Chris Hedges's Blog, page 394

Has Emmanuel Macron Lost the People for Good?

PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron will be speaking to his nation at last Monday, after increasingly violent, radicalized protests against his leadership have shaken the country and scarred its beloved capital. His long silence has aggravated that anger and many protesters are hoping only to hear one thing from Macron: “I quit.”

That’s a highly unlikely prospect.

Instead Macron is expected to announce measures to reduce taxes and boost purchasing power for France’s working classes who feel his presidency has favored the rich. He’s being forced to act after four weeks of “yellow vest” protests that started in France’s struggling provinces and morphed into surging riots in Paris, scaring tourists and foreign investors alike.

The 40-year-old leader met Monday in his presidential palace with local and national politicians, unions and business leaders to hear their concerns — but with no representatives of the scattered, leaderless protest movement.

On Monday evening, Macron will give a national televised address, his first public words in more than a week. Some fed-up demonstrators have already promised new demonstrations this Saturday, regardless of what the president says.

Participants at Monday’s meeting said the president didn’t leak his plans but seemed to grasp the gravity of the yellow vest crisis.

“We will listen to him to see if we have been heard,” said Yves Veyrier, secretary general of the leftist workers union FO.

Small business representatives lamented the blow to retail and other companies at the height of the Christmas shopping season.

Herve Morin, a centrist politician who heads a group of regional leaders, said Macron gave no signs of stepping down. Morin urged the president to change “the method and the software” in communicating with the French public, warning that if he doesn’t, “the country risks heading into chaos.”

A presidential official said 37 people were around a table with the president on Monday, describing how the yellow vest protest movement is impacting their industries, unions, small businesses and local governments.

Among steps the French government is considering are new taxes on online giants like Google and Amazon; abolishing taxes on workers’ overtime and speeding up tax cuts.

Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said Monday the government could delay some payroll taxes but expressed resistance to restoring the wealth tax or lowering taxes for retirees, among the protesters’ many and varied demands. He stressed that the new measures should focus on helping the working classes.

“We are ready to make any gesture” that works, he said on RTL radio. “What is important now is to put an end to the crisis and find peace and unity in the country again.”

Fallout from the protests so far could cost France 0.1 percent of gross domestic product in the last quarter of the year, Le Maire warned.

“That means fewer jobs, it means less prosperity for the whole country,” he said.

The yellow vest protests began in November against a rise in fuel taxes — which Macron eventually abandoned last week — but have mushroomed to include a plethora of sometimes contradictory demands, including, lately, Macron’s resignation.

“Macron is there for the rich, not for all the French,” 68-year-old retiree Jean-Pierre Meunuer said at Saturday’s protest in Paris.

With new demonstrations planned Saturday, some police officers exhausted by four weekends of rioting are calling for overtime to be paid.

“The state should commit itself to the payment of overtime,” the UNSA police union said in a statement Monday. “These extra hours should be exempted from tax. Night hours should be revalued.”

Graffiti throughout the French capital singles Macron out for criticism, reflecting a national sense that the centrist former banker is arrogant and out of touch. Macron however has appeared determined to continue trying to make the French economy more competitive globally. No French presidential or parliamentary elections are planned until 2022.

Key Paris tourist sites reopened Sunday, including such as the Louvre museum and the Eiffel Tower, while workers cleaned up tons of debris from Saturday’s protests, which left widespread damage in the capital and elsewhere.

At least 71 people were injured in the Paris protest riots on Saturday and nearly 1,000 people were being held in custody.

French media reported that 136,000 protesters took to the streets nationwide Saturday.

America’s Children Face Income Inequality Unseen in Generations

The Inequality to Be Suffered by Our Children

The fortunate ones will not be suffering. In the past eight years, the richest 5% of Americans have increased their wealth by $30 trillion—almost a third of total U.S. wealth—while the poorest 50% have seen their average wealth drop from $11,500 to $9,500. There is ample evidence for a nation soon to be made even more unequal by the transfer of wealth from rich baby boomers to their children and grandchildren, who will have done little if anything to earn it. The middle class will be further crippled by the ongoing growth in inequality. Unless progressive policies are demanded by American voters, most of our children and grandchildren will suffer from the continuing expansion of a Great-Depression-like wealth gap that already “dwarfs” the rest of the developed world.

Nearly a Third of U.S. Wealth Will Be Handed Down, Mostly to Rich Kids 

Total U.S. wealth is about $98 trillion. According to an Accenture study, $30 trillion in financial and non-financial assets will be inherited by the children of Baby Boomers in the next thirty to forty years. A Boston College study predicts an overall transfer twice that size, at $59 trillion, with $36 trillion going to heirs. Deloitte predicts a $24 trillion transfer of wealth (to and from all generations) in the next fifteen years. America’s richest 20% own nearly nine-tenths of this impending windfall (Table 6-5).

Some sources question the claims for massive impending wealth transfers, saying that Boomers may spend most of their money, or that the newly rich young beneficiaries will mismanage their portfolios. Apparently it’s difficult for some of us to accept the reality of a worsening disparity in U.S. wealth.

The Rich Kids Will Have Learned How to Avoid the Public Good

Skipping out on tax obligations will start right away, as over 99.8 percent of estates are not currently required to pay any estate tax.

Here’s another way for the young heirs to skip out on taxes: Offshore hoarding of private American wealth is estimated to be $3.3 trillion (4% of U.S. $82 trillion financial wealth).

And yet another way: Make a fortune, then move out of the country and renounce U.S. citizenship to avoid taxes. Most infamous for this strategy was Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who turned decades of American technology research into a billion-dollar fortune before bolting to Singapore and giving up his U.S. citizenship. There are more of these tax avoiders every year. Tech billionaires are building their doomsday bunkers in relatively safe faraway places like New Zealand, the home of the world’s most unaffordable house prices.

Still another way to shirk responsibility, while looking altruistic: Set up a donor-advised fund with a charitable-sounding name. Rich donors can get immediate tax deductions, while the recipients of their largesse don’t actually have to use the money for charitable causes, and the fund directors can pay themselves handsome undisclosed salaries.

The Rich Kids Will Have Private Doctors, Police and Firefighters 

The kids will never have to worry about health care. They’ll continue their parents’ trend of paying ‘concierge’ doctors to visit their mansions or yachts, where emergency rooms are equipped with heart monitors, ultrasounds, x-ray machines, and blood analyzers. If a hospital stay is required, they might look into a $2,400 per day penthouse hospital suite complete with butler and grand piano.

In case of fire, they can follow the example of Kanye and Kim and hire a private firefighting service.

For security, the already proliferating private police forces are certain to fill the protection needs of the kids with newly-acquired estates. But private officers tend to be undertrained compared to public police; their acts of aggression are rarely reported; and in some states private forces are not even subject to investigation through the Freedom of Information Act.

The Growing Number of Poor Kids 

The expected growth in inequality is shown dramatically in a 2017 report by the Institute for Policy Studies, which predicts ZERO median Black household wealth by the year 2053, if current trends continue. Median Latino household wealth would hit zero twenty years later. Right now the poverty rates for Black and Hispanic kids are 30 and 26 percent, respectively. Overall, for all demographic groups, income instability and debt are diminishing the quality of life for middle- and lower-class families with children. It’s frightening to anticipate a worsening poverty rate for children already largely ignored by the privileged members of society.

Democrats have not been the answer to all this. Both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were buddies with Wall Street; Obama spent public money on drone wars; Clinton decimated the safety net and increased mass incarceration.

Greater equality of wealth and opportunity can only be achieved through progressive policies, now and in 2020. That is the hope of people who care about the needs of society rather than one’s position on a billionaire list.

U.S. and Petrol States Conspire to Undermine U.N. Climate Study

The COP24 talks in Katowice, Poland, have led to a “diplomatic standoff” that has world leaders, climate activists, and experts alarmed as four “oil allies“—the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait—have banded together to “water down” worldwide support for a landmark United Nations climate study released in October.

Most world leaders gathered in Poland to discuss how to meet the goals of the Paris agreement seemed eager to heed the warnings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on what the world could look like if the global temperature rises to 1.5°C versus 2°C (2.7°F versus 3.6°F)—which has elicited demands for “rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented” reforms to avert climate catastrophe.

The four-nation coalition of oil-exporting nations, however, wasn’t having it—and aimed to make it easier for governments to ignore such calls for urgent action to address the climate crisis by fighting against a motion to “welcome” the study. Instead, they suggested, it should merely be “noted.”

“The United States was willing to note the report and express appreciation to the scientists who developed it, but not to welcome it, as that would denote endorsement of the report,” the U.S. State Department said. “As we have made clear in the IPCC and other bodies, the United States has not endorsed the findings of the report.”

Last year, President Donald Trump revealed his intention to withdraw from the Paris agreement, provoking immediate condemnation across the United States and the rest of the world. Within a few months of that announcement, all other countries had signed on to the accord, leaving the U.S. as the sole nation opposed to it.

Efforts by the U.S. and others on Saturday to block global support for the IPCC report raised immediate concern and frustration among climate experts.

“I think it was a key moment,” Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) told the Associated Press. “The fact that a group of four countries were trying to diminish the value and importance of a scientific report they themselves, with all other countries, requested three years ago in Paris is pretty remarkable.”

“It’s really an embarrassment for the world’s leading scientific superpower to be in this position of having to disbelieve a report that was written by the world’s scientific community including a large number of pre-eminent U.S. scientists,” he said.

Meyer, who has tracked climate negotiations for many years, didn’t just lay blame on the U.S. though. He also noted that “the Saudis with their sidekicks the Kuwaitis have long been troublemakers in this in this process.”

“We’ve seen this story before—a small number of bad actors who, in essence, are conspiring to prevent the implementation of an agreement where there’s otherwise support among the rest of the world’s nations—in this case, the conclusion that we need to keep warming below one-and-a-half degrees Celsius, and that requires substantial reductions in carbon emissions over the next 10  or 12 years,” Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann said in an interview with BBC News.

Acknowledging that unfortunately, the small group of countries sabotaging the motion to welcome the study seem to be “focused on their own short-term financial interests at the expense of the larger interests of this planet,” Mann reiterated the need for, among other changes, a swift global transition to renewable energy to stabilize warming “below catastrophic levels.”

“Deliberately ignoring the IPCC report would be wholly irresponsible,” declared May Boeve, executive director of 350.org, vowing that her group “stands with the rest of world in condemning these climate deniers…and the vested fossil fuel interests behind them.”

The sabotage efforts also infuriated some of those participating in the talks in Poland—including Rueanna Haynes, a delegate for St. Kitts and Nevis, who reportedly told her fellow diplomatic representatives during the plenary that it was “ludicrous” to not welcome the IPCC’s warnings.

“It’s very frustrating that we are not able to take into account the report’s findings: we are talking about the future of the world—it sounds like hyperbole when I say it, but that’s how serious it is,” she told the Guardian. “I would say that this issue has to be resolved. This is going to drag out and the success of the COP is going to hang on this as well as other issues.”

8 Reasons That John Kelly Will Not Be Missed

Trump announced Saturday that his chief of staff, John Kelly, will leave at the end of the month. It has been reported that the two men are not speaking. Kelly was often seen as a force for stability in the Trump administration, but as I warned when he first came in, he shared many of Trump’s crackpot far right-wing ideas and therefore was not in fact a source of stability for the country.

1. Kelly thought that we are under siege:

“We are under attack from failed states, cyber-terrorists, vicious smugglers, and sadistic radicals. And we are under attack every single day. The threats are relentless.”

As journalist Michael Cohen wrote in response at the Boston Globe, “Cyber-terrorists have never killed an American citizen, no failed state threatens America and more Americans are killed by lightning strikes than sadistic radicals.”

2. Kelly believed that construction on Trump’s border wall would begin by summer of 2017, and seemed to think that if it had, it would have been a good thing.

3. Nor is the wall needed or wanted by a majority of Americans. Kelly was almost delusional about U.S. immigration enforcement: “Nothing’s been done in the past eight years to to enforce the border rules and regulations, not to mention many of the immigration laws inside of the United States.”

Fact: The Obama administration deported at least as many people as the Bush administration had, if you use the same definition for deportations in both administrations. By sheer reported numbers, Obama deported some 2.5 million people during his eight years while Bush deported 2 million. They probably actually deported about the same number. Kelly’s bizarre notion that the laws were not implemented since 2009 is flat wrong.

4. Kelly full-throatedly supported the Nazi family border separation policy of the Trump administration. On undocumented immigration, Kelly gave NPR an interview went like this:

Kelly: “But a big name of the game is deterrence.”

NPR: “Family separation stands as a pretty tough deterrent.”

Kelly: “It could be a tough deterrent—would be a tough deterrent. A much faster turnaround on asylum seekers.”

NPR: “Even though people say that’s cruel and heartless to take a mother away from her children?”

Kelly: “I wouldn’t put it quite that way. The children will be taken care of—put into foster care or whatever. But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.”

Kelly’s doctrine of “deterrence” of undocumented immigration into the U.S. through family separation was undergirded by a special kind of sadism and ignorance combined. First of all, villagers in Honduras were not going to know about Kelly’s policy. Second, they are so desperate that many will take the risk anyway. Third, it is wrong to pounce and take U.S. citizen children away from their mothers and fathers all of a sudden, giving them no time to make alternate arrangements. As for foster homes, with all due respect to the dedicated people who often run them, social science has proven that they are the biggest producer of a criminal class in the U.S. Children growing up without strong parental role models have a much greater chance of ending up in prison. Yes, that’s right. Social science says that if you want a safe society, don’t deport the parents of U.S. citizen children.

5. Kelly wanted to prioritize deportation of undocumented people who use marijuana on the circa 1910 grounds that it is a “gateway drug.” It is not, or Colorado would be nothing but heroin addicts. Legalization of marijuana tracks with lower crime rates.

6. Kelly said of reports that Jared Kushner had met with the Russians during the campaign, before these reports were confirmed, that “any channel of communication” with Russia “is a good thing.” Given Mueller’s revelations this week, that particular assertion hasn’t aged well for the general.

7. Then we should remember Kelly’s bizarre performance during Trump’s first attempt at a Muslim ban, when he gladly acted without any regard to the U.S. Constitution and claimed to have authored the policy (the Mussolini-loving Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller sprang it on him).

8. Kelly bizarrely defended Confederate slave drivers of the 1860s as having lived at a time before the evils of slavery were apparent to moral people. Haiti abolished slavery in 1804, Mexico in 1824, and Muslim Tunisia (!) in 1846. In fact, Tunisia tried to convince the antebellum U.S. to give up the foul practice, after its elite engaged in a modernist debate that instanced the Qur’an’s singling out of manumission as a good deed. That’s right folks, not only were Muslims in Tunis way ahead of Americans in the Deep South in the 1840s, but they were way ahead of John Kerry in 2018.

Oh, Kelly may have cut down a little bit on Trump’s circus of chaos in the West Wing. But what the administration needed was a moral voice, someone who would push back against the conspiracy theories that guide so much of Trump’s policy. Kelly was not that man. People praise him for his military service, but I think his positions, laid out above, profoundly contradict that ethos of the US military, and that he brought shame to the uniform he thankfully no longer wears.

The Terrifying New Climate Record We’ll Set in 2018

For the second year running, the world will have a doubtful achievement to claim by 31 December: record carbon emissions.

Even before the close of 2018, scientists behind the biggest accounting effort on the planet, the Global Carbon Budget, warn that emissions from coal, oil and gas will have dumped a record 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (a way of  comparing the emissions from various greenhouse gases based on their global warming potential) into the atmosphere by the end of this month.

This is 2.7% more than last year, which also showed an increase. Human destruction of the world’s forests will add another four billion tonnes in the same 12 months.

The news came as 190 nations negotiated in Katowice in Poland to work out how to meet the targets they set in 2015 in Paris,  to contain global warming to no more than 2°C by 2100, and if possible no more than 1.5°C.

Little time left

But in a commentary in Nature a second set of scientists warns that time is running out. At the present rate of fossil fuel use, the world is set to breach the 1.5°C target by 2030, rather than the 2040 everybody had assumed.

That is because rising emissions, declining air pollution and natural climate cycles working together will make climate change more fast and furious than expected.

There are hopeful signs: renewable energy investment has begun to accelerate, and some nations have started to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

But the confirmation of yet another record year for fossil fuel combustion – after three consecutive years, 2014-16, in which fossil fuel use seemed to have peaked and might start to fall – suggests that even those nations most concerned about climate change are not doing enough.

“This cannot continue. It must not. To give us a chance of meeting the Paris climate goals, emissions need to fall, and fast”

The biggest emitters are China, the US, India, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Canada, but taken as a collective, the European Union elbows India out of third place.

If the UK, a self-proclaimed climate progressive country, could celebrate the exploitation of a new North Sea oil field while at the same time exploring for shale gas and expanding its biggest airport, it should be no surprise that global emissions were rising, said Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the Tyndall Centre at the University of Manchester, UK.

“If the climate-aware EU is planning new pan-Europe pipelines to lock in high carbon gas for decades to come, is it any surprise global emissions are rising? If ever-green Sweden, currently without any major gas infrastructure, is enthusiastically building a new gas terminal in Gothenburg – is it any surprise emissions are rising?”

Aimed at negotiators

Publication of the Global Carbon Project review for 2018 is timed to focus minds in Katowice, and as a reminder of how much has yet to be done to contain climate change.

“To limit global warming to the Paris Agreement goal of 1.5°C, CO2 emissions would need to decline by 50% by 2030 and reach zero around 2050,” said Corinne Le Quéré, who directs theTyndall Centre for climate change at the University of East Anglia, UK.

“We are a long way from this, and much more needs to be done because if countries stick to commitments they have already made, we are on track to see 3°C of global warming.

“This year we have seen how climate change can already amplify the impact of heatwaves worldwide. The California wildfires are just a snapshot of the growing impacts we face if we don’t drive emissions down rapidly.”

Renewable energy grows

Paradoxically, the data in the report published in one version in Environmental Research Letters and in more detail in the journal Earth System Science Data also point to an acceleration towards renewable sources of energy: the political shorthand for this process is “decarbonisation.”

Coal consumption in Canada and the US had dropped 40% since 2005. Christiana Figueres, who in 2015 as a UN climate chief presided over the wheeling and dealing that resulted in the Paris Agreement, argues in another commentary in Nature that there are signs of promise.

Thousands of businesses in 120 countries had signed up to the Paris goals, which could bring $26 trillion in economic benefits, including 65 million new jobs in what she called the “booming” low carbon economy. “We have already achieved things that seemed unimaginable just a decade ago,” she said.

Robust accounting

“Exponential progress in key solutions is happening and on track to displace fossil fuels. Renewable energy costs have dropped by 80% in a decade, and today, over half of all new energy generation capacity is renewable.

“Before 2015 many people thought the Paris Agreement was impossible, yet thousands of people and institutions made the shift from impossible to unstoppable.”

But, warned David Reay, professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, UK, the accounting within the balance sheet for the carbon budget 2018 was robust.

“Its message is more brutal than ever: we are in the red and still heading deeper. This cannot continue. It must not. To give us a chance of meeting the Paris climate goals, emissions need to fall, and fast. We knew this in 2015, we know it now. And yet they still rise.”

Democrats Raise Prospect of Impeachment, Jail for Trump

WASHINGTON—Top House Democrats on Sunday raised the prospect of impeachment or almost-certain prison time for President Donald Trump if it’s proved that he directed illegal hush-money payments to women, adding to the legal pressure on the president over the Russia investigation and other scandals.

“There’s a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office, the Justice Department may indict him, that he may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, the incoming chairman of the House intelligence committee. “The bigger pardon question may come down the road as the next president has to determine whether to pardon Donald Trump.”

Rep. Jerry Nadler, the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, described the details in prosecutors’ filings Friday in the case of Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, as evidence that Trump was “at the center of a massive fraud.”

“They would be impeachable offenses,” Nadler said.

In the filings, prosecutors in New York for the first time link Trump to a federal crime of illegal payments to buy the silence of two women during the 2016 campaign. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office also laid out previously undisclosed contacts between Trump associates and Russian intermediaries and suggested the Kremlin aimed early on to influence Trump and his Republican campaign by playing to both his political and personal business interests.

Trump has denied wrongdoing and has compared the investigations to a “witch hunt.”

Nadler, D-N.Y., said it was too early to say whether Congress would pursue impeachment proceedings based on the illegal payments alone because lawmakers would need to weigh the gravity of the offense to justify “overturning” the 2016 election. Nadler and other lawmakers said Sunday they would await additional details from Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible coordination with the Trump campaign to determine the extent of Trump’s misconduct.

Regarding the illegal payments, “whether they are important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question, but certainly they’d be impeachable offenses because even though they were committed before the president became president, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office,” Nadler said.

Mueller has not said when he will complete a report of any findings, and it isn’t clear that any such report would be made available to Congress. That would be up to the attorney general. Trump on Friday said he would nominate former Attorney General William Barr to the post to succeed Jeff Sessions.

Nadler indicated that Democrats, who will control the House in January, will step up their own investigations. He said Congress, the Justice Department and the special counsel need to dig deeper into the allegations, which include questions about whether Trump lied about his business arrangements with Russians and about possible obstruction of justice.

“The new Congress will not try to shield the president,” he said. “We will try to get to the bottom of this, in order to serve the American people and to stop this massive conspiracy — this massive fraud on the American people.”

Schiff, D-Calif., also stressed a need to wait “until we see the full picture.” He has previously indicated his panel would seek to look into the Trump family’s business ties with Russia.

“I think we also need to see this as a part of a broader pattern of potential misconduct by the president, and it’s that broad pattern, I think, that will lead us to a conclusion about whether it rises to the level to warrant removal from office,” Schiff said.

In the legal filings, the Justice Department stopped short of accusing Trump of directly committing a crime. But it said Trump told Cohen to make illegal payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, both of whom claimed to have had affairs with Trump more than a decade ago.

In separate filings, Mueller’s team detail how Cohen spoke to a Russian who “claimed to be a ‘trusted person’ in the Russian Federation who could offer the campaign ‘political synergy’ and ‘synergy on a government level.'” Cohen said he never followed up on that meeting. Mueller’s team also said former campaign chairman Paul Manafort lied to them about his contacts with a Russian associate and Trump administration officials, including in 2018.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida called the latest filings “relevant” in judging Trump’s fitness for office but said lawmakers need more information to render judgment. He also warned the White House about considering a pardon for Manafort, saying such a step could trigger congressional debate about limiting a president’s pardon powers.

Such a move would be “a terrible mistake,” Rubio said. “Pardons should be used judiciously. They’re used for cases with extraordinary circumstances.”

Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine and a member of the Senate intelligence committee, cautioned against a rush to impeachment, which he said citizens could interpret as “political revenge and a coup against the president.”

“The best way to solve a problem like this, to me, is elections,” King said. “I’m a conservative when it comes to impeachment. I think it’s a last resort and only when the evidence is clear of a really substantial legal violation. We may get there, but we’re not there now.”

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut urged Mueller to “show his cards soon” so that Congress can make a determination early next year on whether to act on impeachment.

“Let’s be clear: We have reached a new level in the investigation,” Murphy said. “It’s important for Congress to get all of the underlying facts and data and evidence that the special counsel has.”

Nadler spoke on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rubio was on CNN and ABC’s “This Week,” and Schiff appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” Murphy spoke on ABC, and King was on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

French Working-Class Protesters Demand Higher Standard of Living

Nearly 1,000 people are in police custody and at least 71 have been injured after protests that turned violent in France on Saturday. The grassroots protesters, called Gilets Jaunes—“Yellow Vests”—have expressed frustration with the high cost of living in France and the pro-business policies of centrist President Emmanuel Macron, called by some “the president of the rich.”

Macron has proposed increasing taxes on diesel and gas, and although the government has since acquiesced and scrapped the proposal, many working-class people considered that demand a only starting point. The approximately 125,000 people wearing yellow vests who took to the streets Saturday in ongoing protests were joined by about 89,000 police officers, some of whom used tear gas on the crowds. Single mothers, factory workers, delivery workers, secretaries and other workers joined to protest tax cuts for the wealthy and a minimum wage that doesn’t cover basic expenses.

“The Gilets Jaunes that you see in the streets, they’re mainly middle-class, and they’re being bled dry financially,” said Jacques, a technical college teacher and Gilets Jaunes organizer. “The wealth gap is getting wider, and we’ve reached a point where there are the very rich and the very poor—and more and more people are slipping into poverty.”

“Macron’s first move in office was to slash the wealth tax for the mega-rich while cutting money from poor people’s housing benefits,” said Céline, a classroom assistant for children with special needs. “That is a serious injustice.”

Truthdig’s Donald Kaufman covered the protests in Paris:

Snapshots from Saturday’s Paris Protests

French authorities are seeking charges against the person who graffitied the Arc de Triomphe last weekend. At Jacobin, French writer Édouard Louis argued that focusing on such actions in the streets misses the point:

[A] large part of the media-political world wanted us to believe that violence is not the thousands of lives destroyed and reduced to misery by politics, but a few burnt-out cars. You must really never have experienced poverty, if you think that graffiti on a historic monument is worse than the impossibility of being able to take care of yourself, of living, of feeding yourself or your family.

“Don’t mix us up with the casseurs (smashers and looters); they are nothing to do with the Gilets Jaunes and we’re not here for that,” one member of the movement told The Guardian.

To understand the urgency of #GreenNewDeal, look to France. Neoliberal climate action passes on the costs to working people, offers them no better jobs or services + lets big polluters off the hook. People see it as a class war, because it is. https://t.co/xtuF35XXVP

— Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) December 8, 2018

More than 1,700 French protesters were arrested as nearly 125,000 #GiletsJaunes demonstrators took to the streets for the fourth weekend running. pic.twitter.com/k8syFthh0k

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) December 9, 2018

“This movement must continue, for it embodies something right, urgent, and profoundly radical, because faces and voices that are usually reduced to invisibility are finally visible and audible,” Louis wrote.

Scientists Propose Restoring Forests to Fight Climate Change

U.S. scientists have found a new way to cut or offset 22 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from American factory chimneys, car exhausts and power stations: better land use.

Their answer is to leave it to nature. What they identify as 21 natural climate solutions – better use of croplands, the restoration of forests and tidal wetlands, slowing the felling of timber and the containment of urban sprawl – could help limit global warming, slow climate change and reduce sea level rise for the nation that has over the last century emitted more greenhouse gas than any other country.

The most effective single action in a study launched by the US Nature Conservancy and 21 other institutions, and published in the journal Science Advances, would be to step up reforestation: this alone could absorb the emissions of 65 million passenger cars.

“One of America’s greatest assets is its land. Through changes in management, along with protecting and restoring natural lands, we demonstrated we could reduce carbon pollution and filter water, enhance fish and wildlife habitat, and have better soil health to grow our food — all at the same time,” said Joseph Fargione, director of science for the Nature Conservancy, who led the study.

New Thinking—and Old

“Nature offers us a simple, cost-effective way to help fight global warming. In combination with transitioning to zero carbon energy production, natural climate solutions can help protect our climate for future generations.”

Paradoxically, some of the solutions rely not on new thinking, but on old. If areas of the US that were forested before the European settlers arrived were returned to woodland, the land could absorb 381 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. If commercial foresters extended the cycles of logging and improved forest management practices, they could effectively save 267 million tonnes a year of CO2.

Around 4,000 square kilometers (1544.409 miles) of grassland is converted to cropland in a year: the act of ploughing releases 28 percent of the soil carbon to the atmosphere. The scientists reckon that at least 52,000 square kilometers (20077.312 miles) of marginal or unprofitable cropland could be restored to natural grassland or prairie.

Right now, 27 percent of US tidal wetlands are cut off from the ocean and being flooded by river water: accordingly, these release huge quantities of the potent greenhouse gas methane. All it would take to stop this would be to restore the twice-daily marine inundation: reconnection with the ocean, sometimes just by a culvert under a road, would save 12 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year.

The researchers identified just 10 of their 21 possible solutions that together could reduce emissions by more than a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year.

That more efficient use of land is a net benefit is not news: researchers have repeatedly argued that world food security is consistent with forest restoration, and that forests left untouched are of greater overall economic value than cleared land, and that considered changes to farming practices could both deliver more food and leave farmers better off.

But, ironically, efforts to promote natural climate solutions in the US get only 0.8 percent of public and private climate finance, even though these could provide 37 percent of the climate mitigation needed by 2030. The scientists argue that if the US is to commit to the Paris Accord of 2015, to contain global average warming to 2°C or less (35.6 °F)above the levels for most of human history, then natural climate solutions make a promising start.

Lynn Scarlett, a former acting secretary of the US Department of the Interior and now at the Nature Conservancy, said: “This study provides good news that making investments in nature will make a big difference, while offering the potential for new revenue to farmers, ranchers, foresters and coastal communities at the same time.”

Israel’s War on Protesting Children and Other Civilians

GAZA CITY, Gaza — Israeli forces deployed along the volatile border with the Gaza Strip have fired live rounds at rock-throwing Palestinian protesters ever since demonstrations against Israel’s long-running blockade of Gaza began in March.

And for eight months, Israeli snipers have targeted one part of the body more than any other — the legs.

The Israeli army says it is responding to weekly assaults on its frontier by Palestinians armed with stones, grenades and firebombs. The military says it opens fire only as a last resort, and considers firing at the lower limbs an act of restraint.

Still, 175 Palestinians have been shot to death, according to an Associated Press count. And the number of wounded has reached colossal proportions.

Of the 10,511 protesters treated at hospitals and field clinics in Gaza so far, at least 6,392, or roughly 60 percent, have been struck in the lower limbs, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. At least 5,884 of those casualties were hit by live ammunition; others have been hit by rubber-coated metal bullets and tear gas canisters.

The upsurge in violence has left a visible mark on Gaza that will likely remain for decades to come. It is now common to see young men walking through dilapidated streets on crutches. Most have legs bandaged or fitted with a metal frame called a fixator, which uses pins or screws that are inserted into fractured bones to help stabilize them.

The wounded can often be seen gathering at a treatment clinic run by the Paris-based medical charity Doctors Without Borders in Gaza City, where Associated Press photographer Felipe Dana took portraits of some of them.

Some of those he photographed acknowledged throwing stones toward Israeli troops during the demonstrations. One said he had hurled a firebomb. But others said they were unarmed bystanders; one paramedic said he was helping rescue the wounded, while another man said he was waving a Palestinian flag and another said he was selling coffee and tea.

International human rights groups have said the military’s open-fire rules are unlawful because they allow the use of potentially lethal force in situations where soldiers’ lives are not in immediate danger.

Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, rejected international criticism that Israel’s response has been excessive. Instead, he said that firing at people’s legs was a sign of restraint.

“Sniper rifles against hundreds or thousands of rioters that are violently trying to get into Israel with the open aim of killing Israeli civilians or abducting Israeli soldiers, I don’t think that’s disproportionate,” he said. “I don’t think it’s disproportionate to shoot at feet or legs to get them to stop, rather than killing them.”

Doctors Without Borders said this month that the huge number of patients was overwhelming Gaza’s health care system, which has already been severely weekend by a blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt that has fueled economic stagnation and rampant unemployment, and devastated water and electricity supplies.

The Paris-based aid group said the majority of the 3,117 patients it has treated have been shot in the legs, and many will need follow-up surgery, physiotherapy and rehabilitation.

“These are complex and serious injuries that do not quickly heal,” the group said. “Their severity and the lack of appropriate treatment in Gaza’s crippled health system means that infection is a high risk, especially for patients with open fractures.”

“The consequences of these wounds … will be lifelong disability for many,” the aid group said. “And if infections are not tackled, then the results could be amputation or even death.”

Gaza’s Health Ministry says it has carried out 94 amputations since the protests began, 82 of them involving lower limbs.

For Palestinian Children in Gaza, an Education in Conflict

 

When Mazen al-Dalo took two of his young sons to see the Palestinian protests against Israel’s decade-old blockade of Gaza, he knew it could be dangerous.

Rock-throwing demonstrators were being shot by Israeli soldiers, and armored Israeli jeeps were firing endless volleys of tear gas into the crowds.

But it was important to teach the boys about Palestinian history, he said, and give them a glimpse of the modern-day struggles their people face. “Seeing things with your own eyes is different than reading about them in books,” the 44-year-old father said, explaining his decision to take the children, aged 8 and 11, one day last April.

The family only ventured about 400 meters (yards) from the border — a spot al-Dalo believed was safe, away from the violent confrontations. But just as he pointed to a group of Israeli soldiers atop a berm on the other side of the Israeli fence, a single gunshot rang out.

The round ripped off al-Dalo’s thumb and struck his 8-year-old son, Mohamed, in the leg — two more casualties in a simmering conflict that began last spring and has seen a staggering 948 Palestinians under the age of 18 shot and wounded by Israeli forces, according to the United Nations.

In a statement, Israel’s military said it does “everything possible to avoid harming children.” But Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza, “cynically uses Gaza residents, especially women and children, as human shields and places them at the forefront of the violent riots.”

Hamas, which has orchestrated the demonstrations, denies such allegations. Hazem Qassem, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said “there is no way to prevent the people from participating. There are entire families (who go) and there is no way to prevent them.”

Ever since the demonstrations began in March, children have been a constant presence among the surging crowds — some hurling stones with slingshots or burning tires, others merely watching from afar. While many are brought by parents who hold their hands and carry them on their shoulders, others make their way on their own.

Of the 175 Palestinians killed so far, at least 34 were 18 or under, according to an Associated Press count. Gaza’s Health Ministry says 2,295 minors have been hospitalized, 17 of whom have had a limb amputated; at least 5,124 have been injured in all.

Young victims are not a new phenomenon in the region. In the first Palestinian uprising that began in 1987, children and teens often threw stones at Israeli soldiers, who frequently responded with live rounds. According to the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, minors comprised about 21 percent of deaths back then. In the latest protests, that percentage is roughly the same.

The Israeli military, which deploys snipers atop pyramid-shaped bunkers positioned at regular intervals along the frontier, says it takes pains to avoid civilian casualties and only uses live fire as a last resort. But it also says it must defend against “terrorist” crowds hurling grenades and firebombs, and stop those who penetrate or damage the fence.

Amnesty International and other human rights groups argue that under international law, the use of live ammunition can only be justified in the face of imminent death or serious injury. Israel argues that is exactly what its forces face. One Israeli soldier was killed by a Hamas sniper during a demonstration last July, and at least six have been wounded.

Video images circulating on social media, however, have also shown unarmed protesters being shot, including some struck while running away or waving the Palestinian flag, Amnesty said. One incident in September showed a 16-year-old boy being shot in the chest while waving his hands in the air; he had just hurled a stone toward the fence, but it’s unclear if it had even reached it.

After another teen was shot dead in April, U.N. envoy Nickolay Mladenov asked in a tweet: “How does the killing of a child in #Gaza today help #peace?” Mladenov answered his own question, saying “It doesn’t! It fuels anger and breeds more killing.”

The protests have been fueled by desperate living conditions in Gaza, a place most residents are prohibited from leaving. More than a decade since Israel and Egypt imposed the blockade on Gaza, unemployment is over 50 percent, tap water has become undrinkable and electricity is sporadic. Israel says the blockade is necessary to prevent Hamas from importing weapons.

When the demonstrations began, Raed Abu Khader told his 12-year-old son Mohammed to stay away, and the boy promised he would. But on Aug. 24, Khader received an urgent phone call from a friend: Mohammed had been shot in the leg at one of the demonstrations held that day.

“He shouldn’t have been there,” Abu Khader said of the boy, who has been unable to move his left leg since and fears it will be amputated. “But the Israelis should only be shooting to scare children off — not hit them.”

It’s unclear what Mohammed was doing when the shooting took place. Speaking in a wheelchair surrounded by friends on a Gaza street, he boasted that he had just hung a Palestinian flag on the fence when gunfire rang out. Later, lying in his darkened home with his distraught father looking on, the teen could not answer when asked where he was. Staring at the ground, his brown eyes welled with tears.

Abu Khader said the boy had been transported to the protest site via one of the Hamas-organized buses that park outside Gaza’s mosques every Friday. At the end of the ride was a spectacle that is consistently part-war, part-festival: cultural shows, corn on the cob, balloons and Palestinian kites laden with trails of flaming embers meant for Israeli farms. Plus the weekly confrontation itself: Palestinians armed with stones and firebombs battling armed Israeli forces flying spider-like drones equipped with tear gas.

“They see their friends going, and they want to go,” Abu Khader said. “They think it’s a game. They think they’re going to have fun. They don’t know how dangerous it is.”

The round that struck Mohammed Abu Khader severed the nerves in his leg so completely, he can neither feel nor move his limb at all. If he does not get out of Gaza, his 39-year-old father says, he will likely lose his leg.

Today, the boy often cries. He no longer goes to school. His father says the boy feels useless.

Mohammed al-Dalo, the boy whose father took him to the protest, has been similarly traumatized. His father said he is markedly quieter now.

And like Mohammed Abu Khader, his life may be changed forever.

At a clinic run by Doctors Without Borders, physiotherapist Eyad Abedelaal says Mohammed al-Dalo suffers from “foot drop.” Nerve damage means he cannot move his toes up and down; the boy limps when he walks.

They will try to perform another surgery to fix the problem. “But unfortunately, this kind of nerve damage will likely last forever,” Abedelaal said. “It means to walk correctly, he’ll probably need special shoes for the rest of his life.”

Mohammed’s father, Mazen al-Dalo, says the boy asked to go back to the protests, but he refused because he doesn’t want him to get hurt again.

Still, he has no regrets. “This is the tax you have to pay to achieve the right of return,” he said, referencing a deep-held desire to take back land that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced from seven decades ago after the war that created Israel. “Nothing is free. We all have to sacrifice.”

___

Associated Press journalists Fares Akram and Felipe Dana contributed.

Even the Latest Robin Hood Flop Can’t Kill the Legend

It’s been said that every generation gets the Robin Hood it deserves, but what have we done to deserve the abomination that was recently dropped in mall-plex theaters? With a couple of weeks left in the year, it’s too soon to call Otto Bathurst’s “Robin Hood” the worst movie of 2018, but I can safely say it’s the worst movie so far this century.

Cluttered and tedious, with a plot that seems to have been adapted from posts on a fan-fiction site, this “Robin Hood” is stitched together from bad ideas in other Robin Hood movies. As in the Kevin Costner rendition, Robin, played by Taron Egerton, goes off to fight in the Crusades and brings back a black friend played by Jamie Foxx; didn’t Dave Chappelle parody this plot device 25 years ago in Mel Brooks’s “Men in Tights”?

To top it off, it’s packed to the rafters with things we don’t associate with Robin Hood. Marian, played by Eve Hewson, becomes a female Che Guevara, tossing Molotov cocktails at the faceless and inept men in arms. And let’s just hope the rooftop horse chase doesn’t become a staple of future Robin Hood movies.



Movies made by major studios once fell under various genres–westerns, mysteries, horror, adventure, and so forth. Now there seems to be only one: action. When “The Mummy” is remade, the King Arthur story retold or “Mission Impossible” pumped up into yet another movie (six times, so far), the elements that made the original a success—suspense, character development, mise-en-scene—are dumped in favor of action, spectacle and special effects.

One of the few notable elements of the new “Robin Hood” is that it has an English actor in the lead. Incredibly, Egerton is only the second English actor to play the greatest rogue of British folklore in a serious feature film, the first being the Irish-born English actor Richard Todd in a handsome, too-little-seen 1952 Disney film, “The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men.”

Watch Richard Todd’s Robin duel with Little John (James Robertson Justice) with quarterstaffs:

The British are better represented in the comedy Robin Hoods. There was John Cleese’s socialist Robin Hood in Terry Gilliam’s “Time Bandits” (1981). (“Hello,” he greets the time travelers, “I’m … Hood.”)

John Cleese’s Robin Hood distributes wealth to the poor:

Cary Elwes was the hero in Mel Brooks’ “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” (1993). (In which, says Elwes, the people should trust him because, “Unlike some Robin Hoods, I can speak in an English accent.”)

I suppose the nitpickers will also count Brian Bedford, who was the voice of the cartoon fox in the 1973 Disney feature. (And we’re not counting TV, although Richard Greene was fine in the series “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” which ran from 1955-1960.)

Most Robin Hoods have been played by colonials: the American Douglas Fairbanks in the 1922 silent film, Australian Errol Flynn in the all-time popularity champion, “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1939), New Zealand-born Russell Crowe in 2010, and Kevin Costner in his clunky “Prince of Thieves” (1991). We’ve had an Irish actor, Patrick Bergin, in the underrated 1991 “Robin Hood” costarring Uma Thurman as Maid Marian, a much better film than Costner’s, which got all the publicity that year; a Scotsman, Sean Connery, in a revisionist “Robin and Marian” (1976) directed by Richard Lester with Audrey Hepburn as Marian; and a Welshman, Jonas Armstrong, in a highly entertaining BBC series (2006-2009).

Here’s Errol Flynn as the most popular of all Robin Hoods:

There was even a musical Robin Hood—if you count Frank Sinatra in “Robin and the 7 Hoods” (1964).

When Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” was released in 2010, stars Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett and William Hurt were heard on talk shows repeating the company line: “Forget everything you’ve ever heard about Robin Hood.” What they should have said was, “Forget everything you’ve ever seen in Robin Hood movies.” In Scott’s film, Robin helps usher in the Magna Carta and saves England from a French invasion in a bloody battle more appropriate to “Braveheart” than the Robin Hood story. (The gore reminded me of a translation of “Beowulf” that the late author Jorge Luis Borges criticized for “being more primitive than the original.”)

At least the fighting in the Scott epic looked as if it was done by humans; the action scenes in the new Robin Hood, much like those in Guy Ritchie’s “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” (2017), look  CGI-ed.

Did He Exist?

With so many books, documentaries and movies about Robin Hood, we know everything about him except whether or not he existed.

Robin Hood and King Arthur, both of which got their literary starts around the same time, are Britain’s two parallel myths: the founder of the dynasty and the forest outlaw. Arthur appeared first on paper, or at least parchment, courtesy of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the early 12th century and attracted the upscale crowd. Ballads and later, folk plays, about Robin appealed to the yeoman class.

King Arthur looks to the past and is forever fixed in time. Robin Hood, merry trickster and thief, is still evolving, transcending his national and historical origins to inspire folk heroes in cultures all over the world.

In the United States, every bandit who has stood for an oppressed minority has been dubbed a Robin Hood. The early 19th century California outlaw Joaquin Murrieta was called by his biographer “The Robin Hood of El Dorado,” and the fictional character he helped inspire, Zorro, is world famous. (Douglas Fairbanks, the biggest adventure star of the silent era, happened to play both Robin Hood and Zorro.)

The Robin Hood of the early ballads was a clever but otherwise undistinguished Saxon highwayman with no particular grudge toward the ruling Normans—that would come later. He robbed the rich and kept the money, all the while maintaining respect for his king. William Langland, author of the gloomy 14th century moral tract “Piers Plowman,” approved of neither Robin nor lazy sods who wasted time reading nonsense about him; “I kan [know] noght parfitly my Paternoster. … But I kan rymes of Robyn hood …” says a slothful priest in Langland’s satire who can’t memorize the Lord’s Prayer but can quote verbatim from medieval England’s equivalent to today’s X-Men comics.

An 1830 collection of poems and ballads about Robin Hood. (Cowan’s Auctions)

According to Stephen Knight in his 2003 book, “Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography,” by 1600 there were at least 200 known references to Robin Hood emphasizing the hero’s bold resistance to authority. Little John is around in most of the early stories, sometimes acting as an equal instead of a sidekick. Once the basics of the story were established, Robin acquired new companions each time the story was told: Maid Marian here, Friar Tuck there. Robin got himself involved in contemporary controversies and became a serviceable symbol for whatever grievances or resentments were sweeping through England in a given century.

As Knight puts it, “When the myth goes through periods of dynamic activity, it may indeed operate as a safety valve, as the reflex of genuine political resistance to oppression.”

With the exception of Ben Jonson, who unfortunately died before completing his Robin Hood play, “The Sad Shepherd,” Robin Hood was a popular phenomenon, a subject seldom dealt with by serious writers. By the end of the 18th century, says Knight, “Robin Hood became a new man, and one who is still with us.”

Unlike other medieval heroes “who did not struggle free of the setting amber of antiquity, Robin … escaped to illuminate another day, another part of the sociocultural forest, with his multiple contradictory and essentially volatile set of values.” Stated another way, Robin could exemplify the values of either the left–redistribution of wealth and land—or conservatives—rebelling against corrupt central authority and high taxes. But mostly the left.

Robin Hood gets a lift from Friar Tuck. Illustrated by Howard Pyle in his 1883 edition. (Wikimedia Commons)

It was the character’s evolution into a social bandit that got him notice from literary A-listers. In 1822, Thomas Love Peacock’s novella, “Maid Marian” was a bestseller, and around the same time, Sir Walter Scott’s “Ivanhoe” gave Robin a costarring role, introducing the theme of Saxon yeomanry versus Norman nobility into the story. “Ivanhoe” also introduced two other staples of the saga: the Merry Men’s allegiance to King Richard the Lionheart and Robin as descended from nobility, according him the rank of Earl of Locksley.

Scott’s Ivanhoe/Robin may have been modeled in large part on Scotland’s national hero, William Wallace. Mel Gibson’s “Braveheart” presents Wallace as a Spartacus in kilts, but as English scholar Maurice Keen noted in his work “The Outlaws of Medieval Legend,” Wallace spent more of his life as a bow-and-arrow-toting forest outlaw, hunting deer and robbing arrogant Englishmen, than he did leading armies in combat.

Knight observed that both Wallace and Robin “are provoked to outlawry by legal violence, both command substantial numbers of well-disciplined men. … In the transition from small-time yeoman defender of local rights to major threat to national law and order, Robin appears in part to be remodeled in the form of Wallace.” Scott knew all of the Wallace legends and even wrote a book-length poem inspired by him.

However, it wasn’t a Scotsman or Englishman who gave us the Robin Hood we know today. It was American writer and illustrator Howard Pyle, who combined the most palatable images of Robin Hood and revamped him into a cross between a Victorian gentleman and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s noble savage. Published in 1883, “The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood,” in its various forms, has never gone out of print and may well be the all-time bestselling children’s book of the Western world.

Pyle’s book was hugely popular in Britain, where it was adapted into a stage play in which women played the role of Robin wearing a garment that would come to be identified with the Robin Hood story: tights to show off their legs.

Watch Mel Brooks’s Merry Men show off their legs:

You could exhaust yourself with studies to determine whether either Arthur or Robin were real or simply myth. But then, as everyone’s favorite sixth-century scholar, Stephanus of Byzantium, put it, “A myth is something that never was but always is.”

One thing is for certain: we’ll see him again. If the new Robin Hood doesn’t kill him, he’ll never die, but with luck we’ll deserve a better Robin Hood next time around.