Chris Hedges's Blog, page 54

Another Trump Official Has Been Caught Red-Handed

In 2017, Dow Chemical scored a long-sought-after victory: After a push from the U.S. government, China approved the import of the company’s genetically modified herbicide-resistant corn seeds.

A grateful Dow lobbyist emailed a senior Agriculture Department official whose support had been critical: “Thank you for your efforts in support of U.S. agriculture.”

That official, Rebeckah Adcock, was no stranger to Dow. Before joining the Trump administration, Adcock was the chief lobbyist for the herbicide industry’s trade group, of which Dow was a prominent member.

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Adcock had helped her former industry colleagues in a variety of ways. At Dow’s request, for example, she had arranged a meeting between a top company official and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue about the seed issue.

Before the May 2017 meeting, a Dow lobbyist emailed Adcock: “Do you know who will staff the secretary?”

Adcock wrote back, playfully, “Yes and u do too.”

“Roger,” the lobbyist, Hunt Shipman, replied. Then he joked about the potential conflict of a public servant helping former colleagues: “Maybe you can have a chair on both sides of the table…maybe you can staff them both? :)”

Adcock isn’t the only lobbyist who has made her way to the federal government. Roughly one of every 14 appointments in the Trump administration has been a lobbyist. But previously unreported emails show Adcock repeatedly trading notes with industry players to craft policy.

“It’s highly inappropriate conduct,” said Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel for the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Canter worked as an ethics attorney in the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

The emails were recently obtained by the Sierra Club and the liberal freedom of information group American Oversight. The groups requested the communications in response to a ProPublica and New York Times investigation that revealed the industry ties of Adcock and other administration officials.

All federal employees are subject to standards of conduct that require them to be impartial and to seek authorization before participating in matters where their impartiality is likely to be questioned.

“As a U.S. official, she cannot represent any person’s interest other than the [U.S. government’s] in matters in which U.S. interests are at stake,” Canter said.

Like other officials, Adcock had signed a Trump administration ethics agreement, promising to avoid conflicts of interest. But the agreement gave Adcock wide berth, allowing her to offer help to Dow and other clients of the herbicide and pesticide trade group she worked for.

Adcock did not respond to requests for comment. Dow declined to comment.

The Agriculture Department said in a statement that “Ms. Adcock has acted in accordance with her ethics agreement” because she was employed by the industry’s trade group instead of by Dow directly.

Adcock enjoys a broad mandate at the Agriculture Department. She initially ran a team responsible for rolling back regulations deemed overly burdensome to industry. Since then, she has become a close confidante of Perdue, and she has been involved in everything from coordinating Perdue’s 2018 rural bus tour in support of an expansive new farm bill to reinterpretingthe federal Clean Water Act.

Industry players have asked Adcock to reach down into the bureaucracy on even small issues. After a farmer in rural northern Illinois filled and graded a tributary and cleared four acres of forest along a government-protected creek, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers threatened him with fines of up to $37,500 per day until it was improved to the government’s liking, Don Parrish, a senior director at the American Farm Bureau Federation, contacted Adcock.

Emails show Parrish and Adcock repeatedly emailed about a section of the Clean Water Act that prevents companies from draining or filling wetlands and tributaries that flow into navigable water. Adcock told Parrish she was “getting answers” to his questions. It’s unclear if the farmer had to pay any fines.

The ethics agreement Adcock signed said she would not work on “the impact of crop protection products (including herbicides, fungicides and insecticides) on water.” It did not bar Adcock from working with trade groups like the Farm Bureau on Clean Water Act enforcement.

Dow also came to Adcock with a problem that was affecting its bottom line.

The company had been struggling to get approval from China for three years. “It’s hugely political,” a top company official said on an investor earnings call in 2017. “So I’m spending a thorough amount of my time and my capital to China to get this one over the line.”

It was against that backdrop that, in May 2017, Shipman, the lobbyist for Dow subsidiary Dow AgroSciences, emailed Adcock seeking a meeting between Dow AgroScience’s CEO and the agriculture secretary, Perdue.

In one email exchange, Adcock asked Shipman for background information on trade barriers for seed products and Shipman sent three documents on China’s biotechnology crop approvals.

Two days later, China agreed to take steps to reduce approval times, including a process to let U.S. officials request speedier decisions and a commitment by China to rule on several outstanding biotech issues, including those of Dow AgroSciences.

Shipman was registered as a lobbyist for Dow AgroSciences through his firm, Cornerstone Government Affairs. Lobbying records show he worked on biotechnology approval issues for the company in 2017, with Cornerstone earning $290,000. Shipman did not report he was lobbying the Agriculture Department. Rather, the records indicate he was lobbying the Senate and the House, which carry fewer government lobbying restrictions.

Shipman and Cornerstone did not respond to requests for comment.

One week later, a different lobbyist — Joe Bischoff, who also represented both Dow and CropLife for Cornerstone — repeatedly emailed Adcock about a regulatory issue for a genetically modified petunia flower.

In the correspondence, he shared questions that Dow wanted a House member to ask Perdue in a hearing the next day. The questions largely focused on China’s slow genetically modified crop import approvals. The congressman, Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), chairman of a biotechnology subcommittee, ended up asking Perdue questions that mirrored some of the wording the Dow lobbyist had emailed. Davis’s office declined to comment.

After China approved Dow’s corn seed, the company spun off its agriculture business into a new subsidiary, Corteva. The corn was hailed as “a key growth driver” for Dow’s seed business, for which the company projected sales to increase by $600 million by 2020. A recent internal analysis shows that the new company is now the top corn seed producer in the Asia-Pacific region.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Stephen Miller’s Contempt for Immigrants Laid Bare in New Leaked Emails

The Trump administration is known for its revolving door of staff members. White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, however, has outlasted many of Trump’s most high-profile hires. Along the way, he designed the first travel ban and advocated for family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border, among other anti-immigration policies. In November, leaked emails between Miller and Breitbart, the far-right website, obtained by Hatewatch, a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center, revealed in writing what many observers suspected for years: Miller is also a white nationalist.

On Tuesday, Hatewatch published a new batch of the leaked emails, showing Miller “siding with white nationalists and other extremists on the issue of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, more commonly known as DACA.” He is vehemently opposed to the United States providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who came to America with their parents as young children but who have not yet obtained citizenship.

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Hatewatch obtained 900 emails from Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart editor, who told the SPLC she shared them to expose the “evil” roots of the Trump administration’s policies. They were sent while Miller was an aide to former Sen. and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

In the emails, Miller is obsessed with “the great replacement,” an idea popularized by white nationalist groups claiming that immigrants are going to soon outnumber native-born Americans. Hatewatch points out that the concept has inspired white supremacist terrorism, including an attack on a New Zealand mosque. Miller mentioned the theory in a 2015 email criticizing former Florida Gov. and presidential candidate Jeb Bush: “Jeb has mastered the art of using immigration rhetoric to sound ‘moderate’ while pushing the most extremist policies.” Miller later claimed Bush wanted to use “immigration to replace existing demographics.”

Miller also told McHugh that DACA “provides illegal youth (one of the single strongest pull factors for entering and remaining illegally) with both work permits and generous free cash tax credits.”

He admonished Republicans who expressed sympathy for the plight of DACA recipients, also known as “Dreamers”: “Demanding DREAMers be given citizenship because they ‘know no other home.’ That principle is an endorsement of perpetual birthright citizenship for the foreign-born,” Miller wrote in the email. “Not only will the U.S.-born children of future illegal immigrants and guest workers be made automatic U.S. citizens, but their foreign-born children will too because, as [former Republican House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor said, ‘Our country was founded on the principle.’”

In other emails to Breitbart staff, Miller forwarded an interview with anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly, in which she argued, according to Hatewatch, that “undocumented immigrants should be shipped out on trains to ‘scare out the people who want to undo our country.’”

Miller was also angry when Fox News Chairman Rupert Murdoch tweeted that “Mexican immigrants, as with all immigrants, have much lower crime [rates] than native born,” a view Miller considered insufficiently anti-immigrant. He argued that it is time to “lift the taboo” on expressing his belief that Latino immigrants are less likely to be upwardly mobile than whites.

Immigration reform, especially protections for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children, once had broader support among Republicans.

When the party released its analysis of the 2012 election, the 100-page “autopsy” document warned that “we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.” The report added that “comprehensive immigration reform is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was an original sponsor of the DREAM Act. As McClatchy’s Emma Dumain recalled last year, Graham’s primary opponents in the 2014 election taunted him for it, calling him “Lindsey Grahamnesty.”

At the time, Graham stood firm on his position. Now, Dumain observes, he “is aligning himself with conservative immigration hardliners,” moving closer to Miller’s position.

More than 150 Democratic politicians have demanded that Miller be fired or resign since the initial publication of the Brietbart emails, according to reporting from HuffPost, but Republicans have remained largely silent.

Read the full Hatewatch series here.

For Western Media, the Only Coup in Venezuela Is Against Guaidó

The Washington Post (1/5/20) described Venezuelan lawmakers voting against someone other than Washington’s chosen candidate to head the assembly as “sedition within the opposition.The international corporate media have entered crisis mode following the replacement of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as head of the country’s National Assembly.

In headline after headline, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “Takes Over” (NBC, 1/6/20), “Claims Control of” (New York Times, 1/5/20; CNBC, 1/6/20) or “Seizes” (Reuters, 1/5/20; NPR, 1/6/20) parliament, and “Ousts” Guaidó (Wall Street Journal, 1/5/20) in the process.

The Washington Post (1/5/20) takes this hysteria to another level, hyperbolically proclaiming that “Venezuela’s Last Democratic Institution Falls as Maduro Attempts De Facto Takeover of National Assembly.”

Such headlines obscure the elementary if inconvenient fact that Guaidó failed to secure the necessary votes from his own coalition’s deputies to continue as president of the legislature, leading him to convene a parallel, ad hoc session in the offices of the right-wing El Nacional newspaper.

Serving Up State Propaganda

Corporate journalists repeat unceasingly the US State Department talking point that the January 5 assembly election, which chose Luis Parra as the legislative body’s new president, was “phony” because Guaidó and his loyalists were barred from attending the session, rendering the vote void.

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“Venezuela’s socialist government installed a new head of Congress on Sunday after armed troops blocked opposition legislators from entering parliament,” Reuters (1/5/20) misinformed readers.

As Venezuelanalysis (1/5/20) reported, this narrative was refuted by pro-Guaidó lawmaker William Davila, who, after strolling in to the legislature, told press that with few exceptions, virtually all deputies were permitted to take their seats. Other senior opposition lawmakers, including the outgoing first and second vice presidents of the body, were visibly present inside the parliament.

New York Times

Moreover, video evidence reveals that Guaidó was not himself “prevented,” as the New York Times (1/5/20) had it, from entering the legislature, but rather refused to do so except in the company of fellow lawmakers whose parliamentary immunity had been revoked for alleged criminal offenses. Likely knowing he did not have the votes to secure reelection, Guaidó appears to have declined to attend the session, going as far as to scale a fence in a publicity stunt widely reported by Western outlets that all but ignored the crucial facts behind the day’s events.

Corporate media followed up their lie that the pro-Guaidó opposition was banned from parliament with the dubious claim that the subsequent vote held in the offices of El Nacional was “official.” The Washington Post (1/5/20) matter-of-factly stated, “In a 100-to-0 tally — enough to put him over the top in a full session of the 167-seat chamber — those present reelected Guaidó as head of the legislature.” The reporters evidently neglected to inspect the actual vote tally, which contained glaring irregularities such as votes by legislators abroad fleeing criminal charges, as well as those cast by substitutes for deputies who had already voted for Parra. As even hard-right, Miami-based journalist Patricia Polea highlighted, Jose Regnault Hernandez, the substitute for newly sworn-in National Assembly Second Vice President Jose Gregorio Noriega, was allowed to vote for Guaidó despite Noriega having himself stood for election on a rival ticket earlier that afternoon.

It is also deeply ironic that Western outlets would rush to declare the legitimacy of an irregular vote held in the offices of a local newspaper, given the lengths they have gone to deny the existence of press freedom in Venezuela (FAIR.org, 5/20/19).

Why Isn’t Guaidó in Jail?

Procedural formalities aside, the real question, which corporate journalists will never ask, is why an opposition figure who arbitrarily declared himself “interim president” with the backing of hostile foreign powers, and who urged the military to rise up to install him in the presidential office, would be permitted to set foot outside a jail cell in Venezuela, let alone stand for reelection as head of parliament?

The answer would require admitting that this naked violation of sovereignty is only tolerated because of the constant threat of lawless imperial violence, which US corporate media enthusiastically cheerlead against other independent Global South states like Iran.

Instead, Western journalists continue to whitewash the US-sponsored coup–the sixth major attempt since 2002–impugning Maduro’s democratically elected government as “authoritarian” or a “dictatorship” (FAIR.org, 4/11/19;  8/5/19), which is newspeak for “legitimate target for bombing and/or murderous sanctions.”

Throwing to the wind any semblance of neutrality, the New York Times (1/5/20) reported:

Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, moved on Sunday to consolidate his grip on power by taking control of the country’s last independent institution and sidelining the lawmaker who had staked a rival claim to the presidency.

“The political chaos comes at a time when Venezuela is facing economic collapse,” the paper of record added, bolstering the rationale for Maduro’s overthrow. “Hunger is widespread, and millions have fled the country.”  Like most corporate media (FAIR.org, 6/26/19), the Times reflexively avoided mention of US economic sanctions’ role in severely exacerbating the crisis and killing tens of thousands since 2017, writing off the illegal, inhumane measures as “sanctions on Mr. Maduro’s government.”

For the corporate press, it would appear that the only “coup” is that perpetrated by Maduro in insisting on serving out his elected mandate (Washington Post, 1/6/20; Wall Street Journal, 1/6/20; Forbes, 1/7/20).

Concealing Corruption

In their elegies to the “last democratic institution in the authoritarian South American state” (Washington Post, 1/5/20), Western journalists rarely attribute Guaidó any significant blame for the perceived debacle.

Despite acknowledging Guaidó’s falling popularity, following his utter failure to oust Maduro, mainstream outlets have turned a blind eye to the opposition leader’s string of humiliating scandals. Guaidó has been linked to Colombian paramilitary drug lords, while his inner circle has been accused of embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid funds, among other illicit acts.

The CBC (1/6/20) has never referred to Juan Guaido as a “would-be president.”

Tellingly, the only corruption allegations mentioned in the latest corporate coverage are those against Parra and his dissident opposition colleagues. Making little effort to conceal its bias, CBC (1/6/20) describes the new National Assembly president as “a previously unknown backbencher mired in accusations of bribe-taking,” whose “rambling comments” were challenged by journalists.

The double standard is striking, given that Western media have devoted strenuous efforts over the past year to anointing a “previously unknown backbencher” as president of Venezuela. The attacks on Parra comes amid threats of US sanctions against him and other opposition politicians who broke with Guaidó. The blatant imperial blackmail recalls similar US threats reportedly issued against opposition presidential candidate Henri Falcón, who defied the opposition’s 2018 electoral boycott that paved the way for the current coup efforts.

Corporate journalists’ discouragement over Guaidó’s failures (FAIR.org, 7/23/19) is becoming ever more pronounced (e.g., Reuters, 12/3/19; Washington Post, 12/17/19; New York Times, 1/6/20). But at the end of the day, they have simply invested too much in this smooth, technocratic figure to fundamentally fault him, let alone actually question the imperial regime-change machinery that produced him and his elite coterie.

Paul Krugman in Imperial Fantasy Land

Every time the United States does something vicious, stupid or both, a great chorus erupts from the American choir: “This is not who we are.” The sound is defiant, heroic and ridiculous, like hearing “Ode to Joy” sung by a thousand synthetic, smart-speaker voices and backed by an orchestra of slide whistles. Marx famously wrote that Hegel, in observing that “all great historic facts and personages recur twice,” nevertheless “forgot to add: ‘Once as tragedy, and again as farce.’” Neither man, it turns out, anticipated our capacity for making the same simultaneously panicked and lazy turn around the goldfish bowl over and over again, forgetting each time more of the brief journey we’ve just made.

One such vicious stupidity was the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, on the orders of Donald Trump. Soleimani had long been a thorn in the side of the U.S., imperiling its ambitions for its conquered Iraqi client state and the ungovernable semi-protectorate in Afghanistan—this despite the fact that Iran and the U.S. should have been, and sometimes were, allies of convenience in what pundits like to call “the region.” Like the U.S., Iran wants quiescent, stable and relatively demilitarized neighbors on its borders. But America’s psychotic foreign policy establishment has never forgiven Tehran for the 1979 revolution, which removed the Western-friendly shah from power, and for failing to bow to American hegemony in the decades since.

More justifiably, Iran has never forgiven the United States for the CIA-engineered coup of 1953, for backing Saddam Hussein during the brutal Iran-Iraq war, for decades of sanctions and isolation, and for George Bush—speaking words written by current “Never Trump” grifter David Frum—surprisingly and insultingly naming Iran in the so-called axis of evil at a time when tensions between the two nations appeared to be dying down.

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In the aftermath of the assassination, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman rushed to assure his readers and likely himself that Trump’s bullying violence represented a fundamental break with American history. While America once had “a special leadership position, one that sometimes involved playing a role in reshaping other countries’ political systems,” he argued, Trump “has never shown any sign of understanding why America used to be special.”

America, Krugman contends, “was something more than a big country throwing its weight around. We always stood for something larger.”

You’ve heard this song before, and I’ll spare you the purple prose. Before Trump, America stood for a rules-based international order. And while we accidentally bumbled our way into killing millions of Vietnamese and Koreans, conquered Haiti and Puerto Rico, toppled (at one point or another) most of the governments in South America, occupied the Philippines, waged genocidal wars against Native Americans and fought for decades in the heart of the Islamic world, we are, and have always been, the good guys. At least until a febrile real estate conman with a short attention span and nasty temper fumbled his way into the White House and stopped mouthing the comforting pieties that we all expect from a president.

Trump’s amorality has produced a kind of crude honesty, one that cuts against the complaint that the president is a liar. In truth, he’s what is known as a “bullshitter”—the distinction, according to the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt’s pithy little essay-turned-book, “On Bullshit,” being that the liar lies instrumentally, actively trying to conceal a truth that he understands to be true, while the bullshitter operates from a place of unconcern for truth. A bullshitter does not (and maybe cannot) distinguish truth from falsehood at all.

In this regard, in both words and actions, Trump can sometimes lie truthfully. The week after the assassination crisis, he went on Fox News and claimed that Saudi Arabia had paid the U.S. $1 billion for more troops in the Middle East, and that South Korea would pay another $500 million. These actual sums and transactions are almost certainly pure fantasy, a byproduct of the president’s frequent confabulations of half-remembered comments from programs on that very same Fox News. Yet they capture the rapacious nature of the U.S. and its globe-spanning empire.

In certain quarters, the president’s tall tale was received with outrage and dismay. “He sells the troops,” tweeted libertarian Rep. Justin Amash, I-Mich. Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu retweeted his colleague, and added his own lament:

Dear @realDonaldTrump: I served on active duty in the United States military. We are not mercenaries. We are not bargaining chips. We don’t deploy for money.

Our troops exist to protect the Constitution and the national security of the United States. Get it?#SaturdayThoughts https://t.co/yGCimg10cy

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) January 11, 2020

These are noble sentiments that have the disadvantage of being completely wrong. American forces have acted to secure commercial interests since Thomas Jefferson decided to fight the “Barbary pirates.” “War,” as American Gen. Smedley Butler indelibly observed, “is a racket.” If American fighting rarely involves an explicit pecuniary quid pro quo, then it is nevertheless inextricably tied up with the interests of capital, foreign and domestic.

As for the Constitution, was it lost in Iraq? I can imagine how one might honestly believe that American troops are not an explicitly mercenary force, but the idea that the U.S. fights wars to protect its founding document or its national security is utterly and tragically belied by every American military action since World War II—not to mention most of those preceding it. If we are unable to wean ourselves from these noble delusions, in which we are always the tragic heroes defeated by the same curiously repetitive mistakes, then Donald Trump, and the inevitable future Donald Trumps, will never stop having an advantage. You can’t defeat dishonesty with better versions of untruth.

“We have always tried,” Krugman complained, “to behave as no more than first among equals.” It is not exactly a lie, but it’s bullshit.

Robert Reich: There’s Hope For America Yet

If climate change, nuclear standoffs, assault weapons, hate crimes, mass killings, Russian trolls, near-record inequality, kids locked in cages at our border, and Donald Trump in the White House don’t occasionally cause you feelings of impending doom, you’re not human.

But I want you to remember this: As bad as it looks – as despairing as you can sometimes feel – the great strength of this country is our resilience. We bounce back. We will again. We already are.

Not convinced?

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Robert Reich: A Centrist Cannot Win in 2020



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First, come back in time with me to when I graduated college in 1968. That year, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Our cities were burning. Tens of thousands of young Americans were being ordered to Vietnam to fight an unwinnable and unjust war, which ultimately claimed over 58,000 American lives and the lives of over 3 million Vietnamese. The nation was deeply divided. And then in November of that year, Richard Nixon was elected president.

I recall thinking this nation would never recover. But somehow we bounced back.

In subsequent years we enacted the Environmental Protection Act. We achieved marriage equality for gays and lesbians. We elected a black man to be president of the United States. We passed the Affordable Care Act.

Even now, it’s not as bleak as it sometimes seems. ​In 2018 we elected a record number of women, people of color, and LGBTQ representatives to Congress, including the first Muslim women.​ ​Eighteen states raised their minimum wages.

Even in traditionally conservative states, surprising things are happening. In Tennessee, a Republican legislature has ​enacted free community college​ and ​raised taxes for infrastructure.​ Nevada has expanded ​voting rights​ and ​gun controls​. New Mexico has increased​ spending by 11 percent and ​raised​ its minimum wage by 60 percent. Teachers have gone on strike in Virginia, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina — and won. The public sided with the teachers.

In several states, after decades of tough-on-crime policies, conservative groups have joined with liberals to reform criminal justice systems. ​Early childhood education​ and alternative energy promotion​ have also expanded nationwide, largely on a bipartisan basis.

Now, come forward in time with me.

Look at the startling diversity of younger Americans. ​Most Americans now under 18 years old are ethnically Hispanic, Asian or Pacific Islander, African-American, or of more than one race.​ ​In ten years, it’s estimated that most Americans under ​35​ will also be people of color or of mixed races.​ ​Thirty years from now, most of us will be.​

That diversity will be a huge strength. We will be more tolerant, less racist, less xenophobic.

Our young people are also determined to make America better. I’ve been teaching for almost 40 years, and I’ve never taught a generation of students as dedicated to public service, as committed to improving the nation and the world as is the generation I’m now teaching. That’s another sign of our future strength.

Meanwhile, ​most college students today are women​, which means that in future years even more women will be in leadership positions – in science, politics, education, nonprofits, and in corporate suites. That will also be a great boon to America.

I don’t want to minimize the problems we now have. I just want to remind you of how resilient America has been, and how well situated we are for the future.

Never give up fighting for a more just society.

The forces of greed and hate would prefer you give up, because that way they win it all. But we have never given up. And we never will.

Can Batteries Help Limit Australia’s Bush Fires?

With at least 27 human fatalities and a scarcely credible estimate by scientists that more than one billion animals have been killed nationwide by the unprecedented blazes  since September 2019, Australia’s bushfire horrors have stunned the world.

The climate crisis is contributing to the catastrophe, at least to its scale and intensity, whether or not it is its primary cause. And scientists revealed only this month that global heating is causing daily weather change.

But something else happened in Australia in 2019 which could point the way towards a fast route, not for Australia alone but globally, to renewable energy and a safer future.

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In the state of South Australia the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery – 129MWh, able to power 30,000 homes for an hour during a blackout – was switched on just 60 days after the contract to build it was signed.

So ways of cutting the use of fossil fuels and reducing their contribution to climate heating, now clearly implicated in Australia’s catastrophe, are within reach.

The battery was commissioned in order to bring greater reliability and stability to the state’s electricity grid, preventing blackouts, improving reliability across the network and helping to even out price spikes.

The state’s efforts to increase its proportion of renewable energy had previously been hampered by freak weather which caused outages, which in turn sparked a political brawl over energy policy. The federal government blamed the supply failures on the use of renewable technologies.

40 Days to Spare

The state premier challenged the technology entrepreneur Elon Musk,  who replied by saying he would build a massive battery within 100 days of signing the deal. He managed it with 40 days to spare.

His approach − a familiar one in the renewable energy world − was to charge the battery packs when excess power was available and the cost of production very low, and then discharge them when the cost of power production rose.

The world is becoming increasingly reliant on battery power, largely because of the need to reduce carbon in the transport sector; almost 60% of new cars sold in Norway during March 2019 were entirely electric-powered. A recent World Economic Forum (WEF) report expects global battery demand to increase by more than 19 times its current levels in the next decade.

Batteries have historically been a dirty but convenient product, requiring the mining of metals such as nickel and zinc, yet considered disposable; landfills are strewn with these hazardous toxins, with more arriving every day. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), each year Americans throw away more than three billion batteries – 180,000 tons of waste.

Yet the WEF report projects that new generation batteries could not only enable 30% of the required reductions in carbon emissions in the transport and power sectors, providing access to electricity to 600 million people who currently have no access; they will also create 10 million safe and sustainable jobs around the world.

Batteries will probably play a large part in future energy supply systems; in 2018, South Australia invested $100 million in a scheme to encourage householders to fit batteries to their solar systems, enabling them to use their own power on site rather than exporting it to the grid. This helps to reduce demand at peak times.

Electric cars are not the only part of the transportation sector that will be in need of batteries. A number of companies are currently working on electric-powered commercial aircraft designs, and Norway is working on battery technology for shipping, with an all-electric passenger vessel already operating.

The Rapid Transition Alliance (RTA) is a UK-based organisation which argues that humankind must undertake “widespread behaviour change to sustainable lifestyles . . . to live within planetary ecological boundaries and to limit global warming to below 1.5°C”, with the slogan “Evidence-based hope for a warming world”.

It believes there is evidence that batteries can offer hope for Australia  and other countries facing similar lethal threats − provided they absorb several crucial lessons.

First, it says, technological leaps need both the flair of individual effort and the clout of institutional backing if they are to work at scale.

Then behavioural change must be practical and economically viable, because only a small minority of people will ever change for green reasons alone. Simply switching to electricity as a fuel source is not enough: to hit climate targets and maintain a habitable world, there needs to be an absolute reduction in energy consumption.

And finally, as batteries increasingly form part of the energy infrastructure, safeguards must be put in place around the mining involved in obtaining the minerals needed to make them, to ensure that poorer communities in the global South do not pay the price for cutting carbon emissions in richer countries.

Trump Has No Idea What ‘Deep State’ Really Means

This seems like a strange moment to be writing about “the deep state” with the country entering a new phase of open and obvious aboveground chaos and instability. Just as we had gotten used to the fact that the president is, in effect, under congressional indictment, just as we had settled into a more or less stable stalemate over when (and if) the Senate will hold an impeachment trial, the president shook the snow globe again, by ordering the assassination of foreign military officials and threatening the destruction of Iran’s cultural sites. Nothing better than the promise of new war crimes to take the world’s attention away from a little thing like extorting a U.S. ally to help oneself get reelected.

On the other hand, maybe this is exactly the moment to think about the so-called deep state, if by that we mean the little-noticed machinery of governance that keeps dependably churning on in that same snow globe’s pedestal, whatever mayhem may be swirling around above it. Maybe this is even the moment to be grateful for those parts of the government whose inertia keeps the ship of state moving in the same general direction, regardless of who’s on the bridge at any given time.

However, that sometimes benign inertia is not what the people who coined that term meant by deep state.

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What Is a “Deep State”?

The expression is actually a translation of the Turkish phrase derin devlet. As historian Ryan Gingeras has explained, it arose as a way of describing “a kind of shadow or parallel system of government in which unofficial or publicly unacknowledged individuals play important roles in defining and implementing state policy.” In the Turkish case, those “unacknowledged persons” were, in fact, agents of organized criminal enterprises working within the government.

Gingeras, an expert on organized crime in Turkey, has described how alliances between generals, government officials, and “narcotic traffickers, paramilitaries, terrorists, and other criminals” allowed the creation and execution of “policies that directly contravene the letter and spirit of the law.” In the Turkish case, the history of such alliances can be traced to struggles for power in the first decades of the previous century, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The interpenetration of the drug cartels and government in Mexico is another example of a deep state at work. The presence of cartel collaborators in official positions and in the police hierarchy at all levels makes it almost impossible for any president, even the upright Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to defeat them.

The term “deep state” has also been used to characterize the role of the military in Egypt. As Sarah Chayes has written in Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, Egypt’s military has long been a state-within-a-state with its own banking and business operations that constitute 25%-40% of the Egyptian economy. It’s the country’s largest landowner and the ultimate maker and breaker of Egyptian presidents. In 2011, at the height of the Arab Spring, a popular uprising forced President Hosni Mubarak, who had run the country for 30 years, to resign. The military certainly had something to do with that resignation, since he handed over power to Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

When, however, a nascent democracy brought their longtime opponent, the Muslim Brotherhood, to power with the election of Mohamed Morsi, that was too much for the generals. It helped that Morsi made his own missteps, including the repression of peaceful protesters. So there wasn’t much objection when, in 2012, his own minister of defense, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, led a military coup against Morsi. Sisi and the Egyptian military have run the country directly ever since, making the state and the deep state one and the same.

Donald Trump and the “Deep State”

From his earliest days in the White House, Donald Trump and his officials have inveighed against what the president has regularly labeled the “deep state.” What he’s meant by the term, though, is something different from its more traditional use. Rather than referring to a “shadow or parallel system of government” operating outside official channels, for Trump the deep state is the government — or at least those parts of it that frustrate him in any way.

When, for example, the judicial system throws up barriers to government by fiat, that’s the deep state at work as far as he’s concerned. Want to proclaim “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” but the courts put a hold on your executive order? Blame the deep state.

Did anonymous government officials tell the press that your National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, lied about his contacts with Russian officials? Blame the deep state for the leaks.

As early as March 2017, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer acknowledged that the administration did indeed believe in the existence of a deep state, a shadow operation that had infiltrated many of the offices and activities of the federal government. A reporter asked him, “Does the government believe that there is such a thing as a ‘deep state’ that is actively working to undermine the president?”

Spicer replied:

“I think that there’s no question when you have eight years of one party in office that there are people who stay in government — affiliated with, joined — and continue to espouse the agenda of the previous administration, so I don’t think it should come to any surprise that there are people that burrowed into government during the eight years of the last administration and may have believed in that agenda and want to continue to seek it.”

In other words, for the Trump administration and its supporters, the deep state is any part of the apparatus of government itself that doesn’t do their absolute bidding.

The Huffington Post has assembled a convenient list of some of Trump’s tweets invoking the “deep state.” Here’s a summary:

In November 2017, he blamed unnamed “deep state authorities” for a failure to continue investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails, calling those authorities “Rigged and corrupt.”


That same month, he tweeted that the FBI and the Justice Department were withholding information about “surveillance of associates of Donald Trump.” This was, he said, “Big stuff. Deep State,” and he demanded that someone “Give this information NOW!”


In January 2018, he accused Hillary Clinton’s former aide Huma Abedin of putting “Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents.” Did this mean, he asked, that the “Deep State Justice Dept must finally act”? If it were to “finally act,” he added, it should be “Also on Comey & others.”


In May 2018, he accused the “Criminal Deep State” of going after “Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam” and “getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before!” Apparently the president was referring to a conspiracy theory of his that the Obama administration had embedded a spy in his campaign operation in order to ensure a Hillary Clinton victory.


In July 2018, he was ruminating about a supposedly missing Democratic National Committee computer server that the FBI, he believed, had failed to impound. Was this failure, he wondered, an action of the “Deep State”? (Yes, this is the same nonexistent server he later asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look for in his country as a precondition for releasing U.S. military aid.)


In September 2018, he inveighed against the deep state in general, suggesting that it and its allies were upset at his policy achievements. This time he suggested that the deep state does have its extra-governmental allies, “the Left” and “the Fake News Media”: “The Deep State and the Left, and their vehicle, the Fake News Media, are going Crazy — & they don’t know what to do. The Economy is booming like never before, Jobs are at Historic Highs, soon TWO Supreme Court Justices…”

Trump, in other words, sees the U.S. government as infected by “Unelected, deep state operatives who defy the voters, to push their own secret agendas.” Those “operatives,” he told a rally in 2018, are “truly a threat to democracy itself.”

Does the United States Have a Deep State?

The November House impeachment hearings brought us the testimony of a number of career diplomats and civil servants like Marie Yovanovich, the former ambassador to Ukraine, and Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a Ukraine specialist on the National Security Council. Their appearance led John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the CIA, to exclaim in a speech at George Mason University, “Thank God for the deep state.”

He meant it as a joke, but he was also pointing out that their dignified testimony might serve as a reminder of the value of government service. “Everyone here has seen this progression of diplomats, and intelligence officers and White House people trooping up to Capitol Hill right now,” he explained. Those who watched that progression, he said, certainly recognized that “these are people who are doing their duty.” McLaughlin told National Public Radio’s Greg Myre and Rachel Treisman that he had received some “blowback” from his joke, and added:

“I think it’s a silly idea. There is no ‘deep state.’ What people think of as the ‘deep state’ is just the American civil service, social security, the people who fix the roads, health and human services, Medicare.”

I’ll give one cheer for that kind of deep state: not a secret, extra-official shadow government, but the actual workings of government itself for the benefit of the people it’s meant to serve. Personally, I’m all for people who devote their lives to making sure our food is as safe as possible, the cars we drive won’t kill us, our planes stay up in the air, and roads and railways are built and maintained to connect us, not to speak of having clean air and water, public schools and universities to educate our young people, and a social security system to provide a safety net for people of my age — all of which, by the way, is in danger from this president, his administration, and the Republican party.

But there’s another way of thinking about the deep state, one that suggests an ongoing threat not to Donald Trump and his pals but to this democracy and the world. I’m thinking, of course, of that vast — if informal, complex, and sometimes internally competitive — consortium composed of the industries and government branches that make up what President Dwight Eisenhower famously called the “military-industrial complex.” This was exactly the “state” that I think President Obama encountered when he decided to shut down the George W. Bush-era CIA torture program and found that the price for compliance was a promise not to prosecute anyone for crimes committed in the so-called war on terror. January 2009 was, as he famously said, a time to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

Here is Mike Lofgren, a long-time civil servant and aide to many congressional Republicans, writing in 2014 about that national security machine for BillMoyers.com. In “Anatomy of the Deep State,” he described the power and reach of this apparatus in chilling terms:

“There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol…

“Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”

Lofgren was not describing “a secret, conspiratorial cabal.” Rather, he was arguing that “the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day.” This has certainly been the experience of those who have, in particular, opposed U.S. military adventures abroad. They discover that many of the lies, deceptions, and crimes of that “state within a state” are openly there for all to see and are being committed in the equivalent of broad daylight with utter impunity.

This, by the way, creates certain obvious problems for those of us who oppose the presidency and the striking new militarism of Donald Trump — if, at least, it means embracing such representatives of Lofgren’s deep state as that old war criminal, John Bolton. He has not become a progressive hero just because he’s suddenly proclaimed himself ready, if subpoenaed, to testify in the Senate impeachment trial of his former boss. If Bolton chooses to do so, you can be sure that he will not be motivated by a devotion to democratic government or the rule of law.

Trump’s own relationship to the national security deep state has been ambivalent at best. It’s clear that many of those officials initially thought he might be a weapon they could aim and shoot at will, but he’s turned out to be far more bizarre and unpredictable than any of them expected. There’s evidence, for example, that the assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani was presented to Trump as the most extreme option possible — in a bid to convince him to act against Iran, but in a less drastic way. As the New York Times reported recently, “Pentagon officials have often offered improbable options to presidents to make other possibilities appear more palatable,” but they don’t expect presidents to choose the decoy. Donald Trump is clearly not one of those presidents.

There is a sense, however, in which the United States under Trump does resemble the original Turkish conception of a deep state, that “kind of shadow or parallel system of government in which unofficial or publicly unacknowledged individuals play important roles in defining and implementing state policy.” That’s a pretty apt description, for instance, of the actions of the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in relation to U.S. policy towards Ukraine, which he’s been coordinating and in some sense directing for some time.

The only difference in this case is that Trump has been fool enough to acknowledge his personal lawyer’s role. May that foolishness get him turned out of office, one way or another. In the meantime, I’ll keep giving my one cheer for the civil servants who keep the wheels turning. I suspect, however, that as the world awaits developments in the Middle East now that Trump has followed 18 years of U.S. state (and deep state) disaster there with his own impetuous intervention, few people will be offering many cheers for the United States of America.

Poverty Is the New Draft

What follows is a conversation between professor As`ad AbuKhalil and Sharmini Peries of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

Jacqueline Luqman: This is Jackie Luqman with The Real News Network. Last week and this, Black Twitter was aflood with funny memes that seem to make light about how black people aren’t included in the “We’re going to war with Iran” sentiment because the push for this war wasn’t about black people or what black people wanted. But all jokes aside, are black and Latino and native and poor white people really sitting on the sidelines of America’s military actions, or are they more involved in them than they realize or would even like to be?

Here to talk about all the ways that black people, brown people, and poor people actually are the people most targeted by military recruiters, which puts them right in the cross hairs of military action, is Erica Caines. Erica is a local organizer in Baltimore and is the founder of Liberation Through Reading. You can find that on #liberationthroughreading on Twitter. Erica, thank you so much for joining.

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Erica Caines: Thank you for having me.

Jacqueline Luqman: So since the draft ended in 1973, militaries relied on an all voluntary service and has used strategies that target young people that include placing recruiters in schools. People don’t know where that comes from because it’s from the No Child Left Behind Act signed by President George Bush in 2002 which requires military recruiters to be granted the same access in schools that college recruiters are granted. Erica, how does this affect black and brown and indigenous and poor communities and does it affect them differently than everybody else?

Erica Caines: Oh yeah. Well, as we can see, it’s a societal issue obviously. What we know is that we are, well, black and brown colonized people, are specifically targeted because they kind of corner us, squeeze us without options. I think a report just came out that said that this was the highest recruitment year specifically because they targeted student loan debt. What it is is that the common thing that we are hearing is that black people are not necessarily patriotic. We are just out of option. So I would attribute that to what’s happening at the schools and why they’re also making it an access to or access out of poverty the same way that colleges are used.

Jacqueline Luqman: So Erica, what you’re saying is that the military is targeting young people who are out of financial and economic options. So what is going on is that it may not be a national draft, but it is what people called a few years ago, the phrase popped up a few years ago, a poverty draft. Is that pretty accurate?

Erica Caines: Yes. I would say that poverty in fact is the new draft. I think they are creating conditions, systemic and systematic conditions that are leaving poor black colonized people without choices. We’re seeing that we’re suffering from lack of healthcare. The military offers that. Lack of free education, the military offers that. Housing, the military offers that. So what’s happening is we’re kind of getting squeezed into if you don’t find yourself with the ability to go to higher education or go to college because you have been deemed not smart enough of or don’t have the money to get into colleges because higher education is not free, then the military is always the other option.

Jacqueline Luqman: And actually the data from the Department of Defense actually backs up what you say because the 2017 population representation in the military services report indicates that nearly 20% of military members come from neighborhoods with a median household income of around $40,000 or less. Keeping in mind that in 2017 the median US household income was around $60,000, and that’s according to the United States census. So the things that military recruiters are doing, Erica, to entice kids in high schools and sometimes even from what I understand middle school to get them to sign up in the military seemed pretty nefarious. One of the things are military sponsored a video game tournaments. But what are some other ways that recruiters might entice young people to join the military that their parents may not be aware of that are going on?

Erica Caines: I mean, I talk about this often about Girl Scouts of America, just with their partnership with Raytheon, even though that is not the military itself, it’s still an extension of the military. And I think that partnership, what it does is it normalizes that relationship or normalizes military or the US military existence. I don’t think that many people are aware that that partnership exists because a lot of the enticement with military is wrapped up in STEM or tech programs. That’s a big push. And I think that we see that push, especially during the Obama years. And I do want to say that it was especially during those years that you can see that black people, I don’t want to say became extra patriotic, but kind of gotten used to the idea of assimilating into being an American and what that meant and just that pride of America, and that all translated into acceptance of the military.

Jacqueline Luqman: So I want to touch on really quickly what you said about black people in particular wanted to be accepted as American, especially under the Obama years. What’s the historical reference to that? Because I think there is a unique strain of the history of black people in this country that ties wanting to be accepted as American in military service. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

Erica Caines: I think that I try to be cautious in how I speak about military servicemen as individuals and just the function of a military because many black people do join, and we do have many black veterans. I think the difference now though is that when we speak to elders, we’re speaking to people who were drafted. We’re not necessarily talking to people who volunteered. Whereas now we have been involved in a war since I was a freshman in high school at 2001, and black people have since continuously volunteered.

And that disconnect I think is not necessarily a product of over-patriotism or the sense of pride of America, but I think that that disconnect really occurred during the Obama years where we got to see ourselves or somebody who looked like us represented this country that always denied us. And I think before we looked at, especially during the Bush years, we were incredibly anti-war because it was always looked at “this is a y’all thing, this is a us and them, this is not a black people’s war.” But then when it became a black president, there was no way to separate any conflicts.

Jacqueline Luqman: That is really interesting, especially because it seems like we’ve gone back to that sentiment in the black community with this conflict that we are hoping is a deescalating between the United States and Iran, where, as I said at the beginning of our discussion, there were a lot of memes floating around social media, on Black Twitter, on Facebook, and on Instagram kind of making light of the fact that this war with Iran, if it was going to exist, was not black people’s war. And I’m going to venture to say that some native Americans and some Latino people and certainly some poor people express the idea that they were not willing to fight another rich man’s war. But what were your sentiments? What were you thinking when you saw some of those memes come up on your social media timeline?

Erica Caines: I mean naturally as an anti-imperialist and an antiwar organizer, I didn’t find it funny. I found it kind of disturbing in a way because I don’t think that connections or I don’t think people understood why it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t that I didn’t… The common excuse was, was that this is just something that black people traditionally do. We laugh at our pain. But I counter that with, but this isn’t our pain. We’re not the people who are going to be affected by it and are the people complicit in it. I mean regardless if we are for the war, we are for candidates that push sanctions. We are for candidates that support wars and support these actions. And to remove yourself from these things and not consider your part, it just shows this vast disconnect and the kind of black apathy that I don’t recall ever seeing or reading a text or even speaking to elders about.

There’s always been that contradiction and it’s always been that battle between black veterans and black people who served and those who didn’t. But I think now what we’re seeing is just a sort of just don’t care. I mean, we noticed that with all these uprisings going around the world. There’s no real investment in it. Not in the days of of the Civil Rights Black Power Movement where we were distinctly antiwar and pushed the antiwar movement. We were the head of it. I know now they rewrite it and they put other people there, but it was a lot of black people standing down against the draft and refusing to take part of it. That really rocked the boat. And I think that we are so far removed from that now.

Jacqueline Luqman: Now, that seems to me that that’s a function of lack of political education especially when you mentioned the issue of sanctions where people in this country, and I want to get your thoughts on this, people in this country don’t think of the economic dire straits that marginalized communities are in and that it’s manufactured. Poverty is a manufactured condition in the United States. People don’t think that way. So when they’re talking about, they meaning the US government, talking about imposing sanctions on another country full of brown people or another country full of Muslims, or another country that this government has considered the other and the enemy, most Americans don’t think that that’s so bad as long as we’re not dropping bombs on people because it’s just sanctions.

But we experience economic sanctions in this country. Marginalized people do, and we feel the pain from that. But we cannot make the connection between the imposed economic conditions that cause young people to be more likely to look at the military as a viable option for getting a college education, for getting healthcare, for getting housing. We don’t connect that pain, that economic pain that is created here in this country with the economic pain that’s created when sanctions are imposed on another country. And so it seems easier to me for marginalized young people in this country to sign up to be a part of that imperialist machine because they lack the political education to understand the connections. What are your thoughts on that?

Erica Caines: Well, that’s what I think the big part of the antiwar movement is lacking. I think a lot of the criticisms of mass protests are partly valid. I think a lot of it is criticism for criticism’s sake, but there is a point that what do we do after we mobilize? We can chant anti-war. We can chant hands off Iran, but we have to really get the people to understand why it’s important. I think that that’s part of the reason why there’s such a huge disconnect. Again, I think that happened a lot during the Obama years where it was less, I don’t think people even understand how long we’ve been in Afghanistan or how long we’ve been in that region because we haven’t had to directly go there as often or how we visualize war with people boots on the ground.

It’s not how we’ve been doing war these last few years. We sort of turn that around with droning and sanctions. And I don’t think that people that sanctions are an act of war. I mean, when you are intentionally starving people and preventing them for the ability to get medicine, that is an act of war. When we look at what happened in Venezuela where thousands of people died, yet people were still referring to Maduro as a dictator and not look at anything wrong with America’s role and how and why people weren’t able to get food and medicine and such things in that country. The same thing with Iran. What’s happening in that nation is a lot of it is the cause of the US and we’re not understanding how war has changed, shifted more towards technology and more towards not needing to put our people in direct harm.

Jacqueline Luqman: So, Erica, the same survey that I mentioned earlier, the 2017 Population Representation in the Military Services Report from the Department of Defense says that of the young people they surveyed, 49% said that if they were to join the military, one reason for doing so would be to pay for future education. So young people who are joining the military do understand, especially marginalized young people who as you repeatedly made clear, recognize that they don’t have any options to achieve parts of the so-called American dream that they want to achieve, don’t have those options outside of the military. In that reality, how do we address this situation? How do we challenge this system of creating an environment in which young people feel they have no other choice but to join the military in order to get healthcare and a decent place to live and a college education at the same time we are challenging the imperialism of this government and at the same time that we are trying to educate a whole new generation of people into all of those things? How do we challenge this?

Erica Caines: So I think that in realizing that poor black and brown marginalized people are pushed and squeezed and kind of cornered into joining the military, I think that people say that also as a soft way of justifying why people join the military. They don’t actually say that to combat those reasons, but just to excuse it. And I think that’s another way that we kind fall complicitly in it, even if it’s not intentional. When you talk about the destruction and the devastation and all of the placement has caused, people go, “Well, it’s not the soldier’s fault.” Yeah. But in saying that we’re making this an individual issue and not actually challenging the structure and function of the US military. And I think the best way to do that is create mutual aid.

I don’t think that people understand that we’re not helpless. And I think that that’s just a fallback to make it seem that we are pretty helpless in this. So we have no choice but to join the military. And I think even in that, when we talk about why people are joining, they’re joining for individual reasons. They’re not joining for communal uplifting. It’s for an uplifting of themselves out of poverty or out of their situation or to a better way of life. But it’s not like it’s a communal effort.

And I think if more people were to join organizations that are focused on creating these avenues of mutual aid and basic community building, we can alleviate the amount of people that feel like, well the military is an option because I don’t have a house, I don’t have housing, I don’t have food, I don’t have education. And we’re helping to provide these things. Or we are seriously challenging candidates. If voting is your thing and you’re seriously challenging candidates about providing these things, then that’s one way that we can alleviate the amount of people that do join the military. But we’re not helpless.

Jacqueline Luqman: You mentioned… Oh, I’m sorry, go ahead.

Erica Caines: No, you’re good.

Jacqueline Luqman: So you mentioned joining organizations. What are some of the organizations that you can recommend for our viewers in Baltimore and even some organizations that our viewers internationally and nationally can look into?

Erica Caines: I am a member of the Black Lives for Peace, and I am in the Baltimore chapter and this is what we do. We do political education. We do disruptions. We show up at the marches. It’s not just a one facet thing. It’s a multifaceted. You have to combat at all angles. We are also linked up with Eugene with People’s Progress Party, which I am a member of that as well. And they do mutual aid in the community and in Baltimore they’re helping right now currently Douglas Homes fight to keep their housing. So there’s different organizations of people in different avenues of ways to combat this. But I fear that we’re always going to continue to fall back on. There’s nothing we do and the military is our only option. So for as long as we continue to do that and so long as we justify the strong and long arm of US imperialism, intentional or not.

Jacqueline Luqman: Well, we certainly have our work cut out for us, but we thank you so much, Erica, for coming on today and explaining why this situation with Iran really does involve black, brown, native, Latin and poor white communities, why it is their fight also, we’re just fighting it from a different perspective. So thank you so much for joining me.

Erica Caines: Thank you for having me.

Jacqueline Luqman: And thank you for watching. This is Jacquelyn Luqman with the Real News Network in Washington DC.

Security Firm: Russia Hacked Company Involved in Ukraine Scandal

BOSTON—A U.S. cybersecurity company says Russian military agents have successfully hacked the Ukrainian gas company at the center of the scandal that led to President Donald Trump’s impeachment.

Russian agents launched a phishing campaign in early November to steal the login credentials of employees of Burisma Holdings, the gas company, according to Area 1 Security, a Silicon Valley company that specializes in email security.

Hunter Biden, son of former U.S. vice president and Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden, previously served on Burisma’s board.

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It was not clear what the hackers were looking for or may have obtained, said Area 1’s CEO, Oren Falkowitz, who called the findings “incontrovertible” and posted an eight-page report. But the timing of the operation suggests that the Russian agents could be searching for material damaging to the Bidens or perhaps scheming to plant misinformation.

The House of Representatives impeached Trump in December for abusing the power of his office by enlisting the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden, a political rival, ahead of the 2020 election. A second charge accused Trump of obstructing a congressional investigation into the matter.

“Our report doesn’t make any claims as to what the intent of the hackers were, what they might have been looking for, what they are going to do with their success. We just point out that this is a campaign that’s going on,” said Falkowitz, a former National Security Agency offensive hacker whose company’s clients include candidates for U.S. federal elected offices. In an earlier interview, he told The Associated Press that the campaigns of top candidates for the U.S. presidency and House and Senate races in 2020 have in the past few months each been targeted by about a thousand phishing emails.

Falkowitz did not name the candidates. Nor would he name any clients.

Burisma did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Russian hackers from the same military intelligence unit that Area 1 said was behind the operation targeting Burisma have been indicted for hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee and the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 presidential race.

Stolen emails were released online at the time by Russian agents and WikiLeaks in an effort to favor Trump, special counsel Robert Mueller determined in his investigation.

Area 1 discovered the phishing campaign by the Russian military intelligence unit, known as the GRU, on New Year’s Eve, said Falkowitz, who would not discuss whom he notified prior to going public. He said he followed the industry standard process of responsible disclosure, which would include notifying Burisma.

In phishing, an attacker uses a targeted email to lure a target to a fake site that resembles a familiar one. There, unwitting victims enter their usernames and passwords, which the hackers then harvest. Phished credentials allow attackers both to rifle through a victim’s stored email and masquerade as that person.

In the report, Falkowitz said the GRU agents used fake, lookalike domains that were designed to mimic the sites of real Burisma subsidiaries.

Falkowitz said the operation targeting Burisma involved tactics, techniques and procedures that GRU agents had used repeatedly in other phishing operations, matching “several patterns that lots of independent researchers agree mimic this particular Russian actor.” Area 1 says it has been tracking the Russian agents for several years.

The discovery’s timing — just weeks before presidential primaries begin in the United States — highlights the need to protect political campaigns from targeted phishing attacks, which are behind 95% of all information breaches, said Falkowitz.

“This is a real specific, timely case that has real implications,” he said. “To discover it and potentially get out in front of it is a significant departure from what’s typical in the cyber security community, where someone just tells you, yeah, you’re dead.”

Area 1 said its researchers connected the phishing campaign targeting Burisma to an effort earlier last year that targeted Kvartal 95, a media organization founded by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

In this case, the Russian military agents, from a group security researchers call “Fancy Bear,” peppered Burisma employees with emails designed to look like internal messages.

In order to detect phishing attacks, Area 1 maintains a global network of sensors designed to sniff out and block them before they reach their targets.

In July, the U.S. Federal Elections Commission gave Area 1 permission to offer its services to candidates for federal elected office and political committees at the same low rates it charges non-profits.

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AP writer Yuras Karmanau in Kiev, Ukraine, contributed to this story.

Virginians Deserve to Have Local Control Over Confederate Monuments

Confederate monuments are back in the news in Virginia. Legislation that would let cities and counties control decisions over local Confederate monuments will be introduced this month in both the Virginia House of Delegates and Senate. Lives depend on the outcome.

The last time the statues dominated Virginia news was in August 2017, when a gathering of white supremacists and fascists from across the country rallied in Charlottesville, leaving three people dead and dozens more injured. As a member of the Charlottesville City Council at the time, I’ve had a front-row view of what can happen when localities can’t make these decisions for themselves.

In January 2017, after almost a year of thoughtful and sometimes heated community discussion, I made the motion that the city remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and rename the downtown park dedicated to him. Neo-Confederates and white nationalists had been flooding Council’s email boxes with vitriolic rhetoric, some threatening to harm any councilor who voted to remove the monuments. My personal cell phone number and home address had been published on hate group websites from Georgia to Arkansas, and the calls I got were graphic and frightening. Someone kept track of when the lights in my house went on and off, and called from time to time to tell me about it. Someone came into our driveway and plastered the back of my car with Confederate flag stickers.

In making that motion, I said, “I believe we need to make a decision quickly on these two matters because until we do, we will continue to attract unwanted interference from the Confederate heritage groups and white supremacy activists around the country, many of whom have no stake in our local decision.”

In February 2017, with strong community support, the City Council voted to remove the statue and rename the park. That decision—and a court injunction that prevented it from being carried out—was part of what led to the deadly August 2017 rally in this small Virginia city.

More than two years later, General Lee and two other Confederate statues still stand in downtown Charlottesville, kept there by a local judge’s ruling that cited the state law protecting Confederate monuments from attempts to “disturb or interfere with” them. While city attorneys agree with Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring that the law does not apply to independent cities like Charlottesville, and plan to appeal, the local control bill will make sure that all localities—cities and counties—have the right to make local decisions that reflect their values and ensure public safety.

Dozens of communities around the country, including New Orleans, Louisville, Dallas, and Baltimore, have removed Confederate statues in their public spaces and changed the names of countless schools and highways named for heroes of the Confederacy’s Lost Cause. After the racist murders of nine worshipers at Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, and the violence at the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally, they have determined that monuments to white supremacy have no place in their public spaces. But in Southern states with outmoded Confederate monument laws like Virginia’s, localities have been prevented from acting. Our intent has been clear, however. In town after town, local governments have voted to change the names of highways, parks, and schools named for Confederate leaders, as these changes are not blocked by state law.

Before the bloodshed in Charlottesville, many people didn’t understand that memorials to the Confederacy were a threat to public safety. The statues had stood for generations, their history as overt instruments of racial intimidation and glorification of the days of the antebellum South forgotten. Few were from the period immediately after the Civil War; most were erected in the late teens and 1920s, as Southern states dismantled the civil rights progress made during Reconstruction and were engaged in widespread voter suppression, Jim Crow legislation, and lynchings. The Ku Klux Klan membership rolls included many local leaders, and the organization was involved in the celebrations that surrounded the monuments’ erection.

I moved to Charlottesville with my family in 1994, eager to make a home here. As parents in an interracial family, my husband and I hoped that Charlottesville would—unlike much of the South—be a good place to raise our children to feel valued and empowered.

On one of our first drives through the city, we were startled to see the giant statues honoring the heroes of the Confederacy. Surely, I thought, Charlottesville didn’t venerate these figures. Why then were their statues so prominently displayed? Charlottesville friends were quick to assure us that these statues didn’t reflect the true feelings of the city’s current population, but were just artistic vestiges of an earlier time.

My experiences in 1960s Mississippi as the child of civil rights activists made it hard for me to see them as anything other than monuments to white supremacy, and I soon learned that many of my African American neighbors were equally disturbed by them.

The Confederate generals immortalized in Charlottesville are depicted in full battle uniform, leading the fight to preserve the institution of slavery. They were not local heroes; in fact, neither was known to have ever visited Charlottesville. At the time of the Civil War, Charlottesville’s population was more than 50 percent enslaved people—local residents who would no doubt have opposed the Confederate cause—so the generals’ cause had not represented the majority opinion during their lifetimes.

The bill headed to the state legislature will finally let residents of Charlottesville and all Virginia communities decide what messages they want to convey through their public spaces.

Several statewide groups, including Virginia First Cities, a coalition of Virginia’s oldest cities, and the statewide coalition Monumental Justice Virginia, have called for local control of monuments, and changes in the makeup of the legislature itself make passage more likely in 2020 than it has ever been before. The 2019 election that swept Democrats into majorities in both Virginia’s House and Senate for the first time in recent memory, and the fact that 40 percent of the state legislators in 2020 will be in their first or second term, has changed the calculus for bills like this one.

Gov. Ralph Northam, also a Democrat, has indicated his willingness to sign a local control bill. The time has come—and is well overdue—for Virginia legislators to do the right thing and put a bill on his desk to let local communities decide if they still want to venerate monuments to the Confederacy in their public spaces.

As long as these monuments continue to idolize those who rebelled against the United States to maintain the right to enslave African Americans and uphold white supremacy, our community and others like ours will not be safe for anyone.

This article was produced by Make It Right, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Kristin Layng Szakos served eight years on the Charlottesville, Virginia, City Council from 2010 to 2017 (serving as vice mayor from 2014 to 2016). She chaired Virginia First Cities, co-chaired the national Youth, Education and Families Council, and served on the National League of Cities Council on Race, Equity and Leadership. She is a freelance writer in Charlottesville.