Chris Hedges's Blog, page 94

House Judiciary Committee Sets Dec. 4 Impeachment Hearing

WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee is set to take over the impeachment probe of President Donald Trump next week, scheduling a Dec. 4 hearing on the question of “high crimes and misdemeanors” set out in the Constitution.

The opening hearing will feature legal experts who will examine the constitutional grounds as the Judiciary panel decides whether to write articles of impeachment against Trump — and if so what those articles will be.

Democrats are aiming for a final House vote by Christmas, which would set the stage for a likely Senate trial in January.

Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said Tuesday that his panel’s hearing will “explore the framework put in place to respond to serious allegations of impeachable misconduct.”

Meanwhile, the House Intelligence Committee will be submitting the report on its probe into Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff has said his committee will finish that report “soon after Congress returns from the Thanksgiving recess.” The panel held two weeks of impeachment hearings this month examining Trump’s requests for Ukraine to investigate Democrats as the U.S. withheld military aid to the country.

Trump and his lawyers are invited to attend the Judiciary hearing and make a request to question witnesses, according to Democratic rules approved by the House last month. The committee released a letter from Nadler to the president, saying that he hopes Trump will participate, “consistent with the rules of decorum and with the solemn nature of the work before us.”

It’s unlikely that the president himself will attend, as Trump is scheduled to be overseas on Dec. 4 to participate in a summit with NATO allies outside London — a split screen showing leadership that Trump’s allies may find favorable. The Judiciary panel gave the White House until the evening of Dec. 1 to decide whether Trump or his lawyers would attend.

If Democrats stay on schedule, the hearing could come as the committee introduces articles of impeachment and then holds a vote, a process that could take several days. If the committee approves articles by the end of the second week of December, the House could hold an impeachment vote the third week of the month just before leaving for the holidays.

The charges are expected to mostly focus on Ukraine. Democrats are considering an overall “abuse of power” article against Trump, which could be broken into categories such as bribery or extortion. That article would center on the Democrats’ assertion, based on witness testimony, that Trump used his office to pressure Ukraine into politically motivated investigations.

Democrats are also expected to include an article on obstruction of Congress that outlines Trump’s instructions to officials in his administration to defy subpoenas for documents or testimony.

Though several government officials called by Democrats cooperated with the committee, several key witnesses — including acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and former National Security Adviser John Bolton — refused, following Trump’s orders.

Lastly, Democrats could include an obstruction of justice article based on special counsel Robert Mueller’s report released earlier this year. Mueller said he could not exonerate Trump on that point, essentially leaving the matter up to Congress.

When and if the House approves articles of impeachment, the Republican-controlled Senate would be expected to hold a trial in early 2020. Unless political dynamics change drastically, Trump would have the backing of majority Republicans in that chamber and be acquitted.

It’s still unclear how long a trial might last, what it would look like and who might be called as witnesses.

While the matter remains in the House, Schiff said in a letter to his colleagues on Monday that his committee “will continue with our investigative work” and could still hold depositions or hearings. But Schiff said it will not prolong a fight to obtain documents or testimony in court.

“The president has accepted or enlisted foreign nations to interfere in our upcoming elections, including the next one,” Schiff said in the letter. “This is an urgent matter that cannot wait if we are to protect the nation’s security and the integrity of our elections.”

Though the investigative hearings are over, Democrats are continuing to release new information. On Tuesday, the House Budget Committee said that the White House Budget Office had given investigators documentation that the first official hold on military aid to Ukraine was signed on the evening of July 25, just hours after Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden and his family, on a phone call.

Revelations about that phone call triggered the impeachment inquiry in September as the White House released a rough transcript of the conversation.

The House Budget Committee said a career budget official signed the July 25 letter, which delayed the Ukraine aid through Aug. 5, but that subsequent “apportionment” letters were signed by a political appointee, Michael Duffey, who retained responsibility for the account through the Sept. 30 end of the 2019 budget year.

Duffey defied a House impeachment probe subpoena to testify.

___

Associated Press writers Andrew Taylor and Zeke Miller contributed to this report.

America Is Never Going Back to Normal

French King Louis XV reputedly said, “Après moi, le déluge.” (“After me, the flood.”) Whether that line was really his or not remains unclear, but not long after his death did come the French Revolution. We should be so lucky! Our all-American version of Louis XV, Donald I, is incapable, I suspect, of even imagining a world after him. Given the historically unprecedented way he’s covered by the “fake” or “corrupt” news media, that “enemy of the people,” I doubt they really can either.

Never, you might say, have we, as a nation, been plunged quite so fully not just into the ever-present, but into one man’s version of it. In other words, for us, the deluge is distinctly now and it has an orange tint, a hefty body, and the belligerent face of every 1950s father I ever knew — my own, in his angrier moods, included — as well as of redbaiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. Of course, you have to be at least as old as me to remember that Trump-anticipating political showman and his own extreme moment. After all, in distinctly Trumpian fashion (though without Twitter), he accused President Truman’s secretary of defense, George Marshall, and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, of being Russian agents. As McCarthy said at the time, “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?” McCarthy (whose aide, Roy Cohn, was once Donald Trump’s mentor) offers a reminder that Trumpian-style personalities were not unknown in our history and that, in the case of McCarthy, their antics were, however minimally by twenty-first-century standards, actually televised.

Our very own Louis XV is, of course, something else again: a deluge of tweets, insults, self-praise, lies and false claims, and strange acts of almost every imaginable sort. In other words, thanks in significant part to the media and social media, Donald J. Trump is indeed the definition of a deluge and we, the American people, are — thought about a certain way — present-day Venice; we are, that is, six feet under water, even if we don’t quite know it.

And here’s what may be the strangest thing of all: while HE — and, given the last three-plus years, those caps are anything but an exaggeration — is dealt with by the media in deluge fashion, there’s one story that’s in our faces everyday and yet, in some sense — a sense that drives me bonkers — is simply missing in action. To be clear: since 2016, Donald Trump has been covered in our ever-shrinking yet ever-expanding media universe like no other individual in history from Nebuchadnezzar’s moment to our own.

You know that. I know that. Everyone knows that — and yet, in case you haven’t noticed, the fact that HE’s in all our faces like no king, no emperor, no autocrat, no president, no entertainer, no performer ever is hardly being covered, hardly even acknowledged from day to day, week to week, month to month, or even sadly, given how long the Trumpian moment has already lasted, year to year. In other words, HE is eternally there, but the media, omnipresent as it may be when it comes to him, in some sense isn’t.

Winter Is Coming in Trumpian Fashion

The way that omnipresence is linked to his omnipresence must, I suppose, be obvious to everyone. Still, no one is really covering the coverage, not the way it should be covered in all its mind-boggling strangeness. Take the other day, a perfectly typical passing moment in my life in the age of Trump. On my way into the men’s locker room at my local gym, I stopped to have a sandwich in a room with a giant TV screen and a few tables and chairs. On any day as I wander through, the TV is almost invariably on — tuned in to (where else?) CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News — and if you-know-whose angry face isn’t on screen, then there are almost invariably several talking heads discussing HIM or something related to HIM anyway.

That particular day, when I sat down to eat my sandwich, CNN was on and the story being covered concerned an unscheduled visit the president had paid to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The White House claimed that Trump was simply getting part of his yearly physical early because he happened to have a free weekend in Washington. But the visit was (gasp!) “unannounced” and evidently unexpected by the hospital staff — as if much that Donald Trump does is announced and expected — and who knew what that meant.

In truth, the answer was: no one about to be onscreen yakking had much of anything to offer. The only news, beyond the visit itself, was that there was no news at all about HIM. Still, medical experts were interviewed and, by the time I had finished my sandwich and headed into the locker room, the talking heads were still discussing… well, essentially the same nothing much because nothing much was known.

And when I walked through that same room on my way out after my swim, another set of talking heads was, of course, discussing the president’s unscheduled visit to Walter Reed. Several days later, when I began writing this piece, the issue was still being chewed over by columnists and on TV and, as with so much else about this president, days after Trump’s “mysterious, unannounced visit to the hospital,” as the New York Times put it all too accurately, there remained “a torrent of speculation” about it. Then again, such a description could be applied endlessly to stories about Donald J. Trump.

Now, there would be nothing particularly wrong with any of this, story by story, if it weren’t seemingly our only media present, past, and future in the Trump era. But the historically unprecedented nature of all this yakking, writing, interviewing, speculating, Tweeting, Facebooking, discussing, arguing, reporting, and perhaps, above all, the 24/7 talking heads on cable news going on and on about everything faintly related to one distinctly over-present personage (who was evidently God’s gift to them in 2016) has yet to truly sink in.

At some level, it’s not even complicated, especially in this impeachment moment. The shambling body of that president of ours — thanks to a set of media decisions about what truly draws eyeballs on this planet — simply blocks out much of the rest of the world, everything but HIM and anything or anyone faintly relevant to or associated with or ready to attack him and his strange imperial solar system. In media terms, he is now something akin to a force of nature, a Category 5 (or maybe 6) hurricane, but so, of course, is the coverage of him.

There’s obviously a unique history to be written of how King Donald I, still officially “president” of the United States (though he often acts as if he were something far more than that), proved so capable of drawing every camera, every bit of media attention to himself alone, how he kept “the red light” of those cameras and their social media equivalents ever on. It’s a feat for the ages and, it seems, a successful gamble in a media world that found itself in a scramble for ad dollars, for existence and eyeballs, a world that made some hard, if seldom publicly delineated, decisions about what, in the twenty-first century, the news was becoming.

After all, in a world in which so much is, in fact, happening (and going wrong), other decisions, though hard to imagine today, might have been possible and Donald Trump’s all-enveloping, all-absorbing presidency, under less of a media glare and stare, might have taken quite a different turn.

Right now, it doesn’t matter what the subject is: Sports? It’s him. Movies? It’s The Godfather Part II, Roger Stone, and him. And believe me, if there’s an expert on the Godfather films — and I know one! — he’ll be interviewed. Or if you were truly curious about how former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley managed to remain “all in” with the president as her new book comes out (despite a misstep or two and thanks to some advice from Ivanka and Jared), no problem. Hey, believe me, winter is coming and winter, it turns out, is HIM, too. It’s all him, all the time.

This is not, of course, the only way this world could be covered.

The Donald as a Perspective Problem

I remember the first moment I saw this kind of coverage and I was living in a very different world. It was Friday, November 22, 1963, and President John F. Kennedy had just been gunned down. I was 19 years old and, in those days when you didn’t have a screen in every room (or every hand), I was in the basement of my college dorm (along with so many others), near a pool table, watching the only accessible TV around. It was the closest we would come, except perhaps in the O.J. Simpson White Ford Bronco moment, to the sort of 24/7 coverage that has become the norm of the post-9/11 world.

In that case, of course, a president had been assassinated, something that hadn’t happened in my lifetime, not in fact in the lifetime of the TV set. And the reportage on the three major networks of that moment went on without commercials for four days — from soon after the fatal shots were fired that Friday, through the on-camera shooting of suspect Lee Harvey Oswald during a perp walk in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters that Sunday, until Kennedy’s funeral the following Monday (when 81% of home TVs were reportedly on). According to Nielsen, 93% of Americans were watching, “more than half of them for 13 or more straight hours.” But a president had been murdered and the coverage, while unique for its moment, did end.

Donald Trump exists in a very different universe, one in which the screen is with you, day and night, in which HE and you and it are often alone together for what seems like forever. At 75, I’m not quite as screened in as much of our world. I still read an actual newspaper, the New York Times, in print. (Who knows how much longer that will even be possible, as the paper newspaper continues to shrink?) And the truth is that, for me, it’s become a kind of daily nightmare. I have no doubt that the paper, which got rid of a number of its copy editors (and now has visible typos and errors daily), has assigned more reporters to cover you-know-who (& company) than it has ever assigned to cover anyone or anything long-term before. (Back in March 2018, for instance, I counted a typical day on the Trump beat and found “15 reporters, three op-ed writers, and the unnamed people who produced those editorials.”)

On some days, as in the week the impeachment hearings began, it’s no longer uncommon to have up to six interior pages of the paper covered with Trumpian “news” — at least two or three of those pieces continuations from the front page and many of them filled with material that’s distinctly repetitive. Think of it as the newspaper version of those endlessly talking heads on cable TV.

To take a recent example, on November 21st, the morning after U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified in the impeachment hearings, of the six columns that normally make up the Times’s front page, three were devoted to giant quotes from Sondland’s testimony in large white and yellow print against a dark background. The other three atop the page were articles on the same subject, all under a single giant headline, another quote from Sondland, “We Followed the President’s Orders.” One was headlined “A Witness Places Pompeo Firmly ‘in the Loop’”; a second, “Democrats Detect Watergate Echo”; a third, “Sondland Names Top Officials in Ukraine Push.” At the bottom of the page was a piece on the Democratic debate of that night, headlined “Democrats Soften Disagreements and Sharpen Attacks on Trump.” Only a single piece, Sabrina Tavernise’s “Moving Vans Idle as Migration Stalls in a Reshaped Economy,” snugly lodged at the bottom right corner of the page, and one of the eight reporters involved in front-page coverage, had nothing to do with the president or his possible impeachment.

On the editorial pages, there was a giant editorial, “Implicating the President and His Men,” while three of the four op-eds opposite it had Trump in their titles (“Should Trump Tromp Rudy?,” “The Cowardice Behind Trump’s Vaping-Ban Retreat,” and “Trump Is Doing What He Was Elected to Do”). Inside the paper, there were another 5½ pages of pieces with Trump in the headline or on subjects related to the impeachment process, involving 11 more reporters. More than 20 reporters, op-ed and editorial writers, in other words, were dealing with the world of Donald Trump on that single day.

And yet that kind of coverage itself is never front-page news, even if he invariably is. In a sense, what that means is that you can neither see him for what he is nor see around him. Once upon a distant time — it was the 1990s, just after the Cold War ended — I wrote a book that I called The End of Victory Culture. In it, I explored how, “between 1945 and 1975, victory culture ended in America” and traced it to “its graveyard for all to see,” the disastrous war in Vietnam,” or as I put it: “It was a bare two decades from the beaches of Normandy to the beachfronts of Danang, from Overlord to Operation Hades, from GIs as liberators to grunts as perpetrators, from home front mobilization to antiwar demonstrations organized by ‘the Mobe.’”

And in truth, despite the dreams of Washington’s political elite in the immediate post-Cold War moment and then of top officials of the Bush administration in the post-9/11 moment, “victory” has turned out to be a truly lost cause for the planet’s most “indispensable” nation, as our never-ending wars of this century have made all too clear. Whether we know it or not, we are now in a distinctly post-post-triumphalist American world. Otherwise, of course, there’s no way Donald Trump would be in the White House.

But here’s my question for someone who isn’t 75 years old and is ready to write a new book: What exactly are we at the end of now? It must be something, mustn’t it? What does the Trump phenomenon really represent? And far more important, what lurks behind all the attention paid to him (other, of course, than a climate-changed planet)?

He’s our “witch hunt” president and, if nothing else, he’s presented us, Escher-style, with a remarkable perspective problem. Thanks to certain essential media decisions about what matters (especially when it comes to gluing eyeballs to screens), we’re eternally in close-up. It isn’t just that Donald Trump is somewhat overweight. He’s the sumo wrestler as president. He fills the screen. Every screen. All the time.

Thanks to the media, he’s impeaching us. But really — and I’m just asking — which witches are we actually hunting these days?

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

 

Congressman Condemns the Coup in Bolivia

Thirteen of us squeezed into Congressman Jim McGovern’s small office in Northampton, Massachusetts, far outnumbering the number of chairs available. At the head of the table sat Koby Gardner-Levine, the congressman’s Northampton district representative. Outside, a couple dozen more stood in the near-freezing temperature chanting, “Evo, amigo, el pueblo está contigo” (Evo, brother, the people are with you), holding signs that read “Say no to the coup!” and “Hands off Bolivia.”

The delegation—represented by various local community groups and leaders—organized in response to the November 10 coup in Bolivia three days earlier. Though some say that Morales voluntarily resigned, it is important to note that he did so at the behest of commander-in-chief of Bolivia’s armed forces General Williams Kaliman—“at the point of a gun,” as local activist Marty Nathan pointed out at a second delegation to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Springfield office on November 18.

By Tuesday, November 12, former senator Jeanine Áñez Chávez had declared herself president with the blessing of the military, and in direct violation of the country’s constitution. Entering the presidential palace with an oversized Bible, she loudly declared, “The Bible has come back to the [presidential] palace, god bless us!” On November 14, Áñez signed decree 4078, abdicating the military of responsibility for violence when participating in “operations for the restoration of internal order and public stability.” The next day, on November 15, soldiers and police perpetrated a massacre in Sacaba, Cochabamba, that killed nine and injured hundreds.

Since the October 20 election, the violence encouraged by the opposition party has claimed the lives of at least 32 people (though the numbers are rising rapidly) and has been responsible for hundreds of injuries and over 1,000 arrests.

At McGovern’s office, the demands of the delegation were clear: publicly condemn the coup and U.S. involvement, sponsor a resolution in Congress condemning the coup, and condemn the abuse of human rights fomented by the right wing and the self-appointed coup government.

A few minutes into the meeting with District Representative Gardner-Levine, Congressman McGovern would call in to speak with the group and read them a tweet he had already drafted condemning the coup. “The time for military coups, in Latin America or elsewhere, is over,” stated the congressman. Within five minutes, the tweet would be live on the congressman’s account.

The Tentacles of the United States in Bolivia’s Coup

As noted by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the ousting of Morales fits within a much longer history of coups in Bolivia (1964, 1970, 1980, and—most recently—2019) and of U.S. intervention.

Bolivia has been a source of enrichment for the West for centuries; the silver that flowed from its veins funded the development and expansion of industrialized nations, and today it holds up to 70 percent of the world’s lithium, a key material in batteries for hybrid cars, cell phones, and other electronics. The most recent coup in Bolivia fits neatly within the continuation of centuries of pillage and the struggle for geopolitical control over the country and its resources.

As Kevin Young, assistant professor of Latin American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies Bolivia, explained to Congressman McGovern at the November 13 delegation, “We don’t have the details of what exactly the United States has been doing. We do know that Trump, [Senator Marco] Rubio, and others have come out and publicly praised the coup. … Behind the scenes, they may be doing other things. We know that they are funding the right-wing opposition. We don’t know all of the diplomatic machinations that are taking place behind the scenes. Our concern first and foremost is the role of the United States.”

McGovern remains among a small handful of U.S. representatives to condemn the coup—a group that includes Rep. Ilhan Omar (MN), Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Rep. Ro Khanna (CA), and Rep. Adriano Espaillat (NY). On November 22, Congressman McGovern was among 14 House members who signed a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo firmly stating that the “developments in Bolivia … bear the hallmarks of a military coup d’état” and imploring Pompeo and the Trump administration to “consider an immediate change in course and to take action to support democracy and human rights in Bolivia.”

The more common response, however, has ranged from silence on the issue to direct support of the coup. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo directly endorsed Áñez, stating, “I applaud Bolivian Interim President Jeanine Áñez for assuming this role at a time of great responsibility where there is a need to restore order and maintain civilian leadership in Bolivia.” A similar sentiment was echoed by Senator Marco Rubio, who alleged that Morales is “working from [asylum in] Mexico to undermine peaceful democratic transition in Bolivia [and g]ot Cuba[,] Venezuela & Nicaragua to arm protestors in Cochabamba.”

In a statement celebrating the coup, President Trump—like Rubio—linked the Morales administration to Venezuela, which he (and his predecessors) have sought to undermine since the inauguration of Hugo Chávez in 1999: “[the events in Bolivia] send a strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua that democracy and the will of the people will always prevail. We are now one step closer to a completely democratic, prosperous, and free Western Hemisphere.”

Trump’s linking of Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua—an expansion of the so-called “troika of tyranny”—unveils a key driver of the U.S. support behind the coup: the coup, and the U.S. support behind it, fit into a longer process to undermine leftist governments in the region that threaten the interests of the U.S., its allies, and transnational corporations. Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Bolivia have—until now—remained strongholds in the region that have put national sovereignty before the interests of imperialists; it is these strongholds that the U.S. has long sought to topple.

While the evidence and depth of the United States’ involvement in the coup in Bolivia are still being unearthed, so far we can point to at least a few key pieces of evidence:

Williams Kaliman—the military general who called on Morales to resign, and who has overseen brutal state repression—studiedat the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in Fort Benning, Georgia, in 2004. WHINSEC, formerly known as the School of the Americas, played a key role in training military generals in the spate of anti-democratic coups in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Other key players in the coup have also been linked to WHINSEC.
The Organization of American States (OAS) has been among the main forces in justifying the coup by spreading unsubstantiated claims about electoral fraud. The U.S. funds 60 percent of the OAS budget and plays an influential role in the organization.
A North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) reportfrom 2009 shows longstanding funding of opposition political parties by USAID: “the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has invested more than $97 million in ‘decentralization’ and ‘regional autonomy’ projects and opposition political parties in Bolivia since 2002, showing USAID has funded and fomented separatist projects promoted by regional governments in Eastern Bolivia.”
A vehicle from the U.S. Embassy (license plate 28-CD-17) was seen participating in the police operation in which four Cuban medics were detained, as reported by the president of Telesur, Patricia Villegas Marín, and Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, Cuba’s minister of foreign affairs, though it is unclear what the vehicle was doing.

In the eyes of the United States and its presiding war hawks, Morales’ Bolivia is a pesky remnant from the era of the “Pink Tide”—a wave of left-leaning governments in Latin America from the 1990s to early 2000s that dared to confront the unabated interests of transnational corporations and imperialist governments—a lonely island among a series of what today range from neofascist to dedicated neoliberal governments, from Brazil to Chile to Argentina.

Bolivia’s pre-coup story of success—both in its economic indicators and in its measures of the general well-being of its population—provides an uncomfortable counterpoint to the neoliberal narrative and policy slate of its neighbors, whose citizens have suffered as a result. To overthrow the Morales administration is to dent the regional struggle for sovereignty, a domino in the United States’ quest for geopolitical control.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Celina della Croce is a coordinator at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research as well as an organizer, activist, and advocate for social justice. Prior to joining Tricontinental Institute, she worked in the labor movement with the Service Employees Union and the Fight for 15, organizing for economic, racial and immigrant justice.

The Renewable Electricity Revolution Is Almost Here

Finding effective ways to store energy until it’s needed is a major obstacle for the renewable electricity revolution, but two new mechanical systems mean cheap stored power could soon be widely available.

Cheaper than batteries, both have the virtue of being able to produce full power within a second of being switched on. And the energy they generate can also be stored for months without any loss of power.

Although developed by different teams completely independently and with different markets in mind, the two systems have great similarities. They use surplus electricity from renewables (wind or solar power) to winch a weight up a mineshaft or a mountain. When there’s a need to generate more electricity, the weight is released to fall to the bottom again, turning turbines attached to it by cables and so providing instant power to the grid.

One system envisages helping populations on isolated islands or in dry places where conventional hydro-electricity is not available, but where surplus sun and wind power can haul loads of sand or water up thousands of feet of mountainside.

The system, combining a technique known as Mountain Gravity Energy Storage (MGES) with hydropower, has been proposed by IIASA, the Austria-based International Institute for Applied System Analysis, and is described in the journal Energy. It allows the energy to be stored for months.

“Regions with high mountains could become important long-term energy storage hubs”

If a water source is available halfway or further up a mountain the empty containers can be filled nearer the top, making the system even more financially attractive.

Julian Hunt, a researcher at IIASA, said that cranes built on a mountaintop would haul sand or gravel to the summit rather like a ski lift. He said: “One of the benefits of this system is that sand is cheap and, unlike water, it does not evaporate – so you never lose potential energy and it can be re-used innumerable times. This makes it particularly interesting for dry regions.”

Unlike hydro-power systems that were limited to a height differential of 1,200 metres, MGES plants could cope with differences of more than 5,000m.

“Regions with high mountains, for example the Himalayas, Alps, and Rocky Mountains, could therefore become important long-term energy storage hubs. Other interesting locations for MGES are islands such as Hawaii, Cape Verde, Madeira, and the Pacific Islands with steep mountainous terrain,” Dr Hunt said.

50-year life

The mine shaft system, being developed by Gravitricity and based in the Scottish capital, Edinburgh, is designed to use weights from 500 to 5,000 tons. The company reckons its system will last at least 50 years without wearing out and will work with 80 to 90% efficiency, offering “some of the best characteristics of lithium batteries” at costs well below them.

It uses the same principle as MGES, but relies on old mines from the coal industry, where it uses surplus power to raise weights from the bottom of the shaft to the top. Many shafts, sometimes thousands of feet deep, remain in heavily industrialised areas of Europe.

Depending on the need, Gravitricity’s installation can be geared to produce between one and 20 megawatts of peak power within seconds, and depending on the output required can run for between 15 minutes and eight hours.

Gravitricity says it has already had a rush of interest from industrial partners and is working on a demonstration project.

There is already a different type of generation and storage system at work in the UK, known as pumped storage, which relies on transferring water from one underground reservoir to another. It is in use at Dinorwig in North Wales, where it is known as Electric Mountain.

Ocasio-Cortez Debunks Neoliberals’ Favorite Talking Points Once and for All

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won applause and cheers from her constituents on Sunday at a town hall in the Bronx where she expressed deep frustration with the routine dismissal of investment in public goods as “free stuff.”

“I never want to hear the term ‘free stuff’ ever again,” Ocasio-Cortez told the audience.

The progressive first-term Democrat explained her vision for newly proposed legislation—the Green New Deal for Public Housing—for a $180 billion investment in upgraded public housing that would prioritize communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis, retrofit units with energy-efficient insulation and appliances, and create 250,000 jobs. The bill is cosponsored in the Senate by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).

Like public roads, schools, and libraries, Ocasio-Cortez said, public housing should be recognized as a public good funded by taxpayers, particularly the wealthiest people and corporations.

“It is possible and it’s not that we deserve it because it’s a handout,” the congresswoman said. “People like to say, ‘Oh, this is about free stuff.’ This is not about free stuff… These are public goods.”

Ocasio-Cortez won applause from members of the audience for her plan, including one who shouted of housing, “It is a human right!”

Watch:

From yesterday, @aoc had a Green New Deal for public housing townhall in the Bronx. “I don’t want to hear the term free stuff ever again…I am already hearing from some of these neoliberal folks who are trying to flip the script on us.” pic.twitter.com/ugxsCTa6r3

— David Freedlander (@freedlander) November 25, 2019

On social media Monday Ocasio-Cortez said public services for the use of all people “are worth investing in, protecting, and advancing for all society and future generations.”

Public education, libraries, & infrastructure policies (which we‘ve had before in America and elsewhere in the world!) are not “free stuff.”

They are PUBLIC GOODS.

And they are worth investing in, protecting, & advancing for all society and future generations.

Sincerely,

NY-14 https://t.co/LZdUPMfbpm

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 25, 2019

At Sunday’s town hall, Ocasio-Cortez denounced the term “free stuff” to dismiss progressive proposals for benefits already available to people in many developed countries as a “neoliberal” talking point.

“I’m already hearing some of these neoliberal folks who are trying to flip the script on us and say…’Oh, I don’t want to pay for a millionaire’s kids to go to college,'” she said.

The argument makes no more sense, Ocasio-Cortez suggested, than saying publicly-funded infrastructure unfairly benefits the rich.

“I believe all people should be able to go to a public library,” she said. “Everyone can drive on our roads, everybody should be able to send our kids to public school, and every person who needs it should have access to public housing that looks like this.”

Bloomberg’s Press Cheerleaders Are Conveniently Ignoring His Scandals

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s entrance into the crowded presidential race hasn’t caused big changes in polling for the top three Democratic candidates Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. It has, however, brought a number of media cheerleaders for the city’s richest resident out of the woodwork.

In the New York Post (11/9/19), columnist Michael Goodwin said that Bloomberg’s record of raising “student test scores, creating jobs and cutting crime,” while being liberal on “abortion, climate change and gun control,” is the kind of sensible centrism needed to counter the “militant class warfare” he sees in candidates like Warren, who he called an “Occupy Wall Street brat.”

Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 11/12/19) says Michael Bloomberg “will forcefully put a Democratic pro-growth, pro-innovation, pro-business agenda on the table.”

In the New York Times (11/12/19), Thomas Friedman yammered on about Israeli politics before he celebrated Bloomberg as an industrialist, which he described as a more virtuous form of making billions of dollars than investing or trading, and claimed that Bloomberg would be well-positioned to address inequality, because doing so requires “celebrating and growing entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship — and fostering a culture of accountability, lifelong learning and self-motivation.”

Columnist Bret Stephens (New York Times, 11/8/19) took a similar tone, contrasting Bloomberg’s real business leadership with Trump’s fakery, and asserting that the former mayor is immune to the right’s usual rallying cries against liberals:

The right’s charge-sheet against today’s Democrats is that they hate capitalism, hate Israel, hate the cops, think of America as a land of iniquity, and never met a tax or regulation they didn’t love. Against Bloomberg it all falls flat.

At the New York Daily News (11/13/19), contributor Judi Zirin scoffed at anti-billionaire zealotry, saying it was Bloomberg’s business acumen that allowed him to turn the city’s “budget deficit into a huge surplus.”

There’s a clear theme emerging: In a world where Sanders and Warren are moving the Overton window to the left on economic issues, and Republicans are lock-step behind a white nationalist incumbent, a new pro-business centrist is needed to restore sanity to our discourse. In a world where it’s fun to hate billionaires, a money-maker who gives to nice causes, hates guns and supports environmentalism is the person who can give capitalism a good name again.

Better yet, Bloomberg, at least on the surface, appears to be a kind of tough, successful executive, of both a major company and the nation’s largest city, in a Democratic field dominated either by legislators or candidates with smaller-town executive experience. (Sanders was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, for example.)

But if the media are going to celebrate Bloomberg’s achievements as a private and public executive, they need to address his baggage in those roles as well. The media crowing for Bloomberg’s sensible executive skills leave out several notable scandals during his mayoralty.

The CityTime scandal, which federal Judge George Daniels called “the largest city corruption scandal in decades,” was a 2011 debacle in which digitizing the city’s payroll system resulted in ballooning costs and the conviction of three contractors for bilking the city. Unions had rallied against the system, but Bloomberg, who oversaw and championed the overhaul, pressed on.

The Daily News‘ Judi Zirin (11/13/19) says  “Bloomberg’s personal success doesn’t preclude his candidacy; it endorses it.”

As long-time city reporter Bob Hennelly noted on WNYC (6/29/11), even though Bloomberg never faced prosecution in the mess, this was his responsibility:

The irony here is rich. “The massive scheme” started as an outsourced city contract to design a payroll system that would precisely track the hours worked by city employees. After a couple of false starts with other vendors, defense contractor Scientific Applications International Corporation was awarded the job in a no-bid contract by the Giuliani Administration.

Under Mayor Bloomberg, the contract ballooned from $63 million where it had started out in the Giuliani years , to more than $700 million. Federal prosecutors now say at least $600 million of that was “tainted.” At every level, federal prosecutors allege grafters had honeycombed CityTime into a paragon of corruption.

Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez, one of the main journalists to focus on the ripoff, called it the “biggest scandal of the entire Bloomberg era” (Democracy Now!, 12/23/10). But the late investigative journalist Wayne Barrett, in the now-defunct Village Voice (7/22/09), proposed another contender for that title: the deadly Deutsche Bank fire in Lower Manhattan, which he argued was a scandal that went up to the highest reaches of city power.

For months, Lower Manhattan residents and worker advocates had raised alarm bells about the controversial simultaneous decontamination and demolition of the former Deutsche Bank Building, which had been badly damaged on 9/11. They alleged that shoddy contracting could endanger the community, but the city pressed on despite these loud objections. On August 18, 2017, faulty construction work led to a fire that killed two firefighters, largely because the contractors had violated construction codes that would have allowed for quicker emergency exits. The incident soured relations between the Lower Manhattan community and the administration, and inflamed tensions between Bloomberg and the firefighter unions.

Then we have Bloomberg’s long record of sexism as a boss, which often seems forgotten. The Washington Examiner (11/11/19):

For instance, a New York Magazine journalist reported that in his time spent with Bloomberg, he degraded women based on their appearance, in one instance ignoring the conversation they were in to gesture at a woman and say, “Look at the ass on her.” The same article recounts a female politician detailing how the mayor shamed her for wearing flats rather than heels and demeaned the gray streaks in her hair.

New York Magazine also reported on a list of “Bloombergisms,” common phrases and quips the mayor used to make. These reportedly included “If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they’d go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale’s,” and “I know for a fact that any self-respecting woman who walks past a construction site and doesn’t get a whistle will turn around and walk past again and again until she does get one.”

This matters not just because we live in a world of #MeToo, but if part of the outrage of Donald Trump is that his governance is intertwined with sexism, why is it so different that Bloomberg is similar, just behind closed doors? (Hint: It’s not.)

In the New York Post, Michael Goodwin (11/9/19) says Bloomberg “could help save the party from following Sanders or Warren into the political wilderness.”

“As Bloomberg’s New York Prospered, Inequality Flourished Too” (New York Times, 11/9/19) is corporate media’s ambivalent way of acknowledging that Bloomberg’s tenure benefited the few at the expense of the many, with the “growth and prosperity” the Times illustrated with the controversial Atlantic Yards/Barclay Center in Brooklyn accompanied by increases in rents, gentrification and homelessness.

Finally, elite media celebrating Bloomberg as “our best chance to bring America together again,” as Judge Judy Scheindlin did in a USA Today op-ed (10/16/19), can only do so by downplaying the severity of the harm done by his eager expansion of the NYPD’s racist and unconstitutional stop-and-frisk program. Charles Blow (New York Times, 11/10/19) used his column to denounce as a “non-negotiable deal breaker” Bloomberg’s support for the scheme, which targeted black and Latino males as young as 13, making their routine harassment and humiliation “just a fact of life in New York” (New York Times, 11/17/19). But news articles and profiles still prevaricate, like the Times explainer (11/17/19) that referred to stop-and-frisk as a “crime-prevention strategy,” though it acknowledged that research revealed the stops no more successful at finding weapons than simple chance, and the city’s crime rate famously declined with the program’s phaseout.

Bloomberg defended stop and frisk up until it “emerged as a vulnerability for him on the campaign trail,” and his “apology” (“Our focus was on saving lives”) rings false.

Put it all together and you have a pretty good picture of the kind of executive Bloomberg was: the kind who would tolerate criminal negligence and excessive waste, all to make some absurd point about workplace efficiency. The kind who led an administration whose obsession with thrift and lack of appreciation for safety near the World Trade Center contributed to the needless deaths of two of New York’s Bravest.

All of this had an effect on real New Yorkers, especially working-class, and in the case of policing, non-white New Yorkers. That narrative often gets left out of the narrative that he’s a “get things done” type who can run the US government like a successful business.

For Bloomberg’s cheerleaders in the press, the reality of his record as a governing executive is left out of their case that he’s the one to cure the nation of populism across the political spectrum. This is shoddy journalism, even if it’s partisan and on the opinion pages, largely because none of these things are secrets—these are stories that were doggedly covered by city reporters at the time.

These omissions show just how out of touch the punditry around Bloomberg is—not just with regular New Yorkers, but with journalism itself.

Bloomberg Is Running ‘Against Bernie, Not Trump,’ Says Sanders Campaign

Billionaire media businessman and former three-term Mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg entered the Democratic primary on Sunday expressly to attack Sen. Bernie Sanders’ attempt to win the party’s 2020 nomination, the Sanders campaign charged Monday.

“Bloomberg is primarily motivated by a desire to stop Bernie and his working-class movement,” claimed Sanders speechwriter David Sirota Monday in his Bern After Reading newsletter.

According to Sirota, the timing of Bloomberg’s announcement lines up with Sanders’ rise in the polls and a well-reported meeting between the media mogul and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, one of the two wealthiest men in the world alongside Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Bloomberg is also close with Disney’s Bob Iger, Sirota said.

Bloomberg’s run is reminiscent of the billionaire’s decision in 2016 to float a run in order to take down the Sanders campaign.

“Bloomberg began floating the idea of a presidential bid in 2016, just as Bernie was beginning to gain momentum in that race,” wrote Sirota. “At the time, Bloomberg disparaged Bernie and his campaign’s challenge to Wall Street.”

Sanders, in a statement Friday in advance of Bloomberg’s entrance in to the race, said he was “disgusted” that Bloomberg believed the race could be bought.

“I’m disgusted by the idea that Michael Bloomberg or any other billionaire thinks they can circumvent the political process and spend tens of millions of dollars to buy our elections,” Sanders said.

The Vermont senator doubled down on those criticisms at a rally on Sunday in New Hampshire.

“We do not believe that billionaires have the right to buy elections,” said Sanders. “That is why multi-billionaires like Michael Bloomberg are not going to get very far in this election.”

On MSNBC Monday, anchor Katy Tur wondered if Bloomberg has another candidate in mind to take down.

“Is this a real campaign, is he really running?” wondered Tur. “Or is he running to torpedo Elizabeth Warren?”

Warren, in New Hampshire on Sunday, said that while she accepts some excesses of wealth she draws the line at billionaires having more political power than the rest of Americans.

“I understand rich people are going to have more shoes of the rest of us,” said Warren. “They’re going to have more cars than the rest of us, they’re going to have more houses—but they don’t get a bigger share of democracy. Especially in a Democratic primary.”

Britain, Land of Tea and Torture

British politics is presently mired in the second general election campaign in three years, thanks to the grinding parliamentary impasse precipitated by Brexit. One of the most important features of the clamor surrounding Brexit is that very few other political issues are getting the sustained scrutiny they demand, or rather, that every piece of current affairs information is filtered through the lens of our faltering, exasperating withdrawal from the EU. Enormous and urgent issues, from climate catastrophe to austerity budget cuts, from rising homelessness to the financial crisis in the National Health Service, are all taking a back seat to Brexit, which has acted as the determinant of every political conversation in Britain since 2016. These have been boom times for those in British politics who want to get their way while avoiding accountability.

For example, David Cameron’s Conservative government, which announced the 2016 referendum that started it all, has another piece of urgent unfinished business. In 2010, Cameron announced a judge-led inquiry into Britain’s role in the U.S.-led post-9/11 rendition and torture program. Over the last decade, British authorities have consistently refused (or failed) to conduct this inquiry and recently, the government presided over by arch-Brexiteer, unapologetic racist and serial liar Boris Johnson refused to continue inquiries, kicking British accountability for torture into the long grass once again.

There is a great deal of other torture news in Britain, some of it to do with our complicity in the torture program, much of it to do with historical abuses, some of it to do with our immigration detention system, all of it routinely buried under the agonizing slew of second-by-second analysis of Brexit. Last week, for instance, allegations resurfaced that the UK military and government ministers suppressed evidence of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Three weeks ago, a Nigerian man was found dead in British immigration detention in conditions of incarceration that human rights groups characterize as torture. A UN expert has argued that the treatment in British detention of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has amounted to psychological torture, and this week has seen medical professionals emphasize his need for treatment for the injuries and depression that have resulted from his stay in Belmarsh prison.

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Recently, a court in Belfast ruled that British treatment of Irish prisoners during the Troubles should correctly be described as torture. One of Johnson’s election pledges is to shield British veterans from prosecution for murders committed during the Troubles in Ireland. There’s a debate over here about whether MI5 should be required to abide by the law, which has led to credible allegations that the British Security Services are seeking to evade accountability for extrajudicial murder and torture. And of course, as a background to all of this, the Home Office’s Hostile Environment policy introduced by Theresa May has made life for immigrants incredibly difficult and has seen lifelong UK residents deported. Torture remains a British problem, and we Brits need to be better at confronting it and dealing with it.

One of Johnson’s election pledges is to shield British veterans from prosecution for murders committed during the Troubles in Ireland. There’s a debate here about whether the British Security Service should be required to abide by the law, which has led to credible allegations that the MI5 is seeking to evade accountability for extrajudicial murder and torture. And, as a background to all of this, the Home Office’s “hostile environment” policy introduced by Theresa May has made life for immigrants incredibly difficult and led to the deportation of  lifelong U.K. residents.

In short, torture remains a British problem, and we Brits need to be better at confronting it and dealing with it.

The root cause of this refusal to account for torture is a pathology in British life, of which Brexit is only the latest and wildest symptom. Britain has never honestly reckoned with itself over the precipitous and carnage-filled loss of its empire in the 20th century. Contemporary conversations about empire are routinely dominated by imperial nostalgia and amnesia, with little understanding of the crucial role played by violence, extortion, slavery and torture in our centuries-long global ascendancy. As a consequence, there is little understanding of why torture, as an issue that connects them all, still matters in today’s Britain.

Violence, Empire and Secrecy

“Torture is as British as suet pudding and red pillar-boxes.” —Ian Cobain, “Cruel Britannia”

We Brits, in general, are pretty poor at coming to terms with our imperial past, both in terms of what our centuries of global domination entailed and how that domination continues to have consequences in the present. British imperial amnesia manifests as a reluctance or inability—part failure, part refusal—to understand our imperial past in historical and political context. When the subject of empire comes up, it is generally considered both that the British empire was a benevolent project and that British decolonization was both regrettable and relatively painless. We may be aware of flashpoint events, such as the massacre of civilians in Amritsar in 1919 or on Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, but the general understanding is that events like these were discrete, shocking excesses, rather than acts that could more usefully be understood as part of a constant pattern of violent colonial policing.

In 2016, the market-research company YouGov published a poll showing that “by three to one, British people think the British Empire is something to be proud of rather than ashamed of.” Popular historians and broadcasters, generally of a right-wing persuasion, such as Niall Ferguson, Jeremy Paxman and Andrew Marr, have published tome after tome in the last decade without countenancing a serious consideration of the way that violence and coercion underpinned the establishment, daily running and dissolution of the British empire. Hip-hop musician and activist Akala, for example, writes in his book, “Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire,” that “decolonisation may well turn out to have been the most significant historical process of the second half of the twentieth century, but you would never know this from mainstream historiography.” (Here I’d like to insert an element of autobiography: I left my secondary education without any awareness that Britain had ever been an imperial power, let alone one of the biggest slavers in history.)

This ahistorical and reactionary understanding of empire is bolstered by the brasher proclamations of such public intellectuals as Bruce Gilley or Nigel Biggar, who are openly celebratory of what they describe as the virtues of the British empire. Gilley, for instance, wrote in a controversial 2017 article titled “The Case for Colonialism,” that he was in favor of “the civilising mission without scare quotes” and that “Western and non-Western countries should reclaim the colonial toolkit and language as part of their commitment to effective governance and international order.” Earlier this year, Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg went so far as to defend the British use of concentrationary incarceration during the Boer War on BBC’s flagship political discussion show “Question Time,” arguing, in his studied, arrogant drawl, that concentration camps designed to demoralize and starve their inhabitants were safe, comfortable and constructed in accordance with humanitarian principles.

Rees-Mogg’s insouciant apologia for concentration camps is a particularly interesting—and shocking—case of the casual dismissal of colonial violence found throughout elite British political discourse. Our national blind spot is particularly pronounced, however, when it comes to the bloodshed of decolonization. As noted scholar of postcolonial Britain Paul Gilroy wrote in 2004, “[T]the mysterious evacuation of Britain’s postcolonial conflicts from national consciousness has become a significant event in its own right.” Britain’s decolonizations were marked by torture to the extent that it can be seen as a characteristically colonial form of violence, in settings as diverse as Aden (today’s Yemen), Cyprus, Kenya and Northern Ireland, to name but a few.

But Britain also has a long history of obscuring or withholding historical records of imperial violence—even, at times, deliberately destroying archival materials—and as a consequence, mainstream accounts of Britain’s geopolitical role and colonial history remain generally positive. In ordinary conversations, people are much more likely to mention our infrastructure projects abroad (“We gave them the railways”) than they are to acknowledge the systematic racism and violence that underwrote British power, as though we built the railways in India out of a sense of benevolent generosity toward the local population rather than to facilitate our extractivist pillage of the subcontinent.

It is true that a growing body of academics, journalists and writers, such as Priyamvada Gopal, Kim Wagner, Brian Drohan, Darius Rejali, Catherine Elkins, Bob Brecher, Ruth Blakely, Sam Raphael and Ian Cobain, have been conducting extraordinary research aiming to reorient the conversation about colonial violence, empire, anticolonialism and British innovations in the systematic use of torture as a tactic of imperial government. Nonetheless, torture features in our national political conversations at best as a side issue, as something that somehow does not really involve us.

Where Is the British Torture Debate?

Other democracies with histories of torture and other human rights violations, such as the U.S. and France, have conducted high-profile and often bitterly acrimonious public debates over torture. As I have written elsewhere, these debates have often played out through culture. In 1960s France, for example, public intellectuals such as Henri Alleg, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus took high-profile positions in the debate over the systematic torture that the French military was committing in the course of its long colonial war in Algeria.

More influential, perhaps, was ex-paratrooper Jean Lartéguy’s novel, “The Centurions,” written in 1960 at the height of the war. The novel won the prestigious Prix Ève-Delacroix and sold over half a million copies, so it was one of the defining texts of the Algerian conflict in terms of the effects it would have on the ways that French colonial violence was publicly interpreted. Its major contribution to the world has been a particularly powerful and influential dramatization of the ticking-bomb scenario, a justification for emergency torture in which countless innocent lives are saved when French soldiers torture a terrorist into revealing the locations of 15 bombs scattered throughout Algiers. By narrating this thought experiment as a compelling story, this novel was able to popularize the justification for torture to the extent that it became one of the determining dimensions of the political debate in France at the time. In contrast, other forms of cultural production that explored the issue of torture from a position that was less sympathetic to the French military, such as Jean-Luc Godard’s “Le Petit Soldat,” Alleg’s torture memoir, “The Question,” or Gillo Pontecorvo’s anticolonial classic “The Battle of Algiers,” were expressly censored by the French government. The division, violence and unrest of the period of French decolonization, of which the debate over torture was vitally emblematic, led to crises in public life and the end of the Fourth Republic.

Similar cultural dynamics played out in the U.S. after 9/11. Thrillers like “24,” “Daredevil,” “Unthinkable” and “Zero Dark Thirty” have positioned torture as necessary and effective by telling stories remarkably similar to “The Centurions.” Grizzled, combat-worn heroes who know how the world really works commit torture and save the world by doing the dirty work. Anti-torture thrillers have appeared, too, ensuring that the debate at least appears more nuanced in 21st-century America than in 1960s France. Consider, for instance, “Rendition,” “Extraordinary Rendition” or “The Report.”

But Britain’s record of torture has not attracted as much public discussion. The only comparable literary narrative about Britain that I have been able to locate is Robert Ruark’s “Something of Value,” a long, brutal novel about the violent British response to the Kenyan Mau Mau uprising that uses the unsavory and dehumanizing central metaphor that counterinsurgency in Kenya was another form of big-game hunting. But Ruark was an American; British writers dared not make such openly racist and violently triumphalist literary statements. Major writers of the period of decolonization, such as Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John le Carré, did not investigate or tell stories about British torture, often preferring instead to focus their attention on the torture committed by the Soviet Union in the course of the Cold War.

It might also be tempting to argue that Britain is rhetorically inoculated from its own history of torture through the circulation of uncritically patriotic narratives, such as the ever-expanding James Bond franchise. After all, Bond shows us the best of Britain, projecting strength, style and sex appeal, and only ever suffering torture, never inflicting it. It is more accurate, though, to say instead that torture is positioned, in much mainstream British discourse that addresses the issue, as not a British problem or as something that Britain simply does not do.

Why? Back to Brexit

The British attitude to torture—a mixture of coy denial, willful ignorance and sordidly enthusiastic perpetration—is connected to Brexit much more intimately than is apparent at first flush. One of the major attractions of Brexit for “Leave” voters was the idea that, after the great liberation of Brexit, Britain would no longer be bound by the rules of the European Convention on Human Rights, long seen by British Conservatives as an unnecessary impediment to British sovereignty. Indeed, Tory Prime Ministers Cameron and May repeatedly promised to tear up or replace the Human Rights Act, which integrates the ECHR into British law; May in particular was keen to disregard human rights legislation in the pursuit of her security agenda. There is a strong case to be made both that the freedom to withdraw human rights from people—in particular (but not exclusively) terrorism suspects, that is, those the authorities are most likely to want to torture—was one of the major attractions of Brexit, and that Brexit will make Britain’s human rights record worse.

For example, the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s 2019 report states that “the removal of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights from domestic law through the EU Withdrawal Act may result in a loss or weakening of some rights protections (for example, Article 1 on human dignity). In addition, the U.K.’s future extradition arrangements with the EU and future funding to prevent violence against children, young people, women and other groups at risk, and for women’s services, including for victims of domestic violence, remain uncertain.” Yet “Leave” voters are more likely to assert that the desire to scrap human rights legislation has more to do with undoing regulatory integration with the EU than it is about stripping rights from terror suspects—as though the two reactionary impulses could not coexist.

Northern Ireland also presents an interesting case. The province remains part of the British union, but every attempt so far to negotiate a Brexit deal seems to have been conducted in arrogant ignorance and contempt of the historical circumstances and colonial dynamics unique to the region that charge the issue with a very urgent, life-and-death significance. A hard border in Ireland would likely have terrible consequences for the population of the six counties, but our government seems not only not to care about this but not even to entertain a cursory understanding of it.

This discussion of Brexit, partition and human rights is important enough. But it misses the bigger picture: The fact remains that in Britain, torture is a big elephant in the room, bigger, even, than this election and bigger than Brexit. Torture is an issue that synthesizes historical injustice, continuing complicity, foreign policy and domestic politics, our human rights record and our political, moral and ethical values today. In particular, it is significant that torture is difficult to integrate into the antagonistic idiom of most political talk, which tends to focus on the electoral and managerial matters of whether one party or another should be voted for. This is because torture is one of those rare issues on which there is a bipartisan consensus: Both major ruling parties in Britain, the Labour Party as much as the Conservatives, are historically complicit in it. It may be the Conservative Party’s Rees-Mogg defending concentration camps and its Boris Johnson quietly closing down the torture inquiry, but it was Tony Blair’s Labour Party that took us to war in Iraq and allowed British airports to be used for extraordinary renditions.

We in Britain need to face the fact that we are a torturing nation, as well as a nation of genteel, afternoon tea-drinkers; that we have been historic innovators in torture, as well as experts in fine manners. After all, to conclude with another autobiographical aside, it was at a pleasant Christmas party that I spoke to a soldier who told me, while we were wearing party hats and drinking wine, that the way to avoid breaking the law when committing waterboarding is to half-drown people with diesel fuel instead (because diesel-boarding is not legally recognized, neither is it legally prohibited). We need this national conversation urgently.

McGahn Must Testify Before House, Federal Judge Rules

WASHINGTON—A federal judge has ordered former White House counsel Donald McGahn to appear before Congress in a setback to President Donald Trump’s effort to keep his top aides from testifying.

The outcome could lead to renewed efforts by House Democrats to compel testimony from other high-ranking officials, including former national security adviser John Bolton.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson ruled Monday in a lawsuit filed by the House Judiciary Committee.

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McGahn was a star witness in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and Democrats wanted to question McGahn about possible obstruction of justice by Trump. That was months before the House started an impeachment inquiry into Trump’s effort to get Ukraine to announce an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden.

An appeal is likely.

The White House has argued that McGahn and other witnesses have “absolute immunity” from testifying.

But Jackson disputed the administration’s reasoning in a 118-page ruling. “That is to say, however busy or essential a presidential aide might be, and whatever their proximity to sensitive domestic and national-security projects, the President does not have the power to excuse him or her” from complying with a valid congressional subpoena, Jackson wrote. She is an appointee of President Barack Obama.

Whether McGahn has to provide all the information Congress seeks, though, is another matter, the judge wrote. The president may be able to assert “executive privilege” on some sensitive issues, she wrote.

McGahn was a vital witness for Mueller, whose April report detailed the president’s outrage over the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and Trump’s efforts to curtail it.

In interviews with Mueller’s team, McGahn described being called at home by the president on the night of June 17, 2017, and being directed to call the Justice Department and say Mueller had conflicts of interest and should be removed. McGahn declined the command, deciding he would resign rather than carry it out, the report said.

Once that episode became public in the news media, the report said, the president demanded that McGahn dispute the news stories and asked him why he had told Mueller about it and why he had taken notes of their conversations. McGahn refused to back down.

It’s unclear if McGahn’s testimony would include any new revelations beyond what Mueller has already released. Mueller concluded that he could not exonerate Trump on obstruction of justice, but also that there was insufficient evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

House Democrats leading the impeachment inquiry have yet to try to force Bolton to testify, and a subpoena for Bolton’s former deputy, Charles Kupperman, to appear was withdrawn. Democrats have said they don’t want to get bogged down in court fights over testimony.

Noam Chomsky: Centrism Will Only Get Us Four More Years of Trump

Noam Chomsky is not here to reassure you. As Arctic ice melts, centrists in the Democratic Party actively hinder progress on “Medicare for All” and Republicans work equally hard on voter suppression, the activist, linguist and professor is sounding the alarm.

In an interview after last week’s Democratic debate, Chomsky spoke with Truthout’s C.J. Polychroniou about America’s political culture, the rise of democratic socialism, the Democratic Party’s fear of progressives, and why he finds it “psychologically impossible to discuss the 2020 election without emphasizing, as strongly as possible, what is at stake: survival, nothing less.”

According to Chomsky, another four years of Donald Trump “may spell the end of much of life on earth, including organized human society in any recognizable form.”

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This is especially true when it comes to climate change, an existential threat that Trump continually plays down. Chomsky quotes Raymond Pierrehumbert, a lead author of the 2018 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. In a September op-ed for the Tucson Sentinel, Pierrehumbert wrote, “With regard to the climate crisis, yes, it’s time to panic.”

While other countries attempt to alleviate the effects of climate change, “Trump and the political organization he now virtually owns are taking steps, too—to exacerbate the crisis,” all the while threatening to use nuclear weapons, which could also destroy us if environmental decline doesn’t first, Chomsky says.

Our current political climate didn’t arrive in 2016, however—a point Chomsky emphasizes:

In recent years, the Republican Party has dedicated itself [with] such fervor to its constituency of wealth and private power that a voting base had to be mobilized on grounds unrelated to its primary policy objectives—with many dark forces. And it’s also worth recalling that there are parallels elsewhere, notably in Europe, with the collapse of centrist parties.

American institutions have consistently enabled these trends. When Polychroniou asks Chomsky what happens if Trump wins the Electoral College in 2020, if not the popular vote, Chomsky replies that he’s more worried the Senate, which he calls “racially undemocratic.” Multiple factors, he says, “are converging to a situation where a small minority—white, rural, Christian, traditional, older, fearful of losing ‘their America,’ will be able to dominate the political system.”

Chomsky refers to two bright spots in these dark times: the rise of democratic socialism, and a young, activist left (inspired by Bernie Sanders) that “doesn’t just show up every four years to push a button and then leave matters to their betters, but continues its activism and [engagement] in public affairs that is none of their business, according to long-standing democratic theory.” He’s also somewhat hopeful about worker-owned cooperatives that challenge traditional business structures. Chomsky calls these developments “a bare sample of considerable ferment that could open the way to a much more free and just social order—if imminent looming catastrophe can be overcome.”

Read the full interview at Truthout.