California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

The Absence of War is Not Peace

by John Lawrence

Human beings do not use the absence of war to create peace. They use the absence of war to prepare for the next war. The time between wars could be used in a more constructive way and that is to do everything possible to prevent the next war. Instead what we do is to build up our offensive and defensive capacities so that whatever side we are on prevails in the next war. The US military-industrial complex is allotted almost a trillion dollars a year whether or not there is war or absence of war. There is never ever really peacetime. It's sole purpose is to prepare for the next war. Meanwhile the Peace Corps is allotted next to nothing in order to create the conditions that might prevent the next war. What are those conditions you might ask? They are very simple: creating educational opportunities for the undereducated, creating economic opportunities for those in poverty, creating hospitals and clinics for those whose health is at risk, building infrastructure for those lacking access to modern infrastructure. In other words building more successful societies from the ground up for those lacking what the most advanced societies already have. Above all poverty and lack of healthful conditions must be alleviated all over the world including in the advanced nations themselves before anything approaching world peace can be achieved.

So what is the lesson of the Israeli-Gaza war? It is that in the time period before the war, nobody did nothing to create the conditions for a lasting peace which would have been the two state solution. Instead people just stood back content to have the Palestinians live miserable lives without political or economic rights. Nobody cared. Nobody worked hard to correct or ameliorate the situation. People were content just to let the situation fester until the next violence broke out, and then it did with very dramatic and horrific results. When there was an absence of war, people just said ho hum, there's no urgency to create the conditions for a lasting peace. Then when war breaks out everyone gets very excited and upset, horrible things happen to children and old people. People want revenge. Hate proliferates. War is exciting. Peace is dull and undramatic. People get bored with the absence of war. People's senses come alive during war. During the absence of war in which there is no real peace, people pursue their self interest or in other words lining their purses. During war they get all excited. There is nonstop news coverage. People get upset by (wo)man's inhumanity to (wo)man as if people doing horrible things to other people is unimaginable. It's not. People's senses come alive and they come out of their collective stupors.

If the US just spent half its defense budget on war and the other half on peace, it would still have a larger defense budget than any other country in the world, and just think what the Peace Corps could do with a $500 billion budget. Why it could even compete with China's Belt and Road initiative which is building infrastructure in parts of the world where inadequate infrastructure exists. The two largest world economies could compete creating peace in the world instead of trying to out compete each other with larger and better weapons and more vitriolic and challenging rhetoric. However, this is not OK with conservatives who feel very threatened by the Chinese COMMUNIST Party although the Chinese system brought 800 million people out of poverty in 40 years primarily by adopting a free enterprise capitalistic system. Oh but it is still authoritarian politically, you say. That is subject to interpretation as the Chinese political system is based on Confucianism which promotes a meritocracy unlike the US where any bozo can become President.

So where is the American Department of Peace? We have the Department of Defense(Offense). We have the Department of Homeland Security. We have the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). What agencies of the Federal government are devoted to creating a more peaceful world? Basically, none, and so is it any wonder that, while the human race continues to invent a plethora of gadgets, it can do hardly anything to create world peace? Peace depends on mutual respect among the leaders of the various nations of the world. Instead US authorities criticize and lord it over the leaders of other nations because they are not exactly like us. Instead of walking a mile in their shoes, they insist that every other nation walks a mile in our shoes.

Five Decades and a Mountain of Evidence: Study Explores How Toxic Chemicals are ‘Stealing Children’s Future Potential’

Children of color and from low-income families are not only exposed to more dangerous substances but also experience disproportionate harm to their brain development, researchers report.

By Victoria St. Martin

October 23, 2023, from insideclimatenews

 

Steven James, 12, waits to hunt geese on St. Lawrence Island, in Alaska, sitting hidden behind a wood bar and a whale bone. Credit: Ann Johansson/Corbis via Getty Images.

For over 2,000 years, the Indigenous people known as the Yupik have occupied St. Lawrence Island, a sliver of Alaska that rests in the Bering Sea just below the Arctic Circle and where, on a clear day, it’s said that one can see the coastline of Russia about 40 miles away.

To this day, residents maintain a subsistence lifestyle centered around the region’s fish and wildlife. Growing up on the island, Pangunnaaq Vi Waghiyi absorbed a simple lesson that has been passed down across the generations: “Our elders call the ocean our farm,” she related fondly in a recent phone interview.

But what happens when the ocean, the soil, and the air itself become polluted? 

Drawing on her familial roots at the top of the world, Waghiyi has been working with the environmental justice group known as Alaska Community Action on Toxics to help researchers answer those questions.

Now, a newly released review of more than 200 studies has concluded that children from low-income families and families of color are exposed to more neurotoxic chemicals—and experience greater harm from them—than young people from higher-income and white families.

The article, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives and based on research by an alliance of scientists, medical professionals and environmental advocates, including Waghiyi’s group, focuses on a range of harmful chemicals, including lead, particulate matter, pesticides, and phthalates, or substances added to plastics to make them more flexible.

The review notes that those chemicals can affect brain development and cause developmental delays in children—problems that, researchers wrote, can be exacerbated by such factors as poverty, “racist and discriminatory policies and processes such as racial residential segregation, disproportionate citing of polluting sources in communities of color, and government-backed policies to dispossess Native Americans of their lands and cultures.”

The combined research demonstrates that such environmental injustices affect the health of all age groups, the authors write. Yet as noted by the science writer Harriet Washington, they add, “environmental assaults on the developing brain are particularly pernicious because the effects can have lifelong implications.”

“The whole issue is, children are not exposed to one neurotoxicant at a time—it’s many,” said Devon Payne-Sturges, a co-lead author of the article and an associate professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health. “And so, you know, policies that allow these exposures to continue are really just stealing children’s future potential. And we wanted to highlight this issue about cumulative exposures and cumulative effects.”

The authors examined 218 studies spanning five decades, most of which focused on exposure to combustion-related air pollution like car exhaust or industrial emissions, which increases the risk of respiratory ailments, heart disease and strokes, or to lead, which can cause developmental delays, neurological problems and behavioral challenges in children.

Beyond the high rates of lead exposure among Black and Hispanic children, the researchers noted that children of color have been exposed to higher levels of the pesticides widely used in agriculture. And Black and Hispanic mothers have been exposed to high levels of phthalates, which interfere with human hormones, they observe.

The authors also summarized how low socioeconomic status has amplified the adverse impact of lead exposure on children’s cognitive functioning to a greater degree than previously believed. And they examined studies in which air pollution exposures were associated with greater adverse effects in terms of lowering IQ scores among children who are from families with low socioeconomic status.

“We found that certain types of adversity or disadvantage really magnify the impact of a particular chemical,” said Tanya Khemet Taiwo, an assistant professor in the Department of Midwifery at Bastyr University in Kenmore, Washington, who was also a lead author of the study.

“That means that if you have equal levels of, say, lead exposure in two children and one comes from a family without any social disadvantage, the actual loss of IQ is greater in that child living in a home where they have some factors of social disadvantage,” Khemet Taiwo said. “And that was something we spent a lot of time struggling with and working on and really digging through.”

The article’s authors say they hope their work will help inspire targeted interventions, shape new policy, and encourage greater investment in efforts to eliminate those health disparities. Their findings also underline the need for a greater emphasis on the role of race when researchers are studying harmful environmental exposures, they add.

“The treatment of race and ethnicity in epidemiological studies deserves as much rigor as exposure and health outcome assessment,” the researchers wrote, adding, “Racial categories must be recognized as social constructions whose meanings are not static, and are the result of racism and racialization.” 

Such processes “allocate differential economic, political, social, and even psychological rewards to groups along racial lines and are maintained to preserve status differences,” they noted.

The scientists also pointed to a “conspicuous” lack of studies involving Native American and Indigenous populations, one of the factors driving Waghiyi and her group to assist in such research efforts.

Waghiyi is 64 and a native of Savoonga, the most populous city on St. Lawrence Island with 835 people. She said her community has borne a disproportionate share of the effects of contamination because its diet is still primarily centered on whales, seals, walruses and reindeer.

“Because of where we live in the Arctic, we are some of the most highly contaminated population on the planet because of our reliance on our subsistence foods,” she said.

Ocean currents sweep pollutants up into the Arctic region, Waghiyi explained, and the island is home to an abandoned Cold War-era air base that has been shedding chemicals into the air, soil and water as it decays. The results have been devastating, she said. 

“We now know my people have four to 10 times higher PCBs”—polychlorinated biphenyls, chemicals that cause cancer in animals and have other adverse health effects—“than the average American in the Lower 48,” Waghiyi said. “Along with PCBs, we also found pesticides, heavy metals, solvents. Massive fuel spills. Asbestos. Lead. Mercury.”

The activist views the chemicals as “burdens we didn’t create and environmental violence, where we’re being contaminated without our consent.”

Waghiyi, who also serves as a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, said her group has helped lead community-based research on the harms of toxic chemicals on Sivungaq, the traditional name for St. Lawrence Island.

Now based in Anchorage, Waghiyi said the research is “my passion because it is so personal and we’re seeing health disparities never seen before in our people.” 

In the 1970s, she said, a Yupik elder named Annie Alowa who was working as a health aide began noticing a high incidence of cancer as well as low birth weights, miscarriages and stillbirths in the Northeast Cape, the part of St. Lawrence where Waghiyi grew up. “Early on, she tried to get help for our people for 20 years, and nobody would validate her concerns,” Waghiyi said.

Now Alaska Community Action on Toxics is investigating the legacy contaminants from the military base, persistent organic pollutants like the pesticide mirex and other worrisome substances. Waghiyi said the effects have been multigenerational and, for her, searingly personal.

“Where do I begin?” she said. “My father died of cancer. My mother had a stillborn child after me. She also had heart disease, diabetes, strokes, depression and cancer. We buried my brother of cancer a year ago. I’m a cancer survivor and I’ve had three miscarriages. 

“We’re seeing birth defects in our children. We have children being born with no brains. And these are all families associated with the Northeast Cape.”

Change will not come fast enough for her generation, Waghiyi said, but whatever the obstacles, her group will press on for the children. ”My community and leadership are committed to making meaningful change for our future generations,” she said.

---

Victoria St. Martin

Health and Environmental Justice Reporter, Philadelphia

Victoria St. Martin covers health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. During a 20-year career in journalism, she has worked in a half dozen newsrooms, including The Washington Post where she served as a breaking news and general assignment reporter. Besides The Post, St. Martin has also worked at The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, The Trentonian, The South Bend Tribune and WNIT, the PBS-member station serving north central Indiana. In addition to her newsroom experience, St. Martin is also a journalism educator who spent four years as a distinguished visiting journalist with the Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy at the University of Notre Dame. She is a co-director of the Dow Jones News Fund summer internship training workshop at Temple University. St. Martin is a graduate of Rutgers University and holds a master’s degree from American University’s School of Communication. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011 and has written extensively about the prevalence of breast cancer in young women. In her work, St. Martin is particularly interested in health care disparities affecting Black women.

• @VStMartin

[email protected]

Off the Top of My Head

The Main Hope for Humanity: Secularization

by John Lawrence

When you consider all the wars that have been fought in the name of religion, it is not too farfetched to propose that the main hope for human civilization is secularization. Some of the commandments would be

1. No war is worth being fought over someone's religion.
2. There is no sacred ground, land, location, site or artifact.
3. Only the earth as a whole is holy.
4. Remember the body, to keep it holy. Thou shall not kill.
5. Do not despoil or pollute the environment.
6. Only extract resources as needed.
7. Replace, regenerate, replant or renew extracted resources.
8. All life on earth is to be respected.
9. All humans are equal and have the same rights including economic rights.
10. No religion is more important or more holy than any other religion.

Humans have slaughtered each other from the beginning of time. Many times the slaughter has been carried out in the name of religion. The slaughterers have maintained that God was on their side. The other side were infidels who needed to be converted to the correct religion or be killed. We, as a species, have not made any progress in the elimination of war. We have only made progress in the invention of gadgets, many of which have been destructive to the environment: namely, fossil fuel based gadgets and advanced weapons. Chemistry has led to the invention of plastics which have accumulated in the oceans. Pesticides and herbicides have accumulated in the ecosystem creating conditions conducive to cancer.

Islam, Christianity and Judaism trace back the founding of their religions to Abraham. The descendants of Abraham's two sons, Isaac or Israel and Ishmael, became the Jewish and Arab tribes respectively. Muslims are the descendants of Ishmael; Jews are the descendants of Israel. Christians also trace their lineage back to Abraham since Jesus was a Jew. There are schisms in Christianity (Protestants and Catholics) which led to centuries of European wars. Schisms in Islam (Sunnis and Shiites) led to wars between them. For hundreds of years Christian crusaders killed Muslims and vice versa. Jews have been persecuted and killed for millennia right up to the present day. So what good has religion done for the human race? In terms of world peace we would have been better off without it. It has led to the justification of war and killing and the belief of the killers that their religion was the only correct religion. PreChristian religions have been labeled with the pejorative word - pagan. NonChristians have been labeled as heathen, another pejorative word. Eastern religions have led to conflict between Hindus and Muslims. Pakistan was created by partitioning India so Muslims could live in one place, Hindus in another. China seems to be the only place where there was religious tolerance. In Chinese philosophy, the three teachings are Confucianism, Taoism, and Chinese Buddhism. All of these three teachings are considered a harmonious aggregate.

Meanwhile, while religious people were not killing each other, they were despoiling the environment under the Biblical edict of dominion: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." So man is free to use the environment in any way that profits him regardless of the harm to the ecosystem. Animals can be slaughtered to extinction with no Biblical or religious consequences just as humans who are not of the correct religion can be killed without consequence. The earth can be polluted by corporations for whom externalities do not impose a cost so that pollution of the environment without consequence increases profits to shareholders. Earth is plundered; shareholders profit.

There will never be world peace until religion has no bearing on respect for the human rights of all people, and until respect for the environment predominates over the extraction of the earth's resources. There is always a rationale for war. There is never enough work done to create peace and understanding. Human rationality has led to war which is undertaken in a very rational way, but the rational human mind seems incapable of working out a rationality and a followup for a peaceful world especially when creating a peaceful world costs money.

New Safe Camping Site in Balboa Park Opens

by Hannah Ramirez October 20, 2023, from Voice of San Diego

Press conference at the second safe sleeping program site near the Naval Medical Center on Oct. 20, 2023./ Photo by Ariana Drehsler 

In what used to be the Naval Medical Center’s parking lot, 21 tents out of the 400 planned are ready to serve San Diego’s unhoused residents.

San Diego’s second safe sleeping site is now open. 

Mayor Todd Gloria, Councilman Stephen Whitburn and other city officials provided a tour Friday of the site located on the edge of Balboa Park, also known as the O Lot. The city will admit the site’s first residents on Saturday, officials said. 

In what used to be the Naval Medical Center’s parking lot, 21 tents out of the 400 planned are ready to serve San Diego’s unhoused residents. These tents are lined up side by side and are staggered into three different levels on the property with the capacity to house up to two people and their belongings. 

There is already a waitlist of over 120 people for the O lot.

City officials have considered this lot for months coinciding with the camping ban that started in June, as a way to eliminate encampments on public property with more shelters accessible to the unhoused population.

Within the O lot, residents will have access to restrooms, showers, laundry, meals and even a free shuttle to transport them between two other safe sleeping program sites. This shuttle will help them access other services, run errands and go to work and school as needed.

As of now, city officials expect O lot will be available for 18-24 months.

Chief Operating Officer Eric Dargan during a press conference at the O Lot Safe Sleeping site on the edge of Balboa Park and near the Naval Medical Center on Oct. 20, 2023. / Photo by Ariana Drehsler

“Seven months ago we asked all 31 operational departments to be creative, to open up the minds to step up to the plate and identify city properties where we could provide safe sleeping sites. This is just one of those examples and many more to come.” said Dargan.

The two service providers for this site will be Dreams for Change and the Downtown San Diego Partnership.

“With this site, we will be able to work with clients while they are in place of security and safety,” said Betsy Brennan, CEO for the Downtown San Diego Partnership,  “Security and safety is of utmost importance and environment much more conducive to talking about the next steps for how we can support them on their journey.”

Mayor Gloria explained that the city charter dictates that this city property needs to be used for recreational purposes but under an emergency declaration a temporary exception has been given.

The Time Is Now for a Just Transition From Factory Farming

 Image: Adobe

by Grace Hussein, Sentient Media, from Truthdig, October 17, 2023

A new report suggests reinventing the industrial food system to tackle climate change.

Ahead of COP28, global leaders are increasingly turning to food systems to tackle climate pollution. Now, experts from Stockholm Environment Institute have released a new policy report with recommendations for reinventing the food system. The common thread — a shift away from factory farms. 

The experts specifically call out the harms of industrial meat, as producing beef and dairy products along with other meats is one of the largest contributors to climate change, using vast amounts of water and land while belching a significant amount of greenhouse gasses. 

“…Even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately,” the authors write, “emissions from food systems alone, particularly from animal product production, would make it impossible to limit global warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to limit warming to 2°C.” 

Because food production doesn’t exist in a vacuum, eliminating meat — or even just reducing it — is no small task. In much of the world, animal products continue to play a key role in health and nutrition, the authors write, especially for “pregnant and lactating women, young children and people on low incomes with little access to alternatives.” 

Yet it’s precisely because animal products continue to play a pivotal cultural, social, economic and nutritional role that a just transition away from them is necessary in order to ensure the best outcomes for people, animals and the environment. 

Health and Justice Require Food System Change

The report argues for a “One Health” strategy for solving these problems — what the CDC defines as an approach that recognizes the ties between humans, animals and the planet. Instead of focusing on one of these issues — for example just animal welfare — One Health solutions also take into account the impacts to human health and the environment. 

Industrial agriculture’s high disease risk demonstrates how human, animal and environmental well-being are all interconnected, and, the researchers argue, how all three of these are intrinsically linked to food production. 

“…Even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately,” the authors write, “emissions from food systems alone, particularly from animal product production, would make it impossible to limit global warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to limit warming to 2°C.” 

Part of the problem is that raising animals on factory farms by the billions is driving the destruction of forests and an overreliance on antibiotics. In a worrying turn of events, the number of new pathogens discovered yearly has jumped from three to five in just one decade, a trend scientists believe is due in large part to deforestation. About 40 percent of deforestation is attributable solely to beef production. 

The authors also argue that social justice plays an equally important role in food systems transformation. Enter just transition. 

Originated by unions in the United States, just transition principles were created to protect the interests of workers and communities as emerging environmental regulations began to shift economies away from dependence on polluting industries. The framework has been employed heavily in the fields of energy and fuel, but has only recently made its way into discussions surrounding food systems transformation. 

What makes food systems change especially unique are the stakeholders— workers, communities, but also livestock, according to the research. Farm animals “are sentient beings,” the authors acknowledge, which means they too “will be directly affected by the policies that governments adopt to transform the meat sector.” Any and all solutions, they argue, should “reduce, rather than increase, suffering.” 

Just Transition Is More Than Financial

The researchers recommend a number of shifts, including phasing out subsidies and other government support for factory farms, while at the same time boosting support for alternatives such as plant-based and alternative proteins, as well as policies that support equitable access to food. 

Some of the measures they suggest phasing out are so-called “ag-gag laws,” which protect producers from undercover investigators and government-funded campaigns to increase meat consumption. 

Meanwhile, the researchers caution against blanket support for meat alternative products, to avoid perpetuating the same inequalities represented within industrial meat production. Instead, they also suggest support for policies and programs that encourage a deeper shift to eating whole-food, plant based products as a means for boosting public health. 

The experts also call on policymakers to ensure that the transition planning process is inclusive of all stakeholders, highlighting “truly inclusive, transparent processes that enable stakeholders to participate meaningfully.” 

Any and all solutions, they argue, should “reduce, rather than increase, suffering.” 

To do this, policymakers must take active steps to combat the underlying prejudices and socioeconomic inequalities fueling injustices within the food system. Racism and other forms of marginalization run deep. For example, within the U.S., only a small percentage of farmers are Black, a trend that originated with the country’s legacy of slavery and became entrenched after the decades of tenancy, rather than ownership, that followed.

Instead of fixing the problem, the U.S. Department of Agriculture made things worse by systematically denying Black farmers the support they offered white farmers. Addressing these injustices requires an understanding of this history, as well as exploring paths for more fair land ownership, according to the authors. 

The researchers also recommend that direct support be provided to the stakeholders most heavily impacted by the transition away from meat. Part of that includes “social safety nets and compensation for the disruptions caused,” but also  “addressing “the physical and mental impacts” of a changing food system. The authors note that ranching and pastoralism are core to identity in many communities, and a shift away from something so culturally entrenched requires addressing losses that are personal as well as financial.  

Ultimately, it’s not just meatpacking workers, the authors remind us. They recommend involving “stakeholders beyond the meat sector itself,” including seasonal farmworkers and small scale farmers, as well as workers and communities of color. While a just transition in the food sector presents challenges that are different from coal or energy communities, the authors urge “time is short and there is a great deal at stake,” as biodiversity and the health of the planet — along with its inhabitants — depend on it.

Off the Top of My Head

What do the Pope and Ted Kaczynski Have in Common?

by John Lawrence

Recently the Pope delivered a strong condemnation of the western lifestyle in Laudate Deum. In his writing, which was all about our failure to address climate change sufficiently, he decried our "technocratic paradigm" which basically is the worship of technology as a false god whose premise is that technology in and of itself will solve all the problems of the human race especially in terms of artificial intelligence (AI). The implication is that the new religion is technology. Kaczynski railed against "industrial-technological society" which he felt reduced the free exercise of human potential. The Pope decried spiritual poverty; Kacynski decried psychological poverty. In both cases the authors felt that humanity had lost its soul.

It's easy to see why. As the Pope observed, consumption equals fossil fuel emissions equals climate change. The more consumption, the more climate change. Kaczynski was also anti-consumption, but his gripe was more with the lifestyle required to live a life of consumption as opposed to getting by with less so one could opt out of "the system." The American way of life is surely one of high consumer values. Advertising to get people to consume more is relentless. People work to acquire things as opposed to just working enough to supply one's basic needs leaving the rest of your time free to pursue more life affirming pursuits. While Kaczynski focused almost exclusively on the negative psychological results, the Pope focuses on the long term effects that climate change can have on people especially poor people who are suffering and will suffer disproportionately although they are not the main perpetrators of fossil fuel emissions. One could also mention that many of the consumable products that rich nations favor also pollute the oceans and have negative health effects in general. All of creation including animals suffer as a result of the high consumption lifestyles of rich nations, rich nations that have been most responsible for inventing the technologies that are driving climate and ecological destruction.

What Kaczynski failed to do and what the Pope is doing is to relate the high consumption technology driven lifestyle to the destruction of the earth's resources and the environment. The Pope expressed this very well in his writing:

"This is a global social issue and one intimately related to the dignity of human life. The Bishops of the United States have expressed very well this social meaning of our concern about climate change, which goes beyond a merely ecological approach, because “our care for one another and our care for the earth are intimately bound together. Climate change is one of the principal challenges facing society and the global community. The effects of climate change are borne by the most vulnerable people, whether at home or around the world”. In a few words, the Bishops assembled for the Synod for Amazonia said the same thing: “Attacks on nature have consequences for people’s lives”. And to express bluntly that this is no longer a secondary or ideological question, but a drama that harms us all, the African bishops stated that climate change makes manifest “a tragic and striking example of structural sin”.

A spiritual life, a psychologically healthy life is very much at odds with the American high consumption lifestyle. A high consumption lifestyle driven by advertising is not only bad for us as individuals, it is bad for the planet as well.

Off the Top of My Head

What To Do About Religious Intolerance Leading to War

by John Lawrence

The current situation in the Middle East is a reminder that throughout history war has been religious based. Think of the wars in Europe between Protestants and Catholics or the Crusades which were wars between Christians and Muslims or the persecution of Jews throughout history. If we are ever to have peace in this world, religious tolerance is paramount. So there should be religious studies in schools at all levels, but not studies about one religion. Students should be required to study all the major religions which are Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Not only that, but students should be required to attend religious services in all these religions. Only by understanding the different religions can one develop a tolerance for them all. Only when we come to a time when it doesn't matter what religion a person espouses will we be able to all get along. It shouldn't matter what one's religion is. They shouldn't be perceived as "the other." All human beings need to get to the point where they are human beings first and their religion is a matter of indifference.

I think this can only be accomplished by an educational system in which a student becomes familiar with all the different religions, has friends who are members of different religions and comes to see that, regardless of one's religion, human beings are all basically the same. In other words all societies should become secularized. It would help greatly if all students were required to attend religious services of all the five great religions mentioned earlier. What is more important than peace on earth, and to accomplish this tolerance of all religions must be inculcated in students everywhere. Tolerance of other religions is more important than the beliefs of any particular religion. As long as one perceives that someone is a member of a different religion than their own and is perceived as "the other," there will be suspicion, fear, tension, hatred and war. World peace is something that needs to be worked at to be accomplished and understanding and tolerance of religion is a good place to start.

In addition to tolerance of different religious views, an uplifting of the economic circumstances of the world's poorest citizens will do more to create peace than anything else. War is often the result of the perceived superiority of living conditions of one group of people by another group. One group is the downtrodden and one group has all the advantages and is living the good life. Everyone in the world needs to be brought up to at least a decent standard of living before there will be peace in the world. So religious tolerance brought about by education regarding all the world's religions and attendance at all religious services combined with an all out effort to bring all the world's peoples up to a decent standard of living will do much to bring about world peace. These efforts have to be done at the same time that the earth itself must be protected from environmental degradation especially with regard to climate change. The old paradigm in which earth's resources were to be exploited without consequence, in which humans were told that they had "dominion" over earth's resources, must go to be replaced with an ethic not of exploitation but of respect for the planet and all its resources including its human resources.

End War Before It Ends Us

A bloodied Palestinian man carries his baby into Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.  (Photo by Momen Faiz/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

by Robert C. Koehler

Oct 15, 2023, Common Dreams

We have to learn to value and connect with one another, even, or especially, when it’s the last thing we can imagine doing.

Humanity’s cancer shows up in Israel and Palestine. Missiles fly, hell makes global headlines, thousands of people die, many of them (oh God, of course) children.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declares: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly. . . . We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.”

That’ll show ’em! Revenge rules. Kill the human animals, even if they’re toddlers.

Here’s the vicious cycle of war: One side commits a heinous crime against humanity — e.g, Hamas fires missiles into Israel, killing more than 700 people. This justifies an even more heinous response from Israel, firing its own (far more sophisticated) missiles into Gaza, declaring war on a trapped population of people in the “open air prison” of Gaza. Both sides feel justified as they continue to commit crimes against humanity — you know, look what they did! The essence of war is dehumanization.

I write these words not to try to “equalize” the wrongs of this conflict or to shrug off its history: the colonization of Palestine in the wake of World War I, the savage destruction of hundreds of its villages in the creation of the state of Israel. As Chris Hedges writes:

“Israel has spoken this blood-soaked language of violence to the Palestinians since Zionist militias seized more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, destroyed some 530 Palestinian villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in more than 70 massacres. Some 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed between 1947 and 1949 to create the state of Israel in 1948.”

In other words, he asks: What did Israel expect? This latest war is just one more upsurge of retaliation by a suppressed segment of humanity. Hamas, Gaza’s current governing organization, is deemed a terrorist organization — certainly by much of the U.S. media — but here’s the thing: Almost every national government with a military is a terrorist organization, or at least potentially so. The United States certainly is. Terrorism is just another word for war.

We live in a world that remains trapped in the consciousness of war. The only way to deal with harm and danger is to inflict it yourself. They just killed our children, so we’re gonna kill theirs. Whoever kills the most children wins, or so it seems.

Is a different way of thinking possible at the level of geopolitics? Is a world without war possible?

Orly Noy, who is Israeli (editor of the Hebrew-language news magazine Local Call), describes how terrifying it got when Hamas fired its missiles into Israel. Writing in The Guardian, she notes: “The public desire for revenge is both understandable and terrifying, but the erasure of any moral red line is always a frightening thing.

“It is important not to minimize or condone the heinous crimes committed by Hamas. But it is also important to remind ourselves that everything it is inflicting on us now, we have been inflicting on the Palestinians for years. . . . I keep reminding myself that ignoring this context is giving up a piece of my own humanity. Because violence devoid of any context leads to only one possible response: revenge.

And revenge, she writes, “is the opposite of security, it is the opposite of peace, it is also the opposite of justice. It is nothing but more violence.

“. . . we have not only brought Gaza to the brink of starvation, we have brought it to a state of collapse. Always in the name of security. How much security did we get? Where will another round of revenge take us?

“Terrible crimes were committed against Israelis this Saturday, crimes that the mind cannot fathom — and in this time of dark grief, I cling to the one thing I have left to hold on to: my humanity. The absolute belief that this hell is not predestined. Not for us, nor for them.”

How can her understanding of this terrifying moment be multiplied by, oh, let us say, seven billion human minds? Revenge and war don’t work. Even our enemy acts in a context. And conflict can only be understood — and transcended — in the context of all parties that are part of it. This is the creation of peace.

Yes, alas, this is more complicated than simply kicking someone’s ass — winning the game. It’s almost as though there’s a global commercial interest in keeping conflict alive — not just among political hawks and the arms dealers, but . . . well, as a lifelong journalist, I can certainly add my profession to the list: If it bleeds, it leads, as they say. How many headlines do you see that read: “Israel and Palestine (or Russia and Ukraine) Engage in Empathic Dialogue, Find Understanding”?

My God, making connection, even with the enemy? This is not what governments fund. This is not how we understand ourselves. At best, ending war — transcending war — is an unfathomably long, seemingly impossible process, and our understanding of what it will take is minimal, compared to how much we understand, let us say, about the structure of the atom.

Or is it so minimal? Perhaps we know more than we think we do. As the late Marion Woodman, author and Jungian psychologist, wrote: “Power in the sense of controlling somebody else is different from personal presence. That kind of power — patriarchal power — does not value other people. What I strive for instead is empowerment.”

We have to push on. We have to learn to value and connect with one another, even, or especially, when it’s the last thing we can imagine doing. This may well be the primary task of being human. If we don’t end war, it will certainly end us.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

 

 

Robert C. Koehler

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. Koehler has been the recipient of multiple awards for writing and journalism from organizations including the National Newspaper Association, Suburban Newspapers of America, and the Chicago Headline Club. He's a regular contributor to such high-profile websites as Common Dreams and the Huffington Post. Eschewing political labels, Koehler considers himself a "peace journalist. He has been an editor at Tribune Media Services and a reporter, columnist and copy desk chief at Lerner Newspapers, a chain of neighborhood and suburban newspapers in the Chicago area. Koehler launched his column in 1999. Born in Detroit and raised in suburban Dearborn, Koehler has lived in Chicago since 1976. He earned a master's degree in creative writing from Columbia College and has taught writing at both the college and high school levels. Koehler is a widower and single parent. He explores both conditions at great depth in his writing. His book, "Courage Grows Strong at the Wound" (2016). Contact him or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

Full Bio >

‘Gobsmackingly bananas’: scientists stunned by planet’s record September heat

The carbon emissions driving the climate crisis and rapid arrival of an El Niño event are to blame, researchers say

A firefighter tries to control a wildfire in the hills at Cali, Colombia on 22 September. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

from the Guardian, Climate crisis

Global temperatures soared to a new record in September by a huge margin, stunning scientists and leading one to describe it as “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas”.

The hottest September on record follows the hottest August and hottest July, with the latter being the hottest month ever recorded. The high temperatures have driven heatwaves and wildfires across the world.

September 2023 beat the previous record for that month by 0.5C, the largest jump in temperature ever seen. September was about 1.8C warmer than pre-industrial levels. Datasets from European and Japanese scientists confirm the leap.

The heat is the result of the continuing high levels of carbon dioxide emissions combined with a rapid flip of the planet’s biggest natural climate phenomenon, El Niño. The previous three years saw La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean, which lowers global temperature by a few tenths of a degree as more heat is stored in the ocean.

Conditions have now rebounded to an El Niño event, which releases ocean heat and drives up temperatures. It’s all but certain that 2023 will be the hottest on record and 2024 may even exceed that, as the heating impact of El Niño is felt most in the year after it begins.

“September was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist, absolutely gobsmackingly bananas,” said Zeke Hausfather, at the Berkeley Earth climate data project.

Mika Rantanen, climate researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, said: “I’m still struggling to comprehend how a single year can jump so much compared to previous years.” Prof Ed Hawkins, at the University of Reading, UK, said the heat seen this summer was “extraordinary”.

Samantha Burgess, at the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, said: “The unprecedented temperatures for the time of year observed in September have broken records by an extraordinary amount. 2023 [is] on track to be the warmest year and about 1.4C above pre-industrial average temperatures. Two months out from [the UN climate conference] Cop28, the sense of urgency for ambitious climate action has never been more critical.”

The heat hit record levels within many countries too, including France, Germany, and Poland. The UK saw its joint hottest September on record, the Met Office reported, in data that goes back to 1884.

In Australia, climate scientist and author Joelle Gergis said: “Observations of Australia’s climate in September are shocking. Figures show where maximum temperatures were the highest on record, with many areas 3C to 5C above average. Rainfall deficits are primed for drought. Summer is going to be brutal.”

While human-caused global heating and El Niño are the biggest factors causing the record-breaking temperatures, other factors may be contributing small increases as well, Hausfather said. These include an uptick in the 11-year solar cycle, cuts in sun-blocking sulphur emissions from shipping and industry and a volcanic eruption in Tonga that released a large amount of water vapour, which traps heat.

In August, the Guardian asked 45 leading climate scientists from around the world about the record-breaking temperatures. They said that, despite it certainly feeling as if events had taken an alarming turn, the broad global heating trend seen to date was entirely in line with three decades of scientific predictions.

Increasingly severe weather impacts had also been long signposted by scientists, although the speed and intensity of the reality and the unexpected vulnerability of many populations scared some. The off-the-charts sea temperatures and Antarctic sea ice loss were seen as the most shocking events.

The scientists said that the exceptional events of 2023 could be a normal year in just a decade, unless there is a dramatic increase in climate action. The researchers overwhelmingly pointed to one action as critical: slashing the burning of fossil fuels down to zero.

Off the Top of My Head

Congress Gets Paid While Government Shuts Down: Perfect!

by John Lawrence

A bunch of highly paid do-nothings keep getting paid while average paycheck-to-paycheck people starve. It doesn't get any better than this. The leader of the free world can't even keep its government functioning. What's wrong with this picture? Or, if you prefer, what a revolting development this is. Obviously, the founders did not contemplate this! Republicans want to reduce government spending, but they're not interested in reducing spending for the bloated defense department. They want to spend more on defense (offense), and they're only too happy to talk about all the wonderful new weapons the US is developing like the F-35 which continues to crash. Every one costs $150 million by the way. Recently a pilot bailed out of one and let it crash rather than trying to land it and save the country $150 million. And then there are the ATTACKEMS. What a clever name! Let's attack em before they ATTACKUS. Now Republicans don't want to spend any more money on Ukraine. Does that mean the US and NATO will have to negotiate a peace settlement? What a disaster - being forced to stop the killing because of an inability to ATTACKEM any more. As a last option we would be forced into peace instead of WINNING! What a disaster! No more killing? No more generals on TV telling us how disastrous this would be?

All the generals and spokesmen - and they are mostly men -  for the military-industrial complex, who only can think in terms of war and winning, cannot even contemplate that a negotiated peace settlement might be even possible. For them peace is an unmitigated disaster. Lockheed's profits might even go down. At least one thing Elon Musk has done is to show that it's possible to do great things without the venerable cost plus contracts that the military industrial complex prefers. Musk just gets paid for performance not cost plus. Cost plus contracts incentivize private industry to delay the finish date and run up costs because their profits are guaranteed to be a percentage of those costs. So, what the hell, the more something costs, the more money they make! Fortune magazine wrote: " Lockheed Martin’s $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter jet is 10 years late and 80% over budget—and it could be one of the Pentagon’s biggest success stories" Subtitle: "How America's biggest defense contractor turned a military spending fiasco into a business victory." You could say much the same for the bureaucracy at NASA. Musk totally showed them up with a workforce one tenth the size. Can you say "BLOATED" and by the way, "SCLEROTIC." Now the US government relies on Elon Musk for its space program. Pitiful. But at least it's saving the taxpayers money. You go, Elon!

Well, at least, SpaceX won't be shutting down although they probably won't be getting paid either. Perhaps Musk could build the next jet fighter for a fraction of the cost of the F-35. Meanwhile, part of the world is laughing at the fact that the US government can't even keep the lights on. And part of the world is crying in their beer about the fact that the US can't keep the lights on. I'll leave it up to you, dear reader, to guess what parts are laughing and what parts are crying.

Resurrecting the Common Good: A Civic Education for All

Chapter 9 of the Common Good

Robert Reich

Sep 29, 2023

 

Friends,

Today in my series on the common good, I’m proposing that our schools reinstate what used to be called “civic education.”

 

When, in 1961, I heard John F. Kennedy’s admonition that we ask what we can do for our nation, I was attending a small public high school in upstate New York. Part of the required curriculum was citizenship education. It involved a series of courses on history and government. As in most schools, some were well taught; others were taught abysmally.

One teacher, named Ruth Lee, often pointed to a world map showing the Soviet Union, China, and most of Eastern Europe in bright red, with surrounding nations (Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and North Korea) in pink. Her ongoing civics lesson was that communism was spreading like an infectious disease. If we weren’t careful, what remained of the free world would catch it.

Civic education in the 1950s and 1960s reflected many of the prejudices of that time.

Yet it at least engaged us, day after day, in the practice of thinking about the well-being of our society and the world. The ongoing examination of history and our system of government had a cumulative effect: Regardless of our politics, we began to see ourselves as the inheritors of an important legacy. That legacy was far from perfect, but it was profoundly important.

Above all, we had an obligation to become responsible citizens.

 

CIVIC EDUCATION WAS LONG AGO ELIMINATED from the standard high school curriculum.

Now, education is viewed mainly as a private investment rather than a public good. What you learn is what you’ll earn, as the popular saying goes.

With inequalities of income and wealth wider than they have been in over a century, parents and their children face the daunting possibility of unprecedented riches for those with the “right” education, or the risk of squalor for those on the losing track.

These days, the typical college graduate earns twice as much as someone with only a high school degree. And a high school dropout earns half the earnings of a high school graduate.

Yet if education is simply a private investment yielding private returns, there is no reason why anyone other than the “investor” should pay for it. No wonder increasing numbers of parents resist paying for the education of children who are poorer or require extra teacher time and resources.

The same attitude extends to legislatures that have been cutting funding for public universities. If a university degree is a private investment offering a good return to the individual, they argue, why should taxpayers bear the cost? Why shouldn’t students and their parents take out loans to cover it, just as people borrow for all sorts of other worthwhile investments, such as a new home or business?

But education is not just a private investment. It is also a public good. America’s founders knew that the survival of the new republic necessitated a public wise enough to keep power within bounds. It required citizens capable of resolving the tension between private interests and the common good — people imbued with civic virtue.

 

AT THE CLOSE OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION OF 1787, someone was said to have asked Benjamin Franklin what sort of government the delegates had created for the people. He replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

What did “keeping it” require? More than anything else, education.

“Ignorance and despotism seem made for each other,” Jefferson warned. But if the new nation could “enlighten the people generally . . . tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”

During the colonial era, a few towns ran public grammar schools — but only for a few weeks in the winter when family farms didn’t require their children’s labor. Other towns relied on private tuition.

After the Revolution, reformers pushed for free public education. Jedediah Peck of upstate New York typified the reform movement. “In all countries where education is confined to a few people,” he warned, “we always find arbitrary governments and abject slavery.” Peck convinced the New York legislature to create a comprehensive system of public education.

The person most credited with founding American public schooling, Massachusetts educator Horace Mann, also linked public education to democracy. “A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people,” he wrote, “must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one.”

Mann believed it important that public schools educate all children together, “in common.” The mix of ethnicities, races, and social classes in the same schools would help children learn the habits and attitudes of citizenship. (His project was not without fault: It emphasized Protestantism over Catholicism, for example, which was one reason Catholics created their own private schools.)

If the common good is to be restored, education must be reconnected to these public moral roots. We must stop thinking about it solely as a private investment that may lead to a good-paying job, and revive the founders’ understanding of it as a public good that helps train young people in responsible citizenship.

This requires that schools focus not just on building skills but also on teaching civic obligations.

What does this entail?

For starters, every child should gain an understanding of our political system, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism. They must understand the meaning and importance of the rule of law, and why no one should be above it, and they need to know where these legacies came from, and why they continue to be important.

This is what we demand of people who want to become naturalized citizens. Immigrants have to pass a civics test covering the organization of the U.S. government and American history. (When I served as secretary of labor, I had the privilege of administering the Pledge of Allegiance to some of those who had passed that test and witnessing their pride and gratitude in being welcomed into citizenship.)

Every child must also grasp the meaning and importance of justice — of equal political rights and equal economic opportunity, and how these two goals are related. They need to see how the economy is organized, how its rules are made, and what groups and interests have the most influence in making those rules.

They must learn about our history of racism and of genocide — not, as Republican governors and legislatures across America have charged, in order to be ashamed of America — but to be aware of the moral challenges America has faced. This is a means of helping our children practice tolerance toward different beliefs, ethnicities, races, and religions. They need to learn about basic human rights and America’s responsibilities in the world.

Such an education must encourage civic virtue. It should explain and illustrate the profound difference between doing whatever it takes to win, and acting for the common good. The difference between getting as much as one can get for oneself, and giving back to society. Between assuming everyone is in it for themselves, and understanding that we’re all in it together. Between seeking personal celebrity, wealth, or power, and helping build a better society for all.

 

A CIVIC EDUCATION must also urge and equip young people to communicate with others who do not share their views. It should teach them how to listen, to open their minds to the possibility their own views and preconceptions may be wrong, and to discover why people with opposing views believe what they do.

It should enable them to work with others to separate facts and logic from values and beliefs, and help them find facts and apply logic together even if their values and beliefs differ.

These lessons cannot be learned only in the classroom. A true civic education also requires learning by doing.

Young people should develop what Tocqueville called the “habits of the heart” by taking on responsibilities in their communities — working in homeless shelters and soup kitchens, tutoring, mentoring, coaching kids’ sports teams, helping the elderly and infirm.

Young people need to move out of their bubbles of class, race, religion, and ideology, and go to places and engage in activities where people look different from themselves and have different beliefs and outlooks from their own. They must learn to listen to them and communicate with them.

 

TWO YEARS OF REQUIRED PUBLIC SERVICE would give young people an opportunity to learn civic responsibility by serving the common good directly. It should be a duty of citizenship.

This is how we once regarded military service. From World War II until the final days of the Vietnam War, in January 1973, nearly every young man in America faced the prospect of being drafted into the army. Sure, many children of the rich found means to stay out of harm’s way, but the draft at least spread responsibility and heightened the public’s sensitivity to the human costs of war.

Richard Nixon officially ended the draft and created a paid military mainly to take the wind out of the sails of the antiwar movement, and he succeeded.

Since then, the United States has had what’s called an “all-volunteer” army — “volunteer” only in the sense that young people have taken these jobs because they were among the best they could get.

Today’s military is composed of fewer young people from rich families than the population as a whole. When compared with other groups of the same age, the military also has more Southerners and a higher percentage of Black Americans. Most come from the same kind of blue-collar households whose incomes have gone nowhere for four decades.

It’s easy to support a war that you don’t have to fight in. A 2004 survey showed that the majority of young people supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but only a small minority were themselves willing to fight in that war.

Two years in the armed services or in some other service to the nation would help instill in all young people a sense of their obligations to society, regardless of their family’s wealth or status. It would allow young Americans to connect with other Americans who differed from them by race, social class, and politics. (Not incidentally, it might also remind many upper-income Americans of the personal costs and risks of American foreign policy.)

Public service could take many forms in addition to military service. The Peace Corps could be revived and expanded. Projects like “Teach for America” could be enlarged and extended to other service professions, like “Social Work for America.” Nonprofits could offer a range of public service work.

All such recruits would be paid a modest stipend, at least living expenses plus interest payments on any student loans. That would be less than the current pay of “all-volunteer” army recruits.

 

WHENEVER THE IDEA OF NATIONAL SERVICE COMES UP, some object that no one should be forced to serve their country. In 2003, when George W. Bush proposed expanding AmeriCorps, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal grumbled “the entire concept of paid volunteerism is an oxymoron.” Dick Armey, then House majority leader, opined, “We give least well when we give at the direction and supervision of the government. The idea that government can teach charity to America rings very hollow with me.”

Rubbish. Young people were forced to serve their country when we had a draft. We require children to attend school for 16 years in order to learn the basics. Why shouldn’t they be required to put in two years of public service, to help learn the basics of citizenship?

Besides, national service has nothing whatever to do with government teaching “charity.” It is about teaching civic virtue.

Once learned, civic virtue must be practiced. As I hope I’ve made clear, our obligations as citizens go beyond voting, paying taxes, obeying the law, and serving on juries. We owe to one another our time and energies to improve our communities and to protect and strengthen our democracy.

This should not be thought of as “charity,” either. It is a commitment to pass on to future generations a society that comes closer to its ideals than it was when it was passed on to us.

 

Next week, in the last of this series of essays, I will talk about truth as a common good. Thank you again for joining me on this journey.

These weekly essays are based on chapters from my book THE COMMON GOOD, in which I apply the framework of the book to recent events and to the upcoming election. (Should you wish to read the book, here’s a link.)

Subscribers to this newsletter are keeping it going. If you are able, please consider a paid or gift subscription. And we always appreciate your sharing our content with others and leaving your thoughts in the comments.

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Off the Top of My Head

These Two Things Do Not Compute: Shutting Down the American Government and Lecturing the World About the Virtues of American Democracy

by John Lawrence

The US power structure dominates the world in terms of its military bases. The US controls about 750 bases in at least 80 countries worldwide and spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined. The US also controls the world's financial transactions. The dollar’s role as the primary reserve currency for the global economy allows the United States to borrow money more easily and impose painful financial sanctions. With the US' dominant position in world affairs, you would think that it would be impossible for a handful of representatives in Congress to shut down the entire US government. But that is exactly the situation the US and the world is in. The US is the leader in world affairs. Yet the leader can't even keep the lights on. Other countries are looking at this. Nixon called the US a pitiful, helpless giant. He said, "If, when the chips are down, the worlds most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world." So what is the US when its government shuts down? Exactly that: a pitiful, helpless giant. Its military personnel on the 750 military bases won't get paid. How's that for demoralizing the military? Service members will continue to report for duty, though they will not get paid during a shutdown. And many of the hundreds of thousands of civilians who work for the Department of Defense will likely be furloughed, says White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby. Air traffic controllers will not get paid either although they will be required to report for work as well. Does that portend more close calls at airports?

The world is watching. American diplomats are fond of lecturing other world leaders about the pitfalls and shortcomings of their governments. However, their governments probably would not be caught in the pickle of a complete government shutdown. Nor would the governments of the civilized world, with the exception of the US, contemplate putting a person with 91 criminal indictments into the position of their President. The US is much in the need of updating. It is giving democracy a bad name in the sense that the national dialogue is turning into a clown show. Trump's rallies are providing entertainment for his base which is an audience that is more addicted to being entertained than it is to supporting a leader who is devoted to improving their lives. This reminds me of Hitler's rallies which were designed as pageantry for its entertainment value. It sure enthralled the German people. People are loyal to a leader who entertains them, who moves them, not one who will use the legitimate levers of government to improve their lives or to make the country and/or the world a better place. Joe Biden is the opposite. He has made the country and the world a better place despite not being very entertaining. That's why he's not leading Trump in the poles. Trump's base (cult) are excited by Trump. Biden's base, if you could call it a base, are ho hum. Oh well, I guess he's done some good, but I'm not excited. For Trump's base excitement is the sine qua non.

Getting back to the military NPR reports the following:

Separately, the Department of Defense says post and base services would be closed or limited, while elective surgeries and procedures in its medical and dental facilities would have to be postponed. Commissaries would remain open overseas but close in the U.S.

And certain Pentagon activities, like operational planning and military recruitment, will be paused.

Defense officials warned earlier this week that a shutdown would strategically "play into the hands of U.S. competitors" because it would cost time as well as money. Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh called it "the worst thing that could happen."

"The U.S. military's going to continue to do its job and protect our national security interests, and of our allies and partners as well," she said, adding that a shutdown would make those efforts harder. "When you don't have your full operating capacity to be able to help with the mission, to be able to conduct an exercise or training, of course, that gets to our national security and readiness."

Kirby agrees that a prolonged shutdown could harm national security, especially when it comes to delayed management of DOD contracts for things like maintenance, logistics and procurement.

So five Republican representatives can act collectively as dictators to threaten national security as well as domestic tranquillity, and there's absolutely nothing anybody can do about it. This is democracy in action? This is the vaunted "rule of law"? What exactly is this except a fly in the ointment of democracy or in any system that purports to be a democracy and what does this say about the world's military and financial leader? Other countries are watching this spectacle.

'Truly Historic' Youth-Led Climate Case Arrives at European Human Rights Court

Young Portuguese citizens arrive at the European Court of Human Rights for a hearing in a climate change case involving themselves against 32 countries, in Strasbourg, France on September 27, 2023. (Photo: Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images)

Six Portuguese young people are suing the governments of 33 countries, arguing their human rights have been violated by a widespread failure to mitigate the climate crisis.

By Julia Conley, September 27, 2023, from Common Dreams

Lawyers for six Portuguese children and young adults on Wednesday expressed hope that their unprecedented climate case, brought to the European Court of Human Rights three years after it was first filed, will ultimately be a "game-changer" that forces governments in Europe and across the globe to take decisive action to address the climate emergency.

Ranging in age from 11 to 24, the six plaintiffs sat on Wednesday before nearly two dozen human rights judges and attorneys representing nearly three dozen nations, determined to prove to the court that countries across Europe have violated their fundamental rights by allowing greenhouse gas emissions to continue heating the planet despite warnings from energy experts and scientists.

In Duarte Agostinho v. Portugal and 32 Others, the plaintiffs are seeking not financial relief but a ruling from the court that would compel the governments of the 27 E.U. member-nations as well as Russia, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, and Turkey to speed up their efforts to keep planetary heating below 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.

Because the human rights court's rulings are legally binding for E.U. members, a decision in favor of the young plaintiffs "would act like a binding treaty imposed by the court on the respondents, requiring them to rapidly accelerate their climate mitigation efforts," Gerry Liston of the U.K.-based Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), told the Associated Press.

"In legal terms, it would be a game-changer," Liston told the outlet.

Four of the plaintiffs live in central Portugal, where wildfires killed at least 66 people in 2017. The country faced more blazes this summer—the hottest on record—as well as a record-breaking heatwave which saw the temperature in the central region of the country rise to 46.4°C (115.5°F), which at least one plaintiff said had interfered with schoolwork, and which climate scientists said would not have happened without planetary heating and fossil fuel extraction.

"Without urgent action to cut emissions, [the place] where I live will soon become an unbearable furnace," 20-year-old Martim Agostinho, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement.

Lawyers for the defendants claimed the group should have litigated the case in the domestic court system, with Belgian legal expert Isabelle Niedlispacher arguing before the court that the plaintiffs did not make an attempt "to invoke, let alone exhaust domestic remedies."

But GLAN, which says it "pursues innovative legal actions across borders," dismissed the claims, noting that the fossil-fueled climate emergency and the extreme weather it's causing have no respect for countries' boundaries and are placing the entire planet at risk.

"It cannot be within a state's discretion whether or not to act to prevent catastrophic climate destruction," said Alison MacDonald, another attorney representing the young people.

Sébastien Duyck, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, called the case "truly historic" because the governments of dozens of countries have been compelled to respond.

"These governments are forced to lay out a legal defense justifying the gap between their climate policies and what science says is needed to avoid climate breakdown," said Duyck. "In the broader context of global litigation, this case wields remarkable influence, given that the European Court of Human Rights holds a prominent role in setting legal precedents within Europe and beyond."

The case was brought to the court a month after a state judge in Montana sided with 16 young residents who argued that the state had violated their rights by promoting fossil fuel extraction. The United Nations Environment Program released a report in July showing that climate litigation has emerged as an important driver of far-reaching, concrete action by governments to reduce emissions.

Gearoid O'Cuinn, another lawyer for GLAN, said defendants resorted to "climate denialism" when they argued, as Greece did, that the "effects of climate change, as recorded so far, do not seem to directly affect human life or human health."

Greece has faced both deadly wildfires and flooding in recent weeks.

"European governments' climate policies are consistent with a catastrophic 3° of global heating this century," said Liston. "For the brave youth-applicants, that is a life sentence of heat extremes which are unimaginable even by today's rapidly deteriorating standards."

"The European Court of Human Rights was set up following the horrors of World War II to hold European governments to account for failing to protect human rights," Liston added. "Never has there been as urgent a need for the court to do so than in this case."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

 

 

Julia Conley

Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

Off the Top of My Head

Is the World Engaged in “A Battle Between Democracy and Autocracy”?

by John Lawrence

Joe Biden thinks so. Here's what he said: "But we emerged anew in the great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force." Politicians tend to look at the world in binary terms. It's all black and white. Their system is bad; ours is good. In reality there's a lot of gray; it's not simply black or white. If Biden were to be absolutely truthful, he would have to say that the US has a version of democracy and so does China. America's version would be decried by the founders who were totally against what they called "factionalism." Jefferson abhorred political parties. This is from history.com:

"Today, it may seem impossible to imagine the U.S. government without its two leading political parties, Democrats and Republicans. But in 1787, when delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia to hash out the foundations of their new government, they entirely omitted political parties from the new nation’s founding document.

"This was no accident. The framers of the new Constitution desperately wanted to avoid the divisions that had ripped England apart in the bloody civil wars of the 17th century. Many of them saw parties—or “factions,” as they called them—as corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly democratic government."

The US' version of democracy is based on a two party system with a voting system called first-past-the-post. Neither parties or voting systems are mentioned in the Constitution. The first-past-the-post voting system essentially precludes third parties. The effect of a third party candidate is that of a "spoiler." He or she takes votes away from the party he or she is most closely associated with which tends to elect the least popular candidate if the third popular candidate were not running. This has had disastrous effects on American popular elections as it did in 2000 when Ralph Nader running as a third party candidate took votes away from Al Gore with the result that George W Bush, who subsequently lied us into the Iraq war, was elected President. Gore would have gotten the US further along the road of climate change mitigation.

The European parliamentary multi-party system is arguably more democratic than the US two party system because more parties with varied interests can be represented. Their head of government, the Prime Minister, equivalent to the US President, is not popularly elected but is elected by members of parliament. The US tends to identify heads of government not popularly elected with undemocratic systems yet Presidents in the US were not popularly elected until the 17th Amendment was passed in 1912. China has a version of democracy in which the President is not popularly elected but is elected by the highest legislative body - the National People's Congress. Yet the US keeps insisting that China is an autocracy but the parliamentary systems of Europe are OK as was the US before 1912. China has multiple political parties but is dominated by one party - the Chinese Communist Party. The question is to what extent is the Chinese one party system less democratic than the American two party system in the sense of which system most closely represents the needs and wants of its people.

Democratic elections are held in China at the local or county level. These Congresses elect officials at the provincial level and they in turn elect the National People's Congress. The people vote democratically for officials only at the local level. Officials at higher levels are only indirectly democratically elected similar to the US system before 1912 or the parliamentary system. Voters have selected U.S. senators in the privacy of the voting booth since 1913. This system of “direct election” was not what the framers of the U.S. Constitution had in mind, however, when they met at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Article I, section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, as written by the framers, provided for election of senators by state legislatures, something Donald Trump sought to exploit. Election of officials by the democratic vote of a body that was democratically elected by the people is arguably democratic in some sense just as the election of head of government by a parliament is arguably democratic. Therefore, it can be argued that China has some version of democracy. Moreover, eight minor political parties in addition to the Chinese Communist Party exist.

One can quibble about how democratic a political system is. The point is that there is no absolute version of democracy so different systems have to be judged on their own merits. A one party system is not necessarily less democratic than a two party system which is not necessarily less democratic than a multi-party system, all things considered. How well the system functions to meet the needs of its own people, the historical evolution of the present system and how well established is the rule of law which exists in conjunction with the democratic election of leaders and representatives should also be considered. For instance, in China stability is a primary value whereas in the US freedom is a primary value. According to Keyu Jin in The New China Playbook, the Chinese people don't mind video surveillance in public because it minimizes street crime. On the other hand in the US video public surveillance is considered an infringement of freedom even though much street crime has been solved by both public and private video cameras .

'A Watershed Moment': California Sues Big Oil Over Decades of Climate Destruction

A man runs past a fallen tree amid Tropical Storm Hilary on August 21, 2023 in San Diego, California. (Photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

"California's move is an unmistakable sign that the wave of climate lawsuits against Big Oil will keep growing and that these polluters' days of escaping accountability for their lies are numbered."

 

by Jake Johnson, September 16, 2023, from Common Dreams

"California's move is an unmistakable sign that the wave of climate lawsuits against Big Oil will keep growing and that these polluters' days of escaping accountability for their lies are numbered."

The state of California on Friday filed suit against ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron, accusing the five oil and gas giants of a decadeslong campaign to mislead the public about the threat fossil fuels pose to the climate.

The lawsuit makes California the largest economy on the planet to take legal action against fossil fuel companies over their efforts to deceive the world about their destructive—and immensely profitable—business model. California is also a major producer of oil and gas.

"This has been a multi-decade, ongoing campaign to seek endless profits at the expense of our planet, our people, and the greedy corporations and individuals need to be held accountable," California Attorney General Rob Bonta toldThe New York Times in an interview on Friday. "That's where we come in."

With its new civil lawsuit, filed in a San Francisco court, California joins Rhode Island, Minnesota, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and other states that have sued the fossil fuel industry over its role in massive climate damages. Dozens of municipalities, including several in California, have also filed lawsuits against oil giants.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. has experienced a record-breaking 23 billion-dollar extreme weather disasters this year, from deadly flooding in California to the catastrophic wildfire that killed nearly 100 people in Maui, Hawaii—which is also suing Big Oil.

Cities and states representing 25% of the U.S. population are currently taking part in some kind of climate-related legal action against the fossil fuel industry, according to Fossil Free Media, and the Biden Justice Department is facing growing pressure to join the fight.

In an effort to improve their chances of winning the mounting legal battles, fossil fuel giants have tried to move climate liability lawsuits from state to federal court—but the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear their appeals earlier this year.

"Just like tobacco and opioid companies, the oil and gas industry will have to face the evidence of its deception in court."

Richard Wiles, the president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in a statement Saturday that "California's decision to take Big Oil companies to court is a watershed moment in the rapidly expanding legal fight to hold major polluters accountable for decades of climate lies."

"Whether it's fires, droughts, extreme heat, or sea-level rise, Californians have been living in a climate emergency caused by the fossil fuel industry, and now the state is taking decisive action to make those polluters pay," said Wiles. "As similar cases proceed toward trial, California's move is an unmistakable sign that the wave of climate lawsuits against Big Oil will keep growing and that these polluters' days of escaping accountability for their lies are numbered. Just like tobacco and opioid companies, the oil and gas industry will have to face the evidence of its deception in court."

California's lawsuit, which also names the American Petroleum Institute as a defendant, comes days after The Wall Street Journalpublished a front-page story based on previously unreported documents that detail Exxon's behind-closed-doors effort to cast doubt on climate science after 2006, when the company publicly acknowledged the link between fossil fuels and climate change for the first time.

Exxon and other oil companies have been aware of the connection since the 1970s.

"For more than 50 years, Big Oil has been lying to us—covering up the fact that they've long known how dangerous the fossil fuels they produce are for our planet," California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. "It has been decades of damage and deception."

"Wildfires wiping out entire communities, toxic smoke clogging our air, deadly heatwaves, record-breaking droughts parching our wells," Newsom continued. "California taxpayers shouldn't have to foot the bill. California is taking action to hold big polluters accountable."

The Times noted Friday that California's lawsuit aims to establish "a fund that would be used to pay for recovery from extreme weather events and mitigation and adaptation efforts across the state."

"The lawsuit claims that California has already spent tens of billions of dollars paying for climate disasters, and expects costs to rise significantly in the years ahead," the Times added.

Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media, said Saturday that with its lawsuit, "California just kicked open the door for every city and state in America to sue the fossil fuel industry for climate damages."

"After this summer of brutal heat waves and climate disasters, I think the public is hungry for a way to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for the damage they've done," said Henn. "Big Oil knew, they lied, and now it's time to make them pay."

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Jake Johnson

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

Summer of Deadly Climate Breakdown Spurs Mass Protests Worldwide

Children hold placards as they march with their parents during a climate protest in Jakarta, Indonesia on September 17, 2023.

(Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images)

by Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, September 17, 2023

"We deserve a world free from fossil fuels."

Climate activists are closing out the hottest summer on record with hundreds of demonstrations worldwide, all blaring a unified message: "End fossil fuels."

From Indonesia to Uganda to the United Kingdom to the United States, climate campaigners young and elderly, scientists, human rights advocates, and other defenders of the planet have taken to the streets this weekend or are planning to do so on Sunday, a mass mobilization that comes ahead of United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres' Climate Ambition Summit in New York City on Wednesday.

On Sunday afternoon, the city is set to see the largest climate protest in the U.S. in years, with tens of thousands expected to join a march calling on President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency and do everything in his power to phase out fossil fuel extraction.

"We deserve a world free from fossil fuels," organizers declared before Sunday's march, which is set to kick off at 1:00 pm ET. "This is our chance, and Biden's opportunity, to break free from fossil fuels and build a just and safe future."

The United States is the world's largest historical emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gases, and a recent report identified the country as " planet-wrecker-in-chief" over its continued support for fossil fuel expansion at home and abroad. The nation has been hit by a record 23 billion-dollar extreme weather events so far this year.

Biden, who has come under fire for approving massive drilling projects in Alaska and elsewhere, is expected to skip Wednesday's Climate Ambition Summit.

 

(Photo: Niall Carson/PA Images via Getty Images)

The New York City march will cap off a weekend of global climate action held at the tail-end of a summer marred by catastrophic extreme weather, from devastating wildfires in Hawaii and Greece to massive flooding in Libya and China.

Thousands of people have been killed across the globe by extreme weather this year.

"We've experienced a summer of painful evidence that we are living in the midst of a climate crisis," organizer Eric Weltman told a local New York media outlet on Saturday.

In the face of intensifying climate breakdown and government inaction, activists around the world have ramped up their protests and civil disobedience outside of government buildings and corporate offices in recent days.

"In Quezon City in the Philippines [on Friday], activists lay in front of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources in protest and held signs demanding fossil fuels—from coal to natural gas—be phased out," The Guardianreported. "In Sweden, climate activists gathered in front of Parliament, just next to the Royal Palace where Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf was celebrating his 50th anniversary on the throne. Their chants about 'climate justice' could be heard in the palace courtyard as the king watched the changing of the guard during the golden jubilee celebrations."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has estimated that more than a third of Earth's population currently lives in areas "highly vulnerable" to climate chaos, a fact that was magnified this year as much of the globe faced weather disasters made far more likely by the continued burning of fossil fuels.

A comprehensive U.N. report published earlier this month found that world governments are nowhere close to holding emissions to levels necessary to keep warming within limits set by the Paris climate accord nearly a decade ago.

Agnès Callamard, secretary-general of Amnesty International, warned that "this generation faces a worsening climate catastrophe, with devastating consequences for human rights, but too many leaders in positions of power today are doing too little to avert this disaster, and even reneging on existing promises."

"We call on governments and corporations to act now to safeguard everyone's right to a healthy environment by bringing a rapid end to the current era of fossil fuel dependency, swiftly and fairly transitioning to renewable energy sources, and ending energy poverty," said Callamard.

 

(Photo: Loredana Sangiuliano/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Fossil fuel giants, meanwhile, are thriving—and ditching their previous vows to curb emissions, barreling ahead with more planet-wrecking oil and gas production.

While profits have dipped this year amid falling global gas prices, the world's leading fossil fuel companies raked in a combined $219 billion last year, spurring growing calls for legal action against the destructive industry.

On Friday, California became the largest economy in the world to file suit against major oil and gas companies.

"Against the backdrop of a harrowing year, with millions of people experiencing devastating climate impacts, the painful reality of the climate crisis is clear," said Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "It's well past time to stop putting the profits of fossil fuel companies ahead of the wellbeing of people and the planet."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

 

---

 

Jake Johnson

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

Off the Top of My Head

500,000 Killed in Ukraine War. Is It Worth It Just To Insure That Ukraine Can Join NATO?

by John Lawrence

Putin's bottom line is that Ukraine should not join NATO. Biden insisted that it should be able to. That was the impasse that led to the Ukraine war. All that Biden had to do was to negotiate a time period during which Ukraine would not be considered for NATO membership. He would not do that. He could have called Putin's bluff if indeed it was a bluff that Putin would not invade if Ukraine were not allowed to join NATO. If Putin had still invaded after prohibiting Ukraine from joining NATO for a period of time, then the US and the EU could have gone ahead with their current strategy of supplying Ukraine with arms to defend itself. The New York Time reported:

The total number of Ukrainian and Russian troops killed or wounded since the war in Ukraine began 18 months ago is nearing 500,000, U.S. officials said, a staggering toll as Russia assaults its next-door neighbor and tries to seize more territory.

The officials cautioned that casualty figures remained difficult to estimate because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war dead and injured, and Kyiv does not disclose official figures. But they said the slaughter intensified this year in eastern Ukraine and has continued at a steady clip as a nearly three-month-old counteroffensive drags on.

Russia’s military casualties, the officials said, are approaching 300,000. The number includes as many as 120,000 deaths and 170,000 to 180,000 injured troops. The Russian numbers dwarf the Ukrainian figures, which the officials put at close to 70,000 killed and 100,000 to 120,000 wounded.

But Russians outnumber Ukrainians on the battlefield almost three to one, and Russia has a larger population from which to replenish its ranks.

Is it worth it? I repeat IS IT WORTH IT? For the principal that any country can join NATO? IMHO war is never worth it. Why is there not a peace movement? If it was so important that Russia keep its hands off Ukraine, why didn't Obama protest in 2014 as Russia seized territory in Eastern Ukraine? To be clear Obama did not want to commit the US to stopping Russian aggression in Ukraine according to Brookings:

As regards the two-year-old conflict between Ukraine and Russia, the president [Obama] said Ukraine is a core interest for Moscow, in a way that it is not for the United States. He noted that, since Ukraine does not belong to NATO, it is vulnerable to Russian military domination, and that “we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.”" Obama was hesitant to get involved militarily in Ukraine. "But the president [Obama] has signaled privately that despite all the pressure, he remains reluctant to send arms. In part, he has told aides and visitors that arming the Ukrainians would encourage the notion that they could actually defeat the far more powerful Russians, and so it would potentially draw a more forceful response from Moscow. He also wants to give a shaky cease-fire a chance to take hold, despite a reported 1,000 violations so far, and seems determined to stay aligned with European allies that oppose arms for Ukraine.

“If you’re playing on the military terrain in Ukraine, you’re playing to Russia’s strength, because Russia is right next door,” Antony J. Blinken, the deputy secretary of state, told an audience in Berlin last week. “It has a huge amount of military equipment and military force right on the border. Anything we did as countries in terms of military support for Ukraine is likely to be matched and then doubled and tripled and quadrupled by Russia.”

In February 2014 Obama even threatened Ukraine, not Russia, with sanctions, putting the onus on Ukraine. "TOLUCA, Mexico (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama called on Ukraine’s armed forces on Wednesday to stay out of the country’s political crisis and warned that there would be consequences for those who “step over the line.” Using his toughest language so far in response to a Ukrainian conflict that has drawn threats of U.S. and European Union sanctions, Obama denounced the violence and put the onus on Ukraine’s government to reach a peaceful resolution."

George W Bush, the perpetrator of lying us into the Iraq war, agreed with Obama: "There are good reasons why even George W. Bush backed off (or at least stopped short of pursuing) a pledge to consider Ukraine for NATO membership. First, calmer minds weighed the level of Western interests in Ukrainian independence against the cost of defending it in a pinch, and found the former coming up short." Calmer minds did not prevail, however, when Joe Biden became President. Despite all the good Biden has done domestically, his Ukraine policy has committed the US to what amounts to perpetual war.

Some advisors advocated for a moratorium on Ukraine's joining NATO as a way to stave off war. "Before the Russian invasion, Quincy Institute senior research fellow on Russia and Europe Anatol Lieven wrote that as part of a broader package to stave off war, the United States should propose “the declaration of a moratorium on Ukrainian membership of NATO for a period of 20 years, allowing time for negotiations on a new security architecture for Europe as a whole, including Russia.”"

Putin's primary concern was that Ukraine not join NATO, a concern that was effectively ignored in negotiations leading up to the February 2022 invasion.

"President Vladimir Putin accused Western nations of ignoring key Russian security concerns, following the U.S.′ refusal last week to concede to Moscow’s demands over Ukraine and NATO.

“It’s already clear now ... that fundamental Russian concerns were ignored,” Putin said at a press conference Tuesday, according to a Reuters translation.

Putin said that the U.S. wanted to “contain Russia” and that it was using Ukraine to do that, as he reiterated Russia’s position that any possible membership of Ukraine in NATO would “undermine Russia’s security.”

“Let’s imagine that Ukraine is a NATO member, it is fully packed of weapons, it gets advanced attack means like those in Poland and Romania and it starts an operation in Crimea,” Putin said, describing Crimea, a part of Ukraine annexed by Russia in 2014, as a “sovereign Russian territory.”

“Let’s imagine that Ukraine is a NATO member state and it initiates a military operation. What should we do then, [should we] fight against the NATO bloc? Did anyone think at least something about that? Apparently not.”

Nonetheless, Putin said he hoped dialog over Ukraine would continue and that a way needed to be found to, as he put it, “protect everyone’s security.”

Biden could have acknowledged Putin's concerns regarding Russia's security interests and argued for a moratorium on Ukraine's bid for NATO membership. This may or may not have forestalled Russia's 2022 invasion. If it had, the US and its allies had nothing to lose except the principal that any country should be free to join NATO. If it hadn't, Russia's invasion could be countered with the policy the US has pursued since Russia invaded which is to send weapons to arm Ukraine without putting "boots on the round." Subsequently, Russia secured Ukraine's non-membership in NATO by starting and pursuing what amounts to a perpetual war with the result of 500,000 people killed so far and billions of dollars in destroyed real estate. Has it been worth it to uphold the principal that Ukraine should be free to join NATO. I don't think so. A new security arrangement is needed for Europe including Russia sans NATO.

Off the Top of My Head

Should the President Be Popularly Elected by Direct Vote of the People?

by John Lawrence

In the US the President is popularly elected by the people after having been filtered through the archaic electoral college. In a parliamentary democracy the head of government equivalent to the US President is indirectly elected by the parliament not by a direct vote of the people. In China the president is also elected by a majority vote of the National People's Congress, the highest legislative body very similarly to how the heads of government are elected in parliamentary democracies. In Russia the President is nominally elected by a popular vote of the people similarly to the US although the system has been manipulated in such a way as to keep Putin in power. So what are the drawbacks of a popularly elected President by a vote of the people? The main drawback IMHO is that in the US an incompetent but popular boob like Donald Trump can be elected to the most powerful office in the land and arguably in the whole world. The election for President of the US is a popularity contest, and there is no requirement of experience or competency. In parliamentary democracies as well as China, supposedly the indirect election of President or its equivalent, "head of state," is an election by a meritocratic body of lawmakers. Therefore, it is more likely that a competent President or head of government will be elected.

In recent history in the US, the least competent but most popular person has been elected President based more on their personality and charisma than on their competency or knowledge of the job. It is more likely that a guy who "you would like to have a beer with" is elected President than someone who is more experienced and/or intelligent. Adlai Stevenson was branded as an "egghead" which effectively ended his political career. The leading Democratic figure of the 1950s, Stevenson was known for his wit, intellectual speeches, and liberal political convictions. For many Americans in the mid-twentieth century, he symbolized conscience in politics. Stevenson lost the Presidential election twice to Dwight Eisenhower, the World War II war hero. In 2000 Al Gore lost the election to George W Bush who promptly lied the US into war with Iraq. Gore, who was a staunch advocate for climate change mitigation, presumably would have employed government resources in that direction rather than fighting a fruitless war. Gore actually won the popular vote but was defeated by a combination of the Electoral College and the Supreme Court.

Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House that were then taken down by Ronald Reagan. So much for science taking precedence over popular ignorance and prejudice. Reagan also ran up the national debt substantially as did George W Bush and Donald Trump. Then when Democrats are elected President, Republicans cry bloody murder over the national debt while doing their best to prevent Democrats from spending any government money to actually help people. Fortunately, Joe Biden has been very successful in getting legislation passed to mitigate climate change among other accomplishments. But, his popularity as a candidate in 2024 in on the line as a majority of the American people don't want him to run again. Trump, despite 91 criminal indictments, is running neck and neck with Biden, one of the most accomplished Presidents in American history. One wonders whether the sclerotic American electoral system can withstand the challenges brought by popular but unscrupulous candidates for the Presidency by those you'd "like to have a beer with." Finally, the electoral College has all the disadvantages of indirect elections and none of the advantages.

No Labels, no fables, no third-party betrayals

All Americans who believe in democracy must unite behind Joe Biden.

Robert Reich

Sep 7, 2023

 

Good morning, friends,

I couldn’t sleep last night. I made the mistake of looking at a lot of voting data before bedtime and then reading some of the BS being put out by the third-party group “No Labels,” as well as by my old friend Cornel West, who’s now running for president as the Green Party candidate. It was a mistake. It’s now 2 a.m. where I am, and I’m loaded for bear.

Let me be absolutely clear. Third-party groups such as No Labels and the Green Party are in effect front groups for Trump in 2024, and should be treated as such.

No Labels has pledged to spend $70 million to support a third-party candidate in 2024 who could easily draw enough votes from President Biden to tip the presidential election to Trump.

 

No Labels has already qualified as a presidential party that can run candidates on the ballot in 10 states, including in both Arizona and Florida. Already, Joe Manchin is flirting with the idea of running as a third-party presidential candidate under the No Labels banner.

If you believe that No Labels exists in order to encourage bipartisanship, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.

No Labels — which claims to be a centrist organization — will not reveal its donors, one of whom is reportedly the conservative megadonor Harlan Crow. Politico reports that No Labels has brought on a major Trump donor as an adviser in the pivotal battleground state of Florida.

But whatever it says it aims to be, No Labels will help Trump.

So will every other third party claiming to be in the “center” or on the “left” — including the Green Party, which is already on the ballot in the two key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin and whose most likely candidate for president is Cornel West. And the People’s Party, especially if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. becomes its nominee.

The reason they’re all front groups for Donald Trump is that the upcoming 2024 election is likely to be nail-bitingly close even as a two-way race between Trump and Biden.

The good news is that Trump loyalists don’t represent a majority of the electorate — which is why Trump has lost the popular vote in both his presidential runs and did not top 47 percent in either.

So, as long as the anti-Trump vote is unified behind Biden, Trump cannot win, as Biden demonstrated in 2020.

But if a third-party candidate takes even a small part of the anti-Trump vote away from Biden, Trump is likely to be returned to the White House.

Consider the five states most likely to decide the 2024 election in the Electoral College — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In 2016, Trump narrowly won each of them, giving him the presidency. In 2020, these five states narrowly tipped in the other direction, giving Biden the presidency.

Biden’s razor-thin margins in these five states in 2020 came from a massive anti-Trump vote.

In all of these states, at least 1 in 3 Biden voters said they voted mainly against Trump. In Wisconsin (where the Green Party has already secured a spot on the 2024 ballot), 38 percent of Biden voters said they voted mainly against Trump. In Arizona (where No Labels has already secured a spot on the 2024 ballot), 45 percent of Biden voters said they voted mainly against Trump.

Biden has no margin for error. Even a small drop-off from his 2020 anti-Trump vote would make him vulnerable.

Just 44,000 votes out of more than 10 million cast in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin — less than half of 1 percent — were the difference between the Biden presidency and a tie in the Electoral College that would have thrown the election to the House of Representatives, and hence to Trump.

 

If candidates from No Labels, the Green Party, and the People’s Party peel off just 15 percent of the anti-Trump vote from Biden, and Trump’s base stays with him, Trump would win all five swing states comfortably and return to the Oval Office.

These third parties are already putting out rubbish about “voting your conscience” and “giving the people a real choice.” It’s cynical propaganda designed to obscure the reality that any anti-Trump votes they pull away from Biden will only help ensure a Trump victory.

If No Labels were a legitimate third party rather than a Trump front, it would withdraw from all ballots for the 2024 election. If Cornel West and the Green Party had positive intentions, they would do the same. The rest of us must spread the word about the dangers of these third parties.

If Trump wins the GOP nomination for president, as seems highly likely despite (or because of) his coming trials, all Americans who believe in democracy must unite behind Joe Biden — to ensure that Trump, in the words of then-Rep. Liz Cheney, “never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.”

Please spread the word. Now.

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Why Have So Many Americans Succumbed to Trumpism?

Chapter 6 of The Common Good

Robert Reich

Sep 8, 2023

 

 

 

Friends,

Today, in the sixth essay about the loss of America’s sense of common good, I want to summarize where we’ve come by focusing on one of the worst consequences of the loss: The emergence of Trumpism, and of the despair that has led so many Americans to give up on democracy.

Starting next week, in the seventh essay of this series, I’ll talk about what I believe we can and should do to resurrect the common good.

 

It is easy for many of us to condemn fellow Americans who have succumbed to the lies and thuggery of Donald Trump. It’s convenient for us to assume they’re ignorant, or racist, or gullible fools.

But what if their willingness to believe and support Trump is understandable, given what has happened to them? I’m not suggesting it’s justifiable, only that it may be explicable.

As we have seen, many of the key political and economic institutions of our society have abandoned their commitments to the common good — and along the way, abandoned the bottom half of the adult population, especially those without college degrees.

The consequence has been a catastrophe, especially for the bottom half. The erosion began 40 years ago. By 2016, when Trump was elected president, the typical American household had a net worth 14 percent lower than the typical household in 1984, while the richest one-tenth of 1 percent owned more wealth than the bottom 90 percent put together.

Income has become almost as unequal as wealth: Between 1972 and Trump’s election in 2016, the pay of the typical American worker dropped 2 percent, adjusted for inflation, although the American economy nearly doubled in size.

Most of the income gains have gone to the top. The 2016 Wall Street bonus pool was larger than the annual year-round earnings of all 3.3 million Americans working full-time at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

Whereas 90 percent of American adults born in the early 1940s were earning more than their parents by the time they reached their prime earning years, this proportion steadily declined. Only half of adults born in the mid-1980s are now earning more than their parents by their prime earning years.

Average weekly nonsupervisory wages, a measure of blue-collar earnings, were higher in 1969 (adjusted for inflation) than they are now.

Most Americans without college degrees are working longer hours than they worked decades ago and taking fewer sick days or vacations, and they have less economic security.

Nearly one out of every five American workers is in a part-time job. Two-thirds are living paycheck to paycheck. Along with pay, employment benefits have been shriveling. The gap in life expectancy between the nation’s most affluent and everyone else is widening, as well.

Increasing numbers of working Americans have been succumbing to opioids. Death rates have been rising for Americans with no more than high school degrees, due to suicides, chronic liver cirrhosis, and poisonings, including drug overdoses.

Climate Report Card Says Countries Are Trying, but Urgently Need Improvement

The global assessment, two years in the making, is the first official gauge of progress under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

by Brad Plumer, September 8, 2023, from the New York Times

 

 

While many of the worst outcomes feared in the 2010s appear less likely today, the report said, current efforts are still not enough to avoid calamity.Credit...Sascha Steinbach/EPA, via Shutterstock

Eight years after world leaders approved a landmark agreement in Paris to fight climate change, countries have made only limited progress in staving off the most dangerous effects of global warming, according to the first official report card on the global climate treaty.

Many of the worst-case climate change scenarios that were much feared in the early 2010s look far less likely today, the report said. The authors partly credit the 2015 Paris Agreement, under which, for the first time, almost every country agreed to submit a voluntary plan to curb its own planet-warming emissions. Since then, the rise in global greenhouse gases has notably slowed.

Yet those efforts still aren’t enough to avoid calamity, according to the report, which was written by representatives from the United States and South Africa and based on contributions from hundreds of governments, scientists and civil society groups from around the world.

Under the Paris Agreement, countries vowed to limit the rise in average global temperatures to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels and make a good-faith effort to stay at 1.5 degrees Celsius. Past that level, the dangers from intense flooding, wildfires, drought, heat waves and species extinction could become unmanageable, scientists have said. Earth has already heated up roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times.

Countries are far from meeting those goals. Current climate pledges would put the world on track for a significantly more hazardous 2.5 degrees Celsius or so of warming by 2100, assuming nations followed through on their plans. In order to keep global warming at safer levels, global emissions would need to plunge roughly 60 percent by 2035, which would most likely require a much faster expansion of energy sources like wind, solar or nuclear power and a sharp decrease in pollution from fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas.

The window for keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report said, is “rapidly narrowing.”

The new report is part of what’s known as the global stocktake. When countries approved the Paris Agreement, they agreed to meet every five years, starting in 2023, to officially assess how the fight against climate change was going and see whether they should ratchet up their efforts.

The report, nearly two years in the making, is meant to serve as the foundation for the next round of United Nations climate negotiations, known as COP28, that will start in late November in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. There, countries will discuss how to respond to the global stocktake and what more they can do.

“I urge governments to carefully study the findings of the report and ultimately understand what it means for them and the ambitious action they must take next,” said Simon Stiell, the United Nations climate head. “The global stocktake is a critical moment for greater ambition and accelerating action.”

The report avoids singling out any individual countries for success or failure, underscoring one of the thorniest dynamics in global climate talks. Everyone agrees that the world as a whole should cut emissions faster, but nations sharply disagree over who, exactly, should do more. Developing countries like India say that wealthy emitters like the United States and Europe should curtail their fossil fuel use more rapidly. U.S. officials, in turn, often point out that China needs to do much more now that it has become the world’s largest emitter by far.

The man overseeing this year’s negotiations, Sultan al-Jaber, is the head of both the Emirates’ biggest renewable energy company and its national oil company, a dual role that has provoked criticism from many environmentalists, who say he is unlikely to be an impartial mediator.

 

Sultan Al-Jaber, president of the COP28 climate meeting in November, in Nairobi this week.Credit...Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. al-Jaber has said he wants countries to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. He also wants nations to agree, for the first time, on a long-term goal of phasing out “unabated” fossil fuels. That phrasing would allow for the continued use of oil, coal or gas if companies can capture and bury the emissions those fuels produce — a technology that has struggled to gain traction because of high costs.

The new global stocktake report says those measures, and many others, are “urgently” needed.

“The United Nations’ polite prose glosses over what is a truly damning report card for global climate efforts,” said Ani Dasgupta, president of the World Resources Institute. “Carbon emissions? Still climbing. Rich countries’ finance commitments? Delinquent. Adaptation support? Lagging woefully behind.”

One perennial sticking point in global climate talks is that developing nations say they can’t afford to shift rapidly away from fossil fuels and adapt to fiercer heat waves and storms without outside help.

Under the Paris deal, wealthy emitters like the United States and Europe vowed to provide $100 billion per year from public and private sources by 2020 for this purpose. But they have yet to fulfill that promise. In 2020, industrialized countries provided $83.3 billion in climate finance. And only a small fraction of that money goes toward adaptation, such as building sea walls or helping farmers cope with drought, which is often the most pressing need.

The report notes that developing countries will ultimately need trillions of dollars to prepare for climate change and calls for wider systemic reforms, such as reforming lending practices at multilateral banks or aiding countries that are saddled with large debt burdens.

“There’s been so much focus on holding developed countries accountable for their $100 billion promise, which is absolutely important,” said Charlene Watson, a senior research associate at the Overseas Development Institute. “But the reality is we’ll need so much more.”

Countries have made some progress in adapting to climate threats by, for instance, building flood barriers or installing early-warning systems for tropical cyclones. But those efforts are often “incremental” and unequally distributed, the report warned. Preparing for future threats, like dwindling freshwater supplies or irreversible ecosystem damage, will require “transformational” changes in climate adaptation.

One obstacle, the report noted, is that many adaptation efforts “are failing to keep pace with increasing climate impacts and risks.”

“It’s a lot harder to track progress on adaptation than it is to track progress on finance or cutting emissions,” said Richard Klein of the Stockholm Environment Institute, who added that coming up with measurable global goals for adaptation would be a key challenge for future climate talks.

Some experts faulted the report for being too vague in many of its recommendations. “The opportunity was missed to make clear proposals on what countries could concretely implement, how much financial support should be provided and on what it should be spent,” said Niklas Höhne, a German climate scientist and founding partner of NewClimate Institute. “On these issues, the report often remains on the surface.”

The big question now is how countries will respond to the global stocktake.

“We’ve had lots of reports about lack of progress over the years, but what’s different about this one is that it isn’t a group of scientists or a single U.N. agency saying this,” said Rachel Kyte, a veteran climate diplomat and former dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “This is something that all the countries have had a say in.”

“This is like sitting down with your doctor and agreeing that your liver could be better, you really need to be in better shape,” Ms. Kyte added. “Now are you going to get off the couch and do something about it, or just sit there and ignore it?”

---

Brad Plumer is a climate reporter specializing in policy and technology efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions. At The Times, he has also covered international climate talks and the changing energy landscape in the United States. More about Brad Plumer

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 9, 2023, Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Climate Report Card Says Countries Are Trying, but Progress Is Still Slow. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Off the Top of My Head

Does China Have Some Version of Democracy and Capitalism?

by John Lawrence

The Chinese Communist Party in reality is just the Chinese Party. It is communist in name only. Kishore Mahbuboni in the book, Has China Won, says "...is America making a fundamental error of perception when it views the CCP as a Chinese Communist Party? This would imply that the soul of the CCP is embedded in its communist roots. Yet, in the eyes of many objective Asian observers, the CCP actually functions as the Chinese Civilization Party. Its soul is not rooted in the foreign ideology of Marxism-Leninism but in the Chinese civilization." China has had a capitalist economic system ever since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in 1978. China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty in about 40 years mainly due to the component of its system that represents private enterprise. It also has state owned enterprises but they have not been mainly responsible for China's rapid growth in GDP.

Xi Jinping has been President of the people's Republic of China since 2013. He is not popularly elected by the general public. Instead, he is elected by the National People's Congress (NPC), constitutionally China's highest state body, which also has the power to remove the president and other state officers from office. Elections and removals are decided by majority vote. This is not dissimilar to how the head of parliamentary democracies, the Prime Minister is elected. The British head of government is not elected by a popular election of the people either. He is elected by members of Parliament similar to most other parliamentary democracies. The US also originally had a system in which the President and Senators were not elected by a popular election of the people. Passed by Congress on May 13, 1912, and ratified on April 8, 1913, the 17th Amendment modified Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution by allowing voters to cast direct votes for U.S. Senators and the President. Prior to its passage, the President and Senators were chosen by state legislatures. The Chinese government has been based on a meritocratic bureaucracy for thousands of years. The popular vote elects the first representative body who elects the next higher body until the National People's Congress elects the President.

The cleavage between communism and capitalism is basically an historic artifact. Capitalism won. Almost all nations of the world have capitalistic economic systems including China. None of them have systems that are identical to the US. They all have some versions of capitalism and democracy. Prior to 1912 the US had a system similar to China's in that the President was not popularly elected but was elected by a vote of the states' senates. Today in order to maintain international tensions, US politicians keep up the dichotomy between the US and China by insisting that China's leaders are not elected democratically and that China has a communist economic system. The truth is that China has a version of democracy and a version of capitalism just as the US does. Vested interests in the US are responsible for maintaining the fiction that Chinese is communist and autocratic. In fact US democracy is vulnerable to being overthrown by a demagogue like Donald Trump which almost happened on January 6, 2020. The US is still vulnerable as a near majority of Americans prefer Trump to Joe Biden, a man who has passed landmark legislation like only a very few American Presidents have accomplished.

US democracy is also vulnerable in the sense that its first past the post voting system almost guarantees that third party candidates will be spoilers as happened in 2000 when Ralph Nader took votes away from Al Gore. Despite that Gore won the popular vote. If Nader had not been in the election, Gore would have overwhelmingly won the popular vote. However in the electoral college, which is an outdated feature of American democracy, it came down to who won the popular vote in Florida. The Supreme Court stopped the hand recount giving Bush the Presidency. There is still controversy over who would have won if that hadn't happened. In any case the Bush administration lied us into the disastrous Iraq war, something Gore probably would not have done. Also Bush was a fossil fuel guy while Gore was knowledgeable about global warming and would have pursued that agenda . History might have turned out differently, and more importantly the future history of planet Earth might turn out differently if Gore had won.

Chinese philosophy is based on Confucianism which emphasizes duty to family while the US is based on individualistic ethics emphasizing individual freedom. Keyu Jin writes in The New China Playbook, "According to the World Values Survey, which explores people's beliefs and values in more than 100 countries, 93% of Chinese participants value security over freedom, as compared to only 28 % of Americans. Such differences can be fully understood only by taking culture and history into account. In China, an interventionist state is rooted in paternalism, a hallmark of government in China since Confucian times, more than 2500 years ago;..." Although China's private enterprise capitalism has resulted in the fact that 800 million people have been pulled out of poverty in 40 years, GDP growth is not the sine qua non of Chinese capitalism. Under Xi China is turning a corner and reining in certain aspects of unbridled growth in order to mitigate certain unsalutary aspects of unfettered enterprise while emphasizing producing economic benefits for the 13% of the Chinese population still in poverty. So China is much more apt to put its finger on the economic scale while the US has more of a hands off policy on private enterprise. The downside of this is the unregulated growth of toxic social media and potentially artificial intelligence in the US. The US could mitigate the spoiler effect of third party candidates for President by adopting a different voting system. The current first past the post voting system practically guarantees that there will be a 2 party system with third parties acting as spoilers, something which could result in a second Trump Presidency despite 91 criminal indictments. Replacing first past the post with a voting system such as approval voting would eliminate the spoiler effects of third parties. It could be implemented simply by a vote of Congress since it would not violate any aspect of the Constitution. However, in the sclerotic American Congress it is unlikely that there will be any major changes in the US Constitution which is well past its "use by" date.

Fossil Fuel Kills, Asians in particular

New data that shocked even me

Bill McKibben

Sep 5, 2023

 

 

Cooling off in the rivers of Peshawar, Pakistan, during one of this summer’s brutal heatwaves.

When we talk about “humanity,” we are, statistically, mostly talking about Asia—just under 60% of our sisters and brothers live there. But they don’t live anywhere near as long as they should.

New data last week from University of Chicago researchers showed that across South Asia, air pollution—mostly from burning fossil fuels—is robbing people of five years of life on average. Five years! If you live in Delhi, the most polluted big city on the planet, that number is an unimaginable 11.9 years. If you would have lived to 70, you died at 58. Thank about that. Across the region, “particulate pollution levels are currently more than 50 percent higher than at the start of the century and now overshadow” other health risks. Every breath that people take is killing them, every hour of every day.

But those other health risks are also rising fast, spurred on by the climate disasters that also come with burning fossil fuel. A remarkable report in today’s Washington Post (which has been doing a lot of remarkable climate coverage lately) was headlined Climate-linked ills threaten humanity, and for a while was the lead story in the paper. It looked at Pakistan, home to last year’s record-breaking flood and a series of devastating heatwaves, and found almost unimaginable levels of misery. Here’s the big picture:

Pakistan is the epicenter of a new global wave of disease and death linked to climate change, according to a Washington Post analysis of climate data, leading scientific studies, interviews with experts and reporting from some of the places bearing the brunt of Earth’s heating. This examination of climate-fueled illnesses — tied to hotter temperatures, and swifter passage of pathogens and toxins — shows how countries across the globe are ill-prepared for the insidious, intensifying risks to almost every facet of human health.

And here’s what it looks like on the ground:

On a recent 109-degree day, babies wailed and adults vomited into buckets in the crowded heat stroke ward of Syed Abdullah Shah Institute of Medical Sciences, a 350-bed government medical center in central Sindh. With just seven beds for heat stroke victims, patients’ parents and relatives crowded together on the mattresses. Nurses in green scrubs attached bags of intravenous hydration fluids to the arms of even the tiniest patients as fans whirled and two air conditioners dripped and chugged.

The number of heat stroke patients coming to the hospital in summer has increased around 20 percent a year in the last five years, according to M. Moinuddin Siddiqui, the hospital’s medical director, at a time when Pakistan experienced three of its five hottest years on record.

So, bottom line: when you burn fossil fuel you produce particulates which lodge in lungs and kill you (one death in five on the planet comes from breathing the byproducts of fossil fuel combustion), and when you burn fossil fuel you produce carbon, which lodges in the atmosphere, driving heatwaves and floods that kill you.

If fossil fuel was the only way we had to power our lives, I suppose you could tot up its advantages and decide that, on balance, it was still worth burning. Or not. But fossil fuel is not the only way we have to power our lives. India has 300 clear and sunny days a year on average, enough to produce 5,000 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year. Which is, um, more than they need—solar farms on a small percentage of “low-conflcit wastelands” in the country could provide four times its power requirements. According to a recent World Bank study, utilizing just 0.071 percent of Pakistan'’s area for solar PV would meet the country’s current electricity demand. No, none of this comes for free—you have to mine lithium and cobalt. But the damage from those activities doesn’t begin to compare in scale to the toll that fossil fuel is exacting every hour from billions of human bodies.

By any measurable moral calculation, focusing the planet’s efforts and finances on rapidly converting Asia (and Africa and South America) to renewable energy would provide the largest imaginable payoff, both in the short-term and the long, and for both the people who live there, and for the smallish percentage of humans who don’t. But that would mean standing up to the fossil fuel industry—including in America, where that industry is eager to export more, not less, fossil fuel to Asia.

Carbon dioxide molecules are invisible, and particulates are too small to be seen with the naked eye. But they will break our bodies, and our civilizations, unless we break the power of the fossil fuel industry. That is the choice.

America set us on the hydrocarbon path. Asia, with help from the whole world, could be the place that got us off.

In other energy and climate news:

+It’s not just Asia, of course. The Washington Post also has a crackerjack piece of data reporting on how the ever-higher temperatures are affecting life in the Mediterranean.

“The number of days of high or extreme fire danger in southern Europe is already at levels we thought we wouldn’t see until 2050,” said Jesus San Miguel, a senior researcher at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. “Because of climate change, we are going much faster than we thought.”

Wildfires — some record size — have been turning virgin forests into preternatural moonscapes and trigging mass evacuations of developed areas. Fires are threatening cultural heritage, too, in a part of the world known as much for the ruins of ancient civilization as the joys of the modern vacation.

+Native Hawaiian Keolu Fox has an essay in Science magazine insisting that the horrible fires in Lahaina, Maui could be the springboard for reimagining the politics and economy of the islands

About 70% of Hawai‘i’s economy has come to rely on mass tourism. Restructuring this industry alone will require a strong vision. Visiting Hawai‘i should be an experience that deepens one’s understanding of the delicate balance of island ecosystems and the role people play in safeguarding them. An ecotourism approach directed at educating visitors about conservation and the natural environment of the islands would help build respect for nature and its vulnerabilities. This kind of tourism can be seen in highly threatened locales, including Bhutan and the Galápagos.

+Joshua Partlow has a fine account of this summer’s flooding in Juneau; it centers on the way that glacial melt can accumulate in lakes, which eventually—and catastrophically—overflow. These kinds of tragedies are happening in glacial areas around the world, but having one in the middle of the capital of an American state focused attention:

Some 15 million people worldwide live under the threat of sudden flooding from glaciers, according to a study published this year in the journal Nature Communications. As the climate warms, glaciers everywhere are retreating and meltwater lakes have grown in size and number, intensifying this threat.

Since the Mendenhall Glacier began shrinking in the mid-1700s, it has retreated more than three miles, including some 800 feet between August 2021 and August 2022. The rate of retreat depends on various factors, but scientists say the rapid loss is due in part to human-caused global warming in recent decades.

+The state of California officially endorsed the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty, good news for the ongoing effort. Here’s how Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, responded:

"This decision of the State of California is a commitment to take down the single biggest contributor to the climate crisis: the fossil fuel industry. California joins the millions of voices across Turtle Island and Mother Earth calling on Biden to follow in the footsteps of our Pacific Island brothers and sisters from the small Island states and negotiate a mandate for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. As the state with the highest population of Indigenous Peoples in the country, it is important to pass legislation that would put a halt to the devastation and destruction of the compounding effects of climate change caused by fossil fuels."

Meanwhile in California, as Grist points out, a single legislator has managed to hold up fossil fuel divestment plans for the world’s fifth largest economy for another year. (An oil and gas PAC spent more than a hundred thousand dollars on her last campaign…)_

+ The ongoing fight to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline—the object of Joe Manchin’s extortion earlier this year—may hinge in part on how much the pipe itself has deteriorated, according to Bill Kitchen.

+America was blessed with huge amounts of groundwater—and like many of our blessings, we’ve decided to use it up fast. Here’s a canny account from the Times.

Groundwater loss is hurting breadbasket states like Kansas, where the major aquifer beneath 2.6 million acres of land can no longer support industrial-scale agriculture. Corn yields have plummeted. If that decline were to spread, it could threaten America’s status as a food superpower.

Fifteen hundred miles to the east, in New York State, overpumping is threatening drinking-water wells on Long Island, birthplace of the modern American suburb and home to working class towns as well as the Hamptons and their beachfront mansions.

Around Phoenix, one of America’s fastest growing cities, the crisis is severe enough that the state has said there’s not enough groundwater in parts of the county to build new houses that rely on aquifers.

In other areas, including parts of Utah, California and Texas, so much water is being pumped up that it is causing roads to buckle, foundations to crack and fissures to open in the earth. And around the country, rivers that relied on groundwater have become streams or trickles or memories.

“There is no way to get that back,” Don Cline, the associate director for water resources at the United States Geological Survey, said of disappearing groundwater. “There’s almost no way to convey how important it is.”

UN Affirms Climate Crisis Threatens Children's Rights, Potentially Bolstering Youth-Led Lawsuits

Youth protesters put up their fists as they participate in a rally on the west steps of the Colorado Capitol Building on February 20, 2017 in Denver, Colorado.

(Photo: Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

"States should take positive measures to ensure that children are protected from foreseeable premature or unnatural death and threats to their lives," reads the updated document

by Julia Conley, Common Dreams, August 28, 2023

A group of children in Portugal who are expected to present arguments in a climate case at the European Court of Human Rights next month may have a stronger legal standing following a formal opinion issued Monday by a United Nations committee, which affirms that the climate, biodiversity, and pollution crises present "an urgent and systemic threat to children's rights globally."

After consulting with more than 16,000 children in more than 120 countries, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child updated the 1989 Convention on children's rights to say that there is an urgent need to address the "triple planetary crisis" and to explain "how children's rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child apply to environmental protection, and confirms that children have a right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment."

"The right to life is threatened by environmental degradation, including climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss, which are closely linked to other fundamental challenges impeding the realization of this right, including poverty, inequality, and conflict," reads the document, which was updated after a two-year period of gathering input from children around the world. "States should take positive measures to ensure that children are protected from foreseeable premature or unnatural death and threats to their lives that may be caused by acts and omissions, as well as the activities of business actors, and enjoy their right to life with dignity."

The formal opinion—called General Comment No. 26—and updated document were released four weeks before the Portuguese case is set to go to court, where six children are preparing to argue that the 33 member-states of the European Union have failed to fight the climate crisis and to seek a legally binding decision requiring the countries to make immediate, deeper cuts to their fossil fuel emissions.

At least 19 other cases filed by youths in countries including Brazil, the United States, and Indonesia make similar arguments, and legal analysts said Monday that the updated treaty may help the young people in court.

"This could definitely strengthen their hand because now there's a fully articulated set of guidance that pulls everything together in one place," lawyer Ann Skelton, who chairs the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, told Reuters.

Noam Peleg, a law professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, wrote at The Conversation that the changes offer "a practical guide to help children" fight their government's continued support of planet-heating fossil fuels and clarifies that governments have an obligation to protect children from the climate emergency as part of their duty to defend human rights.

"The general comment also identifies children as agents in their own lives," said Peleg. "By extension, this means children have a right to participate in the drafting of environmental policies or laws that will affect them."

As Common Dreamsreported last month, climate litigation has emerged in recent years as a key driver of climate justice.

The committee's changes were announced two weeks after a state judge in Montana ruled that the state violated the constitutional rights of 16 young residents by promoting fossil fuel extraction.

"Children worldwide have been leading the fight against climate change; calling on their governments and corporations to take action to protect the planet and their future," said David Boyd, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and the environment. "With its General Comment No. 26, the Committee on the Rights of the Child not only echoes and amplifies children's voices, but also clearly defines the rights of children in relation to the environment that state parties should respect, protect and fulfill collectively and urgently."

Some young people and advocates who were consulted by the committee had pushed the panel to put the world's children in an even stronger legal position by calling on countries to take action beyond that which is demanded by the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which calls for emissions cuts that would limit planetary heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures.

Kelly Matheson, deputy director of global climate litigation at Our Children's Trust—which represented the children in the Montana case—toldReuters that the new document represents "such a missed opportunity."

"It's an exercise in incrementalism instead of taking quantum leap forward," Matheson said.

Committee member Philip Jaffé toldReuters that climate leader Greta Thunberg, who at 15 began a protest outside the Swedish Parliament that grew into the global school strike demanding climate action, had called on the panel "to be more vigorous and somewhat bolder."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

 

 

Julia Conley

Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

More Banks to Fail? Not in North Dakota

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Ellen Brown from Web of Debt Blog

U.S. banks are again in the crosshairs. Standard and Poor’s has downgraded five new middle-tier banks and put three others on negative outlook. This follows sweeping downgrades earlier in August by Moody’s, which cut credit ratings on 10 banks and placed four of the 15 largest U.S. banks on review for possible downgrade. As with the banks going into receivership earlier this year, concerns include interest rate risk due to unrealized losses from long-term securities.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government itself has been downgraded by Fitch Ratings, which questions the government’s ability to finance its nearly $33 trillion federal debt. Just the interest on the debt is approaching $1 trillion annually — one third of the government’s federal income tax receipts — while the military budget is closing in on another $1 trillion, devouring over half the discretionary federal budget. That leaves virtually none to cover the nearly $6 trillion that, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, is needed to repair America’s broken infrastructure, among other neglected service needs. 

While economists disagree on the overall economic outlook, conditions seem to be deteriorating across the board. Congress cannot agree on a budget, with threats of another government shutdown October 1 when the new fiscal year begins. The moratorium on student debt also ends on October 1, with 45% of borrowers saying they expect to go delinquent on their student loan debts. Credit card debt is at the highest level ever recorded, surpassing $1 trillion; with the average rate of interest at a new all-time record of 20.63 percent, and delinquencies surging dramatically. One trillion dollars in corporate debt is rolling over at much higher interest rates this year; layoffs and empty offices are decimating the commercial real estate market; and elevated interest rates are jeopardizing the home mortgage market, among other debt crises.

Where North Dakota Shines

One state, however, has escaped all this unscathed. North Dakota has the fastest growing GDP per capita in the country; and North Dakota banks are thriving, backstopped by the nation’s only state-owned bank. (“Who knew?” said Kevin O’Leary in a recent Fox News news clip.) According to the latest annual report of the Bank of North Dakota, “The Bank set a record net income of $191.2 million in 2022, up $47 million from 2021. Our asset size set a record as well — $10.2 billion. The return on investment was a healthy 19%. Standard & Poor’s (S&P) affirmed BND’s credit rating as A+/Stable.” 

The BND has been called the nation’s safest bank. Its stock cannot be short-sold, since it is not publicly traded; the bank cannot go bankrupt, because by law all of the state’s revenues are deposited in it; and it will not suffer a run, since the state, being the principal bank depositor, would not “run” on itself. Compare JP Morgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, considered among the country’s safest because it is “too big to fail.” JPM has over $1 trillion in uninsured deposits, the type most likely to “run” or be pulled in a crisis, and it has total deposits of $2.38 trillion. The FDIC insurance fund now has a balance of only $116.1 billion – only 5% of JPM’s deposits. JPM also has major counterparty risk in the derivatives market, a multi-trillion-dollar global bubble called by the Bank for International Settlements a “ticking time bomb.” JPM has $61 trillion in total derivatives, or $628 billion in netted derivatives, five times those of Credit Suisse which went insolvent last spring. Credit Suisse had to be bought by the giant Swiss bank UBS to avoid a derivatives implosion among “globally systemically important banks,” of which Credit Suisse was one. 

Not just the BND but North Dakota’s local banks are very safe. The BND acts as a “mini-Fed” for them, helping with liquidity, capitalization, and regulation. It provides correspondent banking services, an active Fed Funds program, check clearing, cash management services, loan guarantees, and other banker’s bank services. No local banks have been in trouble this year (or in fact during this century), but if they were to suffer a bank run, the BND would be there to help. According to its former CEO Eric Hardmeyer, the BND has a pre-approved Fed Funds line set up with every bank in the state; and if that is insufficient for liquidity, the BND can simply buy loans from the troubled local bank as needed. 

Replicating the Model

Advocates in other states are working to replicate the BND model or variations of it, with some very promising business plans forthcoming. One analysis recently published by the Center for New York City Public Affairs at the New School measures the projected economic impact of a local New York City public bank, based on a business model put forth by local advocates. The analysis focuses on job creation, affordable housing development and preservation, and community development lending during the bank’s five-year start-up phase, the time projected to achieve a full lending portfolio. The authors concluded:

In just its five-year start-up phase, a New York City public bank has the potential to create thousands of jobs, while constructing and renovating nearly 20,000 units of affordable housing, directing over a billion dollars to climate infrastructure investments, and expanding the capacity of the city’s CDFI community banks and credit unions to meet the needs of low- and middle-income New Yorkers. …

By partnering with CDFI banks and credit unions and other responsible lenders, the public bank could enable these institutions to increase their lending by over $5.8 billion. Besides financing affordable housing and community development and climate infrastructure, the public bank’s loans would allow CDFIs to increase their capacity with respect to mortgage and consumer lending. … Loans for mortgages and small businesses will build wealth and ensure that a larger share of the City’s money keeps circulating in New York’s working-class communities. Public bank lending of $4.55 billion is estimated to create approximately 70,600 jobs in its start-up phase.

Other states pursuing legislation in 2023 involving the establishment of public banks include California, Oregon, Washington State, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. At the federal level, a much needed solution to the infrastructure crisis is a national infrastructure bank, proposed in HR 4052. We have faced these crises before and have come out the stronger for them. Alexander Hamilton dealt with what appeared to be an insurmountable sovereign debt crisis by establishing the First Bank of the United States as an infrastructure and development bank in 1791. That model was followed by Roosevelt’s government in pulling the country out of the 1930s Great Depression, and it can help put our economy on a more solid footing today.

___________________

This article was first posted on ScheerPost. Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 400+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.

Home Insurers Cut Natural Disasters From Policies as Climate Risks Grow

Some of the largest U.S. insurance companies say extreme weather has led them to end certain coverages, exclude natural disaster protections and raise premiums

By Jacob Bogage

September 3, 2023 at 7:30 a.m. EDT

Hurricane Idalia caused flood and wind damage in Steinhatchee, Fla. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)

In the aftermath of extreme weather events, major insurers are increasingly no longer offering coverage that homeowners in areas vulnerable to those disasters need most.

At least five large U.S. property insurers — including Allstate, American Family, Nationwide, Erie Insurance Group and Berkshire Hathaway — have told regulators that extreme weather patterns caused by climate change have led them to stop writing coverages in some regions, exclude protections from various weather events and raise monthly premiums and deductibles.

Major insurers say they will cut out damage caused by hurricanes, wind and hail from policies underwriting property along coastlines and in wildfire country, according to a voluntary survey conducted by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, a group of state officials who regulate rates and policy forms.

Insurance providers are also more willing to drop existing policies in some locales as they become more vulnerable to natural disasters. Most home insurance coverages are annual terms, so providers are not bound to them for more than one year.

That means individuals and families in places once considered safe from natural catastrophes could lose crucial insurance protections while their natural disaster exposure expands or intensifies as global temperatures rise.

“The same risks that are making insurance more important are making it harder to get,” Carolyn Kousky, associate vice president at the Environmental Defense Fund and nonresident scholar at the Insurance Information Institute, told The Washington Post.

The companies mentioned those policy changes as part of previously unreported responses to the regulatory group’s survey. The survey was distributed in 2022 by 15 states and received responses — some sent as recently as last month — from companies covering 80 percent of the U.S. insurance market.

Allstate said its climate risk mitigation strategy would include “limiting new [auto and property] business … in areas most exposed to hurricanes” and “implementing tropical cyclone and/or wind/hail deductibles or exclusions where appropriate.”

Nationwide has already pulled back in certain areas. The company said that in 2020, it “reduced exposure levels in some of the highest hazard wildland urban interface areas in California.”

In its response to the regulators’ survey, Nationwide said it no longer underwrites coverage for “properties within a certain distance to the coastline” because of hurricane potential.

Other changes will come. “More targeted hurricane risk mitigation actions are being finalized and will start by year-end 2023,” Nationwide told regulators.

Berkshire Hathaway, which also offers reinsurance — insurance policies for insurance providers — wrote that increased climate disasters mean “it is possible that policy terms and conditions could be updated or revised to reflect changes in such risk.”

U.S. homeowners have faced unprecedented disasters in recent weeks that have underscored the new challenges facing insurance markets.

Hurricane Idalia brought severe flooding to Georgia and the Carolinas, and tore through parts of Florida that had never experienced direct hits from a major storm. Tropical Storm Hilary caused $600 million in damage on the West Coast, according to Karen Clark & Co., a leading catastrophe modeling firm. The fires on the Hawaiian island of Maui, whose cause is still under investigation, led to $3.2 billion in property damage, the firm said.

Those catastrophes, insurance industry insiders said, show just how quickly claims costs are escalating in the face of climate change.

U.S. insurers have disbursed $295.8 billion in natural disaster claims over the past three years, according to international risk management firm Aon. That’s a record for a three-year period, according to the American Property Casualty Insurance Association.

Natural catastrophes in the first six months of 2023 year in the United States caused $40 billion in insured losses, the third costliest first-half on record, Aon found.

“There’s no place to hide from these severe natural disasters,” said David Sampson, president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association. “They’re happening all over the country and so insurers are having to relook at their risk concentration.”

Off the Top of My Head

A Winning Strategy for Democrats in 2024

by John Lawrence

Democrats should add one item to their already impressive list of campaign strategies such as reproductive freedom, lowering drug prices, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act and more! They should take the wind out of the only Republican economic sail that they can offer: tax cuts. Dems should run on a tax break for the middle class paid for by a tax increase on billionaires and multimillionaires. They could also throw in a financial transactions tax but that would not be well understood by most voters. However a tax cut for the middle class would be well understood, and taxing billionaires more to pay for it would be equally well understood. All the arcane computations to achieve this scenario need not even be mentioned. That would be getting down in the weeds and too wonky for the average state of ignorance of the American public.

Biden is still at work on his Build Back Better agenda. Witness:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden touted the potential cost savings of Medicare’s first-ever price negotiations for widely used prescription drugs on Tuesday as he struggles to convince Americans that he’s improved their lives as he runs for reelection.

The drugs include the blood thinner Eliquis, diabetes treatment Jardiance and eight other medications. The negotiation process was authorized under the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed last year, capping decades of debate over whether the federal government should be allowed to haggle with pharmaceutical companies.

Any lower prices won’t take effect for three years, and the path forward could be further complicated by litigation from drugmakers and heavy criticism from Republicans.

But the effort is a centerpiece of Biden’s reelection pitch as the Democrat tries to show Americans he’s deserving of a second term because of the work he’s doing to lower costs while the country is struggling with inflation. The drug negotiations, like many of Biden’s biggest policy moves, will take time to play out, and his challenge is to persuade the public to be patient.

So as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, Medicare gained the right to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices. This is huge. Other countries have been doing this for years. Prices are substantially higher compared with European countries. One explanation for this price differential is that, unlike in the US, national health authorities in Europe negotiate new drug prices with manufacturers. Until now, that is. For the first time the government will be able to negotiate drug prices down at least for Medicare. This is still not the case for the general public however. For them they will still have to pay through the nose unlike any other civilized country. Unlike almost every other "democracy", the US does not have universal health care. Predatory drug corporations can still sock it to the American people. Democrats need to keep hammering away at making universal health care a right and a reality for the American people.

Bernie's Take on Democratic Politics

by Bernie Sanders

The Republican Party, which wants more tax breaks for the rich and cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, opposes pro-union legislation, and denies the reality of climate change, now has more support from the working class of this country than Democrats.

How does that happen? What do we do about it? That’s what I discuss in this attached recent speech I gave in New Hampshire. Please read it below, or watch at this link on YouTube.

It has always been my view that good policy is good politics. If you deliver for the American people, if you address their needs, they will respond accordingly.

It has also been my view that being honest with the American people, even when speaking the truth is uncomfortable and painful, is not only the right and responsible thing to do – but it’s also good politics.

The American people are tired of press releases, they’re tired of photo ops, they are tired of tweets and snappy one-liners. They want an honest analysis of what is going on in our society now and leadership which provides answers to the many crises that we face. They want to understand why we are where we are today, and how we can move to a better place.

Make no mistake about it. Today, all across our country there are deep feelings of anger, unease, discontent and foreboding. That is true for those who define themselves as progressive, as I do, or those who see themselves as conservative or moderate. It is true for Democrats, Republicans and independents. It is true whether you live here in New England, or in California, the Midwest, the South, or the Rocky Mountains.

In a world which is changing rapidly in so many respects, many of our people are anxious, they feel left behind and they are uncertain about what the future will bring for them and their kids. Perhaps most importantly, they feel powerless to alter the course of events and believe their elected officials are not only failing them but have little understanding of the pain they are experiencing. Many are even questioning whether our current form of government is capable of addressing their needs or responding effectively to the crises we face.

It is no secret that I want Joe Biden to be re-elected president, and that he and I share the goal of beating back right-wing extremism. We also want Democrats to have majority control over the Senate and the House – and Governor’s mansions and state houses all across the country.

In my view, if that is going to happen, if we are going to defeat creeping authoritarianism and right-wing extremism, there has got to be an ideological change of course. Democrats, up and down the line, are going to have to be much clearer to the American people as to what they stand for and, most importantly, which side they are on in the great struggles that we now face.

As a U.S. Senator, I am more than aware that most Democrats are prepared to take on a reactionary Republican Party which wants more tax breaks for billionaires, cuts to Social Security, cuts to Medicare, cuts to Medicaid, cuts to education and nutrition programs - and a party which largely ignores the existential threat of climate change. Almost every Democrat I know stands with the women of this country in their fundamental right to control their own bodies. And Democrats are united in their opposition to racism and discrimination against the LGBT community.

But, if Democrats are serious about winning elections and addressing the major crises that we face, they must go further. They must embrace the working class of this country in a way which hasn’t been done in almost 60 years. It is absolutely absurd that, given the anti-worker ideology and policies of the Republican Party, that party now has more working class support than Democrats.

It should be deeply worrying that, according to recent polls, Democrats are losing more and more support within the Latino community and even among Black men. That has got to change - not just for the well-being of the Democratic Party but for the future of our country.

The Democrats, once and for all, must reject the corporate wing of the party and empower those who are prepared to create a grassroots, multi-racial, multi-generational working class party in every state in this country. Democrats, through words and action, must make it clear that they stand with a struggling working class, a disappearing middle class, and millions of low income Americans who are barely surviving. They must make it clear that they are prepared to boldly take on the powerful corporate interests who have so much power and influence in Washington and in state capitals throughout the country; that they will protect the needs of young people who, everything being equal, will end up with a lower standard of living in their parents; and that they will vigorously fight for the seniors of our country and the disabled who so often face difficult and expensive health care decisions.

Perhaps most importantly Democrats must reject austerity economics and understand that, with the new and innovative technologies being developed, we now have the capability, as never before in world history, to provide a decent standard of living for every man, woman and child in this country - and create an incredibly bright future. Democrats must make clear that these new technologies and the artificial intelligence now being created must work to benefit all of our people, and not just the corporations that own that technology.

In my view, if Democrats are prepared to do that, they will win this election comfortably. If not, I’m not quite sure what the election outcome will be or, for that matter, what the future of the country holds.

If we’re going to be honest with the American people, we have got to acknowledge the realities of today, with the understanding that many of these crises have existed for decades.

And within that context, let me say a few words, about the achievements of the Biden Administration in its first 3 years.

President Biden and those of us who have worked with him have every right to be proud of what we have accomplished – especially given the fact that the work was done in a very divided and contentious Congress.

Yes. We should take pride in the American Rescue Plan which, at one of the lowest moments in modern American history - when we were dealing with the worst public health crisis in 100 years and the worst economic downturn since the great depression - helped revive our economy far faster than anyone could have imagined.

Yes. We should take pride in finally making significant investments in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure - roads, bridges, waste water plants, broadband and creating hundreds of thousands of good paying jobs in the process.

Yes. We should take pride in the unprecedented investments we have made in renewable energy.

Yes. We should take pride in that we have finally begun to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry.

Yes. We should take pride in the fact that we are rebuilding manufacturing in the United States.

Yes. We should take pride in the fact that unemployment today is extremely low. Here in New Hampshire it is all of 1.7 percent. We should take pride in the fact that inflation, which not so long ago stood at 9%, has been reduced to almost 3%.

Yes, we should take pride in the fact that President Biden, more than any president in history, has created an administration that actually looks like America in its diversity.

Yes. We should take pride in what we’ve accomplished but, at the same time, this 2024 campaign, at the presidential level and on down, must be honest with the American people and acknowledge the very real challenges that persist for working families and the middle-class.

So, while we take pride in our accomplishments, we must also acknowledge the reality that tens of millions of our fellow Americans continue to live in pain and despair.

Interestingly, this is exactly what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose portrait hangs in President Biden’s Oval Office, managed to do when he ran for a second term.

FDR, perhaps the most popular and effective president in American history, governed during the extremely difficult periods of the Great Depression and World War II. On January 20, 1937, Roosevelt gave an extraordinary speech at his second inaugural, in which, he took the opportunity not only to focus on his accomplishments but rather on the unfinished business he was determined to complete.

And this is what he said:

“In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens—a substantial part of its whole population—who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life.

“I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day.

“I see millions whose daily lives in city and on farm continue under conditions labeled indecent by a so-called polite society half a century ago."

He continued:

“I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children.

“I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory and by their poverty denying work and productiveness to many other millions.

“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

“It is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope--because the Nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out. We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country's interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

That speech by Roosevelt is extraordinary for its candor and honesty in describing the gravity of the problems confronting America in his time - even though he was the sitting president. In other words, despite the progress he had made in his first term, he understood that much, much more had to be done.

Of course, he was not really informing people about conditions in America. Instead, he was reflecting back what people already knew, what they felt in their hearts, and what they experienced in their day-to-day lives.

In that way, his remarks were not an indictment of his own Administration but instead a rallying cry for working families across America to come together with him in a joint effort to cure these ills.

We need to do now what Roosevelt did then. We need to be clear to working people that we understand the reality of their lives and our political discourse must reflect that reality.

And what is that reality?

In the wealthiest country in the history of the world, tens of millions struggle to put food on the table, find affordable housing, affordable health care, affordable prescription drugs, affordable childcare and affordable educational opportunities. That is an indisputable reality, and it is imperative that we acknowledge that reality.

At a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality, while the billionaire class and the 1 percent are doing better than at any time in American history, over 60 percent of our people live paycheck to paycheck, while many work for starvation wages and under terrible working conditions. Despite massive increases in worker productivity and an explosion in technology, the average American worker is making $45 a week less today than he or she did 50 years ago after adjusting for inflation while the vast majority of our families need two bread winners to survive.

Today, we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth. Unbelievably, fewer than half of working-age Americans have any retirement savings and that number is even higher for women.

Today, despite spending twice as much per capita on health care as almost any other country, 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured and one out of four patients cannot afford the prescription drugs their doctors prescribe. As a result of a massive shortage of doctors, nurses, mental health providers and dentists many millions of Americans wait months in order to get a medical appointment and tens of thousands die, unnecessarily, because they can’t afford the health care they need when they need it.

While three people own more wealth than the bottom half of American society, nearly 600,000 Americans are homeless and some 18 million households spend over half of their income to put a roof over their heads. While major Wall Street firms gobble up working class neighborhoods in order to gentrify them, and make huge profits, workers are unable to find housing they can afford.

There was once a time, not so many years ago, when the United States led the world in terms of the quality of our educational systems. We had the highest percentage of people who were college graduates, and a very high quality public school system. Today, in an extremely competitive global economy, that is no longer the case and we now lag behind many other countries in our educational achievements. In many states, teachers are paid embarrassingly low salaries.

Meanwhile, over 45 million Americans are drowning in over $2 trillion in student debt for the crime of getting a higher education.

Today in America, not only do we have more income and wealth inequality than we have ever had, we have more concentration of ownership than ever before. In sector after sector, whether it is finance, agriculture, energy, defense contracting, media, transportation, health care, or Big Tech, a small number of huge, multinational corporations control what is produced, distributed and sold. The idea that our economy today is based on small business startups, rugged free enterprise and competition is nothing more than a myth.

But the crises we face are not just economic. In communities throughout the country there is increased crime, we are struggling with a major opioid epidemic and we are now experiencing the worst mental health crisis in modern history – exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. Our life expectancy, which is already lower than most other major countries, is getting even lower in many parts of the country because of widespread addictions to alcohol and drugs, increased obesity and a growing suicide rate. Racism, sexism and homophobia continue to plague the country as we see an increase in hate crimes. With the school year now beginning, parents and kids worry about the epidemic of gun violence we have seen in recent years. Could it happen in our school, they ask?

Further, the American people know that our political and constitutional systems are in trouble. We have a former president who refused to acknowledge his defeat, and encouraged a violent insurrection to overturn the election results. We have state legislatures all across the country working overtime to make it harder for people of color and young people to vote, and who are gerrymandering districts to stay in power. And last, but not least, we have a campaign finance system which is totally corrupt, enabling billionaires, through their super PACs, to buy elections.

The American people also know that we have a Supreme Court that has, for the last 24 years, made far reaching decisions that have undermined faith not only in the judiciary, but the ability of our government to respond to the needs of the people. And that is not only their absurd and anti-democratic decision in Citizens United, but their willingness to undermine decades of precedent and deny the women of this country the constitutional right to control their own bodies.

The result of all of this is that faith in our democratic system is now extremely low.

Many millions of Americans have not only lost faith in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, but democracy itself.

And then, on top of all of that, just when you think the challenges we face could not be greater, the United States and the rest of the world face the existential threat of climate change. What a summer it has been. We have breathed the unhealthy smoke coming from the terrible forest fires in Canada, we have seen the floods in Vermont - the worst natural disaster in my state since 1927, we have observed the horrific death toll in Hawaii from their horrible flash fires, we have observed the drought, floods, fires and record-breaking heat waves in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. Increasingly, our people understand that climate change is not only real but that the planet is well on its way to becoming less healthy and habitable for our kids and future generations. Given their fears, millions of young couples throughout the world are wondering whether it even makes sense to have children.

So, where do we go from here? It’s easy to define the problems. It’s a lot harder to solve them. How do we revitalize American democracy and move forward toward a government which, to quote Lincoln, is “of the people, by the people, and for the people?”

In a divided nation how, in fact, do we bring our people together to address the enormous economic, social, and environmental crises we face – and create a government that works for all and not just the few?

In my view, by articulating the reality of Americans’ lives we will begin to recreate the trust that has evaporated in the institutions of government and the major political parties. To be credible we have to name names and demand accountability. It just cannot be that every political leader and every corporation and every institution other than Donald Trump and a few Republicans is acting in good faith.

The truth is that we are where we are today, because the people on top, the people with the power are extraordinarily greedy, dishonest, arrogant, irresponsible, and could care less about the needs of ordinary Americans.

Let’s confront the reality. It’s not, as Republicans tell us, the fault of immigrants, or racial minorities, or women, or LGBT people, or Muslims or any other minority group for the very desperate situation that too many people find themselves in. That’s just old fashioned demagoguery.

The reason so many have it so bad is that never before in the history of the United States have so few had it so good, owned so much and had so much economic power.

Never before in the history of the United States have so few, through their super PACs, campaign contributions, lobbyists and ownership of the media had so much political power.

And never before in our history has it been more necessary for all of us, standing together, to wrest that incredible power away from the few and redistribute it to the many.

Whether it is Wall Street, where three investment firms exercise incredible economic power as they control over $20 trillion in investments and, combined, are the major stockholders in the vast majority of S&P companies.

Whether it is the health insurance companies who make huge profits off a dysfunctional health care system that costs us twice as much per capita as virtually any other country.

Whether it is the pharmaceutical industry, which makes tens of billions in profits every year while charging us the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

Whether it is the major defense contractors who produce massive cost overruns and have jacked up our military spending to some $900 billion a year.

Whether it is the food industry, which has dramatically increased prices at the grocery store while reaping enormous profits.

Whether it is Big Tech, which intentionally addicts our kids to social media platforms and contributes to the mental health crisis facing so many young people.

Perhaps most importantly, it is the fossil fuel industry which has lied for years about the causation of climate change, and is now enjoying record-breaking profits as they raise the price of gas at the pump.

Add it all together and what we are seeing is an unprecedented level of corporate greed. In fact, over half the inflationary costs that we have seen in the United States in recent years has nothing to do with the war in Ukraine, nothing to do with broken supply chains but everything to do with the greed of corporate America, the prices they have raised and the record breaking profits they are making.

And by the way, this is not just an American issue. This is a global issue. While over 6 million people throughout the world died of COVID, and millions more became ill because they were forced to go to work to support their families, the billionaire class used the pandemic to make themselves even richer. During the first two years of the pandemic, the world’s ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion while the incomes of 99 percent of humanity went down and an additional 160 million people were forced into poverty.

These multibillionaires want it all, and they are prepared to step on anybody who gets in their way.

That is the kind of corporate greed we’re looking at now and the kind of greed that virtually all Americans - whether they’re black or white or Latino or Asian American or Native American - are increasingly disgusted with. This is where good policy is good politics. If we are looking at bringing the American people together, we have got to take on corporate greed.

And in that regard, we should take another lesson from President Roosevelt as he was fighting against the cabal of the economic elite of his era. In a 1936 campaign speech at Madison Square Garden during the Democratic Convention this is what Roosevelt said:

“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

“They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred."

He continued:

“I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.”

That is what Roosevelt said in the 1936 campaign, which by the way he won in a landslide. And that is what we should be saying in the 2024 campaign. Like Roosevelt, we should not be afraid to welcome the hatred of the billionaire class that is doing so much harm to our country.

Whether they like it or not, we must address the crisis of wealth and income inequality and demand that billionaires and large profitable corporations start paying their fair share of taxes.

Whether they like it or not, we must increase the federal minimum wage from a starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to a living wage of at least $17 an hour.

Whether they like it or not, we need to end the concentration of ownership in this country and break up giant monopolies that are strangling small businesses and keeping inflation artificially high.

Whether they like it or not, we need to make certain that every worker in this country who wants to join a union has the opportunity to do that. We can no longer tolerate the illegal, anti-union activities of Starbucks, Amazon, and other major corporations.

Whether they like it or not, we need to establish once and for all, that health care is a human right, not a privilege. We must take on the greed of the insurance companies that made over $69 billion in profits last year while tens of thousands of Americans die because they are unable to get the medical care they need. The current health care system is broken and dysfunctional. We need to fight for Medicare For All.

Whether they like or not, we need to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry – which has 1800 paid lobbyists in Washington – and make sure that drug companies can no longer charge us by far the highest prices in the world.

Whether they like it or not, we must take on the military industrial complex, cut military spending, and use those savings to invest in expanding Social Security benefits, affordable housing, child care, and education.

Whether they like it or not, we will save the planet by transforming our energy systems away from fossil fuels to renewable and sustainable energy.

Whether they like it or not, we will overturn Citizens United and move to public funding of elections and no longer allow billionaires and their Super PACs to buy elections.

Let me conclude by saying this. In the United States, and in fact around the world, support for the establishment and their institutions is in decline. People want change. And change will come. The question is: what kind of change will it be? Will it be the kind of change that is dominated by the wealthy and powerful? A change which bans books, denies our history, pits one group of Americans against another, and treats women as second class citizens who are not smart enough to make important decisions for themselves. That is one kind of change that could happen.

But there is another kind of change which could happen. And that is a change that would create a fairer, more just and more democratic society, based on love, solidarity and compassion. A change based on the principles of economic, social and racial justice. The choice is clear. And I know the kind of change I will be fighting for.

The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way.

 

Aug. 21, 2023, from the New York Times

 

Credit...Photo illustration by Boris Zhitkov/Getty Images

By Adam Grant

Dr. Grant, a contributing Opinion writer, is an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the author of “Think Again” and the host of the TED podcast “Re:Thinking.”

---

On the eve of the first debate of the 2024 presidential race, trust in government is rivaling historic lows. Officials have been working hard to safeguard elections and assure citizens of their integrity. But if we want public office to have integrity, we might be better off eliminating elections altogether.

If you think that sounds anti-democratic, think again. The ancient Greeks invented democracy, and in Athens many government officials were selected through sortition — a random lottery from a pool of candidates. In the United States, we already use a version of a lottery to select jurors. What if we did the same with mayors, governors, legislators, justices and even presidents?

People expect leaders chosen at random to be less effective than those picked systematically. But in multiple experiments led by the psychologist Alexander Haslam, the opposite held true. Groups actually made smarter decisions when leaders were chosen at random than when they were elected by a group or chosen based on leadership skill.

Why were randomly chosen leaders more effective? They led more democratically. “Systematically selected leaders can undermine group goals,” Dr. Haslam and his colleagues suggest, because they have a tendency to “assert their personal superiority.” When you’re anointed by the group, it can quickly go to your head: I’m the chosen one.

When you know you’re picked at random, you don’t experience enough power to be corrupted by it. Instead, you feel a heightened sense of responsibility: I did nothing to earn this, so I need to make sure I represent the group well. And in one of the Haslam experiments, when a leader was picked at random, members were more likely to stand by the group’s decisions.

Over the past year I’ve floated the idea of sortition with a number of current members of Congress. Their immediate concern is ability: How do we make sure that citizens chosen randomly are capable of governing?

In ancient Athens, people had a choice about whether to participate in the lottery. They also had to pass an examination of their capacity to exercise public rights and duties. In America, imagine that anyone who wants to enter the pool has to pass a civics test — the same standard as immigrants applying for citizenship. We might wind up with leaders who understand the Constitution.

A lottery would also improve our odds of avoiding the worst candidates in the first place. When it comes to character, our elected officials aren’t exactly crushing it. To paraphrase William F. Buckley Jr., I’d rather be governed by the first 535 people in the phone book. That’s because the people most drawn to power are usually the least fit to wield it.

The most dangerous traits in a leader are what psychologists call the dark triad of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. What these traits share is a willingness to exploit others for personal gain. People with dark triad traits tend to be more politically ambitious — they’re attracted to authority for its own sake. But we often fall under their spell. Is that you, George Santos?

In a study of elections worldwide, candidates who were rated by experts as having high psychopathy scores actually did better at the ballot box. In the United States, presidents assessed as having psychopathic and narcissistic tendencies were more persuasive with the public than their peers. A common explanation is that they’re masters of fearless dominance and superficial charm, and we mistake their confidence for competence. Sadly, it starts early: Even kids who display narcissistic personality traits get more leadership nominations and claim to be better leaders. (They aren’t.)

If the dark triad wins an election, we all lose. When psychologists rated the first 42 American presidents, the narcissists were more likely to take reckless risks, make unethical decisions and get impeached. Add a dash of Machiavellianism and a pinch of psychopathy, and you get autocrats like Putin, Erdogan, Orban and Duterte.

Eliminate voting, and candidates with dark triad traits would be less likely than they are now to rise to the top. Of course, there’s also a risk that a lottery would deprive us of the chance to select a leader with distinctive skills. At this point, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. As lucky as America was to have Lincoln at the helm, it’s more important to limit our exposure to bad character than to roll the dice on the hopes of finding the best.

Besides, if Lincoln were alive now, it’s hard to imagine that he’d even put his top hat in the ring. In a world filled with divisiveness and derision, evidence shows that members of Congress are increasingly rewarded for incivility. And they know it.

A lottery would give a fair shot to people who aren’t tall enough or male enough to win. It would also open the door to people who aren’t connected or wealthy enough to run. Our broken campaign finance system lets the rich and powerful buy their way into races while preventing people without money or influence from getting on the ballot. They’re probably better candidates: Research suggests that on average, people who grow up in low-income families tend to be more effective leaders and less likely to cheat — they’re less prone to narcissism and entitlement.

Switching to sortition would save a lot of money too. The 2020 elections alone cost upward of $14 billion. And if there’s no campaign, there are no special interests offering to help pay for it.

Finally, no voting also means no boundaries to gerrymander and no Electoral College to dispute. Instead of questioning whether millions of ballots were counted accurately, we could watch the lottery live, just as we do with teams getting their lottery picks in the N.B.A. draft.

Other countries have begun to see the promise of sortition. Two decades ago, Canadian provinces and the Dutch government started using sortition to create citizens’ assemblies that generated ideas for improving democracy. In the past few years, the French, British and German governments have run lotteries to select citizens to work on climate change policies. Ireland tried a hybrid model, gathering 33 politicians and 66 randomly chosen citizens for its 2012 constitutional convention. In Bolivia, the nonprofit Democracy in Practice works with schools to replace student council elections with lotteries. Instead of elevating the usual suspects, it welcomes a wider range of students to lead and solve real problems in their schools and their communities.

As we prepare for America to turn 250 years old, it may be time to rethink and renew our approach to choosing officials. The lifeblood of a democracy is the active participation of the people. There is nothing more democratic than offering each and every citizen an equal opportunity to lead.

From Nixon to Trump: The Decline of the Common Good in American Politics

Chapter 5 of The Common Good

Robert Reich

Aug 25, 2023

 

 

 

Friends,

America’s failure to hold Richard Nixon accountable for his attacks on democracy when he was president undermined the common good and paved the way for Donald Trump to mount even worse attacks.

The scandal that came to be known as “Watergate” and led to Nixon’s resignation from the presidency was a shock to the American political system. Afterward (analogous to putting locks on the doors after a town’s first robbery), Congress enacted many reforms, but all were eventually watered down or found by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional.

The Watergate scandal began the modern era of “whatever-it-takes-to-win” politics — blatant disregard of any and all norms and laws that interfered with gaining or keeping power. Trump is the logical and inevitable consequence.

In 1974, in his last remarks about Watergate as a senator, 77-year-old Sam Ervin —who as chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee became widely revered for his fairness and deep respect for the Constitution — explained that President Nixon and his aides had “a lust for political power” that “blinded them to ethical considerations and legal requirements; to Aristotle’s aphorism that the good of man must be the end of politics.”

What was particularly chilling about Nixon’s behavior was his disdain for the common good and total obsession with himself.

On the tapes of his White House meetings, Nixon can be heard to talk incessantly about himself — his needs, his place in history, and his animosities — but he never once mentions the nation’s needs. For Richard M. Nixon, there was no common good. Only Richard Nixon.

 

The details of what occurred still shock.

In 1970, Nixon authorized break-ins or “black bag jobs” of people considered domestic security threats. An early goal was to destroy the reputation of Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked to the news media the Pentagon Papers, showing that the Johnson administration had lied to the American people about the Vietnam War.

Nixon’s burglars broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, seeking information that might smear Ellsberg and undermine his credibility in the antiwar movement. “You can’t drop it, Bob,” Nixon told his assistant H. R. Haldeman in June 1971, referring to Ellsberg. “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it. You understand?”

In early 1972, Nixon launched a plan for spying on and sabotaging Democrats in the upcoming presidential campaign, including wiretaps and burglaries.

His henchmen paid the chauffeur of Senator Ed Muskie, whom Nixon considered his most likely Democratic opponent, to photograph Muskie’s internal memos and strategy documents.

They paid others to dig up dirt on the sex life of Senator Ted Kennedy, a potential opponent in 1976. “I’d really like to get Kennedy taped,” Nixon told Haldeman. They inserted a retired Secret Service agent into the team protecting Kennedy who, Haldeman assured Nixon, would “do anything that I tell him.” Nixon replied, “We just might get lucky and catch this son of a bitch and ruin him for ’76,” adding, “That’s going to be fun.”

Nixon ordered another assistant, John Ehrlichman, to direct the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the tax returns of all likely Democratic presidential candidates, including Kennedy. “Are we going after their tax returns?” Nixon asked. “You know what I mean? There’s a lot of gold in them thar hills.”

Off the Top of My Head

It's Not Biden's Job to Reduce Inflation. That's Jerome Powell's Job.

by John Lawrence

Republicans are so stupid. They blame Joe Biden for not doing something that's not his job to do. Furthermore, the way Powell is going about his job requires him to create more unemployment, to reduce economic activity. That's the traditional way to reduce inflation. So getting rid of inflation requires more economic pain not less. Then if there is a recession, they'll blame Joe Biden, not Jerome Powell, for that. As far as house prices being out of sight for more and more people, how about blaming the hedge funds and other entities that are bidding up asset prices. Eventually houses will be unaffordable for the masses of people which will turn the American people into renters and basically debtors. Is that Joe Biden's fault or the fault of hedge finds and other cash flush investors who are entering this market? In fact they are in the process of cornering this market. Higher interest rates are also hurting would be home owners and car buyers. Is that Joe Biden's fault or Jerome Powell's fault for raising interest rates? Joe Biden has no control over interest rates. The American consumer is all about me, me, me not what is best for the country as a whole.

Biden has done more than any President since Lyndon Johnson to improve the economy with the Chips Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the American Rescue Plan and more. Nearly 11 million jobs have been created since President Biden took office – including 750,000 manufacturing jobs. It's the first time the US government has had an industrial policy. He kept the economy afloat during the COVID lock down. The US economy has been left to free enterprise for too long. With deregulation this has allowed corporate entities to pollute, to create dangerous products, to do nothing about carbon dioxide emissions.The government was just supposed to be hands off and let corporations run wild, all in the name of maximizing GDP. Well there are more important things than maximizing GDP like saving the planet from global warming. It is all ready too late to do that. It's only a question at this time of how bad it will get before some of the measures that are being taken today will kick in and save the planet, hopefully, from complete destruction. Each year heat waves and floods are getting more severe. Each year is hotter than the previous year. How important is it to maximize GDP under these conditions?

During World War II, the government made sure that the economy was completely focused on the war effort. Consumer consumption was kept low in order to support the war effort. Today with an even larger danger looming, the economy is going on its merry way with so many elements of it not focused on climate change. In fact I call it the Taylor Swiftization of the economy. Entertainment including professional athletics are very large components of GDP. Nero fiddling while Rome burned is nothing compared to what is happening today. Perhaps the energy going into these frivolous sectors should be refocused on climate change. But the American people don't even all agree that climate change is even a serious situation. They want more fossil fuels, more drilling, more pipelines, more gas production. Fortunately, some states like California are doing more like outlawing gas powered cars by 2035. However, 2035 is too late. Too little, too late is the story of the world's response to climate change. So major disasters will continue with the government's fiscal budget increasingly committed to bailing out these disasters. FEMA, by the way, is bankrupt, and insurance companies no longer want to insure.

Off the Top of My Head

How Trump and All His Co-defendants Will Win

by John Lawrence

In a nutshell: get one Trump voter on the juries. You need all 12 jurors to agree that someone is guilty. You need only one Trump voter on the jury to acquit. Who wins? The lawyers who will make millions. The media who will be transfixed with this legal circus. It'll end up being much ado about nothing. If Trump happens to be found guilty and actually faces jail time, he will probably leave the country. Why should a billionaire or semi-billionaire, who has assets in other countries and probably money stashed away off shore, willingly go to some sleazy jail or even some country club jail when he could live well in some other country? Trump is not exactly a loyal American citizen who adheres to the rule of law and playing fair. He can declare from abroad that he is some sort of President in Absentia and his loyal followers will still probably send him money. He will say he is prepared to come back to America as soon as his followers take political power and he can come in riding on a white horse.

Trump and his lawyers like constitutional scholar John Eastman who set up the fake electors scheme will work the system, and, if they can't convince one juror of their innocence, they will get themselves pardoned by the next elected Republican President which could be in 2024. American voters are nothing if not fickle. They have one of the best Presidents in American history who, despite great odds, accomplished more than anyone since Lyndon Johnson. Biden's popularity is in the tank despite his accomplishments. Why is this? Maybe because of his age. Maybe because he's not "charismatic" enough. Trump voters seem to be impressed by his charisma first and foremost. I guess charisma and popularity, not competence, is what gets you elected President in this country. Even as he faces 91 criminal indictments, on the TV it's all Trump, all the time. Just like the movie Trump is everywhere all the time all over the place.

Trump and his lawyers had a scheme for replacing electors, but it was not all that far fetched. Until 1913 state legislatures had control over electors. Passed by Congress on May 13, 1912, and ratified on April 8, 1913, the 17th Amendment modified Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution by allowing voters to cast direct votes for U.S. senators. Prior to its passage, senators were chosen by state legislatures. So Eastman and others were just trying to argue that there was something unconstitutional about the 17th Amendment. The Supreme Court might have been convinced that he was right and the state legislatures should have the final say in which case Trump would have been elected, not Biden. Republicans have used the Supreme Court before to get George W Bush elected in 2000 despite the fact that, when all the votes were counted, Al Gore really won the election. Bush convinced the Supreme Court to stop counting the votes. The result was the disastrous George W Bush administration in which he lied us into the Iraq war.

Republicans have been using dirty tricks for years to get themselves elected including gerrymandering and doctoring voter rolls to eliminate black voters. Black politicians and activists say that Republican lawmakers have used racial gerrymandering and voter suppression to secure those majorities and are using their political might to further consolidate power among mostly White Republicans. Republicans have been busy removing black voters from registration lists. According to Mother Jones: Fifty-five percent of the registration notices were sent to municipalities where Hillary Clinton had defeated Donald Trump, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and nine of the 10 areas with the highest concentration of voters on the purge list were big cities and college towns that had voted for Clinton. Milwaukee and Madison, the state’s two Democratic strongholds, accounted for 14 percent of the state’s registered voters but 23 percent of the names on the removal list. Voters in predominantly Black neighborhoods or areas with large student populations were nearly twice as likely to be flagged for removal, The Guardian found.

Trump and his lawyers just took dirty tricks to a whole new level. Now they will win in court just by the process of jury selection. It only takes one to find any of the myriad of defendants not guilty.

Rich Men North of Richmond

Republicans court cultural populism, while Democrats eschew economic populism. But economic populism is the key.

Robert Reich

Aug 21, 2023

Over the past week, Oliver Anthony’s video of his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” has gone viral, clocking more than 20 million views on YouTube. As it’s risen to the top of the streaming charts, it’s also become a theme song for reactionary conservatives (Marjorie Taylor Greene calls it “the anthem of the forgotten Americans”).

“Rich Men North of Richmond” expresses class resentment with words and music evocative of Woody Guthrie. But Guthrie aimed his fire at economic elites who oppressed hardworking Americans. Anthony is aiming at cultural elites who have reduced the status of white American-born men.

America is in a new populist age, but the new populism comes in two radically different forms: cultural and economic.

Today’s Republicans are wielding cultural populism on behalf of so-called “forgotten Americans” who are white, male, Christian, and nationalist.

For seven years, Donald Trump has rarely missed a day to blame all America’s problems on immigrants, Democrats, socialists, the mainstream media, the “Deep State” (including the FBI, Justice Department, prosecutors, and unfriendly judges), “coastal elites,” and, wherever possible (and usually indirectly), women and people of color.

Florida’s Ron DeSantis is basing his inchoate presidential campaign on a war against what he calls America’s “ruling class,” which includes bureaucrats, journalists, educators, and other supposed “woke” experts who, as DeSantis told the audience attending his campaign kickoff in Iowa in May, “are not enacting an agenda to represent us. They’re imposing their agenda on us, via the federal government, via corporate America and via our own education system.” DeSantis is shipping undocumented immigrants out of Florida, barring teaching about sex or America’s history of racism, blocking abortions after twelve weeks, requiring Trans young people to use bathrooms according to their gender at birth.

For Republican politicians these days, the culture wars are the central struggle of American public life. Why? Because cultural populism’s underlying political agenda is white male Christian nationalism. It aims to resurrect the social and racial hierarchy that dominated American life before the 1960s.

This not only fuels the Republicans’ mostly white, male, Christian, American-born base. It also reassures the fat cats bankrolling the GOP that working-class resentments are channeled away from economic populism — which could threaten the fat cats’ wealth.

What are Democrats doing with economic populism?

Some Democrats continue to talk about “forgotten Americans” who have been left behind economically. And Biden and his allies in Congress have made a good start at helping these Americans — even though most of the working middle class doesn’t seem to be aware of it.

But few Democrats are willing to blame what’s happened on economic elites. (When Bernie Sanders tried in 2016, the Democratic establishment squashed his presidential ambitions.)

Yet the Republicans’ cultural populism is bogus. The biggest change over the last three decades — the change lurking behind the insecurities and resentments of the working middle class — has nothing to do with identity politics, “woke”ism, Critical Race Theory, transgender kids, or any other current Republican bogeymen. It has directly to do with a huge shift in the distribution of income and wealth.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has just released a report showing changes in the distribution of family wealth from 1989 to 2019 (the first and the most recent years for which comparable survey data on family wealth are available).

Families in the top 10 percent of the distribution now hold more than two-thirds of all wealth. Families in the bottom half of the distribution hold only 2 percent of total wealth. (Families in the bottom quarter have negative net wealth — they’re in debt. Families in the top 1 percent — indeed, the top one-tenth of 1 percent — have a disproportionate share of the wealth of the top 10 percent.)

Look at the dramatic change over the last three decades. Although total wealth is much greater now than it was then, the distribution of that wealth is far more unequal. The bottom 50 percent hasn’t budged. Wealth at the top has exploded.

 

This change didn’t happen because of so-called “neutral market forces.” It happened because of policy decisions made over the last three decades.

What sort of decisions? To open the borders wide to imports from China. To deregulate Wall Street and allow it to make bets with other people’s money. To dramatically cut taxes on the rich. To let corporations bash unions and fire workers who try to organize. To encourage private equity to take over “underperforming” companies and then promptly fire workers and sell off assets. To allow big corporations to buy or merge with other big corporations. To bail out the biggest banks but not homeowners who get caught in the downdrafts. To encourage corporations to buy back their shares of stock rather than reinvest profits. To privatize higher education and push students into taking out massive college loans. And so on.

These policy decisions didn’t just happen, either. They were pushed by wealthy elites on Wall Street and in corporate C-suites, who made mammoth donations to politicians on both sides of the aisle — mostly but not exclusively Republican — to ensure that their wishes would be honored.

Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and other Republican culture warriors don’t represent “forgotten Americans.” They’ve championed the very policies that have caused these Americans to be forgotten.

Biden and most Democratic lawmakers in Congress are advocating policies that will make the nation more equitable, such as student-loan forgiveness and negotiated drug prices. But they’re reluctant to push very hard for higher taxes on the wealthy, or labor laws that make it easier to organize, or to roll back any of the other big structural changes that wealthy elites have put in place over the last 30 years.

And they don’t want to blame the rich for what’s happened.

“I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day / Overtime hours for bullshit pay,” Anthony sings.

Yes, you have — but not because cultural elites have replaced white Christian nationalist men with people of other races, genders, nationalities, and creeds.

It’s because America’s wealthy have turned their growing wealth into increasing political power to change the rules of the game in ways that further enlarge their wealth and power, while shafting the bottom half.

If Democrats don’t tell the economic truth about what’s happened and place the blame squarely where it’s deserved, the lies of Republican cultural populists will fill the void — not just with faux-populist lyrics, but with bad laws.

Off the Top of My Head

Ted Kaczynski and His Protest Against Technology

by John Lawrence

Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unibomber, wanted a revolution in which all technology would be removed from civilization and we would basically go back to the days of hunter gatherers, which he considered to be our natural state. If he were protesting only the harm that technology has done, he might have had a better case. In particular the chemical industry which has given us plastics which are polluting the oceans, PFAS chemicals, aka 'forever chemicals', weed killers such as Monsanto's Roundup and other chemicals likely causing cancer, Kaczynski might have had a better case. But his case was based on his perception that technology was psychologically inhibiting human freedom. In particular participation in a technological society was enslaving the human spirit. In many respects his protest was against wage slavery which in the early days of the American republic some writers considered almost as pernicious as chattel slavery. Michael Sandel writes in Democracy's Discontents:

"Labor leaders dramatized their case against wage labor by equating it with Southern slavery - "wage slavery," as they called it. Working for wages was tantamount to slavery not only in the sense that it left workers impoverished but also in the sense that it denied them the economic and political independence essential to republican citizenship.

"Wages is a cunning device of the devil for the benefit of tender consciences who would retain all the advantages of the slave system without the expense, trouble and odium of being slaveholders," wrote Orestes Brownson. The wage laborer suffered more than the southern slave and, given the unlikelihood of rising to own his own productive property, was scarcely more free. The only way to make wage labor compatible with freedom, Brownson argued, would be to make it a temporary condition on the way to independence: "There must be no class of our fellow men doomed to toil through life as mere workmen at wages. If wages are tolerated it must be, in the case of the individual operative, only under such conditions that, by the time he is at a proper age to settle in life, he shall have accumulated enough to be an independent laborer on his own capital, on his own farm or in his own shop."

Kaczynski's problem with the system included the slavery of the university system in which one must struggle for years at no or little pay for the privilege of going to work as a more highly paid wage slave and what this does to the human spirit that longs for freedom from this technological system. By going off and leading a barely self sufficient life in a cabin in the mountains, Kaczynski was escaping from the system which had enslaved his mind psychologically for years. What he didn't realize was that he could have achieved this by dropping out of that system and pursuing an independent life based on some form of independent labor. In other words, he could have left the system for self-employment and so can anyone else. The really destructive thing about the technological society is not what it did to the human spirit but what it did to the environment, and that was something that Kaczynski was not very much concerned about. Some people evidently have no problem with participating in the "system." However, the destruction of the environment brought about by the chemical industry and fossil fuels is actually destroying the planet. Kaczynski missed his calling. He could have made his life a protest against climate change and environmental destruction caused largely by the chemical industry, and he could have figured out a different way to get his manifesto published without killing and maiming people. Self publishing, perhaps?

The US and China must unite to fight the climate crisis, not each other

Cooperation is not only in the best interests of all countries, but is absolutely necessary for the survival of the planet

 

from the Guardian, Mon 21 Aug 2023 06.11 EDT, Last modified on Mon 21 Aug 2023 12.45 EDT

 

by Bernie Sanders

 

‘US and China should come to an agreement to mutually cut their military budgets …’ Photograph: Leah Mi

Climate change is a global crisis and cannot be solved by any one country alone. If the United States, China and other industrialized countries do not come together to dramatically decrease greenhouse gas emissions, the world we leave our children and future generations will become increasingly unhealthy and uninhabitable. Tragically, the cooperation required to address this existential threat is being undermined by hawks in both the United States and China who are moving us toward a disastrous cold war.

Now is the time for a radical rethinking of geopolitics to reflect the reality that international cooperation is not only in the best interests of all countries, but is absolutely necessary for the survival of the planet.

Here’s the reality. The last eight years have been the eight hottest on record. This year is on track to be the hottest year in recorded history, and this past July was the hottest month on record. Across the United States, July broke more than 3,200 daily temperature records and dozens of American cities broke or tied their previous daily temperature records three or more times. Phoenix experienced 31 days in a row at or above 110F (43.3C), 13 days longer than the previous record. El Paso, Miami, Austin and many other places also suffered under record-breaking stretches of extreme heat.

Smoke from unprecedented wildfires in Canada enveloped US cities and drifted halfway around the world, causing dangerously unhealthy air quality. Vermont, my home state, experienced floods that damaged 4,000 homes and 800 businesses, the state’s worst natural disaster since 1927. In Maui, Hawaii, rapidly moving fires destroyed 2,700 structures in historic Lahaina and took more than 100 lives, making it the deadliest wildfire in the US in more than a century.

But it’s not just the US that is dealing with record-breaking heatwaves and enormous climate-caused devastation. China experienced record-high temperatures last month, including the country’s all-time temperature record of 126F (52.2C), and recent flooding has killed about 100 people, destroyed nearly 200,000 homes, displaced some 1.5 million people and caused more than $13bn in damage.

From Tokyo to Rome to Tunis to Tirana, cities across Asia, Europe and north Africa experienced their hottest days on record. In Iran, the heat index hit 158F (70C), testing the limits of human survival. In our own hemisphere, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador all saw temperature records fall. It’s winter right now in South America, but that hasn’t stopped temperatures from exceeding 100F (37.7C) in some places, a heating event a climate historian labeled “one of the extreme events the world has ever seen”.

And it’s not just that temperatures have been soaring on land. Our oceans have never been warmer. Right now, 44% of the world’s oceans are experiencing a marine heatwave. The Mediterranean Sea is experiencing its hottest temperatures on record, more than 9F hotter than average in some places. Off the coast of Newfoundland, waters are as much as 18F above normal. South of Miami, waters reached 101F (38.3C). You’re supposed to find temperatures like that in a hot tub, not the ocean. This warming could further devastate coral reefs, fisheries and marine ecosystems around the world.

In the midst of this global crisis, there is both good news and bad news. The good news is that recent years have seen long-overdue steps to transition the global economy away from fossil fuels into more efficient and renewable energy sources. In the United States, the Inflation Reduction Act included an unprecedented $300bn in investments in clean energy and energy efficiency, which could help increase US solar energy by 500% and more than double wind energy by 2035, reducing carbon emissions by roughly 40%.

Other countries have also made major investments. China spent $546bn on clean energy last year and continues to manufacture and deploy more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined. By 2030, China may deploy enough renewable energy to essentially power the entire US electrical grid three times over. The European Union has laid out a plan to invest more than $1tn over the next decade in renewables and energy efficiency, aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% compared with 1990.

Importantly, large sections of the corporate world have turned away from investments in fossil fuels and are now spending hundreds of billions on sustainable energy. Altogether, the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects the global community to invest $1.6tn in wind, solar power, electric vehicles, batteries, and electric grids this year, compared with just $1tn in fossil fuels. This progress has led the IEA to forecast that renewables will surpass coal to become the largest source of global electricity generation by early 2025, much faster than previously predicted.

The bad news is that we are still falling well short of the kinds of investments needed to deal with this crisis. We are still not moving fast enough to save our planet. The latest report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that without more urgent action, the world will pass the key 1.5C (2.7F) threshold by the early 2030s, risking a far deadlier future for our children and future generations. The science is clear: if the US, China, and the rest of the planet do not act with greater urgency to dramatically cut carbon emissions, our planet will face enormous and irreversible damage.

Let’s be clear: since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the US has put more carbon into the atmosphere, by far, than any other country. While the new technologies sustained by fossil fuels improved our standard of living, we laid the groundwork for the climate calamity the planet is now experiencing.

In recent years, the rapidly growing Chinese economy has eclipsed the US as the world’s major carbon emitter. Right now, China is building six times as many coal-fired power plants as the rest of the world combined – the equivalent of two new coal plants every week. Last year, they quadrupled the number of new coal plants approved compared with 2021. Current plans will see China add as much new coal to its grid as used in all of India, the second largest coal user, and five times more coal capacity as the US.

It is no great secret the Chinese government is undertaking many policies that we and the international community should oppose. They are cruelly repressing and interning the Uyghurs, threatening Taiwan and stifling freedom of expression in Tibet and Hong Kong. China has bullied its neighbors, abused the global trading system, stolen technology and is building out a dystopian surveillance state.

The US is rightly organizing its allies to press Beijing on these and other issues. But organizing most of our national effort around a zero-sum global confrontation with China is unlikely to change Chinese behavior and will alienate allies and partners.

Most importantly, it could doom our planet by making climate cooperation impossible between the world’s two largest greenhouse emitters. We need to move in a bold new direction. Recent history provides some instructive examples.

In 1962, when the US and the Soviet Union stood on the verge of nuclear war, President John F Kennedy and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, came together to prevent mutual destruction. Just a few months later, with the nuclear crisis as the background, President Kennedy proposed to the Soviet Union an arms reductions plan which would change the confrontational dynamic that had brought the world to the brink. Even arch anti-communists like Nixon and Reagan made bold gambits to reduce tensions, fearful of global annihilation. We face a similar dynamic today, facing collective catastrophe if we do not change course.

Here is the insane dynamic that must be changed. In recent years, both the US and China have greatly increased their military budgets. The US now spends some $900bn on the Pentagon, more than the next 10 nations combined. China, with the world’s second largest military budget, spends almost $300bn. Despite spending these huge amounts on “defense”, both countries are losing the war against the climate ccrisis. The US has experienced massive floods, fires, drought and extreme weather disturbances, which have cost us hundreds of billions. The recent flooding in China alone will cost that government tens of billions. Into the future, scientists tell us that great cities like Shanghai and New York will be underwater if we do not act effectively against the climate crisis.

So here’s a “radical” idea. Instead of spending enormous amounts of money planning for a war against each other, the US and China should come to an agreement to mutually cut their military budgets and use the savings to move aggressively to improve energy efficiency, move toward sustainable energy and end our reliance on fossil fuels. They should also provide increased support for developing countries who are suffering from the climate crisis through no fault of their own.

Now, I know that establishment politicians in both countries will tell me how naive and unsophisticated I am to offer such a suggestion and they will provide a million reasons as to why it can’t be done. My response is this: go talk to the people in Vermont who have lost their homes because of unprecedented flooding and the families in Hawaii who lost loved ones in the recent fires. Go talk to the more than 1 million people in China who have been displaced by catastrophic floods. Go talk to the people in southern Africa who are starving because of the terrible drought and floods they are experiencing or farmers around the world who can no longer grow their crops because of water shortages.

Perhaps most importantly, go talk to the hundreds of millions of young people in every country on earth who are losing hope, wondering whether they should even have children of their own, given the enormous challenges the climate crisis poses for a normal life.

Nelson Mandela famously remarked; “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” If we are to save the planet, now is the time for bold action. Let’s do it.

• Bernie Sanders is a US Senator and chairman of the health, education, labor and pensions committee

EPA’s new definition of PFAS could omit thousands of ‘forever chemicals’

Agency plans a ‘case-by-case’ approach that allows for flexibility, but critics say ‘this is not a new definition – it is a lack of definition’

Tom Perkins

Fri 18 Aug 2023 06.00 EDT

Last modified on Fri 18 Aug 2023 07.47 EDT from the Guardian

 

A person fishes in the Cape Fear River 30 June 2022, in Wilmington, North Carolina. The consequences of the EPA’s narrower definition have already been felt in North Carolina’s Cape Fear basin, which is contending with decades of Chemours pollution. Photograph: Allison Joyce/The Guardian

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) office responsible for protecting the public from toxic substances has changed how it defines PFAS for a second time since 2021, a move critics say they fear will exclude thousands of “forever chemicals” from regulation and largely benefit industry.

Instead of using a clear definition of what constitutes a PFAS, the agency’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics plans to take a “case-by-case” approach that allows it to be more flexible in determining which chemicals should be subjected to regulations.

Among other uses for the compounds, the EPA appears to be excluding some chemicals in pharmaceuticals and pesticides that are generally defined as PFAS, current and former EPA officials say, and the shift comes amid fierce industry opposition to proposed limits on the chemicals.

The approach puts the toxics office at odds with other EPA divisions, other federal agencies, the European Union, Canada and most of the scientific world. The definition is likely to generate confusion in the chemical industry and within the agency, current and former EPA officials say.

“This is not a new definition – it is a lack of definition, and it makes no sense,” said Linda Birnbaum, a former EPA scientist and head of the National Toxicology Program. “It is just going to lead to terrible confusion.”

PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 15,000 compounds most frequently used to make products water-, stain- and grease-resistant. They have been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease and a range of other serious health problems. They are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down in the environment.

In a statement to the Guardian, the EPA said its latest definition was more “expansive” than the previous. Its approach was designed “to focus on substances most likely to be persistent in the environment, including some chemical substances whose structures or sub-structures resemble, at least in part” more thoroughly studied PFAS compounds, like PFOS and PFOA.

But public health advocates warn that all PFAS are persistent in the environment and all that have been studied are toxic, and for those reasons many are calling on the government to largely restrict the entire chemical class.

Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, a current EPA employee in the toxics office said the chemical’s definition has been evolving for several years. The employee said they first learned of the latest change in public comments made by Michal Freedhoff, a Biden-appointed toxics office administrator.

Current and former EPA employees say the agency is not defining some fluorinated chemicals used in pesticides as PFAS at a time when research has discovered their widespread use in agricultural products. The agency also excludes some “ultra short chain” PFAS refrigerants, which are defined as PFAS by the European Union but not the toxics office, said Tim Whitehouse, a former EPA attorney now with the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility nonprofit.

He said the stricter regulations in Europe have forced the industry away from the kind of PFAS refrigerants produced by Chemours, a chemical manufacturer with a plant in North Carolina. Chemours opposes defining the refrigerants as PFAS “because it is going to destroy their market” as it has in Europe, Whitehouse added.

The consequences of the EPA’s narrower definition have already been felt in North Carolina’s Cape Fear basin, which is contending with decades of Chemours pollution. A 2019 citizen group petition asked the EPA to conduct studies that would shed light on the health impacts of 54 PFAS compounds found in human blood and water in the region.

In the agency’s December 2021 response, itdeclined to test for 15 chemicals it said “do not meet” the toxics office PFAS definition.
The change also creates uncertainty for chemical companies who are producing substances that may or may not fall within the definition, which Kyla Bennett, a former EPA official now with PEER, characterized as “insanely frustrating”.

“The EPA claims they switched to a case-by-case basis to remain flexible, but in the past it has said, ‘We want to provide regulatory certainty,’ but this is the furthest from regulatory certainty that I can think of,” she added.

The White House’s Office of Science and Technology coordinates among federal agencies could provide guidance to federal agencies on which definition to use, but it has failed to do so, Bennett said.

“The bottom line is the EPA has one job and that is to protect human health and the environment, and when it comes to PFAS they are not,” she added.

It is unclear what prompted the latest shift, the employee said, but it comes as the EPA implements its “PFAS strategic roadmap” to help rein in PFAS pollution. The shifting definition complicates that effort, the employee said.

 

“EPA can’t get its act together on what PFAS are,” they added. “To regulate PFAS, you have to agree what are and are not PFAS.”

 

The most widely used, inclusive definition, and that proposed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), defines any chemical with one fluorinated carbon atom as a PFAS. That could include tens of thousands of chemicals on the market and some public health advocates say a narrower definition is warranted.

 

The EPA toxics office in 2021 implemented a “working definition” that defined PFAS as chemicals that have “at least two adjacent carbon atoms, where one carbon is fully fluorinated and the other is at least partially fluorinated”. It covered about 6,500 PFAS, but the toxics office expanded the definition as the industry exploited loopholes.The employee said debating the definition distracts from the more important effort to quickly regulate PFAS that are already known to be found in people and animals.

How private equity is destroying the labors of love

Private equity is turning every business into a short-term profit center.

by Robert Reich

Aug 17, 2023

 

 

 

 

Friends,

Last week, Paramount announced that it will be selling Simon & Schuster, one of the biggest and most prestigious publishing houses in the United States, to the private-equity firm KKR, for $1.62 billion.

The acquisition vastly increases the influence of financial interests over book publishing.

This worries me because it continues a trend that began years ago — elevating profits above the love of publishing books.

When I published my first book decades ago, the purpose of most publishing houses was to publish books. Publishers made money in order to publish books. They earned enough on their big bestsellers to take chances on unknown authors like me and put out books that delighted small numbers of enthusiastic readers but never showed a profit.

But in more recent years, the major purpose of most book publishers has switched from publishing books to making money.

After KKR takes over Simon & Schuster, this prestigious publishing house won’t be taking risks on unknown authors or putting out wonderful books that appeal to small numbers of enthusiastic readers. It’s going to be a profit center for one of the biggest private equity firms on Wall Street, dedicated exclusively to making money.

The same dynamic has infected other parts of the economy. News organizations once made money in order to report the news. Now, news organizations exist in order to make money.

For years, CBS News was insulated from the commercial side of CBS. This allowed Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite to report what they thought the public needed to know. Today, most network and cable news has to show a profit. It’s been a slippery slope leading to Fox News’s shameless pandering to the lies and bigotry its viewers find entertaining.

Hospitals and health insurers once made money in order to provide health care. Now, hospitals and health insurers provide health care in order to make money.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield began as nonprofits that insured all comers. But as big profit-seeking insurers targeted younger and healthier people, the Blues were left to insure the older and less healthy, which made it impossible for them to continue. They turned to making money. Now, private equity runs hospitals, into the ground.

And so on.

I was reminded of this distinction — between making money in order to provide particular products and services, and providing products or services in order to make money — while watching the magnificent series “The Bear,” now streaming on Hulu.

If you haven’t seen it, I won’t give away the plot except to say that the major characters want to create a great restaurant. Each has a backstory that reveals why this is so important to them.

Making money is the means to achieving their dreams, but they aren’t in it for the money. They’re in it to produce wonderful food, served with perfection. This transcendent goal is central to their own self-worth. It gives each of their lives purpose and meaning.

It’s still possible for businesses to exist in order to produce wonderful goods and services. I know many retailers, small manufacturers, and professionals who do what they do mainly for the love of it. (My father ran a clothing store, and although he worked seven days a week, making money was secondary — enabling him to keep his family afloat and continue to do what he loved.)

But the financialization of the American economy has turned almost all larger businesses into profit centers. Private equity in particular has leached out every other value.

When I ask my former students how they like their work, I often hear the same story. “I like it well enough,” they say, often with a tinge of regret. “But the money people won’t let me do what I’d really love to do.”

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Off the Top of My Head

Contrasting the Chinese, EU and American Economic Systems

by John Lawrence

Since 2001, China has pursued a “going-out” investment policy. At first, the PRC (People's Republic of China) mainly encouraged SOEs (state owned enterprises) to invest overseas but in recent years, China's overseas investments have diversified with both state and private enterprises investing in nearly all industries and economic sectors. After Deng Xiaoping came to power in the late 1970s, China opened up its economic policy with the result that approximately 800 million people were lifted out of poverty in about 40 years. This turned China into a capitalistic nation ruled by the Chinese Communist party although the word "communist" is largely an anachronism at this point. China developed a unique economic system comprised of state owned enterprises and private enterprise. It has been the private aspects of China's system that have mainly driven the huge increases in GDP to the point where China is likely to take over the US as the world's largest economy in terms of GDP in a few years.

There are 4 components of GDP: consumption, investment, government spending and profit from exports. Some of the reasons for China's becoming an economic powerhouse are that consumption is only 38% of GDP whereas US consumption is nearly 70% of GDP. While Americans consume, China produces, exports and invests. I would characterize the US as having a Taylor Swift economy, an economy based on consumption of entertainment and other disposable items with no lasting value. It has been reported that Taylor Swift and the Barbie movie have been at least somewhat responsible for keeping the American economy afloat. When you add in social media and professional athletics, much of American consumption is immediately disposed of as soon as the event is over. In the EU consumption is about 52% of GDP so somewhat larger than China's but much less than the US.

Chinese investment is 43% of GDP while The US' is about 16%. EU investment is about 25% of GDP so midway between the US and China. At 21.4% EU government spending is larger than either the US (17.6%) or China (16%). Like the American government the Chinese government doesn't spend a lot of money on welfare. Chinese families are basically savers and provide a lot of the same services to their own intergenerational extended families which are provided by EU governments. The American ethos is largely individualistic and so many family members who can't provide for themselves fall through the cracks. This is one reason for the homeless crisis in the US.

The Chinese economy is bolstered by the fact that it is a net exporter (2.5% of GDP) while the US (-2.7%) and the EU (-2.7%) are net importers which subtracts from their GDPs. China also exports capital and manpower in the form of the Belt and Road Initiative. Announced in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aims to strengthen China’s connectivity with the world. It combines new and old projects, covers an expansive geographic scope, and includes efforts to strengthen hard infrastructure, soft infrastructure, and cultural ties. As of October 2019, the plan touches 138 countries with a combined Gross Domestic Product of $29 trillion and some 4.6 billion people. Supporting a diverse array of initiatives that enhance connectivity throughout Eurasia and beyond could serve to strengthen China’s economic and security interests while bolstering overseas development. 

The Chinese political system, nominally communist, has the same elements of democracy that the early US political system had which is that locally elected bodies select the next higher political body with 3 successive iterations so that the National Assembly is chosen by the provincial assemblies at the next lower level. The original American Constitution had a similar feature in that the Senate was not chosen directly by the people but by state legislatures. State legislatures continued to elect senators until adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1913 which provided for popular election of senators. The Chinese system tends to meritocraticy with the best and brightest ascending to the top levels whereas the more democratic American system has within it the possibility of electing complete idiots like Donald Trump whose ascendancy served to prove how vulnerable the two party system really is. By contrast the Chinese emphasize harmony and stability which are attributes of their main philosophical inheritance: Confucianism.

'This Is Huge': Judge Sides With Montana Youths in Historic Climate Ruling

Youth plaintiffs await the start of the nation's first youth climate change trial at Montana's First Judicial District Court on June 12, 2023 in Helena, Montana. (Photo by William Campbell/Getty Images)

"As fires rage in the West, fueled by fossil fuel pollution, today's ruling in Montana is a game-changer that marks a turning point in this generation's efforts to save the planet," said one attorney representing 16 young plaintiffs.

by Julia Conley, August 14, 2023, from Common Dreams

Climate advocates on Monday expressed hope that an unprecedented ruling by a state judge in Montana, siding with 16 young residents who argued the state violated their constitutional rights by promoting fossil fuel extraction, will mark a sea change in the outcomes of climate lawsuits.

In Held v. State of Montana, District Court Judge Kathy Seeley ruled that rights of the plaintiffs—who range in age from 5 to 22— have been violated by the Montana Environmental Policy Act because the law has prevented the state from assessing the climate impacts of mining projects.

Fossil fuel emissions including Montana's "have been proven to be a substantial factor" in heating the planet and causing pollution, Seeley said in the nation's first ruling on a constitutional, youth-led lawsuit regarding the climate.

Because the Montana Constitution guarantees residents a "clean and healthful environment," the state's environmental policy law violates the document, said Seeley.

"This is HUGE," said meteorologist Eric Holthaus.

"This is a landmark decision establishing enforceable principles of intergenerational justice."

Julia Olson, founder of Our Children's Trust, the non-profit law firm that helped represent the plaintiffs, called the victory a "sweeping win" that could have reverberating effects on the hundreds of lawsuits that have been filed in the U.S. arguing against the continued extraction of fossil fuels.

"As fires rage in the West, fueled by fossil fuel pollution, today's ruling in Montana is a game-changer that marks a turning point in this generation's efforts to save the planet from the devastating effects of human-caused climate chaos," said Olson in a statement.

In their defense, state attorneys argued that Montana's fossil fuel emissions are insignificant compared to global emissions, but Seeley said in her ruling that the state's per capita emissions are "disproportionately large" and rank in the top six per capita emissions in the United States.

The state also ultimately rested its case on the argument that the state legislature should take up the issue of the environmental law rather than the judiciary—an admission, said Michael Gerrard of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, that the climate science underpinning the plaintiffs' case was indisputable.

"Everyone expected them to put on a more vigorous defense," Gerrard toldThe Washington Post Monday. "And they may have concluded that the underlying science of climate change was so strong that they didn't want to contest it."

During the trial, the plaintiffs testified about their own suffering due to pollution and extreme weather, while climate experts explained the connection between the state's fossil fuel activities and planetary heating, the wildfires and scorching heat that have overwhelmed parts of the West, and other extreme weather.

"Judge Seeley's decision comes at a time when we're seeing the impacts of climate change accelerate—from low streamflows and lake levels to unprecedented heat waves, floods, and wildfires," said Melissa Hornbein, senior attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center, which along with McGarvey Law also represented the plaintiffs. "These are the climate realities the youth plaintiffs and expert witnesses told us about on the stand, while the state disclaimed any responsibility and dismissed them."

"We're relieved that the court recognized that these youth plaintiffs are already feeling the impacts of the climate crisis, as well as the dangers threatening their future if the state doesn't take meaningful action to address it," Hornbein added. "We're also delighted that Judge Seeley recognized Montana's significant role as an emitter on the global stage, as well as its ability—constrained only by a resistant government—to rectify its disproportionate contribution to the climate crisis."

The Sunrise Movement, the youth-led climate action organization, said the ruling is "proof that our generation is unstoppable—we have the power to bring down the fossil fuel industry and win a Green New Deal."

As Common Dreams reported last month, lawsuits around the world have emerged as a key driver of climate action as a wide range of plaintiffs—from children in the U.S. to senior citizens in Switzerland—have argued that their human rights have been violated by the companies and lawmakers that have promoted fossil fuel production despite scientific evidence of the danger it poses.

Out of approximately 2,200 worldwide climate cases, about three-quarters have been filed in the United States, according to the United Nations Environment Program and the Sabin Center, and the number of legal challenges has more than doubled since 2017.

The outcome of the Montana case could "open up the floodgates for more climate lawsuits," said Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said that the next plaintiff to file a case against the fossil fuel industry should be the federal government, to hold companies accountable "for their role in the climate crisis."

"This is a landmark decision establishing enforceable principles of intergenerational justice," said Roger Sullivan, an attorney at McGarvey Law. "Simply stated, the government elected by this generation must abide its obligation to pass on a stable climate system to future generations."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

 

 

Julia Conley

Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Judge Rules in Favor of Montana Youths in Landmark Climate Case

The court found that young people have a constitutional right to a healthful environment and that regulators must be allowed to consider climate impact.

Youth plaintiffs in Held v. State of Montana gathered in June at Pioneer Park in Helena, Mont.Credit...Janie Osborne for The New York Times

 

By Mike Baker

Aug. 14, 2023, 1:48 p.m. ET, from the New York Times

 

A judge in Montana ruled on Monday that young people in the state have a constitutional right to a healthful environment, finding in a landmark case that the state’s failure to consider climate change when evaluating new projects was causing harm.

The case, brought by a group of young Montana residents ranging in age from 5 to 22, is the first of its kind to go to trial in the United States. While the state has contended that Montana’s emissions are minuscule when considered against the rest of the globe’s, the plaintiffs argued that the state must do more to consider how emissions are contributing to droughts, wildfires and other growing risks to a state that cherishes a pristine outdoors.

In her ruling, Kathy Seeley, a district court judge, found that the state’s emissions “have been proven to be a substantial factor” in affecting the climate. Laws that limited the ability of regulators to consider climate effects were unconstitutional, she ruled.

“This is a huge win for Montana, for youth, for democracy and for our climate,” said Julia Olson, the executive director of Our Children’s Trust, which brought the case.

A Record 15 Billion-Dollar Disasters Have Hit US So Far This Year: NOAA

The El Rico Pipe Yard remains submerged as Tulare Lake continues to expand in Corcoran, California on March 30, 2023. (Photo: Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

The tally could rise with the Atlantic hurricane season set to pick up.

by Jessica Corbett, August 8, 2023, from Common Dreams

The United States has already endured 15 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters this year, underscoring the dangers of and need for humanity to combat the fossil fuel-driven planetary emergency. The record pace of pricey extreme weather was announced Tuesday as part of the findings in the latest monthly U.S. climate report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Since recordkeeping began in 1980, the U.S. has experienced 363 weather and climate disasters with damages hitting $1 billion, with a consumer price index (CPI) adjustment to 2023, according to NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). The total cost of those events topped $2.59 trillion.

As of Tuesday, there have been 15 confirmed events with losses exceeding $1 billion including "one flooding event, 13 severe storm events, and one winter storm event," NCEI's related webpage explains. "Overall, these events resulted in the deaths of 113 people and had significant economic effects on the areas impacted. The 1980-2022 annual average is 8.1 events (CPI-adjusted); the annual average for the most recent five years (2018-2022) is 18 events (CPI-adjusted)."

 

While the total damage for the 15 events neared $40 billion, the costliest disasters were early March storms in the South and East ($6.1 billion), a tornado outbreak March 31-April 1 ($5.4 billion), and California flooding ($4.6 billion).

Jonathan Erdman, a senior meteorologist with The Weather Channel, noted Tuesday that "2017 is the full-year record. There were 22 billion-dollar disasters in 2017, responsible for an estimated $383.7 billion in damage, both the most of any year since 1980. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria were responsible for 86% of that damage tally in 2017."

While the Atlantic hurricane season officially begins in June, it tends to pick up in August—meaning this month could increase the billion-dollar disaster tally and put 2023 on track to break the 2017 record.

Florida Todayreported Monday that "there are now five tropical waves out there in the Atlantic the National Hurricane Center is keeping an eye on that are expected to bring some thunderstorms to the Lesser Antilles and the Caribbean this week, but no major tropical activity is expected over the next few days."

AccuWeather meteorologists in March forecast 11-15 named storms this season but last week updated that estimate to 13-17.

Erdman pointed out that "since 1980, America's costliest weather disasters have almost exclusively been hurricanes. For example, 2005's Hurricane Katrina's damage—adjusted for inflation to 2023—was $193.8 billion, almost five times the total of all 15 of 2023's disasters so far. Last year, Hurricane Ian inflicted an estimated $115.2 billion in damage."

In addition to the billion-dollar disasters, other key findings from NOAA's new report include that the year-to-date temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 53°F, or 1.7°F above average, with Florida seeing its warmest January-July period yet while Connecticut, Delaware, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, and New Jersey saw their second-warmest periods.

For just last month, the average temperature across the contiguous U.S. was 75.7°F, or 2.1°F above average, making it the 11th-hottest July in the 129 years recorded. Four states—Arizona, Florida, Maine, and New Mexico—saw their hottest Julys on record.

The recent extreme heat has fueled fresh demands for action from Congress and the White House, with campaigners and even some policymakers pressuring President Joe Biden to stop approving fossil fuel projects and declare a climate emergency.

"We are experiencing extreme weather events across the globe. Heatwaves. Wildfires. Drought. Flooding," Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said on social media Saturday. "President Biden must declare a climate emergency now!"

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

 

 

Jessica Corbett

Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

U.N. Chief Warns of ‘Catastrophe’ With Continued Use of Fossil Fuels

António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, said instead of replacing Russian oil, gas and coal, nations must pivot to clean energy.

António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, at the organization’s headquarters in New York City this month.Credit...Andrew Kelly/Reuters

By Lisa Friedman

March 21, 2022, from the New York Times

WASHINGTON — Countries are “sleepwalking to climate catastrophe” if they continue to rely on fossil fuels, and nations racing to replace Russian oil, gas and coal with their own dirty energy are making matters worse, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres warned on Monday.

The ambitious promises world leaders made last year at a climate summit in Glasgow were “naïve optimism,” Mr. Guterres said. Nations are nowhere near the goal of limiting the average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic impacts increases significantly. The planet has already warmed an average of 1.1 degrees Celsius.

And the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet is continuing to increase. Global emissions are set to rise by 14 percent in the 2020s, and emissions from coal continue to surge, he said.

“The 1.5 degree goal is on life support. It is in intensive care,” Mr. Guterres said in remarks delivered to a summit The Economist is hosting on sustainability via video address.

“We are sleepwalking to climate catastrophe,” he said. “If we continue with more of the same, we can kiss 1.5 goodbye. Even 2 degrees may be out of reach. And that would be catastrophe.”

Mr. Guterres’s speech comes as the European Union is trying to find ways to reduce its dependence on Russian oil and gas, and countries like the United States are scrambling to increase fossil fuel production to stabilize energy markets. President Biden and European leaders have said that the short-term needs will not upend their longer-term vision of shifting to wind, solar and other renewable sources that do not produce dangerous greenhouse gas emissions.

But the U.N. secretary general said he fears that strategy endangers the goal of rapid reduction of fossil fuel burning. Keeping the planet at safe levels means slashing emissions worldwide 45 percent by 2050, scientists have said.

In Glasgow in November world leaders promised to stave off climate change and, for the first time, planned to “phase down” coal — the dirtiest fossil fuel. Leaders from 100 countries also pledged to stop deforestation by 2030, a move considered vital since trees absorb carbon dioxide. The United States, Europe and about 100 other nations also said they would cut methane emissions 30 percent by 2030. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas produced from oil and gas operations.

But there has been almost no progress, Mr. Guterres said. In addition, rich countries most responsible for polluting the planet have not met their obligation to help the poorest countries — already “slammed” by high inflation, rising interest rates and debt — to develop clean energy, he said.

At the same time, he warned, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is upending global energy markets, further undermining climate goals.

“As major economies pursue an ‘all-of-the-above’ strategy to replace Russian fossil fuels, short-term measures might create long-term fossil fuel dependence and close the window to 1.5 degrees,” Mr. Guterres said.

He cautioned countries could become so focused on the immediate need to fill the oil, gas and coal gap “that they neglect or kneecap policies to cut fossil fuel use.”

“This is madness,” he said. “Addiction to fossil fuels is mutually assured destruction.”

Last week the International Energy Agency warned that the world faced its first global energy crisis, and recommended that major economies conserve energy by implementing 10 strategies, from carpooling to traveling by train instead of airplane.

In his speech, Mr. Guterres said wealthy nations should be dismantling coal infrastructure to phase it out completely by 2030, with other nations doing so by 2040. He called for an end to fossil fuel subsidies and a halt to new oil and gas exploration. Mr. Guterres also said private sector financing for coal must end.

“Their support for coal not only could cost the world its climate goals,” he said. “It’s a stupid investment — leading to billions in stranded assets.”

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents oil and gas companies, said in a statement that the industry “can responsibly develop America’s vast resources while at the same time reducing emissions to address climate change.”

President Biden has promised a rapid clean energy transition in the United States but it has not started yet. Legislation he has championed to hasten the shift to renewable energy, the Build Back Better Act, is stalled in Congress. Meanwhile, his plans to stop new oil and gas leasing have faced challenges in the courts.

---

Lisa Friedman reports on federal climate and environmental policy from Washington. She has broken multiple stories about the Trump administration’s efforts to repeal climate change regulations and limit the use of science in policymaking. More about Lisa Friedman

Off the Top of My Head

The Best Democracy May Not Be One Achieved by Elections

by John Lawrence

For a truly democratic system we would have to go back to ancient Greece and the system developed by Aristotle: sortition. Sortition is the selection of a legislative body randomly by lot. If the American House of Representatives truly represented the American people it would be chosen in this way. There is no more representative way of choosing a democratic legislative body. In the ancient Greek legislative body known as the Council of 500, each representative was chosen by lot. If the American House was chosen in this way, it would a) eliminate the need for money in American politics and b) eliminate the need for political parties in American politics. People have been brainwashed to believe that only a government in which there are elections for the representatives is a true democracy. It's not the only or even the best way. Representatives chosen by lot are more representative of the American people than representatives chosen by election. So at least for the purposes of selecting this body, with sortition the two party system would go by the wayside.

So what would this say about the relative merits of a democracy in which the representative body was chosen by lot and a one party system such as the Chinese government. In other words how would a no party system compare to a one party system , and is a no party system more democratic than a one party system. Yes, certainly it would be. But is a two party system such as the US currently has necessarily more democratic than a one party system. In the Chinese system the lowest deliberative body is voted on by the people. Then there are 3 levels of elections. The first is for the municipal people's Congress which elects the people's congresses of provinces which elects the highest level the National People's Congress. If the National People's Congress were to be selected by lot, then the Chinese system would be truly democratic just as the American system would be if the House of Representatives were selected by lot. Based on this analysis one could argue that the Chinese one party system is just as much a version of democracy as the American two party system and that if both systems used sortition instead of elections by vote, both systems would be arguably more democratic. Whether a system is a one party system, a two party system or a multiparty system such as they have in Europe, the various systems should only be compared on the actual results the system is capable of manifesting and how much their various bodies reflect the wishes of the people.

The American system is currently on the brink of systemic failure due to the fact that there is such a great divisive split between the two parties.The American system notably does not always elect the best and brightest candidates. The Chinese system arguably is more merit based than the US system. In the US a clown and no nothing like Trump can be elected and cause great havoc. In fact he almost instigated a complete overthrow of the American system of democracy. People with money or financial backing stand a better chance of being elected than people of merit or good will. The First Amendment allows candidates to lie about virtually anything, and, if they can convince enough voters that their alternative facts are the true facts, they can win elections. While the Chinese system does not represent the ultimate democratic form of government, neither does the American system. Both systems could be reformed to allow more truly representative government and more successful and capable government. In fact in the US if the House of Representatives were formed by sortition and the Senate were formed by voting or sortition based on a pool of candidates that had at least minimal background, experience and educational requirements, the American system would be quite a bit more democratic than it is right now. The ideal system might be one that approaches as closely as possible to a no party system.

Off the Top of My Head

American Democracy Teetering on the Brink

by John Lawrence

So what are the possible outcomes? Let's assume Trump is the Republican nominee. Option 1: Trump is convicted and goes to jail before the 2024 election. In this scenario, Trump will probably lose the election for President. Independents will be aghast. Trump's base will not be able to organize sufficiently to carry out another assault on the seat of American democracy. There will be sporadic outbursts. In jail Trump will not have the media exposure he has outside of jail. Option 2: Trump is indicted multiple times but not convicted before the 2024 election. Trump probably still loses the national election, but is in a position as a free man to organize another insurrection, this time on a much larger level than the one on January 6, 2021. This could amount to civil war. Option 3: Trump loses the election and subsequently goes to jail. This could also result in a dangerous situation because Trump still has access to an outsize megaphone and continue to rile up his base before he goes to jail and cause trouble leading again to a possible civil war.

As long as Trump is a free man, he can continue to foment a revolution. He can continue to advocate for violence towards his perceived enemies, even those that are a legitimate part of the judicial and legal system. He is already attacking Jack Smith, the special counsel, who is prosecuting him on multiple counts regarding January 6 and also the document handling fiasco. Trump continues to insist that the American legal system is not legitimate. He continues to undermine the legitimacy of the rule of law. His followers essentially consist of a cult who want Trump exonerated irrespective of his purported criminality. As long as Trump is free, he will continue to whip up his followers and lead them to the brink of civil war. Who knows if in addition to Trump's calls for revolution, there is also a parallel movement going on to organize for a response to Trump's being convicted and put in jail or if Trump loses the election regardless of whether he has been convicted or not. Trump's followers are bound and determined to put Trump back in the White House by any means necessary. They will do whatever Trump eggs them on to do.

The United States' continued existence as a democracy cannot be taken for granted at this point. The Republican controlled House can throw the US into chaos if they decide not to authorize the budget. That in and of itself could shut the country down. There is a good chance that they will not authorize the continuance of government spending. There are many other ways that they could partner with Trump to bring the country down. Are some elements of the military also in league with Trump? Who knows. It seems that they were on January 6 when they wouldn't send troops to protect the Capitol on a timely basis. Obviously, some people in the military establishment sympathize with Trump. The influence of Fox News and other conservative media continues to amplify Trump's messages. The First Amendment guarantee of free speech enhances Trump's ability to foment a possible civil war. Trump's base who have grievances going back to loss of the Civil War combined with Trump's perceived grievances reinforce each other. An aggrieved leader and his aggrieved followers represent a volatile mixture

Trump almost succeeded in overturning the American government on January 6. Only Mike Pence stood in his way. Notably, firearms were not a part of the insurrectionists' arsenal as they invaded the Capitol. Marjorie Taylor Greene has said that next time they would bring their fire arms. Could another mob do what they did on January 6, and also be successful at it? Or could they be successful at the State level? These are tenuous times during which a number of scenarios involving Trump trying to take over the American government could play out. His base will never accept the outcomes of any indictments or even convictions. How will they react when he is sentenced to jail for the rest of his life? Or will the prosecutors chicken out when it comes to conviction and putting Trump in jail. If Trump is successful in fomenting a civil war, an unlimited right of Free Speech will be largely to blame. Can Trump be sentenced to shutting his mouth?

Gazing into the future should really make us sweat

 

Ibrahim Rayintakath

 

By David Wallace-Wells Opinion Writer, New York Times, August 2, 2023

On the last day of July, Phoenix finally registered a temperature high below 110 degrees Fahrenheit — the first time that had happened in 31 days. The temperature of pavement in the city measured up to 180 degrees, and local burn units are full of patients who simply fell to the ground and were burned, as though Maricopa County’s whole surface were a skillet on the stove. The I.C.U.s are filling up, too, and the region’s iconic saguaro cactuses are crumpling and collapsing in the heat. On the same day last week that President Biden offered only a few meek remarks about extreme heat and just a few million dollars in new funding for heat forecasting, the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, leaned into a typically vehement formulation. “The era of global warming has ended,” he said. “The era of global boiling has arrived.”

It was, worldwide, the hottest month on record. June was the hottest June on record. August appears poised to be the hottest August. Every single day for four straight weeks, as Canada burned and Sicily burned and Algeria burned, global temperatures surpassed the daily record set in 2016 and matched last summer, when 61,000 Europeans are estimated to have died as a result of the heat.

But what else do you expect as greenhouse gas emissions continue? On opposite ends of the planet, temperatures recorded in the North Atlantic and sea ice measured near the South Pole, tracked so far from recent trends that you might embarrass yourself simply stating the size of the anomaly — a four sigma event in the temperatures of the North Atlantic, meaning that, given a stable climate and a normal distribution of chance, it should be expected about once every few hundred years and perhaps a six sigma event for Antarctic sea ice, meaning we should expect to see it, at least according to the simplified math, only once every 7.5 million years.

At a certain point, that math just gets silly, telling you perhaps more about the improper way you might have structured the comparison than about the size of the anomaly itself. But you can measure the anomalies in other ways, such as by noting the hot-tub ocean temperatures off the Florida Keys, a year’s worth of rain falling in 36 hours in parts of Beijing or 100-degree temperatures in the mountains of Chile or that there is an Argentina-size gap between this year’s Antarctic sea ice and the typical extent. And the fact that we are seeing these gob-smacking anomalies at all is a sign that the historical framework implied by terms like “seven sigma” and “500-year storm,” imperfect in the best of times, no longer applies to the world we live in now.

The environmental journalist Juliet Eilperin called the ocean temperatures “beyond belief”; The Washington Post reported that they had “baffled scientists.” Contemplating the trajectory of Arctic sea ice, the atmospheric scientist Zack Labe wrote memorably about how often he finds himself answering questions about the state of the science these days by saying, “I don’t know.” And for all the uncertainty, many of those watching the changes unfold have a queasy intuition that we may be entering a new climatic regime — and perhaps inching closer to some quite concerning tipping points.

“Shocking but not really surprising,” is how NASA’s Gavin Schmidt put it. “Even the things that are unprecedented are not surprising.” That is where we are all living now, in a climate that is both shocking and unsurprising. For several decades, those anxious about global warming have lived in fear of climate prophecies. We are beginning to simply live within them, a process that looks from some vantages like a horror story and from others surprisingly normal.

There are different ways to measure the changes, some less hair-raising than others. In a report published July 25, the World Weather Attribution network examined recent heat waves in the United States, Europe and China, finding that all but the Chinese event would have been impossible without climate change. In a stable, prewarming climate, the heat wave that baked China would have happened once every 250 years; now, the network said, it should be expected every five years. The episodes in Europe and North America, once impossible, should be expected once every 10 to 15 years. I’d bet on these frequencies being underestimates. Last summer there were 100 million Americans under heat advisories, and heat across Europe was called record-breaking then, as well. (On British television, a broadcaster complained that her meteorologist guest was being too gloomy about the heat; “I want us to be happy about the weather,” she said. In the weeks that followed, several thousand Britons died in the heat.)

But the World Weather Attribution report also characterized the heat waves in another way, incorporating a critique made by Patrick Brown of the Breakthrough Institute last summer to measure the simple size of the temperature anomaly attributable to climate change, too. By this metric, the network found, warming had added just one degree Celsius to the temperatures in China, two degrees to the heat waves in North America and two and a half degrees to southern Europe’s.

The coolheaded climate scientist Zeke Hausfather tried to quickly contextualize the recent string of anomalies to show that, in fact, they were, while alarming, nevertheless within the range of expected outcomes, given the present level of global warming. Well, at least two of the three anomalies he examined — the Antarctic sea ice was still quite off the charts. (About those, one scientist told The Guardian that “something weird is going on”; another said that the abrupt changes were “very much outside our understanding of this system.”)

But even if, in most cases, the science is vindicated by this summer’s extremes, that isn’t ultimately all that reassuring. Forecasts for warming have long scared many of those who really looked at them, and so it’s not exactly comfortable to know that we are merely coasting along the high end of those forecasts today. As the climate stalwart Bill McKibben put it to me recently, when it comes to global warming, “‘I told you so’ are the four least satisfying words in the language.”

“The speed of us passing limits is mind-bending,” wrote the Texas A&M atmospheric scientist Andrew Dessler, with whom Hausfather shares a Substack, in a short reflection on why climate impacts seemed to be escalating so quickly. “When the Earth warms the next 0.1 degrees Celsius, an entirely new group of thresholds will be passed, bringing great harms to entirely different groups of people,” he wrote. “Many of them will not expect it, having been lulled into complacency by the fact that they hadn’t been negatively impacted by warming up to then. Is that you?”

As the extreme events have piled up this summer, I keep returning to a conversation I had last fall with the Texas Tech atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a lead author of several U.S. National Climate Assessments and the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy.

“The good news is we have implemented policies that are significantly bringing down the projected global average temperature change,” she said, describing a suite of projections now showing expected temperature rise this century of two to three degrees Celsius rather than four to five. But the bad news was that we had been “systematically underestimating the rate and magnitude of extremes.” Even if temperature rise is limited to two degrees, she said, “the extremes might be what you would have projected for four to five.”

In a long essay I published soon after that conversation, I emphasized that good news — that thanks to the technological and economic miracle of renewables, a global political awakening and an understanding that some earlier assumptions about future energy use were too pessimistic, we had about cut in half our expectations of warming in less than a decade.

This summer, I’ve been thinking more about her bad news — that even accounting for rapid global decarbonization and a drastic cut in expected global temperature rise, we may still end up in a world defined by impacts long called catastrophic. For now, it seems scary enough to say, we don’t really know.

 

Off the Top of My Head

Toxic Masculinity

by John Lawrence

Traditional masculine traits are dominance, aggression, emotional repression, violence. These traits have been historically mostly expressed in terms of the military. In the First World War, many of the participants were more than eager to cover themselves in glory by proving their manhood in combat. Instead many of them ended up dying miserable deaths in muddy trenches or hung from barbed wire. The persistence of war in the human experience can be laid squarely at the feet of men and their interpretation of what is manly in my opinion. In fact peace or even world peace is seen as a feminine idea. Most traditional men would not consider peace in the form of world wide understanding and compassion even possible because it would be based on feminine values. The only peace even possible in the traditional male mind is "peace through strength." Traditional male values prevent even an acknowledgment of what peace would really consist of because it would consist of emotional values that are traditionally feminine. The predominant attitude is that joining the military will "make a man out of you." A real man is only supposed to express a limited and actually stunted set of emotions and certainly is not supposed to express any vulnerabilities. Physical force or the threat of force is acceptable in a man's world. Understanding, cooperation and diplomacy are not.

Traditional male activities are beer drinking (a man can hold his liquor), fast car racing or pickup driving (showing dominance by means of a powerful machine), participation in or spectating at competitive sports, participation in or admiration of the military. Dominance, competitiveness, the use or threat of violence, pugnaciousness, toughness, looking down on men who don't conform to this stereotype - these are all traditional male traits. None of these traits are physically or mentally healthy. For instance, holding your liquor can lead to cirrhosis of the liver. Emotional repressiveness can lead to an inability to relate to women even though some women are attracted to the traditional male type. In fact it can be argued that Trump's popularity is a result of his expression of traditional male values. In an article in FiveThirtyEight entitled With His Version of Masculinity, we find this:

But the quest to seem masculine is particularly complicated in this year’s GOP primary because Trump has been so successful at projecting a macho image that Republican voters have responded to. This masculine identity isn’t about demonstrations of physical prowess — nobody talks about how far Trump can run or whether he can bench-press a certain weight. His version of manliness is fueled by other kinds of behavior — including his belittling of other candidates, aggression toward women, “tell it like it is and don’t apologize” affect — that are associated with traditional ideas about how a man should behave. The other GOP candidates largely aren’t trying to imitate those aspects of Trump’s macho identity — but experts told us that without Trump’s signature belligerence, his version of masculinity might not resonate as much. And that means his rivals may have an especially difficult time convincing the GOP primary electorate that they’re as strong a leader as Trump.

“In this view of masculinity, men are supposed to be dominant, powerful, aggressive,” said Theresa Vescio, a professor of psychology at Penn State University who studies masculinity. “And the more that people — both men and women — think that good men should be high in power, status, dominance and toughness, the more they say that’s what a man is, the more they support Trump.”

It might seem strange to some that a man who is not particularly physically fit or athletic, never served in the military and eats junk food is an exemplary manifestation of manhood. It seems ridiculous that Trump's penchant for belittling his opponents is seen by some as "manly." That his getting away with stiffing contractors, creditors and not paying taxes are manly traits. But somehow Trump's unwillingness to apologize about anything or ever admit he did anything wrong is seen by some Republicans as the counter to "liberal values" like having compassion and respect for people who disagree with you. Instead Trump calls his detractors and competitors names, assails them as weaklings and asserts his macho masculinity while he hides behind a bevy of lawyers and uses his money to shield himself from any negative consequences. His seeming ability to get away with stuff is seen as quintessentially masculine. The article continues:

These are the voters who are especially likely to find Trump’s version of masculinity appealing. Trump is particularly effective at drawing on his supporters’ fears about threats to traditional masculinity, while simultaneously building himself up as a paragon of that version of manliness, according to the experts we spoke with. His image as president was aggressively militant, threatening other world leaders and avoiding compromise. And his refusal to apologize for a well-documented track record of sexual harassment and assault makes him seem authentically masculine and powerful to some voters, according to Dan Cassino, a political scientist at Fairleigh Dickinson University who studies male gender identity. “It’s as much about tearing others down as it is about building others up,” Cassino says. “The insults, the misogynistic behavior — these are very negative masculine traits but he’s willing to assert them in a way others aren’t, and that means nobody thinks he’s lying about who he is.”

By projecting an image of himself as a powerful, strong, dominant man who’s willing to shrug away modern conventions around how men and women should behave, Trump has reached people who support traditional gender hierarchies. “There are a lot of conservatives — men but some women too — in this country who increasingly feel like they’re on the outside looking in, while liberals run things,” said Paul Elliott Johnson, a professor of communication at the University of Pittsburgh who studies gender and politics. “Trump invites those people to feel victimized and then says, ‘I will fix the problem.’”

As detrimental to society in general as these toxic traditional masculine values are, they will even probably contribute to the annihilation of the human race altogether either through war or the ignoring of climate change. There is not even any talk of world peace any more. It's not even on anyone's radar. The militarization of the American psyche is complete. The Peace Corps is never even mentioned in the media. Most people would not even know that it exists. The Peace Corps represents the feminine values of help and caring for those less fortunate. The traditional male simply looks upon them as losers in the game of life, probably because of their inferiority to white males. As traditional white males, they believe that they have simply outcompeted those who come from as Trump has termed them, "shithole countries."  Let people with feminine values agonize over them and their claims that rich white men should help them out with their situations due to climate change. Macho men would scoff at their suggestions that the rich nations should bear the cost of ameliorating the effects of global warming or as U.N. chief António Guterres declared, "global boiling." As Trump and other macho men might say, "suck it up." There will probably never be world peace until women run the world. And where would that leave the traditional man and his toxic values? Healthy manhood, in my humble opinion, should be nothing more nor less than loving, supporting and cherishing the girls and women in our lives whether they be girlfriends, lovers, wives, daughters, mothers or grandmothers. All the rest of the positive values a man can manifest are simply personhood values which can be exemplified by both sexes.

Climate Crisis ‘Out of Control’ as Global Temperature Breaks Record for 3rd Time in 4 Days

A woman shelters under a bag during a heatwave in Beijing on July 7, 2023. (Photo: Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

Thursday's record came after the revelation that the seven-day stretch ending Wednesday was also the hottest week in at least 44 years.

by Olivia Rosane, July 7, 2023, from Common Dreams

For the third time in just four days, the Earth sweated through its unofficial hottest day on record Thursday.

The average global temperature reached 17.23°C, or 63°F, on July 6, up from the record set Monday, surpassed Tuesday, and matched Wednesday, according to data from the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer. Thursday's record came after the revelation that the seven-day stretch ending Wednesday was also the hottest week in at least 44 years.

"Climate change is out of control," United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in response to Monday's and Tuesday's records, as The Associated Press reported. "If we persist in delaying key measures that are needed, I think we are moving into a catastrophic situation."

Scientists attribute the high temperatures to a combination of global heating caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels and an El Niño event officially declared by the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization Tuesday.

"Such records are the predictable consequence of a short-term El Niño temperature boost coming on top of the long-term global warming trend due to mankind's greenhouse gas emissions."

Earth's temperature reached 17.01°C, or 62.62°F, Monday and then 17.18°C, or 62.9°F, Tuesday, according to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). While these temperatures are the hottest since record-keeping began in 1979, The Washington Post explained, data from ice cores and tree rings indicate that they haven't been experienced on Earth since the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago, when sea levels were around 18 feet higher. The week ending Wednesday was also 0.08°F, or 0.04°C, warmer than any in the record books, according to AP.

"Such records are the predictable consequence of a short-term El Niño temperature boost coming on top of the long-term global warming trend due to mankind's greenhouse gas emissions," lead Berkeley Earth scientist Robert Rohde tweeted in response to Thursday's new record.

The University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer uses both temperature readings from the surface, air balloons, and satellites, along with NCEP forecast data, to provide daily average two-meter air temperatures, according to The Guardian.

The records it reports are considered "unofficial" by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) because they rely partly on computer models, AP explained, but the agency did not deny the impact of the climate emergency and El Niño on recent extremes.

"Although NOAA cannot validate the methodology or conclusion of the University of Maine analysis, we recognize that we are in a warm period due to climate change," NOAA said in a statement reported by AP.

There are also other indicators speaking to spiking temperatures: The European Union's Copernicus ECMWF ERA5 dataset put Monday's mean temperature at a record 16.88°C and Tuesday's at a new record temperature of 17.03°C.

June was also the warmest June on record, according to a report from the E.U.'s Copernicus Climate Change Service released Thursday, with temperatures more than 0.5°C above the 1991-2020 average. Sea surface temperatures also broke monthly records for both May and June, and Antarctic sea ice dwindled to 17% below average for a record low for June.

"We are in uncharted territory and we can expect more records to fall as El Niño develops further and these impacts will extend into 2024," Chris Hewitt, WMO Director of Climate Services, said in a statement responding to the report. "This is worrying news for the planet."

Scientists predict that the record breaking will continue into July, which is usually the warmest month of the year.

"Chances are that the month of July will be the warmest ever, and with it the hottest month ever," Karsten Haustein, a research fellow in atmospheric radiation at Leipzig University, told The Guardian, clarifying that "ever" meant in the last 120,000 years.

"I've never seen anything like it. I've been having heart palpitations because of the heat. I'm starting to think seriously that I'm going to leave Timbuktu."

The records aren't just numbers. They have been felt in extreme heatwaves around the globe from Texas to China. Cities in China are opening air raid shelters to help people hide from heat that has already turned deadly, APreported Friday, and temperatures in Beijing surpassed 35°C for more than nine days in a row for the first time since 1961.

Temperatures were also high in Timbuktu, Mali.

"Usually, at night it's a bit cool even during the hot season. But this year, even at night, it's been hot—I've never seen anything like it," 50-year-old Fatoumata Arby toldAP. "I've been having heart palpitations because of the heat. I'm starting to think seriously that I'm going to leave Timbuktu."

Beyond high temperatures, the impacts of the climate emergency continue to be felt in other ways. In an update Thursday, Canadian officials said the country's record-breaking wildfire season—which has sent toxic smoke pouring across the border in recent weeks—continues, with nearly 5,000 people forced from their homes and more than 8.8 million hectares of forest burned, CBC News reported. That's nearly 11 times the average hectares burned in the last decade.

"This number is literally off the charts," Michael Norton, director of the Northern Forestry Centre with the Canadian Forest Service at NRCan, said during a press conference reported by Politico, "with at least three more months left in the active wildfire season."

Officials say the climate emergency is playing a major role in the unprecedented season.

"This summer, we are witnessing the effects of climate change first-hand as Canada continues to experience more intense and frequent severe weather events," Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam said in a briefing reported by CBC News.

In Pakistan, meanwhile, heavy monsoon rains have killed at least 50 people in two weeks, Al Jazeera reported Friday. The deluge comes a year after devastating flooding in Pakistan swallowed a third of the country and claimed more than 1,700 lives. Pakistan contributes less than 1% to global greenhouse gas emissions, but it is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, and scientists said that rising temperatures made last year's disaster more likely.

"Only when we bring carbon emissions to zero does the warming stop."

In response to news of broken records and weather extremes, University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann said people should not be paralyzed with fear.

"Rather than being 'terrified' by this expected consequence of human-caused warming, we should be motivated to act—in particular, holding politicians accountable at the ballot box," he tweeted. "Only when we bring carbon emissions to zero does the warming stop."

There's a chance that living through this summer of extremes could help with that motivation.

"The issue of climate change doesn't often get its 15 minutes of fame. When it does, it's usually tied to something abstract like a scientific report or a meeting of politicians that most people can't relate to," George Mason University climate communications professor Ed Maibach told AP.

"Feeling the heat—and breathing the wildfire smoke, as so many of us in the Eastern U.S. and Canada have been doing for the past month—is a tangible shared public experience that can be used to focus the public conversation," he said.

 

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Olivia Rosane

Olivia Rosane is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Off the Top of My Head

Barbie and Taylor Swift Prop Up US Economy

by John Lawrence

The Federal Reserve has credited Barbie and Taylor Swift with propping up the US economy. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia announced this month that Taylor Swift's tour helped boost travel and tourism in the region, a claim also made by several other U.S. cities regarding the musician's widely popular concerts. The US consumer is amusing itself to death. Meanwhile, the earth is burning up or in fact boiling. One would think that, if the climate situation were so dire, there would be an 'all hands on deck' effort to fight the war on climate change. But, nope, Americans are propping up the economy and in so doing are contributing even more fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere thus hastening rather than retarding climate change. Even as some American cities - namely Phoenix, Las Vegas and Palm Springs - are sweltering under temperatures greater than 110 degrees Fahrenheit, even with the handwriting on the wall, Americans are dealing with this crisis by going to the movies and to Taylor Swift concerts. Taylor had better beware that she may get a container of coke thrown at her or even chicken nuggets while she struts about the stage. Cardi B got so mad when a "fan" threw her drink at her that she threw her microphone at the fan.

Newsflash: Americans attending Taylor Swift concerts aren't the same Americans who fought World War II. The era of Americans foregoing consumer delights in order to commit themselves to a long hard slog in the name of world peace, freedom and democracy is over. In fact, politically speaking, a major portion of Americans, not a majority hopefully, would rather be entertained by a clown like Trump than to have to ask themselves what they can do for their country as John F. Kennedy suggested. "Ask not what your country can do for you," Kennedy intoned. Well, that question has been answered. What this country can do for Americans is to provide them with entertainment like Barbie and Taylor Swift. And "what you can do for America" is to go to the movies and attend concerts spending your money in order to keep the economy afloat.

The U.N. chief issued a stark warning on climate change this week: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,” António Guterres declared in a news briefing, as scientists confirmed that July is set to become Earth’s hottest month on record. But, boiling or not, most Americans just want to be entertained and to consume all the merchandise that goes with it. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have been moving markets, quite literally. The Federal Reserve has tracked the striking effect of Taylor Swift's tour on host cities. One analysis estimates it could generate almost $5 billion in global revenue. When Beyoncé comes to town, hotels, hair stylists and bartenders all get a boost, according to Yelp. "Despite the slowing recovery in tourism in the region overall, one contact highlighted that May was the strongest month for hotel revenue in Philadelphia since the onset of the pandemic, in large part due to an influx of guests for the Taylor Swift concerts in the city," the [Federal] reserve wrote in the Beige Book, which is published by the regional banks to share information about the state of the economy.

Have Americans degenerated to the point that when given a choice between letting the earth boil and become unfit for human habitation and entertaining themselves, they would choose to entertain themselves. This is literally "amusing ourselves to death." Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. Postman sees television's entertainment value as a present-day "soma", the fictitious pleasure drug in Brave New World, by means of which the citizens' rights are exchanged for consumers' entertainment. Postman was on to something. In the current scenario, though, citizens' responsibilities are being exchanged for consumers' entertainment. In America, as we have been promised, our only responsibility is to enjoy our freedom even if that means that we succumb to the future of a boiling earth.

Off the Top of My Head

How to Turn the US From a Two Party System into a Multi-Party System

by John Lawrence

Very simply by changing from a first past the post (fptp) system in which the candidate with the highest number of votes wins to approval voting. In the first past the post system a voter can only vote for one of the candidates who are running. In the approval voting system a voter can vote for more than one candidate. In both cases the candidate with the highest number of votes wins. Taking Presidential elections as an example, the fptp system generates the 2 party system. Third party candidates mess up the system because they take votes away from the party they are most closely associated with. Ross Perot took the 1992 election away from George H W Bush since some voters most closely associated with the Republican party voted for Perot while most Democrats voted for Clinton. The second choice of most Perot voters was probably George H W Bush. Perot took 19% of the vote. Clinton won with 43% of the vote, and Bush lost with 37% of the vote. If Perot had not been in the race, Bush probably would have won. If the fptp voting system had been replaced with approval voting, voters could have voted for Bush and Perot. In that case Perot still wouldn't have won, but he wouldn't have taken votes away from Bush. For example if all the voters voting for Perot had Bush as their second favorite and voted for both candidates, Bush would have had 19% more votes thus winning the election. Perot would still have 19% of the vote and Clinton would still have had 43% of the vote, but Bush would have won having garnered 37 + 19 = 56% of the vote!

Making this simple change in the US voting system at all levels would result in a flourishing of third, fourth and fifth parties. These parties would not take votes away from the winners of the election, but would give information about which alternatives were on voters' minds in addition to the platforms presented by the major parties. Eventually, one of the multitude of parties might even replace one of the two major parties. This change of voting systems would let a multitude of parties and ideas flourish instead of cleaving all voter concerns into two parties. It would result in a loss of power for the 2 major parties and do much to decrease the divisiveness in American politics. It would allow real participation by minorities in American politics. The fptp system encourages the division of American voters into two camps in a system where hate and divisiveness can flourish. Approval voting would eliminate the possibility of third party candidates being spoilers in elections and taking votes away from the candidate who would have won if the third party candidate had not been running.

The change from the fptp system to the approval system could be done very simply. Nothing else about the American system would need to be changed, not the ballots, not the counting of votes. The only change on the ballot would be from "vote for one" to "vote for more than one." This change would encourage a multiplicity of candidates and viewpoints and would enrich the American political system. Third parties would be welcomed instead of feared. It would also tend to diminish the role of money in politics as the two party system encourages wealthy donors to give to only one of the two parties. If a viable multi-party system were in place, they would need to spread their money among a multiplicity of parties. Parties with a small number of supporters would be in the position of adding to their membership and growing into major parties based on their ideas and not on their war chests. There are many other improvements that could be made to the American democratic system, but none could be implemented more simply and have such far reaching results. And it doesn't mention in the Constitution which voting system should be used.

'Climate Upheaval': Wildfires Kill Dozens Across Mediterranean

Flames engulf the village of Gennadi, Greece on July 25, 2023. (Photo: Christoph Reichwein/picture alliance via Getty Images)

At least nine nations in northern Africa and southern Europe are struggling to contain blazes. Meanwhile, policymakers are still allowing corporate interests to pour more fossil fuels onto the raging fire of climate chaos.

by Kenny Stancil, July 26, 2023, from Common Dreams

Algeria, Croatia, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia, and Turkey.

What do these nine countries have in common? All of them are currently battling deadly infernos made worse by the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.

And yet, governments worldwide continue to greenlight new coal, oil, and gas production—exacerbating planet-heating pollution and ensuring that heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather disasters will increase in frequency, duration, and intensity.

Algeria and Tunisia

In Algeria, roughly 8,000 firefighters on Tuesday struggled to control conflagrations burning across 15 provinces in the country's drought-stricken north, where temperatures reached 122°F. The fires, which prompted the evacuation of more than 1,500 people, have killed at least 34 individuals so far.

"Witnesses described fleeing walls of flames that raged 'like a blowtorch,' destroying homes and coastal resorts and turning vast forest areas into blackened wastelands," The Guardian reported.

Amid heavy winds, two border crossings with neighboring Tunisia have been closed, as authorities there grapple with fires burning in the northwestern region of Tabarka.

Croatia

In Croatia, firefighters on Tuesday worked to contain blazes spreading just south of Dubrovnik, a major tourist destination. The task has been made more difficult by fierce winds in the area, which are keeping firefighting aircraft grounded.

France

In France, hundreds of firefighters were mobilized Tuesday in an attempt to control wildfires near the Nice international airport and on the outskirts of Arles.

Greece

In Greece, more than 20,000 people have been evacuated in recent days from homes and hotels as wildfires rage on the island of Rhodes.

At least three people have died so far, including two pilots whose firefighting plane crashed on Tuesday.

Italy

Italy has been pummeled by a combination of storms in the north, which killed at least seven people on Tuesday, and wildfires in the south, which have also led to multiple deaths.

"While the north was drenched, the heatwave across the south persisted, with temperatures of 47.6°C (117°F) recorded in the eastern Sicilian city of Catania on Monday," The Guardian reported. "The bodies of two people in [their] 70s were found in a house destroyed by the flames, while an 88-year-old woman was found near the Sicilian city of Palermo."

"Italian firefighters said they tackled nearly 1,400 fires between Sunday and Tuesday, including 650 in Sicily and 390 in Calabria, the southern mainland region where a bedridden 98-year-old man was killed as fire consumed his home," the newspaper noted.

On social media, Sicily's civil protection minister Nello Musumeci wrote: "We are experiencing in Italy one of the most complicated days in recent decades—rainstorms, tornadoes, and giant hail in the north, and scorching heat and devastating fires in the center and south. The climate upheaval that has hit our country demands of us all... a change of attitude."

Portugal

In Portugal, hundreds of firefighters scrambled Tuesday to extinguish blazes near Cascais, another popular tourist destination. The country is already hard-hit by drought, and wind gusts are accelerating the spread of flames.

Spain

A fast-moving wildfire in the heart of the Spanish island of Gran Canaria prompted authorities to order evacuations, close roads, and deploy dozens of firefighters and several helicopters on Tuesday.

Turkey

In Turkey, officials on Tuesday evacuated a hospital and a dozen homes in the coastal town of Kemer, where firefighters continued to battle flames.

Europe is the fastest-warming continent on the planet, which has already endured 1.3°C of temperature rise since the late 1800s. July has seen the hottest day and week in recorded history and is on pace to be the hottest month ever. 2023 will likely go down as the hottest year ever, though the potential record is not expected to last long because newly arrived El Niño conditions are projected to make 2024 even hotter.

Last year's brutal heatwaves killed more than 61,000 people in Europe alone. Existing policies put the world on track for up to 2.9°C of temperature rise by the end of the century, prompting United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to call business-as-usual a civilizational "death sentence."

"Most people still don't know what peril they are in," climate scientist Peter Kalmus tweeted last week. "This will be the coolest summer for the rest of your life, and that shouldn't be just a meme—it should be actually terrifying. The only path out of this heat nightmare is to end fossil fuels ASAP."

"Keep in mind that climate catastrophe is caused by those who run the fossil fuel industry, who have lied and blocked action for decades," he added. "It will get far, far worse until we stop them. We can stop them, but we need to get angry, take risks, and do it!"

 

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Kenny Stancil

Kenny Stancil is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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