Chris Hedges's Blog, page 78

Progressives Need a United Front for Warren and Sanders

We’re now seven weeks away from the Iowa caucuses, the first voting in the Democratic presidential race. After that, frontloaded primaries might decide the nominee by late spring. For progressives torn between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — or fervently committed to one of them — choices on how to approach the next few months could change the course of history.

As a kindred activist put it to me when we crossed paths last weekend, “Bernie speaks our language”—a shorthand way of saying that the Bernie 2020 campaign is a fight for a truly transformative and humanistic future. “Not me. Us.”

I actively support Bernie because his voice is ours for genuine democracy and social justice. Hearing just a few minutes from a recent Bernie speech is a reminder of just how profoundly that is true.

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At the same time, many thoughtful and well-informed progressives are supporting Warren. While I’m wary of the conventional foreign-policy outlook that she laid out early this year and reaffirmed days ago, there’s much to applaud in Warren’s record and proposals on economic and social issues. Notwithstanding her declaration of being “a capitalist to my bones,” Warren has earned corporate America’s hostility.

Overall, Wall Street despises Elizabeth Warren. With some exceptions, the titans of “the Street” are highly averse to her regulatory agenda, fear her plans such as a wealth tax, and definitely don’t want her to become president.

What’s more, the power structure of top corporate Democrats is out to crush the Warren campaign as well as the Sanders campaign. Not coincidentally, corporate media attacks rose along with Warren’s poll numbers. The corporate system’s antipathy toward her isn’t as high as it is toward Sanders, but it’s pretty damn high.

Meanwhile, powerful status-quo interests are eager to see acrimony develop between Sanders and Warren forces.

“The year began with a weak-looking Sen. Elizabeth Warren posing no threat to Sanders; by summer, Warren had jumped past Sanders and the rest of the field,” the Washington Post’s David Weigel noted days ago. “Now, with Warren’s momentum fading, the two Democrats most broadly acceptable to the left have been splitting endorsements and capturing separate swaths of the electorate.”

Let’s face it. Supporters of Sanders and Warren will probably need each other if one of them is going to win the nomination.

Scenarios for Sanders or Warren to ultimately go it alone at the mid-July national convention in Milwaukee are unlikely. Much more probable is a necessity of teaming up to combine the leverage of their delegates.

In the shorter term, given the structure and rules of the Iowa caucuses coming up on February 3, tacit teamwork between Sanders and Warren supporters would benefit both while undermining the corporate Democrats in contention.

The approach taken so far by Sanders and Warren on the campaign trail suggests how their supporters ought to proceed in relation to each other—illuminating real and important differences without rancor, while teaming up to fend off policy attacks from corporate-backed opponents.

What continues to be in effect between Sanders and Warren—and what is needed among their supporters on the ground—is the equivalent of a nonaggression pact. At the same time, we should be willing to draw clear distinctions between the policy positions of those two candidates.

The need is for supporters to openly explain reasons for preferring Warren or Sanders while avoiding the start of a mutual demolition derby. In the process of strengthening progressive forces, it’s vital to defeat corporate Democrats, before proceeding to defeat Donald Trump.

“Electability” can be debated endlessly, but anyone claiming total certainty as to which candidate would be more likely to beat Trump is overreaching. At the same time, the need for a Sanders-Warren united front should be clear—as clear as the imperative of rolling back the monstrous right-wing power that has controlled the presidency during the last three years.

Media Taking Notice as Sanders Surges in New Polls

Bernie Sanders refuses to be counted out of the Democratic primary field, and, based on two recent polls, it appears that voters are backing him up.

After he was hospitalized for a heart attack in October, pundits questioned whether Sanders should continue his campaign. The Washington Post observed that the incident raised questions about his age, reminding readers that he is 78. Politico media writer Jack Shafer wrote at the time that if America had a version of the 25th Amendment that applied to presidential candidates (not just to presidents), “we would be talking right now about subtracting Bernie Sanders from the campaign trail until he proves himself physically fit to assume the powers of [the] chief executive of the United States.”

Instead, Sanders has bounced back stronger than ever, according to two new polls. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll released Monday shows that even in the crowded Democratic primary field, 22% of respondents said they would vote for Sanders. Joe Biden came in first place, at 24%. Together, they have the support of almost half of Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent respondents. Elizabeth Warren came in third place, at 17%. Pete Buttigieg was fourth, at 13%.

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The survey wasn’t the only good polling news for Sanders in the past week. In a survey of California Democratic voters by the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies, 24% of respondents said they prefer Sanders over Warren (22%), Biden (14%) and Buttigieg (12%).

Mark DiCamillo, director of the UC Berkeley poll, told the Los Angeles Times that “the race is really unusually fluid.” In terms of specific candidate qualities, the Times observers, Sanders was respondents’ top choice in three areas: “being the candidate who would bring the right kind of change to Washington (28%), the one who comes closest to sharing voters’ values (27%) and the candidate who best understands the problems of ‘people like you’ (28%).”

Media outlets are taking notice of this upswing in public opinion, with BuzzFeed and Politico releasing Sanders-focused features on the same day. BuzzFeed’s piece is a profile of the candidate; Politico’s is an analysis of what a Sanders administration and governing style might look like. While it might seem early to plan a Cabinet, as David Siders explains in Politico, “If the 2016 election taught the political class anything, it’s that the old limits of plausibility no longer apply, and the prospect of a Sanders presidency is worth taking seriously.”

The BuzzFeed profile suggests that the Sanders campaign is deploying a strategy related to its new slogan: “Not me, us.” The plan, writer Ruby Cramer implies, is to get away from the perception that Sanders is focused only on himself, and instead present a message that emphasizes his campaign as a broader social movement aiming to fight economic inequality.

“There’s this idea that Bernie Sanders is ‘a man of the people who doesn’t like people’—just issues,” Cramer explains. “That’s not exactly right, though the precise balance between the two can be difficult to pin down.”

Cramer recounts how, in 1990, Sanders told his press secretary, “Some people say I am very hard to work with,” according to that former staffer’s memoir. “They say I can be a real son of a bitch. They say I can be nasty, I don’t know how to get along with people. … Well, maybe there’s some truth to it.”

According to Cramer’s conversations with Sanders’ staff and supporters, as well as outside experts, he is countering that narrative by balancing the giant rallies typical of his 2016 campaign with more discussion-oriented town hall events, where attendees can share their stories not only with the candidate, but with each other, building a sense of togetherness and collective power. The campaign also is focusing on sharing people’s stories of struggle under an unequal economic system, rather than simply Sanders’ own. It is also releasing campaign ads and videos featuring stories of families struggling to pay their rent, deal with medical debt or pay for college.

“The stories he collects and broadcasts across the internet aren’t just voter testimonials produced to validate the campaign or its policies—they’re aimed, in Bernie’s mind, at people validating one another,” Cramer writes.

As for Sanders’ governing style, Siders writes in Politico that his aides imagine:

… a government driven by impatience, one that sees itself with a mandate to confront climate change vigorously, to shore up the nation’s labor unions and defend its immigrant populations. Maybe there won’t really be Medicare for All, thanks to Mitch McConnell and a Republican Senate, but they at least see less expensive prescription drugs and health care for more people than currently have it.

With two months to go until the first primaries and three until Super Tuesday, there is plenty of time for the narrative to change, but whatever happens, it looks like the media might finally have to take Sanders seriously.

Bipartisan Spending Deal Could End Freeze on Gun Research

WASHINGTON—A bipartisan deal on a government spending bill would for the first time in two decades provide money for federal research on gun safety. A law adopted in the 1990’s has effectively blocked such research and prohibits federal agencies from engaging in advocacy on gun-related issues.

The spending bill, set for a House vote as soon as Tuesday, would provide $25 million for gun violence research, divided evenly between the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Nearly seven years to the day after we lost 20 beautiful children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary” in Newtown, Connecticut, “we are finally making progress in Congress to reduce gun violence,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., chairwoman of the labor and health subcommittee of the House Appropriations panel.

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“The epidemic of gun violence is a public health emergency. Yet, for more than two decades, Congress has failed to provide any meaningful reforms,” DeLauro said in a statement.

The new funding for NIH and CDC “will help us better understand the correlation between domestic violence and gun violence, how Americans can more safely store guns and how we can intervene to reduce suicide by firearms,” DeLauro said.

The agreement follows approval of language last year clarifying that the so-called Dickey Amendment does not prohibit federal spending on gun research, as had been widely argued by gun rights supporters. The 1996 law, named after former Republican Rep. Jay Dickey of Arkansas, has been the focus of a political fight for more than two decades, and the CDC largely abandoned gun research in the wake of its passage.

Dickey, who died in 2017, argued in recent years that research on gun violence was needed.

Gun control supporters hailed the agreement on gun-research funding as an important breakthrough.

The announcement “is a huge victory in our nation’s commitment to addressing and solving the gun violence epidemic,” said Christian Heyne, vice president of the Brady gun safety group.

“Students graduating from college this spring have never lived in a United States where the federal government studied this issue. That ends today,” Heyne said. The National Rifle Association pushed for the 1996 Dickey law but maintains it does not oppose gun research. Instead the group says it opposes research that is biased, flimsy or aimed at advocacy.

Ohio Rejected Thousands of Absentee Ballot Applications Last Year

COLUMBUS, Ohio—Thousands of Ohio voters were held up or stymied in their efforts to get absentee ballots for last year’s general election because of missing or mismatched signatures on their ballot applications, an Associated Press review has found.

The signature requirement on such applications is a largely overlooked and spottily tracked step in Ohio’s voting process, which has shifted increasingly to mail-in ballots since early, no-fault absentee voting was instituted in 2005.

To supporters, the requirement is a useful form of protection against voter fraud and provides an extra layer of security necessary for absentee balloting.

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To detractors, it’s a recipe for disenfranchisement — a cumbersome addition to an already stringent voter identification system.

Susan Barnard, of Dayton in Montgomery County, said her 78-year-old husband, Leslie, who has cancer, missed a chance to vote last year because of a delay related to the signature requirement.

“We had planned a cruise last fall to give him something to look forward to,” said Barnard, 73. “It fell at the time of the election, and we were going to vote the absentee ballot. We got right down to the wire and we didn’t have one for him, and so he did not vote because of that.”

She said he had hoped to vote in the election, which included races for governor, state Supreme Court and Congress. Barnard suspects her husband simply forgot to sign his ballot application.

Figures provided to the AP through public information requests to Ohio’s 88 county boards of elections show 21 counties rejected more than 6,500 absentee ballot applications because a signature was either missing or didn’t match what was on file. That requirement is not for the ballot itself, which faces a different battery of requirements, but merely for an application requesting one. Another five counties reported rejecting about 850 applications combined, for various reasons that the boards didn’t specify.

The few counties that tracked what happened to applications after they were rejected said issues were largely addressed before or on Election Day.

Twelve responding counties recorded encountering no signature issues with the absentee applications. The remaining responding counties said they didn’t track how many applications they rejected.

It’s a statistic conspicuously absent from all the official data collected by the state, making it all but impossible to compare the issue across years or multiple states.

Signatures and other verification requirements are there to safeguard Ohio’s elections, said state Rep. John Becker, a southwestern Ohio Republican. He said if a voter fails to sign the application form, “that’s on them.”

“I’m a big believer in personal responsibility,” Becker said. “You’ve got the form in front of you. If you forget to sign it, there are consequences.”

But Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, said the AP analysis highlights a largely unexamined step in a process her organization already views as inefficient and subject to uneven enforcement.

“So a person can register to vote online, but if you go online to request an absentee ballot, a form is mailed to you that you have to mail back,” Miller said. Her organization supports allowing people to request absentee ballots online.

About 1.4 million of Ohio’s roughly 8 million registered voters cast absentee ballots last year.

Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose advocated as a state lawmaker for Ohio to allow voters to apply for absentee ballots online. A version of legislation he first proposed in 2013 is now before Ohio’s Legislature.

“While Ohio has long been a national leader in early voting, there is certainly more that can be done to prevent issues like these from occurring,” LaRose said. “Election integrity and voter access can certainly coexist, so let’s work together to modernize the process so we can improve the antiquated system currently in place.”

LaRose’s predecessor mailed absentee ballot applications to 6.6 million of Ohio’s 8 million registered voters in 2018. And state law actually says a request for an absentee ballot “need not be in any particular form” — meaning it could conceivably arrive on a cocktail napkin or the back of an envelope.

Still, the signature requirement is one of eight or nine pieces of information, depending on the type of election, that a successful request must contain.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, three states — Oregon, Washington and Colorado — conduct all-mail elections, eliminating the ballot application process by automatically mailing a ballot to every registered voter before Election Day.

Miller said Ohio has not shown the political will to move in this direction, but her organization is pushing establishment of a permanent absentee list for those voters who meet certain criteria that require help, such as illness, permanent disability or illiteracy. Seven states and the District of Columbia have just such a system.

Hope Lies in the Streets

Global finance capital has seized control of the economies of most nation-states. The citizens watch, helplessly, as money and goods are transferred with little regulation across borders. They watch as jobs in manufacturing and the professions are shipped to regions of the global south where most workers are paid a dollar or less an hour and receive no benefits. They watch as the taxes of the rich and corporations are slashed, often to zero. They watch as austerity programs dismantle or privatize utilities and basic social services, jacking up fees to consumers. They watch as chronic unemployment and underemployment devastate workers, especially the young. They watch as wages stagnate or decline, leaving working men and women with unsustainable debts. This economic tyranny lies at the root of the unrest in Hong Kong, India, Chile, France, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon as well as the rise of right-wing demagogues and false prophets such as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

It does not matter whether liberals or conservatives, Tories or Labour, Republicans or Democrats are in power. Finance capital is impervious to political control. The newly defeated Labour Party in Britain, by adopting a Brexit-neutral stance in the election, badly misread the zeitgeist. Yes, its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, had to contend with hysterical warnings of economic collapse and endured a smear campaign—amplified by a media mouthing the accusations of his Tory opponents—that included claims he was a threat to national security and an anti-Semite, but his and Labour’s failure to appreciate how desperate workers were for a solution, even one growing out of magical thinking about the promise of Brexit, was a mistake. Brexit is not a realistic alternative to economic tyranny. But it at least offers a hope, however unfounded, of shattering the bonds of corporate power. It posits itself as a weapon in the war between the insiders and the outsiders. That this desperate hope by the outsiders is peddled by con artists and charlatans such as Johnson and Trump is part of the sickness of our age, an echo of the economic distortions and right-wing populism that saw fascists rise to power in Italy and Germany in the first part of the 20th century.

Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Exxon Mobile, Walmart, Apple and Amazon are the modern versions of the East India Company or La Compagnie Française de l’Orient et de la Chine. These and others among today’s global corporations, with the assistance of the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, have created unassailable monopolies and effectively hollowed out many nation-states, both physically and culturally. Forlorn, derelict urban wastelands, populated by the bitterly dispossessed, are as common in France or Britain as they are in America’s Rust Belt. Governments, captive to corporate control, have been prostituted to transfer wealth upward, swell corporate profits and crush dissent at the expense of democracy.

The decay and rupture of the social bonds that once held our societies together have unleashed the dark pathologies of opioid, alcohol and gambling addictions and led to an explosion of hate crimes and mass shootings, along with suicide. Social control provided by work, civic and political participation—bonds that integrated us into our communities and gave us a sense of place, dignity and agency—has been handed over to a heavily militarized police, a massive prison system and a judicial system complicit in abolishing basic rights, including due process and privacy.

So, to steal a line from Vladimir Lenin, what is to be done? Can a reformist political candidate, a Bernie Sanders or perhaps an Elizabeth Warren—although I question the authenticity of Warren—defeat Trump and the retrograde forces that empower him? Or will the U.S. reformers suffer Corbyn’s fate? In short, can the system be reformed from the inside? Or will we have to take to the streets, as the people are doing in Chile, Lebanon, France, Hong Kong and elsewhere, to demand the overthrow of corporate rule?

The left, even under Corbyn, is not ready to speak in revolutionary language. Revolutionary rhetoric within the political system has been adopted by the neofascists and the hard right. The Brexit debate is about blowing up the system, not working within it. Those who support Brexit and Johnson will, like those who support Trump, be betrayed. But the language employed by Johnson and Trump is about destruction, and this yearning for destruction runs deep among the working class. The tragedy is that by backing these demagogues the public is complicit in its own enslavement.

Extinction Rebellion, which I support, is attempting to counter this corporate assault and the consequent ecocide with revolutionary language and sustained civil disobedience designed to make governance impossible. I hope Extinction Rebellion will gain enough popular support to raise a strong barrier before the corporate state starts employing the brute force outlined in Operation Yellowhammer, the six-page British government plan that calls for the possible deployment of 50,000 regular and reserved troops and 10,000 riot police to cope with the unrest that might be caused by food and medical shortages following Britain’s departure from the European Union.

The violent suppression of protesters in France, Chile, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, India and Hong Kong is already underway, a window into what may be coming to England, the United States and other countries that attempt to throw off the yoke of corporate oppression.

The corporate state loathes the political left, but the American political left, by agreeing to operate within the constrained and largely rigged electoral system, is easily neutered, as liberalism was this year in Britain and was in 2016—and will be in 2020—in the United States. America’s Democratic Party leadership, as hostile to its progressive candidates as many in the Labour Party hierarchy in Britain were to Corbyn, employed a series of measures to prevent Sanders from obtaining the nomination in 2016. They included a superdelegates scheme, the use of hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate money, iron control of the Democratic National Committee and blocking those registered as independents from voting in Democratic primaries. Politicians such as Sanders and Corbyn are easily dispatched.

But while the corporate state detests political mavericks such as Sanders and Corbyn, it both hates and fears the revolutionary left. The revolutionary left speaks an unvarnished truth about corporate power and calls out the entire political ruling class for its complicity. It is not interested in accommodation. It seeks to disrupt and paralyze the corporate state. When many thousands, as in Hong Kong, take to the streets shouting slogans like “There are no rioters, only a tyrannical regime” and “It was you who taught me that peaceful marches are useless,” the corporate ruling elites begin to worry. This is why populist leaders, including Eric Drouet of the gilets jaunes, or yellow vests, in France, are arrested. It is why Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, spent six weeks in jail this fall in Britain. It is why Edward Leung is serving a six-year prison sentence on charges of rioting and assaulting a police officer during the 2016 Fishball Revolution in Hong Kong. Revolutionaries refuse to play by the rules.

These global revolutionary movements embody a resurrection of the concept of the common good, the belief that a society should be structured around caring for all its members, especially the most vulnerable. They are forces of solidarity, even community. They understand, as the economist Karl Polanyi wrote, that there are two kinds of freedoms. There are the bad freedoms to exploit those around us and extract huge profits without regard to the common good. And there are the good freedoms—freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s job—that the bad freedoms destroy. The bad freedoms, championed by an atomized, hyper-individualistic consumer culture, which kneels before the cult of the self, have triumphed. The death grip of the ruling elites was illustrated in recent days in Madrid, where world leaders refused during COP25—the United Nations’ conference on climate change—to take meaningful action to halt the climate emergency, an existential threat to humankind.

The bankrupt ideologies of globalization and neoliberalism, formulated and used to justify the consolidation of wealth and power as well as the ecocide that is devastating the planet, have, however, lost their credibility. Neoliberalism, the idea that once regulations on corporations and trade barriers are lifted and taxes slashed, a society will prosper, was always an absurdity. None of its promises could be defended by the history and theory of economics. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite—eight families now hold as much wealth as 50 percent of the world’s population—while demolishing government controls and regulations, sending production to the global south, privatizing public services and destroying labor unions does not distribute wealth. Allowing global speculators to use money lent to them by the government at virtually zero percent interest to buy back their stock does not distribute wealth. Permitting corporations to engage in structured asset destruction through inflation, to strip assets through mergers and acquisitions, to raise the levels of debt incumbency to enforce debt peonage on the public, to engage in corporate fraud that includes the dispossession of assets, does not distribute wealth. The raiding of pension funds, credit and stock manipulations and looting the U.S. Treasury when the bubbles and Ponzi schemes evaporate does not distribute wealth. Such actions funnel wealth to those at the top. They create enormous income inequality and monopoly power. They fuel discontent and political extremism. They make the planet uninhabitable for most species. They destroy democracy.

But economic rationality was never the point. The point was the restoration of class power. Neoliberalism transforms freedom for the many into freedom for the few. The idiocy of the intellectual gurus who sold us this ideology—Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand—should have exposed the con from the beginning, but they were given ample platforms, while their critics, the old Keynesians, were pushed out and silenced. Freedom became equated with freedom of market forces to do anything the capitalists wanted. And that freedom doomed us and looks set to doom the ecosystem on which we depend for life. Karl Marx in volume one of “Capital” explained over a century ago how freedom of the market always results in social inequality.

The loss of credibility of the reigning ideology has led the ruling elites to forge an alliance with right-wing, neofascist demagogues such as Trump and Johnson who employ the tropes of racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, bigotry and misogyny to channel the public’s growing rage and frustration away from the corporate elites and toward the vulnerable. These demagogues accelerate the pillage. They accelerate the hatred, racism and violence that act as a diversion. And they accelerate the social unrest that becomes the excuse for the imposition of tyranny. Hope lies in the streets. Millions of people in Hong Kong, India, Chile, France, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon understand. It is time to join them.

Marathon Climate Talks in Madrid Fizzle to End With Slim Deal

MADRID — Marathon U.N. climate talks ended Sunday with a slim compromise that sparked widespread disappointment, after major polluters resisted calls for ramping up efforts to keep global warming at bay and negotiators postponed debate about rules for international carbon markets for another year.

Organizers kept delegates from almost 200 nations in Madrid far beyond Friday’s scheduled close of the two-week talks. In the end, negotiators endorsed a general call for greater efforts to tackle climate change and several measures to help poor countries respond and adapt to its impacts.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said he was “disappointed” by the meeting’s outcome.

“The international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation and finance to tackle the climate crisis,” he said. “We must not give up and I will not give up.”

The final declaration cited an “urgent need” to cut planet-heating greenhouse gases in line with the goals of the landmark 2015 Paris climate change accord. But it fell far short of explicitly demanding that countries submit bolder emissions proposals next year, which developing countries and environmentalists had demanded.

The Paris accord established a common goal of keeping temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), ideally 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. So far, the world is on course for a 3- to 4-degree Celsius rise, with potentially dramatic consequences for many countries, including rising sea levels and fiercer storms.

After two nights of fractious negotiations, delegates in Madrid decided to defer some of the thorniest issues to the next U.N. climate summit in Glasgow in November.

Chile’s Environment Minister Carolina Schmidt, who chaired the meeting, said she was “sad” no deal had been reached on the rules for international trading in carbon emissions permits.

“We were on the verge,” she said, adding that the goal was to establish markets that are “robust and environmentally sustainable.”

Economists say putting a price on carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, and allowing countries or companies to trade emissions permits, will encourage the shift to away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy.

Some observers welcomed the failure of a deal on carbon markets, though, and the European Union and developing countries had said beforehand that no deal was better than a bad one.

“Thankfully, the weak rules on a market-based mechanism, promoted by Brazil and Australia, that would have undermined efforts to reduce emissions, have been shelved,” said Mohamed Adow, director of Nairobi-based campaign group Power Shift Africa.

Helen Mountford, from the environmental think-tank World Resources Institute, said that “given the high risks of loopholes discussed in Madrid, it was better to delay than accept rules that would have compromised the integrity of the Paris Agreement.”

The talks in Spain took place against a backdrop of growing worldwide concern about climate change. The past year saw large protests in hundreds of cities around the globe and climate activists staged several rallies inside and outside the conference venue to express their frustration at the slow pace of the talks.

The meeting was moved from Chile’s capital Santiago to Madrid at a month’s due to violent protests against the Chilean government, which was under pressure to deliver a positive result.

Delegates made some progress on financial aid for poor countries affected by climate change, despite strong resistance from the United States to any clause holding big polluters liable for the damage caused by their emissions. Countries agreed four years ago to funnel $100 billion per year by 2020 to assist developing nations, but so far nowhere near that amount has been raised.

Under the Paris accord, countries are supposed to regularly review their national emissions reduction targets and increase them if necessary. Last week, the European Union agreed a goal of becoming carbon neutral by mid-century, but the move did little to sway discussions in Madrid about setting more ambitious targets in the medium term, an issue that will be on the agenda again in Glasgow.

The United States will be excluded from much of those talks after President Donald Trump announced the country’s withdrawal from the Paris accord, a process than comes into force Nov. 4, 2020.

Scientists said the longer countries wait to cut emissions, the harder it will be to meet the Paris temperature target.

“The global emissions’ curve needs to bend in 2020,” said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research near Berlin.

“Emissions need to be cut half by 2030, and net zero emissions need to be a reality by 2050,” he said. “Achieving this is possible — with existing technologies and within our current economy. The window of opportunity is open, but barely.”

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://www.apnews.com/Climate

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Comey: ‘Real Sloppiness’ in Russia Probe but No Misconduct

WASHINGTON — Former FBI Director James Comey acknowledged Sunday that a Justice Department inspector general report identified “real sloppiness” in the surveillance of a former Trump campaign aide and said he was wrong to have been “overconfident” about how the Russia investigation was handled.

But Comey also insisted he was right to feel some measure of vindication because the report did not find evidence for the most sensational of President Donald Trump’s claims, including that he had been wiretapped and illegally spied on and that the FBI had committed treason in investigating ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign.

“Remember how we got here,” Comey said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “The FBI was accused of criminal misconduct. Remember, I was going to jail, and lots of other people were going to jail.”

The inspector general, he added, “did not find misconduct by FBI personnel, did not find political bias, did not find illegal conduct.” The significant mistakes the inspector general identified are “not something to sneeze at” but also not evidence of intentional misconduct, Comey said.

In a tweet Sunday, Trump called for an apology from Comey, now that he “got caught red handed.”

“So now Comey’s admitting he was wrong,” Trump wrote. “So what are the consequences for his unlawful conduct. Could it be years in jail? Where are the apologies to me and others, Jim?”

The report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that the FBI opened the Russia investigation for a legitimate reason and was not motivated by partisan bias when it did so. But Horowitz also found major errors and omissions in applications the FBI submitted to eavesdrop on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Those problems include the omission of key information about the reliability of a source whose information had been relied on for the warrant, and the altering of an email by an FBI lawyer.

Comey said in retrospect that he was wrong when he told an interviewer last year that the applications to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were handled in a “thoughtful, responsible way.”

“I was overconfident in the procedures that the FBI and Justice had built over 20 years. I thought they were robust enough. It’s incredibly hard to get a FISA. I was overconfident in those,” Comey said Sunday.

“Because he’s right,” Comey added, referring to Horowitz. “There was real sloppiness, 17 things that either should’ve been in the applications or at least discussed and characterized differently. It was not acceptable and so he’s right. I was wrong.”

Current FBI Director Christopher Wray told The Associated Press last week that the report identified problems that the report found problems that are “unacceptable and unrepresentative of who we are as an institution.” The FBI is taking more than 40 steps to fix those problems, he said.

Horowitz told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that no one who was involved in the warrant application process should feel vindicated, rejecting claims of vindication that Comey had made in an opinion piece earlier in the week. Comey said Sunday that he simply meant that the report had debunked some of the gravest allegations that Trump and his supporters had made.

“All of that was nonsense. I think it’s really important that the inspector general looked at that and that the American people, your viewers and all viewers, understand that’s true,” Comey said.

He also criticized Attorney General William Barr for saying in a separate interview last week that the many errors by the FBI left open the possibility that agents may have acted in bad faith.

“The facts just aren’t there, full stop,” Comey said, when asked whether Barr has a valid point. “That doesn’t make it any less consequential, any less important, but that’s an irresponsible statement.”

Ultra-Fast Computers Could Avert Global Disaster

The way to steer the planet safely away from overwhelming climate crisis may sound familiar, though it’s staggeringly ambitious: just use incredibly powerful and ultra-fast computers.

Studies in two separate journals have called for new thinking about global change. One warns that only a genuine accommodation with nature can save humankind from catastrophic change. The other argues that present understanding of the trajectories of global heating is so uncertain that what is needed is a global co-operation to deliver what scientists call exascale supercomputer climate modelling: exascale means calculations at rates of a billion billion operations a second.

There’s a snag: nobody has yet built a working exascale computer, though several groups hope to succeed within a few years. But when it’s done it could transform the prospects of life on Earth.

“We cannot save the planet – and ourselves – until we understand how tightly woven people and the natural benefits that allow us to survive are,” said Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University, one of the authors of a paper in the journal Science.

“We have learned new ways to understand these connections, even as they spread across the globe. This strategy has given us the power to understand the full scope of the problem, which allows us to find true solutions.”

And Tim Palmer of Oxford University, an author of a perspective paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has called for a new and international investment in sophisticated climate modelling, exploiting a new generation of computers, in much the same way that physicists at CERN in Geneva co-operated to explore the sequence of events in the first microsecond of creation.

“By comparison with new particle colliders or space telescopes, the amount needed, maybe around $100 million a year, is very modest indeed. In addition, the benefit/cost ratio to society of having a much clearer picture of the dangers we are facing in the coming decades by our ongoing actions, seems extraordinarily large,” he said.

“To be honest, all is needed is the will to work together across nations, on such a project. Then it will happen.”

The point made by authors of the Science study is that humankind depends acutely on the natural world for at least 18 direct benefits: these include pollination and the dispersal of seeds, the regulation of clean air, and of climate, and of fresh water, the protection of topsoils, the control of potential pests and diseases, the supplies of energy, food and animal fodder, the supplies of materials and fabrics and yields of new medicines and biochemical compounds.

Massive change

“Human actions are causing the fabric of life to unravel, posing serious risks for the quality of life of people”, the authors warn.

“Human actions have directly altered at least 70% of land surface; 66% of ocean surface is experiencing cumulative impacts; around 85% of wetland area has been lost since the 1700s and 77% of rivers longer than 1000 km no longer flow freely from source to sea.”

There was a need for “transformative action” on a global scale to address root economic, social and technological causes and to avert catastrophic decline of the living world. “Although the challenge is formidable, every delay will make the task harder”, they warn.

But in a world of rapid change – with species at increasing risk of extinction and global heating about to trigger catastrophic climate change – there is still the challenge of working out what the implications of any change might be.

The argument is that human society must change, and so too must the scientific community. Climate modelling might deliver broad answers, but researchers would still need to be sure what might work best in any particular circumstances, and that would require new and vastly more complex levels of mathematical calculation and data interpretation.

Space-race urgency

Professor Palmer and his colleague Bjorn Stevens of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg call for better understanding of the need for change.

“What is needed is the urgency of the space race aimed, not at the Moon or Mars, but rather toward harnessing the promise of exascale supercomputing to reliably simulate Earth’s regional climate (and associated extremes) globally”, they argue.

“This will only be possible if the broader climate science community begins to articulate its dissatisfaction with business as usual – not just among themselves, but externally to those who seek to use the models for business, policy, or humanitarian reasons.

“Failing to do so becomes an ethical issue in that it saddles us with the status quo: a strategy that hopes, against all evidence, to surmount the abyss between scientific capability and societal needs.”

We Are All Female and We All Hate It

“Females”
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EVERYONE IS FEMALE.

The worst books are all by females. All the great art heists of the past three hundred years were pulled off by a female, working solo or with other females. There are no good female poets, simply because there are no good poets. A list of things invented by females would include: airplanes, telephones, the smallpox vaccine, ghosting, terrorism, ink, envy, rum, prom, Spain, cars, gods, coffee, language, stand-up comedy, every kind of knot, double parking, nail polish, the letter tau, the number zero, the H-bomb, feminism, and the patriarchy.

So begins “Females,” the first book by critic Andrea Long Chu, whom you may know as Twitter’s @theorygurl or as the author of expertly savage recent reviews in Bookforum, Affidavit, and others. As this opening indicates, “female” is an existential category for Chu, defined not by genitals or modes of performativity, but rather by the universal, constitutive experience of “let[ting] someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense.”

Whether or not you agree with Chu’s argument is, I think, somewhat beside the point. Certainly there have been many pixels spilled by those who, in rather predictable fashion, are either with Chu or against her on the questions of trans identity and affect, biological and performative accounts of sex and/or gender, and psychoanalytic accounts of desire. In this, Chu finds herself in much the same position as one of the critical voices to whom “Females” is so attached, Valerie Solanas, a multi-hyphenate thinker best known for writing the “SCUM Manifesto” (1967) and for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968. In “SCUM Manifesto,” Solanas upended our understanding of gender, claiming that all traits culturally understood as female (e.g., passivity, vanity, frivolity, weakness) are actually male traits, and that those traits understood to be male (e.g., forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, courage, vitality) are actually female traits. For Solanas, the behavior of men — screwing, engaging in wars, et cetera — is an endlessly hopeless endeavor to “prove” that they are, in fact, men in the ways patriarchal culture has defined the term. Men are female, to summarize Solanas’s argument, and they hate it. Chu takes this claim and inflates it another degree: we are all female, and we all hate it. Thus, like a latter-day Solanas, Chu attracts heat from all sides: the feminists who will rankle at “female” being rendered so negatively, so abjectly (“You do not get to consent to yourself — a definition of femaleness.”), without any sort of recuperative transformation; the TERFs who will claim that a pure and holy and politically powerful femaleness is here being sullied by a trans writer who can’t possibly understand womanhood (“To be female is to be an object”); the incels and manosphere members who I can imagine furiously typing their repetitive Reddit replies to one another about a radical trans agenda of “manocide.” In effect, everyone who would be pre-programmed to dislike “Females” will find reasons to do so.

Click here to read long excerpts from “Females” at Google Books.

To be sure, Chu leaves a great deal of room for doubt throughout the text, wondering herself whether “what you’re reading is a feminist text,” whether she wants it to be a feminist text, and acknowledging a “preference for indefensible claims” that she shares with Solanas. But if we sidestep the norms of reception — questions of whether an argument is to accepted or rejected, whether it is good or bad — we are forced to sit, rather uncomfortably, with an ambivalence that beats at the heart of “Females’” reading of the interrelation between desire, power, and identity. You see, if we are all female, and we all hate it, what we actually hate is our entrapment in a structure of desire in which the central agent isn’t us, in which our desire isn’t our own, but rather someone else’s. “Gender is not just the misogynistic expectations a female internalizes,” Chu explains, “but also the process of internalizing itself, the self’s gentle suicide in the name of someone else’s desires, someone else’s narcissism.” Facing that structure of desire means facing the ways in which our agency, our power, is compromised in a culture that places positive emphasis on independence and domination (typically rendered as “male” traits in patriarchal culture) while deriding dependence and submission (typically rendered as “female” traits that we’d best avoid). To get a grip on this in a slightly different register, consider the culture’s celebration of the tomboy (the boyish girl) against its revilement of the sissy (the effeminate boy). Both step out of the rigid boxes of gender, but only one of them in a direction mainstream culture treats as potentially redeemable.

What Chu is saying is something that most of us have experienced in one way or another with more or less awareness. This is, for example, at least one part of the narrative arc of coming out: before coming out, you’re closeted and you perform as if you were merely any average cisgender heterosexual; then, in the process of coming out, you agglomerate to yourself aspects of an “out” identity that circulate in public space and media (gay slang, modes of dress, ways of holding oneself in public, cultural references and preferences) in order to advertise yourself as out, as available to the community for sex, for friendship, for yourself. Much like the hermit crab, we spend our lives collecting pieces of a self from elsewhere, and those pieces provide the protection of recognition, of being a verifiable, readable self for someone else. Think, for example, of the many decisions you make about your appearance every time you’re getting ready for a night out. This, for Chu, is the existential condition of being female: we adorn and perform ourselves in service of another, we desire to be desired by that other, and it is this condition of objectification, abjection, and submission that we abhor most because one of the foundational messages of mainstream culture is that we should desire to be otherwise: that, in the existential terms that are Chu’s frame here, we should want to be male and not want to be female. “This is the root of all political consciousness,” Chu explains, “the dawning realization that one’s desires are not one’s own, that one has become a vehicle for someone else’s ego; in short, that one is female but wishes it were not so.”

It is here where Chu’s book adds the wobble of ambivalence — namely, that we also want to be subject to another; that we may, in other words, not want power or capacity, but its opposite. This point comes out clearest in Chu’s engaging writing on sissy porn. As a genre, sissy porn can be described as porn that involves cross-dressing, male-to-female role play in which a male imagines himself as the most loathed form of masculinity: the boy who acts like a girl. For this reason, sissy porn often traffics in costumes associated with the more absurdist cultural visions of femininity: lace stockings, hot pink lipstick, schoolgirl outfits, patent leather mary janes, panties (usually lacy, and in varieties of pink or white). Sissy porn also relies heavily on narratives of forced feminization, the notion that the boy is compelled to become a girl by some other agent, often through the trope of hypnotic suggestion. What you’re watching when you watch sissy porn, Chu argues, is a narrative about what porn does to you as you consume it: it makes you into a female, it makes you into a subject for another’s desire. “Did sissy porn make me trans,” Chu writes.

At the very least it served as a neat allegory for my desire to be female — and increasingly, I thought, for all desire as such. Too often, feminists have imagined powerlessness as the suppression of desire by some external force, and they’ve forgotten that more often than not, desire is this external force. Most desire is nonconsensual; most desires aren’t desired.

Porn is important territory in this analysis because it is where we confront our desires most privately, in the sense that we select porn that appeals to us, and, at the same time, engage those desires publicly, in the sense that we are consuming videos that are feeding us desire, and feeding that same desire to any number of unknowable others getting off on the same thing.

Productive as this reading of porn is, “Females” does some of its most compelling work by way of a rather unexpected close reading of the culture of the manosphere, those parts of the internet where disaffected men (incels and Proud Boys and others) go in search of ways to more authentically inhabit a masculinity no one actually possesses. (A “Chad” — manosphere argot for a popular guy who gets a lot of girls, and thus is the envy of sexually frustrated “beta” males — is based on a vision of a muscled, and confident football quarterback that is more the denizen of movie-screen high schools than any real locker room.) In these online forums, men effectively admit that they are not men in the ways they should be: they can’t get girls, they masturbate too much, they aren’t strong, they spend (ironically) too much time online rather than being out in the world making conquests. They want to be, in other words, anything but themselves, which Chu reminds us is being female; the manosphere’s “resentment of immigrants, black people, and queers,” she elaborates, “is a sadistic expression of his own gender dysphoria.” This cis-male dysphoria intersects with transgender identity when Chu notes that the “red pill” that appears in “The Matrix,” and which serves as the term for waking up from “feminist brainwashing” in alt-right discourse, has been seen as a stand-in for Premarin, one of the earliest testosterone blocking hormones, a reading of the film that Chu argues has been ascendant among trans women since director Lana Wachowski came out as transgender in 2012. The rage of the disaffected male, here dubbed his gender dysphoria (being female, but not wanting to be), gets channeled into acts of violence meant to prove that he isn’t what he is: “a beta [male] trapped in an alpha’s body, consumed with the desire to be female and desperately trying to repress it.”

There are implicit, and perhaps unanswerable, questions here. What if we could just accept that we are all female, that we are trapped by desires not of our own making? What if our desire to be desired were not somehow rotted from the inside by the cultural scripts that tell us we must be the top, never the bottom? This is the terrain of what is sometimes called “critical bottomhood,” a series of cultural arguments that attempt to free the receptive position (sometimes called “the female role”) from its typical associations with passivity and powerlessness, replacing them with new understandings of agency and control, as it were, from the bottom. What I take away from “Females” is a sense of the internal flaw of that line of reasoning. In seeking to turn bottomhood on its head, one is merely trying to avoid the “bottom” label; the transformation from bottoming to something like bottoming-as-a-kind-of-topping is just an attempt to reclaim an agency that we are told is what we should want, is what we should aspire to above all else.

While Chu can’t get us out of this trap, and in some ways languishes in this irresolvable what-to-do question in “Females,” her pointing to it is worthwhile. And so, whether we agree or disagree, Chu gives us much to consider.

This review originally appeared at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

 

Sanders and Omar Lead Largest Rally in New Hampshire for 2020 Vote

Sen. Bernie Sanders held his largest rally yet in the key state of New Hampshire on Friday night, joined by Rep. Ilhan Omar, who has faced racist attacks since taking office earlier this year but who received a warm welcome from the crowd of more than 1,300 people.

The rally was reportedly the largest of any Democratic primary candidate in the state so far, according to the campaign; last month, South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg reported that he drew “about 1,300” to a rally in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

“The political revolution is strong in New Hampshire,” said Sanders campaign New Hampshire state director Shannon Jackson. “We are seeing incredible enthusiasm from voters across the state. Sanders and Omar represent a vision for the future of economic, racial, environmental, and social justice, and the voters of New Hampshire are on board. The multiethnic working class coalition we are building was on display today and will ultimately lead us to victory on February 11th.”

Omar’s appearance with Sanders came hours after a Washington Examiner op-ed claimed the Vermont senator is running “the most anti-Semitic [campaign] in decades” despite the fact that Sanders’ fathers’ family members were killed in the Holocaust. Omar, one of the first Muslim women to be elected to Congress and, like Sanders, a vocal critic of Israel’s violations of Palestinians’ human rights, was named as an example of the senator’s allyship with anti-Semites.

The editorial raised alarm among progressives concerned that anti-Sanders groups could level the same attacks that weakened outgoing British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign in Thursday’s general election—but the New Hampshire crowd showed enthusiasm for Omar’s appearance.

Rep. Ilhan Omar speaks at a Bernie Sanders rally in Nashua, NH. pic.twitter.com/oeDFOc9uG4

— The Hill (@thehill) December 14, 2019

“It’s not an issue. It doesn’t bother me in the least,” one attendee, Fred Voelker of Franklin, N.H., told the Concord Monitor of Omar’s participation.

Sanders referred to claims of Omar’s anti-Semitism in a tweet about her appearence with him in Nashua as well as at events across the state.

Rep. @Ilhan Omar has stood up to some of the ugliest racism thrown at a member of the United States Congress, and she has stood up with pride and dignity. I’m honored to have her support and to join the people of New Hampshire with her today. pic.twitter.com/aWXIJ31nyt

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) December 14, 2019

In her comments while introducing the senator, Omar offered a defense of Sanders’ so-called “radical” agenda aimed at passing Medicare for All, creating jobs and eliminating fossil fuel emissions through the Green New Deal, and forcing the wealthiest Americans and corporations to pay a fair share of their income to narrow the wealth gap.

“If believing that 500,000 Americans should not be forced into medical bankruptcy every single year is radical, than we’re proud to be radical,” Omar said.

Watch Sanders’ and Omar’s comments in their entirety below:

Trump is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe and a religious bigot. Our campaign is the strongest to defeat him because it is rooted in human solidarity. Join us live for our rally with @ilhanmn in Nashua, NH: https://t.co/vArIp7GjiI

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) December 14, 2019