Chris Hedges's Blog, page 366

Nancy Pelosi Accused of Excluding Progressives From Key Committees

“At first glance, progressives got mostly rolled.”

That was how journalist David Dayen reacted on Wednesday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) announcement of appointees to three of the most powerful congressional committees, which progressives have targeted as essential for advancing ambitious policy priorities like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal.

Critics immediately pointed out that the bold progressives advocacy groups have been pressuring Pelosi to pick for seats on the Ways and Means Appropriations committees—such as Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ro Khanna (Calif.), and Pramila Jayapal (Wash.)—were entirely absent from the House Speaker’s list of assignments.

“No one here I think would be described as a progressive firebrand,” the Washington Post‘s Mike DeBonis wrote of the committee appointments.

Among the number of progressive snubs was Pelosi’s choice of Wall Street-friendly Rep. Tom Souzzi (D-N.Y.)—a self-described fiscal conservative—over Ocasio-Cortez for a spot on the Ways and Means Committee, the House tax-writing body that has the power to shape—or completely stonewall—Medicare for All and other bold legislation.

“So frustrating,” Ady Barkan, a progressive activist who is dying of ALS, said in response to Pelosi’s assignment list.

Referring to the delivery by Markos Moulitsas, the establishment-friendly founder of the liberal Daily Kos, of thousands of roses to Pelosi’s office on Wednesday, one progressive strategist told the Huffington Post‘s Daniel Marans: “Progressives handed Nancy Pelosi 7,000 roses today in her office. She returned the favor by shutting them out of key committees that really [control] the money in her House.”

It’s already generating blowback. From a progressive strategist active in lobbying for committee seats: “Progressives handed Nancy Pelosi 7,000 roses today in her office. She returned the favor by shutting them out of key committees that really controls the money in her House.”

— Daniel Marans (@danielmarans) January 10, 2019

I will note: It’s hard for progressives to maintain a united front with Democratic leadership if some top activist types are giving gifts to the same people other activists are trying to pressure.

— Daniel Marans (@danielmarans) January 10, 2019

While calls for freshmen members like Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) to be selected for key committees were always a long-shot due to House tradition and seniority norms, progressives were also angered by the exclusion of Jayapal and Khanna from the Ways and Means committee.

In an interview with Politico, Khanna said made his case to the Democratic leadership for a spot on Ways and Means, but ultimately his push was unsuccessful. Khanna also expressed support for the idea of having bold freshmen on key panels, despite the history of new members being denied such powerful positions.

“I’m for shaking things up and getting some new voices, I respect seniority and I think it’s important to respect that and committee chairs, but a good balance would be to get some of the new members on,” Khanna added.

Woof. No Ro Khanna. No Pramila Jayapal. https://t.co/rZ1kaYkBup

— Every Billionaire Is A Policy Failure (@DanRiffle) January 10, 2019

Pelosi’s announcement on Wednesday included appointees to Ways and Means, Appropriations, and Energy and Commerce, with assignments for Financial Services, Intelligence, and Judiciary still to come.

As Dayen reported for The Intercept in November, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) “secured a commitment that at least 40 percent of Democrats on five key committees would be members of the CPC.”

In a series of tweets on Wednesday responding to Pelosi’s announcement, Dayen noted that “11 of the 26 members named in these exclusive committee assignments are in the Progressive Caucus, but four of them are also in the New Democrat Coalition,” a group of centrist lawmakers.

“Progressive[s] probably approached 40 percent on two of the three committees (maybe not [Energy and Commerce]), but there’s a disproportionate number of Progressive Caucus/New Dem hybrids that made it,” Dayen added.

Understanding Global Warming’s Impact on Oceans Is Vital but Complicated

Climate scientists who have found a new way to chart temperature change in the world’s seas over time say ocean warming speeds are much slower in deep water than on the surface.

Planet Earth is mostly ocean. Human-linked changes have started to raise global temperatures to what could be alarming levels and, as the thermometer rises, so will sea levels. So detailed understanding of temperature and ocean is vital. But two separate studies confirm that the connection is far from simple.

One study of the Atlantic confirms that in the last 150 years, the oceans have taken up 90% of the excess energy released by the combustion of fossil fuels to drive human economic growth and power − and to fuel potentially-catastrophic global warming and runaway climate change.

But what the oceans will actually do with that colossal burst of heat has yet to be fully explored. And a separate examination of the deep history of the Pacific Ocean confirms that change may be inexorable, but it is also very slow: the deeper parts of the Pacific are still registering the onset of the so-called “Little Ice Age” several centuries ago.

Both studies are reminders that oceanography is still a relatively new science and researchers still have a lot to learn about the fine detail of the ways in which temperature, atmosphere and ocean interact to affect climate over the world’s continents.

But repeated research has confirmed that the oceans are warming in response to human-triggered changes on land, that this warming presents several different kinds of hazard to marine life, and that there is a link between overall ocean temperatures and the behaviour of the ocean’s currents, a link that plays out in dramatic shifts in regional climates.

So the rewards for a more precise understanding are considerable. But understanding starts with accurate and comprehensive data, and systematic measurement of ocean temperatures began only with the voyage of the British research ship HMS Challenger in 1871.

So Laure Zanna, a physicist at the University of Oxford and her colleagues, report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they deployed sophisticated mathematical techniques to calculate the heat uptake of the oceans and the way the blue planet has responded since 1871.

Huge Heat Uptake

Altogether, in the last 150 years, the deep waters have absorbed 436 zettajoules: a joule is the unit of energy required to deliver one watt for one second and a zettajoule is a number followed by 21 zeroes. This is an enormous amount of heat, roughly 1,000 times the energy consumed by 7 billion humans in the course of a year.

The researchers’ results so far show that roughly half the observed warming of the last 60 years – and the associated sea level rise – is linked to changes in ocean circulation. They were able to reconstruct two considerable bouts of warming, over the years 1920 to 1945 and between 1990 and 2015. What they have yet to do is sort out what this means for the behaviour of the oceans over the decades to come.

“The technique is only applicable to tracers like man-made carbon that are passively transported by ocean circulation,” Professor Zanna said. “However, heat does not behave in this manner as it affects circulation by changing the density of seawater. We were pleasantly surprised by how well the approach works. It opens up an exciting new way to study ocean warming in addition to using direct measurements.”

What the research also underlines is that the oceans have a long memory: so extensive and so deep are the five oceans that the surface waters may respond to 20th century greenhouse gas emissions while the deepest trenches contain water that last warmed more than 1,000 years ago in the reign of Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor.

Still Adjusting

US oceanographers report in the journal Science that they matched predictions from computer models and modern data and ancient evidence with readings from the Challenger expedition to show that two kilometres under the waves, the Pacific Ocean is still adjusting to cooling that began with the onset of the Little Ice Age centuries ago.

Such studies count as basic research: as a way of testing techniques and establishing ground rules from which more discovery could follow. They also offer new ways to understand oceans as registers of climate change over long intervals.

“These waters are so old and haven’t been near the surface in so long, they still ‘remember’ what was going on hundreds of years ago when Europe experienced some of its coldest winters in history,” said Jake Gebbie, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

“The close correspondence between prediction and observed trends gave us confidence that this is a real phenomenon.”

Bill McKibben: We’re Headed for Hell, or Some Place Like It

What follows is a conversation between environmentalist Bill McKibben and Dharna Noor of the Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

DHARNA NOOR: I’m here in Burlington, Vermont, where the Sanders Institute has convened hundreds of international civic leaders, artistic leaders, political leaders to address the problems of our age, like the economic crisis, social crises, and, importantly, the climate crisis. And I’m here with somebody who has been doing this for decades, for a very long time. Bill McKibben is a founder of 350.org, a leading environmental organization. He’s a leading environmentalist in his own right, and author of one of the first books on climate change for a mass audience. Thanks for being here today.

BILL MCKIBBEN: Hey. What a pleasure.

DHARNA NOOR: So we’re coming off of a panel where you moderated some leading minds on the climate crisis to talk about not only the problem itself, but what can be done about it; how we can address economic justice and environmental justice and racial justice together. Could you talk about where this idea of the Green New Deal has come from?

BILL MCKIBBEN: Yeah. I mean, this is an exciting moment, right? This was sort of at the beginning of a new idea–not that new. People have been talking in one way or another about a big, some kind of big infrastructure program that would deal with both our economic woes and our climate crisis. But it feels a little more real now. Clearly there’s something in the air. Part of that something in the air is smoke from the wildfires, and that helped galvanize people’s attention. Part of it’s this chain of reports that have come out from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the federal–even Trump’s federal government saying that climate change is a horrible, pressing problem. So we may be in a moment of some action.

DHARNA NOOR: It’s true. But you know, we’re up against so much. While so much movement is happening with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Representative Tlaib, from across the House, you know, there are so many others who are opposing this. You mentioned the Trump administration’s latest report, but they issued it on Black Friday, a day that nobody’s really watching what’s happening in the news. Talk about how we can overcome some of these struggles.

BILL MCKIBBEN: The only ways to win these fights are to build movements, because the fossil fuel industry has all the money. That’s their weapon. There’s no secret to it. They use it to bludgeon entire political parties into submission. But sometimes organized people can beat organized money if they get together in numbers large enough. And that’s what’s been happening increasingly over the last few years. There’s now enough human beings really scared and really determined to do something that I think the politicians won’t be able to hide this forever.

DHARNA NOOR: One, I think, reason that so many more people have sort of opened up to the idea of fighting the climate crisis is because of the number the sheer number of people who we’ve seen affected by it. And we’ve seen especially new trends in migration and the need for migration because of the climate crisis. But despite this, Trump and his administration have been working on a NAFTA 2.0 of sorts, which includes, again, huge subsidies to not only big pharmaceutical companies, but also fossil fuel industries. Could you talk a little bit about what the effect of that will be, and how we can mobilize against this kind of immigration policy?

BILL MCKIBBEN: The effect of NAFTA 1 was, among other things, to suddenly undermine a lot of peasant agriculture across Mexico. And that’s one of the reasons that so many people had to leave their homes. Now all of that pressure is exacerbated by a change in climate. So we look at, you know, people arriving from Guatemala and Honduras and Nicaragua. Partly that’s because there’s great violence in those places, but partly that’s because they’ve suffered through unprecedented droughts that are driving people into the cities and into the middle of that violence, and then eventually driving them out of the country altogether.

You see what happens in our current framework when a few thousand people show up at the border, and it causes a national freakout, that scientists, climate scientists tell us with great conviction that we’re looking at 150, 200, 300 million people on the move by the middle or latter part of this century. That’s the kind of thing that destabilizes the entire globe. I mean, people on the move is a recipe for trouble. That’s why one of the most important things we can try to do is slow down the climate crisis to the point where people don’t have to leave the places that they love.

DHARNA NOOR: And yet so often when the when talk of addressing the climate crisis in the U.S. is brought up, the issue that’s raised so often is the loss of jobs. Talk about how, within a Green New Deal, we can foster a just transition. Because despite its many issues, the New Deal had provisions to support labor organizing [crosstalk].

BILL MCKIBBEN: Yeah, absolutely. And a Green New Deal, one hopes, one assumes, would create lots of jobs. The transition to renewable energy is going to take a hell of a lot of people doing a hell of a lot of work. And there’s no reason, if done wisely, that those shouldn’t be good jobs. Among other things, one of the things that’s appealing about them is it’s difficult to outsource them. No one’s going to put their house on a boat and send it to China to get a solar panel put on top, or insulation stuffed in the walls. That needs to be done close to home.

DHARNA NOOR: In this climate I think so often the demons are thought of as those in the Republican Party. But we know that, of course, many Democrats are still accepting fossil fuel contributions. One aspect of the Green New Deal that Alexander Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement are championing is to stop fossil fuel contributions. President Barack Obama sort of boasted that he and his administration boosted our oil and gas industry. Could you talk about just what the response to that has been, and what it should be?

BILL MCKIBBEN: There’s no question that we’re in a worse country than we were when Barack Obama was running it. I mean, there’s no question. On the other hand, I helped organize the biggest demonstrations against Barack Obama while he was in office precisely because their coziness with the oil and gas industry was leading them to approve pipelines and things willy nilly. I’m surprised, actually, to hear him boasting about it now, because I don’t think it’s something that reflects well on his administration. There are other things from the Obama years that I’d boast about if I were him.

DHARNA NOOR: Why are we calling it a Green New Deal? What is the, why are we invoking the same name as FDR’s New Deal?

BILL MCKIBBEN: Well, because that was one of the last times that we looked systemically at our economy; not taking little piecemeal things here and there, but really making some big, powerful moves. One of the things that’s important to remember about the New Deal, and that I hope the Green New Dealers will remember, is that it also involved a lot of experimentation. Some of the things they tried early on didn’t work, so they quickly abandoned them and went to other things. And that’s good. Pragmatism is important here. Any discussion around climate change is held honest by the physics of this dilemma.

DHARNA NOOR: And just lastly, could you talk about the stakes if we don’t usher in this kind of Green New Deal?

BILL MCKIBBEN: If we don’t do something here and around the world quickly, then we’re headed, if not to hell, then to a place with a very similar temperature.

DHARNA NOOR: Great. Thank you so much. Bill McKibben, thanks for being with us today.

BILL MCKIBBEN: Thank you.

Living in a Country Where Credibility Is Ancient History

In one of the Bible stories about the death of Jesus, local collaborators with the Roman Empire haul him before Pontius Pilate, the imperial governor of Palestine. Although the situation is dire for one of them, the two engage in a bit of epistemological banter. Jesus allows that his work is about telling the truth and Pilate responds with his show-stopping query: “What is truth?”

Pilate’s retort is probably not the first example in history of a powerful ruler challenging the very possibility that some things might be true and others lies, but it’s certainly one of the best known. As the tale continues, the Gospel of John proceeds to impose its own political truth on the narrative. It describes an interaction that, according to historians, is almost certainly a piece of fiction: Pilate offers an angry crowd assembled at his front door a choice: he will free either Jesus or a man named Barabbas. The loser will be crucified.

“Now,” John tells us, “Barabbas had taken part in an uprising” against the Romans. When the crowd chooses to save him, John condemns them for preferring such a rebel over the man who told the “truth” — the revolutionary zealot, that is, over the Messiah.

What, indeed, is truth? As Pilate implies and John’s tale suggests, it seems to depend on who’s telling the story — and whose story we choose to believe. Could truth, in other words, just be a matter of opinion?

Many of my undergraduate philosophy students adopt this perspective. Over the course of a semester, they encounter a number of philosophers and struggle to understand what each is arguing and what to think when they contradict each other. I do my best to present scholarly assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of these varying approaches, but all too often students find themselves drowning in a pool of epistemological confusion. If a philosophy can be criticized, they wonder, how can it be true? The easiest solution, they often find, is to decide that truth is indeed just a matter of opinion, something that has only become easier now that Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office.

A more difficult route out of the morass would be to trust themselves to evaluate the claims of competing theories of how life works and decide, however tentatively, which seems most convincing. But it’s precisely the skills needed to evaluate such competing claims that many of them lack. Often, they doubt that such skills even exist. In this, they are not unlike President Trump who is frequently astonished to learn things that ought to be part of an ordinary citizen’s knowledge base. (Apparently, until he personally stumbled upon the fact, for example, “nobody knew that health care is complicated.”) Their answer to most questions is some version of “nobody knows” or indeedcan know; truth, in other words, is just a matter of opinion.

This popular belief that nobody really does or can know anything is the perfect soil for an authoritarian leader to take root.

But facts really are, as the popular expression has it, “a thing.” Try telling a former resident of Paradise, California, that truth is just a matter of opinion when it comes, for example, to climate change. Paradise, you probably remember, was the town in Butte County that was incinerated last November by the deadliest wildfire in California history. Or rather the deadliest so far, since there can be no doubt — if you don’t happen to be the president or his climate-change-denying Republican colleagues and cabinet members or part of the 20% of Americans who still refuse to believe the obvious — that worse is to come. After all, as the Associated Press reported recently, 15 of California’s 20 “most destructive” wildfires have burned in the last two decades.

For President Trump, whether or not the global climate is changing is not a question to be answered by examining evidence. “People like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers,” he told the Washington Post that very November, adding, “As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it.”

To Trump, what is clearly the worst danger threatening humanity is a matter not of fact, but of belief, and possibly even a complete fiction.

From Credibility Gap to Alternative Facts

Donald Trump is hardly the first American president to have a loose relationship with the truth. Back in the 1960s, when the Vietnam War was raging, what was then dubbed the “credibility gap” opened in the minds of journalists and the public — a gap between President Lyndon Johnson’s assertions about “progress” in that war and “the facts on the ground.” Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, who co-directed PBS’s 10-part series on that war, argue that “this radical diminution of trust” in the presidency began with Johnson’s, and later President Richard Nixon’s lies to the American public about what was actually going on there.

Those lies included a specious casus belli and legal underpinning for the full-scale American intervention there (supposed North Vietnamese attacks on two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin). Even the State Department’s official online history now acknowledges that “doubts later emerged as to whether or not the [second] attack… had taken place.” As the war progressed, two administrations rolled out ever more lies about the victory soon to come, especially via post-battle body counts, often presented like sports scores in which the winner was the one with the lower number: Americans, 78; Viet Cong, 475. Miraculously, the U.S. military never appeared to lose a match, which made the public all the more surprised when they lost the war itself.

In the Vietnam years, at least, such a credibility gap could be acknowledged and an administration forced to confront it. Despite the fact that media outlets now almost routinely tote up Trump’s “untruths” — his misstatements, false statements, and lies — by the thousands, his administration has managed to call into question the very existence of any “facts on the ground” whatsoever. This process began in the most literal way on the first day of the Trump era: his inauguration. In January 2017, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer insisted that Trump had drawn “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.”

When journalists began comparing photographs of the crowds at Trump’s and Barack Obama’s inaugurations — the literal facts on the ground — it became clear that Spicer was lying. (The photos of the Trump inaugural would later be “edited” to fit the president’s desired reality.) Some of us wondered: Would that moment mark the opening of a new credibility gap for the Trump era? And the answer would be: no, it would signal the beginning of something even worse.

In the epistemological universe of the president and his base, a credibility gap is inconceivable, because there are no facts on the ground to begin with. Or rather, we are invited to choose from a range of “alternative facts,” as Trump aide Kellyanne Conway so unforgettably put it. His press secretary can’t lie, no matter what the (unedited) aerial photos of those crowds may show, not when what you might perceive as a lie is simply someone else’s statement of alternative fact.

Trump’s is not the first administration in recent memory to suggest that truth is a matter of what you choose to believe — or, if you prefer, a matter of faith. In “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” a 2004 New York Times Magazine article, journalist Ron Suskind reported on discussions among various administration insiders about the president’s worldview. An unnamed former aide to Ronald Reagan assured Suskind, for instance, that, for President Bush, truth was in fact absolute. It just wasn’t based on evidence:

“This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about al-Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he’s just like them…

“This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts. He truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.”

A Bush aide (later identified as key adviser Karl Rove) similarly disparaged evidence-based reality, though in his case by favoring facts created not through faith but power. As he so resonantly explained to those stuck “in what we call the reality-based community”:

“That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Everything Is Possible and Nothing Is True

Not surprisingly, among its critics Donald Trump’s presidency has inspired any number of references to political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s description of the dismantling of truth by authoritarian regimes of the previous century. In her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt described the process this way:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true… Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

Our aspiring authoritarians (and the Russian internet trolls who assist them) understand this strategy well: Was Barack Obama born in the United States? Nobody knows for sure, but many people believe he wasn’t. Did Hillary Clinton run a secret pedophile ring from the basement of a Washington pizzeria? Nobody knows for sure, but some people believe she did. Do the Obamas have a 10-foot wall around their Washington home, suggesting that, according to the president, the entire country just needs a “slightly larger version” of the same on its southernmost border? Nobody knows, and in any case, how can we believe a photo of the house without such a wall offered by the Washington Post? Photos, after all, can easily be faked. Did Russia interfere in the 2016 presidential election? Nobody knows for sure, not even Donald Trump, despite having been shown substantial evidence that it did.

The cumulative effect of a mounting number of claims about which “nobody knows” the truth is a corresponding rise in the belief that nobody can know what is true. All evidence is equally valid (or invalid), so what’s real is as optional as the possible endings in a “choose-your-own-adventure” TV show.

If the world was “ever-changing” and “incomprehensible” to “the masses” in the authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century, how much more incomprehensible is the turbo-charged, Internet-fueled world of 2019? Today’s propaganda can be not only omnipresent but precisely tailored to specific audiences, even if its objectives (and often sources) may not be obvious at first glance.

We are used to thinking of propaganda (a word whose Latin roots mean “towards action”) as intended to move people to think or act in a particular way. And indeed that kind of propaganda has long existed, as with, for example, wartime books, posters, and movies designed to inflame patriotism and hatred of the enemy. But there was a different quality to totalitarian propaganda. Its purpose was not just to create certainty (the enemy is evil incarnate), but a curious kind of doubt. “In fact,” as Russian émigrée and New Yorker writer Masha Gessen has put it, “the purpose of totalitarian propaganda is to take away your ability to perceive reality.”

Eroding the very ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy has been, however instinctively, the mode of the Trumpian moment as well, both the presidential one and that of so many right-wing conspiracy theorists now populating the online world. When everybody lies, anything can indeed be true. And when everybody — or even a significant chunk of everybody — believes this, the effect can be profoundly anti-democratic.

Such belief, born of the relentless rush of falsehoods and conspiracy theories, doesn’t just rile people up and make them wonder what in the world is true. It also generates a yearning for a single voice to rise above the crashing waves of claims and counterclaims, a voice that can be trusted.

In a world in which people sense that truth no longer matters, it doesn’t make a difference whether what that voice says is true. What matters is that the voice is strong and confident. What matters is that it is authoritative even in its falsehoods. And if that reminds you of Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines or Brazil’s newly inaugurated hard-right president Jair Bolsonaro, or Donald Trump, it should.

Why Telling the Truth Matters

Most of what we know, we learn not through personal experience, but because of the reports of other trusted human beings. I have never performed the double-slit experiment, but I know that electrons can behave both as particles and waves. I haven’t recorded ocean or air temperatures over the course of a century, yet I know that on average, the Earth’s air, land, and waters are growing dangerously warmer.

It’s because so much of what we know depends on the truthfulness of others that the philosopher Immanuel Kant believed lying was always wrong. His reasoning was that when we lie to another person, we fail to respect her infinitely valuable capacity to encounter the world and think about the moral choices she’ll make in it. By refusing to tell her the truth, we treat her not as a person, but as an instrument — a tool to get something we want. We treat her like a thing.

I suspect that Kant was right, although one of my other favorite ethicists, Miss Manners (the journalist Judith Martin), argues that certain fictions (“this is delicious!”) are the lubricant without which society’s wheels would freeze in place. Perhaps — you knew I was going to say this! — the truth lies somewhere in between.

However, I am certain of one thing: that truth-telling is the bedrock of democracy. When we routinely assume that our fellow citizens and government officials are lying, it becomes impossible to work together to determine how our neighborhoods, our cities, or our country should function. When we abandon the effort to figure out what is true, we cede the field to anti-democratic leaders who derive their “just powers” not “from the consent of the governed” but from the acquiescence of the willingly deceived.

Anyone who has tried to tell the truth consistently knows how difficult it is to do so. The temptations to lie are powerful, in politics as in daily life. As the poet Adrienne Rich wrote in “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” when we claim we are lying because we don’t want to cause pain, what we really mean is that we don’t want “to have to deal with the other’s pain. The lie is a short-cut through another’s personality.”

Similarly, in democratic politics and organizing, the lie is a shortcut through the hard work of listening to other people’s arguments and formulating our own. Suppose your senatorial candidate (like the one for whose election I recently worked) favors raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. It’s tempting to promise potential voters (especially the many voters who don’t know what a senator can and can’t do) that if your candidate wins, their wages will definitely rise. Electing your candidate may indeed make that more likely, but it’s hardly a guarantee.

In the short run, promising that wages will go up wins more elections than saying they might. But in the long run, this kind of shortcut drives people out of the democratic process, because they stop believing that candidates ever keep promises.

Even in a life-or-death campaign (such as the effort to unseat Trump will be, if he’s still around in 2020), we need to build democratic relationships based on telling the truth as well as we know how. Only if we can trust each other to try to be honest can we hope to rebuild something resembling a truly functioning democracy. Otherwise, sooner or later this country will be seduced by the siren song of yet another strong and authoritative voice.

Humans are finite creatures and any truth we lay claim to will of necessity be partial, multi-faceted, and complex. At our best, we see only part of what is there and articulate only part of what we see. The promise of democracy — when it works — is the possibility of combining all those partially glimpsed and imperfectly reported realities into a still imperfect, but nevertheless better, whole.

Trump’s Border Visit Comes as Shutdown Talks Fall Apart

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is taking the shutdown battle to the U.S.-Mexico border, seeking to bolster his case for the border wall after negotiations with Democrats blew up over his funding demands.

Trump stalked out of his meeting with congressional leaders — “I said bye-bye,” he tweeted soon after — as efforts to end the partial government shutdown fell into deeper disarray. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers now face lost paychecks on Friday.

During his stop Thursday in McAllen, Texas, Trump will visit a border patrol station for a roundtable on immigration and border security and will get a security briefing on the border. But Trump has expressed his own doubts that his appearance and remarks will change any minds, as he seeks $5.7 billion for the wall that has been his signature promise since his presidential campaign.

McAllen is located in the Rio Grande Valley, the busiest part of the border for illegal border crossings.

The unraveling talks prompted further speculation about whether Trump would declare a national emergency and try to authorize the wall on his own if Congress won’t approve the money he’s seeking.

“I think we might work a deal, and if we don’t I might go that route,” he said.

The White House meeting in the Situation Room ended after just 14 minutes. Democrats said they asked Trump to re-open the government but that he told them if he did they wouldn’t give him money for the wall. Republicans said Trump posed a direct question to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: If he opened the government, would she fund the wall? She said no.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Trump slammed his hand on the table. However, Republicans said Trump, who handed out candy at the start of the meeting, did not raise his voice and there was no table pounding.

One result was certain: The shutdown plunged into new territory with no endgame in sight. The Democrats see the idea of the long, impenetrable wall as ineffective and even immoral. Trump sees it as an absolute necessity to stop what he calls a crisis of illegal immigration, drug-smuggling and human trafficking at the border.

Trump headed to Capitol Hill earlier Wednesday, seeking to soothe jittery Republican lawmakers. He left a Republican lunch boasting of “a very, very unified party,” but GOP senators have been publicly uneasy as the standoff ripples across the lives of Americans and interrupts the economy.

During the lunch, Trump discussed the possibility of a sweeping immigration compromise with Democrats to protect some immigrants from deportation but provided no clear strategy or timeline for resolving the standoff, according to senators in the private session.

GOP unity was tested further when the House passed a bipartisan spending bill, 240-188, to reopen one shuttered department, Treasury, to ensure that tax refunds and other financial services continue. Eight Republicans joined Democrats in voting, defying the plea to stick with the White House.

There was growing concern about the toll the shutdown is taking on everyday Americans, including disruptions in payments to farmers and trouble for home buyers who are seeking government-backed mortgage loans — “serious stuff,” according to Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Senate Republican.

Some Republicans were concerned about the administration’s talk of possibly declaring a national emergency at the border, seeing that as an unprecedented claim on the right of Congress to allocate funding except in the most dire circumstances.

“I prefer that we get this resolved the old-fashioned way,” Thune said.

Democrats said before the White House meeting that they would ask Trump to accept an earlier bipartisan bill that had money for border security but not the wall. Pelosi warned that the effects of hundreds of thousands of lost paychecks would begin to have an impact across the economy.

“The president could end the Trump shutdown and re-open the government today, and he should,” Pelosi said.

Tuesday night, speaking to the nation from the Oval Office for the first time, Trump argued that the wall was needed to resolve a security and humanitarian “crisis.” He blamed illegal immigration for what he said was a scourge of drugs and violence in the U.S. and asked: “How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?”

Democrats in response accused Trump appealing to “fear, not facts” and manufacturing a border crisis for political gain.

In an off-the-record lunch with television anchors ahead of his speech, Trump suggested his aides had pushed him to give the address and travel to the border and that he personally did not believe either would make a difference, according to two people familiar with the meeting. But one person said it was unclear whether Trump was serious or joking. The people familiar with the meeting insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the meeting publicly.

___

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin, Colleen Long, Alan Fram and Deb Riechmann contributed to this report.

For AP’s complete coverage of the U.S. government shutdown: https://apnews.com/GovernmentShutdown

Los Angeles Teachers Union Delays Strike Until Monday

LOS ANGELES—The union representing teachers in Los Angeles — the nation’s second-largest school district — postponed the start of a strike until Monday because of the possibility of a court-ordered delay of a walkout.

United Teachers Los Angeles previously said its 35,000 members would walk off the job Thursday for the first time in 30 years if a deal wasn’t reached on higher pay and smaller class sizes.

However, a judge was considering Wednesday whether the union gave legally proper notice of a strike and could have ordered teachers to wait.

Union officials said they believe they would have prevailed in court but decided to postpone a strike to avoid confusion and give teachers, parents and others time to prepare.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, with 640,000 students, said the delay provides an opportunity to keep talking and avoid a strike.

Teachers are hoping to build on the “Red4Ed” movement that began last year in West Virginia, where a strike resulted in a significant raise.

It moved to Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Colorado and Washington state, spreading from conservative states with “right to work” laws that limit the ability to strike to the more liberal West Coast with strong unions.

“What you’re seeing with unions is real enthusiasm and a belief that you can actually be successful,” said Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois. “The educational sector is rife with deep grievance and frustration, but there’s now a sense that you can actually win.”

The walkouts in other states emboldened organized labor after a critical defeat at the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled last year that government workers can’t be required to join unions and pay dues.

“Each state is different, but the commonality across all states is teachers, and parents are sick of schools not being invested in,” union President Alex Caputo-Pearl said.

The Los Angeles district has offered a 6 percent raise over the first two years of a three-year contract. The union wants a 6.5 percent hike that would take effect all at once and be retroactive to fiscal 2017. Health care fully paid by the district and a pension plan would be unchanged under both proposals.

The union also wants significantly smaller class sizes, which routinely top 30 students, and more nurses, librarians and counselors to “fully staff” the district’s campuses in Los Angeles and all or parts of 31 smaller cities, plus several unincorporated areas.

The district has said the union’s demands could bankrupt the school system, which is projecting a half-billion-dollar deficit this budget year and has billions obligated for pension payments and health coverage for retired teachers.

Negotiations were continuing, but little progress was evident in the contract dispute.

Superintendent Austin Beutner traveled Wednesday to Sacramento to ask state lawmakers for additional resources for Los Angeles schools in hopes of averting a walkout.

Unlike other states, schools in California stay open if a strike happens. The Los Angeles district has hired hundreds of substitutes to replace teachers and others who leave for picket lines.

The union said it’s “irresponsible” to hire substitutes and called on parents to consider keeping students home or join marchers if a strike goes forward.

Larry Sand, a retired Los Angeles and New York City teacher who heads the California Teachers Empowerment Network, said he believes the Los Angeles union sees its showdown with the district as a public “sales pitch” for organized labor now that teachers have a choice about joining.

Sand, whose organization describes itself as a nonpartisan information source for teachers and the public, said overly generous benefits for teachers in the past have overburdened the district.

Teachers earn between $44,000 and $86,000 a year depending on their education and experience, according to the Los Angeles County Office of Education. The district says the average teacher salary is $75,000, which reflects the older, more experienced workforce.

The union argues that the district is hoarding reserves of $1.8 billion that could be used to fund the pay and staffing hikes. The district said that money is needed to cover retiree benefits and other expenses.

Beutner, an investment banker and former Los Angeles deputy mayor without experience in education, has become a lightning rod in negotiations.

The union says Beutner and school board members who voted him in are trying to privatize the district, encouraging campus closures and flipping public schools into charters — privately operated public schools that compete for students and the funds they bring in.

Beutner, who attended public school, has said his plan to reorganize the district would improve services to students and families. He and his supporters on the board envision an education system with a “portfolio approach” — public and charter schools under the same leadership.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Politics of Dancing

“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution,” are words attributed to the great early 20th-century anarchist thinker, writer and crusading social-justice activist Emma Goldman. While she may not have uttered precisely those words, the sense of the phrase was on full display in Congress last week, as a video circulated of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing with friends while she was an undergraduate at Boston University, 10 years ago. The video surfaced in a failed attempt to discredit the new member of Congress as she was sworn in as the youngest woman ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Ocasio-Cortez’s response to the online criticism was short and brilliant, tweeting a video of herself dancing into her new congressional office. The video got tremendous attention. What was largely overlooked was the tune that she was dancing to: the classic 1970 anti-war anthem “War,” sung by Edwin Starr. It rocketed to No. 1 in the summer of 1970, and has been a staple anthem against war ever since. “War, What is it good for, Absolutely nothing,” the chorus goes. Ocasio-Cortez mouths the words as she dances through her congressional office door.

Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign website details an array of progressive policies, including a “peace economy” that reads, in part: “As of 2018, we are currently involved in military action in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. Hundreds of thousands of civilians in these countries have been killed either as collateral damage from American strikes or from the instability caused by U.S. interventions. Millions more have fled their broken countries, contributing to the global refugee crisis … we must end the ‘forever war’ by bringing our troops home, and ending the air strikes that perpetuate the cycle of terrorism throughout the world.”

She recently corrected Fox News host, and unofficial consigliere to President Donald Trump, Sean Hannity, who accused her of the heresy of calling for an “end to military airstrikes.” She responded in a tweet, saying she supports “ending unjust wars” entirely.

Since prevailing in the Democratic primary to represent New York’s 14th Congressional District, defeating powerful Democrat incumbent Joe Crowley, Ocasio-Cortez has been regularly targeted by the right wing. Last July, she said on “Democracy Now!” that “the issues I ran on were very clear … improved and expanded Medicare for all; tuition-free public colleges and universities, as well as trade schools; a Green New Deal; justice for Puerto Rico; an unapologetic platform of criminal-justice reform and ending the war on drugs; and also speaking truth to power and speaking about money in politics.”

The Green New Deal calls for the rapid and radical decarbonization of the entire economy, transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources in hopes of staving off the worst effects of climate change while there is still time. The Green New Deal also demands a “just transition,” ensuring that workers displaced from shuttered industries like coal mining get the support they need to move into other productive work.

Ocasio-Cortez joined in a protest with the youth-led Sunrise Movement, sitting in at the office of incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Ocasio-Cortez was calling on the new Democratic majority in the House to impanel a “Select Committee for a Green New Deal,” which would have broad authority, including subpoena power, to push the project forward. Clearly, the pressure campaign had an effect but fell short of the activists’ demands. Pelosi restarted the dormant House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, making it advisory-only. The new chairperson of that committee will be Democrat Kathy Castor of Florida, who, critics point out, has taken tens of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel interests (although a spokesperson said she will forgo such contributions going forward). Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response: “We don’t have time to sit on our hands as our planet burns. For young people, climate change is bigger than election or re-election. It’s life or death.”

As she was sworn in to Congress on Jan. 3, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore all white “to honor the women who paved the path before me, and for all the women yet to come. From suffragettes to Shirley Chisholm, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the mothers of the movement,” she said.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez respects her elders. The old guard in Congress, both Republican and Democrat, shouldn’t fear that this youngest woman ever elected to Congress will be dancing circles around them; instead, they should follow in her footsteps.

* * *

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,400 stations. She is the co-author, with Denis Moynihan and David Goodman, of the New York Times best-seller “Democracy Now!: 20 Years Covering the Movements Changing America.”

(c) 2019 Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Distributed by King Features Syndicate

‘Bye-Bye’: Trump Stalks Out of Shutdown Session With Democrats

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump stalked out of his negotiating meeting with congressional leaders Wednesday—“I said bye-bye,” he tweeted soon after—as efforts to end the 19-day partial government shutdown fell into deeper disarray over his demand for billions of dollars to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers now face lost paychecks on Friday.

The president is to visit the border in person on Thursday, but he has expressed his own doubts that his appearance and remarks will change any minds.

The brief session in the White House Situation Room ended almost as soon as it began.

Democrats said they asked Trump to re-open the government but he told them if he did they wouldn’t give him money for the wall that has been his signature promise since his presidential campaign two years ago.

Republicans said Trump posed a direct question to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: If he opened the government would she fund the wall? She said no.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Trump slammed his hand on the table and walked out. Republicans said Trump, who passed out candy at the start of the meeting, did not raise his voice and there was no table pounding.

One result was certain: The shutdown plunged into new territory with no endgame in sight. The Democrats see the idea of the long, impenetrable wall as ineffective and even immoral, a terrible use of the $5.7 billion Trump is asking. He sees it as an absolute necessity to stop what he calls a crisis of illegal immigration, drug-smuggling and human trafficking at the border.

“The president made clear today that he is going to stand firm to achieve his priorities to build a wall — a steel barrier — at the southern border,” Vice President Mike Pence told reporters afterward.

That insistence and Trump’s walking out were “really, really unfortunate,” said Schumer.

Trump had just returned from Capitol Hill where he urged jittery congressional Republicans to hold firm with him. He suggested a deal for his border wall might be getting closer, but he also said the shutdown would last “whatever it takes.”

He discussed the possibility of a sweeping immigration compromise with Democrats to protect some immigrants from deportation but provided no clear strategy or timeline for resolving the standoff, according to senators in the private session. He left the Republican lunch boasting of “a very, very unified party,” but GOP senators are publicly uneasy as the standoff ripples across the lives of Americans and interrupts the economy.

Trump insisted at the White House “I didn’t want this fight.” But it was his sudden rejection of a bipartisan spending bill late last month that blindsided leaders in Congress, including Republican allies, now seeking a resolution to the shutdown.

GOP unity was being tested further late Wednesday with the House voting on a bipartisan bill to reopen one shuttered department, Treasury, to ensure that tax refunds and other financial services continue. Republicans were expected to join Democrats in voting, defying the plea to stay with the White House.

Ahead of his visit to Capitol Hill, Trump renewed his notice that he might declare a national emergency and try to authorize the wall on his own if Congress won’t approve the money he’s asking.

“I think we might work a deal, and if we don’t I might go that route,” he said.

There’s growing concern about the toll the shutdown is taking on everyday Americans, including disruptions in payments to farmers and trouble for home buyers who are seeking government-backed mortgage loans — “serious stuff,” according to Sen. John Thune, the No. 2 Senate Republican.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, was among several senators who questioned Trump at the Capitol.

“I addressed the things that are very local to us — it’s not just those who don’t receive a federal paycheck perhaps on Friday but there are other consequences,” she said, mentioning the inability to certify weight scales for selling fish. The president’s response? “He urged unity.”

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said “the president thinks there will be increasing pressure on everybody to come to the table once people start missing their paycheck.”

Earlier, Cornyn called the standoff “completely unnecessary and contrived. People expect their government to work. … This obviously is not working.”

Like other Republicans, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said she wants border security. But she said there was “no way” the shutdown fight would drag on for years as Trump warned last week.

“I think certainly I have expressed more than a few times the frustrations with a government shutdown and how useless it is,” Capito said Tuesday. “That pressure is going to build.”

Democrats said before the White House meeting that they would ask Trump to accept an earlier bipartisan bill that had money for border security but not the wall. Pelosi warned that the effects of hundreds of thousands of lost paychecks would begin to ripple across the economy.

“The president could end the Trump shutdown and re-open the government today, and he should,” Pelosi said.

But the meeting breakup put an end to that idea.

Tuesday night, speaking to the nation from the Oval Office for the first time, Trump argued that the wall was needed to resolve a security and humanitarian “crisis.” He blamed illegal immigration for what he said was a scourge of drugs and violence in the U.S. and asked: “How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?”

Democrats in response accused Trump appealing to “fear, not facts” and manufacturing a border crisis for political gain.

A growing number of Republicans are uncomfortable with the toll the partial shutdown is taking, and Trump’s response to it. They are particularly concerned about the administration’s talk of possibly declaring a national emergency at the border, seeing that as an unprecedented claim on the right of Congress to allocate funding except in the most dire circumstances.

“I prefer that we get this resolved the old-fashioned way,” Thune said.

Trump did not mention the idea of a national emergency declaration Tuesday night. A person unauthorized to discuss the situation said additional “creative options” were being considered, including shifting money from other accounts or tapping other executive authorities for the wall.

Trump on Wednesday floated ideas that have been circulated for a broader immigration overhaul. Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has suggested a compromise that would include wall funding as well as protecting some immigrants from deportation.

In their own televised remarks, Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer accused Trump of misrepresenting the situation on the border as they urged him to reopen closed government departments and turn loose paychecks for federal workers.

Negotiations on wall funding could proceed in the meantime, they said.

Schumer said Trump “just used the backdrop of the Oval Office to manufacture a crisis, stoke fear and divert attention from the turmoil in his administration.”

In an off-the-record lunch with television anchors ahead of his speech, Trump suggested his aides had pushed him to give the address and travel to the border and that he personally did not believe either would make a difference, according to two people familiar with the meeting. But one person said it was unclear whether Trump was serious or joking.

The people familiar with the meeting insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the meeting publicly.

___

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin, Colleen Long, Alan Fram and Deb Riechmann contributed to this report.

For AP’s complete coverage of the U.S. government shutdown: https://apnews.com/GovernmentShutdown

Trump’s Racist Language of Pollution Drives His Brand of Fascism

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Truthout. 

The ruthless ideologies and policies of a fascist past are with us once again, and the warning signs can be seen in the emergence of the normalizing discourses of pollution and disposability. As a central element of neoliberalism, the discourse of disposability signals a society in which certain people are viewed as throwaways. Meanwhile the discourse of pollution suggests a mode of dehumanization that enables policies in which people are relegated outside the boundaries of justice and become the driving force for policies of terminal exclusion. These terms represent a merging of neoliberalism and fascist politics.

The utopian visions that support the promise of a radical democracy and prevent the dystopian nightmare of a fascist politics are disappearing in the United States. The viciousness of the Trump administration and the cruelty imposed by neoliberalism mutually inform each other. President Donald Trump’s policies range from stripping food stamps and health care from poor children and caging immigrant children in some god-forsaken prison in Texas to allowing thousands of Puerto Ricans to live for more than a year without electricity, safe water and decent shelter. Such policies are matched by an ongoing, if not relentless, discourse of dehumanization and objectification aimed at those considered disposable.

The deep grammar of violence now shapes all aspects of cultural production and becomes visceral in its ongoing production of domestic terrorism, mass shootings, the mass incarceration of people of color and the war on undocumented immigrants. Not only has it become more gratuitous, random and in some cases trivialized through the monotony of repetition, it also has become the official doctrine of the Trump administration in shaping its domestic and security policies. Trump’s violence has become both promiscuous in its reach and emboldening in its nod to right-wing extremist groups. The mix of white nationalism and expansion of policies that benefit the rich, big corporations and the financial elite are increasingly legitimated and normalized in a new political formation that I have called neoliberal fascism. This new historical conjuncture emerges through a fusion of discredited eugenicist discourses (e.g., Trump’s notion that you have to be born with the right genes) and a rebooted melange of mythic notions of meritocracy (objective measures of individual quality), scientific racism (pseudo-science that supports racial hierarchies), Horatio Alger fables (anyone can work hard and become rich and successful), and a sheer contempt for the “losers” who are viewed as alien to a white public sphere supported by Trump and his minions.

The dual logics of pollution and disposability have become central to a punishing state that both legitimates the denigration of human life and too often unleashes state violence upon immigrants, people of color, poor people, and anyone else considered a threat to the belief that the public sphere is exclusively for whites. Under the Trump administration, the discourse of pollution is increasingly visible when applied to undocumented immigrants or those marginalized by ethnicity and race, who those in power place in the same categories as contaminants and toxins. At the same time, those individuals considered disposable often meet a more violent end. This is clearly visible in the ongoing criminalization of immigrant children on the southern border who are forcibly separated from their parents and deposited in child migrant detention centers largely run by for-profit businesses that are making close to a billion dollars in profits. Some children have died while in these internment centers. The logic of disposability also fuels throughout the United States the modeling of public schools after armed camps, and the targeting of poor Black and Brown youth as objects of control and harassment by the criminal justice system, particularly through the expansion of the school-to-prison pipeline.

Obsessed with race, Donald Trump has weaponized and racialized the culture wars by using racially charged language to legitimate white supremacist ideologies and pit his supporters against protesting Black athletes, undocumented Latino immigrants, dark-skinned immigrants, and other people of color whom he routinely insults and punishes through race-based policies. Trump has claimed that “laziness is a trait in blacks,” according to one of his former employees, and he has called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Meanwhile, he stated in December 2015 that a judge hearing a case about Trump University was “biased” because of the judge’s Mexican heritage.” These comments are a small sampling of Trump’s racist remarks.

Racism runs deep not only in Trump’s base but also in a Republican Party that as Paul Krugman points out engages in extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter purges, “deliberate restriction of minority access to the polls” and the ongoing subversion of state legislatures. Frank Rich has gone further and argued, “The Republican Party has proudly and uninhibitedly come out of the closet as the standard-bearer for white supremacy in the Trump era.” George Packer adds to this signaling the emerging fascist politics that now engulfs the Republican Party. He argues that simply smug ideological fundamentalists and political purists such as Barry Goldwater, Phyllis Schlafly, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich no longer define the Republican Party. He writes that the GOP has become “more grotesque than ever”:

… conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence. The new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes.

What we are witnessing at the current moment is not only the emergence of dangerous, illiberal, anti-democratic ideologies that mimic the legacy of white nationalism but also the resurgence of a powerful affective and educational culture nurtured by false promises, anger, feelings of repulsion, hatred and the spectacularization of violence. What is alarming about this culture of intolerance, bigotry and violence is its alignment with the Nazi obsession with notions of cultural and biological pollution and their systemic efforts to purge society of those deemed contaminated. This language is not unlike Trump’s characterization of asylum seekers as vermin who will bring “large-scale crime and disease” to the United States.

Unmasking Language of Disposability and Pollution

Rather than being a historical relic of a horrible past, the language of pollution and disposability has reemerged under the Trump administration to an unusual extent. This is a language rooted in what Thomas Mann once called “the archaic shudder,” one that opens the door to the rhetoric of racial purity, social cleansing and the glorification of violence. This merging of white nationalism and policies aimed at racial cleansing are buttressed by the cruel architecture of neoliberalism, which creates landscapes of unabashed misery, violence and terror. Neoliberalism offers little hope for economic and social justice while claiming ironically that it is not only a moral beacon and force for the good but also perniciously that there is no realistic alternative to it.

This toxic ideology is further solidified in the assumption that the connective social bonds that make a democracy possible should be viewed with disdain and replaced with a notion of individualism in which all problems and the means to address them should be placed solely at the feet of individuals. Under such circumstances, fear and economic anxiety produced by massive inequality, the dismantling of the welfare state, precarious employment, eroding white privilege, demographic changes and the collapse of the social contract are redirected to those human beings considered “losers,” “outsiders” and “excess.”

The merging of neoliberalism and elements of a fascist playbook are now anchored firmly in the language of disposability and pollution. This rhetoric is part of a representational crisis marked by the increasing attraction of and growth of architectures of meaning and proliferating digital platforms and cultural apparatuses engaged in the production of modes of desire, identifications and values that fuel right-wing extremists and an apocalyptic populism. The current historical conjuncture is marked by a new era of politics and way of thinking about place, community, rootlessness and identity. The once dominant narratives about critical agency, truth, justice and democracy are collapsing. Fascist terror is no longer fixed in the past or ephemeral to the 21st century. Under the Trump administration, malice, lies and unrelenting cruelty have become official policy and fraught with dangerous risks. Fascist politics avoids reason, maligns the truth and appeals to a pathological nationalism. In doing so it creates a mythic past that either denigrates or excludes those considered at odds with its notions of white supremacy and racial purity. What emerges is a celebration of the brutality of 1930s, which becomes a signpost for imagining a present under what Trump’s nostalgically codes in the slogans “America First” and “Make America Great Again.” Culture now becomes integral to a politics deeply rooted in an anti-democratic ethos.

Under neoliberalism, a new political formation has developed in which a racialist worldview merges with the economic dictates of a poisonous form of casino capitalism. Echoes of the past can be heard in Trump’s and his associates’ repeated use of a language boiling over with terms such as “vermin,” “animals,” “stupid” and “losers,” to name only a few of the toxic expressions crucial to a politics of social cleansing, racial purity and violent forms of exclusion. The current language of disposability and pollution carries with it powerful affective overtones that “transform the noble concept of a common humanity into a disdainful sneer,” as Richard A. Etlin points out in his introduction to Art, Culture, and Media Under The Third Reich.

The language of pollution is used to treat some groups as not simply inferior but also as a threat to the body politic, and is closely aligned with the language of camps and extermination. More than an ostentatious display of power on the part of the Trump administration, the language of pollution and disposability functions as a performative language designed to dramatize and re-enact national identity, one that defines itself in white nationalist assumptions. Assigned to the dumping ground of social and political abandonment, those individuals or families considered noxious and superfluous are now associated with a rootlessness that bears a close resemblance to the Nazi notion of blood and soil. Looking back at the Nazi era, the dangers of the language of disposability and pollution become terrifying given how they were deployed in the interest of unimaginable horrors. Etlin provides a glimpse of the logic and effects of the discourse of pollution and its morphing into policies of disposability and eradication. He writes:

From propaganda posters to problems in mathematics text­books for schoolchildren, Germans were repeatedly asked, once the Nazis had come to power, to ponder the economic costs of maintaining the lives of the handicapped and mentally ill.Forced sterilization of people considered “hereditarily ill” had been decreed in July 1933; compulsory abortions, in 1935. The legalized secret killing of [physically and cognitively disabled] children began in 1939, as did plans for the murder of Germany’s adult mental patients, both programs “planned and administered by medical professionals” involving “some of Germany’s oldest and most highly re­spected hospitals.” The utilitarian calculation of the cost of sustaining life for these so-called unproductive members of German society does not account for the full reasoning behind such measures. Rather, one must look to an altered moral outlook best represented by the notion of the “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens,” that is, the “destruction” or “exter­mination,” of “lives not worth living.”

The politics of disposability now exists at the highest levels of the US government and is central to the creation of a death-saturated age.

The politics of disposability is no longer a discourse limited to the historical memory of totalitarian governments, internment camps and extermination policies. As both a state-legitimated ideology and established policy, it now exists at the highest levels of the US government and is central to the creation of a death-saturated age. Fantasies of absolute control, racial cleansing, unchecked militarism and class warfare are at the heart of an American imagination that has turned lethal. This dystopian mindset is marked by hollow words and lethal actions; similarly, its dreamscape is pillaged of any substantive meaning, cleansed of compassion and used to legitimate the notion that alternative worlds are impossible to entertain.

In this worldview, the present creates nightmares parading as dreams in which the future is imagined “by way of a detour through a mythic past,” in the words of AK Thompson. There is more at stake here than shrinking political horizons and the aligning of the existing moment with echoes of a bygone fascist era. What we are witnessing is a mode of governing fueled by fantasies of exclusion accompanied by a full-scale attack on morality, thoughtful reasoning and collective resistance rooted in democratic forms of struggles. We are also witnessing an unprecedented assault on the mainstream media and the fundamental necessity in a democracy for an independent, critical journalism.

Trump’s threat to use “libel laws,” his labeling critical news outlets as “fake news,” and his notion of the media as the “enemy of the American people”—a term linked to authoritarian regimes—are key warning signs of a fascist politics, as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have shown in their book How Democracies Die. Trump has degraded the office of the president and has elevated the ethos of political corruption, hyper-masculinity and lying to a level that leaves many people numb and exhausted. He has normalized the unthinkable, legitimated the inexcusable and defended the indefensible. Pollution in its biological, ecological and material forms has become the centerpiece of Trump’s endorsement of a fascist politics that is at the heart of a growing right-wing populism across the globe and is bolstered by his support.

Trump has normalized the unthinkable, legitimated the inexcusable and defended the indefensible.

Trump has also expanded the discourse of pollution and disposability to enact a full-fledged attack on the environment. As the editorial board of the New York Times put it, “Trump imperils the planet” with his corporate-friendly retrograde policies. Not only has he appointed cabinet members who harbor a deep disdain for environmental regulations to head the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and other agencies whose purpose is to serve the public good, he has also enacted policies utterly destructive to the environment and human life.

For example, the Trump administration is lifting federal protections for thousands of waterways and wetlands, compromising the safety of water for millions of Americans. The Department of Interior will allow oil drilling on millions of previously protected acres including the establishment of oil and gas production wells in federally controlled waters of the US Arctic. The Environmental Protection Agency will lift restrictions on carbon emissions from new coal plants and has proposed weakening greenhouse gas emissions and fuel standards for light duty vehicles. The Trump administration has weakened the Endangered Species Act and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement as part of what Eliot Weinberger describes as “Trump administration’s ‘energy dominancy’ agenda, to eliminate safety rules for offshore oil and natural gas drilling platforms.” Responding to a government report that predicted dire consequences to the US from climate change, Trump stated, “I don’t believe it.”

Trump’s astonishingly irrational response is not simply about his own ignorance regarding scientific studies or the validity of science itself; it is primarily about pandering to the major corporations who make big profits in plundering the environment. Wealth extraction, exploitative low wages, employment contingency, manufactured inequality, brutal forms of labor discipline and engineered suffering are the defining characteristics of the neoliberal capitalism now driving Trump’s policies. Ted Steinberg is right in arguing, “Flirtation with disaster is in a sense the essence of neoliberal capitalism, a hyperactive form of [an] exploitative economic order that seems to know no limits.”

It is important to note that Trump’s environmental rollbacks do more than increase the profits of plundering corporations; they also endanger the lives of millions. For instance, a Harvard University study by professors David Cutler and Francesca Dominici calculated that repealing the Clean Power Plan Rule would “lead to an estimated 36,000 deaths each decade and nearly 630,000 cases of respiratory infection in children alone.” Moreover, the authors estimate that the repeal of emission requirements for heavy trucks alone “could lead to as many as 41,000 premature deaths per decade and 900,000 cases of respiratory tract symptoms.” They conclude with this sobering warning:

Overall, an extremely conservative estimate is that the Trump environmental agenda is likely to cost the lives of over 80,000 US residents per decade and lead to respiratory problems for many more than 1 million people. This sobering statistic captures only a small fraction of the cumulative public health damages associated with the full range of rollbacks and systemic actions proposed by the Trump administration.

In pursuing policies such as these, Trump is abetting the inhumane and ethically irresponsible ethos and pragmatism at the heart of a sordid capitalism that thrives on economic shock doctrines. In doing so, he refuses to acknowledge that the emerging disasters overtaking the planet call into question the very foundations of a predatory global capitalism, which divorces economic activity from social costs, and embraces a death-dealing notion of progress at any price. Neoliberal fascism is on the march and has produced a wide-ranging shift in the economy, ideology, power, culture and politics. Ways of imagining society through the lens of democratic ideals, values and social relations have given way to narratives that substitute cruelty for compassion, greed for generosity, and pollution for social bonds rooted in human rights. Pollution has become not only the new mantra for an assault on human rights but also a warning and unapologetic forecast of the horrors of state power and its turn to a politics of social and racial cleansing, along with its embrace of authoritarianism. We face in the current era a major challenge to education, reason and informed judgment and their relationship to democracy. The formative cultures necessary to ensure the production of informed and critical citizens necessary for a democracy are collapsing under the weight of the powers of the financial elite and big corporations. At the same time, as Anthony DiMaggio has argued, fascism is on the table and “has become a permanent feature of American politics.”

Such a threat in terms of its historical genesis and its contemporary modes of expression can no longer be ignored. The stakes are much too high.

Note: I want to thank my friend, Oz Zambrano, for his editorial help with this essay.

The Ultimate Test of Trump’s Cronyism Is Unfolding in Beverly Hills

The Beverly Hills heiress waiting for Ivanka Trump at a Republican soiree last summer should have been at the height of her social powers.

Lisa Korbatov’s parents had made a fortune redeveloping Los Angeles’ Garment District and were donors for Republican and pro-Israel causes. Korbatov herself was president of the Beverly Hills school board and a trustee of the Jewish Community Foundation, and her local political activism had received swooning coverage from the staid Beverly Hills Courier, the hip LA Weekly and publications in between.

Three years ago, the local Boy Scouts even chose the blunt-speaking, charcoal-haired Korbatov for their 2015 Distinguished Citizen Award.

But Korbatov, 54, lately has become an object of derision in palm-shaded pockets of Beverly Hills. For eight years, she had led what passed for a heroic cause in auto-centric Southern California – fighting to derail L.A.’s nascent subway system. A planned 9-mile, $6.3 billion subway extension would tunnel under Korbatov’s alma mater, Beverly Hills High School.

Korbatov believes that the subway poses a dire threat to the school and the surrounding enclave of wealth and celebrity. And so, from her perch on the school board, she has done all she can to stop it.

She’s warned that students could be incinerated by exploding underground gases, poisoned or given cancer by seeping fumes, because the subway will run through the old oil fields that lie beneath much of West L.A. They might be targeted by terrorists attracted by the subway line. Perhaps the school itself will be demolished because of a subterranean construction accident while the tunnel is being built, she has claimed.

“You will not succeed, and we will stop you at every turn,” Korbatov warned subway boosters on the day in 2012 when the route was approved.

But LA Metro, as the region’s transit agency is called, has rolled through the turns successfully. The agency has debunked Korbatov’s theories about explosions and poisonous gas. It repeatedly has beaten the school district in court, obtained approvals and funding, and built a staging area near the high school for the coming big dig.

As her cause seemed increasingly hopeless, Korbatov became viewed as less of a noble crusader and more of a Chihuahua clamped to a pant leg. At her urging, the financially strapped school district has spent an estimated $16 million on lawsuits that failed. But even as Korbatov prepared to leave office at the end of 2018, her crusade continued in the form of a lobbying blitz, petition drive and more litigation.

For many in Beverly Hills – even those who never liked the idea of tunneling under the school – it’s time to stop fighting and try to negotiate a settlement with Metro that will pay to ease the disruption of the construction project.

But as Korbatov mingled among Republican donors at the private event in West L.A., she kept a dagger in her stocking: an affiliation with Donald Trump that she hopes to parlay into total victory in her anti-subway campaign.

For if the president can be persuaded to cut off federal funding for the subway project, the Purple Line will be stopped in its tracks.

So that’s what brought Korbatov to the soiree in June.

She donated $20,000 to a political action committee controlled by Bakersfield Rep. Kevin McCarthy in hopes of importuning the GOP House leader and his special guest, the president’s daughter, about the subway threat.

In case Ivanka Trump or McCarthy had questions, she brought the school superintendent with her. It was one more attempt to leverage her personal connection with Trump to the benefit of her anti-subway campaign.

***

The Republican woman from Beverly Hills surely seemed out of place on a stage with Hillary Clinton’s speechwriter, an Al Gore campaign adviser and a New York Times reporter.

It was January 2017, three days before Trump’s inauguration, and the University of Southern California was hosting a panel on presidential politics. Like everyone else in blue-state America, USC’s political scientists were trying to figure out what to expect. It turned out that Lisa Korbatov held in her pocket the new American political currency: a previous business encounter with Trump.

“I had a personal experience with him, as did my husband, through some business deal,” Korbatov said, in answer to a question about whether Trump would make peace with his critics once he took office.

“He couldn’t have been more calm and normal on the phone multiple times,” she said. “So I think some of this is a little bit of theatrics. I think he’s very practical, pragmatic.”

The business deal Korbatov referenced was a little-noticed, emblematically bizarre episode in Trump’s varied real estate career. In 2007, while Trump was in town to film “The Apprentice: Los Angeles,” Korbatov’s parents had bought a Rodeo Drive mansion from the family of the corrupt dictator of the African nation of Gabon for $10.5 million. The following year, they sold it, with Korbatov’s husband, a lawyer, handling the deal.

An investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting showed that Mokless Girgis, an Egyptian man with little money and a history of financial scams, paid $10.3 million cash for the property, according to real estate records.

Six weeks later, records show Girgis transferred the property – for no money at all – to a shell company set up for Trump by Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime former fixer and lawyer.

In a filing, Girgis claimed his name had been put on the mansion deed by mistake and he never had owned the property. Korbatov’s husband, Igor, gave the same account, saying the wrong deed had been filed by the title company. Real estate experts who reviewed the transaction for Reveal said they found the story of the $10 million clerical error implausible.

Trump held the mansion for about a year, then sold it for $9.5 million – completing what, on paper at least, appears to be the best real estate deal he ever made. Girgis, pursued by creditors, later left the country.

Korbatov has other ties to Trump. The school district’s lead law firm in the subway fight – hired at Korbatov’s urging – is headed by Marc Kasowitz, a hard-edged New Yorker who for 20 years represented Trump in cases involving divorce, bankruptcy, sexual misconduct and Russian interference in the 2016 election. After Trump was elected, Korbatov began dropping Kasowitz’s name in an effort to draw the new president’s attention to the subway.

Korbatov also has a long association with Beverly Hills investment banker Elliott Broidy, a top Trump fundraiser. After the inauguration, Korbatov and Broidy wrote to Trump, urging him to stop the subway.

So far at least, those seemingly impeccable Trump connections have been of little help, largely because both men have been engulfed in scandals.

Kasowitz was forced to resign as Trump’s lawyer in 2017 amid reports that he might be ineligible for a White House security clearance because of a drinking problem.

Broidy became GOP persona non grata because news stories based on hacked emails portrayed him as engaged in a multimillion-dollar influence-trading scheme – even as he made hush-money payoffs to a Playboy model who was carrying his child.

And so, Korbatov began pressing House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other pro-Trump lawmakers.

In June, at her urging, six GOP members of Congress – including California Rep. Devin Nunes, Trump’s champion on the House intelligence committee – wrote to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, urging her to cut off federal funds to the L.A. subway.

At an October gathering of school activists, Korbatov boasted that she had lobbied Trump herself and obtained a commitment from McCarthy to lobby the president on her behalf.

“I’ve gone to very high-level donor events as a donor, and I’ve talked to them and I pass on information and documents. I even saw the president. I gave him some letters and he accepted them a few weeks ago,” Korbatov said, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by Beverly Hills Weekly and shared with Reveal.

“I have been going to the large donors and getting letters, and the letters have been going to Kevin McCarthy. They pressure him because the only person Trump loves and listens to is Kevin McCarthy. So Kevin is the key. I saw him at least six times in a few months. He has told me that he will do it.”

Korbatov declined to be interviewed for this story. She referred written questions from Reveal to the school district’s lawyer, Terry Tao. In a letter, Tao reiterated the district’s concerns about “the danger and disruption” posed by the subway.  He didn’t mention Trump. McCarthy’s press aide didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The wail of needy hangers-on is background noise to any politician’s life, growing louder the higher the political rung. Trump for decades has done business deals that have invited accusations of political back-scratching and other types of conflicts of interest. And since he’s been in office, stories about Trump friends getting what they wanted from the government have become something of a national and international news beat.

The subway saga points to Trumpian influence trading gone local.

The emerging Los Angeles mass transit system is the product of decades of ballot measures, public meetings, legal challenges and civic planning initiatives; even in Beverly Hills, voters overwhelmingly approved the system Korbatov fights.

Los Angeles, made famously sclerotic with traffic jams and endless sprawl, is in the process of redefining its core, with multi-story commercial and residential neighborhoods served by a growing spider’s web of transit lines. This in turn has attracted businesses whose workforce has no interest in sitting in gridlock.

Korbatov, however, is betting all that public process can be trumped – if only she can persuade the president to reach down into the federal transportation bureaucracy and cancel a grant that has long since been awarded to Metro.

***

When Denny Zane, the godfather of the effort to fund a grand expansion of L.A.’s transit system, says he will be in the car for quite a while with plenty of time to talk, it rolls off his tongue as though Angelenos say it to each other all the time.

In this motor raconteur spirit, the former mayor of Santa Monica recalls an evening in spring 2007 when he was driving along Olympic Boulevard in an attempt to get to an event in Beverly Hills.

“It was really stuck. It was going nowhere. And a blurb came on the radio saying, ‘LA Metro announced today that it has no money for any new projects for the next 30 years,’ ” he recalled. During the previous 40 minutes, Zane had driven 2 miles.

Meanwhile, the once-ratty wasteland of central L.A. was blossoming as technology companies erected regional headquarters in an expanding area boosters called Silicon Beach.

But car traffic, already horrible, was congealing to a point that it was making economic growth, and even workaday existence, unsustainable.

Zane knew then-L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was a transit enthusiast. Zane told his left-wing pals that the mayor needed “a grand coalition” to get a subway built. Eventually, business and environmental groups got a measure on the ballot.

It seemed a long shot in the city built for the car. An early 20th-century system of trolleys had long ago been uprooted, and 1990s-era subway efforts had left the city with the 17-mile-long Red Line, a little-used, often-mocked service between downtown and North Hollywood. Los Angeles’ historic antipathy to public transit was epitomized in a 1991 academic book titled, “Transport of Delight.” It argued that L.A. mass transit supporters must have a psychological obsession with objects being inserted into dark tunnels.

But Los Angeles also has a history of rejecting orthodoxies – even its own.

And so in 2008, voters passed a half-cent sales tax increase to build what at the time was dubbed a “subway to the sea.”

City planners envisioned a new L.A. of high-density development combining restaurants, arenas, hotels, apartments and theaters, all within steps of each other. To make the whole thing work better, hundreds of miles of transit capillaries would emanate from new subways. One, called the Purple Line, would transect Beverly Hills along a route yet to be determined.

***

Lisa Korbatov had been elected to the school board in 2009. She became the board’s dominant personality, with opposition to the subway her signature issue.

At first, Metro had plotted a route for the Purple Line beneath busy Santa Monica Boulevard to a station among the high-rises of Century City. But earthquake experts warned that the Santa Monica fault posed a threat.

To reduce earthquake danger, Metro in 2011 proposed moving the station several hundred feet to a site just a few blocks from Beverly Hills High. The change required putting the subway line in a tunnel beneath the school. Despite a howl of protest from Beverly Hills residents, officials approved the new route at a stormy meeting in 2012.

To some, the plan desecrated a 91-year-old Southern California landmark known for its movie star alumni, dormant oil wells and the “Swim Gym” – a basketball court that converts into an indoor pool.

To Korbatov and her allies, moving the subway a few blocks was a catastrophe.

***

On a blue-sky Southern California day, fresh-faced students in shorts and backpacks trudge among manicured hedges toward a cluster of French Normandy-style classroom buildings. Suddenly, an orange fireball obliterates the scene.

“Methane gas, toxic chemicals and teenagers don’t mix,” intones a bass-baritone narrator’s voice. “But this dangerous combination is on the verge of exploding at Beverly High, turning the school into a mega-disaster.”

The spliced-in explosion was the centerpiece of a 2012 video deployed by the school district in its anti-subway lobbying campaign. The project would bring explosions, health hazards, cave-ins – at least according to the video.

Two years later, YouTube videos created by Beverly Hills students repeated the litany of dangers.

“Are we being hysterical?” asked a school board member in one video. “No!”

Even worse might be in store, Korbatov has claimed. In 2010, she told Beverly Hills Patch, that “our high school, with its reputation as having affluent and Jewish students, would make a good target” for terrorists attracted by the subway.

Korbatov also accused subway boosters of political corruption.

Then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and longtime County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky had pushed the subway to “take care of a couple of developer friends who bundle and give large political donations,” she claimed in a news release.

Both Villaraigosa and Yaroslavsky have been out of office for years, but Korbatov continues to complain that the subway project is corrupt.

“This is Metro – this is what they do to communities,” she declared during a school board meeting in June. “They lie. They lie and they use your taxpayer dollars to just run roughshod over your liberties, your sanctity and your sovereignty.”

***

In 2012, shortly after the route was approved, the school district filed lawsuits in state and federal court claiming the project violated environmental laws.

Environmental studies ignored earthquake dangers, underplayed the risk of toxics and explosions, and failed to note the subway might make the high school unusable, the lawsuits claimed.

For its part, Metro contended that the subway would be perfectly safe and posed no threat to anybody, and it argued that its $13.8 million in environmental studies had been done by the book.

The following year, Lisa Korbatov pushed the school board to hire Marc Kasowitz’s law firm to take over the case. She wanted the help of the firm’s top lobbyist: Joe Lieberman, the former Connecticut senator and Democratic vice presidential nominee. Lieberman had political ties to West Coast Democrats. Perhaps he could persuade the mayor to reroute the subway.

But negotiations went nowhere, and Beverly Hills never got any traction in court. In 2014, a judge tossed the school district’s state lawsuit. An appeal fell flat. The federal courts took longer, but in 2017, the district’s federal lawsuit also was rejected. The district responded by filing yet another lawsuit.

The litigation is pricey, and the district really cannot afford it. Beset by declining enrollment and high costs, Beverly Hills schools have been running a deficit, the county Office of Education says.

To pay the lawyers, the school board has spent the proceeds of voter-approved school construction bonds. The district contends that’s legal. But the district’s own auditors have red-flagged the issue, noting that the state constitution requires that school construction bonds be “used for specific school facilities projects only.”

Nor is the district forthcoming about what the lawsuits have cost. Franklin Tell, a lawyer who serves on a citizens committee set up to oversee bond spending, estimates legal fees have topped $16 million. Nobody knows for sure, he said.

The district refused to let the committee see the lawyers’ invoices, saying the bills were confidential, records show. Tell worries that the latest lawsuit will run legal bills even higher on what he is convinced is a lost cause.

“The hubris, arrogance, and ego driven stupidity to commence yet another lawsuit after its appeal was denied, confirms my worst fears that this fiasco has gotten completely out of control,” he wrote in an email to the school board in May.

***

Trump’s election seemed to open a new path for derailing the subway: The Kasowitz firm had serious juice with the new president. Partner David Friedman, who had been Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer, became U.S. ambassador to Israel. Joe Lieberman was mentioned as a candidate to succeed fired FBI Director James Comey. Marc Kasowitz himself took on the high-profile job of leading the legal team representing Trump on the special counsel’s Russia probe.

In Beverly Hills, Lisa Korbatov boasted that Kasowitz played golf with the president, a person who knows her says.

In March 2017, Korbatov wrote to Trump, calling the subway a “financial fiasco” and again mentioning explosions. The letter made a point of noting that the school district was represented by Kasowitz.

But the meeting she requested never materialized, and soon Kasowitz was no longer Trump’s lawyer. In July 2017, ProPublica reported that Kasowitz “had struggled intermittently with alcohol abuse” and had not sought a security clearance, perhaps fearing he was ineligible. When a critic sent an email to Kasowitz urging him to resign, the president’s lawyer went off, writing: “Watch your back, bitch. … Don’t be afraid, you piece of shit. Stand up.”

After ProPublica published the exchange, Kasowitz resigned as Trump’s lawyer.

So Korbatov turned to another Trump connection: Elliott Broidy, a wealthy investment banker and an old family friend from L.A. Jewish and Republican circles.

Like her parents, Broidy for years had given generously to pro-Israel causes, and he was also a major GOP fundraiser, serving as finance chairman of the national Republican Party under President George W. Bush. In 2008, when Bush took a delegation of prominent American Jews to Israel, delegates included Broidy and Korbatov’s mother, Selma Fisch.

In 2009, Broidy’s career nearly had been wrecked when he was implicated in a pay-to-play scandal at the New York state pension fund. But he rebuilt his investment banking business and became a heavyweight Trump fundraiser, serving as vice chairman of the Trump Victory Committee PAC and vice chairman of the president’s inaugural committee.

When Korbatov wrote to Trump about the subway, Broidy also signed the letter. Broidy, it seemed, would be her new ticket into Trump’s orbit.

In 2018, a promising opportunity to use Broidy’s ties to the president arose: Broidy was co-hosting a $35,000-per-plate fundraiser for Trump in Beverly Hills.

But Broidy, too, fell from grace after hacked emails implicated him in an influence-trading scandal that involved hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia and other countries seeking access to Trump. A $1.6 million hush payment to former Playboy model Shera Bechard, set up by Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen, cemented Broidy’s status as a pariah.

Broidy was dropped from the fundraiser. He resigned as deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Korbatov had lost another entrée to Trump.

In the spring, Korbatov began cultivating Indiana Rep. Todd Rokita, a hardline Trump supporter on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

At the time, Rokita was running in a U.S. Senate primary, telling voters, “I’m pro-life, pro-gun and pro-Trump.” Korbatov donated $3,400.

After he lost, Rokita went back to Congress and began circulating a letter to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao warning of the subway’s threat to Beverly Hills High: Students might face “coughing, dizziness, nausea, and headaches” or even “cancer, chronic asthma, and other respiratory illnesses,” he wrote. Rep. Devin Nunes and four other California GOP lawmakers signed Rokita’s letter, which sought a meeting to discuss the $1.2 billion in federal funds granted to LA Metro to extend the Purple Line.

But like the other approaches, no immediate action resulted.

***

Meanwhile, Metro set up a staging area next to the high school to begin work.

The move energized opponents. More than 5,300 people signed an online “Stop the Purple Threat” petition addressed to Trump. In October, Superintendent Michael Bregy helped organize a districtwide student walkout to protest the subway, with a noisy rally at a park near a property Trump owns. But the effort produced no discernible headway, and the Los Angeles Times editorialized, “Seriously, Beverly Hills? Cut your Purple Line hysteria, already.”

For many in Beverly Hills, it was long past time to abandon the fight.

The district’s losing battle “continues to waste millions of dollars that are earmarked for school improvements,” said former Mayor Stephen Webb. The project “is not going to be dangerous to the kids,” he said. “I wouldn’t have supported it if it were.”

“Fighting Metro is a lost cause,” said former school board member Herbert Young.

But Lisa Korbatov seemed determined to continue fighting the subway even after her term on the school board expired at the end of the year.

As she recounted in a series of WhatsApp messages to subway opponents, she was buoyed by an encounter with the president, apparently at an event at the Trump hotel in Washington.

On Oct. 5, she wrote that she recently had spoken to the president and had given him important documents about the subway issue.

“He knows,” she wrote. “He told me he’s (going to) look into it.”

Trump’s daughter also seemed receptive, she wrote. “Ivanka got two packages from me. One I gave her two months ago and spoke to her. … She knew me, and knew the issue.”

In the meantime, she urged subway opponents to “bombard the White House” with emails and calls, declaring, “They all cave in to pressure in DC.” She also urged opponents not to lose heart.

“You all need to trust me,” she wrote. “Nobody knows more than me.”

This story was edited by Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.