Chris Hedges's Blog, page 408

French Police Fire Tear Gas, Water Cannons at Violent Protesters

PARIS—French police fired tear gas and water cannons to disperse violent demonstrators in Paris on Saturday, as thousands gathered in the capital and beyond and staged road blockades to vent anger against rising fuel taxes.

Thousands of police were deployed nationwide to contain the eighth day of deadly demonstrations that started as protests against the tax but morphed into a rebuke of President Emmanuel Macron and the perceived elitism of France’s ruling class. Two people have been killed since Nov. 17 in protest-related tragedies.

Tense clashes on the Champs-Elysees that ended by dusk Saturday saw police face off with demonstrators who burned plywood, wielded placards reading “Death to Taxes” and upturned a large vehicle.

At least 19 people, including four police officers, were slightly hurt and one person had more serious injuries in the day of unrest in Paris, according to police.

Macron responded in a strongly worded tweet: “Shame on those who attacked (police). Shame on those who were violent against other citizens … No place for this violence in the Republic.”

Police said that dozens of protesters were detained for “throwing projectiles,” among other acts. By nightfall, the Champs-Elysees was smoldering and in the Place de la Madeleine, burned scooters lay on the sidewalk like blackened shells.

“It’s going to trigger a civil war and me, like most other citizens, we’re all ready,” said Benjamin Vrignaud, a 21-year-old protester from Chartres.

“They take everything from us. They steal everything from us,” said 21-year-old Laura Cordonnier.

The famed avenue was speckled with plumes of smoke and neon — owing to the color of the vests the self-styled “yellow jacket” protesters don. French drivers are required to keep neon security vests in their vehicles.

Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said that 8,000 protesters flooded the Champs-Elysees at the demonstration’s peak and there were nearly 106,000 protesters and 130 arrests in total nationwide.

Castaner denounced protesters from the far-right whom he called “rebellious,” as he accused National Assembly leader Marine Le Pen of encouraging them.

But the Interior Ministry played down the scale of Saturday’s demonstrations by highlighting that up to 280,000 people took part in last Saturday’s protest.

The unrest is proving a major challenge for embattled Macron, who is suffering in the polls.

The leader, who swept to power only last year, is the focus of rage for the “yellow jacket” demonstrators who accuse the pro-business centrist of elitism and indifference to the struggles of ordinary French.

Macron has so far held strong and insisted the fuel tax rises are a necessary pain to reduce France’s dependence on fossil fuels and fund renewable energy investments — a cornerstone of his reforms of the nation. He will defend fresh plans to make the “energy transition” easier next week.

Paris deployed some 3,000 security forces on Saturday, notably around tourist-frequented areas, after an unauthorized attempt last week to march on the presidential Elysee Palace.

Police officials said that a no-go zone, set up around key areas including the presidential palace and the National Assembly on the Left Bank of the Seine River, has not been breached.

But authorities are struggling because the movement has no clear leader and has attracted a motley group of people with broadly varying demands.

The anger is mainly over a hike in the diesel fuel tax, which has gone up seven euro cents per liter (nearly 30 U.S. cents per gallon) and will keep climbing in coming years, according to Transport Minister Elisabeth Borne. The tax on gasoline is also to increase four euro cents. Gasoline currently costs about 1.64 euros a liter in Paris ($7.06 a gallon), slightly more than diesel.

Far left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon explained to BFMTV the historical importance of this issue in the Gallic mindset: “When tax is no longer agreed to, it’s the start of revolutions in France.”

___

Chris Den Hond and Patrick Hermensen contributed to this report.

Tijuana Mayor Declares Humanitarian Crisis, Seeks U.N. Aid

TIJUANA, Mexico—The mayor of Tijuana has declared a humanitarian crisis in his border city and said Friday he was asking the United Nations for aid to deal with the approximately 5,000 Central American migrants, most of whom were camped out inside a sports complex.

The comments by Mayor Juan Manuel Gastelum came as city officials and volunteers worked together to assist the 4,976 men, women and children who had arrived after more than a month on the road. The Trump administration has spent weeks lambasting the caravan, which it said was filled with criminals, gang members and even — it insinuated at one point without any proof — terrorists.

Manuel Figueroa, who leads the city’s social services department, said Tijuana was bringing in portable toilets and showers, as well as shampoo and soap.

It wasn’t enough.

“Because of the absence, the apathy and the abandonment of the federal government, we are having to turn to international institutions like the U.N.,” Figueroa said.

Rene Vazquez, 60, a Tijuana resident who was volunteering at the stadium, said Mexico’s federal government ignored the problem by allowing the caravan to cross the country without stopping. Now the city of 1.6 million is stuck with the fallout.

“I don’t have anything against the migrants, they were the most deceived, but this is affecting us all,” Vazquez said.

Gastelum vowed not to commit the city’s public resources to dealing with the situation. On Thursday, his government issued a statement saying that it was requesting help from the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Vazquez, who plays on a soccer team that uses the sports complex, said Mexico should step up now and process humanitarian visas for the group so they can start looking for work. Meanwhile, since his soccer team can no longer practice at the complex, he was spending time passing out donated pizzas and roasted chicken to the migrants.

The migrant caravan that left Honduras in mid-October was mostly well received by the towns it passed through along the way to the border. Even cities with few resources made sure the migrants had food and a place to rest.

But in those places, the caravan stayed at most two nights — with the exception of Mexico City. In Tijuana, many of the migrants who are fleeing violence and poverty are seeking asylum in the United States and face the prospect of spending months in the border city before they have the opportunity to speak with a U.S. official.

Gastelum said Friday that the Mexican government has talked about sending 20 tons of resources to Tijuana to help but that three-fourths consisted of materials to reinforce the border and only 5 tons were for the migrants.

The mayor also criticized the federal government for not taking more seriously President Donald Trump’s threat Thursday to shut down the border if his administration determined Mexico had lost “control” of the situation in Tijuana.

“That’s serious,” he said.

The migrants also were receiving support from local churches, private citizens who have been providing food, as well as various agencies of the Baja California state government, which says it identified 7,000 job openings for those who qualify.

Adelaida Gonzalez, 37, of Guatemala City arrived in Tijuana three days ago and was having a hard time adjusting. She was tired of sleeping on a blanket on a dirt field, of waiting 30 minutes to go to the bathroom and again to get food and didn’t know how much more she could take.

“We would not have risked coming if we had known it was going to be this hard,” said Gonzales, who left Guatemala with her 15-year-old son and her neighbor.

She said she was considering accepting Mexico’s offer to stay and work in Chiapas as a refugee.

Some of the migrants staged a small demonstration at the city’s Chaparral border crossing Thursday, and a few dozen spent the night there. Police cordoned off the streets around the crossing tangling traffic, but pedestrian traffic across the border continued uninterrupted Friday.

Alicia Ramirez, 65, a Tijuana businesswoman, said she had been worried she wouldn’t be able to make her annual Black Friday crossing to do her Christmas shopping, but had no trouble walking into California. About a dozen Mexican police stood by the crossing carrying plastic shields.

Still, the threat of a border closure kept her daughters in Los Angeles from coming to see her for the holidays.

“My daughters were worried, so they decided not to come,” she said.

__

AP writer Christopher Sherman in Mexico City contributed to this report.

How Medical Insurers Collect Patients’ Data as They Sleep

This story was co-published by ProPublica and NPR.

Last March, Tony Schmidt discovered something unsettling about the machine that helps him breathe at night. Without his knowledge, it was spying on him.

From his bedside, the device was tracking when he was using it and sending the information not just to his doctor, but to the maker of the machine, to the medical supply company that provided it and to his health insurer.

Schmidt, an information technology specialist from Carrollton, Texas, was shocked. “I had no idea they were sending my information across the wire.”

Schmidt, 59, has sleep apnea, a disorder that causes worrisome breaks in his breathing at night. Like millions of people, he relies on a continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, machine that streams warm air into his nose while he sleeps, keeping his airway open. Without it, Schmidt would wake up hundreds of times a night; then, during the day, he’d nod off at work, sometimes while driving and even as he sat on the toilet.

“I couldn’t keep a job,” he said. “I couldn’t stay awake.” The CPAP, he said, saved his career, maybe even his life.

As many CPAP users discover, the life-altering device comes with caveats: Health insurance companies are often tracking whether patients use them. If they aren’t, the insurers might not cover the machines or the supplies that go with them.

In fact, faced with the popularity of CPAPs, which can cost $400 to $800, and their need for replacement filters, face masks and hoses, health insurers have deployed a host of tactics that can make the therapy more expensive or even price it out of reach.

Patients have been required to rent CPAPs at rates that total much more than the retail price of the devices, or they’ve discovered that the supplies would be substantially cheaper if they didn’t have insurance at all.

Experts who study health care costs say insurers’ CPAP strategies are part of the industry’s playbook of shifting the costs of widely used therapies, devices and tests to unsuspecting patients.

“The doctors and providers are not in control of medicine anymore,” said Harry Lawrence, owner of Advanced Oxy-Med Services, a New York company that provides CPAP supplies. “It’s strictly the insurance companies. They call the shots.”

Insurers say their concerns are legitimate. The masks and hoses can be cumbersome and noisy, and studies show that about third of patients don’t use their CPAPs as directed.

But the companies’ practices have spawned lawsuits and concerns by some doctors who say that policies that restrict access to the machines could have serious, or even deadly, consequences for patients with severe conditions. And privacy experts worry that data collected by insurers could be used to discriminate against patients or raise their costs.

Schmidt’s privacy concerns began the day after he registered his new CPAP unit with ResMed, its manufacturer. He opted out of receiving any further information. But he had barely wiped the sleep out of his eyes the next morning when a peppy email arrived in his inbox. It was ResMed, praising him for completing his first night of therapy. “Congratulations! You’ve earned yourself a badge!” the email said.

Then came this exchange with his supply company, Medigy: Schmidt had emailed the company to praise the “professional, kind, efficient and competent” technician who set up the device. A Medigy representative wrote back, thanking him, then adding that Schmidt’s machine “is doing a great job keeping your airway open.” A report detailing Schmidt’s usage was attached.

Alarmed, Schmidt complained to Medigy and learned his data was also being shared with his insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield. He’d known his old machine had tracked his sleep because he’d taken its removable data card to his doctor. But this new invasion of privacy felt different. Was the data encrypted to protect his privacy as it was transmitted? What else were they doing with his personal information?

He filed complaints with the Better Business Bureau and the federal government to no avail. “My doctor is the ONLY one that has permission to have my data,” he wrote in one complaint.

In an email, a Blue Cross Blue Shield spokesperson said that it’s standard practice for insurers to monitor sleep apnea patients and deny payment if they aren’t using the machine. And privacy experts said that sharing the data with insurance companies is allowed under federal privacy laws. A ResMed representative said once patients have given consent, it may share the data it gathers, which is encrypted, with the patients’ doctors, insurers and supply companies.

Schmidt returned the new CPAP machine and went back to a model that allowed him to use a removable data card. His doctor can verify his compliance, he said.

Luke Petty, the operations manager for Medigy, said a lot of CPAP users direct their ire at companies like his. The complaints online number in the thousands. But insurance companies set the prices and make the rules, he said, and suppliers follow them, so they can get paid.

“Every year it’s a new hurdle, a new trick, a new game for the patients,” Petty said.

A Sleep-Saving Machine Gets Popular

The American Sleep Apnea Association estimates about 22 million Americans have sleep apnea, although it’s often not diagnosed. The number of people seeking treatment has grown along with awareness of the disorder. It’s a potentially serious disorder that left untreated can lead to risks for heart disease, diabetes, cancer and cognitive disorders. CPAP is one of the only treatments that works for many patients.

Exact numbers are hard to come by, but ResMed, the leading device maker, said it’s monitoring the CPAP use of millions of patients.

Sleep apnea specialists and health care cost experts say insurers have countered the deluge by forcing patients to prove they’re using the treatment.

Medicare, the government insurance program for seniors and the disabled, began requiring CPAP “compliance” after a boom in demand. Because of the discomfort of wearing a mask, hooked up to a noisy machine, many patients struggle to adapt to nightly use. Between 2001 and 2009, Medicare payments for individual sleep studies almost quadrupled to $235 million. Many of those studies led to a CPAP prescription. Under Medicare rules, patients must use the CPAP for four hours a night for at least 70 percent of the nights in any 30-day period within three months of getting the device. Medicare requires doctors to document the adherence and effectiveness of the therapy.

Sleep apnea experts deemed Medicare’s requirements arbitrary. But private insurers soon adopted similar rules, verifying usage with data from patients’ machines — with or without their knowledge.

Kristine Grow, spokeswoman for the trade association America’s Health Insurance Plans, said monitoring CPAP use is important because if patients aren’t using the machines, a less expensive therapy might be a smarter option. Monitoring patients also helps insurance companies advise doctors about the best treatment for patients, she said. When asked why insurers don’t just rely on doctors to verify compliance, Grow said she didn’t know.

Many insurers also require patients to rack up monthly rental fees rather than simply pay for a CPAP.

Dr. Ofer Jacobowitz, a sleep apnea expert at ENT and Allergy Associates and assistant professor at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, said his patients often pay rental fees for a year or longer before meeting the prices insurers set for their CPAPs. But since patients’ deductibles — the amount they must pay before insurance kicks in — reset at the beginning of each year, they may end up covering the entire cost of the rental for much of that time, he said.

The rental fees can surpass the retail cost of the machine, patients and doctors say. Alan Levy, an attorney who lives in Rahway, New Jersey, bought an individual insurance plan through the now-defunct Health Republic Insurance of New Jersey in 2015. When his doctor prescribed a CPAP, the company that supplied his device, At Home Medical, told him he needed to rent the device for $104 a month for 15 months. The company told him the cost of the CPAP was $2,400.

Levy said he wouldn’t have worried about the cost if his insurance had paid it. But Levy’s plan required him to reach a $5,000 deductible before his insurance plan paid a dime. So Levy looked online and discovered the machine actually cost about $500.

Levy said he called At Home Medical to ask if he could avoid the rental fee and pay $500 up front for the machine, and a company representative said no. “I’m being overcharged simply because I have insurance,” Levy recalled protesting.

Levy refused to pay the rental fees. “At no point did I ever agree to enter into a monthly rental subscription,” he wrote in a letter disputing the charges. He asked for documentation supporting the cost. The company responded that he was being billed under the provisions of his insurance carrier.

Levy’s law practice focuses, ironically, on defending insurance companies in personal injury cases. So he sued At Home Medical, accusing the company of violating the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act. Levy didn’t expect the case to go to trial. “I knew they were going to have to spend thousands of dollars on attorney’s fees to defend a claim worth hundreds of dollars,” he said.

Sure enough, At Home Medical, agreed to allow Levy to pay $600 — still more than the retail cost — for the machine.

The company declined to comment on the case. Suppliers said that Levy’s case is extreme, but acknowledged that patients’ rental fees often add up to more than the device is worth.

Levy said that he was happy to abide by the terms of his plan, but that didn’t mean the insurance company could charge him an unfair price. “If the machine’s worth $500, no matter what the plan says, or the medical device company says, they shouldn’t be charging many times that price,” he said.

Dr. Douglas Kirsch, president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, said high rental fees aren’t the only problem. Patients can also get better deals on CPAP filters, hoses, masks and other supplies when they don’t use insurance, he said.

Cigna, one of the largest health insurers in the country, currently faces a class-action suit in U.S. District Court in Connecticut over its billing practices, including for CPAP supplies. One of the plaintiffs, Jeffrey Neufeld, who lives in Connecticut, contends that Cigna directed him to order his supplies through a middleman who jacked up the prices.

Neufeld declined to comment for this story. But his attorney, Robert Izard, said Cigna contracted with a company called CareCentrix, which coordinates a network of suppliers for the insurer. Neufeld decided to contact his supplier directly to find out what it had been paid for his supplies and compare that to what he was being charged. He discovered that he was paying substantially more than the supplier said the products were worth. For instance, Neufeld owed $25.68 for a disposable filter under his Cigna plan, while the supplier was paid $7.50. He owed $147.78 for a face mask through his Cigna plan while the supplier was paid $95.

ProPublica found all the CPAP supplies billed to Neufeld online at even lower prices than those the supplier had been paid. Longtime CPAP users say it’s well known that supplies are cheaper when they are purchased without insurance.

Neufeld’s cost “should have been based on the lower amount charged by the actual provider, not the marked-up bill from the middleman,” Izard said. Patients covered by other insurance companies may have fallen victim to similar markups, he said.

Cigna would not comment on the case. But in documents filed in the suit, it denied misrepresenting costs or overcharging Neufeld. The supply company did not return calls for comment.

In a statement, Stephen Wogen, CareCentrix’s chief growth officer, said insurers may agree to pay higher prices for some services, while negotiating lower prices for others, to achieve better overall value. For this reason, he said, isolating select prices doesn’t reflect the overall value of the company’s services. CareCentrix declined to comment on Neufeld’s allegations.

Izard said Cigna and CareCentrix benefit from such behind-the-scenes deals by shifting the extra costs to patients, who often end up covering the marked-up prices out of their deductibles. And even once their insurance kicks in, the amount the patients must pay will be much higher.

The ubiquity of CPAP insurance concerns struck home during the reporting of this story, when a ProPublica colleague discovered how his insurer was using his data against him.

Sleep Aid or Surveillance Device?

Without his CPAP, Eric Umansky, a deputy managing editor at ProPublica, wakes up repeatedly through the night and snores so insufferably that he is banished to the living room couch. “My marriage depends on it.”

In September, his doctor prescribed a new mask and airflow setting for his machine. Advanced Oxy-Med Services, the medical supply company approved by his insurer, sent him a modem that he plugged into his machine, giving the company the ability to change the settings remotely if needed.

But when the mask hadn’t arrived a few days later, Umansky called Advanced Oxy-Med. That’s when he got a surprise: His insurance company might not pay for the mask, a customer service representative told him, because he hadn’t been using his machine enough. “On Tuesday night, you only used the mask for three-and-a-half hours,” the representative said. “And on Monday night, you only used it for three hours.”

“Wait — you guys are using this thing to track my sleep?” Umansky recalled saying. “And you are using it to deny me something my doctor says I need?”

Umansky’s new modem had been beaming his personal data from his Brooklyn bedroom to the Newburgh, New York-based supply company, which, in turn, forwarded the information to his insurance company, UnitedHealthcare.

Umansky was bewildered. He hadn’t been using the machine all night because he needed a new mask. But his insurance company wouldn’t pay for the new mask until he proved he was using the machine all night — even though, in his case, he, not the insurance company, is the owner of the device.

“You view it as a device that is yours and is serving you,” Umansky said. “And suddenly you realize it is a surveillance device being used by your health insurance company to limit your access to health care.”

Privacy experts said such concerns are likely to grow as a host of devices now gather data about patients, including insertable heart monitors and blood glucose meters, as well as Fitbits, Apple Watches and other lifestyle applications. Privacy laws have lagged behind this new technology, and patients may be surprised to learn how little control they have over how the data is used or with whom it is shared, said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum.

“What if they find you only sleep a fitful five hours a night?” Dixon said. “That’s a big deal over time. Does that affect your health care prices?”

UnitedHealthcare said in a statement that it only uses the data from CPAPs to verify patients are using the machines.

Lawrence, the owner of Advanced Oxy-Med Services, conceded that his company should have told Umansky his CPAP use would be monitored for compliance, but it had to follow the insurers’ rules to get paid.

As for Umansky, it’s now been two months since his doctor prescribed him a new airflow setting for his CPAP machine. The supply company has been paying close attention to his usage, Umansky said, but it still hasn’t updated the setting.

The irony is not lost on Umansky: “I wish they would spend as much time providing me actual care as they do monitoring whether I’m ‘compliant.’ ”

Ruling on Genital Mutilation Shocks Advocates for Women

MINNEAPOLIS—Women’s rights advocates said they were shocked when a federal judge in Michigan ruled this week that a law protecting girls from genital mutilation was unconstitutional. They called his decision a serious blow to girls’ rights. Legal experts said the judge made clear that U.S. states have authority to ban the practice, though only about half do.





Here is a look at the ruling, which dismissed several charges against a doctor accused of cutting nine girls in three states as part of a religious custom, and what could happen next.
 





The Ruling, Simplified

Dr. Jumana Nagarwala was among eight people charged in federal court in Michigan in connection with the genital mutilation of nine girls from Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois between 2015 and 2017. Authorities alleged that mothers brought their girls to Nagarwala when they were roughly 7 years old for the procedure.Nagarwala has denied any crime was committed and said she performed a religious custom on girls from her Muslim sect, the India-based Dawoodi Bohra.On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman threw out mutilation and conspiracy charges against all the defendants. He ruled that a 1996 federal law that bans female genital mutilation was unconstitutional because Congress didn’t have the power to regulate the behavior in the first place.Heidi Kitrosser, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, explained that Congress doesn’t have unlimited authority to legislate and can only make laws that fall within powers explicitly outlined in the Constitution.In this case, Friedman found that Congress lacked authority to regulate the practice under the Commerce Clause because the procedure is not a commercial activity. He also said Congress’ treaty powers don’t give it authority, because there was no rational relationship between treaty obligations that call for equal rights and a law banning genital mutilation.But the judge clearly stated that the power to regulate female genital mutilation lies with state governments, which have primary authority in defining and enforcing criminal law.”The court really could not have been clearer in suggesting this is something that states can do,” Kitrosser said.Human Rights FearsThe AHA Foundation works to protect women from genital mutilation, honor violence and forced marriages. The group said the ruling was outrageous and set a precedent that cutting girls’ genitals was not a concern at the national level.While 27 states have laws against female genital mutilation, including Minnesota and Illinois, the 23 states that don’t could become destinations for the procedure, said Amanda Parker, the foundation’s senior director. Michigan lawmakers banned the procedure after Nagarwala’s arrest.

“This is exactly how we got here. The defendants in this case had the victims shipped from Minnesota to Michigan, and the only way of holding them accountable for FGM was the federal statute,” Parker said in a statement. She said the court ruling “sends the message that the authorities are not serious about protecting girls, especially those in immigrant communities, from this form of abuse.”

Friedman said in his ruling that states without laws specifically banning female genital mutilation can still prosecute the practice under laws that criminalize sexual battery and abuse.

“No state offers refuge to those who harm children,” he wrote.

But those abuse laws often don’t take the specific issues surrounding female genital mutilation into account, said George Zarubin, AHA’s executive director.

“This is such an underground, secretive, barbaric practice,” Zarubin said. “I think the judge made a major mistake.”

Is This Common?

Genital mutilation, also known as female circumcision or cutting, has been condemned by the United Nations. The World Health Organization says there is no health benefit to the procedure, and it can cause numerous health problems. The practice is common in parts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East and is generally performed as a way of controlling a girl’s sexuality.

It’s difficult to gauge how often genital cutting occurs in the U.S . because the practice is largely underground. A 2012 study from the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention estimated that more than 513,000 girls in the U.S. had been subjected to or were at risk of undergoing genital cutting.

What’s Next?

Federal prosecutors have the option of appealing Friedman’s ruling, but it’s unclear if they will. The U.S. Attorney’s Office has not returned messages from The Associated Press his week seeking comment.

Molly Blythe, an attorney for Nagarwala, said Friedman’s decision was warranted under the law and it is “exactly what our justice system is designed to do.”

Although the bulk of the case is now dismissed, Nagarwala and three others still face federal obstruction charges, and Nagarwala faces an additional count of conspiracy to travel with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct.

Blythe said Nagarwala will continue to fight the remaining charges.

If Friedman’s decision stands, the AHA Foundation will work with Congress to try to pass a new federal law to ban the procedure nationwide, said Zarubin. The foundation will also continue work to ban the practice in all 50 states.

“I think a lot of us in the community that are working to try to ban female genital mutilation in this country are beside ourselves” with this decision, he said.

Denouncing the Republican Party

“The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right”
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  “ The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right”

By Max Boot

Max Boot begins “The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right” with an inscription from W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939”:

“All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky.”

I’d call this chillingly prescient. But thanks to The New York Times, we now know that Donald Trump didn’t actually build any of those sky-groping buildings. No matter. Max Boot has Trump’s measure: The Donald is “a bigoted bully” with few convictions “outside of narcissism and nativism, racism, and sexism.” “His entire career has been full of racist slurs and acts.” He’s a “functional illiterate,” “a plutocrat who avoided the draft and has never shown any willingness to sacrifice anything for anyone.” And Boot quotes an anonymous Republican congressman: Trump is “an evil, really fucking stupid Forrest Gump.”

“It strains credulity to claim,” Boot adds, “as Trump supporters do, that there was no relation between the Kremlin’s intervention and Trump’s victory.”

If “The Corrosion of Conservatism” had come out a couple of months earlier, Boot would have probably received a pipe bomb in the mail.

Click here to read long excerpts from “The Corrosion of Conservatism” at Google Books.”

Boot, to borrow a phrase from Henry James, has not lost his temper but found it. A columnist for The Washington Post, a global affairs analyst for CNN, a former WSJ editorial page editor and the author of several excellent books—most recently “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam“—Boot has written the essential book of the Trump era, the one that needs to be read immediately by those of all political stripes.

One of the things that makes “The Corrosion of Conservatism” powerful reading is that Boot, while refusing to identify himself as a Democrat—he is still a fiscal conservative, pro-free market and the welfare state, pro-free trade, pro-environment, and pro-gun control—has shed all illusions of his own party. The recent history of the Republican Party is “the story of moderates being driven out and conservatives taking over—and then of those conservatives, in turn, being ousted by those even farther to the right.”

He rejects “the premise, so popular in conservative circles, that the white identity politics promoted by Trump is simply an understandable response to the identity politics of African Americans, Latinos, Asians and other minorities.” Seen in the context of the long sweep of history, these politics are “a reaction to, rather than the cause of, white-nationalist sentiment.”

This isn’t news to many people, he admits—“But it is a new realization for me.”

In a paragraph that deserves to be reprinted on the internet and quoted on television, he writes, “No, not all Trump supporters are racist. But virtually all racists, it seems, are Trump supporters. And all Trump supporters implicitly condone his blatant prejudice. At the very least they don’t consider racism to be a reason to turn against the president. For a disturbingly large number of Trump voters, it is the primary reason to support him.”

Boot is likely the most persuasive voice in conservatism. Granted, given the current state of conservative thought, that’s not saying much, which is precisely the point of this book. “The modern conservative movement,” Boot writes, “was inspired by Barry Goldwater’s canonical text from 1960, ‘The Conscience of a Conservative.’ I believed in that movement, and served it my whole life.”

Boot’s views shifted not just because of Trump, but after a review of his original sources. “I used to think that Goldwater’s reputation as an extremist was a liberal libel,” he writes. “Reading his actual words—something I had not done before—reveals that he really was an extremist.” Boot now prefers to see himself as “an Eisenhower Republican,” by which I assume he means a Republican who golfs a lot and doesn’t attack the media, maintains our traditional alliances, and doesn’t envy foreign dictators.

He came by his ideology the hard way. Born in 1969 in Russia—“what Donald Trump would call a ‘shithole’ country”—he grew up in a Soviet Union where prejudice was so pervasive that Jews had their nationality stamped on their passports, “just like in Nazi Germany.” Boot’s father was a refusenik, a dissident who was denied permission to leave the country. His parents and many other Soviet Jews were finally granted permission to immigrate, in large part helped by U.S. conservatives’ hard line against the USSR repression of Jews. (The family made it out of Russia just in time, narrowly escaping a KGB warrant.)

Boot is “thankful to America for taking us in … and I am greatly saddened that the United States has extended refugee status to so few others in the Trump era.” Other kids his age grew up wanting to be cowboys or athletes or astronauts; young Max grew up reading William F. Buckley’s magazine, National Review, and conservative Old Testaments like the economist Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” “The Conservative Mind” (a volume edited by Russell Kirk) and Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France.“ (One quibble that’s always bothered me: Burke was not an “English political philosopher” but an Irish one.)

He dreamed of being a columnist like Buckley and George Will. Buckley’s PBS show, “Firing Line,” “elevated conservatism; the shows that conservatives watch today, primarily on the Fox News Channel, debase and dumb down the movement.” Boot’s political hero “was Ronald Reagan: He made conservatism optimistic and inclusive—a sharp contrast to how dark and divisive the movement would become in recent years.” The U.S. successes in the Cold War during the Reagan years “made me proud to be an American—and a conservative.”

And a brief but incisive insight: “Reagan offered hope; Trump, fear.”

It came as a shock that “Republican voters could not have cared less what elite conservatives like us were saying. Trump went over our heads by speaking directly to the country at his televised rallies.” Boot continues, “It turned out that conservative eggheads were just as far removed from the heartland of America” as the liberals, whom conservatives mocked for being “elite” and “out of touch.”

The worst part, though, was the way Republicans who savaged Trump during the primaries caved when he became the favorite for the nomination. Boot was particularly hurt when Marco Rubio flipped: “I had thought he was a man of principle.” The defection of Ted Cruz did not surprise him, though. The senator from Texas “was every bit as opportunist and unprincipled as Trump—not nearly as successful at faking candor.”

Boot holds nothing back. “Republicans genuflected before their new master,” and demonized their Democratic opponents, particularly, of course, Hillary Clinton. Despite political differences, his decision for the 2016 presidential election was clear. “The strongest case for Clinton is what she is not,” he wrote in Foreign Policy magazine. “She is not racist, sexist … cruel, erratic, or volatile. She is not a bully or an authoritarian personality. She is not ignorant or unhinged.”

Of all the conservative toadies who gave in to Trump, “the fundamentalists were the most egregious; these supposed champions of morality were willing to support a candidate who regarded the sins prescribed in the Ten Commandments as his personal to-do list. The more Commandments he violated, the better they liked him.” Trump’s inaugural address was “the most dystopian, disquieting, and divisive” ever. His vision of America, “paranoid, angry, xenophobic.”

“Under the pressure of Trumpism, conservatism as I understand it has been corroding. … I no longer like to call myself a conservative,” Boot writes. “Other contemporary developments such as the failure of the Iraq invasion, the Great Recession of 2008-2009, the #MeToo movement, and the spread of police video tapes revealing violent racism” played into his decision to renounce the Republican Party.

“My ideology has come into contact with reality,” Boot acknowledges. “And reality is winning.”

 

Government Climate Report Warns of Worsening U.S. Disasters

WASHINGTON — As California’s catastrophic wildfires recede and people rebuild after two hurricanes, a massive new federal report warns that these types of extreme weather disasters are worsening in the United States. The White House report quietly issued Friday also frequently contradicts President Donald Trump.

The National Climate Assessment was written long before the deadly fires in California this month and Hurricanes Florence and Michael raked the East Coast and Florida. It says warming-charged extremes “have already become more frequent, intense, widespread or of long duration.”

The federal report says the last few years have smashed records for damaging weather in the U.S., costing nearly $400 billion since 2015. “Warmer and drier conditions have contributed to an increase in large forest fires in the western United States and interior Alaska,” according to the report.

“We are seeing the things we said would be happening, happen now in real life,” said report co-author Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University. “As a climate scientist it is almost surreal.”

And report co-author Donald Wuebbles, a University of Illinois climate scientist, said, “We’re going to continue to see severe weather events get stronger and more intense.”

The air pollution from wildfires combined with heat waves is a major future health risk for the West, the report says. During the fires in northern California, air quality hit “hazardous” levels, according to government air monitoring agencies.

“There’s real concern about how the West will be able to manage this increasing occurrence,” said report co-author Kristie Ebi, a University of Washington public health professor. She said global warming is already harming people’s health, but it will only get worse.

The report is mandated by law every few years and is based on hundreds of previously research studies. It details how global warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas is hurting each region of United States and how it impacts different sectors of the economy, including energy and agriculture.

“Climate change is transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us,” the report says.

That includes worsening air pollution causing heart and lung problems, more diseases from insects, the potential for a jump in deaths during heat waves, and nastier allergies.

What makes the report different from others is that it focuses on the United States, then goes more local and granular.

“All climate change is local,” said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Richard Alley, who wasn’t part of the report but praised it.

While scientists talk of average global temperatures, people feel extremes more, he said.

“We live in our drought, our floods and our heat waves. That means we have to focus on us,” he said.

The Lower 48 states have warmed 1.8 degrees (1 degree Celsius) since 1900 with 1.2 degrees in the last few decades, according to the repot. By the end of the century, the U.S. will be 3 to 12 degrees (1.6 to 6.6 degrees Celsius) hotter depending on how much greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere, the report warns.

Outside scientists and officials from 13 federal agencies wrote the report, which was released on the afternoon following Thanksgiving. It was originally scheduled for December. The report often clashes with the president’s past statements and tweets on the legitimacy of climate change science, how much of it is caused by humans, how cyclical it is and what’s causing increases in recent wildfires.

Trump tweeted this week about the cold weather hitting the East including: “Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS – Whatever happened to Global Warming?”

Friday’s report seemed to anticipate such comments, saying: “Over shorter timescales and smaller geographic regions, the influence of natural variability can be larger than the influence of human activity … Over climate timescales of multiple decades, however, global temperature continues to steadily increase.”

Releasing the report on Black Friday “is a transparent attempt by the Trump Administration to bury this report and continue the campaign of not only denying but suppressing the best of climate science,” said study co-author Andrew Light, an international policy expert at the World Resources Institute.

Trump, administration officials and elected Republicans frequently say they can’t tell how much of climate change is caused by humans and how much is natural.

Citing numerous studies, the new climate report says more than 90 percent of the current warming is caused by humans. Without greenhouse gases, natural forces — such as changes in energy from the sun — would be slightly cooling Earth.

“There are no credible alternative human or natural explanations supported by the observational evidence,” the report says.

Nothing Brings a Family Together Like Thievery

For a variety of reasons, the concept of family has been changing over the past 30 years in Japan, where the rate of marriages and births has dropped to a record low. One in four men is likely to remain a lifelong bachelor, while one in seven women will remain single. Among those who do get married, economic constraints and limited access to child care prevent many from having children.

Shifts in Japanese society have been attributed to the 10-year recession the country suffered in the 1990s, followed by a recovery marked by decreased corporate spending, hiring cuts and increased demand for part-time workers. The broader recovery in recent years has primarily benefited those on the favored side of the country’s widening wealth gap.

Japanese filmmaker career parallels his country’s economic trajectory, taking up aspects of the great recession and the severe social impact of a stalled recovery. His latest film, “Shoplifters,” about a different kind of family, unrelated by blood, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and is Japan’s submission to the 2019 Oscars.

“I am interested in the contemporary family. But I don’t know if I’m concerned about the state of the contemporary Japanese family,” Kore-eda said during a recent press tour in Los Angeles. Sitting in a quiet suite in West Hollywood’s London Hotel, he reflected, “I would say it’s much more personal for me.”

The new film stars Kore-eda regulars like , who has appeared in six of his films, and four-time collaborator . Together, they anchor a cast of varying ages and experience levels portraying a clan of individuals with dubious pasts joined as an ad-hoc family. They survive through methods such as shoplifting, showcased in the film’s compelling opening sequence, as Osamu (Franky) and his boy Shota () wind through a market, surreptitiously pinching goods along the way.

Added to their haul, as they make their way home, is a little girl who appears lost in the street. Rather than leave her under a bush for the night, they take her with them. When they later discover she is an unwanted child who might possibly face physical abuse, they decide to keep her. It’s not kidnapping if they don’t ask for ransom, reasons Nobuyo (Ando Sakura).

As per usual in Kore-eda’s movies, the element of surprise springs from his work with his youngest cast members. No director is better at mining little actors’ candid and unsentimental emotion.

“With the children, they never even see a script,” Kore-eda said. “What I’ll do is I will take the child and say, ‘Okay, your dad is going to say this, and you can say this in return to him.’ On the spot, that’s the first time they hear it. And then I will allow the child to basically say it in their own words,” Kore-eda explained, adding that he also spends time with child cast members, shopping or going to dinner. “So I’m building a relationship with them and, in the process, really sort of finding out what words I can communicate with and what works for them. And by the time I get to set, I’ve already got that established relationship.”

The frank portrayals and emotional veracity common to Kore-eda’s movies might stem from his background as a documentary filmmaker in the early 1990s. In 1995, when he finally got a chance to direct a feature film, “Maborosi,” about a woman with a newborn who is suddenly widowed when her husband commits suicide, he won awards at major international festivals, including the Venice Film Festival.

His 2004 film, “Nobody Knows,” is about a 12-year-old who is suddenly left to care for his younger siblings. “Still Walking” (2008) centers on a family gathering to commemorate the death of a son. Working through his filmography, fractured families become a pronounced theme.

Kore-eda’s characters tend to be ordinary people doing what they can to get by. He finds poetry in the everyday, crafting simple scenarios and scenes brimming with naked humanity. As such, more than one film historian, including , has compared him to the postwar master , whose classics like “Late Spring” (1949) and “Tokyo Story” (1953) exhibit a similar elegance and simple charm that belie unexpected emotional depth. It’s a comparison Kore-eda grudgingly accepts.

“One of the things that I struggle to relate to is that in the world of Ozu, all the people are very polite and very nice and very good, whereas [in] Naruse’s, they’re more kind of tricky and take advantage of you,” he said. “And they’re no good with money and they’re jealous, they’re just kind of not real nice people in many ways,” he explained, citing Ozu’s contemporary, .

Naruse’s films focus on the downtrodden, often unmarried, women and prostitutes, whose backs are to the wall. His 1935 directorial debut, “Wife! Be Like A Rose!”, about a woman who contacts her biological father who had abandoned the family when she was a child, thematically resonates with Kore-eda’s filmography. “I guess if my characters were to appear in a film, they’d probably feel more comfortable in a Naruse film,” he said.

Often, the dynamics of the stories play out with the organic resonance of a fable, as in Kore-eda’s 2013 Cannes Jury Prize winner, “Like Father, Like Son,” in which a well-to-do family of three discovers their 6-year-old boy was switched at birth with one from a working-class family and attempts to switch back.

“That came from a very personal incident,” he said of the acclaimed film. “It was two or three years after my child was born, and I was very busy. I hardly went home at all. I went home for a quick visit and as I was leaving, my daughter came up and said, ‘Oh, please come and visit again.’ And it was quite shocking, and it made me think, what is the relationship between a father and a child? Is it the amount of time that’s spent together, is that what’s really important? And that’s where it led to the movie, ‘Like Father, Like Son,’ rather than some larger social perspective.”

Even so, the larger social perspective is mirrored in Kore-eda’s personal experience, whether he’s aware or not. While “Abenomics,” the economic policy under current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has spurred the strongest growth in decades, the main benefactors are the wealthy in Japan’s larger cities. Unemployment is down, but wage growth is stagnant, and with some of the longest hours in the world (some companies requiring up to 80 hours of overtime per month), there is little time left for parenting. As a result, roughly 47 percent of married couples describe their relationship as “sex-free,” and birth rates have dropped to the point where adult diapers are outselling baby diapers.

For his next film, “The Truth,” Kore-eda returns his lens to the family. This time, it consists of a theatrical Paris-based clan led by a famous actor played by . plays her less-successful actor daughter, married to a man played by .

Kore-eda’s schedule has been mayhem. Right after accepting the Palme d’Or, he flew to New York to cast Hawke and began hitting the festival circuit: Toronto, Vancouver and the U.K. In recent months, he has been shooting “The Truth” in Paris in English, a language he doesn’t speak.

“I don’t understand every moment of it. I certainly have gotten a sense of the rhythm. Is it the right rhythm? Is the feeling being expressed properly? Is it being expressed naturally? Those kinds of aspects, I can pick up on,” he said about directing in English.

And lest you think it’s another heavy movie about a family torn apart through jealousy and neglect, Kore-eda set the record straight. “There is some humor in it,” he said, smiling. “There will be some laughs.”

Robert Reich: Trump Has No Use for the Rule of Law

Democracies depend on what’s known as the “rule of law.” It’s based on three fundamental principles. Trump is violating every one of them.

The first is that no person is above the law, not even a president. Which means a president cannot stop an investigation into his alleged illegal acts.

Yet in recent weeks Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who at least had possessed enough integrity to recuse himself from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s possible collusion with Russia in the 2016 election, and replaced him with an inexperienced loyalist hack, Matthew G. Whitaker – whose only distinction to date has been loud and public condemnation of the investigation. As a conservative legal commentator on CNN, Whitaker even suggested that a clever attorney general could secretly starve the investigation of funds.

There’s no question why Trump appointed Whitaker. When asked by the Daily Caller, Trump made it clear: “As far as I’m concerned this is an investigation that should have never been brought. It should have never been had…. It’s an illegal investigation.”

The second principle of the rule of law is a president cannot prosecute political opponents or critics. Decisions about whom to prosecute for alleged criminal wrongdoing must be made by prosecutors who are independent of politics.

Yet Trump has repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to bring charges against Hillary Clinton, his 2016 rival, for using a private email server when she was Secretary of State, in alleged violation of the Presidential Records Act.

During his campaign, Trump led crowds in chanting “lock her up,” called Clinton “crooked Hillary,” and threatened to prosecute her if he was elected president.

After taking office, according to the New York Times, Trump told White House counsel Donald McGahn he wanted the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton. McGahn responded that Trump didn’t have the authority to do so, and such action might even lead to impeachment.

Yet Trump has continued to press Justice Department officials – including Whitaker, when he served as Sessions’s chief of staff – about the status of Clinton-related investigations.

Never mind that Trump’s senior adviser and daughter, Ivanka Trump sent hundreds messages on her private email server to government employees and aides that detailed government business, policies, and proposals. Or that other Trump officials have used their private email to conduct official business as well.

Breaking the rule of law doesn’t require consistency. It requires only a thirst for power at whatever cost.

The third principle of the rule of law is that a president must be respectful of the independence of the judiciary.

Yet Trump has done the opposite, openly ridiculing judges who disagree with him in order to fuel public distrust of them – as he did when he called the judge who issued the first federal ruling against his travel ban a “so-called” judge.

Last week Trump referred derisively to the judge who put a hold on Trump’s plan for refusing to consider asylum applications an “Obama judge,” and railed against the entire ninth circuit. “You go the 9th Circuit and it’s a disgrace,” he said. He also issued a subtle threat: “It’s not going to happen like this anymore.“

In an unprecedented public rebuke of a sitting president, John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, condemned Trump’s attack. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

Trump immediately shot back: “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.” This was followed by another Trump threat: “Much talk over dividing up the 9th Circuit into 2 or 3 Circuits. Too big!”

Almost a half-century ago, another president violated these three basic principles of the rule of law. Richard Nixon tried to obstruct the Watergate investigation, pushed the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies, and took on the judiciary.

But America wouldn’t allow it. The nation rose up in outrage. Nixon resigned before Congress impeached him.

The question before us is whether this generation of Americans will have the strength and wisdom to do the same.

Hillary Clinton’s Migration Remarks Trigger Widespread Outrage

The rise of xenophobic, right-wing extremists intent on stoking bigotry and prejudice against foreigners in Europe and elsewhere has startled observers around the world—but former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton angered critics Thursday when she revealed her belief that the onus lies with European leaders to curb migration in order to appease those same extremists, rather than to protect the rights of asylum seekers.

In an interview with the Guardian, the 2016 presidential candidate perfectly illustrated the rift between so-called centrist Democrats and progressives as she suggested Europe should end its attempts to resettle the world’s 25.4 million refugees whose home countries have become unlivable due to war, unrest, and poverty—frequently thanks to actions by the U.S. and its European allies.

“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame” of right-wing power in Europe, Clinton told the Guardian. “I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message—’we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’—because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.”

Clinton’s comments drew immediate criticism from human rights groups, European leaders, and progressive Americans, who in addition to calling for Democrats to stand with refugees as they exercise their internationally-recognized right to seek asylum, denounced her remarks as a capitulation to extremists like President Donald Trump and his European counterparts.

Clintonism’s doctrine of granting major substantive policy concessions that cause substantial human suffering in exchange for political victories hasn’t changed much since the 1990s but I don’t think it’s where the Democratic Party base is now https://t.co/KJhOB4jVEQ

— Tacchino è buono

The Future of the Planet Looks Like ‘WALL-E’

The story has been lost in the miasma of Donald Trump’s scandal-ridden presidency, but its implications for the U.S. and much of the West cannot be overstated. In April, after ending imports of 24 kinds of scrap last year, Beijing announced that it would be extending its ban to dozens of other materials. And while environmentalists have hailed the move as a “big win for global green efforts,” a rash of countries are suddenly scrambling to dispose of their recyclables.

Dianna Cohen of the Plastics Pollution Coalition believes that a plastics crisis has arrived.

“We suddenly have to deal with our own waste, basically, now,” she tells Robert Scheer. “And then, also, the costs of recycling are increasing, and you have to think about how many trucks are needed to create it, how widely it’s dispersed, et cetera. And that’s a big expense. And then plastic production—internationally, but [also] internally in the United States—is really ramping up right now, and it’s going to continue to explode. So we have a very big problem on our hands. It reminds me of that movie ‘Wall-E,’ or ‘Idiocracy,’ where people live in a world that’s just full of waste, it’s just a wasteland, like a garbage dump.”

In the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” Cohen explains how plastics and the burning of fossil fuels are interrelated, and why recycling alone can’t save us. “Recycling is a really cool idea—I put things in my recycling containers, where I live in Hollywood,” she says. “And I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from doing that, if there is some kind of infrastructure set up in your town where you live. But just because something could potentially be recycled—does it actually get recycled? I think that’s an important question to ask.”

Later in their discussion, she addresses some of our largest corporate polluters—all of them American and European companies—and just how thoroughly inadequate their sustainability efforts have proved. “I think in the time since we founded Plastic Pollution Coalition in 2009, there have been three different sustainability directors for Coca-Cola that I’ve met. These companies often, when I’ve spoken with their sustainability directors, say, ‘Oh, we’re working on a bunch of great stuff, it’s going to be fantastic.’ And I say, ‘I can’t wait to see.’ … [We really need to] hold these corporations responsible for all of the packaging that they use for their products.”

Ultimately, Cohen urges consumers and manufacturers alike to re-evaluate their use of plastics. If we refuse to evolve, to change the way we interact with these materials, she warns, we’re likely threatening the health of our children and future generations.

“If you look at the whole chain, it impacts us negatively—our health, human health, animal health, the planet, the entire chain,” she observes. “So really, I think while plastic is a useful and valuable material, when we use it and design things with it with intended obsolescence, to be used for a short amount of time, we are using a valuable material in an irresponsible way.”

Listen to Cohen’s interview with Scheer or read a transcript of their conversation below:

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where I hasten to add the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, Dianna Cohen, who is the leader, or cofounder, of the Plastic Pollution Coalition. And a really worthy operation, really important to saving the planet. But I have to start with a sort of sick joke: when I think about plastics I think about Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, right, and this uncle or somebody comes up to him as he’s graduated and gives him the key word for life: plastics. And you know, at that time, back in the sixties, I guess as late as the sixties, the whole assumption was that plastics would liberate us; they were great, they were cheap, you could be everywhere, you could make cars out of them, you could–you know, everything. And throw ‘em away, and life was going to be great. So plastics really were identified with the good life and modernization and so forth. And you are one of those people who have spoiled the party. And there are some headlines about that that you can give us; just, you can’t, I mean you can’t get a straw unless you ask for it, right? You’re the one that’s been doing all this, and you’ve been doing it for a long time. And again, I don’t want to make light of it, because you head a great group, and it saves fish and birds and you know, everybody else, and you’ll tell us that. And it’s a great menace to the world. So give us the headlines on this evolving story.

Dianna Cohen: Well, I mean, I think it’s important just to state that plastic pollution is a global crisis. And it’s not a crisis that–in a sense it’s in your face, in a sense it’s not. When we hear about something, like when we had the BP oil disaster, that was a physical thing that you could see oil spilling out. And plastic is a little more nefarious than that, because we are using it all over the world every day–

RS: Well, plastic is oil, right?

DC: Plastic is oil. It’s made from processing oil products–oil products, and then you add plasticizing chemicals to it. And what we’ve been learning over the last 30, 40 years is that these chemicals, which are added to the plastic, create polymer chains that don’t break down in the environment. And they also leach bits of those chemicals into our food and beverages that have been linked to human health issues for us, and impact the marine life, are ingested by sea life and wildlife. It comes back to us in so many ways. Plastic is the gift that keeps giving.

RS: And it’s worse than oil.

DC: I don’t know that it’s worse than oil, but it’s part of the petrochemical world that we live in.

RS: And so let’s cut to the serious part, really, the damage part. This is the major polluter of oceans, most of the waste, and–

DC: It is one of the major polluters of oceans; it is not the sole polluter of the ocean. But because of particular qualities that plastic has, it either floats or it sinks to the bottom, or it begins to get algae and things growing on it, which attract sea life and wildlife to it–they smell it, and they believe it’s edible, and so they eat it or they’re attracted to the colors of it. Pelagic seabirds, like Laysan albatross and other seabirds, also collect plastic bits and pieces thinking that it’s food or krill, or things that they normally would collect and feed to their babies. And then they bring it back to the nest and they regurgitate it, they feed it to the babies, and these babies die with their stomachs full of plastic. Or they live severely impacted, shortened lives because their stomachs are full of plastic. And it’s interesting, because when I first saw these photographic images that had been taken by Susan Middleton and Chris Jordan of dead adolescent Laysan albatross, from Midway Atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean–when I first saw those photographs, you know, it hit me really hard. And not just cerebrally, it’s not a thought that you have; it really hits you, you know, in your heart, in your stomach; it hits you in your gut. And you look at that image, and you think: my God, are my daily choices, and the choices that corporations and companies around us use for packaging for our food and beverages, killing–unwittingly killing animals all over the world? And how am I, how am I playing a part in this? And so when I saw that, for me, those birds in particular, and those images which are very powerful, became a metaphor for what we’re doing to ourselves. We’re stuffing ourselves full of plastic, and the chemicals that leach from plastic, and we’re doing it to our children, and most people are still not yet aware that this is even happening.

RS: Well, let’s spell that out. How does that work?

DC: Well, so, the chemicals that are used to make plastic–you take a carbon source when you make plastic; 98% of plastics are made from petroleum, but you can also use plant-based carbon sources to make plastic, like sugar cane or corn or potato or hemp or bulrush, different fibrous carbon sources. And–

RS: Are they marketed as good plastic, or–?

DC: Um, they’re marketed as bioplastics. So, yeah, there are people who would consider that better; that’s an incremental thing. You know, if you’re trying to move away from and divest from being dependent on fossil fuels and petroleum, then yes, incrementally, perhaps, some of these are better. But the problem really comes to the chemicals that are added, that are the plasticizing chemicals, that give those carbon sources–that give them the qualities that we identify as plastic; make it supple, malleable, transparent, translucent, rigid, et cetera. And those groups of chemicals are called bisphenols. So you might have heard, oh, this is made with bisphenol A, or this is OK because it’s BPA-free. And it may be made with BPB or BPC or BPS or BPZ–another bisphenol. And then phthalates–phthalates are added to a lot of things, from what I understand, to make the plastic mushy–kind of soft and rubbery, like a rubber ducky or something like that, that’s not actually made from rubber from a rubber tree, but made from heavily phthalated plastic. So these two groups of chemicals have now been studied for some time, and BPA has probably been studied the most so far. And BPA leaches micro amounts into the food and beverage that are packaged in containers or bottles or packaging that are made with these materials. And bisphenol A, in studies, has been linked to lower sexual function, sterility and infertility. GQ just did a piece called “Sperm Count Zero,” about new research that’s come out about the impact to human sperm. It’s also been linked to obesity and diabetes, as well as breast cancer, prostate cancer, and brain cancer. And then babies exposed to these chemicals in utero, BPA, it’s been linked to shortened anogenital distance, smaller penis size, feminization of boys–so boys getting breasts, early menses in girls–girls getting their period much younger than they normally would, among other things.

RS: OK, so plastic is bad stuff, we don’t have to debate that, right.

DC: Well, I mean, I think plastic is an incredibly useful material, but when we use it to package all of our food and beverage and beauty products in it, we’re probably not using it in the wisest way for our health.

RS: So, OK, people get the message. And you’ve had some victories lately, right? Give me the headlines on the victories here in California, the governor signed legislation?

DC: Yeah, well, I mean, so we’ve had victories. So when you say we’ve had victories–I mean, I’m a cofounder of and I’m the CEO of the Plastic Pollution Coalition; we’re a global coalition, but we work with other coalitions as well. And we work with a global movement as well, a hashtag global movement called #BreakFreeFromPlastic, the Clean Seas Coalition, and other coalitions. So really, united together, we have had some great wins internationally and nationally and state-wise. And in California just in the last month or so, we had some legislation that passed the assembly, and then Governor Jerry Brown signed into law two bills that are related to reducing microfibers and microplastics, and a bill which has to do with reducing plastic food packaging. And then, I think one of the most interesting ones that we all worked hard to help get the word out about, is a bill that would make straws only available upon request. So this is not taking straws away from anybody; this is straws only upon request. Which immediately does two things: one, it creates less waste; and prior to that, it saves eateries and restaurants and cafes and bars money. Because they don’t need to order as many, because they’re not giving out as many; they’re not automatically putting them in your drink. And I think California was really the natural place to have a piece of legislation like that, that was brought by Ian Calderon. I think California is a natural place to do that, because for many years now, we’ve had water upon request, because we live in a drought-riddled state. And so in the same way, you know, you can have straws upon request. What that also allows businesses to do is make the switch to paper straws, which actually will break down in the environment, or can go in a compost and break down, unlike plastic straws. And unlike bioplastic, or compostable straws, which only will be composted if they go into a system that can heat them up and break them down.

RS: So let me just get this straight. We can go a long way to helping this if we use a paper straw, which, ah–

DC: Well, I mean, if you like straws, you can do what I do, which is I carry reusable straws with me.

RS: But I really want to get the scope of this. And you said there are a few other headlines that–I don’t know, for me, this became vivid in your movie that you helped get out there, where I saw a straw in the eye of a green sea turtle.

DC: It was in its nostril.

RS: Nostril, right, sorry. That did it. That image has stuck with me, and I really, I don’t think I’ve used a plastic straw since. I’ve obviously encountered plastic before. But I really want to get some of the numbers. And it seems to me the big issue here, and a big concern around the world, is people say to us, hey, you Americans started all this. You’re the great wasters, you’re the great–you know, you gave us all this junk, you told us it was a great revolution, it represented freedom. And now you suddenly decided that all of us have got to cut back. And I want to take the example of China, because that has been in the news a little bit. I mean, OK, people describe China as a great polluter–well, China’s got a great population, right? And are we now saying to China, to India, we had our ride with waste and with plastic and other things that pollute the environment, and now we’re going to try to cut back, but you guys have really got to cut back. And I want to ask you about a specific item of news, that for a while there–and I’ve learned it from you–we were shipping our recyclable plastic back to China, on empty cargo ships that were bringing us all our iPhones and everything else. And now, China doesn’t want those recyclable–

DC: They’re producing enough of their own.

RS: They’re producing enough of their own. And so, the price paid for this is being cut in half, I gather, something like that. And therefore, the recyclers are not as interested in grabbing plastic to recycle, is that the case?

DC: Well, I mean, look. Recycling is a really cool idea, and I don’t–I put things in my recycling containers, where I live in Hollywood. And I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from doing that, if there is some kind of infrastructure set up in your town where you live. But just because something could potentially be recycled–does it actually get recycled? I think that’s an important question to ask.

RS: So we want abstinence.

DC: Well, it’s not good for your health, so if you reduce or–if you refuse it in the beginning, then you reduce the amount that you’re using, and you have less that you need to try to recycle or reuse.

RS: And that’s the idea behind a metal straw, for instance, you can–

DC: A metal straw, a glass straw. I mean, there are also wonderful companies doing bamboo straws, growing straw out of rye wheat and hay. There’s a straw company called LOLIWARE that is making straws out of seaweed, and they’re nontoxic and they are, you know, 100% compostable, break down, because it’s part of nature.

RS: OK, so give me the numbers. What percentage of this stuff ends up killing the planet and killing animals?

DC: Well, so, just this last week, Plastic Pollution Coalition released a new projection by chemical engineer Jan Dell, and in that she was looking at what’s going on with recycling rates, and has predicted that recycling rates for plastic in the United States will be only 4.4% by the end of 2018. And that they potentially could sink as low as 2.9% in 2019. And that the four main reasons for this drop is that plastic waste generation is increasing exponentially in the United States; that exports counted as recycling; when China banned foreign waste, we suddenly have to deal with our own waste, basically, now. And then also, the costs of recycling are increasing, and you have to think about how many trucks are needed to create it, how widely it’s dispersed, et cetera. And that’s a big expense. And then plastic production–internationally, but internally in the United States–is really ramping up right now, and it’s going to continue to explode. So we have a very big problem on our hands. It reminds me of that movie Wall-E, or Idiocracy, where people live in a world that’s just full of waste, it’s just a wasteland, like a garbage dump.

RS: Well, we’re going to try to get some optimism in this, but first the break. [omission for station break] We’re back with Dianna Cohen, the cofounder of the Plastic Pollution Coalition. And you know, I have a kind of schizzy feeling about this, because I keep making light of it. After all, it is plastic; plastic was designed to be light and beautiful and efficient and everything else–

DC: It is!

RS: –and everything else. But I watched this documentary [Living in the Future’s Past], which I’m promoting here–Jeff Bridges, as you pointed out, that your group had a lot to do with–

DC: Well, and also the STRAWS documentary.

RS: I suddenly realized, this is not kidding around. This is really serious stuff. And now I’ve even been sobered up to the point where recycling doesn’t cut it. And I know you don’t want to be pushed quite that far, but you know, as a reformed alcoholic here, I believe in abstinence. And if something’s a poison for you, as I feel alcohol is for me–I’m not proselytizing for anybody else–then I have to abstain, which I’ve done most of my adult life, OK. And I feel the same way about plastic. You know, I’m hooked on plastic; it’s been there, as I say, it’s been this wonderful, shiny, supple, easy, cheaper thing that has informed my entire life. And yet, recycling it doesn’t really cut it; nobody wants our junk, the price drops, the money’s not in it. And abstinence, finding alternatives to plastic, is really your message here. Because we’re kidding ourselves, in a way, with the recycling. And the alternative, really, is to understand that this shiny object is the death of us.

DC: Well, I don’t want to talk about death. It’s inevitable. But–but, let’s talk about another cool thing that just came out in the last week: an announcement from all of this data from a new brand audit that was created by #BreakFreeFromPlastic. And what did they find? Three main companies were identified in 239 cleanups and brand audits, which were actually created across 42 different countries on six different continents, and what did they find? They found that Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Co, and Nestle are the worst corporate polluters.

RS: So, ah, let me understand what this means, though. What is the quick fix for these three companies? Let’s say a lot of pressure is brought on them, and so forth; what do they do? Do they go back to glass and recycle? What do they do?

DC: Ah, well–

RS: Tin cans? I don’t know.

DC: I mean, if they wanted a person like me to buy any of their products, I only would buy their products if they were packaged in glass. But you know, it’s interesting, because when I look at photographs of the supermarket here in California in the seventies, all of the beverages were in glass. And there was really a switchover that was made in the eighties.

RS: OK, let’s say in the interest of equal free time, we have a representative here from Pepsi-Co. And what they said was they were Pepsi, being free, you know, the Pepsi generation. They were selling a lifestyle. So were Coca-Cola, also; a little stuffier, Coca-Cola. And that lifestyle was really expanded dramatically by the use of plastic. Plastic and soft drinks, that’s really a critical connection. So you’ve got one of those enlightened capitalists at Pepsi-Co right now in front of you.

DC: Well, I mean, all of these companies have sustainability directors. I think in the time since we founded Plastic Pollution Coalition in 2009, there have been three different sustainability directors for Coca-Cola that I’ve met. These companies often, when I’ve spoken with their sustainability directors, say–oh, we’re working on a bunch of great stuff, it’s going to be fantastic. And I say, I can’t wait to see–I had a dream the other night that you just connected the cap on your plastic bottle, you know, and then took 100% of them back. So we really need to see extended producer responsibility that holds these corporations responsible for all of the packaging that they use for their products.

RS: OK. Well, let me cut to the chase here, because I learned something just in the course of this podcast, that recycling is not the answer. And I had hints of it before, but I deluded myself that if I–you know, when I leave here, I’ll probably go get a soft drink somewhere. And I would grab that plastic bottle, and then I would console myself that I’m doing it at a place that has a recycling bin, you know, bins, and I would throw it in there–OK! I did my good deed for the day. But you’re basically telling me that’s not cutting it.

DC: Well, I’m not–like I said, I’m not dissuading people from putting things into the recycling, but I’m talking about the real–what is the reality of recycling? So recycling is a really nice idea, but it’s somewhat of a myth. Because if you live in a town or a place that has no infrastructure to take back the materials and downcycle them or do something with them, a lot of places in the world, many countries, say that they’re turning it from waste into energy, but those are different forms of burning and incineration, or pyrolysis, and much of that creates particulate pollution, which is toxic in the air for all of us. So, is that really the solution? No, I think the solution is source reduction. So if you work for one of these big companies, and you’re listening to this show right now, you need to turn around and think about how you’re going to shift the whole system within your company. It has to happen.

RS: All right, but I want to push this, because I think it’s an important point. First of all, the problem with recycling is a lot of people are not going to do it, OK. And so therefore, it doesn’t get–

DC: Well, not that a lot of people aren’t going to do it; people can do it, but if there’s no structure in place to support it, it doesn’t matter.

RS: But I’ve actually run into a few people who are in this industry of recycling. And the question there is, who wants this stuff? There’s a limit to landfill for different kinds of recycling. And you came up with an interesting point before, that China doesn’t want our recyclable plastic, right?

DC: Right.

RS: They’ve got a superabundance of recyclable plastic of their own, right?

DC: Mm-hmm.

RS: This myth of recycling–yes, in the short run it’s a good thing to do; yes, it’s better than not doing anything else. But we’ve invested very heavily in recycling as the answer. The answer.

DC: We haven’t invested heavily in it; corporate–

RS: Emotionally.

DC: No. Corporations, that is their messaging, that is their ad, that’s their marketing, is that this is recycled. That is the messaging, that’s their go-to. And it’s false. Our first campaign, from the moment that we created Plastic Pollution Coalition, was to ask people to refuse single-use plastic. Whenever possible, refuse it. Don’t buy your food packaged in it, because it’s not good for your health. It’s not good for the planet, it’s not good for your health, it’s not good for animals, it’s not good for the ocean, waterways, lakes, the environment in general.

RS: I want to be clear, because you know, I’ve tried to make this accessible, and maybe I’ve made it a little lighter than it should be. But we’re talking about the major, or one of the major, environmental problems in terms of the planet, right?

DC: Yes.

RS: So let’s now get true religion, here.

DC: OK.

RS: What are we talking about, if we don’t act on this in a better way than we’ve been doing up to now? We’re not winning this battle.

DC: If we don’t continue to evolve in the way that we act upon it, and actually change and shift the system and the way that we interact with this material, it will continue to ill-impact our health, the health of our children, and future generations who are not born yet. And we will be living in a giant garbage dump.

RS: OK. Now, to play devil’s advocate here, finally, I saw something where there’s a cleanup campaign involving booms on the ocean, and–

DC: Mm-hmm. It’s called The Ocean Cleanup.

RS: Yeah. And–

DC: They’re part of our coalition.

RS: OK. And it made me feel suddenly good about everything.

DC: Why?

RS: I don’t know, maybe I’m a sucker for good news, but it looked like you’re able to put–what are they, describe the whole process of–

DC: They’re giant booms of plastic that have been carried out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and they–

RS: Which is where?

DC: That is somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, spread out over approximately 2,000 square miles, but it shifts depending on whether we’re having an El Niño or La Niña year; somewhere between Hawaii and California, that is where the Northeastern Pacific Gyre is located. And they have pulled them out there, and they are going to be passively cleaning up, I believe, the top three feet or something of the ocean. But the plastic that’s in the ocean is spread out over that 2,000-square-mile area; it’s in the water column, and the entire water strata, and it’s on the ocean floor. It will not be cleaning those parts up.

RS: So it’s a good thing to do, but again, it just really tells you how big the problem is.

DC: It may contribute to some of gathering a little bit of it. But I mean, in my personal opinion, that’s really, that’s the end of the whole chain. I think we need to look back and think, plastic appears to be an inexpensive material; but what is the true impact in our dependence on plastic? From war and extraction, through manufacturing and production, through delivery packaging, et cetera–and then instantly a waste issue, waste management, incineration, particulate pollution. If you look at the whole chain, it impacts us negatively–our health, human health, animal health, the planet, the entire chain. So really, I think while plastic is a useful and valuable material, when we use it and design things with it with intended obsolescence, to be used for a short amount of time, we are using a valuable material in an irresponsible way.

RS: And the “we,” this is something we, we–we Americans have led the world appetite in the use of plastic. We pioneered–

DC: I think we’ve definitely contributed to it; it appears that though there seem to be points where there’s a lot of plastic pollution being generated in Asia and Southeast Asia, when you look at the brand audit data, which is coming out of cleanups in Manila and different places in Southeast Asia, what you find is that the top corporate polluters are European and American corporations.

RS: Right. And my point is, this is what the multinational economy is about. It was like, you know, selling sugar water to the natives; that’s what Pepsi and Coca-Cola claimed they were doing. They had a clean water supply, we put it in a bottle, we sell it–oh, we can put it in a plastic bottle, it makes it easier to ship, and so forth. And environment be damned, in the long run. But I just want to be very clear about this. It’s a serious problem, and if we think in terms of where we get our consciousness from, that scene in The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman, he should have, when that uncle or whatever came up and said “plastic,” he should have–in the manner of the Berkeley sixties, right, that he was supposed to be evoking and so forth–he should have said, go to hell with your plastic, you’re destroying life on the planet.

DC: But I don’t think that people knew that at the time that that film was made.

RS: Exactly, exactly, so–

DC: Yeah, that’s what makes that scene even more deeply ironic now.

RS: Right, right. The revolution was betrayed, the revolution was supposed to be facilitated by plastic, and plastic ends up, right, poking out–what did you say, not the eye but the–

DC: The nostril. Got stuck in the nostril.

RS: –the nostril of turtles–

DC: Well, and that turtle really became a poster child in a wonderful way. You know, and there are tremendous other successes that are going on right now, like big corporations, big companies, have made a commitment and announced that they’re going to stop serving plastic straws. And that includes Starbucks, IKEA, Marriott, Walt Disney World, and some cruise line ships as well, which is pretty exciting, I think. And–well, and plastic straws are also just the tip of the iceberg. It’s an entryway into understanding.

RS: And it starts the discussion. And I’ve been having a discussion with Dianna Cohen, who is the cofounder of the Plastic Pollution Coalition, which is doing great work in educating us. How do people learn more about this? What’s your website?

DC: Well, you can go to PlasticPollutionCoalition.org, or you can follow us on Facebook; we’re PlasticPollutionCoalition. On Instagram we’re @PlasticPollutes; and we’re also on Twitter, @PlasticPollutes.

RS: And you’re a worldwide coalition, with lots–

DC: We’re a global coalition, yeah. We’re over 750 different organizations and businesses around the world. We’re from 60 different countries. Small groups and large groups, all working to stop plastic pollution, and towards a world that is plastic-free.

RS: And that’s it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. Our producers are Joshua Scheer and Isabel Carreon. Our engineers here at KCRW are Kat Yore and Mario Diaz. And we’ll see you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.