Chris Hedges's Blog, page 494

Italian Actress Asia Argento Denies Abuse Claim

NEW YORK—Two days after a report detailed an accusation of sexual assault against #MeToo activist Asia Argento, the Italian actress and filmmaker said she never had a sexual relationship with the young actor whom she agreed to pay $380,000 in a settlement.

Argento, who has alleged that film producer Harvey Weinstein raped her, said in a statement Tuesday that she was linked “in friendship only” to Jimmy Bennett, a now 22-year-old Los Angeles actor who filed a legal notice of intent to sue Argento. As detailed in a New York Times story published Sunday, Bennett claimed Argento, then 37, sexually assaulted him when he was 17 in a California hotel room in 2013. As a child actor, Bennett played Argento’s son in the 2004 film “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things”

Argento said Tuesday that the $380,000 payment was undertaken by her late boyfriend Anthony Bourdain, the television star chef.

“Bennett knew my boyfriend, Anthony Bourdain, was a man of great perceived wealth and had his own reputation as a beloved public figure to protect,” said Argento. “Anthony personally undertook to help Bennett economically, upon the condition that we would no longer suffer any further intrusions in our life.”

Bourdain killed himself in France in June. He has been a staunch supporter of Argento following her allegations against Weinstein.

A lawyer for Bennett didn’t immediately comment Tuesday. But in a statement Monday, Gordon K. Sattro said: “At this time, our client, Jimmy Bennett, does not wish to comment on the documents or the events discussed in the New York Times article yesterday evening.

While we realize that the news cycle demands an immediate response, many times, people need more than a few minutes or hours to respond. We are asking that you give our client some time and space. Jimmy is going to take the next 24 hours, or longer, to prepare his response.”

Bennett’s notice of intent sought $3.5 million in damages, according to the Times report.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s Capt. Darren Harris on Monday said investigators were looking into the alleged incident. No police report was filed at the time, Harris said.

Argento became one of the leading figures of the #MeToo movement after she told the New Yorker magazine that Weinstein raped her at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 when she was 21. Argento told the magazine that she continued to have a relationship with Weinstein because she was afraid of angering him.

Weinstein has been indicted on sex crime accusations involving three women, but not including Argento. The filmmaker, who is divorced and has two children, lives in Rome.

Elizabeth Warren Introduces Sweeping Anti-Corruption Legislation

Confronting the “rot” of corruption that has poisoned every corner of the American political system and rigged government to work solely in the interests of the rich and well-connected, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Tuesday introduced legislation that would address the flagrant ethics abuses of the Trump White House while also taking on the systemic crisis that gave rise to the thoroughly crooked status quo.

“Let’s face it: there’s no real question that the Trump era has given us the most nakedly corrupt leadership this nation has seen in our lifetimes,” Warren said in a speech unveiling her ambitious anti-corruption platform at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. “But they are not the cause of the rot—they’re just the biggest, stinkiest example of it.”

Officially titled The Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act (pdf), Warren’s bill proposes transformational changes to the way Washington functions in an effort to create a government that works for the needs of the public—not the needs of lobbyists working to pollute the planet, imprison more Americans, and hike live-saving prescription drug costs for profit.

If enacted, Warren’s ambitious measure would:

Completely ban foreign lobbying;
Bar members of Congress and congressional candidates from accepting campaign donations from lobbyists;
Require the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) release the tax returns for federal candidates, including the president and vice president;
“Padlock the revolving door” by imposing a lifetime ban on lobbying by former presidents, members of congress, and agency chiefs;
Ban members of Congress from owning and trading individual stock; and
Establish an “independent anti-corruption agency dedicated to enforcing federal ethics laws.”

“Our national crisis of faith in government boils down to this simple fact: people don’t trust their government to do the right thing because they think government works for the rich, the powerful and the well-connected and not for the American people. And here’s the kicker: They’re right,” Warren said in her address on Tuesday. “I’d love to stand here and tell you that this was some sudden drop after Donald Trump was elected, but that wouldn’t be true. This problem is far bigger than Trump.”

“But I’m not throwing my hands up and walking away,” Warren concluded. “I still believe that in our darkest hours, at our lowest points, government can be a force for good to bring us back together. And here’s the good news: deep down, still Americans believe it, too. You see it in the fight to make government affirm healthcare as a basic human right. You see it in the fight to make government stand for people and against giant corporations.”

Our government systematically favors the rich over the poor, the donor class over the working class, the well-connected over the disconnected. This is deliberate, and we need to call it for what it is – corruption, plain and simple. #EndCorruptionNow

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) August 21, 2018

These reforms have one simple aim: to take power in Washington away from the wealthy, the powerful, and the well-connected who have corrupted our government and put power back in the hands of the American people. #EndCorruptionNow

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) August 21, 2018

Warren’s bold slate of anti-corruption proposals was met with enthusiastic applause by dozens of unions, environmental organizations, and consumer advocacy groups, which signed a joint letter on Tuesday calling the senator’s bill a “comprehensive set of policy solutions” that would “address the broad, corrupting influence of corporations over federal government policymaking.”

Adding to the progressive chorus applauding Warren’s legislation, Morris Pearl—chair of the Patriotic Millionaires—called the measure “an important step toward building a government that works to improve the general welfare of all citizens, not pump up the bank accounts of current and former members of Congress.”

“It is disgusting that some of our public servants see their time in office as little more than a path towards personal riches, leaving them to completely disregard their constituents’ interests in favor of the kind of donor- and corporate-friendly policies that can earn them a plush lobbying gig after leaving office,” Pearl said in a statement on Tuesday. “It’s revealing about the state of Washington that this piece of legislation, full of common-sense limitations on the ability of public servants to enrich themselves at the expense of the country, would be considered radical. In a functional democracy, this would be a no-brainer.”

America’s Future Depends on California’s Election Integrity

California is in the news as “ground zero” for the coming struggle over the federal balance of power in November 2018. So opines Larry Hart, a senior fellow at the American Conservative Union Foundation, in a piece published earlier this summer in The Hill.

A year ago, this might have been good news. California restored mandatory paper ballot voting systems over a decade ago, when then-Secretary of State Debra Bowen implemented a security review of the election software used in all of California’s voting systems. It was found vulnerable to tampering and glitches, so paper was instituted as the ballot of record.

California already had a mandatory audit of results obtained by software counting paper: 100 percent of the ballots in at least 1 percent of each county’s precincts, chosen by random selection, had to be hand-counted. The hand-count had to prove that the scanned results were accurate, or else further steps had to be taken. All in all, California scored fairly well in terms of its election integrity, compared with states like Georgia, still reliant on 100 percent paperless touchscreen voting machines and no audits.

But last year, the California Legislature passed a bill, AB 840, that screwed things up. The bill was purportedly designed to enable registrars to contact voters who’d failed to put their signature on the outside of their returned mail ballots; voters thus contacted could come in, sign, and have their vote counted instead of discarded. However, as the bill progressed from the state Assembly and through the state Senate toward passage, it acquired a stealth amendment.

Few legislators knew the amendment existed, let alone its implications, but it was a lethal blow to honest elections. For the sake of efficiency, CACEO—the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials—requested that the exponentially growing amounts of late-arriving ballots, both mail and provisional (ballots used to record a vote when there are questions about a given voter’s eligibility), be exempted from the mandatory audit.

Their wish was granted. California’s late ballot batches will be counted on software, and the results will go unverified by any check or balance.

Mail balloting has exploded in California. Recent legislation allows counties to send every voter a mail ballot if they choose. Any county can also turn whole precincts into vote-by-mail-only and close the precinct polling places. Voters are often notified by a single piece of mail. They may remain unaware and, on Election Day, try to vote at any open polling place they can find.

If they are unaware of the rule of having to “surrender” their unused mailed ballot to vote at the polls, they must vote provisionally. So, the expansion of vote-by-mail has also meant an increase in provisional voting. CACEO argued that it took too long to process all these ballots, first removing them from their envelopes and into precincts randomly chosen to be hand-counted to match the machine results. So, AB 840 restricts the audit pool to the “semi-official canvass results”—i.e., ballots counted on election night: at-polls regular ballots and mail ballots that arrived before Election Day, so they could be signature-checked and separated from their envelopes for inclusion in the precinct scan.

In short, an increasingly large and very specific portion of California votes—the late-processed ballots—are counted on computer with no verification of accuracy. Our polarized politics make battlefields of elections. And those battles are increasingly decided late in the day, on absentees and provisionals—as in the ongoing Ohio special congressional election count; as in Georgia’s special congressional election in 2017; as in the balance-of-power Virginia statehouse election in 2017 that was ultimately decided by a coin toss. None of these squeakers was entirely verified.

Exploitation is possible and even probable. We are being warned by cybersecurity experts that all the lights are flashing on our voting systems, and that they’ve already suffered intrusion with unknown impact. Exempting California’s ballots from verification by audit is beyond irresponsible. It is enabling crime. We are accessories when we leave the door unlocked.

Los Angeles County suffered a “printing error” in June 2018 that dropped 118,000 eligible voters from its precinct rolls. This single error, attributed to incompatible software transfers, swelled the late-ballot batch by 92,000 provisionals. Registrar Dean Logan assured the public that he’d flagged the affected voters and counted all their ballots. Under pressure, he also announced that he would audit the results. This was the right thing to do, but how that audit was performed has not yet been made public. Whatever the method, the public should know. And it should serve as the template for all counties to audit their late-counted ballots—not just provisionals, but late-arriving mail ballots, too. California’s results cannot go unverified this year.

Secretary of State Alex Padilla has latitude in issuing rules and procedures for conduct of elections. CACEO and our legislature must be accountable for what they’ve done, and there must be an emergency regulation to audit the late-ballot count, at minimum, to the same 1 percent random-selection standard as the semi-final official canvass. Conditions are ripe to make a surprise outcome credible. Whether it’s real or merely seems real can only be determined by verifying all computer ballot counts, as was Californians’ intent when we established the mandatory hand-audit. Without it, mistakes will go undetected. Manipulation will go undeterred.

Larry Hart ended his article in The Hill by noting that we may be “up late” to watch the nation’s fate decided in California. We may be up later than that if it takes days to tally the late-ballot counts. And if those counts happen on computers with no hand-count check or balance, California will be implicated in exacerbating the doubts, polarizing anger, and uncivil attacks that are ruining our democracy.

Politics Is Propping Up Our Capitalist System

Until their contradictions explode, coexisting economic and political systems sustain one another. “Normal” politics includes precisely the process of working out social conflicts such that the economic system is sustained. Whatever its form, the state’s tasks include that sustenance. When politics and the state can no longer perform adequately, the system totters. Only then can movements for system change seriously contest the existing system and press for transition to another.

Capitalism displays this pattern in general and particularly in the United States. To see this, we divide the US population into three groups. The first comprises the 1 % richest, mostly corporate directors, etc. The second is the 9% below them who are mostly professional assistants and servants to the 1%. Below them, the third group includes 90% of the population split between the poorest 45% and the remaining 45%. (henceforth the “middle”). The top 10% are the dominant funders, leaders, etc. of both major parties, Republican (R) and Democrat (D). Separately and in comfortable oscillation, both parties sustain US capitalism.

The Ds loudly sympathize with and appeal to the bottom 45%. Those millions get paid poorly, have few benefits, and suffer job insecurity. Because they have relatively little to lose, they represent a constant potential threat to capitalism. To counter that threat, the Ds support policies to soften the system’s hard edges: minimum wages, progressive tax structures, welfare supports, etc.

Left Ds want the top 10% to pay for those policies. Moderate or centrist Ds disagree. They fear that such an approach risks driving otherwise sympathetic members of the top 10% to redirect financial, media, and other resources from D to R. With few, temporary exceptions, moderate Ds have prevailed. Thus when D’s policies govern, their tax costs fall heavily on with maximum effect on the middle.

The Rs work differently. They stress that D policies are chiefly driven by concern for the bottom 45%. They underscore the unfairness of taxing the “hard workers” in the middle to fund the bottom 45%, the “takers.” Rs often characterized those “takers,” often in racialized terms, as unwilling to work hard or at all,  dependent on the nanny state, etc. Rs describe their political goal as ending the “special” benefits for the bottom 45% (“except for the truly needy”) and thereby saving taxpayers in the middle. The Rs’ rhetoric keeps the top 10% happy because it proceeds as if the political struggle (e.g., over taxes) is only between the two halves of the bottom 90%. When left Ds discuss raising taxes on the top 10%, Rs dismiss such talk as “class war” and utterly unrealistic.

While both parties readily describe themselves as capitalist or pro-capitalist, it is especially their oscillation in office that sustains capitalism. The policies of one party proceed until they so aggravate the country that demands for “change” arise. That demand is met by moving to the other party and its policies. System criticism and system change stay out of politics.

R’s insist that deregulating and subsidizing “job-creating” capitalists will trickle down to benefit all. The Ds propose helping especially the bottom 45% because trickle down happens too little and too late. When Ds win, resentment builds and opens the way for Rs to oust Ds and proceed to cut social services for the bottom 45%. Trump is well within this oscillating tradition although he won by positioning himself outside and against the mainstream Ds and Rs. That tapped the mass rage built up against both as responsible for the ever-greater distance between the top 10% and all the rest.

Today establishment Ds again urge the bottom 45% to reject the extremity of Trump’s administration. That—plus the usual salacious revelations, corruptions, etc.—may win over “moderate” Rs alienated by the Trump spectacle. If another oscillation empowers the Ds in 2018 and/or 2020, US politics will again sustain the capitalist system. D’s would likely repress both independent movements for system change (as Obama crushed Occupy Wall Street) and moderately parallel movements inside their party.

Of course, contradictions beset all relationships including that linking US politics and US capitalism. Politics always also undermines, as well as sustains, capitalism. Which effect prevails depends on how the myriad of social influences shapes the relationship. For example, the state has always undermined capitalism by the potential threat in presents. Given universal suffrage, the state’s dependence on majority voting always risks producing state policies that hurt capitalism or even end it by moving instead to, say, socialism or feudalism, etc. That is why laissez-faire and libertarian ideas have always been fostered by capitalism. They work to keep the state weak, hobbled, demonized, etc.

On the other hand, capitalists look to the state for a vast array of supports: laws against labor unions, bailouts in crises, industrial subsidies, global military operations, supportive school curricula, etc.  Tensions beset capitalism as some strengthen the state to get more supports for capitalism while others weaken it for fear of what a strong state might do. Thus the anti-tax party of Trump/GOP imposes tariffs (a tax), launches trade wars, etc. while also encumbering the state with rising budget deficits: strengthening and weakening the state simultaneously.

For a transition to socialism to get underway requires a different politics. A new and genuinely different political party, for example, could offer clear and explicit opposition to capitalism’s continuance. It could advocate a systemic alternative (say democratic worker coops instead of hierarchical employer/employee capitalism). Politics in the US would then finally emerge from the narrow where two parties agreed on sustaining capitalism only fight over how best to do that. There would finally be a real opposition and real political debate about which alternative system best serves the people’s needs.

The development and growth of such a party would change US politics and its relationship to US capitalism. Rs and Ds do all they can, separately and together, to prevent such a party emerging: no surprise there. The question is why the many who grasp the need to get beyond capitalism yet still hesitate about such a party.

Kavanaugh in Memo Pushed Graphic Sex Questions for Bill Clinton

WASHINGTON—Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh suggested that attorneys preparing to question President Bill Clinton in 1998 seek graphic details about the president’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

The questions are part of a memo in which Kavanaugh advised Independent Counsel Ken Starr and others not to give the president “any break” during questioning. He suggested Clinton be asked whether he had phone sex with Lewinsky and whether he performed specific sexual acts.

Kavanaugh worked on Starr’s team investigating Clinton. He said it may not be “our job to impose sanctions on him, but it is our job to make his pattern of revolting behavior clear — piece by painful piece.”

The memo was released on Monday by the National Archives and Records Administration. In the subject line, Kavanaugh asks, “Slack for the President?”

Kavanaugh goes on to answer the question with a resounding no.

He said he had tried to bend over backward to be fair to Clinton and to think of reasonable defenses for his behavior, but in the end, became convinced there were none. “The idea of going easy on him at the questioning is thus abhorrent to me,” Kavanaugh wrote.

He also accused Clinton of committing perjury, turning the Secret Service upside down, and trying to disgrace Starr and the independent counsel’s office with “a sustained propaganda campaign that would make Nixon blush.”

Kavanaugh in the memo states, “The president has disgraced his Office, the legal system, and the American people by having sex with a 22-year-old intern and turning her life into a shambles.”

The release from the Archives comes before confirmation hearings for Kavanaugh, scheduled for the week after Labor Day. Kavanaugh has been making courtesy calls to senators and met Monday for about an hour with the senior Democratic member of the committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hopes to have Kavanaugh confirmed to replace retired Justice Anthony Kennedy before the new court session begins Oct. 1.

After leaving Starr’s investigative team, Kavanaugh went on to serve in the administration of President George W. Bush and as a circuit court judge. He’s reflected on various occasions about investigations involving a sitting president. He wrote in a 2009 Minnesota Law Review article that it would be appropriate for Congress to enact a statute that would allow civil lawsuits against a sitting president to be deferred until the president’s term ends. He said Congress should consider doing the same with “respect to criminal investigations and prosecutions of the President.”

Democrats have asserted that Trump chose Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court because he would protect him from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

Kavanaugh’s August 1998 memo to Starr and his legal team said that he was mindful of the need to respect the office of the president. But he said the full facts should be gathered “so that the Congress can decide whether the interests of the Presidency would be best served by having a new President.”

Otherwise, he asked, “Aren’t we failing to fulfill our duty to the American people if we willingly ‘conspire’ with the President in an effort to conceal the true nature of his acts?”

He went on to suggest 10 questions for Clinton that go into vivid detail about sexual acts, how often they occurred and whether Lewinksy would be lying if she had recounted those actions.

Clinton was impeached in a post-election session of the House, acquitted in the Senate and remained in office.

White House Speechwriter Linked to White Nationalists Is Fired

Darren Beattie was fired from his position as a speechwriter and policy adviser for President Trump last week after a CNN inquiry revealed his 2016 appearance on a panel at a conference that attracts white nationalists.

Beattie attended the H.L. Mencken Club Conference, an event New York magazine calls “popular with white nationalists like Richard Spencer and others on the alt-right.” The conference is named for the early 20th-century journalist whose racist views were revealed in his posthumously published diaries.

Beattie spoke alongside Peter Brimelow, a British white nationalist who founded VDARE.com, an anti-immigration website.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks extremists, the conference “serves as a safe space for professors to vent their racist views, something they clearly had to keep quiet during their time in academia.” Beattie is a former visiting instructor at Duke University.

As reported by The Washington Post, Brimelow earlier this year “described himself as a believer in ‘racial nationalism’ who sees the future of the United States ‘precipitating out on racial lines.’ ”

CNN said the 2016 conference also featured “two writers, John Derbyshire and Robert Weissberg, who were both fired in 2012 from the conservative magazine National Review for espousing racist views.”

The White House would not confirm when Beattie was fired, though his administration email was no longer working by Saturday, CNN reported. It added that White House officials had asked the network to “hold off on the story for several days last week.”

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley would tell CNN only that “Mr. Beattie no longer works at the White House,” declining to elaborate. The Washington Post reported that when White House officials learned of CNN’s investigation, they urged Beattie to voluntarily step down. “When it became clear that Beattie would not resign, the people familiar with the matter said, the White House terminated him,” the Post reported.

Beattie defended his conference speech, titled “The Intelligentsia and the Right,” telling CNN, “I said nothing objectionable and stand by my remarks completely.”

Beattie has not been accused of being a white nationalist himself; it was his participation in a conference mostly attended by white nationalists that came under fire.

Beattie worked under chief White House speechwriter Vince Haley and occasionally worked with Trump senior policy adviser Stephen Miller. New York magazine pointed out that Miller has shaped some of the Trump administration’s harshest immigration policies, including the anti-Muslim travel ban. Beattie had defended Trump’s original executive order on the travel ban in an editorial he wrote while still at Duke, calling it “perfectly reasonable.”

Americans Should Be Freaking Out About Online Censorship

The approaches Facebook and Google are taking toward free speech are a serious cause for concern; scientists have found a song that reduces anxiety; meanwhile, our national debt has hit historic highs. These discoveries and more below.

Taibbi: Censorship Does Not End Well

How America learned to stop worrying and put Mark Zuckerberg in charge of everything.

Socialists Need to Fight for Economic Change — Not Just Another Version Of Capitalism

A limited interpretation of socialism, better characterized as state capitalism, fails to redraw the oppressive employer/employee relationship.

Parkland Students Blend QR and Fashion to Register Voters

In their most recent popularization in the U.S., QRs are front and center in the anti-gun violence movement from March for Our Lives, launched by students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla.

The Ever-Evolving Art of the Coming-Out Video

Whether it’s through a Facebook post or blog entry, countless people are using the internet as their vehicle to come out to loved ones—either as a substitute to coming out in person or to precede a sometimes-difficult conversation.

National Debt at Highest Level Since After WWII

Despite President Trump’s declaration that he would eliminate the national debt over eight years, the debt-to-Gross Domestic Product ratio has reached its highest level since after World War II, according to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

Do Teens Use Facebook? It Depends on Their Family’s Income

Lower-income teens are more likely to use Facebook than their more affluent counterparts.

In China, Fighting Clickbait by Teaching People How to Write

Writing courses offered by the creator of China30s help fund the independent website.

Powerful Women Told Me Getting a Dog Is the Key to Success. They Were Right.

At age 24, buying a dog was irresponsible, and the best decision I’ve ever made.

Neuroscientists Discover A Song That Reduces Anxiety By 65 Percent

Neuroscientists in the U.K. have zeroed in on a single song that results in a dramatic 65% reduction in overall anxiety.

Trump Foreign Policy Held Back by Struggle to Grasp Time Zones, Maps

Trump also has trouble relating to foreign presidents who have real jobs that don’t involve binge-watching cable news.

The Banality of Capitalism in China

There are moments of friendship and warmth in Wang Bing’s documentary Bitter Money but the primary sense a viewer gets is that being on the bottom rung of capitalism in China consists mainly of boredom.

#MeToo Activist Asia Argento Settled Sex Assault Complaint, Report Finds

NEW YORK—Italian actress Asia Argento — one of the most prominent activists of the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment — recently settled a complaint filed against her by a young actor and musician who said she sexually assaulted him when he was 17, the New York Times reported.

Argento, 42, settled the notice of intent to sue filed by Jimmy Bennett, who is now 22, for $380,000 shortly after she said last October that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein raped her, the Times reported.

Argento and Bennett co-starred in a 2004 film called “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things” in which Argento played Bennett’s prostitute mother.

Bennett says in the notice that he had sex with Argento in a California hotel in 2013. The age of consent in California is 18.

The notice says the encounter traumatized Bennett and hurt his career, the Times reported.

The newspaper said it received court documents that included a selfie of Argento and Bennett in bed. Three people familiar with the case said the documents were authentic, the Times reported.

Argento became one of the most well-known activists of the #MeToo movement after she told the New Yorker magazine that Weinstein raped her at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 when she was 21. Argento told the magazine that she continued to have a relationship with Weinstein because she was afraid of angering him.

Weinstein has been indicted on sex crime accusations involving three women, but not including Argento.

Representatives for Argento could not be immediately reached by The Associated Press for comment. Through a representative, Bennett declined to comment to the Times.

We’re Living Through a Second Gilded Age

I’ve long admired Elon Musk as a technological visionary. But I worry about his sense of responsibility to the public.

Last week, Musk announced on Twitter that he intended to turn Telsa, the electric-car maker he founded, into a private company. He said the funding was “secured”–a claim that sent Telsa stock skyrocketing–yet he produced no evidence the funding was nailed down.

There are laws against corporate officials making these sorts of untethered claims, because if untrue they could hurt lots of innocent bystanders–including unwary investors and employees.

Does Musk’s behavior remind you of any other powerful person who also makes unfounded claims on Twitter that send heads spinning?

Donald Trump is no Elon Musk. Musk seems to genuinely care about the future of humanity.

But, like Trump, Musk loves to upend the status quo by breaking norms and maybe even some laws.

He also seems to share Trump’s unrelenting combativeness and penchant for hitting back. A few weeks ago, after a British diver involved in the Thailand cave rescue termed Musk’s offer of a submarine a publicity stunt, Musk called him a pedophile.

Musk has little patience for the media. At a recent quarterly earnings conference, he refused to answer what he termed “boring” or “bonehead” questions.

Musk and Trump aren’t the only notable people in modern America exhibiting these tendencies.

Think of Travis Kalanick, the pugnacious founder of Uber. Or Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Which raises the question: Is it necessary for true innovators to break norms and rules?

Some years ago, the most fashionable buzzword in business was “disruption.” Real entrepreneurs, it was said, disrupt the status quo. They shake up conventional ways of doing things and upturn hidebound institutions.

Trump loyalists think that’s exactly what he’s doing in Washington.

But there’s a less charitable view of why these outsized personalities break the rules. They feel entitled to.

Consider Martin Shkreli, who, after buying the rights to sell Daraprim, a lifesaving drug, promptly raised the price by over 5,000 percent.

Shkreli was unapologetic. And he lashed out at journalists who criticized him, even buying Internet domains associated with their names and then mocking them on the sites.

(Last March, Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison for criminal fraud in an unrelated scheme to bilk his former hedge fund investors.)

Add the former Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. And many of the people Trump has surrounded himself with over the years.

Trump himself continues to place himself above the law.

All these men (note the absence of women) are driven. They’re often brilliant. (Trump is a gifted con man.)

They’ll also do whatever it takes to get what they want. They believe the norms other people live by don’t apply to them.

Their attitude toward the law is that anything they want to do is okay unless it’s clearly illegal. And even if it’s illegal, it’s OK if they can get away with it.

And they have contempt for anyone who gets in their way.

Researchers have found that great wealth and power often correlate with less compassion and stronger feelings of entitlement.

The very rich cheat more on their taxes, are more likely to shoplift, and more likely to cheat at games of chance.

The research doesn’t tell us the direction of causation–whether the rich act these ways because they’re rich, or if they got rich because they act these ways.

Whatever the causal relationship, the era we’re now in has created a few big winners–who, at least in their own eyes, are so successful they’re entitled to do whatever they want.

In the words of railroad magnate William H. Vanderbilt, “the public be damned.”

Vanderbilt said this in 1882, during America’s first Gilded Age–whose entrepreneurs created railroads, telephones, electric power and steel mills, but who also bent the laws to suit their purposes.

Their wealth was unprecedented. Yet most workers barely eked out a living.

We’re now in America’s second Gilded Age.

Last week, it was reported that in 2017, the average CEO of the 350 largest firms in the U.S. received $18.9 million in compensation. That’s a 17.6 percent increase over 2016.

At the same time, the typical worker’s compensation remained flat, rising merely 0.3 percent.

The first Gilded Age fueled a progressive era that tamed and regulated its excesses, beginning in 1901.

In very different ways, Trump and Musk epitomize America’s second Gilded Age. Will their audacity and excesses usher in a second progressive era?

Humankind Is Rapidly Exiting Its ‘Safe Zone,’ New Climate Report Finds

Offering a stark warning to the world, a new report out Monday argues that the reticence of the world’s scientific community—trapped in otherwise healthy habits of caution and due diligence—to downplay the potentially irreversible and cataclysmic impacts of climate change is itself a threat that should no longer be tolerated if humanity is to be motivated to make the rapid and far-reaching transition away from fossil fuels and other emissions-generating industries.

In the new report—titled What Lies Beneath: The Understatement of Existential Climate Risk (pdf)—authors David Splatt and Ian Dunlop, researchers with the National Centre for Climate Restoration (Breakthrough), an independent think tank based in Australia, argue that the existential threats posed by the climate crisis have still not penetrated the collective psyche of humanity and that world leaders, even those demanding aggressive action, have not shown the kind of urgency or imagination that the scale of the pending catastrophe presents.

While the report states that “a fast, emergency-scale transition to a post-fossil fuel world is absolutely necessary to address climate change,” it bemoans the fact that this solution continues to be excluded from the global policy debate because it is considered by the powerful as “too disruptive.” However, the paper argues, it is precisely this lack of imagination and political will that could doom humanity’s future.

As Splatt and Dunlop summarize at Renew Economy, their paper analyzes why:

Human-induced climate change is an existential risk to human civilisation: an adverse outcome that will either annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential, unless dramatic action is taken.
The bulk of climate research has tended to underplay these risks, and exhibited a preference for conservative projections and scholarly reticence.
IPCC reports tend toward reticence and caution, erring on the side of “least drama,” and downplaying the more extreme and more damaging outcomes, and are now becoming dangerously misleading with the acceleration of climate impacts globally.
Why this is a particular concern with potential climatic “tipping points,” the passing of critical thresholds which result in step changes in the climate system. Under-reporting on these issues is contributing to the “failure of imagination” in our understanding of, and response to, climate change.

“Climate change is now reaching the end-game,” reads the forward to the report by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, “where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences.”

When #climate risks are understated, it’s time to understand “What lies beneath” the scientific reports and policymaking. Download the inside story of #whatliesbeneath https://t.co/aJIL6093Pj @breakthroughccr pic.twitter.com/F72oZVjPC4

— David Spratt (@djspratt) August 19, 2018

“It is no longer possible to follow a gradual transition path to restore a safe climate,” write Spratt and Dunlop in an op-ed published in the Guardian on Monday. “We have left it too late; emergency action, akin to a war footing, will eventually be accepted as inevitable. The longer that takes, the greater the damage inflicted upon humanity.”

At the center of their argument, the pair explain, is that while the global scientific community—including the vital work of the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—has been at the forefront of warning humanity about the processes and dangers of human-caused global warming, there has been simply too much “reticence and caution” that has led researchers to downplay the most “extreme and damaging outcomes” that lurk beneath their publicly stated findings and pronouncements.

While this has been understandable historically, given the pressure exerted upon the IPCC by political and vested interests, it is now becoming dangerously misleading with the acceleration of climate impacts globally. What were lower probability, higher-impact events are now becoming more likely.

This is a particular concern with potential climatic tipping points – passing critical thresholds which result in step changes in the climate system – such as melting polar ice sheets (and hence increasing sea levels), permafrost and other carbon stores, where the impacts of global warming are nonlinear and difficult to model with current scientific knowledge.

The extreme risks which these tipping points represent justify strong precautionary risk management. Under-reporting on these issues is irresponsible, contributing to the failure of imagination that is occurring today in our understanding of, and response to, climate change.

“Either we act with unprecedented speed,” Spratt and Dunlop conclude, “or we face a bleak future.”