Chris Hedges's Blog, page 103

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Sinister Plot to Hold On To Power

What follows is a conversation between author Jeff Halper and Marc Steiner of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

MARC STEINER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Marc Steiner. Great to have you all with us once again.

I have to say this: Benjamin Netanyahu may be one of the shrewdest politicians on the face of the earth. He appointed far-right Naftali Bennett Minister of Defense just after he launched an air attack that killed Baha Abu al-Ata–who is the leader of Islamic Jihad we think–in Gaza, along with his wife Asmaa. That kept Bennett with him politically, which was a move on his part. And then it turned out that al-Ata was really not that much of a leader at all, some people write.

And then he bombed the offices of Islamic Jihad in Damascus, and then launched a bombing campaign on Gaza after the Islamic Jihad launched an ineffectual rocket assault on Israel. The attack in Gaza killed 32 Palestinians, including 11 children. And another 111 people were wounded. Okay, so that doesn’t make him brilliant. But his next steps politically inside of Israel that seem to be part of his grand strategy after all, is and was brilliant. And here is where his brilliant manipulation and strategic thinking begins to keep himself in power.

To help us figure all that out, we’re about to talk with Jeff Halper; Jeff Halper joins us once again. He’s an anthropologist, former head of the Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolitions, and his latest book is “War Amongst the People, Israel, the Palestinians, and Global Pacification.” And he is currently involved with the People Yes Network, which promotes strategic coordination among left groups globally. And Jeff, welcome. Good to have you with us.

JEFF HALPER: Good to be back.

MARC STEINER: Always good to talk to you. I meant what I said at the very top here. I mean, whatever you think about Netanyahu and his politics and what he represents, the man is really brilliant, and he knows how to stay in power.

JEFF HALPER: That’s right.

MARC STEINER: So here he has his opposition, Benny Gantz, who might have won a few more votes than he has. He has a week to set up the government. So paint this story for us at this moment about what Netanyahu is doing to set himself up, so he doesn’t go to jail and can stay in power.

JEFF HALPER: Well, that’s all the manipulations, of course. And so Gaza and the Palestinians, as usual, are simply the vehicles for Netanyahu’s political campaigns, essentially. The people of Gaza and Hamas and Islamic Jihad do not pose an existential threat to Israel. And for years and years, they’ve tried even to get into some kind of a peace agreement with Israel. They even agreed to the two-state solution, years ago. It was called the Prisoner’s Stock. But we’re talking about a situation of controlled bias that serves Netanyahu in Israel in different ways. Controlled violence, of course, it continues the pretext of keeping the occupation going because they’re always attacking us, so we always have to defend ourselves.

Controlled violence also, of course, blames the victim so that we can’t be held accountable for anything, and they’re to blame and that gives us a free rein to do anything we want to in the occupied territories or politically. It also keeps the laboratory going, because don’t forget Israel tests all kinds of new weapons systems, security systems, surveillance systems, drones in particular, in Gaza. Gaza is like a little laboratory, which is part of a larger West Bank laboratory. So for all of those reasons, of course, the Gazi is very useful for Israel. But in terms of internal politics, it’s also useful because again, it can be turned on and turned off according to the needs of Netanyahu.

So now that he’s in this competition with Gantz, he’s trying to create a situation in which, and he’s said this many times, that security situation and such; that we can’t afford a new government. And certainly this is the boss subtext, the very important subject, certainly not a government that would rely on the Arabs in Israel. Because any government that Gantz would set up would have to have the support, at least half the support of the joint Arab list. And so by demonizing the Arabs, and of course by creating the conflict in Gaza, what Netanyahu was doing and saying, “What you’re going to have Arabs in the government at a time of war, they’re our enemies fighting us in Gaza and creating an absolutely impossible situation for Gantz.” So there’s all kinds of layered levels. You’re absolutely right. He is a brilliant manipulator.

MARC STEINER: So in taking a step further, I mean let’s take two parts here. A, what just happened in Gaza, I mean 32 people were killed, many of them innocents. I mean the father driving off on his motorcycle and the visuals were put out by some of the middle Eastern Arab media driving up to his house. He’s blown up. His two kids were blown up with him, but he’s just coming home to say hello to his kids. And it was a pretty horrendous attack that took place in Gaza, but many innocent people killed, 111 people wounded.

So that in itself creates this kind of terror inside of Gaza, with Hamas it seems is saying “We’re out of this, we’re not part of this.” So he’s neutralized them. But now it seems inside of Israel is, explain this to us, I mean Benny Gantz was going to form a coalition with Avigdor Lieberman on the right, from the Russian group on the right, the Russian Jews on the ride. And then he had the joint list on the left saying, at least, we passively support them, but not if he supports Gaza. So the Gaza incursions, which means that that was something else that Netanyahu must have planned ahead of time, knowing that that could split that coalition as well, to make it even more difficult for Gantz to form a government. Am I right or wrong about that?

JEFF HALPER: Well, it can be. But not far off. There’s nothing here that’s by chance. `In other words, it’s in the press in Israel that Abu al-Ata was schedule to be assassinated two years ago. In other words, the approval went through the Israeli government and the military 32 years ago. So in other words, for different reasons they might want it to get rid of him, but certainly it was very convenient to get rid of him and particularly at this time when the negotiations are so keen, and you want to make it impossible for Gantz and link up to the Arabs in Israel.

The Arabs in Israel are being portrayed by Netanyahu, not as in training citizens, but as the enemy. I mean there’s no difference in it. And I was speaking between Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and Ayman Odeh from the joint Arab list. And so I think the timing can’t be ignored, of course, for this and don’t forget also, this isn’t an isolated incident. We’ve been talking now about a year and a half or more, what’s called the March of return in Gaza. There have been almost 400 Palestinians killed, and more than 3,600 Palestinians wounded, in very different and very crippled in many cases. In Gaza. So, in other words, this is all art of the controlled violence. It’s controlled politically, it’s controlled in terms of managing Gaza and it’s also controlled in terms of Netanyahu’s immediate political needs.

MARC STEINER: And then didn’t he also kind of bring in one of the leaders of the joint list and kind of set him up in a conversation that he released? Wasn’t that part of his way of getting in between Gantz and potentially building a coalition?

JEFF HALPER: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, let me put it this way. Yes, but you know Netanyahu really is brilliant, but let me introduce another thought to this whole thing and that is that I think for everything else, I think he’s finished politically that Netanyahu.

MARC STEINER: You think he’s finished?

JEFF HALPER: I believe he is going to be indicted, I think. And even if not, people are tired. Even in the Likud, they’re tired of him. Gideon Sa’ar and other people are already beginning to challenge him. So he’s finished. Now, what is true, we have to keep this in mind is he is a brilliant manipulator. His English is great. He knows everybody from Modi, to the Chinese, to Bolsonaro, to Trump to everybody, and he’s set up very important right wing coalitions in the world. He’s got a big plan, a big strategy, and he’s managed to keep this whole thing together, all this all these years. Because the occupation is not very popular in the world, but he’s managed to hold it all together.

The next guy that comes in, whether it’s Gantz or Gideon Sa’ar who’s going to probably take over, or anybody else, is not going to have those skills. His English isn’t going to be so good. You’ll be a local Israeli politician. You won’t know anybody else. You won’t really care that much. And I think in a way after Netanyahu, this whole thing could start to unravel. And I’m looking forward to all kinds of opportunities to finish things when he’s gone because he really is–you’re right–he really is a brilliant manipulator.

MARC STEINER: It’s amazing. I was going to show that the very top, but I meant to do that, but let me show it now. This is just to conclude with what he did in Gaza. This is his press conference when he talked about what was about to do. Let’s look at, just for a moment, I want a quick thought from you on this:

SPEAKER: In the past year, this arch terrorist was the main generator of terrorism from the Strip. He initiated, planned, and carried out many attacks. He fired hundreds of rockets at communities in the Gaza periphery, whose suffering we haven’t ignored. He was in the midst of crossing additional attacks these very days. He was a ticking bomb.

MARC STEINER: So I meant to show this at the top and I apologize but this, because even this, afterwards was shown a ticking bomb. He’s killing somebody because what he might do, and everything I’ve read in the European press and other press, is that this guy wasn’t that big a deal to start with. I mean that these manipulations are sort of there and ended with how you were describing what he was doing inside of Israel proper.

JEFF HALPER: Look, on the one hand, he’s been ticking for two years now. I mean how long do you tick. Again, they improved his killing two years ago. So you have to look at that timing as well. But in addition, what the horse is missing from the whole discussion is any kind of political horizon. And this is the conflict management part, that the international community participates in an allows, and that is that everything is reduced to “They’re terrorists. They’re throwing missiles,” and in the sense, they have a right to resist. Nobody talks about occupation. That word is never, ever, ever used and very seldom internationally in these things. There are 50 years of occupation, 20 years or 10, more than 10 years, 15 years of a siege impoverishment.

If the UN says Gaza is going to be uninhabitable next year already, there’s no water to drink, there’s no employment. Israel is destroyed the infrastructure several times, killed thousands and thousands of people. So in this situation, in a way this particular attack, might have a certain strategic and tactical meaningfulness Netanyahu has put in a wider context. And we have to understand that this is a violent state terrorism, against the Palestinian people, has been going on now for more than 50 years in the occupied territory. And more than 125 years for the entire country.

So we have to always, always put these things within the wider political perspective and understand that Hamas, Islamic Jihad, together with all the other Palestinian factions agreeing years ago, to a two state solution, which is really a very pro-Israel solution, they’ve tried to sue for peace and Israel has always said no. And what Netanyahu tries to do is use these attacks to blame the victim, to make the Palestinians think that the terrorists attacking us. And we lose the whole bigger picture of Israel’s attacks, of besiegement, of occupation, of semi-colonialism, and the fact that we’re talking about Palestinian resistance, we’re not talking about Palestinian attacks on Israel. And so I think we have to keep that wider context all the time in front of us.

MARC STEINER: Well, Jeff. However, as this unfolds, we see what happens with Netanyahu and the indictment, and whether Gantz takes over or someone else takes over for Netanyahu, we’ll come back to you to see what this all is. Thank you for the work you do and thanks for joining us once again.

JEFF HALPER: Thanks for having me.

MARC STEINER: Always good to talk to you, Jeff. And I’m Marc Steiner here for The Real News Network. Thank you all for joining us. Let us know what you think. Take care.

Watch the CIA Get Away With Torture

In the aftermath of 9/11, Americans might generously attribute their embrace of the “dark side,” as former Vice President Dick Cheney described torture, to a collective nervous breakdown. It’s a chapter in our recent history detailed in Jane Mayer’s bestseller, “The Dark Side,” and more broadly in the entertaining and fallacious movie, “Zero Dark Thirty,” but it remains a national shame yet to be confronted by holding those responsible accountable. The end credits of Scott Z. Burns’ expository epic, “The Report,” in theaters Friday, inform us that many associated with the enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT) program remain on staff at the CIA or were even promoted, such as current Director Gina Haspel.

Adam Driver plays Dan Jones, the no-nonsense head of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 probe into the CIA’s use of torture during the Bush era. He is assigned a research team and space in the basement of the agency, where he spends most of his time when not reporting to his boss, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (). Within days, Jones finds his access to documents limited and is barred from talking with CIA personnel. Eventually, his staff is diminished to three, and finally to one.

The movie begins in 2012, when a desperate Jones consults with attorney Cyrus Clifford (). From there, Burns’ screenplay jumps back and forth in time between Jones compiling the report and the horrific accounts it covers. Air Force psychologists James Mitchell () and Bruce Jessen () claim to have a foolproof method for extracting information from detainees based on a system called SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), which they weaponize into EIT in order to cultivate “learned helplessness.”

Jones’ investigation reveals that when torture proved ineffective, officials presented information learned by other methods as proof of EIT effectiveness in order to protect the program because, as the film explains, “It’s only legal if it works.” Despite the odds, Jones completes a 7,000-page report that the Obama White House, in the person of Chief of Staff Denis McDonough (), would rather see suppressed for the sake of “post-partisanship,” hilariously reasoning that otherwise, congressional Republicans might be unwilling to work with it on health care legislation.

“The Report” is one of two Adam Driver movies this season, the other being “Marriage Story,” which is on the Oscar track, evidence that he is red-hot at the moment, which can result from a career spent making smart decisions. Known to mainstream audiences as Kylo Ren in the “Star Wars” franchise, in the past he curried favor with critics in such movies as the Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis” and last year’s “BlacKkKlansman,” for which he was nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar. He is in nearly every frame of “The Report,” delivering a performance that spans from focused to exhausted, and finally, muted rage. Driver navigates his way with emotional subtlety, stifling his frustration as he must, expressive despite the limitations Burns’ script imposes upon him.

Likewise Bening, who is highly entertaining as Feinstein, capturing the California senator’s essence with a wig and a dab of lipstick, despite being 20 years younger and looking nothing like her. A nuanced actor with expansive range, Bening’s Feinstein is all business all the time and, like the rest of the cast, similarly confined by the material.

As Obama’s slippery chief of staff, Hamm placates POTUS, the Democrats and Republicans at the same time with a salesman’s shtick he wears like an old suit, albeit a bespoke tailored suit. , as CIA chief John Brennan channels just a bit of the menace that launched his career playing the murderous Buffalo Bill in “Silence of the Lambs.” Here he is again the heavy, raiding Jones’ office in an effort to kill the report. When that fails, he redacts most of its key information under false pretext.

Rounding out the cast are a host of cameos, including , , and Maura Tierney as a Haspel-like CIA officer. Presumably so many big names were drawn to the film by its weighty subject matter, as well as by the opportunity to work with Burns and longtime collaborator , a producer of the movie. Burns wrote the screenplays for four Soderbergh films, including “The Informant!” and his most recent, “The Laundromat.” He also penned the Bond movie, “No Time to Die.” As a director, he is limited to episodic TV and short films, including a feature from 2006, “Pu-239.”

With “The Report,” Burns convincingly conveys the claustrophobic atmosphere of the fluorescent-lit CIA basement and prisons where the action plays out, but, as with his screenplay for “The Bourne Ultimatum,” he trades character for plot and pacing, weighting his dialogue with reams of exposition. The result is a feature film crying out to be a documentary. Even so, bravo to Amazon, Burns and his cast for recognizing the importance of the story and delivering it in a format that gives it greater visibility.

Who Really Benefits From a Trump Tax Break for the Poor?

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

The Rybovich superyacht marina lies on the West Palm Beach, Florida, waterfront, a short drive north from Mar-a-Lago. Superyachts, floating mansions that can stretch more than 300 feet and cost over $100 million, are serviced at the marina, and their owners enjoy Rybovich’s luxury resort amenities. Its Instagram account offers a glimpse into the rarefied world of the global 0.1% — as one post puts it, “What’s better than owning a yacht, owning a yacht with a helicopter of course!”

Rybovich owner Wayne Huizenga Jr., son of the Waste Management and Blockbuster video billionaire Wayne Huizenga Sr., has long planned to build luxury apartment towers on the site, part of a development dubbed Marina Village.

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2 Dead in California School Attack; Gunman Shoots Himself

SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — A student gunman opened fire Thursday at a Southern California high school, killing two students and wounding three others before he was captured in grave condition after shooting himself in the head, authorities said.

The shooting occurred around 7:30 a.m. at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) northwest of downtown Los Angeles.

Shauna Orandi, 16, said she was in her Spanish class doing homework when she heard four gunshots that she initially mistook as instruments from a band class. She said a student burst into the room saying he’d seen the gunman, and her classmates were stunned into silence.

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“My worst nightmare actually came true,” she said later as she left a nearby park with her father. “This is it. I’m gonna die.”

Freshman Rosie Rodriguez said she was walking up the library stairs when she heard noises that “sounded like balloons” popping. She realized they were gunshots when she saw other students running.

Still carrying a backpack laden with books, she ran across the street to a home, where a person she didn’t know gave shelter to her and about 10 other students.

“I just heard a lot of kids crying. We were scared,” Rodriguez said.

On a normal day, she said, Saugus High School felt very safe.

“We never really thought this would happen in our school,” she said.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said six people were shot, including the 16-year-old student suspect. Thursday was his birthday. No details were released on a motive.

A video of the shooting shows the gunman shooting himself in the head. Authorities say he was carrying a .45 caliber handgun.

The two students who died were 16 and 14. Their names were not released.

Saugus High School and other schools in the area were locked down.

Television images showed deputies swarming the school and several people being moved on gurneys. Lines of students were escorted from the school by armed deputies.

Anxious parents were awaiting reunification with their children in a park near the high school.

Los Angeles County Undersheriff Tim Murakami has tweeted an apology to the parents, saying investigators needed to interview the students before they could be released.

Orandi said she Has heard about so many school shootings that she always assumed she’d panic in such a moment.

But she said she stayed calm, thanks to the help of her teacher who locked down the classroom.

The shots rang out — “bang! pop!” — and Orandi said she heard people yelling and running. Students in the classroom started crying and hugging one another.

“I just couldn’t believe it was happening,” Orandi said.

She was escorted from the classroom to the school gym and later picked up by her father Hamid Orandi.

“She burst out crying like crazy, but I felt better because I knew the danger was gone,” he said. “It’s one of those random things you always have to worry about.”

His daughter said she would probably go home and vomit from the stress.

Student Sharon Orelana Cordova told KNBC-TV she hid under a table in a nurse’s office until officers came to get her.

“When I got out, I saw this person lying on the ground … with blood all over,” she said.

___

Antczak reported from Los Angeles.

The New York Times Won’t Stop Pushing Democrats Right

Last week, the New York Times (11/8/19) published yet another article about polling and the Democratic presidential hopefuls, a year before the general election: “Democrats in Battleground States Prefer Moderate Nominee, Poll Shows.” In the second paragraph, writers Jonathan Martin and Katie Glueck declared,

As the Democratic candidates intensify their argument over how best to defeat President Trump, their core voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona and Florida are counseling them to pursue a political middle ground.

The Times‘ analysis appears to be based on a different question asked in the poll—”Would you prefer a candidate who would be more moderate than most Democrats or more liberal than most Democrats?”—which saw a 55%–39% split in favor of the former. Curiously, though, the polling graphic the Times featured at the top of the piece showed a different story, in which the top progressive Dems combined (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren), compared to the major candidates branding themselves as “moderates” (Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg), receive either greater support in those battleground states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona), or the difference between the camps is within the margin of error (Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida). Many voters polled have yet to make up their minds, but those figures certainly ought to give any journalist pause before drawing the conclusion that those voters are “counseling” pursuit of the so-called middle ground.

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It’s a very slippery question to hang an article on. The opposite of “more liberal” would be “more conservative,” not “more moderate.” It’s not clear what “more moderate” would mean if not “more conservative”—but far more Democrats identify as moderates than as conservatives (Gallup, 2/19/19), so offering “more moderate” as the alternative almost certainly increases the popularity of that choice.

The question also asks about what kind of candidate someone would prefer, rather than directly asking who they’d vote for. This could be especially problematic in an election where Democratic voters regularly tell pollsters they’re more concerned with a candidate’s “electability” than their ideology, and therefore might “prefer” a candidate they think others will vote for. Again, this will skew the answers.

But more importantly, who cares? As everyone knows, we pay extraordinary attention to these “battleground” states, not because they reflect the will of the country better than other states do, but because their votes matter more than the votes from other states due to our undemocratic electoral college system. So what battleground voters “counsel” candidates to do matters only in the sense that who they will vote for in the general election—not the primaries—matters.

The article seems to be making the leap of logic that voters in these states will be less likely to vote for the Democrat in the general election if a progressive is on the ticket. But there’s a much simpler way to figure that out: Ask people in those states who they’re most likely to vote for in the general election in head-to-head matchups.

And guess what? The Times poll did ask that question! And they published a lengthy front-page article about it earlier in the week (“One Year From Election, Trump Trails Biden but Leads Warren in Battlegrounds”—11/4/19), in which the Times’ Nate Cohn highlighted comparatively low poll numbers for Warren, raising questions about her “ideology and gender” and largely excluding Sanders—who beats Biden in Michigan and trails him within the margin of error in the other states—from the analysis.

(Note that the Times poll is only one poll; other respected polls show all three leading Dems beating Trump in nearly every battleground state. See RealClearPolitics for poll roundups and averages.)

So the paper recycled its poll to tell essentially the same story about Democrats being too far left for the battleground states in a different and more roundabout way, presenting it as if it were new. (There’s no mention of the previous write-up in this article.) And we’re still a year out from the general election, and polls were notoriously fallible last time around. Welcome to media coverage of Election 2020.

White Nationalists Are Running the White House

What follows is a conversation between journalists Michael Edison Hayes, Jared Holt and Marc Steiner of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

MARC STEINER: Welcome, everybody, to The Real News Network. I’m Marc Steiner. Good to have you with us.

Stephen Miller is a leading policy advisor to Donald Trump. He may also be the direct link between the White House and the white nationalist movement in this country. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Watch reviewed over 900 emails between Miller and the editors of the right-wing news organization, Breitbart. They were leaked by their former editor, Katie McHugh, who they fired. So I guess you have to be aware of who you fire. In those emails, he pushed a white nationalist agenda, like setting up camps that separate children from families, banning Muslims from certain countries, selling arrest quotas for the undocumented in our country, and more. Now, the white nationalist influence, if not in control of the White House, may be much more real than we admit. And we will explore some of that.

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We are joined by Michael Edison Hayden, who is Senior Investigative Reporter for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Watch. In addition to investigating the Stephen Miller emails, he exposed the identity of a white nationalist organizer working within the State Department in August and published A Guide to Open Source Intelligence reporting for Columbia University’s Tow Center in June. And Jared Holt joins us. He’s an investigative reporter with Right Wing Watch. He wrote our article on this investigation, called Leaked Information Reveals the Extent of Stephen Miller’s Extremism and the Grand Old Party’s Moral Rot.” Right Wing Watch is part of the advocacy group People for the American Way, and he specializes there in researching and reporting extremist right-wing movements in our country. And good to have you both with us. So welcome.

So let me start, Michael, with you, and the background to this just very quickly–how this began. And this was true, right, that the woman who he initially had the email conversations with at Breitbart… Stephen Miller, the woman he talked with, quit, or was fired, I should say, and leaked these emails to you all. Is that right?

MICHAEL EDISON HAYDEN: Well there was a significant amount of time between when McHugh was let go by Breitbart and when I received the emails. I mean, she was let go in the spring of 2017 after publishing some tweets that were widely perceived to be Islamophobic. And McHugh went into a period of self-examination, I guess is the way she portrayed it to me. And she passed along emails to me in June of this year, and I was pretty shocked about what I saw.

MARC STEINER: So I mean, I’m just very curious–we’ll return to Jared here in a moment–when you said you were shocked. I mean, talk a bit about when you first received these emails; you saw this unfolding. What do you mean, shocked? Shocked how?

MICHAEL EDISON HAYDEN: Well, I mean, my main focus is not to cover the administration. My main focus is to cover white nationalism, to cover the Neo-Nazi movement, particularly the online sectors of extremism. That’s where my background lies. And I didn’t go into it saying, “Oh, I’m going to do something about Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller is a white nationalist,” or anything like that. I was handed this material. The first thing I was shown was that he shared a link to a white nationalist website, and said, “Does that interest you?”

And I said, “Yes, it does, because this is very familiar to me.” And when I began to look at it, there’s a level of shock in seeing patterns that were very familiar to me, having covered extremists who are the type of extremists that are not welcome to have a voice almost in polite society, I mean, people who are frequently suspended from social media and things like that, to see those types of patterns of language being used by somebody who is widely regarded to be the most influential advisor the president has.

MARC STEINER: So Jared, how shocked were you by this when you first read it? What was your take?

JARED HOLT: My take is that we’ve known Stephen Miller has had past interactions with this movement before. He’s certainly advocated for policies that many people would perceive to be racist and unfair to immigrants trying to enter this country. But what Michael’s reporting showed was him in his own words, and I think that carries a lot of weight on itself. It’s one of those situations where you could listen to experts, you could listen to people making allegations, or you could just see him, in his own words, expressing what he believes. And I think that is crucial reporting that Michael was able to bring to the public’s attention.

MARC STEINER: All right. Let’s get to the heart of what happens in some of these. There’s just one email I’m going to pull out here from the report that I read from the Southern Poverty Law. And I understand, just to be clear, Michael, there are other reports, as you alluded to in the article, at the end, there’s more coming out. So this is just the beginning, and we will be covering this with some intensity here. So in this one email, Breitbart is saying that they are going to do a series of stories on non-white SAT scores, to break it down. It says, “It’s easier for people to digest it that way and change their minds.” Miller writes back, “On the education angle? Makes sense. Also, you see the Pope saying West must, in effect, get rid of borders. Someone should point out the parallels to the Camp of the Saints.”

Let me stop there for a moment. So when I read that line in your article, Michael… First of all, let’s talk about the Camp of the Saints, what this book was. And there’s more about this as it’s unfolding, as I read the other emails. This is not like some sci-fi novel that we all love to read. This is a book that was a cornerstone of some of the most right-wing racist movements in Europe.

MICHAEL EDISON HAYDEN: Yeah. This book is… From my perspective, you put this thing on your bookshelf, you’re generally making a statement. Either you’re an extremism reporter or, more often than not, you’re an extremist. It’s not the type of thing that you see people reading in public, on a public transit or whatever. The book is scathingly racist and dehumanizes non-whites in a way that is truly grotesque. There is an Indian character, and he sort of leads a flotilla of refugees into France, and he’s called a “turd eater,” and he eats literal human feces. And basically, he and the rest of these brown-skinned refugees come into France, and when they get there, they overtake the population gradually. There’s a part in the book where a white woman is raped to death basically, by refugees. The refugees are depicted as inherently savage and subhuman.

And it’s dystopian in the same way that the 1987 film Robocop is dystopian, but the message of that is the one about public works being privatized. This is a message that refugees, or people from the developing world, are going to come here and completely destroy your country and destroy what you perceive to be your homeland. And it’s not surprising that it has been … It was immediately picked up by white nationalists. I mean, the publisher who issues the book in the United States is a white nationalist publisher who we list, Hate Watch lists in that respect on our website.

MARC STEINER: So pick up on that, Jared. I mean, when you look at someone like Stephen Miller, who is clearly creating some of the most significant policies around immigration and more in our country and is at the right hand of Donald Trump… So talk a bit about what you think; how deep this goes and what that means.

JARED HOLT: Well, as far as the Camp of the Saints thing goes, I have seen some pushback from people who would like to defend Miller. They’ve said, “It’s not a crime to read a book.” But I think that sort of misses the point here. What Stephen Miller was doing was indicating that he was familiar with the contents of the book, and then suggesting a right-wing publisher to further the contents of that book to a right-wing audience, under the guise of some sort of political analysis. So that is indicative to me of a pattern that represents what is likely Steven Miller’s agenda, which is to be a part of the Republican movement under Trump and to usher in policies that are adjacent, in the very least, to the goals of white nationalism.

MARC STEINER: Let’s wrestle with this one question for a moment. Racism and antisemitism run very deep in our world. And racism in this country is one of our greatest social diseases and most everybody is infected by it at some level. So we’re not talking about somebody who may have some racist ideas who works in the government. We’re talking here, Michael, about people who are part of a white nationalist movement who are virulent racists, who live by their racism. And they’re at the heart of the White House here. This is a pretty frightening scenario. I mean, this is different than having a conservative or a liberal deciding what policy is. We’re talking about people who–for want of a better term–in the old days might’ve been called a fascist, at the top.

MICHAEL EDISON HAYDEN: Yeah. I think the best way to frame this–the best way to look at it, in my opinion–is to understand that, yeah, there’s garden variety racism. There’s the stereotype of your uncle or whatever at the Thanksgiving table, this sort of thing, right, that people bat around. And then there’s a difference between organized racism and trying to organize society around racist ideas. And that’s a huge difference. It makes a huge difference to us because we’re not interested policing people based upon the fact that they use slurs. We are interested in people who want to restructure society and have ambitions to restructure society in broad ways. And then if you look at some of the policies that the Trump administration has enacted, I’ll give you one example here, in the emails, there’s one where he shares a link to VDARE, which is a white nationalist website. And they sort of support the sort of white genocide myth, this idea that whites are being systematically eliminated or whatever.

He shares that in the context of temporary protective status for refugees. He’s like, “Here, read this,” and to a very young reporter, who was only 10 months out of college, he says, “Read this. Why don’t you read this as your guide?” And I think that that says volumes about our changing policies around temporary protective status, because we have, the United States has removed the ability to protect refugees from, after natural disasters, from a number of countries that are predominantly non-white. And in doing that, you can see a connection between Miller sharing this email, “This is my reference point,” and then, here we are, and the president of the United States and the people around him are acting on it.

MARC STEINER: And I’m not one who tries to be an alarmist all the time, and I try to look at things kind of objectively and analytically, but Jared, when you heard what Michael just said, and you look at, there’s one quote that came out of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was, when they talked to Katie McHugh, the woman who released these emails, who was the editor of Breitbart before, and the quote was, “What Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy at the Trump administration,” which is what Michael was just describing here. But I mean, this is, I think, politically, when you look at what could be unfolding here, I mean, this is where the danger lives, that the–go ahead.

JARED HOLT: I totally agree. I mean, in 2016, when the alt right, as it would come to be known, essentially a reboot of the white nationalist movement, was gaining foothold in the United States and galvanizing around Trump’s campaign, the biggest hope that they had was that one day they would have government officials, people at the highest levels, that read their podcasts, that read their blogs, that thought the way that they do. And these emails from around that era of the alt-right indicate that Stephen Miller was one of those people. And now Stephen Miller is one of the most, probably, if not the most influential policy voice in the Trump White House. And that is reason for huge alarm, in my opinion.

MARC STEINER: If you look at what Miller is doing; he’s playing this very close to the vest. He’s really very shrewd and smart, cutting off all contacts with so many people because he was afraid to be exposed, not phone calls and writing again so he wouldn’t be exposed. So unearthing this, I wonder, has there been any reaction yet to your report, Michael, from the White House, from any folks in Republican Party around this?

MICHAEL EDISON HAYDEN: Well, they dismissed the report outright in a statement and said that they were… They just attacked Southern Poverty Law Center, as I expected they were going to attack their credibility. Somebody from the White House apparently insinuated to an Axios reporter that this was an antisemitic attack because Miller himself is Jewish, which I think is going to be a very difficult case to make given the reporting that I have done on overt Neo-Nazis who have ambitions of killing Jews. From what I’ve seen, they don’t really have an answer to it, other than to attack the source. And I kind of expected that. I figured they would attack. Honestly, I thought the attacks would be a lot more aggressive than they have been. I thought there’d be a lot more attacks on our character, on my character, and things like that. I think that there’s just no way for them to claim that the emails are not real. They’re real. He sent them.

MARC STEINER: Exactly. And I’m sure the attacks will become more forceful in the coming week. But as we conclude here, one of the things, Jared, that you wrote in the end of your article; your quote was, “That a figure like Miller could rise in the ranks of the GOP and be normalized in the American press is indicative of the moral rot of the Republican Party and a failure of the nation’s largest mass media networks to address Miller as what he is, a white nationalist at the heart of power in a GOP administration.” Well, let me just ask you both to wrestle with that comment, and let you start since you wrote that, Jared. I mean, we’ve talked about this on the air before. The number of people who are virulently racist and part of this national movement are in the White House. They’re in the executive branch. How deep does it go? How worried should America be about what we’re looking at, or are we being overly concerned?

JARED HOLT: Well, I think the point of history that we’re in right now is the result of a system that has ultimately faulted. I do not think that this is indicative of a healthy, functioning democracy, that figures like Miller, figures like Trump himself even, can rise to the level of power that they have and receive institutional support from the mainline GOP, and also from an institutionalized press that pretends that this is just another side of a normal political debate. What we’re fighting for, ultimately, is our political future for the next set of decades. And I do think that it’s interesting to see if mainstream media, if our major networks, are going to wrestle with this story and treat it as seriously as I believe it is.

MARC STEINER: I think it’s a very serious story to wrestle with. Michael, how do you respond to that?

MICHAEL EDISON HAYDEN: I mean, I agree with what Jared is saying. The only thing I would add about this is it seems that Miller has gotten a tremendous amount of cover from the fact that Steve Bannon was removed. And people, I think began to turn away from the possibility that the extreme far right was influencing Trump in some way, just because Bannon went. And then Miller was always this character who was lurking in the background. And then every time he would show up on Fox and whatever else, it would come up again, people would just be like, “Oh, there’s Stephen Miller again,” in the back of their heads.

But if you remember what happened with Steve Bannon; I know Southern Poverty Law Center launched a petition, for example, and other people did, to draw attention to his beliefs and things like that. And it wasn’t until after Charlottesville, it was one week after Charlottesville that Bannon was resigned from his post, and did so, you know, just went quietly into the night. It would be a shame if we have to wait for a similar Charlottesville-like event or a mass shooting for them to respond by removing Miller. And he’s really gotten away with being there for years, whereas Bannon was removed relatively quickly.

MARC STEINER: And as I said before, Miller plays it very smart. He’s not like Bannon, he doesn’t kind of come out and be… He’s not vociferous like Bannon. He’s not a media hog like Bannon.

MICHAEL EDISON HAYDEN: I will add one detail.

MARC STEINER: Go ahead.

MICHAEL EDISON HAYDEN: I think is important to add about that. We have Bannon talking about Camp of the Saints, which I think was the big scandal which sort of unearthed like, “Wow, what does he really believe?” And the first time, I think publicly that Bannon ever mentioned Camp of the Saints was in October of 2015. And the reason why that is very significant is because the first time that Miller mentions Camp of the Saints in his emails was one month prior to that. And then Julia Hahn writes a story that adheres very similarly to the pitch that Miller was making to Katie McHugh. Julia Hahn works at the White House as an aide, by the way, now. And then a few days later, Bannon mentions Camp of the Saints in a radio interview with Jeff Sessions, who’s Miller’s boss. So if Camp of the Saints was too toxic for Bannon, where did Bannon start talking about it?

And we have another thing about Camp of the Saints as well, which is that, prior to Miller mentioning it, on VDARE, a white nationalist website, they had a literal story tag “Camp of the Saints.” So anything that was about refugees was tagged–or not anything, but most of the things were tagged with “Camp of the Saints” on it. So I mean, you just see a pathway directly… And Daily Stormer, which is a Neo-Nazi website, was writing on Camp of the Saints. So you have this pathway from these white nationalist hate sites directly to Session’s office and to Breitbart. Then it gets a megaphone to the entire country, and next thing you know, Miller, Bannon, and Julia Hahn, they’re all in the White House.

MARC STEINER: And on that note, we’ll stop and contemplate all that. And in the coming week, as more comes out, we look forward to having you both back, and to talk about this in some depth as this unfolds. It’s really important work you’re doing, Michael Edison Hayden. We appreciate the work that you’re putting out there. And Jared Holt, your investigative work in Right Wing Watch is also incredible. And it’s good to have this out there. We need to be able to wrestle with this in an honest way to see what we’re facing. Gentlemen, thank you so much for both joining us. And I look forward to talking more as this unfolds.

MICHAEL EDISON HAYDEN: Thanks, Mark.

JARED HOLT: Thanks for having us.

MARC STEINER: And I’m Marc Steiner here for The Real News Network. We will stay on top of this. Let us know what you think. Take care.

SPEAKER: Thanks a lot for watching. Appreciate it. But do us one more solid favor. Hit the subscribe button below. You know you want to. Stay up on our videos.

Robert Reich: Billionaires Don’t Actually Like Capitalism

Billionaires are wailing that Elizabeth Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’s wealth tax proposals are attacks on free market capitalism.

Warren “vilifies successful people,” says Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase.

Rubbish. There are basically only five ways to accumulate a billion dollars, and none of them has to do with being successful in free market capitalism.

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A Tool for Dismantling Capitalism Is Hiding in Plain Sight



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To Defeat Fascism, We Must Dismantle Capitalism



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The first way is to exploit a monopoly.

Jamie Dimon is worth $1.6 billion. That’s not because he succeeded in the free market. In 2008 the government bailed out JPMorgan and four other giant Wall Street banks because it considered them “too big to fail.”

That bailout is a hidden insurance policy, still in effect, with an estimated value to the big banks of $83 billion a year. If JPMorgan weren’t so big and was therefore allowed to fail, Dimon would be worth far less than $1.6 billion.

What about America’s much-vaulted entrepreneurs, such as Jeff Bezos, now worth $110 billion? You might say Bezos deserves this because he founded and built Amazon.

But Amazon is a monopolist with nearly 50 percent of all e-commerce retail sales in America, and e-commerce is one of the biggest sectors of retail sales. In addition, Amazon’s business is protected by a slew of patents granted by the U.S. government.

If the government enforced anti-monopoly laws, and didn’t give Amazon such broad patents, Bezos would be worth far less than $110 billion.

A second way to make a billion is to get insider information unavailable to other investors.

Hedge-fund maven Steven A. Cohen, worth $12.8 billion, headed up a hedge fund firm in which, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department, insider trading was “substantial, pervasive, and on a scale without known precedent in the hedge fund industry.” Nine of Cohen’s present or former employees pleaded guilty or were convicted. Cohen got off with a fine, changed the name of his firm, and apparently is back at the game.

Insider trading is endemic in C-suites, too. SEC researchers have found that corporate executives are twice as likely to sell their stock on the days following their own stock buyback announcements as they are in the days leading up to the  announcements.

If government cracked down on insider-trading, hedge-fund mavens and top corporate executives wouldn’t be raking in so much money.

A third way to make a billion is to buy off politicians.

The Trump tax cut is estimated to save Charles and the late David Koch and their Koch Industries an estimated $1 to $1.4 billion a year, not even counting their tax savings on profits stored offshore and a shrunken estate tax. The Kochs and their affiliated groups spent some $20 million lobbying for the Trump tax cut, including political donations. Not a bad return on investment.

If we had tough anti-corruption laws preventing political payoffs, the Kochs and other high-rollers wouldn’t get the special tax breaks and other subsidies that have enlarged their fortunes.

The fourth way to make a billion is to extort big investors.

Adam Neumann conned JP Morgan, SoftBank, and other investors to sink hundreds of millions into WeWork, an office-sharing startup. Neumann used some of the money to buy buildings he leased back to WeWork and to enjoy a lifestyle that included a $60 million private jet. WeWork never made a nickel of profit.

A few months ago, after Neumann was forced to disclose his personal conflicts of interest, WeWork’s initial public offering fell apart and the company’s estimated value plummeted. To salvage what they could, investors paid him over $1 billion to exit the board and give up his voting rights. Most other WeWork employees were left holdingnear-worthless stock options. Thousands were set to be laid off.

If we had tougher anti-fraud laws, Neumann and others like him wouldn’t be billionaires.

The fifth way to be a billionaire is to get the money from rich parents or relatives.

About 60 percent of all the wealth in America today is inherited, according to estimates by economist Thomas Piketty and his colleagues. That’s because, under U.S. tax law – which is itself largely a product of lobbying by the wealthy – the capital gains of one generation are wiped out when those assets are transferred to the next, and the estate tax is so tiny that fewer than 0.2 percent of estates were subject to it last year.

If unearned income were treated the same as earned income under the tax code, America’s non-working rich wouldn’t be billionaires. And if capital gains weren’t eliminated at death, many heirs wouldn’t be, either.

Capitalism doesn’t work well with monopolies, insider-trading, political payoffs, fraud, and large amounts of inherited wealth. Billionaires who don’t like Sanders’s and Warren’s wealth tax should at least support reforms that end these anti-capitalist advantages.

Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez Unveil Another Life-Changing Policy

Framing the climate crisis as both an existential threat and a “tremendous opportunity” to fundamentally transform American society, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday unveiled a Green New Deal for Public Housing that would eliminate carbon emissions from federal housing, invest $180 billion over ten years in retrofitting and repairs, and create nearly 250,000 decent-paying union jobs per year.

“Faced with the global crisis of climate change, the United States must lead the world in transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel to sustainable energy,” Sanders, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, said in a statement.

“The Green New Deal is not just about climate change,” the Vermont senator added. “It is an economic plan to create millions of good-paying jobs, strengthen our infrastructure, and invest in our country’s frontline and vulnerable communities. This bill shows that we can address our climate and affordable housing crises by making public housing a model of efficiency, sustainability, and resiliency.”

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The 54-page Green New Deal for Public Housing Act (pdf), which Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez will introduce at a press conference Thursday afternoon, was co-sponsored in the Senate by Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and endorsed by more than 50 climate and affordable housing organizations.

In an interview with the Washington Post Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez said the bill demonstrates that fighting the climate crisis “is not a jobs versus environment paradigm.”

“We need electrical workers. We need construction workers. And it doesn’t have to just be fossil fuel pipelines that create these kinds of jobs,” said the New York Democrat. “We can create millions of jobs in this country by actually rising to the challenge of addressing what this crisis is going to represent.”

Today is a very big day!

We’re unveiling our FIRST-ever Green New Deal infrastructure bill!

In Our Future Climate Dystopia, This Is What the Pentagon Will Do

The Situation Room, October 2039: the president and vice president, senior generals and admirals, key cabinet members, and other top national security officers huddle around computer screens as aides speak to key officials across the country. Some screens are focused on Hurricane Monica, continuing its catastrophic path through the Carolinas and Virginia; others are following Hurricane Nicholas, now pummeling Florida and Georgia, while Hurricane Ophelia lurks behind it in the eastern Caribbean.

On another bank of screens, officials are watching horrifying scenes from Los Angeles and San Diego, where millions of people are under mandatory evacuation orders with essentially nowhere to go because of a maelstrom of raging wildfires. Other large blazes are burning out of control in Northern California and Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington State. The National Guard has been called out across much of the West, while hundreds of thousands of active-duty troops are being deployed in the disaster zones to assist in relief operations and firefighting.

With governors and lawmakers from the affected states begging for help, the president has instructed the senior military leadership to provide still more soldiers and sailors for yet more disaster relief. Unfortunately, the generals and admirals are having a hard time complying, since most of their key bases on the East and West Coasts are also under assault from storms, floods, and wildfires. Many have already been evacuated. Naval Station Norfolk, the nation’s largest naval base, for example, took a devastating hit from Monica and lies under several feet of water, rendering it inoperable. Camp Pendleton in California, a major Marine Corps facility, is once again in flames, its personnel either being evacuated or fully engaged in firefighting. Other key bases have been similarly disabled, their personnel scattered to relocation sites in the interior of the country.

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The Climate Crisis Is Not Your Fault



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Foreign threats, while not ignored in this time of domestic crisis, have lost the overriding concern they enjoyed throughout the 2020s when China and Russia were still considered major foes. By the mid-2030s, however, both of those countries were similarly preoccupied with multiple climate-related perils of their own — recurring wildfires and crop failures in Russia, severe water scarcity, staggering heat waves, and perpetually flooded coastal cities in China — and so were far less inclined to spend vast sums on sophisticated weapons systems or to engage in provocative adventures abroad. Like the United States, these countries are committing their military forces ever more frequently to disaster relief at home.

As for America’s allies in Europe: well, the days of trans-Atlantic cooperation have long since disappeared as extreme climate effects have become the main concern of most European states. To the extent that they still possess military forces, these, too, are now almost entirely devoted to flood relief, firefighting, and keeping out the masses of climate refugees fleeing perpetual heat and famine inAsia and Africa.

And so, in the Situation Room, the overriding question for U.S. security officials in 2039 boils down to this: How can we best defend the nation against the mounting threat of climate catastrophe?

The Unacknowledged Peril

Read through the formal Pentagon literature on the threats to American security today and you won’t even see the words “climate change” mentioned. This is largely because of the nation’s commander-in-chief who once claimed that global warming was a “hoax” and that we’re better off burning ever more coal and oil than protecting the nation against severe storm events or an onslaught of wildfires. Climate change has also become a hotly partisan issue in Washington and military officers are instinctively disinclined to become embroiled in partisan political fights. In addition, senior officers have come to view Russia and China as vital threats to U.S. security — far more dangerous than, say, the zealots of ISIS or al-Qaeda — and so are focused on beefing up America’s already overpowering defense capabilities yet more.

“Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security,” the Department of Defense (DoD) affirmed in its National Defense Strategy of February 2018. “Without sustained and predictable investment to restore readiness and modernize our military to make it fit for our time, we will rapidly lose our military advantage.”

Everything in the 2018 National Defense Strategy and the DoD budget documents that have been submitted to Congress since its release proceed from this premise. To better compete with China and Russia, we are told, it’s essential to spend yet more trillions of dollars over the coming decade to replace America’s supposedly aging weapons inventory — including its nuclear arsenal — with a whole new suite of ships, planes, tanks, and missiles (many incorporating advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and hypersonic warheads).

For some senior officers, especially those responsible for training and equipping America’s armed forces for combat on future battlefields, weapons modernization is now the military’s overriding priority. But for a surprising number of their compatriots, other considerations have begun to intrude into long-term strategic calculations. For those whose job it is to house all those forces and sustain them in combat, climate change has become an inescapable and growing concern. This is especially true for the commanders of facilities that would play a critical role in any future confrontation with China or Russia.

Many of the bases that would prove essential in a war with China, for example, are located on islands or in coastal areas highly exposed to sea-level rise and increasingly powerful typhoons. Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, a major logistical and submarine base in the Indian Ocean, for example, is situated on a low-lying atoll that suffers periodic storm flooding and is likely to be submerged entirely well before the end of the century. The Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, focused on preparing American defenses against the future use of nuclear missiles by either North Korea or China, is located on Kwajalein Atoll in the midst of the Pacific Ocean and is also destined to disappear. Similarly, the country’s major naval base in Asia, at Yokosuka, Japan, and its major air facility, at Kadena on the Japanese island of Okinawa, are located along the coast and are periodically assaulted by severe typhoons.

No less at risk are radar facilities and bases in Alaska intended for defense against Russian Arctic air and naval attacks. Many of the early-warning radars overseen by the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, a joint U.S.-Canadian operation, are located on the Alaskan and Canadian shores of the Arctic Ocean and so are being threatened by sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and the thawing of the permafrost on which many of them rest.

Equally vulnerable are stateside bases considered essential to the defense of this country, as well as its ability to sustain military operations abroad. Just how severe this risk has become was made painfully clear in late 2018 and early 2019, when two of the country’s most important domestic installations, Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida and Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, were largely immobilized by extreme storm events — Hurricane Michael in one case and a prolonged rainfall in the other.

Tyndall, located on a narrow strip of land projecting into the Gulf of Mexico, housed a large fraction of America’s F-22 “Raptor” stealth fighter jets along with the 601st Air and Space Operations Center (601st AOC), the main command and control unit for aerial defense of the continental United States. In anticipation of Michael’s assault, the Air Force was able to relocate key elements of the 601st AOC and most of those F-22s to other facilities out of the hurricane’s path, but some Raptors could not be moved and were damaged by the storm. According to the Air Force, 484 buildings on the base were also destroyed or damaged beyond repair and the cost of repairing the rest of the facilities was estimated at $648 million. It is, in fact, unclear if Tyndall will ever again serve as a major F-22 base or house all the key military organizations it once contained.

Offutt Air Force Base plays a similarly critical role in America’s defense operations, housing the headquarters of the Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), which is responsible for oversight of all U.S. nuclear strike forces, including its intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Also located at Offutt is the 55th Wing, the nation’s premier assemblage of reconnaissance and electronic-warfare aircraft. In March 2019, after a severe low-pressure system (often called a “bomb cyclone”) formed over the western plains, the upper Missouri River basin was inundated with torrential rains for several days, swelling the river and causing widespread flooding. Much of Offutt, including its vital runways, was submerged under several feet of water and some 130 buildings were damaged or destroyed. USSTRATCOM continued to operate, but many key personnel were unable to gain access to the base, causing staffing problems. As with Tyndall, immediate repairs are expected to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars and full restoration of the base’s facilities many millions more.

Wildfires in California have also imperiled key bases. In May 2014, for example, Camp Pendleton was scorched by the Tomahawk Fire, one of several conflagrations to strike the San Diego area at the time. More than 6,000 acres were burned by the blaze and children at two on-base schools had to be evacuated. At one point, a major munitions depot was threatened by flames, but firefighters managed to keep them far enough away to prevent a catastrophic explosion.

An even more dangerous fire swept through Vandenberg Air Force Base, 50 miles north of Santa Barbara, in September 2016. Vandenberg is used to launch satellite-bearing missiles into space and houses some of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense missile interceptors that are meant to shoot down any North Korean (or possibly Chinese) ICBMs fired at this country. The 2016 blaze, called the Canyon Fire, burned more than 12,000 acres and forced the Air Force to cancel the launch of an Atlas V rocket carrying an earth-imaging satellite. Had winds not shifted at the last moment, the fire might have engulfed several of Vandenberg’s major launch sites.

Such perils have not (yet) been addressed in Pentagon documents like the National Defense Strategy and senior officers are normally reluctant to discuss them with members of the public. Nonetheless, it’s not hard to find evidence of deep anxiety among those who face the already evident ravages of climate change on a regular basis. In 2014 and 2017, analysts from the U.S. Government Accountability Office visited numerous U.S. bases at home and abroad to assess their exposure to extreme climate effects and came back with startling reports about their encounters.

“At 7 out of 15 locations we visited or contacted,” the survey team reported in 2014, “officials stated that they had observed rising sea levels and associated storm surge and associated potential impacts, or mission vulnerabilities.” Likewise, “at 9 out of 15 locations we visited or contacted, officials stated that they had observed changes in precipitation patterns and associated potential impacts,” such as severe flooding or wildfires.

Look through the congressional testimony of top Pentagon officials and you’ll find that similar indications of unease abound. “The Air Force recognizes that our installations and infrastructure are vulnerable to a wide variety of threats, including those from weather, climate, and natural events,” said John Henderson, assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations, environment and energy, at a recent hearing on installation resiliency. “Changing climate and severe weather effects have the potential to catastrophically damage or degrade the Air Force’s war-fighting readiness.”

Threats to the Home Front

At a time when U.S. bases are experiencing the ever more severe effects of climate change, the armed forces are coming under mounting pressure to assist domestic authorities in coping with increasingly damaging storms, floods, and fires from those same climate forces. A prelude to what can be expected in the future was provided by the events of August and September 2017, when the military was called upon to provide disaster relief in the wake of three particularly powerful hurricanes — Harvey, Irma, and Maria — at the very moment California and the state of Washington were being ravaged by powerful wildfires.

This unprecedented chain of disasters began on August 26th, when Harvey — then a Category 4 hurricane — made landfall near Houston, Texas, and lingered there for five agonizing days, sucking up water from the Gulf of Mexico and dumping it on that area in what proved to be the heaviest continuous rainfall in American history. With much of Houston engulfed in flood waters, the DoD mobilized 12,000 National Guard and 16,000 active-duty Army troops to assist in relief operations.

Such cleanup operations were still under way there when Irma — a Category 5 storm and one of the most powerful hurricanes ever detected in the Atlantic Ocean — struck the eastern Caribbean, Puerto Rico, and southern Florida. Guard units sent by Florida’s governor to assist in Texas were hastily recalled and the Pentagon mobilized an additional 4,500 active-duty troops for emergency operations. To bolster these forces, the Navy deployed one of its aircraft carriers, the USS Abraham Lincoln, along with a slew of support vessels.

With some Guard contingents still involved in Texas and cleanup operations just getting under way in Florida, another Category 5 storm, Maria, emerged in the Atlantic and began its fateful course toward Puerto Rico, making landfall on that island on September 20th. It severed most of that island’s electrical power lines, bringing normal life to a halt. With food and potable water in short supply, the DoD commenced yet another mobilization of more than 12,000 active-duty and Guard units. Some of them would still be there a year later, seeking to restore power and repair roads in remote, harshly affected areas.

If finding enough troops and supply systems to assist in these relief operations was a tough task — akin to mobilizing for a major war — the Pentagon faced a no less severe challenge in addressing the threats to its own forces and facilities from those very storms.

When Hurricane Irma approached Florida and the Keys, it became evident that many of the Pentagon’s crucial southern installations were likely to suffer severe damage. Notable among them was Naval Air Station (NAS) Key West, a major hub for U.S. operations in the Caribbean region. Fearing the worst, its commander ordered a mandatory evacuation for all but a handful of critical personnel. Commanders at other bases in the storm’s path also ordered evacuations, including at NAS Jacksonville in Florida and Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in Georgia. Aircraft at these installations were flown to secure locations further inland while Kings Bay’s missile-carrying submarines were sent to sea where they could better ride out the storm. At least a dozen other installations were forced to relocate at least some personnel, planes, and ships.

Clusters of Extreme Events

While the extremity of each of these individual climate disasters can’t be attributed with absolute certainty to climate change, that they occurred at such strength over such a short time period is almost impossible to explain without reference to it. As scientists have indicated, the extremely warm waters of the Atlantic and Caribbean contributed to the fury of the three hurricanes and extreme dryness in California and the American West has resulted in severe recurring wildfires. All of these are predictable consequences of a warming planet.

That means, of course, that we can expect recurring replays of summer 2017, with multiple disasters (of ever-increasing magnitude) occurring more or less simultaneously. These, in turn, will produce ever more demands on the military for relief services, even as it is being forced to cope with the impact of such severe climate events on its own facilities. Indeed, the National Research Council (NRC), in a report commissioned by the U.S. Intelligence Community, has warned of just such a future. Speaking of what it termed “clusters of extreme events,” it noted that warming temperatures are likely to generate not just more destructive storms, but also a greater concentration of such events at the same time.

“Given the available scientific knowledge of the climate system,” the report notes, “it is prudent for security analysts to expect climate surprises in the coming decade, including… conjunctions of events occurring simultaneously or in sequence, and for them to become progressively more serious and frequent thereafter, and most likely at an accelerating rate.”

Combine the ravages of Harvey, Irma, Maria, Katrina, and Sandy with the wildfires recently blasting across California and you get some sense of what our true “national security” landscape might look like. While the Pentagon, the National Guard, and local authorities should be able to cope with any combination of two or three such events, as they did in 2017 (although, according to critics, the damage to Puerto Rico has never been fully repaired), there will come a time when the climate assault is so severe and multifaceted that U.S. leaders will be unable to address all the major disasters simultaneously and will have to pick and choose where to deploy their precious assets.

At that moment, the notion of focusing all our attention on managing military rivalries with China and Russia (or other potential adversaries) will appear dangerously distracting. Count on this: U.S. forces sent to foreign bases and conflicts (as with the never-ending wars of this century in the Greater Middle East and Africa) will undoubtedly be redeployed homeward to help overcome domestic dangers. This may seem improbable today, with China and Russia building up their arsenals to counter American forces, but scientific analyses like those conducted by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the NRC, suggest that those two countries are then no less likely to be facing multiple catastrophes of their own and will be in no position to engage in conflicts with the United States.

And so there will come a time when a presidential visit to the Situation Room involves not a nuclear crisis or the next major terrorist attack, but rather a conjunction of severe climate events, threatening the very heartbeat of the nation.

Meet America’s New Underclass

Are you there yet?

By “there,” I mean have you at last become a 1 percenter? It’s the dream of many social climbers to be in the top percentile, but it’s a steep climb — it now takes a paycheck of $515,000 a year to dwell with the swells at the peak.

Actually, that just makes you sorta rich. To rise to the tippy-top of the really richy-rich — the top 0.001 percent — your income has to be above $63 million a year, an exclusive club with only 1,433 members.

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Meanwhile, back down on Earth, it’s harder and harder for working families to make ends meet, even with full-time jobs.

The media keep citing low joblessness as evidence that the economy is humming — but getting work no longer means getting a decent paycheck. In fact, the fastest growing job categories today are low-wage, no-benefit service positions — a primary cause of raging inequality in America.

Indeed, a fast-growing new job category is called “wealth work.” That doesn’t mean getting wealthy — it means working for the wealthy. It’s a new underclass of poorly paid personal service attendants who beautify, shop for, and otherwise tend to the care, feeding, and desires of the rich.

The Atlantic magazine reports that job growth for pedicurists, pet caretakers, private cooks, etc. is at least double the overall growth in jobs. Moreover, there’s a surge in demand for gift wrappers, horse exercisers, oyster preparers, animal therapists, sommeliers, and such.

We must stop letting the Powers That Be pretend that all is right in America as long as the stock market is booming, jobs (or jobettes) are being created, and the 1 percenters are prospering. The glue that holds our diverse society together is the egalitarian ethic of the Common Good.

As my ol’ Texas daddy used to put it to me, “Everybody does better when everybody does better.”