Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 341

Pharma bro goes to prison: Martin Shkreli found guilty of 3 charges, including securities fraud

(Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Martin Shkreli, the so-called “pharma bro” who became infamous for buying the patents to an HIV treatment drug and then promptly raising prices by 5,000 percent, was found guilty of three counts of securities fraud on Friday. He faces up to 20 years in prison, the Washington Post noted.

Outside the newsroom, Shkreli said that he was “delighted in many ways,” adding that he was the victim of “a witch hunt of epic proportions.” He had been charged with eight separate counts.

While Shkreli’s price-hike on the aforementioned drug, Daraprim — which is used for treating toxoplasmosis in HIV-positive patients — was what made him an object of public scorn, none of the charges had anything to do with that incident — which, though morally questionable, was entirely legal.

 

Prosecutors said that Shkreli told investors that he made more money than he actually did as the leader of two hedge funds, MSMB Capital and MSMB Healthcare. He also used invested money to pay off his other investors who wanted to withdraw funds, CNBC noted:

Prosecutors said a mountain of testimony and evidence at trial showed that Shkreli duped multiple investors into putting millions of dollars into two hedge funds he ran, MSMB Capital and MSMB Healthcare, by falsely claiming to have an excellent record of running such funds, and by falsely stating his investment strategy had a low level of risk.

After getting their money, prosecutor said, Shkreli quickly lost much of it, and also used some of it to capitalize his infant pharmaceuticals company, Retrophin, even as he continued sending out financial statements to investors claiming positive returns.

And when investors asked for their money to be redeemed to them in cash, Shkreli brushed them off for months or more, inventing excuses and suggesting alternative ways to pay them back, according to the prosecution’s case.

Prosecutors said that he then looted the stock of Retrophin and cash from the young firm to pay off the hedge-fund investors who he had ripped off.

Shkreli’s defense was that his investors should have known better.

The Shkreli trial faced a tough challenge from the outset: finding people who didn’t hate him already. Jury selection ran into problems last month as potential jurors described him as an “evil man” and even “a snake.”

The pharmaceutical CEO and hedge fund manager is a notorious troll, having jumped on the Trump Train early. He said before the election that he would stream an unreleased Wu-Tang album if Donald Trump won the presidential election (and kept his word).

HBO faces its second round of hacks in just one week

Emilia Clarke in "Game of Thrones" (Credit: HBO)

Television giant HBO faces a cybersecurity crisis as the company experiences its second leak in five days.

On Monday, HBO faced its first cyber attack of the week where hackers stole “thousands of Home Box Office (HBO) internal company documents,” according to IP Echelon, a security company hired to scrub search results following the hack. The revelation came as part of a take-down notice sent to Google so the site could remove the links to the hacked files.

In addition to the script of an upcoming episode of “Game of Thrones,” episodes from their series “Insecure,” “Ballers,” “Room 104,” and upcoming show “Barry,” were released. Hackers claim to have stolen total of 1.5 terabyte of data which include infrastructural data and the personal information of employees, further suggesting there would be more leaks to come.

“The problem before us is unfortunately all too familiar in the world we now find ourselves a part of,” HBO CEO Richard Plepler wrote in a staff email obtained by Entertainment Weekly. “As has been the case with any challenge we have ever faced, I have absolutely no doubt that we will navigate our way through this successfully.”

More recently, an unaired episode of “Thrones” appeared on the internet Friday morning, sparking more controversy over the network’s security. However, the leaked episode is not part of Monday’s successful hacking, as first reported by The Verge. Sources familiar with the breach explain the episode was leaked by HBO’s distribution partner, Star India — the logo of which is watermarked on the episode.

“This confirms the compromise of episode 4 of Game of Thrones Season 7, earlier this afternoon,” says a Star India spokesperson. “We take this breach very seriously and have immediately initiated forensic investigations at our and the technology partner’s end to swiftly determine the cause. This is a grave issue and we are taking appropriate legal remedial action.”

Each year, “Game of Thrones” continues to hold the title as the most pirated show on television — a title the network has boasted previously. But now, as the leaks become more common and — using the stolen personal information as proof— more insidious, HBO faces a systemic security issue. This week’s leaks suggest HBO has a lot of work to do to ensure major hacks such as these don’t spoil their shows with a cult-following, and don’t put the personal information of their employees in jeopardy.

As for now, don’t watch the leaked episode — a move more for your self respect rather than any moral reason considering it was uploaded in 360p. Avoid all of your social media accounts to ensure you won’t find a spoiler. The leaked episode premieres this Sunday on HBO.

White House comes out for “clean” debt ceiling raise, but some Republicans aren’t on board

(Credit: AP Photo/Harry Hamburg, File)

President Donald Trump’s budget chief said that the White House supports Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s calls for a “clean” debt ceiling increase, and the Democrats have indicated they were willing to help the GOP pass the legislation by the end of September, but difference of opinions within the Republican party poses a threat.

“Steve Mnuchin speaks for the administration when it comes to the debt ceiling,” Mick Mulvaney, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said on Tuesday, according to CNN. “You’ve heard that out of the president’s mouth. I respect that; in fact, I think it’s the right way to do it.”

While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., support the “clean” raise, many Republicans don’t support it and want to include “spending cuts or fiscal reforms — the same demand they made repeatedly during Barack Obama’s two terms,” according to Politico.

Republican leaders will need assistance from Democrats, who support the debt limit raise, but remain skeptical of GOP intentions. “Democrats don’t want to risk defaulting on the debt,” Politico reported. “But they’re also concerned that after offering up their votes to Republicans to clear the debt ceiling hurdle, Republicans will promptly turn around in October and pass tax cuts that could balloon the deficit and disproportionately benefit the wealthy.”

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Orrin Hatch R-Utah, said it’s an issue not worth messing with. “We shouldn’t even play with that. It should just be ‘clean,'” he told Politico. “Some conservatives think they can get some programs cut. Well, that’s not gonna happen … We have to pay our bills and anybody who doesn’t want to do that doesn’t deserve to be here.”

Other Republicans have expressed the opposite, such as Sen. James Lankford R-Okla., who simply said “no” regarding a “clean” debt limit raise.

“We’re going to need to raise the debt limit,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn R-Texas said, according to Politico. “We’re talking about different options.”

Politico elaborated:

Conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus have made demands to support a debt increase, including steep cuts to mandatory programs. But GOP leaders under their current strategy will, in essence, ignore conservatives because they can’t give them what they want and expect it to clear the Senate’s higher, 60-vote threshold.

The Freedom Caucus appeared firm in their stance to include other measures along with the hike, and tweeted on Friday that “there’s no excuse” to raise “the debt ceiling without spending cuts and reforms.”

We promised the American people we'd address our nation's debt. There's no excuse 4 raising the debt ceiling without spending cuts & reforms

— House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) August 4, 2017

Congress doesn’t have much time to debate the issue as Mnuchin has said that in order to avoid a major financial crisis the limit must be raised by September 29 or the government will default. However the Senate also left for recess on Thursday night, and both chambers of Congress won’t be back in session until labor day, with only 12 scheduled joint days of working together.

Why is the “deep state” on the tip of so many tongues these days?

Richard Nixon speaks to the Associated Press Managing Editors annual meeting, Nov. 17, 1973. Nixon told the APME "I am not a crook." (Credit: AP)

The politics of the American deep state have grown more explicit in the six months of the Trump presidency.

Rosie Gray of TheAtlantic.com reports that Rich Higgins, an NSC staff director and former Pentagon official, was recently fired for circulating a memo arguing that a “deep state” of leftists, globalists and Islamic sympathizers poses a threat to the Trump administration and to U.S. national security.

His dismissal marks the latest victory by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in the ongoing war within Trump’s White House between those who believe that the president is under threat from dark forces plotting to undermine him, and those like McMaster who dismiss this as conspiratorial thinking.

Who’s right?

It is disturbing and unwelcome for CIA chiefs to intervene in electoral politics. But the agency didn’t write or leak Donald Trump Jr.’s emails. Michael Hayden didn’t dream up the Trump Tower meeting on the “Russian government’s support for the Trump campaign.” To favor tough Russia sanctions is not necessarily a vote for Cold War II.

McMaster, a three-star general and deep state mandarin par excellence, has a point, even if it is Washington conventional wisdom. The notion that a leftist-Islamist conspiracy is mobilizing within the U.S. government is foolish and grounds for professional disqualification.

The only common denominator among popular ideas of the deep state is the role of the secret agencies created by the National Security Act — what Professor Michael Glennon calls “double government.”

Since 1947, Glennon notes, the three branches of the republican government founded in 1789 have been joined by a fourth branch of military and intelligence organizations, which wield power largely beyond the view or control of the Madisonian government and the voting public. In my opinion, “double government” is the most precise and useful way to talk about the deep state.

In any case, the effects of secret government are visible to most voters: endless war abroad, high taxation and mass surveillance at home, contributing to declining faith in government. Secrecy breeds paranoia and paranoia can lead to nuttiness. Paranoia can also be a rational response to unseen threats.

“Deep politics”

The term “deep state” was first popularized by Peter Dale Scott, a Canadian diplomat turned literature professor. His 1974 book “Deep Politics” was an original leftist take on key events in the 1960s, ranging from the assassination of JFK, to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that justified the Vietnam war, to the Watergate scandal that brought down a popular Republican president in record time.

Scott described how networks of clandestine power running from secretive military and intelligence agencies to organized crime and speculative finance had shaped events in the 1960s and ’70s. While Scott’s writing was dense and smugly dismissed as “conspiracy theory,” it had persuasive, even predictive, power.

“Deep politics” surfaced with a vengeance in the Iran-contra scandal in the 1980s. When Congress cut off funding for the Reagan administration’s intervention in the civil wars in Central America, a network of CIA officers, White House officials, arms dealers and drug traffickers made their own policy. The results were quasi-state action in support of death squads and cocaine traffickers.

It is true that some of the Iran-contra machinations were exposed by the press and Congress, but that hardly refuted the notion of a deep state in popular thinking. Quite the contrary.

The Iran-contra investigations exposed the machinations of the most secretive sectors of the U.S. government and society — and those responsible ultimately escaped accountability. In January 1992, President George H.W. Bush, a former CIA director, pardoned the indicted leaders of the Iran-contra conspiracy before they could be brought to trial.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump and the populist right adopted “deep state” as a label for their elitist enemies. The CIA and other secretive intelligence agencies are reviled for their globalism, not their militarism. Entrenched bureaucratic elites are feared for their secularism and faith in the rule of law.

On Breitbart News and Twitter, #deepstate has become a handy hashtag to slap on anybody in Washington, liberal or conservative, who yearns for an early end to the shambolic Trump presidency.

What most Americans think

As “deep state” migrated from leftist trope to rightist meme, it gained currency everywhere.

In April 2017, ABC News pollsters asked Americans about the possible existence of a deep state, defined as “military, intelligence and government officials who try to secretly manipulate government policy.” A near-majority of respondents, 48 percent, agreed while 35 percent described the idea as a conspiracy theory. The belief in a deep state, it is worth noting, ran equally strong among Republicans and Democrats.

The left, the right and the center don’t agree on the particulars, but they do share a fear of secret power in Washington today, which they express with this common epithet. As long as the U.S. government maintains a global war machine and domestic surveillance apparatus shrouded in official secrecy, Americans will argue about the deep state.

Flat Earthers and feedback loops

Donald Trump (Credit: AP//Evan Vucci)

Don’t let it be said that Donald Trump is clueless. Mendacious, chaotic, vicious, disgusting and arguably psychopathic, yes. Supply your own examples from the past week. Say, bragging about crowd sizes and attacking Barack Obama at the Boy Scout jamboree; urging police not to “be too nice” when throwing thugs into paddy wagons, and later claiming he was kidding; tweeting Reince Priebus into oblivion. . . . From the trademark slogan “You’re fired” to “Please don’t be too nice” — is this progress in presidentiality? Only if the Marx Brothers had lived to write a sequel to Duck Soup starring John Belushi as Anthony Scaramucci.

But cluelessness doesn’t explain why truth reels in the United States. Trump gets all too many clues — from delusional sources. He rubber-stamps a mental agenda drawn up by Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity, Breitbart News, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Mike Cernovich, et al., and the Republican politicians who share their wavelength. Trump sops up their horror stories, then barks, tweets, brays and pumps them back out to be amplified in turn on talk radio, Fox News and the other conduits of what I have been calling the VOices of RighT-wing EXtremism, aka the VORTEX. What happens next is a positive feedback loop — garbage begets garbage. The Birthers, Whitewater, “Travelgate” and Vince Foster conspiracy theorists, “death panel” enthusiasts, “Lock Her Up!” chanters, scientist-haters and other Flat Earth factions gulp down the Kool-Aid, panicking those Republican members of Congress who haven’t already swallowed.

Sometimes Trump reacts almost instantaneously, as with the Swedish riot that wasn’t, last February. You may recall that, having watched a Fox News documentary about immigrant violence in Sweden, he told an adoring rally the next day:  “. . . look at what’s happening last night in Sweden,” vaguely suggesting some dire incident, a riot or, perhaps a terror attack. There was no riot the previous night; there was the Fox News show. As the BBC commented:

The statement about a particular incident on Friday night baffled Swedes, including former [conservative] Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who tweeted: “Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking?”

Do these spikes of hysteria matter? In a word, yes. As each panic wave subsides, it leaves a residue of delusion. Over time, the residue tends to acquire one stratum after another. Even refutations and denials can fuel the belief that there’s a “controversy,” an “issue.” Since the right’s paranoid system churns incessantly, a huge and well-represented public has crystallized over the decades. It’s not necessarily a majority on one issue or another, but it has hardened into a permanent critical mass that forces reason into a corner. The Flat Earthers set an agenda that often enough infects the mainstream media as well as the Vortex. What is ludicrously called “the debate” remains warped even if the scarred-up Party of Reason does, for a time, prevail — as when, last week, thanks to three defections, Mitch McConnell failed to bulldozer Obamacare into oblivion.

So as not to get lost in the particular lunacies of the last week (which by the time this piece appears will likely have been bumped aside in favor of the next round) let’s consider in some detail a single case study of a hoax with long legs, a continuing story, one that promises grave consequences for democracy — Trump’s claim that he would have won the popular vote had it not been for voter fraud.

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016

so he tweeted on Nov. 27. This was no idle and groundless boast; this was a fantasy with a history, and it’s nowhere near dead.  Trump guaranteed it a future when he set up a Republican-majority Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, nominally headed by Vice President Mike Pence (“no preconceived notions”), vice-chaired by the unflagging pursuer of fraudulent voters Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (recently fined by a federal judge for a “pattern” of “misleading the court” in voter-ID matters), and including longtime voter fraud fanatic Hans von Spakovsky. The point, obviously, is to suppress the nonwhite vote. Kobach has been beating this drum for years. Trump’s immediate source for his Roswell-New-Mexico-level claim about 3 million noncitizen votes (let alone God knows how many other cases of voter fraud) seems to have been an interview conducted by CNN’s Chris Cuomo on the day of Trump’s tweet with a gentleman named Gregg Phillips. Phillips is a longtime hunter for vote fraud in Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi. In 2016, he tweeted that

No matter what Obama or anyone else says, the only entity that hacked election systems was Obama’s Department of Homeland Security.

— Jumper (@JumpVote) December 30, 2016

and that

So word amongst my spook friends is the Israelis impersonated the Russians.

— Jumper (@JumpVote) December 18, 2016

Phillips works with an organization called “True the Vote,” which began as a tea party offshoot dispatching white poll watchers to mostly-black precincts in Houston. In 2010, as Mariah Blake wrote in The Atlantic, they deployed “hundreds of observers to minority neighborhoods in and around Houston, where they gathered more than 800 complaints of improper voting.” A complaint is not evidence, and 800 is not a huge number, not in the fourth-largest city in America, but the tea party offshoot parlayed this early success into a national recruitment drive. By 2012 they claimed to have trained a million poll watchers nationally, and von Spakovsky spoke at their convention. Abby Rapoport, a solid Texas reporter, thought their claims overblown and ineffective. The New York Times debunked many of them. But these folks never went away. They’re back.

On his CNN show, Cuomo cited a Phillips tweet 16 days earlier, which ran as follows:

But an hour after the Cuomo-Phillips piece aired, Trump credited Phillips and applauded his study:  “Gregg Phillips and crew say at least 3,000,000 votes were illegal.”

For a study in the dynamics of the Vortex feedback loop, watch closely the bouncing ball. Phillips said his group had collected evidence that millions of illegal votes had been cast in 2016, but refused Cuomo’s repeated attempts to elicit some evidence. He needed months to prepare a public report, he said. When Cuomo noted truthfully that he’d put out his numbers before the final vote results were in, Phillips, unfazed, said:  “We are as precise as we need to be.” When would he show his final results? “When the time’s right.”

Last week, by the way, claiming a shortage of funds, Phillips backed off the promised report, saying: “Next steps up are for us to sort of pull back on the national audit, and focus on targeted investigations.”

“Targeted investigations” has a sinister ring, but surely other fake think tanks will arise to pick up where Phillips left off—never mind that at least 20 studies since 2009, including one by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, found in-person voter fraud to be extremely uncommon. Never mind that when George W. Bush’s Justice Department tried to crack down on voter fraud over a five-year period, they achieved fewer than 100 convictions — mostly honest mistakes, not intentional fraud. In the words of NYU’s Brennan Center,

most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices. The report [“The Truth About Voter Fraud”] reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. Given this tiny incident rate for voter impersonation fraud, it is more likely, the report noted, that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

But in the looking-glass world of Vortex, lightning strikes do make news. Remember, this administration is run (if that is the right word) by a friend of the editor of the National Enquirer.

So unsurprisingly, the Republican crowd snaps to attention. When Trump declares himself the winner of a phantom popular vote, his voters are inclined to believe him: According to a Morning Consult/Politico poll, more believe that Trump won the popular vote (49 percent) than believe the truth — that Clinton won (40 percent). As one Trump surrogate put it, “Mr. Trump’s tweets, amongst a certain crowd, a large — a large part of the population, are truth.”

The majority of Trump voters who think he won the popular vote may or may not be precisely the 51 percent of Republicans, or the 52 percent of Fox News viewers, who in 2015 believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. They may not include all the 41 percent of Republicans who affirmed last August that they did not believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, or some of the additional 31 percent who weren’t sure. But they give us a sense of the scale of the problem.

So the Party of Delusion and Panic rolls on, a cement mixer endlessly churning up new material. The echo chamber is never quiet. One propaganda blast fades (the murder of Seth Rich!) and another clangs in its place (Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s suspicious IT worker!)  Just the other day, Fox News touted a “bunker boom,” a spike in orders for —wait for it — underground shelters, now that “North Korea threat has Americans preparing to go underground.” The article cites two Bay Area sources, both anonymous, who say they’ve ordered shelters; the rest of the piece dwells on one company’s sales to Japan. Breitbart, for its part, front-paged “20-Time Deportee Moves to Sanctuary City, Allegedly Rapes 65-Year-Old Woman.” The din is constant. But this stuff is music to the ears of the true believers.

For in the words of political scientists Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins,

…the conservative movement simultaneously undermined popular faith in both mainstream academe and journalism among its supporters, building and reinforcing Republican reliance on alternative ideological information sources Although conservative elites long viewed academe and journalism as hostile to their politics, it required a sustained effort to transmit that distrust to their public supporters and to promote their alternatives. . . . Declining public approval of academics and journalists coincided with the rise of alternative sources on the right that popularized ideologically motivated criticisms of these professions. Previous research shows how distrust of the news media helped to fuel conservative alternatives, which in turn gave rise to more media distrust.

In their recent book, Asymmetric Politics, Grossmann and Hopkins point out that, by way of contrast, the left has huddled close to establishment media and “sources that often implicitly flatter the Democratic worldview but do not portray themselves or their consumers as engaged in an ideological conflict.” In other words, while the right was going full blast, the mainstream bent over backward to prove it was the last recourse of objectivity. It lamely played the game of both-sides-ism.

Now, at last, the best have joined “the resistance,” compelled by a commitment to truth and a sense of decency to look, at times, like Steve Bannon’s nightmare “opposition party.” But for all the fine investigative work now underway at The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, Reuters, The New Republic and USA Today, among others, the mainstream media have yet to face up to the part they’ve played over the years in lending credence to the pure products of the Vortex. As Paul Krugman reminds us unceasingly, they fail to challenge the transparently false notion that, in the 72 years since Harry Truman called for socialized medicine, the Republicans have ever offered a plan to improve health care. In the rush of hero worship and the traditional flood of both-sides-ism, they let pass John McCain’s ridiculous statement last week that after years of hearings, consultations and amendments, “the Obama administration and congressional Democrats . . . forced through Congress without any opposition support a social and economic change as massive as Obamacare.”

Reader, it’s time for a happy ending here, but it eludes me. Even if Trump falls from power, even if the Democrats bounce back in 2018 and 2020, even if the post-Ailes Murdoch empire decomposes once patriarch Rupert leaves the scene, the lust for untruth is a feature of the media landscape till kingdom come. The past cannot be unwritten, though Fox News will try. The Party of Delusion and Panic may be contained, but it is here to stay. Sad!

Cities are already suffering from summer heat. Climate change will make it worse

In this Friday, Nov. 8, 2013 photo, motorists head northbound toward Las Vegas on U.S. Highway 93, near Kingman, Ariz. Supporters of proposals to build an interstate highway connecting Phoenix and Las Vegas say an interstate would create a Los Angeles-Phoenix-Las Vegas “megaregion” and open a trade route from Mexico to Pacific Ocean ports and Canada. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson) (Credit: AP)

NEW YORK, N.Y. — Tina Johnson has a sense of place. She’s a fourth-generation New Yorker who lives in the same apartment in West Harlem’s Grant housing development that her grandparents lived in. She calls that apartment her anchor and the nine buildings that make up the development towering above 125th Street — home to roughly 4,400 residents spread across nine high rises — a small town.

“I have fond memories (of here) and this sense of belonging I want my children to have,” she said.

To keep that sense of place is going to take some work, though. Changes outside that “small town” nestled in a city of 8 million will only compound the stresses altering West Harlem.

A mix of poverty, a lack of services and aging infrastructure already make West Harlem one of the most vulnerable communities in Manhattan.

Climate change is putting further stress on Johnson and the 110,000 people that call the neighborhood home. And the biggest threat is rising temperatures.

As carbon pollution turns up the planetary heat, the impact is clearest on what’s happening to extremely hot days: They’re becoming more common and more intense.

New York has averaged 3 days above 95°F over the past 20 years. If carbon pollution continues on its current trend, by 2075 that number is likely to increase to 31 according to a new Climate Central analysis.

Myriad cities across the country will be far worse off, though. Atlanta is projected to see 69 days above 95°F, Boise could spend 80 days above that threshold while Dallas is on track to have 140 days above 95°F. Then there’s Phoenix, where residents could have to contend with more than half of the year above 95°F (163 days in case you’re wondering).

Many small towns will suffer even more. Alva, Fla., (population 2,182) could see 142 days above 95°F while Salton City, Calif., (population 3,763) could have to cope with a mind-bending 203 days where the mercury tops out at 95°F or higher.

The biggest factor in the number of future hot days is how fast the world reins in carbon pollution today. However, even if emissions are dramatically cut, every place across the U.S. will face more hot weather.

But extreme heat is hardly some far-off problem for 2100. It’s already taking a toll on people and influencing the decisions they make.

For Johnson and thousands of others suffering with limited or no air conditioning, it’s adding injury to insult. A constellation of groups including WNYC public radio and WE ACT, a local environmental justice nonprofit, put together a pioneering study dubbed the Harlem Heat Project last summer. They put thermometers in 30 Harlem residents’ apartments and found that the temperature indoors frequently exceeded the ambient air temperature outdoors, particularly at night.

Building walls throbbed with heat they had absorbed throughout the day, radiating into homes and making sleeping and recovery from the day’s heat near impossible. That puts particular stress on elderly, the young and the infirm. Those conditions are also partly why Johnson, who has lupus and can’t spend much time outdoors, decided to install air conditioning.

“The communities that will be hardest hit by climate change are already the most vulnerable to environmental pollution and inequity,” Peggy Shepard, executive director of WE ACT, said. “Heat exacerbates asthma, other respiratory problems and cardiovascular disease.”

“It puts stress on the family and the house,” Johnson said.

To help ease some of the heat, New York’s $100 million plan will cover a host of initiatives, from planting trees and painting roofs white to cut the heat island effect, to connecting neighbors so that the elderly aren’t forgotten when the mercury skyrockets.

The latter idea holds particular promise as it’s a low-cost program that could achieve major results. Charles-Guzman, the program manager at the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said what happened in the wake of Sandy is a textbook example.

“The neighborhoods where everybody knew each other, those neighborhoods did better (with recovery),” she said. “Not everyone wants a city worker knocking on their door. There’s low trust in government. We’re trying to capitalize on social ties people have with their neighbors.”

It’s tempting to peg New York as an outlier. After all, it’s a massive city with a vibrant economy in a deep blue state. But adapting to extreme heat is hardly the purview of rich, liberal cities.

Across the country, cities and towns of all shapes, sizes and political persuasions are reckoning with increasingly hot weather.

In Las Cruces, N.M., a city of 120,000 that sits in the shadows of the Organ Mountains, city planners are preparing residents for the even hotter future that climate change will bring.

At the town’s core is a clutch of low-slung adobe buildings punctuated by acres of parking lots that shimmer in the summer heat. Houses on the fringe of downtown blend with the desert dust and dead lawns that make up their front yards. Beyond that, the city tapers into the desert scattered with ocotillo, yucca and sagebrush.

The harsh landscape is a product of the sweltering, dry conditions that overtake the southern tier of New Mexico each summer. Even though it’s less dense than New York, trees cover just 4.5 percent of Las Cruces. On days when the temperature tops out above 108°F as it did earlier this summer, that translates to an intense heat island and very little shade for those braving the outdoors. The city is projected to see 64 days above 105°F by 2100, up from just a single day in an average year.

Like New York, Las Cruces is considering how to improve neighborhood awareness as a means to battle more extreme heat. But rather than focusing solely on checking in on neighbors when summer temperatures are at their hottest, city planner Lisa LaRocque said she has a vision to get neighbors helping each other with home repairs that can help keep things cool indoors.

“One of our goals is social cohesion and having neighbors help each other and know each other and create that bonding that might not otherwise occur,” she said. “(One idea is) if we are doing some of the low-hanging fruit of improving energy efficiency, we would do it as a neighborhood cooperative situation where I help you with x and someone else helps me with y.”

About 450 miles to the west of Las Cruces, city planners in San Angelo, Texas, have already glimpsed their future and are weighing how to respond. The city of 100,000 had 100 days above 100°F in 2011, an outlandishly hot year for the city. But that outlandishly hot summer could be routine if carbon pollution isn’t curbed. San Angelo is projected to have 110 days above 100°F by 2100. That’s the equivalent of running from the beginning of May through the end of September with daily temperatures near triple digits (to make matters worse, 39 of those days are projected to top out at 110°F or higher).

That makes the job of city planners in cities like San Angelo that much more important. When AJ Fawver, a city planner, convened a series of meetings to discuss how extreme weather affected basic city functions, managers were skeptical about why they were in the room together.

“Initially there was a feeling it only affects certain types of people,” Fawver said. “But really it affects everyone. You could see that as we went around the room” she said, rattling off how firefighters, road crews, utility workers and even the human resources department found they shared more heat-related woes than they first thought.

Weighing the impacts heat is already having on San Angelo makes the climate projections of what comes next all the more sobering. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe made the three-hour trip down from Texas Tech to talk with the group about what the future holds if carbon pollution isn’t curtailed. The findings painted a picture of relentless heat that will change the way the city functions and people live their daily lives.

“That was a reality check,” Fawver said. “People started thinking about their children and grandchildren and remembering how dreadful that summer was. Then it really hit home.”

San Angelo hasn’t yet decided how to tackle the hotter future that awaits it. But in a county where climate change isn’t a front-burner topic like it is in New York, the conversation is a major first step.

“The idea of climate change is still very controversial for some folks,” said Fawver, who is now the planning director in Amarillo, Texas. “There are people that just don’t want to have that discussion, people that question the science, a whole host of reasons why people want to avoid a conversation. But generally when we try to avoid a conversation, it’s a conversation that’s imperative to have.”

 

Private prison demands New Mexico and feds find 300 more prisoners in 60 days or it will close

(Credit: Eduardo Ramirez Sanchez via Shutterstock)

The nation’s second-largest private prison corporation is holding New Mexico politicians hostage by threatening to close unless the state or federal authorities find 300 more prisoners to be warehoused there, according to local news reports.

“The company that has operated a private prison in Estancia for nearly three decades has announced it will close the Torrance County Detention Facility and lay off more than 200 employees unless it can find 300 state or federal inmates to fill empty beds within the next 60 days,” the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper reported last week.

The paper said that county officials issued a statement citing the threatened closure and emphasized that every virtually every politician in the region, from county officials to state officials to congressmen, were scurrying to save jobs—as opposed to shutting a privatized prison by an operator that has been sued many times for sexual harassment, sexual assault, deaths, use of force, physical assaults, medical care, injuries and civil rights violations.

“This is a big issue for us,” Torrance County manager Belinda Garland told the Santa Fe newspaper.

It quoted Jonathan Burns, a spokesman for CoreCivic — formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America — as saying, while, “The city of Estancia and the surrounding community have been a great partner to CoreCivic for the last 27 years . . . a declining detainee population in general has forced us to make difficult decisions in order to maximize utilization of our resources.”

This is a perfect snapshot of what’s upside-down with privatization: the lack of economic opportunities and politicians who genuflect at providing jobs, regardless of the larger social implications, pushing law enforcement into the dirty business of ramping up arrests and convictions so private firms and shareholders can make more money.

The statement by county officials said that most of the 700-bed facility’s prisoners were federal inmates. Company officials in local meetings said federal sentencing reforms has led to a shrinking prisoner population.

The paper reported, “‘The company told the county it has been holding fewer federal detainees for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Garland said. ‘We’re reaching out to anybody that can help us… We hate to see this facility close.’”

CoreCivic’s 2016 corporate annual report said its revenues had fallen slightly in the final years of the Obama administration.

“State revenues from contracts at correctional, detention, and residential reentry facilities that we operate constituted 38%, 40%, and 46% of our total revenue during 2016, 2015, and 2014, respectively, and decreased 2.0% from $725.1 million during 2015 to $710.4 million during 2016,” it reported. “We own approximately 58% of all privately owned prison beds in the United States, manage nearly 41% of all privately managed prison beds in the United States, and are currently the second largest private owner and provider of community corrections services in the nation.”

The elected officials who have been asked to find more prisoners include New Mexico Democrats, U.S. Sen. Tom Udall and Rep. Michelle Lujan-Grisham. The county said the town of Estancia would annually lose $700,000 in commerce and the county would lose $300,000 in tax revenues if the prison closed in late September, the New Mexican reported.

Must they have so little dignity?

(Credit: AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” is considered one of the great political novels of the last century, but it is also very puzzling. Why does Rubashov, the loyal old Bolshevik, confess to capital crimes he did not commit? He is not tortured; he knows (as do his interrogators) that the charges are absurd.

Koestler, a disillusioned ex-communist, employs Rubashov as a metaphor for the moral bankruptcy that totalitarian ideologies deliberately inculcate in their followers. Their own self-respect as human beings, even objective truth itself, no longer matters to them, so they voluntarily allow the party to destroy them.

Some historians have disputed Koestler’s depiction. The confessing defendants at the Moscow purge trials were indeed tortured, they said. But Koestler, who had narrowly escaped both communism and fascism as a young man, had plenty of personal experience with totalitarian systems, so his interpretation is hardly fantasy; in any case, he was not writing history, but rather a psychological portrait of the hard-core party man who alienates himself from all values other than subservience to the party.

Shorn of its tragedy and reduced to something more like farce, “Darkness at Noon” becomes an instruction manual for understanding the psychology of the toadying functionaries who infest the Trump administration. Now-former chief of staff Reince Priebus, recent victim of the White House’s periodic purges, is a museum grade example of Rubashov’s Syndrome.

Enduring seven months of innuendo about his powerlessness, exclusion whenever decisions were made, and a total lack of line authority, Trump humiliatingly announced Priebus’ departure by tweet a mere day after he had been defamed (and accused of a felony) by Trump’s now erstwhile best buddy and walking mobster stereotype, Anthony (The Mooch) Scaramucci. So how did Priebus take this final, supreme degradation?

Within hours he appeared on Sean Hannity’s show (which he could be certain his old boss was viewing) to say how Trump’s brusque firing of him was “actually a good thing.” He proceeded to heap praise on the president, saying he will “be on Team Trump all the time.”

He also pretended there was no real issue between himself and The Mooch, dismissing it as a “distraction” from the president’s marvelous agenda, all of whose absurd and/or dangerous particulars he itemized as if he were an acolyte reciting the catechism. The Russia investigation was of course fake news, he said, which makes us wonder why everyone within groveling distance of Trump has lawyered up. The Onion deftly nailed Priebus’s self-administered abasement as a complete lack of dignity and self-respect.

Given that all movement conservatives who either have sinned or been made redundant seem eventually to end up on Hannity making their ritual pronouncements of eternal party loyalty, it makes one wonder if the News Corp. entertainer plays the same role enforcing GOP orthodoxy that Andrey Vyshinsky, Stalin’s fearsome prosecutor, played in ensuring that Communist Party comrades toed the line. We look forward, whenever the axe falls, to seeing Jefferson Beauregard Sessions tell Hannity how he can much better serve the president’s agenda as a private citizen than as attorney general of the United States.

Superficial analysis of the Priebus defenestration might conclude that he praised Trump to the heavens so that he could wangle a comfortable sinecure at Fox News or some similar landing pad within the Conservative Media-Entertainment Complex. But if he had been more honest, some other venue with different ideological leanings would surely have dangled a contract in front of him. And, assuming he writes his memoirs, publishers would happily pay multiples more cash for a volume that promised to dish dirt (you’d see “A Searing Indictment!” emblazoned on the book jacket) than they would for prose that might have been written by Kim Jong-un’s official biographer.

Many observers have commented on how the Republican Party has degenerated from a group espousing a more-or-less comprehensible set of principles into a racketeering operation exclusively interested in gaining and keeping power. Mitch McConnell exemplifies this trend. But he has been in the Senate since 1984, knows what terms like “sequestration and “point of order” mean, and has not quite caught up with the latest GOP fashion.

The GOP in the age of Trump also worships power, but power reduced to its most primitive, elemental form, and personalized in the figure of the omnipotent tribal leader. Just as a 12-year old boy worships power in the form he understands it — a pro linebacker, a tough guy, a bully — so the new GOP worships power in the form of Donald Trump because his bizarre displays of dominance (which strike the rest of us as pathetic overcompensation for insecurity) scratch some obscure psychological itch for them.

To return to the “Darkness at Noon” analogy, among some of Trump’s base, as well as the more fervent of his employees, the adoration approaches Stalin’s cult of personality. Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary, has said his boss has “superhuman” health and “perfect genes.” It would seem only a short distance from Mnuchin’s slavering to the mental framework that prevailed at the height of the Stalin cult, when the Soviet Academy of Sciences seriously considered renaming the moon that orbits the earth we live on for their fearless leader.

Likewise, Trump’s counselor, Kellyanne Conway, seems to have been so blinded by the reflected glory of her boss that she no longer recognizes the United States as a constitutional republic in which all citizens, elected and nonelected, are peers. “I do think that it is important to set up that level of deference and humility when you’ve got someone who’s your boss,” Conway gushed to Fox News, the television network now as ever-present in our lives as Big Brother was to Winston Smith and the other subjects of Oceanea.

The puzzling aspect is determining exactly what sort of satisfaction they derive from this adulation. In these primitive and childish dominance games, only a few — Trump, Donald Jr., Scaramucci (who himself got the axe after a run of less than two weeks: apparently being a professional suck-up is a precarious job) — get the privilege of being dominant. The rest are just contestants on The Apprentice being set up for groveling and humiliation, and seemingly enjoying it. This streak of willing subservience is noticeable in all of Trump’s retinue, from Cabinet members to the human props in MAGA caps at his rallies.

Just as Sessions or Preibus had to endure their share of derision, so it is with Trump’s base. He has mocked them (he’s underlined that they’re “losers” in life, sarcastically remarked “I love the poorly educated” and observed that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose their dog-like loyalty) — and yet they see it not as insulting, but rather as part of his charismatic charm.

Historian of the Third Reich Joachim Fest remarked on this trait in Hitler’s followers, and how at rallies, they were spiritually transported by becoming a part of the stage scenery. In extinguishing their own individual autonomy, they imagined they had gained power by being absorbed into the might of their leader. However sublimated this trait might have been, Fest deemed it hardly distinguishable from sexual masochism.

For some time now, the catch phrases of America’s right wingers have expressed the imbecile wisdom of the would-be John Wayne: these colors don’t run, kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out, this vehicle insured by Smith & Wesson and so on. Right-wing media such as The Rush Limbaugh Show are practically instructional guides to such homilies.

Yet their willing prostration before a transparent conman and obvious crybaby like Trump shows not only that their manly man, alpha-male pretentions — a pose much esteemed in conservative literature by pseudointellectuals like Harvey Mansfield and Bill Bennett — are laughable bunk, but that they also picked the worst conceivable messiah to venerate.

How and why this neurosis of power worship breaks out in societies, and particularly in a notionally secular, representative republic, is not something we fully understand. It is long past time for enterprising historians, sociologists, and abnormal psychologists to find out.

The mess we are in: Destructive Bush trauma paved the way for Trump trauma

(Credit: (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds, File))

As a public intellectual, playwright and longtime foundation executive, Colin Greer has a unique view on politics and grassroots-oriented change. Formally a CUNY professor and an expert on education and immigration — he wrote The Great School Legend along with nine other books — he was a founder of Change Magazine and Social Policy Magazine, and was a contributing editor to Parade Magazine for 17 years. Since 1985, he has been president of the New World Foundation, one of the few philanthropies in America that primarily funds grassroots organizing. He also chairs the boards of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting and the Lark Theatre. Greer is also a board member of the Independent Media Institute, the parent organization for AlterNet.

Don Hazen: Many people are concerned about Trump’s scapegoating and lies causing emotional trauma for many Americans, especially immigrants and people who have been sexually and emotionally abused. Do you agree that this trauma has been heightened by Trump?

Colin Greer: I don’t actually agree that the trauma is new. No, I think that Americans have suffered trauma at a high level since that election in 2000 when the Supreme Court gave the election to George Bush in Florida.

DH: Because of the court decision?

CG: Yes, absolutely. First of all, there was a real sense that what we believed in actually did not work. Everybody knew the decision was not true, that it was a lie. The court voted against its own standard—that is States’ Rights, right? We were suddenly seeing corruption at the highest level. Then Bush and Cheney took us to an unnecessary war that we learned very quickly to have no basis — no evidence for it — despite mass U.S. protests, which were shown to be meaningless to those in power. . . . [T]he intelligence was wrong — in fact, contrived — but they drove us to war.

DH: So Bush is getting off lightly, here, in 2017?

CG: Absolutely. That war continues. It has destroyed stability in the world, especially in the Middle East. It intensified terrorism to a level we had not seen it before. It mobilized ethnic Muslim communities all over the world into being enemies of us because of the invasion of Iraq. It destroyed the economy that Obama inherited. [We were] facing intensified loss already under way since Regan showed what limited leverage organized labor possessed. Then, we were powerless to influence the terms of the capitalist theft that was the bail-out, and since which the basic security of workers has been badly undermined and health care out of reach for many Americans so that injury and disease was able to destroy families. Bush, et al, probably had the most traumatic effect of any administration since the early part of the 20th century. All of this was of course followed by the mobilized racism against our black president. [This] demonstrated once again our progressive powerlessness and the distance between people’s needs and government callousness after 2010, which has been the experience of many working Americans continuously since welfare reform and finance deregulation in 1990.

DH: So you are saying Bush has been much more destructive than Trump, so far.

CG: Yeah, and we haven’t paid attention to it. We need, as progressives, to tell that story, both that it happened, [and] that it’s unresolved. We’ve been powerless to reverse the right-wing movement advances for a long time. Everybody knows that. The public has taken that in viscerally; that’s trauma’s process in action. The right wing was advanced ironically by Obama getting elected and immediately attacked. McConnell said, “Our definition of success will be your defeat every day of your administration.” There was a declaration of war. Basically, a declaration of the Civil War all over again, and they basically paralyzed the government that was a Union government run by Confederates. That’s essentially what we’ve had.

Meanwhile, young people are turned off by political leaders, religious leaders, and face enormously reduced expectations of career, asset growth, freedom from debt. So trauma is running wide and deep cross-generationally. And so it has been for decades now.

DH: Do you think that Trump will have the opportunity to out-Bush Bush over the next three and half years or more?

CG: My greatest fear is that his paralyzed government, which will continue to be frozen while the Russian investigation continues, will increasingly frustrate him. Then the shadow, they guy we’re not talking about anymore, Stephen Bannon, will emerge. That comedy of a Cabinet meeting Bannon looked on: Was he looking out for the internal strength of the cords being woven to strangle democracy? Everyone around that table, everyone should have experienced traumatic assault on their integrity. To quote Orwell, their slavery was dressed up as free will and their fear paraded as hope.

My fear is that they will use surprise events to puncture democracy pretty badly. Either an event from outside or from here at home that allows them to undermine the Constitution; or take an action in the world that diverts from what is happening to numbers of Americans here through budget cuts, deregulation, and assault on the press. That kind of action could make him popular by evoking patriotic response because he’s defending America. Given who he is, he could just do that unilaterally. Then, I think, all bets are off because the politics get shaken up. There will be a lot of uncertainty. Independents will overcome their distaste in a patriotic sense of loyalty.

That’s the negative potential, of course. But it builds on a readiness for emergency response and irrational reaction that is preset. Remember the Patriot Act is an expansive permission to squash opposition. With trauma in mind, it’s worth remembering since 2002 through 2016 (so far), each president has intensified our fears and expectations of repeated attack by renewing the declaration of a state of emergency. It can be worse but the tracks have been laid. I think it’s important to look at the tracks and the current danger, but not only to look at the current danger.

DH: Does that lead to a certain kind of fascism?

CG: That’s the potential, I think. We have a president that relies on demagoguery. He’s not yet ruled through demagoguery. But he has tried to change our reality through demagoguery by turning the only institutions we have that can stand against him into enemies. Like the press, like the intelligence services; anything with any level of independence, he scapegoats. You go after the institutions that hold government accountable. That’s the end assault on liberty. And people buy it like it’s what they chose.

The thing that I fear domestically is a constitutional convention. We are getting closer to that, and they’re planning for it. Who knows what will be on that bill of particulars if two-thirds of the states go that route. It’s scary. They are now seven states short of the power to call a convention. But that’s not so far off. While a “balanced budget” amendment is top of the list, some legislatures and leaders are interested in a multi-issue convention. Imagine constitutional amendments calling for a balanced budget, prohibitions against abortion or gay marriage, even extending the tenure of the presidency. It’s important to remember the frog in boiling water. Authoritarianism grows slowly but steadily before dictatorship develops, and even if it doesn’t a right-wing oligarchy is fearsome too.

DH: What’s to be done about that?

CG: What do you do about all that? Too many people in the not-for-profit political world are talking about a 30-year strategy. I don’t think we have 30 years to defend against this. Progressives did that in 1984 with Reagan. We lost that second election. Then, when Clinton was disappointing, “We need a 30-year strategy.” It’s always a generational strategy. But the fantasy that the rising diverse electorate would close off reactionary homogenous voters was futurizing as destiny. It ran its music all the way through the Obama administration, even while legislatures were going to the right and Democrats lost control of 30+ states.

DH: It is true that the whole notion of the dream demographic change that will lead to long-term Democratic party power — that we will have a minority-majority country soon—does not factor in gerrymandering, a right-wing Supreme Court that virtually eliminates the Voting Rights Act, many new restrictions on voting as has turned, e.g., Wisconsin from blue to red, the millions who can’t vote because of felony disenfranchisement, and a lying, manipulative, reality TV star as president.

CG: Right. And the Democratic message to some voters that “we don’t need you” has converged with the right and Trump to make the non-white electorate rather fearsome to traumatized white workers and suburban whites. For the last 20 years white identity has been racialized and established itself at the core of conservative politics. We were divided, and then Republicans using the census and gerrymandering were able to massively move the country to the right while Obama was president, probably in part because Obama was president.

DH: Sounds like the Bernie lament. What can we learn from what Corbyn did in Britain?

CG: What Corbyn did was open up the party to open admission, basically. The more people that joined, the more young people that joined, the stronger he got. I think, pretty clearly, that he was able to hold Theresa May to a very narrow victory because of young people voting. That’s the phenomenon I think we need to be paying attention to . . .

DH: The millennials?

CG: Yeah. We need to pay attention to what’s real in the current resistance politics. It’s young people and older women. It’s not issue politics. There’s a resistance to what Trump represents that’s growing and is the phenomenon we should be supporting.

DH: So ok, we have a mess on our hands. And agreed, Bush trauma predated and led to Trump trauma. That adds up to a lot of trauma . . . What might be effective approaches to addressing trauma and political anxiety?

CG: Trauma can be ubiquitous when political power is wrested from any popular base and used counterproductively with respect to people’s interests. This results in profound uncertainty, sense of powerlessness, and actual loss. We’ve seen peace politics, economic justice drives, immigrant rights and union strength painfully diminished. Even under Obama, immigrants and Latinos took great losses. Under Clinton, caring and responsible economic and social policies took major hits.

Trauma, like scar tissue, can intensify and do new damage.

I do want to caution that it’s never fully accurate to use clinical diagnostic terms to describe collective behavior or the mental health of a whole society.

However, both as a metaphor for serious dysfunction and in recognition of many years of war and social trauma, many have suffered great loss. The economic crash and the ongoing decline in the trades, in union strength, and the constant punditry about the shrinking of white America has left us in bad shape. Meanwhile, poor and working-class whites now feel themselves as experiencing dispossession, oppression and alienation. And that was not supposed to be when through unions and local politics, they once saw a path to realizing American destiny. Now they feel that they took the wrong road. They can’t see another except to express anxiety and place hope in putative strong men.

The blame game is on as a result. And the president epitomizes it.

There are limits of trauma theory and theories of change too. Rejection of the oppression and domination paradigm requires looking closely at “what is.” That is critical. Expecting answers via psychological and social theory is not going to work. Allowing the motivation of our fear to create an illusory sense of opportunity. Looking at what we face and examining how to interrupt and avoid further consolidation of right-wing forces in all the avenues of power, including a mobilized popular base is critical. What is going on to resist is visible, real, and needs to be supported.

Calls on historic resistance lessons that are not particular to the current circumstance are not so useful unless they are grounded phenomenologically in “what is.”

There are a few straight-forward phenomenological questions to ask ourselves:

First, where is the action, who is the subject of threat by police and legal assault? Second, who are the sympathetic supplementary allies in service oriented non-profits and NGOs? This is a valuable but poorly activated progressive force. Frank Riessman’s work in “self-help” and left study groups has been instructive to me. Frank wrote and often talked about the latent political power in the self-help and service sector domain. He saw groups forming around chronic illness and likened them to study groups formed out of chronic economic and political dis-ease. This was power to harness for mutual benefit through state policy, budgets, and services. Finally, can we find ways forward calling all these elements into a coherent alliance of political infrastructure and robust resistance and advance, remembering that if local and national electorates can participate and lift voting by 10 percent, we likely win.

DH: Do any of the famous international political thinkers of the past, people you’ve admired and read, do they have anything to teach us about the political climate we are in?

CG: Political thinkers of the recent past are often stimulating but not terribly useful because almost none of them has a political practice.

DH: What does it mean to have a political practice?

CG: It means . . . What do you do? What do you do on Monday morning? What’s your short-term, what’s your long-term agenda? With whom? Why? What is there to build on?

So thinkers like Adorno, Deleuze, Derrida did not have a way to put their thinking into practice. As Richard Rorty said, “Philosophy is great for the people that love to do philosophy. If you want action, you need a different kind of discipline.”

These thinkers have things to contribute, but they don’t have action to contribute. Adorno has the whole notion of anxiety and the negative dialectic. People are anxious and that can create a dialectic that’s built on the negative rather than on the positive. You can have a synthesis that’s fascism, as well as you can have a synthesis that is the good society. That’s a good warning.

Derrida has this wonderful conception that logic is a form of face. Don’t get tied up in positivism because the rational thinking doesn’t tell you enough about human experience.

DH: Who of the big thinkers does do politics directly in their thinking?

CG: Well, Gramsci. Gramsci did politics, but he ended up in jail for it. And it didn’t end fascism.

DH: Gramsci was Italian and this is during Mussolini’s time?

CG: Right. He gave us some concepts that were really important. One major concept is civil society: Don’t look only at the economy, which is the Marxist tradition. Civil society is the important form that exists in an alternative sphere and you can make change through civil society. Secondly, we must fight for common sense. Hegemonic systems own common sense. Knowledge and information are crucially important. Study groups and dialogue are key. Claiming national platforms for ideas is essential. Finally, winning airtime in national and local media is necessary work. That’s a great warning and we have not paid enough attention to it. We talk about shaping public opinion, but not how do you actually create deep common sense? That’s a big hole. The only times I know where we actually shape common sense is through movements. When movements rise, they change the fabric of thinking.

DH: Are there any great philosophers of movements?

CG: Well, there are great philosophers in movements, because they’re philosophers of action. There is Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The thing they have in common is they’re the phenomenologists. They look at what’s happening, not what might happen, nor what the theory of change is, but what is happening and what can be mobilized. For King, it’s obvious. For Gandhi, it’s obvious. Now it would be, there are these rising movements. There’s opposition politics, but what strength is there in it, phenomenologically, that can actually be coordinated and grown. Not be directed by a theory of change, not be directed by political philosophy, but what’s the actual practice that can currently be commanded to organize for real change?

DH: What’s the movement potential out there today?

CG: In the end, it is the practice of how you bring people and issues together. What do you actually do about it? Who has the resources to commit? Are resources committed over time? Will leaders and others actually allow their issues to be integrated in a whole picture? You’ve got to work toward a whole picture, because they’re all the same issue in the end. The ecology of social justice is that it’s all one challenge.

DH: As a long-time foundation executive, how do you think philanthropy is responding to Trump and the many crises he is creating.

CG: Badly. Badly, but that’s not new. Most of philanthropy usually responds badly to critical situations. Habit, fear of controversy, legal concerns, institutional over victory calculus all take a toll. It helps me to think about three sectors in philanthropy. There is the right wing, and they just throw money at the issues because they’re in it for themselves. There’s the social engineering philanthropy, which is, “We can make the world a better place by teaching people how to do things better, creating better policies.”

DH: Is that the Gates model?

CG: Yes, Gates. It’s MacArthur. It’s generally the bureaucratic foundations and some big, new donors. Then there’s the left philanthropy, which is, by and large, on behalf of other people, not for themselves. Progressive rich people don’t have skin in the game in the same way right-wing rich people have. They don’t lose if they lose . . . The conservatives are just as foremost concerned to preserve, consolidate and advance their own hold in power, and so they invest in power. Progressive philanthropy is one step removed. Not ill-intentioned, but one step removed. Their lives are not bound in it in the same way. On a spectrum of those three categories, liberal and progressive philanthropy have the least amount of money to spend and we spend it least generously.

DH: What do you think of Andy Stern’s model of the basic living wage as an antidote to automation and job loss?

CG: We don’t know what that looks like. How people will use their time? People are identified by work, particularly in this culture and all through western culture. Freud and Marx, most everybody has agreed that work is a defining aspect of identity until you get to the society where you achieve Marx’s goal of human fellowship in which our value is what we provide each other in community. We’re a long way from that society, of course, but we do need to imagine a world in which freedom from work gives you leisure to serve in your community from arts to service to governance. Don’t let’s forget WPA and its family programs. And the union movement’s current expansive and expendable efforts to train for actual jobs that are here for something from construction to nursing. There is a ton of jobs to be created if we have the will, infrastructure, service and community quality of life assets which give us the space to build goodwill and purpose for the changes coming.

DH: Like the arts which became controversial with the Public Theatre’s “Julius Caesar” with Shakespeare in the Park.

CG: In my opinion, that was a big mistake. It could have been done so differently, if they’d been a bit more political imaginative instead of a reflexive liberal aversion to the gutter government is groveling in. If it had been Nixon, for example, and not Trump. If it had been Trump and not Melania. I mean, having the wife of Caesar be blonde with a Slavic accent?

Caesar is a metaphor for a demagogue and the problem of removing a dictator without democratic means. You use the sword against the sword and you live by the sword. So it tells that story, but it’s a metaphor. To make it concrete takes it out of the realm of theater and makes it propaganda.

DH: You’re talking about this as a playwright? How would you have done it?

CG: I would have either reset it so that it took place in a butcher shop, so it was ordinary life and it was somebody was vying with somebody else for control, or a real estate industry like Ibsen does with “Master Builder”; it’s a real estate builder. I would set it like that, out of the construct of imperial, or I would have put it in another period of American history, like Hamilton or like Nixon. So you see it played out, but you’re not actually talking about the murder of the current President of the United States.

Times like these I believe require strategically shaped purpose and impact. That can include preaching to the choir but not to simply feel good and righteous.

Trauma, like murder, will out, to paraphrase the Bard. Emotions are extreme and they are explosive unless and until we try to deploy the cerebral cortex too. The enormity of the danger we face requires our fullest selves and our most robust mobilization of a new “common sense.” The story progressives tell is not yet in sync with either the risk or the injury that’s being sustained in in most sectors of society.

Look, devastating social conditions can de-legitimize a sitting administration. Protest and vision have been powerful forces against proto-fascist tendencies and paranoid behavior before. What was Jim Crow, after all? So none of what I am saying is about inevitability. It’s about waking up to the moment it is, seeing that it’s been a long time coming, but also that its popular base is shallow and not at all synonymous with Republican electoral power. The relentless drive to a desperate presidential choice is also a desperate cry for change that progressives must respond to with vigor, smarts, and outreach to the public on a scale reminiscent of past opposition and transformational politics not the knee-jerk Democratic Party search for brand edge. It always comforts me, and I pray it’s not false comfort, that a 10 percent in voter turnout in most state and national elections would begin to heal the wounds.

Speculation over a political campaign heats up as Zuckerberg hires former Clinton pollster

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at his company's annual F8 developer conference, Tuesday, April 18, 2017, in San Jose, Calif. (AP Photo/Noah Berger) (Credit: AP)

It’s becoming more likely that Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg is planning to run for office. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, hired Democratic pollster Joel Benenson as a consultant, according to a recent report in Politico.

Benenson was a former top adviser to President Barack Obama, and also a chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, as Politico reported. Benenson’s company, Benenson Strategy Group, “will be conducting research for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,” the philanthropy organization headed by Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.

Politico elaborated:

Zuckerberg and Chan have vowed to give away 99 percent of their Facebook shares, worth an estimated $45 billion, to charity. Bringing on Benenson is the latest sign that they’re pushing their philanthropic work more heavily into the political and policy world.

In January, the couple hired David Plouffe, campaign manager for Obama’s 2008 presidential run, as president of policy and advocacy. Plouffe had previously worked at Uber. Ken Mehlman, who ran President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, also sits on the board.

Public polls reveal that Zuckerberg has a decent shot at winning an election were he to run for president. He split the vote in a poll against Trump in a faux 2020 election — both received 40 percent. Still, many polled didn’t have an opinion of him. Zuckerberg has denied any interest in running for public office, yet his recent hires certainly leave room for speculation.

If he decides to campaign, it would be hard to imagine Zuckerberg not running for the Democratic nomination, given his politics. Still, given recent events, it might be best for the Democrats — and the country for that matter — to steer clear of electing another billionaire businessman with no political experience.