Chris Hedges's Blog, page 521

Billionaires in Space: Escapist Fantasies in the ‘Age of the Refugee’

“But look here, doctor,” muses President Merkin Muffley as Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” approaches its hilarious, apocalyptic end. “Wouldn’t this nucleus of survivors be so grief-stricken and anguished that they’d, well, envy the dead and not want to go on living?” The eponymous Dr. Strangelove has just suggested a plan through which a small group of humans could survive a Soviet “doomsday machine” in “some of our deeper mine shafts.”

The doctor reassures him: “When they go down into the mine, everyone would still be alive. There would be no shocking memories, and the prevailing emotion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind, combined with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead!” (He then, of course, gives an involuntary, if enthusiastic, Nazi salute.) He has already assured the assembled crew of national security bigwigs that our “top government and military men” would have to be included to “impart the required principles of leadership and tradition,” and he goes on to reassure Gen. Buck Turgidson, played by the inimitable George C. Scott, that this multigenerational survival plan would indeed require “the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship”—at least “as far as men were concerned.”

Vulgar eschatology is always a survivalist fantasy. The cumulus repose of raptured souls is nowhere near as interesting as the guerrilla “Tribulation Force” who will be, in the immortal words of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, “Left Behind.” Who, after all, is interested in the dull, leveling equality of God’s kingdom come, the want-less communism of a messianic age, when there are bunkers to defend against the starving hordes, zombie heads to be detached from their bodies and, of course, plenty of prestige-TV tits and ass?

Which brings us to the billionaires.

There is a certain apocalypticism inherent in the hoarding of extreme wealth. After a certain number of millions of dollars, every additional increment becomes little more than a hedge against the possibility of disaster. Our current richest man, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, obliquely admitted as much in a recent interview in which he talked about using his “financial lottery winnings”—credit where due, Bezos is the rare uber-capitalist who is willing to acknowledge sheer luck of the draw—to fund the exploration and colonization of space. “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel.”

We must do so to escape “civilizational stasis,” by which Bezos means a sort of Malthusian energy dilemma: the whole surface of the earth covered in solar panels and still inadequate for future energy demands of the teeming masses in a century or two.

Bezos’ expressed vision is more beautiful. Our world will be “zoned residential and light industry,” the parkland Broadacre City of Frank Lloyd Wright’s imagining, with silent, autonomous, electric cars zipping us from place to leafy place.

In space, meanwhile, there could be trillions of us, including “a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts.” What, precisely, these billions upon billions (less approximately 2,000 very smart, very musical people) will be doing, or how they will afford the berth on the rocket ship on their fulfillment-center slave wage, is unclear, but, as the automated airship blares in “Blade Runner,” “A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies! The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!” We already have student loans in this world. Perhaps we can revive the agreements for the new ones.

Though clothed in the language of technological utopianism, Bezos’ fantasy is an extrapolation of environmental catastrophe. As always, this is imagined as a problem fundamentally of the masses, not the masters—the barbarians at the gates, not the feckless and debauched senatorial orders running Rome into the ground. Well, what are the energy demands of a human, or a city of them, compared with Amazon’s server farms? What is Jeff Bezos’ fortune if not the burning of a zillion calories of primeval carbon to power, transaction by transaction, a mechanized, mercantile empire?

Writer and professor Douglas Rushkoff recently published an amusing but terrifying account of a sort of colloquium he conducted with a small gaggle of hedge-fund capos. Thinking he’d been hired “to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers,” he jets off to one of the private-resort enclaves that the very rich have built to avoid the miasmic lower orders. There he finds that his audience is, in fact, just five extremely wealthy men, and for “half [his] annual professor’s salary ,” he entertains their questions about survival after The Event. “That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.”

Their transhumanist post-apocalypse is almost charming in its brutal mundanity: walled compounds and armed guards. They debate whether a more effective mechanism for controlling their personal militias would be food rationing or explosive discipline collars. Rushkoff does not mention any consideration of where the food to be rationed would come from. This may be an oversight in the telling of the tale, but I like to imagine they picture a fortified Whole Foods in the middle of this blasted landscape, from which they might from time to time restock their safes. When Rushkoff suggests—I like to imagine a Spock-like arched eyebrow—that they might consider starting now by cultivating close, equitable relationships with their retainers (i.e., that they might simply treat their servants decently), they brush him off as hopelessly naive.

These fantasies of escape are an interesting piece within the dominant political strain of neoliberalism over the last 50 years or so, which is at its heart an unshakable commitment to the belief that things cannot ever get better, at least for most of us. It is, in effect, the belief that debts in the present foreclose the possibility of a future, at least as far as the bulk of the species is concerned. It can conjure up individual trillionaires within our lifetimes, but it can’t believe that for the development costs of a single line of fighter jet that can’t take off in the rain, we could send everyone to college for free. We can have employment, or we can do something around the margins of climate change, but not both. Collective action is impossible, and popular politics are deeply suspect.

But the billionaires’ dream does infect the slightly less fabulously wealthy, the mere millionaires who make our laws, run the day-to-day of our businesses, operate our insurance firms, believe they got it all through the sweat of their brows. They think Jeff Bezos is going to take them along.

In the third season of Noah Hawley’s “Fargo”—a clever homage that we might, in this Disney-dominated era, say exists in the same “cinematic universe” as the Coen brothers’ original film—a rich but hapless parking-lot magnate played by Ewan McGregor is drawn into an elaborate corporate credit fraud by a mysterious villain played with unctuous, disheveled malice by David Thewlis. At first resistant to the funny business, McGregor’s Emmit Stussy finds himself slowly drawn in as Thewlis’ Luciferian pitchman paints a dire picture. “We live in the age of the refugee, Mr. Stussy,” he intones. He warns of “pitchforked peasants” who will soon descend when they realize that “you’ve got all their money.” And he warns that Stussy is not really rich. Rich, he explains, “is a fleet of private planes.” It is a “bunker in Wyoming and one in Gstaad.” He cajoles the dumb Stussy into making him a partner, and when he congratulates Stussy and himself on being in business together, Stussy asks, almost plaintively, what business is that?

“The billionaire business,” Thewlis replies, and the bare hint of a grin teases McGregor’s face. Only too late does he realize that he is not a partner at all. He’s something halfway between livestock and well-trained serf.

I do not think Jeff Bezos is deliberately villainous in the manner of a TV bad guy. That’s one of the problems with real life: A lot of our enemies believe in LEED-certified buildings and gay marriage. But he does view humanity, especially human labor, as a resource to be extracted and burned, never mind the global consequences.

The market is like the climate, and whether or not humans bear some ultimate responsibility, it operates inexorably, obeying only natural law, and there is bound to be a scramble for the high ground as the waters rise.

Bezos needs to mine just enough of the market to build himself his rocket ship, or at least his bunkers. Several thousand transnational billionaire brothers (the sisters are rare) share this view. They have won the lottery, and they intend to abscond with their winnings.

They will not make it into space, but their fleets of private jets and their walled, fortified compounds already exist.

To update Rosa Luxemburg: “Society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into feudalism.”

Which would you prefer?

Israel Shoots Down Syrian Jet; Syrian Forces Reach Golan

BEIRUT — Israel shot down a Syrian fighter jet it said had breached its airspace on Tuesday while advancing Syrian government forces retaking territory from rebels reached the Golan Heights frontier for the first time in seven years.

The Israeli military said it monitored the advance of the Syrian Sukhoi fighter jet and shot it down with a pair of Patriot missiles after it penetrated Israeli airspace by about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles).

Syria’s military, however, said one of its jets was targeted by Israel over Syrian territory as it flew sorties against Islamic State militants.

Syrian forces have been battling rebels and IS militants at the frontier with Israel for weeks in a campaign to restore President Bashar Assad’s rule over southwestern Syria.

On Tuesday, government forces reached the border fence where a U.N. peacekeeping force is deployed at the edge of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. It was the first time Syrian government had managed to retake the area since 2011, when an uprising swept through Syria against Assad.

Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967. The U.N. deployed peacekeepers between the two sides in 1974.

Israel’s military has been on “elevated alert” along the frontier because of activity on the Syrian side of the fence, said military spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus. Israel has warned Syria through various channels not to violate the 1974 agreement that established the demilitarized zone, he added.

Minutes before the reported downing of the jet, Syria’s state-run Al-Ikhbariya TV was broadcasting footage from the fence demarcating the U.N. buffer zone between Syrian and Israeli forces in the Golan Heights. A U.N. observer post could be seen just on the other side of the fence.

The camera showed an Israeli post 400 meters (440 yards) away.

Israel’s military said the Syrian jet took off from the T4 air base, which Israel is believed to have attacked earlier this year.

The plane flew toward Israel at “relatively high speed” before breaching the country’s airspace, said Conricus. He said it was unknown if the plane deliberately crossed into Israel.

The plane crashed in the southern part of the Syrian Golan Heights, he said. Israel had no reports on the condition of the pilot.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said one pilot was killed and that the condition of the other was unknown.

Syrian rebels surrendered their last pockets in the southwestern Quneitra and Daraa provinces last week, leading thousands of opposition fighters, their families and other civilians to evacuate to the rebel-held province of Idlib in northern Syria.

According to the Observatory, some 9,500 people have been bused from southwest Syria to Idlib. It is unlikely they will be able to return to their homes in the near-term. The U.N. has condemned such arrangements as forced displacement, a war crime.

Over the weekend, rescuers from the Syrian Civil Defense — also known as White Helmets — and their family members were evacuated through Israel to Jordan, after they were promised asylum in Canada and European nations.

The White Helmets have been a target of the Syrian government, which accuses them of staging poison gas attacks and participating in terrorism, claims which have not been proven.

Government forces are now concentrating their fire on one remaining enclave not yet in their hands — a sliver of land along the Golan Heights frontier that is held by the militants linked to the Islamic State group.

___

Associated Press writer Tia Goldenberg in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

N. Korea Dismantling Parts of Launch Site, Researchers Say

SEOUL, South Korea — A U.S. research group says North Korea has started dismantling key facilities at its main satellite launch site in what appears to be a step toward fulfilling a commitment made by leader Kim Jong Un at his summit with President Donald Trump in June.

An official from South Korea’s presidential office on Tuesday said Seoul has also been detecting dismantlement activities at North Korea’s Sohae launch site but did not specify what the North was supposedly taking apart.

While the official said such moves could have a “positive effect” on the North’s denuclearization, analysts say such steps wouldn’t reduce North Korea’s military capabilities unless the country dismantles the whole site.

The North Korea-focused 38 North website said commercial satellite images between July 20 and 22 indicate the North began dismantling key facilities at the site. The facilities being razed or disassembled include a rocket engine test stand used to develop liquid-fuel engines for ballistic missiles and space-launch vehicles and a rail-mounted processing building where space launch vehicles were assembled before being moved to the launch pad, according to the report.

“Since these facilities are believed to have played an important role in the development of technologies for the North’s intercontinental ballistic missile program, these efforts represent a significant confidence building measure on the part of North Korea,” analyst Joseph Bermudez wrote in the report.

Lee Choon Geun, a missile expert at South Korea’s Science and Technology Policy Institute, said the North is giving up little in dismantling the rocket engine test site when it seems clear the country is satisfied with the current design of long-range weapons. However, Lee said that the supposed move to dismantle the rail-mounted processing building was more notable as it potentially indicated to broader dismantlement activities at the site.

“If North Korea goes further and dismantle the entire Sohae site, that would meaningfully reduce the country’s long-range missile capability by eliminating a facility where it could fire multiple ICBMs in succession,” Lee said. “The North can also fire ICBMs from transporter erector launchers, but their technology with these vehicles isn’t stable.”

After his summit with Kim in Singapore on June 12, Trump said he was told by Kim that the North was “already destroying a major missile engine testing site” without identifying which site. The leaders concluded their summit by declaring their vague aspirational goal of moving toward a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula, but there’s lingering doubts on whether Kim would ever agree to fully give up the nuclear weapons he may see as a stronger guarantee of his survival that whatever security assurances the United States can provide.

Kim in late 2017 declared his nuclear weapons and missile program was complete, following a torrent of nuclear and missile tests that include the detonation of a purported thermonuclear warhead and flight tests of three developmental ICBMs potentially capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. North Korea in May invited foreign media to observe a destruction of tunnels at its nuclear testing ground, weeks after Kim declared the site’s mission as finished. However, the North did not open the process to outside experts capable of validating what had been destroyed.

The South Korean presidential official, who didn’t want to be named, citing office rules, said the supposed dismantlement activities shows the North is moving gradually.

“We need further analysis to figure out why the North didn’t turn the dismantlement activities into an event and whether the country is trying to control the speed of the process to maintain a pace it wants,” he said.

Vote in the Midterms—or Be Part of the Problem

Last week it was Russia, Russia, Russia. This week began with a bombastic, all-caps screed about Iran—and, of course, more wailing about the purported “Mueller Witch Hunt.” In between was a stray tweet about football and the national anthem, just to stir the racial pot. President Trump is wagging the dog so hard, I fear he will injure himself.

Through it all, we must keep our eyes on the prize. There is just one realistic way to constrain this lunatic administration and hold it accountable: Vote in November to snatch control of Congress away from the quisling Republicans and hand it to the Democrats.

If I sound like a broken record on this subject, too bad. You can shut me up by generating a gigantic midterm turnout and flipping at least the House. Otherwise, prepare to be reminded, repeatedly and perhaps obnoxiously, that I told you so.

You have no idea when special counsel Robert Mueller is going to finish his investigation, and neither do I. But we all should know by now that when Trump boasted during the campaign about being able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still not lose support, he must have been talking about the GOP majorities in Congress.

We know the drill. Trump says or does something so far beyond the pale that any other president would have been investigated, censured or even impeached. A few Republican members of Congress go public with measured words of criticism; many more acknowledge privately that the president is dangerously out of control. Trump changes the subject via Twitter, and the complaints abruptly stop. Nothing happens. Nothing at all.

It is possible that Mueller will reveal something so shocking that even House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will choose country over party. But it is not likely.

In our history, only two presidents have been impeached; neither was convicted and removed from office. Only one president has resigned before the end of his term. Wildly improbable things do sometimes happen—Trump becoming president, for one—but the odds are that we will have to endure this madness until January 2021.

Presciently, the framers of the Constitution gave Congress the power to check an erratic or power-mad president. But Congress has to be willing to use that power, and Republicans seem afraid to do so. We can only hope that Democrats are up to the task.

We also must hope that the Democratic Party is able to play a winning hand between now and November. This is not a trivial question.

Democrats occupy the mayor’s offices in two-thirds of the nation’s 50 biggest cities, but that is the zenith of their power. Republicans live in the governor’s mansions in two-thirds of the states and enjoy a similar dominance in control of state legislatures. On the federal level, the GOP has a large—but not unassailable—majority in the House and a narrow two-vote edge in the Senate.

Republicans have been shameless in perpetuating their hegemony through gerrymandering and voter suppression, but Democrats can systematically level the playing field—once they achieve power. To do so, they need to win elections.

And to win elections, they need new faces, new ideas and a new attitude. Fortunately, all three are present—and must not be quashed.

Democrats should keep in mind the classic definition of insanity: doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. This is an emergency, and while the party should be true to its values, it can ill afford litmus tests on the left or the right.

If a candidate in, say, West Virginia or Montana is not as fervently pro-choice as the party’s mainstream, or does not make gun control a marquee issue, then so be it. If a candidate in an immigrant-rich district in California, Texas, Florida or New York favors reorganizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement in light of its excesses, that’s fine as well.

There will be plenty of time to worry about the 2020 presidential election. Right now, the Democratic Party’s exclusive focus should be on registering new voters and ensuring that constituencies with a habit of voting only in presidential years—especially minorities and young people—come out in November.

Are you registered? Do you not just plan to vote but swear you will vote? Do you know where your polling place is? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you are not part of the solution. You’re part of the problem.

Net Neutrality Defenders Ramp Up Pressure on House Lawmakers

Turning up the heat on representatives who have yet to indicate their support for a joint resolution to restore open internet protections repealed by Trump’s FCC, net neutrality advocates on Monday launched a new tool to make sure the lawmakers know “the internet is keeping score.”

The new “scorecard” lets constituents know not only whether their representative backs a petition to force a vote on a measure that would override the FCC’s repeal, but also how much in campaign contributions they have received from big internet service providers (ISPs)  and the number of small businesses in the district that have signed an open letter in support of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution. It also features a tool to quickly contact representatives.

“Some elected officials are still under the woefully incorrect impression that they can hide from their constituents when it comes to net neutrality, or attempt to fool them by supporting symbolic legislation instead of the CRA,” said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future.

Fight for the Future is part of the trio, along with Demand Progress and Free Press Action Fund, that makes up the tenacious BattleForTheNet.com team, which plans on ramping up its efforts to restore net neutrality through Congress’s August recess.

The groups scored a victory in May after the Senate passed Sen. Ed Markey’s resolution to restore net neutrality. And then the focus centered on the House, where Republican Speaker Paul Ryan’s refusal to bring the resolution to the floor has necessitated a petition to force a vote. A positive sign came just last week, however, when the first House Republican, Rep. Mike Coffman of Colorado, added his name to the petition.

Now, Battle for the Net says, “victory [is] increasingly within reach.”

According to its tally, there are now 177 votes in support of net neutrality in the House, making it 41 shy of the 218 votes needed to win in the chamber.  If it passes the House, it then heads to President Donald Trump’s desk.

As Timothy Karr, senior director of strategy for Free Press, recently wrote, Republicans should get behind the measure—”that is, if they care at all about their constituents’ wishes.” He noted:

Poll after poll after poll after poll shows large majorities of Republican voters in opposition to the FCC’s repeal. Any Republican seeking re-election in the fall can’t run from this polling data or from the people back home who demand real net neutrality.

“Any lawmaker who sides with the big ISPs that line their pockets with campaign contributions over the basic internet freedom of their constituents will learn the hard way,” Greer added. “The math isn’t complicated: voters overwhelmingly support net neutrality. We’re going to make sure that every single voter knows if their representative sold them out. There’s nowhere to hide.”

Media Conglomerate Tronc Slashes Staff of New York Daily News

“Bear with us, today will be difficult.” This is how Grant Whitmore, general manager for media conglomerate Tronc, the parent company of the New York Daily News, began a morning newsroom meeting, HuffPost reported Monday. The very brief meeting was a prelude to an emailed announcement by Tronc that the paper is laying off approximately 50 percent of its newsroom staff.

“We are fundamentally restructuring the Daily News,” said the email, which, according to HuffPost, was unsigned. It continued, “[W]e are reducing today the size of the editorial team by approximately 50 percent and re-focusing much of our talent on breaking news — especially in areas of crime, civil justice and public responsibility.”

It was a harsh blow for a staff that had already shrunk to 85 in November 2017, a result of five rounds of previous cuts by Tronc, according to the New York Post.

It was not the first time Tronc, which bought the Daily News in 2017, has decimated the staff of local newspapers. “Over the past several years,” The Daily Beast reports, “Tronc has made sweeping cuts at some of the country’s most famous newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, among others.”

Rumors of the layoffs had been circulating for weeks. Study Hall, a newsletter and listserv for journalists, reported Thursday that up to 70 percent of the newsroom staffers could lose their jobs, and that Editor in Chief Jim Rich was planning to resign in protest. He left Monday, as did Managing Editor Kristen Lee.

While Monday’s cuts fell short of 70 percent, the impact was nonetheless devastating.

“Make no mistake,” a Daily News staff member told The Daily Beast, “this is the death of local journalism in this city.” Another employee continued, “Those who are still there are demoralized and have no desire to be part of what’s left.”

While local newspapers around the country have been subject to similar deep cuts, New York has been particularly hard hit in the last two years.

As Deadline reported in 2016, The New York Times “ended its coverage of restaurants, art galleries, theaters and other commercial and nonprofit businesses in the tri-state region, laying off dozens of longtime contributors and prompting protests from many of the institutions that will be affected.”

The Daily Beast analyzed the Times’ decline in local coverage, reporting that a “check of coverage for the week starting on the last Sunday of January finds that the paper ran 48 metro stories. This is less than half of the [equivalent] tally for 2009 (102) and less than a third of the 153 stories in the same period in 2001 (a figure that doesn’t include metro stories in the additional Sunday suburban sections published then).”

In 2016, The Wall Street Journal also laid off staff of its former New York local news section amid a restructuring and deeper newsroom cuts. In the fall of 2017, billionaire Joe Ricketts shut down Gothamist and DNAinfo New York, two websites with an entirely local New York City focus (not to mention closing the national network of -ist and DNAinfo sites) when employees tried to unionize.

According to HuffPost, laid-off Daily News staff members “were told that they’d be paid for 90 days” and “be eligible for transitional benefits after that.” An employee called it “a pretty decent package,” though certainly no replacement for a full-time job, and, for readers, no replacement for dedicated, local coverage.

Georgia Lawmaker Uses Racial Slur, Drops Pants in TV Series

ATLANTA—A Georgia lawmaker is the latest public figure caught with his pants down on provocateur Sacha Baron Cohen’s new cable TV series, this time literally, as the state legislator exposes his bottom, speaks with a mock Asian accent and yells a racial slur all in the name of fighting terrorism.

In Sunday night’s broadcast of Cohen’s Showtime series “Who Is America?” Cohen poses as an Israeli military expert who persuades Republican Rep. Jason Spencer to take part in several outlandish exercises. The lawmaker is told they’re making a counterterrorism video.

Spencer repeatedly shouts a racial slur for black people after Cohen tells him the tactic is useful for drawing bystanders’ attention to an unfolding attack.

He also drops his pants, then his underwear, before backing his exposed rear end toward Cohen while shouting “USA!” and “America!” Cohen told Spencer the move would incite fear in homophobic jihadists. The segment also shows Spencer speaking with a mock Asian accent while pretending to use a selfie-stick to surreptitiously insert a camera phone under a Muslim woman’s burqa.

Spencer’s on-camera conduct horrified fellow Republicans in Georgia. State House Speaker David Ralston said Spencer “disgraced himself and should resign immediately,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

GOP Gov. Nathan Deal said in a tweet: “There is no excuse for this type of behavior, ever, and I am saddened and disgusted by it.”

Regardless, there won’t be any reckoning for Spencer at the ballot box this year. A Republican challenger already defeated the lawmaker in Georgia’s May 22 primary.

The Georgia legislator has been accused in the past of making offensive statements and proposals. In 2016, Spencer sought to update a 1951 state law that outlawed Ku Klux Klan members from wearing hoods at public rallies. Civil rights and Muslim advocacy groups called Spencer’s bill a veiled attempt to ban Muslim women from wearing religious headgear that covers their faces in public. He quickly dropped the proposal.

Spencer isn’t the first public figure to be fooled by Cohen in his Showtime series. Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Arizona sheriff and U.S. Senate candidate Joe Arpaio have also been duped.

In a statement Monday, Spencer apologized for the “ridiculously ugly episode,” but he refused to step down from office. He also said he has received death threats in the past and thought the techniques in the Showtime segment would prevent “what I believed was an inevitable attack.”

The Atlanta newspaper reported Spencer had earlier threatened legal action to prevent the network from airing footage of him.

The Islamic Council on American-Islamic Relations also called for Spencer’s resignation.

“The ignorance and malice behind Islamophobia has led Mr. Spencer to not only pursue bad policy, but engage in humiliating and hateful behavior unbecoming of anyone — especially a state legislator,” said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, director of the group’s Georgia chapter.

Spencer faced calls for his resignation last year after he warned a black former state legislator that she won’t be “met with torches but something a lot more definitive” if she continued to call for the removal of Confederate statues in southern Georgia.

Activist to Star as TV’s First Transgender Superhero

BURBANK, Calif. — A transgender activist who won a discrimination lawsuit after her school refused to let her use the girls’ bathroom will be TV’s first transgender superhero.

Nicole Maines will star in The CW/Warner Bros.’ “Supergirl” as Nia Nal, aka Dreamer. Producers describe her character as a “soulful young transgender woman with a fierce drive to protect others.”

Maines gained national attention for her battle against her Orono, Maine, school district over her right to use the girls’ bathroom.

Maine’s highest court ruled in 2014 that school officials violated state anti-discrimination law when they required her to use a staff restroom.

It was the first time a state high court concluded that a transgender person should use the bathroom of the gender with which they identify.

Will 2018 Be the Year Americans Finally Face Up to Climate Change?

While in many parts of the world climate change is seen as scientific fact backed by 90 percent to 100 percent of experts, in the United States it is a fraught political issue that helps to wedge the partisan divide that these days feels like it could swallow the nation whole. Just look at the way Scott Pruitt, the disgraced former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, approached the phenomenon—like something to be argued in binary terms in a “red team, blue team” debate.

But for those of us alive in the year 2018, it hardly feels debatable climate change is real and it is having a very real impact on our everyday lives. From the food we eat to the air we breathe, rising global temperatures are affecting seemingly everything. Staple foods such as rice are becoming less nutritious. Wine, coffee and chocolate producers are struggling to deal with morphing conditions. Seasons as we once knew them are shifting. Internet infrastructure in the U.S. could soon be flooded. Flora and fauna alike are suffering changes that threaten their very survival. And the list goes on and on.

With the exception of the Pentagon, which seems to understand that global warming is a serious national security threat, the Trump government goes beyond just ignoring the issue. It actively denies scientific facts and erases mentions of climate change from government websites as it slashes funds for renewable energy and tries to revive the fossil fuel industry (and more importantly, their CEOs’ and investors’ profits). Meanwhile, there are already climate refugees in the U.S., not to mention numerous political crises stemming from environmental problems causing human displacement across the globe.

For a while now, many Americans appeared unfazed or oblivious to the grave threat that climate change poses to the planet and everything on it. Even last year’s catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, mudslides and record cold winters did little to shift the national consciousness, perhaps in large part because of mass media’s dearth of climate reporting.

However, two recently released studies paint a new, somewhat hopeful picture of Americans’ thoughts on climate change. One survey, carried out during a heat wave that hasn’t let up, reveals an evolution in thinking not just on the existence of global warming, but on the factors that caused it, according to The Guardian.

A long-running survey of American attitudes to climate change has found that 73% of people now think there is solid evidence of global warming. A further 60% believe that this warming is due, at least in some part, to human influences.

Both of these findings are record highs in a twice-yearly survey that has been conducted by the University of Michigan and Muhlenberg College since 2008. The latest poll was conducted during May, which was hotter than any May recorded in the contiguous US in 124 years of record keeping, according to the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, eclipsing the 1930s during the Dust Bowl era.

Another study looked into the politics behind Americans’ thinking on the subject and found some heartening results, according to Futurity.

Researchers surveyed 2,000 adults and discovered that across party lines, there is general agreement that climate change is real, that it is caused by human activity, and that something should be done to mitigate it.

The study also reveals that people are more likely to support the same climate policy proposal when they think that their own political party supports it. Further, both Democrats and Republicans overestimate how much their peers oppose the ideas of the other party.

“Democratic and Republican citizens alike evaluate a carbon tax or cap and trade policy based on who proposed it—above and beyond their thoughts on the details of the policy, or on whether it is consistent with their beliefs about the importance of climate change,” says David Sherman, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and senior author of the paper, which appears in Perspectives on Psychological Science.

The change of heart is coming none too soon. Countless studies show that if we’re going to act on climate change, we need to do so with expediency before the effects become permanent and irreversible. If the heat’s not keeping you up at night, the thought of an environmental point of no return absolutely should.

Thankfully, the kids already get it: Just look at Saturday’s youth-led climate march, in which hundreds of young Americans in Washington, D.C.,  and elsewhere protested government inaction on one of the most pressing issues of our time. Now if only the grown-ups can fully get past their stubborn politics to listen, learn and, most importantly, act like all our lives depend on it.

Donald Trump’s Kamikaze Attack on Globalism

As presidencies approach their midpoints, pundits begin the inevitable search for that elusive creature: the doctrine. It’s often a quixotic quest, since presidents rarely boil down their foreign-policy visions — if they even have them — to some pithy essence. Then there’s Donald Trump.

Conjuring up the current president’s foreign-policy doctrine is like arguing that the Teletubbies have a theology. After all, this president approaches global affairs the way a teenager with attention-deficit disorder might tackle War and Peace. To call Trump scattershot in his approach would be generous. He doesn’t even have sufficient command of the relevant vocabulary to formulate a doctrine. His linguistic universe, with its “covfefe,” big-league malapropisms, and contradictory pronouncements, often seems to come straight out of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “Jabberwocky.”

Yet punditry abhors a vacuum, so the search for some sort of policy coherence never ends. Many observers have suggested that the Trump doctrine, stripped to its musculature, is simply a reassertion of American power in the crudest form. In The Atlantic, for instance, Jeffrey Goldberg canvassed Trump administration officials for their take on the president’s doctrine and concluded that the most succinct formulation for it was: “We’re America, bitch.” Another possibility: forget the doctrine; Trump is merely asserting his own authority in an increasingly empowered executive branch to do whatever comes into his head. In other words, we’re not talking unilateralism but unileaderism.

A third possibility: that Trump is defining himself and his policies entirely in opposition to his predecessor. The Obama Doctrine, according to administration insiders, boiled down to don’t do stupid shit. In his eagerness to reverse everything his predecessor ever did, Trump seems to have turned his doctrine inside out as well. His recent trip to Europe, with its falsehoods and gratuitous insults, not to speak of the near sundering of transatlantic relations, suggests that the administration continues to come up with new and creative ways of doing stupid shit on a daily basis.

There’s truth in all of this, but something’s still missing.

Although Trump’s approach to global affairs seems to have no particular rhyme or reason, it does have a certain rhythm. It has an insistent, urgent beat, something like the notorious two-note theme of the movie Jaws. The president not only wants you to believe that the world is a dangerous place, but that those dangers are approaching at a terrifying pace. Only Trump, he would have you believe, can save you from those sharp teeth inches from your throat.

Let’s call this approach Trump’s Flight 93 doctrine, after an infamous article, “The Flight 93 Election,” published in September 2016 in the far-right Claremont Review. According to its pseudonymous author, later revealed to be former George W. Bush administration staffer Michael Anton, liberals like Hillary Clinton were piloting America into catastrophe, aided, electorally, by “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty.” Only Donald Trump and his conservative backers — like the heroes who charged the cockpit of hijacked United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001 — could avert such a tragedy. “A Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian roulette with a semi-auto,” Anton wrote. “With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.”

The analogy is, unfortunately, all too apt. Flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, killing all aboard. It was heroism, yes, but at a very steep price. And playing Russian roulette with any kind of weapon rarely ends well.

No surprise, then, that, as the president spins the cylinder of the gun pressed to all our heads, the Trump Doctrine of non-stop risk-taking has turned out to be the most self-defeating approach ever adopted by a modern American president. In fact, it may turn out to be the last doctrine that the White House ever has the luxury to formulate.

The Uses of Doctrine

Doctrines are inherently conservative. Among the many ways the U.S. could deploy its forces and resources overseas, they spell out the one that is best believed to preserve the status quo of American power and at the same time advance a select number of national interests.

Before the first identifiable presidential doctrine — the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 — George Washington warned of forming anything but impermanent alliances with foreign powers. In his farewell address as president, he lauded the “detached and distant situation” that the United States found itself in and cautioned that “foreign influence” could wreak havoc upon the republic. His successor, Thomas Jefferson, spoke similarly against the dangers of “entangling alliances.”

Those warnings, though falling short of doctrinal, were influential in the early republic. In 1821, four years before he became president, John Quincy Adams famously spoke of the dangers of Americans heading overseas “in search of monsters.” The country’s glory, he insisted, “is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace.”

Stirring words, but it was not to be. A mere two years later, President James Monroe made the first effort to link U.S. national interests to a project outside its borders. Latin America, Monroe said in 1823, was effectively part of a U.S. sphere of influence. It was still a far cry from the kinds of imperial intervention that would come in the era of Theodore Roosevelt, more than 80 years later. Monroe, however, did cast aside the warnings of his predecessors and begin a flirtation with a new kind of imperial dominion.

In the twentieth century, such presidential doctrines evolved far beyond simply protecting spheres of influence. They came instead to justify U.S. military intervention on a global scale, while attempting to discriminate between areas worth the risk of war and those beneath U.S. concern. The Truman Doctrine rationalized U.S. efforts to contain the spread of Communism, while spreading the U.S. military and the CIA far and wide. In the midst of the disastrous Vietnam War, the Nixon Doctrine tried to pass on much of global enforcement there and elsewhere to subservient allies. The Carter Doctrine articulated the priority of protecting U.S. access to oil resources in the Middle East, especially the Persian Gulf. The Reagan Doctrine put forward a particularly aggressive policy of actually rolling back Communism — and recovering from a disastrous defeat in Vietnam — while George W. Bush applied Reagan’s framework to a new enterprise, the Global War on Terror.

All of these doctrines were designed to preserve and expand Washington’s preeminent imperial power and authority in the world, while justifying to an American public the increasingly enormous sums ploughed into the military budget. They also signaled to allies what to expect from the United States in terms of its big-picture allocation of resources and attention.

Barack Obama, with his preference for addressing issues on a case-by-case basis, recoiled from any attempt to develop a doctrine. If anything, he wanted to repudiate the doctrinal mistakes of the recent past: America’s fixation on the Middle East, on a borderless global war on terror, and on self-defeating attempts to isolate Cuba and Iran. There was no single theme that brought together all of Obama’s initiatives, though he did put a lot of chips into a so-called Pacific pivot, a shift in military and diplomatic focus from the Middle East to Asia (which never quite came about).

In the end, Obama remained imprisoned in the failed initiatives of the past, including an unending war in Afghanistan and Bush’s Global War on Terror, even as he tried to address new and amorphous threats like climate change. Still, he showed a sincere belief in diplomacy and the synergy of countries working together to solve global problems.

Not so his successor.

Trump Rushes the Cockpit

For the Pentagon, a notoriously risk-averse institution, doctrines are a kind of security blanket. They reassure the generals that civilian leaders will not send U.S. soldiers into harm’s way everywhere at once. Even during the Bush era, with global counterterrorism the primary focus of the moment, the military felt reasonably certain that the administration wouldn’t also pick fights with Russia and China or send troops into Latin America.

Donald Trump doesn’t look at the world that way. He seems to have no ability to prioritize among various real and imagined threats to U.S. national interests because he doesn’t think in any structured way about the nature of such problems. He seems to believe that the country has been, or will soon be, hijacked and so he spots potential hijackers everywhere. Because of the urgency of the situation, he’s always in red-alert mode.

For Trump, immigrants are a clear-and-present danger and so he has repeatedly pushed for extreme measures to keep them out of the United States: a wall, a travel ban, a zero-tolerance family-separation policy. For Republican Party supporters of the president, immigration may well represent an electoral challenge, the means by which the Democratic Party can eventually secure a lock on the presidency. But for Trump, the threat transcends the political. It’s a matter of blood and soil, the touchstones of extreme nationalism. Trump is eager to spend billions of dollars and undermine the American legal system in pursue of his policy of ethnic cleansing.

The global economy is another arena where he has quickly shifted to an emergency footing and taken out after everyone in sight, subjecting allies and adversaries alike to mounting tariffs. Canada, Europe, Japan: they’re all shocked to find his knife in their backs. But the trade war with China promises to be particularly costly. After an opening bid, a 25% tariff on $34 billion in Chinese imports, which generated a response in kind from Beijing, Trump promptly upped the ante. He’s now planning to target $200 billion in Chinese goods. China, however, has a variety of ways to retaliate, including a sell-off of the vast hoard of U.S. Treasury bonds it holds and a potential devaluation of its own currency to make its exports more competitive globally. And keep in mind that a U.S.-China trade war involving the globe’s two largest economies will prove to be anything but a bilateral problem. If this conflict moves to DEFCON 1, the damage will spread across all borders.

After gesturing in the direction of a more prudent, “isolationist,” “America First” national security policy during his election campaign, especially when it came to the country’s never-ending war on terror, Trump has proved to be an indiscriminately bellicose president. He has twice bombed Syrian government targets, issued a “gloves off” directive to his generals in the war in Afghanistan, and expanded the use of drones in the “war on terror.” He made an implicit threat to attack North Korea with nuclear weapons and evidently seriously considered an invasion of Venezuela. And don’t even start on Iran. His approach to war has nothing to do with doctrine. It’s all about going after the “bad hombres.” Its focus seems more to be on who insulted the president most recently rather than any assessment of genuine risk.

Trump has identified a number of hijackers — immigrants, trading partners, the Islamic State, Iran — who have used asymmetrical power to challenge the authority of the United States. But here’s what’s genuinely scary: from his actions, it’s clear that he believes it’s not just random outsiders who are trying to bring down the country. To stay with the Flight 93 image, for Trump it’s the entire global aviation system that’s conspiring against him and his cohort.

All presidential doctrines of the modern era have been predicated on a global international system — first the “Western world” and now the international community — within which the United States was to operate as the first among equals. The Flight 93 Doctrine overturns all such other doctrines. President Trump, personally and with malice, is now taking aim at the entire international architecture that liberals and conservatives helped build to serve U.S. interests. It’s as if the president and his acolytes have commandeered that hijacked plane not to bring them safely back to the airport, but to fly them into buildings in Brussels, The Hague, and Geneva, among other places.

Michael Anton was wrong. The Trump campaign wasn’t about saving America from a suicide mission. It was about launching a kamikaze attack on the heart of globalism.

The Wages of Self-Defeat

Despite George Washington’s warnings, the United States is now so enmeshed in the international system that its prosperitydepends on it. As a result, Trump’s Flight 93 doctrine is a formula for self-defeat.

Take immigrants. Whatever the president may think, the U.S. economy runs on immigrants. Agriculture, construction, and the service sector all rely heavily on recent immigrants, many of them undocumented. Indeed, so vital are they as economic actors that the undocumented annually contribute $11.6 billion in state and local taxes and help keep Social Security afloat even though they have little prospect of ever drawing from the fund themselves. Immigrant workers, both legal and undocumented, make the U.S. economy an estimated 11% larger than it would otherwise be. At a time of record low unemployment and labor shortages — and with a population that is inexorably aging — the United States should for economic reasons alone be encouraging an influx of immigrants, not trying to keep them out.

Trump, meanwhile, is fixated on the “$800 billion a year” that the United States runs as a trade deficit with countries around the world. You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn, given the source, that this number is off, since it doesn’t incorporate the net surplus in “services” — such as tourism, royalties, and banking — the United States has with other countries, which promptly brings that figure down to $500 billion. Far more important, the focus of White House attention shouldn’t be that trade deficit, which doesn’t reflect the overall strength of the U.S. economy, but the enormous and ever-growing debt the United States has, something the Trump tax “reform” plan and his driving desire to continually boost the country’s already bloated military spending only aggravate.

In addition, tariffs are one of the worst ways of addressing trade deficits, since they almost invariably generate retaliatory tariffs so that the “cure” ends up hurting far more than the problem. “The United States will be opening fire on the whole world and also opening fire on itself,” a spokesman for the Chinese Commerce Ministry aptly noted after Trump announced his latest round of tariffs on Chinese goods. Although he may ultimately declare victory in this war, it will certainly be a pyrrhic one.

Trump’s approach to national security is equally self-defeating. It’s bad enough that Washington is applying the screws to allies to up their military spending — and their purchases of U.S. military goods. Worse, he’s not even using the burden-sharing argument to reduce national security expenditures, which have soared above a trillion dollars a year. The wars that Washington is still fighting in Afghanistan and elsewhere across the Greater Middle East and Africa, as well as the wars it’s supporting, as in Yemen, continue to generate instability in that vast region and blowback at home. Trump’s willingness to entertain new wars with Iran, Venezuela, and (if negotiations go south) North Korea is yet more unnerving.

The most devastating impact of the Flight 93 Doctrine, however, will be on the version of the international community Washington had such a hand in creating in its moment of dominance. The organs of the global economy like the World Trade Organization set the rules of the road that have consistently preserved Washington’s privileges, including the dollar’s use as the world’s most common reserve currency. In the form of treaty organizations like NATO as well as bilateral alliances, that community similarly supports American military adventures around so much of the globe by subsidizing its bases, contributing soldiers and weaponry to its military campaigns, and purchasing huge amounts of its military exports. Even as he blathers on about making America number one, Trump is systematically drilling into the very foundations of U.S. power.

There can be no doubt that the rules governing the global economy should be rewritten, given the widening gap between rich and poor. And yes, America should rethink its global military posture and the alliances that support it. Washington needs a radically new foreign policy doctrine that rejects the exceptionalist thinking of the past and offers a more cooperative way for the United States to interact with the world.

But Trump’s Flight 93 Doctrine is the opposite of what’s needed. It will accomplish what Osama bin Laden set out to do so many years ago. By driving a wedge between the United States and its allies, initiating trade wars that will weaken the economy, potentially driving the country toward bankruptcy through insane budget priorities, and destroying the very fabric of the international community, Donald Trump is on a suicide mission. He’s rushing the cockpit, that’s for sure, but don’t expect a soft landing. When it comes, it will be a terrible, heartbreaking crash.