó, someone whom less than 20 percent of Venezuelans had even heard of, let alone voted for, as “morally repugnant.”’

This useful weapon to be used against the left can only be sustained by withholding a great number of key facts—chief among them, the US role in Venezuela’s devastation. US sanctions, according to the Venezuelan opposition’s economics czar, are responsible for a halving of the country’s oil output (FAIR.org, 12/17/18). The UN Human Rights Council has formally condemned the US and discussed reparations to be paid, with one UN special rapporteur describing Trump’s sanctions as a possible “crime against humanity” (London Independent, 1/26/19). This has not been reported by any the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN or any other national US “resistance” news outlet, which have been only too quick to support Trump’s regime change plans (FAIR.org, 1/25/19).

Likewise, the local US-backed opposition’s role in the economic crisis is barely mentioned. The opposition, which controls much of the country’s food supply, has officially accepted responsibility for conducting an “economic war” by withholding food and other key goods.

For example, the monolithic Empresas Polar controls the majority of the flour production and distribution crucial for making arepa cornbread, Venezuela’s staple food. Polar’s chair is Leopoldo Lopez, national coordinator of Juan Guaidó’s Popular Will party, while its president is Lorenzo Mendoza, who considered running for president against Maduro in the 2018 elections that caused pandemonium in the media (FAIR.org, 5/23/18).

Conspicuously, it’s the products that Polar has a near-monopoly in that are often in shortest supply. This is hardly a secret, but never mentioned in the copious stories (CNN, 5/14/14, Bloomberg, 3/16/17, Washington Post, 5/22/17, NPR, 4/7/17) focusing on bread lines in the country.

Also rarely commented on was the fact that multiple international election observer missions declared the 2018 elections free and fair, and that Venezuelan government spending as a proportion of GDP (often considered a barometer of socialism) is actually lower than the US’s, and far lower than most of Europe’s, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Regardless of these bothersome facts, the media has continued to present Venezuela’s supposedly socialist dictatorship as solely responsible for its crisis as a warning to any progressives who get the wrong idea. So useful is this tool that it is being used to attack progressive movements around the world. The Daily Express (2/3/19) and Daily Mail (2/3/19) condemned UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn for his “defense” of a “dictator,” while the Daily Telegraph(2/3/19) warned that the catastrophe of Venezuela is Labour’s blueprint for Britain. Meanwhile, the Greek leftist party Syriza’s support for Maduro (the official position of three-quarters of UN member states) was condemned as “shameful” (London Independent, 1/29/19).

“Venezuela” is also used as a one-word response to shut down debate and counter any progressive idea or thought. While the panel on ABC’s The View (7/23/18) discussed progressive legislation like Medicare for All and immigration reform, conservative regular Meghan McCain responding by invoking Venezuela: “They’re starving to death” she explained, leaving the other panelists bemused.

President Trump has also used it. In response to criticism from Senator Elizabeth Warren over his “Pocahontas” jibe, he replied that she would “make our country into Venezuela” (Reuters, 10/15/18).

The weapon’s effectiveness can only be sustained through a media in lockstep with the government’s regime-change goals. That the media is fixated on the travails of a relatively small and unimportant country in America’s “backyard,” and that the picture of Venezuela is so shallow, is not a mistake. Rather, the simplistic narrative of a socialist dictatorship starving its own people provides great utility as a weapon for the establishment to beat back the domestic “threat” of socialism, by associating movements and figures such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jeremy Corbyn with an evil caricature they have carefully crafted.

Report: Trump Administration Holding Talks With Venezuelan Military

In an effort to encourage defections from Venezuela’s elected President Nicolas Maduro, the Trump administration is reportedly holding secret talks with members of the Venezuelan military as top U.S. cabinet officials continue to issue aggressive threats and push for regime change.

According to Reuters, which cited an anonymous senior White House official, the U.S. “is holding direct communications with members of Venezuela’s military urging them to abandon President Nicolas Maduro and is also preparing new sanctions aimed at increasing pressure on him.”

“The Trump administration expects further military defections from Maduro’s side,” Reuters reported, “despite only a few senior officers having done so since opposition leader Juan Guaido declared himself interim president last month, earning the recognition of the United States and dozens of other countries.”

As Common Dreams reported, Guaido’s move to declare himself “interim president”—which was denounced by experts and activists as the beginnings of a possible coup—was highly coordinated with the Trump White House, which vowed ahead of time to back the opposition leader in his attempt to seize power.

In an interview with Reuters, the anonymous Trump official said the White House believes the few officers who have defected from Maduro are the “first couple pebbles before we start really seeing bigger rocks rolling down the hill.”

News that the Trump administration is holding direct talks with members of the Venezuelan military comes after Venezuelan government officials said they discovered a crate of weapons and ammunition delivered by a U.S.-based plane this week to an airport in the city of Valencia.

Venezuela’s vice minister of citizen security said the weapons shipment was “destined for criminal groups and terrorist actions in the country, financed by the fascist extreme right and the government of the United States.”

With hawkish Trump White House officials like national security adviser John Bolton continuing to warn that U.S. military intervention in Venezuela remains “on the table,” Maduro published an open letter to the American public urging opposition to “warmongering and war.”

“I say this to the people of the United States of America to warn them of the serious and dangerous intent that factions in the White House have for invading Venezuela, which would have unforeseeable consequences for my nation and for all of the Americas,” Maduro wrote.

“The people of the United States should know that this complex, multi-form aggression is being carried out with total impunity and in flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter, which expressly forbids the threat or use of force, among other principles and resolutions in the pursuit of peace and relations of friendship amongst nations,” he added.

While criticizing Maduro for his crackdown on protesters and other abuses, progressive lawmakers in the U.S. have denounced the Trump administration’s interference in Venezuela’s internal political affairs.

“We must condemn the use of violence against unarmed protesters and the suppression of dissent,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote last month. “However, we must learn the lessons of the past and not be in the business of regime change or supporting coups—as we have in Chile, Guatemala, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic.”

Residential Racism

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“Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism”
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“Sundown Towns : A Hidden Dimension of American Racism,” 2018 Edition

A book by James W. Loewen

Racism has despoiled our nation from its very inception. Slavery and Jim Crow have killed, maimed and degraded millions of human beings of African descent for centuries—a tragic legacy that continues, sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly, into the early decades of the 21st century. Almost everyone knows the major features of this sorry history. Students who suffer through the distorted and inadequate history that this book’s author, James Loewen, chronicles in his magnificent “Lies My Teacher Told Me” usually learn at least something about American racism, even while they fail to learn many of its grimmer details.

In this 2018 edition of “Sundown Towns,” an update of his groundbreaking 2005 version, Loewen fills in some of the gaps of public ignorance. His findings are appalling. He reveals that racism in America has been even more pervasive, more systemic, more geographically widespread, and therefore more grotesque than most people—even many progressives and well-meaning anti-racists—could ever imagine. The narrative in this supremely important book is chilling. It is essential to fully comprehend that, despite the formal end of segregation and the advances of the modern civil rights movement, racism has pervaded the entire fabric of American life.

Click here to read long excerpts from “Sundown Towns” at Google Books.

Loewen pulls no punches in the preface to his new edition: “[S]undown towns kept out African Americans. Some excluded other groups, such as Mexican Americans, Native Americans, or Asian Americans, Jews, even Catholics, and Mormons. These places get called ‘sundown towns’ because some, in past decades, placed signs at their city limits typically saying some version of ‘Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in [name of town].’”

Loewen’s new edition locates the history of sundown towns in the context of contemporary events, with the resurgence of racism in the Trump era and the resulting increase of overt white supremacist rhetoric and activity, but also with more energetic African-American resistance including the Black Lives Matter movement. In this  edition, Loewen has augmented his earlier research. He concludes that sundown towns are declining, but despite some progress, residential exclusionary practices in the United States remain a fundamental feature of institutional racism.

Since Loewen began his initial work, he has maintained an active research interest in the topic, including a website and a database of all the sundown towns he has been able to document. This is a remarkable resource for scholars, activists and laypersons alike.

The present book documents the “second generation” sundown town phenomenon. In the author’s home state of Illinois, by his estimate, there are still 507 sundown towns—two-thirds of the towns in the state. The new section of this remarkable book documents the recent developments in these segregated residential communities throughout the U.S. Fortunately, sundown towns are declining, suggesting a slow but steady change in the attitudes of the dominant white population in America.

Still, workforces in former sundown towns even now reflect the residual racism of the earlier exclusionary residential policies: Police officers, teachers, trash collectors and other jobs remain all or predominantly white. The ideology of white supremacy lingers, sometimes strongly, even while a few people of color begin moving into these towns in the 21st century.

As Loewen notes, racial jokes and invective remain. Black children especially feel isolated in largely white educational settings, where the curriculum remains Eurocentric and little or no treatment of African-American history and culture is available. Even more troubling, patterns of law enforcement continue the long and dishonorable pattern of racism. “Driving and Walking While Black” remains common; African-Americans continue to be targeted for minor traffic and other infractions in these formerly sundown towns. The former sundown town of Ferguson, Missouri, became internationally notorious, culminating in the egregious murder of Michael Brown in 2014. Racial profiling is all too alive in these locales and remains a powerful source of dread among African-Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities.

The majority of “Sundown Towns” involves the hidden history of this disgraceful phenomenon. Loewen’s point is striking: Until he published the first edition of this book, there was almost no literature about all-white towns in the United States. Of the relatively few people who knew anything about sundown towns, most probably thought it was a Deep South phenomenon. It was not. This book documents hundreds of non-Southerntowns that for decades excluded blacks from living within their limits. Many were well known, including towns where many famous American writers, entertainers, politicians and other celebrities lived and worked. Some were small, with as few as 500 residents, while others had well over 100,000.

The author asks many powerful questions in this volume, most notably why these towns have excluded blacks and other minority groups for so long, and why some still persist. We have made progress in certain areas of race relations in this country—in education, employment, some areas of politics and elsewhere. Although there has been some notable judicial backsliding in recent years, especially in voting rights and affirmative action, legal decisions have largely advanced civil rights since the mid-20th century. Legal segregation in schooling and elsewhere was ended with major Supreme Court and other rulings. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelley v. Kraemer explicitly ruled that restrictive racial covenants in housing could not be enforced. Fair housing laws are widespread throughout the nation. But informally, with the discriminatory practices of many real estate companies and agents, and perhaps developers like our current president, blacks have been excluded from all too many towns in the United States.

The deep-seated attitudes of white supremacy need to be faced directly. Millions of white Americans are willing to go on public transport with black passengers, eat in restaurants with black customers, send their children to school with black students, work with black colleagues, and do many other daily activities with black people. But they draw the line at having black neighbors; sometimes this is overt and sometimes it is unconscious, unacknowledged. In either case, it is profoundly racist and leads to the creation and perpetuation of sundown towns.

The substance of the 2005 edition of”Sundown Towns” provides cogent historical and sociological analyses of this hidden feature of American racism. Loewen shows, for example, how, in the era after Reconstruction, during the height of Jim Crow from 1890 to 1940, about 15,000 towns and suburbs went sundown. This was the “Nadir Period.” Still, 80 percent of all suburbs remained sundown well beyond that time frame.

Among the most brilliant—but appalling—parts of this book are Loewen’s accounts of the horrific acts of brutality that whites have committed against African-Americans and other “undesirables.” They reveal just how calculated white people have been to create and preserve their racially pure domains. The Ku Klux Klan, one of America’s oldest domestic terrorist organizations, has often perpetuated this violence. The Klan, as Loewen indicates, has found fertile recruiting grounds in sundown towns over the years, even at present. But most violence against blacks and other minorities have emerged without assistance from outsiders. When African-Americans finally managed to move into formerly all-white neighborhoods, residents themselves often resorted to threats, then actual violence.

“Sundown Towns”accounts a phenomenon that touched me personally and fundamentally informed the entire course of my life. Loewen examines the creation of the three white-only Levittowns in New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, begun in the early 1950s. Levitt & Sons, the largest postwar homebuilder in America, built 8 percent of postwar suburban housing—all sundown. The Levitt organization, headed by William Levitt, publicly and officially refused to sell to blacks. Levitt, himself a Jew, had earlier used restrictive covenants to ban Jews from developments he built. As he noted, “[i]t was strictly business.” Actually, it was strictly capitalism, a major incubator of racism.

My parents moved to Levittown, Pennsylvania, in the mid-1950s because housing there was affordable for a growing family. Unaware initially of its sundown status, my parents soon became aware of Levittown’s racism. They joined a few other families who met and conspired to help the first African-American family desegregate the town.

I was the oldest of four children and tagged along to the meetings before the first African-American family, Bill and Daisy Myers and their children, moved in on Aug. 17, 1957. They and their supporters, like my parents (and me), faced hostile racist mobs, death threats, vandalism and horrific harassment from neighbors. For weeks, these mobs gathered in front of the Myerses’ home, shouting racist epithets and making crude gestures. I witnessed the twisted face of bigotry at a young and impressionable age.

In September, we woke up to a large burning cross on our lawn. In December, I testified in a trial. The attorney general of Pennsylvania, Tom McBride, conducted the trial, though it was rare for the highest state legal official to serve as a trial attorney. I was 14 years old. McBride told me to only tell the truth, and not be afraid. I remember his compassion and consideration well. During the trial, I identified the head of the local “Betterment” committee, the organization that sought to rid Levittown of its first African-American residents. In open court, I testified that the Betterment Committee’s James Newell had called me a “nigger lover,” one of many hundreds of times that that repulsive appellation had been hurled at me during the Levittown crisis, and that on numerous nights, a motorcade, flying Confederate flags, would roar past our house.

The courageous Myers family weathered the racist storm and stayed, formally breaking the back of Levittown’s sundown status. I have written and taught about my experience as a young teenager for many decades. I have also given several oral histories about my experiences in Levittown. It catalyzed my life as a civil rights activist in the South, and in California and adjacent areas. It also fundamentally informed my work as a university teacher and as a writer and scholar. My early sundown experience made me a fervent anti-racist for life.

Loewen’s book features many of these real-life stories of sundown towns. Like all exemplary histories, it addresses the human realities that readers find especially engaging. These first-person accounts are crucial in understanding the horrific effects of sundown towns on allresidents, white and black alike. The volume also contains a substantial photographic section. The pictures are difficult to view. They contain images of lynchings and egregious racist language, but they are necessary to come to grips with this nation’s horrific racist past.

“Sundown Towns” ends with a comprehensive three-point program for local institutions, students and citizens in general to alleviate the continuing problem of residential racial segregation. He titles the final chapter, “The Remedy.” I admire his resolve; it is an especially valuable addition to this outstanding book. Still, like the late Derrick Bell and a few others, and after a lifetime of civil rights activism and teaching, I have concluded that American racism is intractable. Anti-racist action, however, is always desirable.

James Loewen is a national treasure. His works have alerted thousands of readers to the multifaceted existence and dangers of racism and other problems in America. “Sundown Towns,” like all his books, reflects the finest progressive and critical tradition of American scholarship. I take enormous pleasure in recommending them to my students. Trained as a sociologist, Loewen is really both a sociologist and a historian, working in the magnificent tradition of C. Wright Mills and Howard Zinn. I can offer no finer recommendation for this book.

 

Food & Water Watch: Carbon Tax Is a Sham

I spoke to Scott Edwards, the legal chief at Food & Water Watch, in order to discuss the activism of an organization with a name that defines why they’re so important in the modern world. Edwards is a lawyer who has spent his career fighting against the corruption that has festered in our system, in which corporations work to deceive the public and decrease their costs by polluting our environment.

In this interview, he talks about why so many on the left have fallen for the “carbon tax” sham, and why so many of our laws end up written by corporate lawyers trying to enrich their companies.

An excerpt from our interview follows below:

Lee Camp: A lot of the future is definitely being written by lawyers. Do you feel the best tactic to fight corporate destruction is in the courts? Or do you feel that it is just one of the tools in the toolbox?

Scott Edwards: It’s a tactic. The ultimate goal is to build the political power and to force our elected officials to represent the needs of people instead of the needs of corporations.

When you say that it’s lawyers that are writing these laws and policies they mean, more specifically, that it’s industry lawyers who’re writing these laws and policies today. Whether you’re talking about legislation around climate, food systems or water protection laws, the drafters are people from Monsanto, from ExxonMobil, from all the big industry groups.

All the big corporate lawyers who are actually writing our laws today are, obviously, doing it in a way that benefits their clients and makes them lots of money.

LC: You mentioned ExxonMobil. Obviously climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time. We’ve got the fires in California which were unprecedented, until next year when those will be “unprecedented.” Every year we hear that and and I feel like climate change is quickly becoming almost the only issue that matters, and clearly the answer to climate change — as we’ve been told by so many of our politicians — is a carbon tax. It’s going to fix everything, correct?

SE: No that’s not correct. Sadly you see a lot of the progressive movement in this country attaching itself to a carbon tax and going around talking about these market-based systems and the logic of, “let’s just stick a price on everything and the marketplace will take care of it.” It is not a solution to climate change.

Ironically, the people who came up with a carbon tax back in 2007 were from ExxonMobil and they were working with libertarians in this country. They understand that if you just stick a price on carbon — and you know they’re talking about $30 a ton, or $20 a ton, or $50 a ton, whatever it is — that’s just a tax on consumers. So for example, you stick a $50 a ton carbon tax on it and that means when I go to the gas pump I’m going to pay 50 cents more per gallon of gasoline.

The notion that paying a little bit more for gas is a solution to our climate problem isn’t based in any kind of reality. For example two years ago I was in New York paying almost $2 more for a gallon of gas than I am today. And people weren’t driving less, they weren’t pulling off from the gas station leaving their cars unfilled. We’ve seen the British Columbia carbon tax that has been in place for years now with no reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. [Carbon tax] is an industry tool that’s used to avoid regulation and that’s all it is. It’s business as usual for them.

LC: It’s always interesting when these ideas are created by the corporations and then they’re kind of laundered through a progressive think tank, and we don’t realize it’s an ExxonMobil idea that’s being shoved down our throats.

While we’re on the topic of climate change, a lot of people don’t realize that it’s not only fossil fuels that’re causing it. It’s also animal agriculture, which in a lot of ways may be the number one cause of climate change because of deforestation, ocean dead zones, species extinction, the list goes on. A recent report that was actually covered by the the mainstream media said we have to decrease our meat-eating by 90% to keep this planet livable. You’ve been going up against industrial farming outfits as well, right?

SE: Oh yeah! It’s a big part of our work. Just like our energy system is fundamentally broken, our food system is fundamentally broken. You’ve got companies like Smithfield, Perdue, and Tyson — these big meat conglomerates – that are creating a lot of our policies around farming.

Monsanto is certainly involved on the crop side. And it is a fundamentally broken system that’s having lots of adverse impacts. One of them is climate. We also have way too many domesticated animals packed into what we call factory farms, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). They hold massive numbers of animals but make no effort to really control the waste that they produce, the impacts on water, or the greenhouse gas emissions that are coming out of them.

So we need to fundamentally shift our meat production system and our crop production system in this country. It’s not so that we can keep feeding everybody. We will continue to feed everybody and feed them good food, but we can’t continue down the road that we’ve been on for the last several decades.

LC: We have plenty of food, we throw out something like forty percent of it.

You mentioned the factory farming or CAFOs, I think that’s the legal term. I like to call it “torture farming,” but I know that maybe you’re not allowed to use the advanced rhetoric that I get to use. Ha. Talk about some of the victories you’ve had at Food & Water Watch, such as beating Trump’s plan to slash the EPA or keeping Atlantic City’s water public. You guys have had a lot of big victories.

SE: It’s a daily battle, and you win some and you lose some. We have certainly won some important fights over the years. I think some of the biggest fights we’ve won are around fracking. We got a fracking ban in place a few years back, something that we were told we would never be able to do. We recently replicated that in Maryland with a Republican governor signing off on a fracking ban. Those were two big energy campaigns we’ve worked on.

Also, as you mentioned, we fought off water privatization efforts around the country. We worked very closely with the folks in Atlantic City to stop their water system being taken over by private companies. We are certainly fighting global trade agreements. That has been a big effort in the past several years for us and we’ve had success there.

The Trump budget cuts will be an ongoing battle. There’s no doubt that he will try to cut the budgets to things like renewable energy programs and other programs that he thinks are not worth having around. That will be an ongoing fight and it’s important in my line of work — with all we’re up against from corporate America, with the bought and paid for politicians that we oppose all the time — to look back at the victories that we do have and appreciate them.

LC: A lot of people don’t realize but trade deals tend to be decided by corporate lawyers and lobbyists, and they’re usually just corporate giveaways. Even what has come out so far about Trump’s changes to NAFTA don’t appear to be any different than the normal corporate giveaways.

SE: These trade deals are all structured to increase profits for corporations and for industries to take advantage of cheap labor, to undercut and undermine any kinds of environmental protections. They’re all structured in a way in which working-class, middle-class people will ultimately pay the price while corporate America and and the wealthy continue to reap all the benefits of these trade agreements. They’re not being structured in a way that benefits us at all.

LC: Food & Water Watch has also stood up to GMO crops and animals. What do you say to people who insist that GMOs are safe completely across the board — they need no more testing, and anyone who says otherwise is a tinfoil hat wearing paranoid?

SE: I would say that anybody who believes that is actually just buying into a government agency line that’s being fed to them without really thinking through what this might mean. There can be a big debate about whether there’s a proper amount of testing done or not. I can tell you that the GMO approval process is extremely streamlined. There’s very little testing that’s going on, particularly for the long-term impacts of any GMO.

But what’s perhaps most offensive about this whole GMO battle, and this is an indicator of how wrong it is and that the testing isn’t being done, is that you have these companies like Monsanto that are fighting so strenuously to not even let people know that their food contains GMOs. So the whole labeling debate where you’ve got all these people in this country simply saying, “Ok, you want to produce GMO food, at least label the things so that as consumers we can make these choices.” And you’ve got Monsanto working with bought-and-paid-for politicians who are shutting down the rights of consumers to know even what they’re eating anymore. And again, that’s a huge red flag for what they really know about what GMOs are and what they do and the lack of testing that’s happening with with that industry.

—

Check out Lee Camp’s new stand-up comedy special only at LeeCampComedySpecial.com. Ten percent of the proceeds will go to Food & Water Watch and Veterans For Peace.

 

Food & Water Watch: Carbon Tax Is A Sham

I spoke to Scott Edwards, the legal chief at Food & Water Watch, in order to discuss the activism of an organization with a name that defines why they’re so important in the modern world. Edwards is a lawyer who has spent his career fighting against the corruption that has festered in our system, in which corporations work to deceive the public and decrease their costs by polluting our environment.

In this interview, he talks about why so many on the left have fallen for the “carbon tax” sham, and why so many of our laws end up written by corporate lawyers trying to enrich their companies.

An excerpt from our interview follows below:

Lee Camp: A lot of the future is definitely being written by lawyers. Do you feel the best tactic to fight corporate destruction is in the courts? Or do you feel that it is just one of the tools in the toolbox?

Scott Edwards: It’s a tactic. The ultimate goal is to build the political power and to force our elected officials to represent the needs of people instead of the needs of corporations.

LC: When you say that it’s lawyers that are writing these laws and policies they mean, more specifically, that it’s industry lawyers who’re writing these laws and policies today. Whether you’re talking about legislation around climate, food systems or water protection laws, the drafters are people from Monsanto, from ExxonMobil, from all the big industry groups.

All the big corporate lawyers who are actually writing our laws today are, obviously, doing it in a way that benefits their clients and makes them lots of money.

You mentioned ExxonMobil. Obviously climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time. We’ve got the fires in California which were unprecedented, until next year when those will be “unprecedented.” Every year we hear that and and I feel like climate change is quickly becoming almost the only issue that matters, and clearly the answer to climate change — as we’ve been told by so many of our politicians — is a carbon tax. It’s going to fix everything, correct?

SE: No that’s not correct. Sadly you see a lot of the progressive movement in this country attaching itself to a carbon tax and going around talking about these market-based systems and the logic of, “let’s just stick a price on everything and the marketplace will take care of it.” It is not a solution to climate change.

Ironically, the people who came up with a carbon tax back in 2007 were from ExxonMobil and they were working with libertarians in this country. They understand that if you just stick a price on carbon — and you know they’re talking about $30 a ton, or $20 a ton, or $50 a ton, whatever it is — that’s just a tax on consumers. So for example, you stick a $50 a ton carbon tax on it and that means when I go to the gas pump I’m going to pay 50 cents more per gallon of gasoline.

The notion that paying a little bit more for gas is a solution to our climate problem isn’t based in any kind of reality. For example two years ago I was in New York paying almost $2 more for a gallon of gas than I am today. And people weren’t driving less, they weren’t pulling off from the gas station leaving their cars unfilled. We’ve seen the British Columbia carbon tax that has been in place for years now with no reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. [Carbon tax] is an industry tool that’s used to avoid regulation and that’s all it is. It’s business as usual for them.

LC: It’s always interesting when these ideas are created by the corporations and then they’re kind of laundered through a progressive think tank, and we don’t realize it’s an ExxonMobil idea that’s being shoved down our throats.

While we’re on the topic of climate change, a lot of people don’t realize that it’s not only fossil fuels that’re causing it. It’s also animal agriculture, which in a lot of ways may be the number one cause of climate change because of deforestation, ocean dead zones, species extinction, the list goes on. A recent report that was actually covered by the the mainstream media said we have to decrease our meat-eating by 90% to keep this planet livable. You’ve been going up against industrial farming outfits as well, right?

SE: Oh yeah! It’s a big part of our work. Just like our energy system is fundamentally broken, our food system is fundamentally broken. You’ve got companies like Smithfield, Perdue, and Tyson — these big meat conglomerates – that are creating a lot of our policies around farming.

Monsanto is certainly involved on the crop side. And it is a fundamentally broken system that’s having lots of adverse impacts. One of them is climate. We also have way too many domesticated animals packed into what we call factory farms, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). They hold massive numbers of animals but make no effort to really control the waste that they produce, the impacts on water, or the greenhouse gas emissions that are coming out of them.

So we need to fundamentally shift our meat production system and our crop production system in this country. It’s not so that we can keep feeding everybody. We will continue to feed everybody and feed them good food, but we can’t continue down the road that we’ve been on for the last several decades.

LC: We have plenty of food, we throw out something like forty percent of it.

You mentioned the factory farming or CAFOs, I think that’s the legal term. I like to call it “torture farming,” but I know that maybe you’re not allowed to use the advanced rhetoric that I get to use. Ha. Talk about some of the victories you’ve had at Food & Water Watch, such as beating Trump’s plan to slash the EPA or keeping Atlantic City’s water public. You guys have had a lot of big victories.

SE: It’s a daily battle, and you win some and you lose some. We have certainly won some important fights over the years. I think some of the biggest fights we’ve won are around fracking. We got a fracking ban in place a few years back, something that we were told we would never be able to do. We recently replicated that in Maryland with a Republican governor signing off on a fracking ban. Those were two big energy campaigns we’ve worked on.

Also, as you mentioned, we fought off water privatization efforts around the country. We worked very closely with the folks in Atlantic City to stop their water system being taken over by private companies. We are certainly fighting global trade agreements. That has been a big effort in the past several years for us and we’ve had success there.

The Trump budget cuts will be an ongoing battle. There’s no doubt that he will try to cut the budgets to things like renewable energy programs and other programs that he thinks are not worth having around. That will be an ongoing fight and it’s important in my line of work — with all we’re up against from corporate America, with the bought and paid for politicians that we oppose all the time — to look back at the victories that we do have and appreciate them.

LC: A lot of people don’t realize but trade deals tend to be decided by corporate lawyers and lobbyists, and they’re usually just corporate giveaways. Even what has come out so far about Trump’s changes to NAFTA don’t appear to be any different than the normal corporate giveaways.

SE: These trade deals are all structured to increase profits for corporations and for industries to take advantage of cheap labor, to undercut and undermine any kinds of environmental protections. They’re all structured in a way in which working-class, middle-class people will ultimately pay the price while corporate America and and the wealthy continue to reap all the benefits of these trade agreements. They’re not being structured in a way that benefits us at all.

LC: Food & Water Watch has also stood up to GMO crops and animals. What do you say to people who insist that GMOs are safe completely across the board — they need no more testing, and anyone who says otherwise is a tinfoil hat wearing paranoid?

SE: I would say that anybody who believes that is actually just buying into a government agency line that’s being fed to them without really thinking through what this might mean. There can be a big debate about whether there’s a proper amount of testing done or not. I can tell you that the GMO approval process is extremely streamlined. There’s very little testing that’s going on, particularly for the long-term impacts of any GMO.

But what’s perhaps most offensive about this whole GMO battle, and this is an indicator of how wrong it is and that the testing isn’t being done, is that you have these companies like Monsanto that are fighting so strenuously to not even let people know that their food contains GMOs. So the whole labeling debate where you’ve got all these people in this country simply saying, “Ok, you want to produce GMO food, at least label the things so that as consumers we can make these choices.” And you’ve got Monsanto working with bought-and-paid-for politicians who are shutting down the rights of consumers to know even what they’re eating anymore. And again, that’s a huge red flag for what they really know about what GMOs are and what they do and the lack of testing that’s happening with with that industry.

—

Check out Lee Camp’s new stand-up comedy special only at LeeCampComedySpecial.com. Ten percent of the proceeds will go to Food & Water Watch and Veterans For Peace.

 

Virginia Governor Says He Won’t Quit; New Allegation Rocks Deputy

RICHMOND, Va.—Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam told top staff Friday that he is not going to resign over a racist photo as another sexual assault accusation was leveled at his lieutenant governor, who would succeed him if he stepped down.

Northam called an afternoon Cabinet meeting to announce his intention to stay, a senior official said. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity

Also Friday, a second woman came forward to accuse Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexual assault. The woman said in a statement that the attack took place when she and Fairfax were students at Duke University. The Associated Press is not reporting details of the allegation because it has not been corroborated.

“I deny this latest unsubstantiated allegation. It is demonstrably false. I have never forced myself on anyone ever,” Fairfax said in a statement after the accusation was made public Friday.

The new developments come at the end of an unprecedented week in Virginia history that has seen the state’s three top Democrats embroiled in potentially career-ending scandals.

The tumult began last Friday afternoon, when Northam’s medical school yearbook page surfaced with a picture of one person in blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan hood and robe.

Northam immediately apologized for appearing in the photograph, saying he could not “undo the harm my behavior caused then and today.” Most of the Democratic establishment called for his resignation by the end of the day.

On Saturday, though, the governor reversed course and said he wasn’t in the picture. He said he wasn’t going to resign immediately because he owed it to the people of Virginia to start a discussion about race and discrimination and listen to the pain he had caused.

“I believe this moment can be the first small step to open a discussion about these difficult issues,” Northam said. But the governor left his long-term plans open, saying he would reassess his decision not to resign if it became clear he had no viable path forward.

The pressure on Northam reached a crescendo Saturday when almost the entire Virginia Democratic establishment, as well as nearly every Democratic presidential hopeful, called on him to resign. That pressure has tapered off as a cascade of scandals involving top politicians has rocked the state.

California college professor Vanessa Tyson publicly accused Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of forcing her to perform oral sex on him at a hotel in 2004 during the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Fairfax, who would replace Northam if he resigned, has cast the allegations as a political smear.

And Attorney General Mark Herring — in line to become governor if Northam and Fairfax resign — admitted putting on blackface in the 1980s, when he was a college student. Herring had previously called on Northam to resign and came forward after rumors about the existence of a blackface photo of him began circulating at the Capitol.

Although the Democratic Party has taken almost a zero-tolerance approach to misconduct among its members in this #MeToo era, a housecleaning in Virginia could be costly: If all three Democrats resigned, Republican House Speaker Kirk Cox would become governor.

Northam’s decision to stay in office comes despite many fellow Democrats in Virginia and beyond reiterating their calls for him to resign as recently as Friday.

Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, a 2020 presidential hopeful, said Friday that he still thinks Northam should step down.

“I think it dredges up very hurtful, painful things from the past. … I think he’s betrayed the public trust, and he should resign,” Booker said in response to a reporter’s question during an appearance in Iowa.

And in statements Thursday night, the state legislature’s Black Caucus and Virginia’s Democratic congressional delegation reiterated calls for the governor to step down, while the state House Democrats — who also previously called for Northam’s resignation — said they remain disappointed in him.

In a positive sign for Northam, even before he announced his plan to stay in the job, a lawmaker from Virginia’s Democratic-leaning D.C. suburbs said Friday he won’t call on the besieged governor to resign.

“I will not request the Governor’s resignation,” State Sen. Chap Petersen, a Democrat, said in a statement. “Nor will I request any other official to resign until it is obvious that they have committed a crime in office or their ability to serve is irredeemably compromised.”

There has also been little appetite among lawmakers to use official means to force him out. Cox, the House speaker, himself said Monday that there was “a rightful hesitation” among lawmakers to seek Northam’s impeachment or removal. He called on Northam to resign, saying “that would obviously be less pain for everyone.”

Kellyanne Conway Claims Woman Assaulted Her at Restaurant

COLLEGE PARK, Md.—A Maryland woman faces charges that she assaulted White House counselor Kellyanne Conway in front of her teenage daughter during a confrontation last year at a restaurant in a Washington suburb.

Mary Elizabeth Inabinett, 63, of Chevy Chase, was charged in November with second-degree assault and disorderly conduct and has a trial tentatively scheduled to start March 29, court records show.

Conway told police she was attending a birthday party Oct. 14 at a Mexican restaurant in Bethesda when she felt somebody grab her shoulders from behind and shake her, according to a charging document prepared by Montgomery County police. The woman who confronted Conway yelled, “Shame on you,” and “other comments believed to about Conway’s political views,” the document says.

Inabinett’s attorney, William Alden McDaniel, Jr., said in a statement that his client exercised her First Amendment right “to express her personal opinions” about a public figure in a public place. McDaniel said his client didn’t assault Conway and will plead not guilty to the misdemeanor charges.

“The facts at trial will show this to be true, and show Ms. Conway’s account to be false,” the lawyer’s statement says.

“Her ‘First Amendment’ right to scream like a lunatic does not include touching me or anyone else,” Conway told The Associated Press in an email.

In a CNN interview broadcast Friday, Conway said she was standing next to her middle school-aged daughter and some of her daughter’s friends when the woman began shaking her “to the point where I thought maybe somebody was hugging me.” She said it felt “weird” and “a little aggressive,” so she turned around to face the woman.

“She was just unhinged. She was out of control,” she said. “Her whole face was terror and anger. She was right here, and my daughter was right there. And she ought to pay for that. She ought to pay for that because she has no right to touch anybody.”

The restaurant’s manager told police the woman who confronted Conway had to be forcibly removed from the premises. Conway told police the woman yelled and gestured at her for 8 to 10 minutes before she was escorted out of the restaurant.

Conway wasn’t injured, according to the charging document. The woman who confronted her was gone by the time police arrived, but restaurant staff helped police identify her as a suspect, and Conway’s daughter provided officers with a short video clip and photograph of the encounter.

Conway said she told President Donald Trump about the incident “long after” it happened. She said Trump asked her, “Are you OK? Is your daughter OK? Are the other girls OK?”

Federal Prosecutors Are Circling Trump’s Inaugural Committee

Federal prosecutors in New York are circling Donald Trump’s inaugural committee as part of a wide-ranging investigation into possible money laundering, illegal contributions and cash-for-access schemes. Now, WNYC and ProPublica have identified evidence of potential tax law violations by the committee.

A spokesman confirmed that the nonprofit 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee paid the Trump International Hotel a rate of $175,000 per day for event space — in spite of internal objections at the time that the rate was far too high. If the committee is deemed by auditors or prosecutors to have paid an above-market rate, that could violate tax laws prohibiting self-dealing, according to experts.

Tax law prohibits nonprofits from paying inflated prices to entities that are owned by people who also control or influence the nonprofit’s activities.

“Every legitimate nonprofit is very concerned with this,” said Doug White, a veteran adviser to tax exempt organizations, speaking generally. “You’re benefiting a private person, and you’re using the nonprofit to do it.”

The inaugural committee also spent at least $1.5 million at a hotel in which the investment firm of the committee’s chairman, Tom Barrack, held a small stake.

In addition, the inaugural nonprofit appears not to have disclosed multiple gifts to the committee on its tax return, as required by law.

Trump’s inaugural committee spent more than $100 million, almost twice the amount spent on the next-most expensive inaugural party, that of Barack Obama in 2009. In addition to probing how the nonprofit spent its money, investigators are examining whether the inaugural received improper donations from foreigners. Inaugural nonprofits are prohibited from receiving donations from people who are not U.S. citizens.

The committee paid a total of $700,000 to the Trump International Hotel for event spaces for four days in January 2017. At the time, a consultant working for the inaugural committee expressed her concern over email that the price quoted by the Trump hotel — $175,000 per day for several event spaces — was too high, as ProPublica and WNYC reported in December.

“Please take into consideration that when this is audited it will become public knowledge,” wrote Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, an experienced New York-based event planner, suggesting a fair rate for the event spaces would be at most $85,000 per day, less than half of what was ultimately paid. That fee did not cover catering.

Ari Krupkin, an event planner at the Markham Group in Washington, said event space rentals typically come as part of a package that includes catering and audio-visual. Without those services included in the price, he said, “$175,000 a day seems more than egregious.”

“It could be a tax law violation,” said Brett Kappel, an attorney at Akerman LLP who advises nonprofits. “Those emails would be of great interest to the Internal Revenue Service if they were to conduct an audit. They probably will be of great interest to the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, which is investigating the inaugural committee.”

Tax law bars nonprofits such as the inaugural committee from insider deals that would unduly benefit people — in this case the Trump family — that have influence over the nonprofit, Kappel said. In legal parlance, these are known as excess benefit transactions. A key question would be whether the Trump hotel charged the inaugural committee above-market rates, which could violate tax rules, Kappel said. If an IRS audit found such a civil violation, the inaugural committee would have to pay taxes on the amount of money it overpaid.

It could become a criminal violation, Kappel said, if investigators uncover evidence that people knew that charging above-market rates to enrich the Trump Organization was illegal and did it anyway.

A question on the mandatory nonprofit tax return, Form 990, asks whether the organization engaged in any excess benefit transactions. The inaugural committee checked the “No” box.

The inaugural committee’s tax return states that it had a written conflict-of-interest policy, but the spokesman declined to provide the policy to reporters. Atchley & Associates, the Texas firm that prepared the tax form, did not respond to requests for comment.

The inaugural committee has said that overall, for the event spaces and other expenses, it paid more than $1.5 million to the Trump hotel, as first reported by ABC and The New York Times.

Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and an executive at the Trump Organization at the time, was on the email chain about the Trump hotel event. She connected Rick Gates, the inaugural committee’s deputy chairman, with a hotel executive when Gates was seeking a price quote for the ballroom. Ivanka Trump’s spokesman in December said she only passed on the note and said that the inaugural should pay a “market rate.” Her spokesman did not respond to inquiries for this story.

In her email, Wolkoff, who was a friend of Melania Trump’s, pointed out that since other venues were donating their spaces, the Trump hotel’s rate was particularly troubling. The company that runs events at Union Station, the site for the inaugural’s candlelight dinner, donated the iconic space, according to a contract obtained by WNYC and ProPublica. Barrack’s own wine was also on the menu at the Chairman’s Global Dinner, an exclusive inauguration week event hosted by Barrack. “It was my honor to have donated wine from my personal vineyard, completely free of charge,” Barrack told Vinepair.

The Union Station donation and the wine do not appear to be included on the inaugural committee’s tax return, which is supposed to report non-cash contributions. The committee spokesman declined to answer detailed questions about the omission and other issues.

In addition, the inaugural spent money at a hotel then partly owned by the investment firm of Barrack, the businessman and friend of Donald Trump’s who chaired the inaugural committee. The committee has said it spent at least $1.5 million at the Fairmont, a Washington hotel owned by the conglomerate AccorHotels. Barrack’s investment firm Colony Capital owned a roughly 5 percent stake in AccorHotels at the time of the inaugural, which it sold soon after. AccorHotels is run by a longtime former Colony executive. The inaugural spent as much or more at the Fairmont as it did at at the Trump International, the Times reported.

The White House and the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said this week that the subpoena to the inaugural committee “has nothing to do with the White House.”

This week, ProPublica and WNYC reported that Barrack’s firm developed a plan after the inaugural to profit from its close ties with Trump and the incoming administration.