Bill McKibben at Yes! magazine writes—Climate Change Is Scary—Not the Green New Deal. It’s very clear that conservatives have one plan for dealing with the popularity of the Green New Deal: scaring the hell out of people:
Myron Ebell of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, the man who led the drive to pull America out of the Paris climate accords, said the other day that the Green New Deal was a “back-to-the-dark-ages manifesto.” That’s language worth thinking about, coming from perhaps the Right’s most influential spokesman on climate change.
Ebell’s complaint (and that of the rest of the Right) is that the set of proposals to address climate change and economic inequality put forth last week by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey would do too much, and cost too much. Indeed, he describes the Green New Deal this way: “It calls for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in 10 years, ‘upgrading all existing buildings’, and replacing our vehicle fleet with electric cars and more mass transit. And turning our energy economy upside down must be accomplished while ending historic income inequities and oppression of disadvantaged groups.” All of which sounds good not just to me, but to most people: Polling for the Green New Deal is through the roof, especially among young people so ably organized by the Sunrise Movement.
But even if ending historic oppression doesn’t catch your fancy, it’s not a return to the Dark Ages.
A return to the Dark Ages is what happened in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit: Survivors dying in the convention center of a modern American city, locals organizing a makeshift “navy” to try to pluck people from rooftops after levees collapsed.
A return to the Dark Ages is what happened in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, when most of the island was literally dark for months as workers struggled to rebuild power lines.
A return to the Dark Ages is what happened in California last fall, when old people burned to death in their cars while stuck in traffic jams trying to flee deadly wildfires.
Heather Digby Parton at Salon writes—So much for the deep-state coup: Andrew McCabe told Congress he was investigating Trump:
The big revelation in the book is that after Trump fired Comey, which everyone knew was because of the Russia investigation, McCabe opened a counter-intelligence investigation and an obstruction of justice investigation into the president of the United States, because of his suspicious behavior during the campaign and in the White House. And -- surprise -- it turns out that McCabe and Rosenstein briefed the Gang of Eight, which includes the leadership of both parties in congress and the chairs and Ranking Members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. [...]
In his book, McCabe writes:
After reminding the committee of how this investigation began, I told them of additional steps we had taken. No one interrupted. No one pushed back. The mood in the room was sober. Schumer had been nodding his head and looking at me very directly throughout the brief. On McConnell's side of the table, I sensed a great deal of resignation.
Rosenstein then took over the meeting and told the assembled officials that he was appointing Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate the Trump campaign's apparent ties to Russia.
What this means is that these members of Congress have known from the beginning that the DOJ and the FBI had opened these two investigations because of the president's suspicious behavior, and that they formed the basis for the Special Counsel's investigation. If McCabe is right, and one of the little birdies in the meeting whispered in the president's ear, he knew it right away too.
Margaret Klein Salamon at Truthout writes—It’s Possible to Face Climate Horrors and Still Find Hope:
In July 2017, David Wallace-Wells broke through the iron curtain of euphemism, optimism and gradualism, pulled no punches and told the truth with the publication of his article “The Uninhabitable Earth” in New York Magazine. Wallace-Wells explored some of the worst-case scenarios of climate change in detail, making the potential nightmare of civilizational collapse and total destruction of our life-support system vivid and real for readers. No false optimism, only rigorous journalistic inquiry and true horror. Its publication caused an uproar amongst “climate communicators” — “You aren’t supposed to tell the whole truth,” they exclaimed — “it turns people off!” And yet people were not turned off. “The Uninhabitable Earth” became the most-read New York Magazine article in history, and was a key inflection point for the climate movement.
In his brand new book released this week, The Uninhabitable Earth; Life After Warming, Wallace-Wells has a chance to again transform, and critically, expand this conversation.
In his book, unlike his article, Wallace-Wells looks at the most likely outcomes. For example, Wallace-Wells describes how even the best-case scenarios for climate change will involve millions of deaths, and tens or hundreds of millions of refugees. We are looking at a “best-case outcome … death and suffering at the scale of twenty-five Holocausts.” The book is grim but gripping; an encyclopedic but also narratively compelling exploration of the many ways that climate change will displace, flood, kill, starve, dehydrate and impoverish billions, while enabling the rise of “Climate Leviathan” authoritarian governments.
In his op-ed column—Virginia legislators claimed a bill to allow appeals from people convicted by junk science was too expensive—Radley Balko at The Washington Post deplores the deep-sixing of a move that would have helped innocent people convicted by flawed forensic science:
As we have previously discussed here, it can be extraordinarily difficult for people convicted because of bad forensics to appeal their convictions. First, the courts are loath to admit their mistakes, so it’s hard to even get an appeals court to concede that a field of forensics or a specific practitioner that it has already approved has since been discredited. Second, both state and federal courts have imposed deadlines on people who find new, potentially exculpatory evidence. Generally, you must file your petition within a year of the time the evidence could have reasonably been discovered. Since the discrediting of forensics fields or specific actors tends to be a gradual process, those convicted are often trapped: If you file before the court agrees that a consensus has been reached that you were convicted with junk science, you’ll not only lose; you’ll also be prevented from making the same claim later once a clear consensus has been reached. But if you wait too long, you risk missing your one-year window to file.
That’s where bills like the proposed law in Virginia can provide some relief. They give defendants a new path to a new trail via a “junk science writ.” Texas was the first state to pass a law like this, after the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham — who was likely innocent — made national headlines. The idea is to give the convicted the opportunity to shortcut the procedural barriers if they can show they were convicted with faulty forensic evidence.
The Innocence Project estimates that faulty forensic science plays a role in about a quarter of wrongful convictions. The National Registry of Exonerations lists 51 Virginians who have been exonerated since 1989. Ten were convicted at least in part because of faulty or fraudulent forensic evidence. A half-million dollars seems like a pretty paltry amount to make sure there aren’t more.
Amy Davidson Sorkin at The New Yorker writes—Does Congress Care About Trump’s Emergency?
The states, in their lawsuit, emphasized that they, at least, cared about Congress’s role, making the point multiple times: “Contrary to the will of Congress, the President has used the pretext of a manufactured ‘crisis’ of unlawful immigration to declare a national emergency”; “Congress has repeatedly rebuffed the President’s insistence to fund a border wall”; “Use of those additional federal funds for the construction of a border wall is contrary to Congress’s intent”; “The thwarting of congressional intent to fund a vanity project . . . cries out for judicial intervention.”
Congress has to show that it cares now, too. Before Trump made his declaration, various Republican senators, including Mitch McConnell, the Majority Leader, Susan Collins, of Maine, and Ted Cruz, of Texas, said that they hoped he wouldn’t do so, or at least that they had concerns about his doing so. But, just before the Senate voted on the budget deal, McConnell announced that he would go along with such a declaration. This weekend, when Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, was asked on “Face the Nation” whether Congress had ceded too much power to the President, he said, “I think that every member of Congress has watched three Presidents send troops to the border. Bush, Obama, now Trump. Not one of us have complained about deploying forces to the border to secure the border. It’s pretty hard for me to understand the legal difference between sending troops and having them build a barrier.” The silence was not as complete as Graham suggested, but what is striking is that he saw a record of complacency as a promise of future passivity on the part of the senators rather than as a habit that it was time for the senators to give up.
Garry Wills at The Washington Post writes—The Catholic Church is bursting with secrets. Investigating one will unravel them all:
The gay priest is required, generally, to uphold the official teaching of his church and of his superiors, making him a collaborator in the suppression of his gay brothers and sisters outside the clergy. In this way, without intending to, the victimized become victimizers. How does that play out, to take an example, in the confessional? If a penitent confesses homosexual activity to a gay priest, does the priest channel God’s forgiveness of a sin that he does not himself consider a sin? This is just one of the many ways in which we Catholics, if we refrain from criticizing this particular stance of our church, contribute to the persecution of the LGBTQ community.
The deepest irony is that a priest who is required to go against his nature is told that he must do this because of “natural law.” The church’s quaint theory of natural law is that the first biological use of an activity is the only permissible use of that activity. If the biological use of sex is for procreation, any other use is “against nature.”
The absurdity of this view is made clear by considering the first biological use for eating: the sustenance of life. If every other use of nutrition is against nature, then any diet beyond what is consumed for life-maintenance is a sin — in other words, no wedding cakes, no champagne toasts. Yet the church continues to adhere to so-called natural law because it underpins doctrine on all sexual matters, including the condemnations of abortion, contraception, in vitro fertilization and stem-cell research.
In their weekly back and forth at
New York magazine,
Alex Carp answers a question from
Frank Rich:
Bernie Sanders has announced another run for the White House. Will he be able to recapture his 2016 momentum in the more crowded 2020 field?
If measured by fund-raising from small donors, the answer would so far be yes. Fresh out of the gate, he dwarfs all his competitors in raking in non-PAC cash. But the most significant difference between 2020 and 2016 is not just that he is squaring off against a much larger field but that many in that field are running on the populist issues he championed last time, or at least marginal variations on them. And some of his competitors — notably Elizabeth Warren — make his arguments with greater specificity and more comprehensive plans for action. By contrast, Sanders’s sole serious opponent last time was a corporate Democrat who, among other things, had collected a fortune by speaking to Goldman Sachs. Arguably the only corporate Democrat this time is Cory Booker, unless you count Howard Schultz, whose independent run is hurtling toward oblivion.
I have to confess that if the Democrats want to run a septuagenarian for president in 2020, I wish it were Nancy Pelosi, not either Sanders or Joe Biden. She is at the peak of her powers as a master of governance and politics, not to mention a joy to watch as she brings Trump to his knees with her combination of legislative cunning and wit. Though there is zero chance she would run, she increasingly seems the gold standard against which all the other Democrats should be measured.
It’s hard to believe that as many as one in six of the tweets you see about a presidential candidate have been generated by a single troll farm, but it’s actually quite possible. Trying to combat this kind of behavior in real time is impossible, so it becomes a game of Whac-a-Mole.
Democratic voters will not be able to avoid being subjected to these kinds of aggressive influence operations. Many will willingly participate in them when they see it as advantageous to their preferred candidate. They’ll share disinformation because it confirms what they want to believe or because they cynically think it will serve their cause. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, people will do the work of the social media trolls for them.
If you want to be a responsible citizen, you should resist this whole process. Sharing posts that are disparaging of other candidates should be done very selectively, and only after you’ve satisfied yourself that they contain factual information vetted by responsible reporters. When anonymous people behave badly in the name of a candidate, you should presume that they’re not actually supporters of that candidate or even necessarily supporters of the Democratic Party or even necessarily American citizens. Pointing at their bad behavior and sharing it widely to harm a candidate is likely to be exactly what they want you to do.
Refusing to personally participate isn’t going to make the problem go away. But you don’t want to be part of the problem. Every person who abstains from participating in these efforts to deceive and divide is lessening the impact these trolls will have on the process.
The Editorial Board of The New York Times concludes in Trump’s Idea of a Middle East Nuclear Deal—Ignore conflicts of interest and legal safeguards:
An interim report from the House Oversight Committee paints a familiar picture of Trump associates skirting the law to curry favor with people who can make them richer. This time, the dealing doesn’t involve Russians but Saudis, and it is not about a lavish tower in Moscow but the sale of nuclear power reactors.
Negotiations were conducted by people who would stand to gain millions, in apparent disregard of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which sets out explicit procedures and criteria for nuclear cooperation agreements and is intended to thwart proliferation of atomic weapons. Their conflicts of interest “could implicate federal criminal statutes,” according to the report. [...]
Efforts by the Obama administration to negotiate a nuclear cooperation agreement faltered over the Saudis’ refusal to make a legally binding commitment to forgo uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing. It’s no surprise that the Saudis would prefer to negotiate over nuclear technology with Mr. Trump, who seems to care far more about profits than about halting the spread of nuclear weapons.
Congressional disaffection with Saudi Arabia was already rising over the Yemen war and the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The House Oversight Committee’s investigation is a stark warning that there is even greater reason for concern and for congressional efforts to put stricter controls in place.
Moira Donegan at The Guardian writes— Elizabeth Warren Why vote for Sanders when you can have Elizabeth Warren instead?
In the 2016 primary, Democratic voters were presented with a choice: Sanders, who represented the potential of redistributive policy, and Clinton, who represented the possibility of shattering, as she put it, the last, highest glass ceiling. She dismissed his ideas as impractical; his supporters attacked her with a virulent misogyny that belied their nominal commitments to equality. For leftist women, to express enthusiasm for Sanders’ policy proposals was seen as condoning the sexist attacks on Clinton. To defend Clinton from sexism meant that we would be accused of condoning the worst choices of her history. This choice, between Sanders and Clinton, redistribution and representation, has been the central conflict of American progressive politics in the years since. You can have either redistribution or representation, the thinking goes, but not both.
Sanders’ announcement, and the resurgence of the party divisions that it has already ushered in, is especially maddening to those of us who would rather avoid a repeat of this bruising 2016 primary fight, as there is already a candidate with a long record of commitment to redistributive policies and a proven ability to combat inequality: Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts.
Like Sanders, Warren has a long career of railing against the injustice of a country where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Unlike him, she has a proven track record outside of the Senate, helping to establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during the Obama administration and writing the book – actually, writing several books – on how to help working families by making finance and debt laws more fair.
But unlike Sanders, Warren does not have the baggage of the 2016 primary, which will weigh Sanders down and alienate large swaths of the Democratic base. She is a woman, an essential identity trait in a party that is increasingly dominated by people of color and accounts for the votes of half of all white women, who rightly want to see themselves better represented in a party whose leaders have been much older, whiter and more male than actual voters. And she does not ask voters to make the choice that was posed to them in the 2016 primary, between fiercely attacking economic inequality and tackling the gender and racial injustices that perpetuate and exacerbate it. Her statements and policy proposals, more detailed than those of the other early frontrunners, and show that she is committed to doing both.
Kate Aronoff at The Guardian writes—It's Bernie's world. The Democratic party is just living in it:
What remains unique about Sanders, too, is his long-held belief that political change is driven from below. As other candidates pitch their own progressive bona fides, Sanders will pitch a political revolution. Investing too much faith in any one person is a dangerous thing, particularly in an office as fraught as the American presidency – for him, just a means to an end. Sanders is all too aware that he’ll need an army at his back to get anything done should he win. Accordingly, he’ll treat his campaign as an opportunity to train them into fighting shape.
The Democratic party is stronger for Sanders having thrown his wrench into its coronation plans two years ago. And we’re all better off. It’s painfully easy to imagine two years of an electoral news cycle orbiting around personality beefs and debates about “electability” instead of, say, the looming collapse of human civilization. With as few as 11 years left before the climate crisis veers into a full-on global catastrophe, the presidential race needs to be a place to debate issues, not individuals. With Sanders on the scene, we can rest assured that it will be.
Bernie Sanders showed us that another world is possible. If that world becomes a reality, we’ll have him to thank – whether he becomes president or not.
Reniqua Allen at The New Republic writes—Missing Black Millenial. No generation has undergone such meticulous examination in recent years as the millennials. Yet our understanding of them contains a glaring gap:
African-Americans make up 14 percent of the millennial population, born, roughly speaking, between 1981 and 1996. Black millennials came of age in the so-called post-race era, their worldview defined by Barack Obama’s historic rise to the presidency, Beyonce’s dominance of the entertainment industry, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s emergence as one of the premier public intellectuals in this country. But they also witnessed tragedies like the Rodney King beating, Hurricane Katrina, and the police shootings of Mike Brown and so many other young black men and women. They saw the horrific and racist treatment of our first black president and his wife. And then they saw the alleged “post-race” period give way to the election of the most openly racist president in modern American history.
The black millennial, then, is composed of contradictions and ambiguity; her journey of tentative steps forward and horrific setbacks. In this, young blacks are not so different from their ancestors, complicating the whole notion of generational change that we are used to ascribing to non-black people, in which a particular cohort is perceived as being fundamentally different from its predecessors. In many ways, the story of the black millennial is as much about consistency as it is about change—which is to say that the story of the black millennial is the story of what it means to be black, period.
Like all millennials, black millennials have to deal with a host of economic challenges. In addition to middling wages and the burden of student debt, they have to negotiate a thriving gig economy that provides little security and an urban housing market that has increasingly priced out the working and middle classes. They are uncertain about the future in a way that past generations weren’t, and grasping for an adulthood that feels forever delayed.
But though black millennials have much in common with their white peers, there are important distinctions. In almost all areas of life, the deck is stacked even higher against us, in part due to historical discrimination and in part because of inequities unique to the millennial era. By many measures, black millennials are behind. We lag in terms of employment, wages, and attaining “good jobs.” We have less wealth, live in poverty more. Even when we try to do something positive like go to college, we have to take on higher amounts of student debt. And then we still end up with fewer job prospects than our white counterparts.
Eric Alterman at The Nation writes—The End of News? If you think the media are in trouble now, just wait till there’s a recession:
Professional, evidence-based journalism has been under assault for decades now, but over the past few months, fresh attacks have battered it further. These attacks arrive fast and furiously, from so many directions that one hardly has time to acknowledge them all, much less address them in a way that keeps journalism’s business model alive and protects the integrity of the original enterprise.
Just since my last column in the Jan. 28/Feb. 4 issue we have seen:
§ More than 1,000 employees laid off at BuzzFeed, AOL, Yahoo News, and HuffPost. The broadcast and digital company Vice Media denuded itself of 350 people. And last year, Mic—a site aimed at and staffed by young people and once valued at $100 million—eliminated virtually its entire staff. [...]
Jill Abramson, former executive editor of The New York Times, published a 544-page book that argues that journalism should stick to old-fashioned commitments like “truth” and “facts.” The problem: Her book is riddled with passages that nearly everyone—with the exception of Abramson—considers some combination of plagiarized, sloppily reported, and insufficiently fact-checked. The inexplicable failure of so credentialed a figure to properly credit others—especially when much of the original work came from the very news sites she was seeking to critique—was a gift not only to those in digital media but to the conservative, pro-Trump world that seeks to discredit traditional journalism as “fake news.”
All of the above makes it harder for journalism to hold power to account. What makes this so worrisome is that, economically speaking, these are fat times. Many of these layoffs are happening at profitable companies, and many funders and shareholders are seeing their best returns in years. One of these days, a recession will come, and with it a carnage that will make us nostalgic for the comparatively halcyon moments of today.