Chris Hedges's Blog, page 607

Mike Pompeo Facing Rare Opposition From Senate Panel

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is facing serious opposition before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which may not have enough votes to recommend him for confirmation because all Democrats, and at least one Republican, have said they will oppose him.

The full Senate is still expected to consider Pompeo’s nomination later this week. But the rare rebuke expected from the panel Monday, even after Pompeo’s recent visit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, would be the first time in years that a nominee for the high-level Cabinet position did not receive a favorable committee vote.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the chairman of the committee, blamed partisan politics for opposition to Pompeo, now the CIA director, saying Pompeo is just as qualified as past secretaries of state nominees Hillary Clinton or John Kerry, both of whom received overwhelming support.

“We are in an era where somebody like this, who is qualified, unfortunately, is likely to be voted out without recommendation or with a negative recommendation,” Corker said Sunday on “State of the Union” on CNN. “It’s just sad that our nation has devolved politically to this point.”

Pompeo’s confirmation before the full Senate now hangs in balance, with the votes of just a handful of senators determining whether he becomes the nation’s top diplomat after Trump fired Rex Tillerson last month.

Key Democrats, including some who had voted for Pompeo as CIA director last year, are peeling away, and Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky remains opposed, despite personal overtures from the president.

Pressure is mounting on senators from both sides. White House allies are unloading ad campaigns against Democrats from Trump-won states, including North Dakota, Indiana and Missouri, to vote for the president’s nominee. But progressive groups are pounding senators’ offices in opposition to Pompeo’s hawkish foreign policy views and negative comments about gay marriage and Muslims. As soon as Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., announced her support last week, one group called on her to switch.

“I don’t agree with every position he’s taken or every word he has spoken,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “But I believe he has an extensive knowledge of world affairs that has been enhanced by his time at the CIA.”

Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., who met with the nominee last week, “has concerns about Mr. Pompeo’s nomination to serve as secretary of state,” said spokesperson Ricki Eshman. The senator “is reviewing his record before making a final decision.”

In the committee, the opposition has been building ahead of Monday’s session.

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who was among the last Democrats on the panel to announce his no vote, said he’s is concerned that Pompeo “will embolden, rather than moderate or restrain” Trump’s “most belligerent and dangerous instincts.”

“I do not make this decision lightly or without reservations,” Coons said in a statement Friday. “However, I remain concerned that Director Pompeo will not challenge the President in critical moments. On vital decisions facing our country, Director Pompeo seems less concerned with rule of law and partnership with our allies and more inclined to emphasize unilateral action and the use of force.”

Rather than allow an unfavorable vote on the panel, where Republicans have a one-seat majority, senators could choose not to issue a recommendation if Pompeo cannot find enough backing.

The committee action won’t necessarily stall Pompeo’s confirmation before the full Senate, but it would be an unusual setback not seen since the panel took a pass on John Bolton, President George W. Bush’s pick for ambassador to the United Nations.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who has been among Pompeo’s most vocal champions in the Senate, lambasted his colleagues ahead of voting.

“Democrats, especially on the Foreign Relations Committee, are really engaged in shameful political behavior,” Cotton said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

But several Democratic senators who supported Pompeo for CIA director say Pompeo’s views are not reflective of those they want in the top diplomat.

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Follow Mascaro on Twitter at https://twitter.com/LisaMascaro

High Court Dives Into Trump Policy With Travel Ban Case

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court has so far had little to say about Donald Trump’s time as president, even as the nation has moved from one Trump controversy to another. That’s about to change.

The justices’ first deep dive into a Trump administration policy comes in a dispute over the third and latest version of the administration’s ban on travel from some countries with majority Muslim populations. Opponents of the policy and some lower courts have labeled it a “Muslim ban,” harking back to Trump’s campaign call to keep Muslims from entering the country.

The high-stakes arguments at the high court on Wednesday could offer some indication about how a court that runs on respect for traditions and precedent will deal with a president who regularly breaks with convention.

Apart from the campaign statements, Trump’s presidential tweets about the travel ban and last fall’s retweets of inflammatory videos that stoked anti-Islam sentiment all could feature in the court’s discussion of the travel ban’s legality.

“The court could get to the right outcome without getting into the question of his tweets. But I think the president set it up so that it’s virtually impossible to ignore him when he’s shouting from the rooftops about what his purpose was in the three versions of the ban,” said Cecillia Wang, the American Civil Liberties Union’s deputy legal director.

Solicitor General Noel Francisco, who will argue the administration’s case, said in a court filing that the ban is well within the president’s authority and is not based on prejudice against Islam.

In a sign of heightened public interest, the court is taking the rare step of making an audio recording of the proceedings available just hours after the arguments end.

One key issue will be how the court evaluates administration actions.

Neil Eggleston, President Barack Obama’s last White House counsel, suggested in an online forum last week that Trump does not merit the same measure of latitude that courts usually give presidents, especially in the areas of national security and immigration.

“The court will have to wrestle with how much to defer to a President who has created this record of chaos and animus,” Eggleston and co-author Amanda Elbogen wrote on justsecurity.org.

Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston, cautioned that the court would be breaking new ground if it were to treat Trump differently from other presidents.

The policy under review at the court applies to travelers from five countries with overwhelmingly Muslim populations — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. It also affects two non-Muslim countries: blocking travelers from North Korea and some Venezuelan government officials and their families. A sixth majority Muslim country, Chad, was removed from the list this month after improving “its identity-management and information sharing practices,” Trump said in a proclamation.

Francisco said the Chad decision shows that the restrictions are premised only on national security concerns. He also said that the State Department has cleared more than 430 visa applicants from the affected countries for waivers that would allow them to enter the U.S.

But the challengers argue that the administration cannot ask the court to ignore all that has happened.

Trump’s first travel ban was issued just a week after he took office in January 2017, and was aimed at seven countries. It triggered chaos and protests across the U.S. as travelers were stopped from boarding international flights and detained at airports for hours. Trump tweaked the order after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco refused to reinstate the ban.

The next version, announced in March 2017, dropped Iraq from the list of covered countries and made it clear the 90-day ban covering Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen didn’t apply to those travelers who already had visas. It also eliminated language that would give priority to religious minorities. Critics said the changes didn’t erase the ban’s legal problems.

The 9th Circuit and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, agreed with the ban’s opponents. The 4th Circuit said the ban “drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination.” The 9th Circuit ruled that Trump violated immigration law.

The third version is indefinite, unlike the other two, and the administration said it is the product of a thorough review of how other countries screen their own citizens and share information with the U.S.

It fared no better than its predecessors in the lower courts, but the Supreme Court said in an unsigned order in December that it could take full effect while the legal dispute continues. The justices said nothing about the substance of the policy, either in December or in earlier actions involving the ban.

Now, though, they are confronted with the administration’s view that Trump has broad discretion to impose limits on immigration and that the courts don’t even have a role to play. The Justice Department has said throughout the course of the legal fight that the lawsuits challenging the policy should be dismissed without ever reaching the challengers’ claims. The administration says that foreigners have no right to enter the United States and no right to challenge their exclusion in American courts.

Supporting briefs for the ban’s challengers dwarf filings on the administration’s side. Retired high-ranking military officers, former Republican officeholders, Catholic bishops, Amazon, Facebook and 113 other companies, the children of Japanese-Americans who were held in internment camps during World War II and more than a dozen mainly Democratic-led states are among those calling on the court to strike down the Trump policy.

The administration’s supporters include roughly the same number of Republican-led states, as well as conservative groups and Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s personal lawyers.

A decision in Trump v. Hawaii, 17-965, is expected by late June.

Weaponizing Data to Subvert Democracy

While Mark Zuckerberg tells us that the job of making Facebook secure is a “never-ending battle,” security issues—especially since 9/11—have been mirrored between the battlefields in the Middle East and the realm of social media. Now the language of protection makes as much sense when hearing about homeland security as it does when listening to Zuckerberg testify before Congress, as he did recently.

In studying various breaches of private data over the years, one common factor that emerges among many of these wide-ranging incidents is that they occurred because of human error. For instance, take the 2007 HM Revenue & Customs data breach, the largest in the United Kingdom’s history, in which two CDs containing the records of approximately 25 million child-benefit claimants—corresponding to every child in the U.K.—went missing in the mail. This benefit (common in the U.K., Canada and most European Union countries) is paid to everyone who has a child, irrespective of wealth. The error was chalked up to poorly trained employees. Last May, a massive security breach hit Equifax, one of the largest credit bureaus in the United States. That attack, in which 145.5 million consumers’ private information was hacked, was discovered more than two months after it happened. The Equifax hack, too, was chalked up to “human error and technology failures” and led to a congressional hearing in October.

So it came as a surprise when Zuckerberg revealed on April 11 that Facebook collects approximately 29,000 points of data on each of its users, in addition to the “detailed profiles on people who have never signed up for Facebook.” This means that information is collected on people regardless of their consent or location. And the bigger picture becomes clearer when we understand the interstitial interactions taking place between corporations and governments, especially in light of the recent developments with Cambridge Analytica (an offshoot of the SCL Group) and Facebook.

This story is not simply about how, in the summer of 2014, University of Cambridge quantitative psychologist Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, using a Facebook-hosted personality quiz named “This is my digital life” (also “thisismydigitallife”), was able to access the Facebook profiles of all 270,000 people who took the quiz and pass on their data to SCL/Cambridge Analytica. The reality is far more sinister. As we are now learning, the 2014 harvesting of the original data set by Kogan’s Global Science Research occurred when the application programming interface was far more porous than today. The data that was scraped afforded access to a total of 87 million Facebook users.

This information was then integrated with other data sets to build the profiles of somewhere between 30 million and 50 million U.S. voters. And it gets worse, as Paul Grewal, vice president and deputy general counsel of Facebook, detailed on March 16, saying that SCL/Cambridge Analytica is “a firm that does political, government and military work around the globe.”

You do the math.

In states such the U.K., where the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), also known as the Snooper’s Charter, has been in effect since 2017, the government has been granted enormous surveillance powers. As stipulated by the IPA, internet companies must now keep customers’ web traffic history for 12 months. The IPA also authorizes spying agencies and the police to conduct the mass hacking of personal computers, smartphones, information technology infrastructures and any electronic device. This legislation also includes the ability to intercept or unlock any software protocol that acts as a form of encryption or data protection and to intercept computer systems like computerized maintenance management system to include other preventative maintenance software. In effect, the IPA allows the British state to monitor, intercept, record and even hack internet communications, granting it sweeping powers to carry out mass digital surveillance, including “bulk hacking,” which enables police and state agencies to access and alter all types of electronic devices “on an industrial scale” even if the owners of these devices are not suspected of a crime. Some firms are even cashing in on the IPA and agencies such as the FBI, which have attempted to access such electronic devices as “GrayKey,” a new software rolled out by Grayshift to meet the needs of governments, not coincidentally headed by former U.S. intelligence agency contractors and a former Apple security engineer. All in all, the IPA is what whistleblower Edward Snowden called “the most extreme surveillance in the history of Western democracy.”

Other European countries, including Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, have adopted the IPA framework. Just last month in the Netherlands, a consultative referendum over the Intelligence and Security Services Act of 2017, also known as Sleepwet, was held along with the municipal elections. This act is similar to the U.K.’s Investigatory Powers Act, as it also expands the government’s powers to monitor all data that moves through the country’s internet infrastructure.

As a result of the referendum, Sleepwet will be amended to ensure that data is not random and is more targeted. In addition, the retention period of collected data will be shortened from three years to one year. In practice, this means that after each year, the question of whether any information found will be retained for a longer period of time will be revisited. Sleepwet has left many Dutch citizens nervous about their privacy and the possibility of bulk acquisition warrants being utilized in the near future.

What is important to remember in the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal is that this episode shows the dangers of how privacy can be invaded, information sold, laws manipulated and citizens deceived. It is also not insignificant that the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations created legislation that paved the way for companies to follow suit with their own approaches to citizens’ privacy. It’s not just the National Security Agency, but an unspoken alliance of corporations and governments that underwrite the mass surveillance of our society today.

I spoke with Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch in London, who elaborates on the interconnectivity between government and corporate surveillance, noting how the Cambridge Analytica scandal was triggered by “electoral influencing using targeted advertising” and has resulted in governments encouraging Facebook to apply more state-directed controls on its platform. Carlo believes that the more effective solution would be a “straightforward ban on targeted digital advertising … followed by the recovery of basic privacy norms both in relation to the private and public sectors.”

Noting the wide-ranging dangers posed by the combination of private industry and government surveillance, Carlo contends that social media platforms and data aggregators are posing new challenges, even redefining the terms of privacy, and that social media platforms are often “at the behest of governments.” Carlo urges that “we mustn’t ignore the fact that many Western governments are involved in a kind of neocolonial digital influencing in target states across the world, and in fact the SCL Group is a military contractor to the U.K. and NATO countries.” He concludes: “If we are serious about dealing with this problem, it is absolutely vital that we look at the bigger picture.”

The April 14 missile strikes on Syria by allied forces from the U.S., U.K. and France demonstrate precisely these links Carlo elucidated days earlier. SCL Group, self-billed as offering “data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organizations worldwide,” was paid $210,000 for the “” and for training in 2014-2015 by the Ministry of Defense. Sir Geoffrey Pattie, a former Conservative member of Parliament and the defense minister from Margaret Thatcher’s government, is president of SCL and co-founder of Terrington Management, which counts among its clients BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin. To boot, Philip May, Theresa May’s husband, works for Capital Group—the largest shareholder in the arms manufacturer BAE Systems, whose stock has soared since the strike on Syria.

The situation is not any better in the United States. Josh Weerasinghe, who was vice president of global market development at BAE Systems from 2012 to 2016, worked with Michael Flynn in his former position at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Flynn also has played an advisory role with Cambridge Analytica since 2016. What’s more, SCL holds a $500,000 contract with the U.S. State Department.

SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, is a military contractor that has had access to secret information within the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense and the U.S. State Department while mining private citizens’ data. The conflicts of interest are as horrifying as the threats to democracy painfully evident. It’s a no-brainer. This has to stop now.

Chaco Canyon, Chaco Earth

CHACO CULTURE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK, N.M.—A bitter wind whipped down the 10-mile-long Chaco Canyon, kicking up swirls of dust among the thorny greasewood and sagebrush bushes. I ducked behind one of the towering sandstone walls in the three-acre ruin, or Great House, known as Pueblo Bonito, to escape the gusts. I was in the section of the 800-room complex where burials took place. Treasure hunters and archaeologists have uncovered in these ruins and tombs delicate white-and-black painted ceramics, flutes, ceremonial sticks, tiny copper bells, inlaid bone, macaw and parrot skeletons, cylindrical jars with the residue of chocolate that would have been imported from Mexico, shells and intricate turquoise jewelry and sculptures. From this vast, bureaucratic and ceremonial complex, the Anasazi—a Navajo word meaning ancient ones or possibly ancient enemies—dominated the Southwest from about the year 850 until the society collapsed in about 1150.

The Chaco ruin, 6,200 feet above sea level, is one of the largest and most spectacular archeological sites in North America. It is an impressive array of 15 interconnected complexes, each of which once had four-to-five-story stone buildings with hundreds of rooms each. Seven-hundred-pound wooden beams, many 16 feet long, were used in the roofs. Huge circular, ceremonial kivas—religious centers dug into the earth, with low masonry benches around the base of the room to accommodate hundreds of worshippers—dot the ruins. It rivals the temples and places built by the Aztecs and the Mayans.

Radiating from Chaco is a massive 400-mile network of roads, some 30 feet wide and still visible in the haunting desert landscape, along with dams, canals and reservoirs to collect and store rainwater. The study of astronomy, as with the Aztec and the Maya, was advanced. Petroglyphs and pictographs on the canyon walls often record astrological and solar events. One pictograph shows a hand, a crescent moon and a 10-pointed star that is believed to depict a 1054 supernova, and one of the petroglyphs appears to represent a solar eclipse that occurred in 1097.

A few thousand priests and ruling elites, along their retainers and administrators, lived in the Great Houses or palaces. They oversaw the trade routes that stretched to the California coast and into Central America. They maintained the elaborate network of lighthouses whose signal fires provided rapid communication. They built the roads, the long flights of stairs carved into the rock formations, the bridges, the wooden ladders to scale the towering cliffs, and the astronomical observatories that meticulously charted the solar observations to determine the equinoxes and solstices for planting and harvesting and for the annual religious festivals when thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, would gather. The buildings in the complexes were oriented to solstitial or cardinal points, a difference the anthropologist Stephen H. Lekson believes denoted not only competing cosmologies but competing political ideologies.

“Chaco was the political capital of a well-defined region that encompassed most of the Four Corners country, with more than 150 outlying Great Houses scattered over an area about the size of Ireland,” Lekson writes.

But this complex society, like all complex societies, proved fragile and impermanent. It fell into precipitous decline after nearly three centuries. The dense forests of oak, piñon and ponderosa pines and juniper that surrounded the canyon were razed for construction and fuel. The soil eroded. Game was hunted to near-extinction. The diet shifted in the final years from deer and turkey to rabbits and finally mice. Headless mice in the late period have been found by archaeologists in human coprolites—preserved dry feces. The Anasazi’s open society, one where violence was apparently rare, where the people moved unhindered over the network of well-maintained roads, where warfare was apparently absent, where the houses of the rich and powerful were not walled off, where the population shared in the spoils of empire, was replaced with the equivalent of gated, fortified compounds for the elites and misery, hunger, insecurity and tyranny for the commoners. Dwellings began to be built in the cliffs, along with hilltop fortresses, although these residences were not close to the fields and water supply. Defensive walls were constructed along with moats and towers. The large, public religious ceremonies that once united the culture and gave it cohesion fractured, and tiny, warring religious cults took over, the archaeologist Lynne Sebastian notes.

Lekson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, believes the Anasazi rulers during the decline increasingly resorted to savage violence and terror, including the public executions of dissidents and rebels. He finds evidence, much of it documented in Steven A. LeBlanc’s book “Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest,” that “Chaco death squads” were sent out across the empire. LeBlanc writes that at Yucca House, a Chaco Great House near Mesa Verde, as many as 90 people were killed and tossed into a kiva and at least 25 showed signs of mutilation.

“Chacoan violence, concentrated and brutal, appears to represent government terror: the enforcement of Chaco’s rule by institutionalized force,” Lekson writes in the article “Chaco Death Squads” in Archeology magazine. “Violence was public, intended to appall and subdue the populace. Chacoan death squads (my term, not LeBlanc’s) executed and mutilated those judged to be threats to Chacoan power, those who broke the rules.”

The anthropologist Christy G. Turner, who specialized in osteology, the study of human bones, in his book “Man Corn” cited “cannibalism and human sacrifice as conspicuous elements of terrorism.” In short, as Lekson writes, “the death squad killed you, cut you up, and then ate you in front of your relatives and neighbors.” The term “man corn” comes from the Nahuatl word “tlacatlaolli,” which Turner defined as a “sacred meal of sacrificed human meat, cooked with corn.” Debra Martin goes on to argue in a paper titled “Violence Against Women in the La Plata River Valley, A.D. 1000-1300” (located on the periphery of the Chacoan empire) that there is evidence of battered women who were perhaps slaves.

The Anasazi elites, no longer willing or able to provide social services or competent governance and plagued by shortages of natural resources, kept extracting unsustainable tribute. They resorted to harsher and harsher forms of repression. By the end, they were hated. The civilization suffered a severe drought in the year 1130. It was the final blow. The impressive structures would lie abandoned until they were discovered by the nomadic Navajos some 600 years later. The Navajos did not reoccupy the buildings, many of which contained skeletal remains, because they believed them to be filled with evil spirits.

“Parts of Chacoan society were already in deep trouble after 1050 as health and living conditions progressively eroded in the southern districts’ open farming communities,” David E. Stuart writes in his book “Anasazi America.” “The small farmers in the south had first created reliable surpluses to be stored in the great houses. Ultimately, it was the increasingly terrible living conditions of those farmers, the people who grew the corn, that had made Chacoan society so fatally vulnerable. The farmers simply got too little back from their efforts to carry on. Thus, great-house society emphasized other trade partners and supported new, lower-cost suppliers on its northern tier. This final trade network likely was focused on the continued well-being of the elites rather than the general welfare of its regional society.”

As the economic and social situation deteriorated, the elites accelerated the building of roads and Great Houses. They held more elaborate rituals and built more kivas. This is typical of decaying societies. The great Mayan city of Tikal was constructed over a period of 1,500 years, but its most impressive temples and towers were erected during its final century. These grandiose projects and spectacles were meant to project power and immortality. They exacerbated, however, the suffering of the impoverished farmers and workers and the decline of diminishing natural resources.

“At the bitter end of the Chacoan era, many elites remained in their great houses, probably trying to hold on to the past, rather like Scarlett O’Hara trying to hold on to Tara in Gone with the Wind,” Stuart writes. “But the farmers who had brought in the corn harvests were long departed, like the slaves who had supported Tara before the Civil War. Chacoan society collapsed, the framing pillar of its once great productivity shattered. The beleaguered Chacoan farmers had buried their babies one last time. Then they abandoned Chaco Canyon and most of its outlying great houses.”

“Prosperity, social integration, altruism, and generosity go hand-in-hand,” Stuart adds. “Poverty, social conflict, judgmental cynicism, and savagery do, too.”

Collapse, as Joseph A. Tainter points out, is “a recurrent feature of human societies.” Complex societies create centralized bureaucratic structures that exploit resources until exhaustion and then prove unable to adapt to scarcity. They create more sophisticated mechanisms to extract depleted resources, evidenced in our own time by the decision of the Trump administration to open up the lands around the Chaco Culture National Historical Park to fracking. In the end, the technologies and organization that make the rise of complex societies possible become the mechanisms that destroy them.

The fate of the Anasazi replicates the fate of all complex societies. The collapse came within one or two decades after the peak. As Jared Diamond writes in “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” the trajectories of complex societies “are unlike the usual course of individual human lives, which decline in a prolonged senescence. The reason is simple: maximum population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production mean maximum environmental impact, approaching the limit where impact outstrips resources.”

“Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps,” Ronald Wright writes in “A Short History of Progress.” “A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn’t easily moved. This human inability to foresee—or watch for—long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by millions of years when we lived hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general population begin to suffer.”

We in 2018 are beset with signs of impending collapse. The droughts, wildfires, flooding, soaring temperatures, crop failures, poisoning of the soil, air and water, and social breakdown from global warming are leaving huge segments of the world’s poor without adequate food, water and security. Desperate migrants are fleeing the global south. Crisis cults carry out nihilistic acts of terrorism, often in the name of religious beliefs. Our predatory elites, who have retreated to their own versions of Anasazi Great Houses, with access to private security, private education, private medicine, private transportation, private sources of water and food and luxury items that are unavailable to the wider population, have walled out reality. Their hubris and myopia, as well as blind obedience to an ideology—global capitalism—that benefits them but accelerates social and environmental destruction, mean they have only bought a little more time before they succumb like the rest of us.

The poet V. B. Price, surveying the Chaco ruins in his poem “Time’s Common Sense,” understands the urgent message these stones impart. He writes, in part:

At Chaco I know I am not alone

I know I have heard even Homer

Weaving the tides of his stories,

And Sappho singing lullabies alone in the night,

Heard the footdrums in Rinconada

Like ancient surf through the stone.

This is the place

Where the past remains.

Utterly changed,

the landscape

is the same.

The future happens so fast,

It’s too fast to dread.

And now

the future is as good

as already over again.

There is one crucial difference between the Anasazi and our complex society. The collapse of past civilizations like the Anasazi’s was localized. There were always new lands to conquer, new natural resources to plunder and new peoples to subjugate. Our age is different. There is no new world left.

We can no longer live on the capital of the natural world and instead must learn to make do with the interest. This means the end to reliance on fossil fuels and the animal agriculture industry. It means adopting a simplicity that rejects the ethos of capitalism and the hedonism and gluttony that define the consumer society. It means a communal society in which inequality and income disparity are not extreme. If we continue to live as if the future does not matter, our society, like that of the Anasazi, will fracture and die. We will vanish from the earth in an act of global suicide.

The human species faces its greatest existential crisis. Yet, our elites replicate the imbecility, arrogance and greed of past elites. They hoard wealth. They shut us out from circles of power. They use brutal forms of repression to maintain control. They exhaust and poison the ecosystem. The longer the corporate elites rule, the longer we fail to revolt, the less chance we have to endure as a species. Settled or civilized life is less than 10,000 years old. Our peculiar human social construction is but a nanosecond to the universe. It may prove to be a brief and fatal experiment. Perhaps, as Franz Kafka wrote, “There is hope; though not for us.”

Earth Day: Conflict Over the Future of the Planet

On this Earth Day, it is difficult to look at the state of the planet and the current political leadership and see much hope. In “Junk Planet”, Robert Burrowes writes a comprehensive description of the degradation of the atmosphere, oceans, waterways, groundwater, and soil as well as the modern pollution of antibiotic waste, genetic engineering, nanowaste, space junk, military waste and nuclear, a description of a planet degraded by pollution impacting our bodies and health as well as the planet’s future.

Burrowes includes another form of waste, junk information, that denies reality, e.g. climate change, the dangers of extreme energy extraction and food polluted by genetic engineering, pesticides, and depleted soils. This false reporting results in policies that create a risk of ecosystem collapse.

Political and economic elites want people to believe these problems do not exist. Those in power seek to protect profits from dirty energy rather than transition to 100 percent clean energy. They seek to protect agribusiness food, pesticides, and genetically modified foods rather than transform food to organic, locally grown foods using regenerative agriculture. They deny the reality of environmental racism rather than correct decades of racism and provide reparations. They seek to put profits ahead of the health and necessities of people as well as ahead of protecting and restoring the planet.

Despite this, a growing portion of the public understands these realities and is taking action to challenge the system. People know, for example, as activist Steven Norris writes, that they should be concerned about the impact of carbon infrastructure on their communities and the planet.

Recently, David Buckel, a nationally known advocate for gay rights and the environment, died in a self-immolation suicide as a wake-up call to save the planet. He wrote in a note, “Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather. Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result – my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”

The undertow being created by organized resistance is growing, and so is the push back against it. In order for this conflict to be resolved, the conflict must be heightened as is occurring now.

People Power Escalates

As we write this, tree-sits are growing in West Virginia where people are putting their bodies on the line to prevent the destruction of trees and habitat to build the Mountain Valley pipeline for fracked gas. In Virginia, Red Terry started a tree-sit on Easter weekend to protect her land from destruction. She remains, despite the company with law enforcement support denying her food and water — something illegal against prisoners or during war. As trees are felled she remains, as do protesters in Pennsylvania, who are also doing tree-sits. Their stubborn courageous should encourage each of us.

In Louisiana, a water protector locked herself into a cement-filled barrel placed in the trench of a horizontal directional drill to block construction of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline. Eleanor Goldfield reports this is part of the Battle of the Bayou, a coalition of groups and individuals standing against the destruction of a fragile environment, facing arrest and creating a future together.

In Maryland, people blocked construction then escalated to a tractor blockade to prevent the construction of a compressor station that will bring fracked gas from the Mid-Atlantic to the Dominion export terminal in southern Maryland. People who fought the export terminal for years are now joining with neighboring counties fighting gas infrastructure and mounting a campaign against the Maryland Department of the Environment as Governor Hogan pushes $100 million in gas infrastructure.

People are taking protests to corporate offices as a busload of Lancaster, PA people did when they brought a 12 foot stretch of pipeline to a meeting room, singing songs and chanting, asking “How does it feel to be invaded?” In Bellevue Washington, protesters constructed a small longhouse blocking the main entrance to the corporate headquarters of an energy company.

California’s Governor Jerry Brown was protested when he came to speak at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Hundreds of people protested Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania over his pro-fracking policies. More politicians will be held accountable in this election year by angry constituents.

The industry recognizes that pipeline protesters are having an impact.  Canada is having a hard time moving tar sands and fracked gas because protests are stopping pipeline investment. Oil companies are successfully being pressured to examine the risks to the environment and human rights from their actions. Washington activists defeated the largest oil-train terminal in the nation.

Protests are successfully resulting in cities divesting from banks who fund fossil fuel projects. Europe’s largest bank, HSBC just announced it will no longer fund oil or gas projects in the Arctic, tar sands projects, or most coal projects. Corporations realize they are investing in stranded assets that may not pay off and they may be held legally accountable for causing climate change.

Litigation Raises Risks

Corporations and the federal government are facing lawsuits from individuals, organizations and state and local governments over climate change and environmental degradation. Protesters are using the courts to underscore the urgent necessity for action by using a climate necessity defense. Courts are beginning to accept it, but protesters willingly understand they risk incarceration.

ExxonMobil is facing a raft of litigation arguing the company was aware of climate risks but continued to mislead the public and to pollute. State and local governments are seeking damages and calling for a federal criminal investigation. Litigation highlights the science of climate change and demonstrates how oil giants made immense profits while billions of dollars of cost from climate change, e.g. immense storms and sea level rise, are borne by individuals and governments. Most suits were brought by coastal communities but recently Colorado communities are suing oil corporations over climate change-caused droughts and fires.

ExxonMobil tried to stop state investigations in Massachusetts, New York, and Texas over misleading investors for years about climate change risks. The judge issued a sharp rebuke with prejudice preventing an appeal and allowing the investigations to continue. Oil companies are no doubt behind new legislation in states to give severe penalties to people protesting “critical infrastructure”.

Future generations from Our Children’s Trust have brought eight suits against the federal government over the destruction of the environment claiming a public trust over the atmosphere. A suit filed by 21 youth in Washington has overcome government efforts to dismiss the case and will be going to trial after both the trial court and Ninth Circuit rejected the government.

Environmental racism is also being challenged. Recently a court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency violated the Civil Rights Act for decades of inaction over complaints filed by residents of Flint, MI. Hundreds of complaints about environmental racism have been made to the EPA. An ultimate case of racism is coming up in the Supreme Court when it considers whether the United States must abide by treaties made with Indigenous Peoples. The long history of racism from the founding of the US by colonizing land inhabited by millions, followed by ethnic cleansing of the Indigenous who lived there is on trial. If treaties are law, as they should be, this will empower Indigenous People more.

Change Is Being Created, Transformation Is Coming

The undertow of protest is having an impact. Corporations fear they will be held accountable for the damage they have done. Governments and elected officials are aware the people are angry and their careers can end with the new political culture created by people power.

The beginning of change always begins with education and changing ourselves. While we know, systemic change is necessary, people are also educating themselves about their own own lifestyles. Thirty-six-year-old Daniel Webb was conscious of the dangers of plastic and decided to keep all of his plastic for a year gathering 4,490 items, 93% were single-use plastic, and just 8 were biodegradable. He made a mural of his plastic to educate others.

The US uses 500 million plastic straws every day. Whenever we order a drink, we rquest no straws and share this fact. This consciousness has permeated the culture, now many restaurants only bring straws when asked, and people are organizing “Don’t Suck”  and “Be Straw Free” campaigns to eliminate plastic straws.

More people spend their money consciously using it to buy organic and local, eating less meat and boycotting factory farm foods. We have more power with our dollar than with our vote in a manipulated “democracy” disguised as an oligarchy.

People are also making changes at the community level. Edmonston, a working-class town with a median income of $19,000 in Maryland, took  small steps to going green. In the early 2000s to ameliorate stormwater flooding, they gradually remade their town into a green town, empty lots turned into community gardens and  rain barrels were added. Now they have permeable pavement, solar panels, fruit trees for food and native plant landscapes with leaves collected by the city and composted.

In Brooklyn, people began reclaiming land with a vacant lot turned into a nearly 2-acre community space with garden beds, an outdoor movie screening area, a pumpkin patch, and an educational production and research farm. They then got data on vacant lots in the city and put bi-lingual signs on them that said: “This land is your land” and told people how to get control of the area, linking them to a website to help. Since 2011, communities have transformed over 200 sites. Municipalization, or fearless cities, may be a key for creating change toward socializing energy into a public service resulting in transformative cities. These changes are not only about the environment and climate justice but are also about economic, racial and social justice.

Despite the government continuing to invest in dirty energy, clean energy is growing. Wind farming is creating jobs in red states like Texas. The Solar Foundation mapped solar jobs by congressional district as solar is the fastest growing source of new energy. Research has been developed on a state-by-state basis to make the United States 100% renewable by 2050, with a national mobilization it could happen more quickly.

There are many challenges at the national level with corrupt federal agencies tied to polluting industries, but people pressure is still having an impact. The Federal Energy Regulatory System (FERC) which has been in bed with the oil, gas, and nuclear industries since its founding, indeed it is funded by those industries, has been the focus of a more than four-year pressure campaign by Beyond Extreme Energy. This June 23-25 they will be holding a Crack the FERC protest campaign to escalate pressure. The protest coincides with the Poor People’s Campaign as addressing the environmental crisis [being] linked to economic inequality, racism, and other issues.

The environmental crisis and the mishandling of climate change are issues that are going to make the 2020s a decade of transformational change. In order for people to create transformative changes, we need a well-educated activist community.

Will Congress Write Trump a Blank Check for War?

On Monday, April 23, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is set to review a bill that would virtually give President Donald J. Trump a blank check to wage war anywhere in the world any time he pleases.

The Constitution places the power to declare war exclusively in the hands of the Congress. However, for the past 75 years, Congress has allowed that power to drift toward the executive branch.

The new bill, should it pass, would effectively make the transfer of the war power from Congress to the president complete. It is hard to imagine a worse time in American history for this to happen.

Why Only Congress Has the Power to Declare War

The framers of the Constitution were well aware of the dangers of placing the power to declare war in the hands of the president. Delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention overwhelmingly rejected South Carolina delegate Pierce Butler’s proposal that the president be given the power to start a war, according to James Madison’s notes on the congressional debates. George Mason said he was “against giving the power of war to the executive” because the president “is not safely to be trusted with it.”

The framers of the Constitution therefore specified in Article I that only Congress has the power to declare war. Article II states, “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.” Those articles, taken together, mean the president commands the armed forces once Congress authorizes war.

In spite of its exclusive constitutional power, Congress has not declared war since 1942. After that time, starting with President Truman, a series of US presidents committed American troops to hostilities around the world without waiting for Congress to act. Following the debacle in Vietnam, Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution in an effort to reclaim its constitutional authority to decide when and where the nation would go to war.

The War Powers Resolution allows the president to introduce US Armed Forces into hostilities or imminent hostilities only after Congress has declared war, or in “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces,” or when there is “specific statutory authorization,” such as an Authorization for the Use of Military Force.

The 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force

Congress enacted Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) in 2001 and 2002, which were directed at al-Qaeda and Iraq, respectively. Although these authorizations were limited, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump have all used them to justify attacking or invading whatever country they wished.

In the 2001 AUMF, Congress authorized the president to use military force against individuals, groups and countries that were seen as having supported the 9/11 attacks. Congress rejected the Bush administration’s request for open-ended military authority “to deter and preempt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States.”

Nevertheless, the 2001 AUMF has been used to justify at least 37 military operations in 14 countries, according to the Congressional Research Service. Many of them were unrelated to the 9/11 attacks.

Bush utilized the 2001 AUMF to invade Afghanistan and initiate the longest war in US history, which continues unabated. Obama relied on that AUMF to lead a NATO force into Libya and forcibly change its regime, creating a vacuum that ISIS moved in to fill. Obama invoked the same AUMF to carry out targeted killings with drones and manned bombers, killing untold numbers of civilians. And Trump is relying on that AUMF as justification for his drone strikes, which have killed thousands of civilians.

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California), the only member of Congress to vote against the 2001 AUMF, was prescient. In July 2017, Lee said, “I knew then it would provide a blank check to wage war anywhere, anytime, for any length by any president.” Lee told Democracy Now! in 2016 that she knew the 2001 AUMF “was setting the stage and the foundation for perpetual war. And that is exactly what it has done.”

Congress granted Bush the 2002 AUMF specifically to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Once that was accomplished, that license ended. So, the 2002 AUMF does not provide an ongoing legal basis for US to engage in military action.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Ben Cardin (D-Maryland) stated at an October 2017 hearing that the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs have now become “mere authorities of convenience for presidents to conduct military activities anywhere in the world,” adding, “They should not be used as the legal justification for military activities around the world.”

At that 2017 hearing, Defense Secretary James Mattis and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Trump had sufficient legal authority to kill people in any part of the world he desired. They cited the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs, as well as Article II of the Constitution. With an abundance of political caution, however, Mattis and Tillerson invited Congress to enact a new AUMF with no temporal or geographical limitations.

At his April 12 confirmation hearing, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, told Sen. Cory Booker that Trump had legal authority to bomb Syria without congressional approval. Pompeo testified, “I believe that he has the authority he needs to do that today. I don’t believe we need a new AUMF for the president to engage in the activity you described.”

The following day, the US, United Kingdom and France launched airstrikes in Syria. Like Trump’s 2017 Syria bombing, they violated both US and international law. The Trump administration persists in its refusal to reveal the memo that purportedly explains its legal justification for the 2017 bombing of Syria.

Attempts in Congress to repeal and/or replace the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs have thus far been unsuccessful. But Mattis and Tillerson may now get their wish.

Authorization for the Use of Military Force of 2018

On April 16, 2018, a bipartisan group of senators introduced a new AUMF to replace the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) and Democratic committee member Tim Kaine (Virginia) sponsored the proposed legislation. Co-sponsors include Senators Jeff Flake (R-Arizona), Christopher Coons (D-Delaware), Todd Young (R-Indiana) and Bill Nelson (D-Florida).

The 2018 AUMF would authorize the president to use military force, with no limitations, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia. It would also allow the president to take military action against al-Qaeda, ISIS and the Taliban, as well as their “associated forces” in any geographical location.

If the president wants to add countries or groups to his hit list, he must report to Congress. However, he can withhold whatever information he says is classified, as Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty & National Security Program at the NYU School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice, has noted.

And although the president cannot add nation-states to the list of countries he wants to attack, he could circumvent that limitation by claiming that terrorists are operating in a new country, or say a particular country is a state sponsor of terrorism, and he needs to use military force to fight terrorism.

The president must notify Congress within 48 hours of expanding his military operations into countries beyond the six listed in the AUMF or “new designated associated forces.” If Congress doesn’t object within 60 days, the president’s expansion will stand.

Alarmingly, the new bill contains a presumption that the president can decide when and where to make war. It would require affirmative action by two-thirds of both houses of Congress to prevent military action.

The bill has no expiration date. Every four years, the president would be required to send Congress a proposal to modify, repeal or maintain the authorization. But if Congress does not respond in 60 days, the AUMF would remain in force. Once again, it places the burden on Congress to take action.

In light of Congress’s failure to meaningfully object to presidential uses of military force, including most recently in Syria, a president should have no concern about congressional pushback. He could continue to make war with impunity, cashing the blank check Congress has provided him.

The proposed AUMF would violate the United Nations Charter. The charter requires that countries settle their disputes peacefully, and forbids the use of military force except when conducted in self-defense or with the blessing of the Security Council. The new AUMF would allow the president to attack or invade another country with no requirement that the attack or invasion be conducted in self-defense or with the council’s permission. It would thus violate the charter.

What’s Next?

Corker has scheduled a committee hearing on the proposed legislation for Monday, April 23. But even if the bill passes out of committee, there is no guarantee it will get a hearing on the floor of the Senate or the House. Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan have shown little appetite for allowing discussion of a new AUMF.

The 2001 and 2002 AUMFs should be repealed, and Congress should not give the president a new one. As George Mason sagely said, a president “is not safely to be trusted” with the power of war.

Israeli Politician Calls for Stripping Natalie Portman of Citizenship

“Annihilation” star Natalie Portman replied to the controversy stirred by her declining to attend the Genesis Foundation awards ceremony in Jerusalem in June because of her distress at “recent events” (the shooting down of unarmed protesters in Gaza by Israeli snipers at the order of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu).

She wrote at Instagram:

“Let me speak for myself. I chose not to attend because I did not want to appear as endorsing Benjamin Netanyahu, who was to be giving a speech at the ceremony. Like many Israelis and Jews around the world, I can be critical of the leadership in Israel without wanting to boycott the entire nation. I treasure my Israeli friends and family, Israeli food, books, art, cinema, and dance.’”

She added “But the mistreatment of those suffering from today’s atrocities is simply not in line with my Jewish values.”

She appears to be characterizing the Likud Party’s punitive treatment of the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza, which the Israelis have blockaded since 2007, as an ongoing atrocity and to be characterizing the assassination by Israeli marksmen of the protesters as mistreatment.

 

Prominent Likud Party member of the Israeli Parliament Oren Hazan, a former casino manager in Bulgaria, said,

“[She is] a Jewish Israeli, who on the one hand cynically uses her birthplace to advance her career and on the other is proud of the fact that she managed to avoid enlisting in the IDF [euphemism for the Israeli Army]. She’s an actress, but she is unworthy of any honor in the State of Israel. … Sweetness can come from strength: I call on Interior Minister Aryeh Deri (Shas) to rescind Portman’s Israeli citizenship. She left Israel at age four, and has no real connection to the State.”

Hazan denies that there are any Palestinians, and is notorious for harassing families of Palestinians going to see imprisoned relatives (some Palestinians have been imprisoned for writing poetry or for Facebook posts, while several hundred children are being held for acts of protest against the Israeli military). He told one bus full of relatives that their loved ones would never see the light of day:

Political scientist Ian Lustick has estimated that there are as many as 1 million Israeli Jews living outside Israel, out of the alleged 6 million Israeli Jews (and 2 million Palestinian-Israelis). It is possible that they or significant numbers of them are being counted in the Israeli official statistics so as to make the Jewish population look larger than it is on the ground. Perhaps Hazan should strip them all of citizenship?

Syria Pummels Islamic State-Held Districts in Damascus

DAMASCUS, Syria—Syrian government forces used warplanes, helicopters and artillery on Sunday to pound districts of the capital held by the Islamic State group, in a bid to enforce an evacuation deal reached with the militants earlier in the week.

The militants agreed to give up their last pocket in southern Damascus on Friday but have yet to begin surrendering to government forces and relocating to IS-held areas elsewhere in the country.

State-run al-Ikhbariya TV showed thick gray smoke billowing from the IS-held Hajar al-Aswad neighborhood on Sunday, and government warplanes streaking overhead amid heavy bombardment of the area. Hundreds of IS fighters and allied militants are holed up in Hajar al-Aswad and the nearby Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp.

Residents of Damascus reported hearing loud booms throughout the night and Sunday morning.

President Bashar Assad has escalated his military campaign to retake all remaining enclaves in the capital and surrounding areas. The IS-held areas in southern Damascus are the last holdouts, after rebels evacuated the eastern Ghouta suburbs following a fierce government offensive and an alleged poison gas attack in the town of Douma.

Chemical weapons inspectors collected samples from Douma on Saturday, two weeks after the suspected gas attack there prompted retaliatory strikes by Western powers on the Syrian government’s chemical facilities.

The site visit, confirmed by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, will allow the agency to proceed with an independent investigation to determine what chemicals, if any, were used in the April 7 attack that medical workers said killed more than 40 people. The OPCW mission is not mandated to apportion to blame for the attack.

Douma was the final target of the government’s sweeping campaign to seize back control of eastern Ghouta from rebels after seven years of revolt. Militants gave up the town days after the alleged attack.

The Syrian government and its ally Russia denied responsibility for the suspected chemical attack.

Meanwhile, rebels have begun evacuating three towns in the eastern Qalamoun region in the Damascus countryside.

Al-Ikhbariya TV said that 35 buses left the towns of Ruhaiba, Jayroud, and al-Nasriya on Saturday carrying hundreds of rebels and their families to opposition-held territory in northern Syria.

The station said the evacuations would continue for three days.

Chinese Auto Show Signals Ambitions to Go Electric

BEIJING—The biggest global auto show of the year showcases China’s ambitions to become a leader in electric cars and the industry’s multibillion-dollar scramble to roll out models that appeal to price-conscious but demanding Chinese drivers.

Auto China 2018, which opens this week, follows Beijing’s decision to allow full foreign ownership of Chinese automakers in a move to make the industry more flexible as it promotes electrics.

The ruling Communist Party has transformed China into the biggest market for electrics with billions of dollars in subsidies to producers and buyers. Now, Beijing is winding down that support and shifting the financial burden to automakers with sales quotas that push them to develop models Chinese drivers want to buy.

That is reflected in the auto show lineup: Global and Chinese brands including General Motors Co., Volkswagen AG and Nissan Motor Co. plan to display dozens of electrics and hybrids, from luxurious SUVs to compacts priced as low as 152,000 yuan ($24,000).

Communist leaders see electric cars as both a way to clean up smog-choked cities and a key ingredient in plans to transform China into a global competitor in an array of technology fields from robotics to solar power to biotech.

“Just in the last two or three years, China rose from being a very small player in the global EV market to be nearly 50 percent of sales in 2017,” said Christopher Robinson, who follows the industry for Lux Research.

“It attracted nearly every automaker in the world,” said Robinson.

Starting in 2019, automakers will be required to earn credits by selling electrics or else buy them from competitors. More stringent fuel efficiency standards will require a big share of each brand’s sales to be non-gasoline models.

Global automakers say electrics should account for 35 to over 50 percent of their China sales by 2025.

“There is huge potential for vehicle electrification here,” said Roland Krueger, chairman of Infiniti Motor Co., Nissan’s luxury brand.

Chinese sales of electrics and gasoline-electric hybrids rose 154 percent in the first quarter over a year earlier to 143,000 units, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. That compares with sales of just under 200,000 for all of last year in the United States, the No. 2 market.

GM plans to display five all-electric vehicles including a concept Buick SUV it says can travel 600 kilometers (375 miles) on one charge, plus a hybrid Cadillac XT5 28E.

The Detroit automaker, which vies with VW for the status of China’s biggest brand, is launching 10 electrics or hybrids in China from in 2016 to 2020.

VW is due to launch 15 electrics and hybrids in the next two to three years as part of a 10 billion euro ($12 billion) development plan announced in November.

Nissan is unveiling an electric model at the auto show designed for China and will display an updated version of its Leaf and an electric concept car.

The Japanese automaker also plans to develop a lower-priced electric with a local partner, state-owned Dongfeng Motor Co. Two more versions of that are to be sold under their jointly owned Venucia brand.

China’s BYD Auto, the biggest global maker of electrics by volume with 2017 sales of 113,669 units, plans to unveil two new hybrid SUVs and an electric concept car. The company also plans to display nine other hybrid and plug-in electric models.

Infiniti plans to display a concept sedan, the Q Inspiration, that Krueger said will be the basis for future electric models.

The sleek Q Inspiration has no air-drawing engine, and thus no front grill — a change Krueger said was suggested by Chinese designers at Infiniti’s Beijing studio.

The car has the roomier back seat that has become standard among luxury brands that want to appeal to Chinese customers who have a driver and ride in back.

“The first car is going to cater specifically to the needs of the Chinese market,” said Krueger.

Ford Motor Co. has announced a “product onslaught” this month for China that includes at least 15 electrified vehicles and 35 other models through 2025. Ford’s first plug-in hybrid in China, the Mondeo Energi, went on sale last month.

Washington and other trading partners have been irked by the Chinese controls that required global automakers to work through state-owned local partners and imposed other restrictions.

Automakers complained joint ventures were cumbersome and expensive but complied because they gained access to a market that passed the United States in 2009 as the world’s biggest.

Last year’s sales of SUVs, sedans and minivans totaled 24.7 million units, compared with 17.2 million for the United States.

The Cabinet’s planning agency announced last week Beijing will loosen those controls by allowing full foreign ownership in the industry, starting with electric vehicle producers this year. Limits for commercial vehicles would end in 2020 and for all passenger vehicles in 2022.

That would end a 50 percent cap on foreign ownership of an auto venture, a limit that required automakers to share technology with potential competitors, adding to President Donald Trump’s trade complaints against Beijing.

“Now you’re going to see the difference between the partners that you want and partners imposed on you,” said Carlos Ghosn, chairman of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance.

Ghosn said his companies were happy with their Chinese partners. But he said with electrics, autonomous driving and other innovations give companies a new chance to consider a partnership or work independently.

“Every time there is a new opportunity we’re going to consider, should we go with a partner? What are the advantages? Or should we go by ourself?” said Ghosn. “This is a new freedom for carmakers, which is welcome.”

Still, while electrics may be China’s future, most brands lose money making them. Profits come from sales of SUVs that are wildly popular with Chinese drivers who see them as the safest option on the country’s rough, chaotic roads.

First-quarter SUVs sales rose 11.3 percent over a year earlier to 2.6 million, or almost 45 percent of all auto sales, according to CAAM. Electrics accounted for just over 2 percent.

___

AP Business Writer Kelvin Chan in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

Actor Verne Troyer of ‘Mini-Me’ Fame Is Dead at 49

LOS ANGELES—Verne Troyer, who played Dr. Evil’s small, silent sidekick “Mini-Me” in the “Austin Powers” movie franchise, has died. He was 49.

A statement provided by Troyer’s representatives that was also posted to his Instagram and Facebook accounts said the actor died Saturday.

No cause of death was given, but the statement describes Troyer as a “fighter” who was unable to overcome a recent bout of adversity then goes on to discuss depression and suicide.

“Over the years he’s struggled and won, struggled and won, struggled and fought some more, but unfortunately this time was too much,” the statement said. “Depression and suicide are very serious issues. You never know what kind of battle someone is going through inside. Be kind to one another. And always know, it’s never too late to reach out to someone for help.”

Troyer became a celebrity and pop-culture phenomenon after starring alongside Mike Myers as “Mini-Me,” the tiny, hairless clone of villain Dr. Evil in two of the three “Austin Powers” films.

“Verne was the consummate professional and a beacon of positivity for those of us who had the honor of working with him,” Myers said in a statement. “It is a sad day, but I hope he is in a better place. He will be greatly missed.”

Troyer appeared in 1999’s “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” and 2002’s “Austin Powers in Goldmember,” in which “Mini-Me” switches sides and becomes a miniature version of Powers. Both hero and villain were played by Myers, who also put Troyer in his 2008 film “The Love Guru.”

He also played the banker goblin Griphook in 2001’s “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and appeared on dozens of TV shows including “Boston Public,” ”Sabrina the Teenage Witch” and “MADtv.”

Troyer was born in 1969 in Sturgis, Michigan, with achondroplasia, a genetic condition that kept him less than 3 feet tall.

“Even though his stature was small and his parents often wondered if he’d be able to reach up and open doors on his own in his life, he went on to open more doors for himself and others than anyone could have imagined,” the statement said. “He inspired people around the world with his drive, determination, and attitude. . . He also touched more people’s hearts than he will ever know.”

Troyer was baptized surrounded by his family during his recent struggles, the statement said. No place of death was given, but he lived in Los Angeles.

Actress Marlee Matlin was among those who paid tribute on Twitter, posting a picture of him and saying he worked with her to raise money for free hearing aids for the deaf and hard-of-hearing.

“So sad to read of the passing of Verne Troyer,” Matlin tweeted, saying Troyer had a “lovely smile with a caring and big heart.”