mmr 27 August 2019

Bernie Sanders’s ‘Green New Deal’: A $16 Trillion Climate Plan

I'm really pulling for Warren; she's got a plan for that!




She's also gaining momentum - rather than losing it.

The Glimmer of a Climate New World Order



I didn’t know politics could move this fast. It has been barely a week since the world woke up to reports of fires tearing through the Amazon rainforest, and already a new sort of global red line has been established — the first of its kind to be drawn around climate behavior. Led by grandstanding French president Emmanuel Macron, the leaders of the G-7 have essentially told Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro that the burning of the Amazon simply cannot stand.

Bolsonaro is himself a showboat, of course, usually excited by the opportunity to troll the community of globalists and liberal cosmopolitans almost literally embodied in the leaders of the G-7 — and particularly in forums bringing those leaders together as though they are puppet-mastering the rest of the world over a continental breakfast. And yet, over the last few days, Bolsonaro has performed a dramatic about-face, moving from shrugging his shoulders at the fires and blaming them on leftist NGOs, to acknowledging they are a problem and deploying his military to put them out. Presumably, this is not just the result of Macron’s rhetoric — “our house is on fire,” the French leader tweeted late last week — but what followed: a promise to spike a major European trade deal with Brazil if Bolsonaro did not take the fires seriously. In other words, a threat to apply the same tools of leverage and sanction and shame to crimes of climate as have been applied, in the past, to violations of human rights and territorial sovereignty.

This is, of course, unprecedented—and much more significant than the paltry $20 million the nations of the G7 pledged to send to Brazil to help fight the fires. It was also, in a way, inevitable. If climate change does transform life on this planet at anything like the scale and speed scientists promise it will, our politics will change with it — and probably quite dramatically. One question this raises is: In what ways? Another is: Will we like what warming does to us? The answers to both are very much open, and we’ve barely begun to develop a political science around climate change that might help us think through the possibilities.

On Friday, I wrote about the fact that, on the very same day that the Brazilian fires became news in America, the U.S. lost its one candidate for president, Jay Inslee, who was committed to taking climate change as seriously as the world’s scientists insist we all must — and I suggested that action on climate may well require an entirely different kind of politics than one that consigns principled crusaders like Inslee to the bin of also-rans. Less than 24 hours after Inslee dropped out, Bernie Sanders dropped his own climate plan — one much grander than anything even Inslee proposed. If Sanders’s gambit represents one new kind of climate politics, this G-7 climate shaming surely counts as another. But what kind is it?

Saturday at the Atlantic, Franklin Foer proposed that meaningful action to combat warming may require that the bedrock principle of national sovereignty be retired, such that leaders like Bolsonaro (or, for that matter, Trump) won’t be able to operate with impunity on climate issues which, despite playing out within those nations’ borders, impact the rest of the world as well (often more so, since impacts are distributed unequally). “If there were a functioning global community, it would be wrestling with how to more aggressively save the Amazon, and acknowledging that the battle against climate change demands not only new international cooperation but, perhaps, the weakening of traditional concepts of the nation-state,” he wrote. “The case for territorial incursion in the Amazon is far stronger than the justifications for most war.”

Foer was writing before Bolsonaro “capitulated,” but the prospect of climate wars seems even more pressing now. The G-7 shame campaign was only a modest step in that direction — individual nation-states acting in concert, not to undermine the sovereignty of a bad actor but to remind him how dependent his country is on the support of other nations, and to threaten to withdraw that support. But it nevertheless allows you to imagine a possible world, probably at least a few years away, in which a similar group of nations — or a similarly concerned single superpower — does take the next step and threatens military action. That is, of course, what often does follow from a sequence of sanctions, and it is more or less how in the aftermath of World War II the nations of the west “consecrated” the principle of human rights. (That is, by fighting wars in its name, if often for other material reasons). If the 21st century is conducted in the shadow of warming as the second half of the 20th was in the shadow of the Holocaust, that sort of succession — from human rights to climate change as the universal touchstone of geopolitics and speakable expression of great-power rivalry — seems not just possible but inevitable.

So — is that where we are headed? Honestly, I don’t know, and don’t know anyone who does. As with everything else when it comes to climate, we are headed into a brave new world with nothing resembling a playbook. But in their brilliant book Climate Leviathan, the political scientists Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright plot a matrix of possible future political responses to climate. The two axes are the relationship to the nation state (i.e., does the world recognize national sovereignty in the face of climate change?); and the relationship to capitalism (i.e., does the world respond to the crisis by doubling down on the importance of capital, or does it retreat from it?). They name the resulting quadrants: Climate Mao (anti-capitalist and nationalist); Climate Behemoth (capitalist and nationalist), Climate Leviathan (capitalist and globalist) and Climate X (anti-capitalist and globalist, basically ecosocialism, which they’re rooting for). But they also acknowledge that each category is too neat — a conceptual framework, not a map of our future. My own guess is that they’re right: that we won’t have any one new paradigm for climate politics, that no one prediction will come to pass in any total way, but that we will evolve those new politics along many different ideological axes.

What would that mean? That there won’t just be ecofascism of the kind that’s been talked about a lot over the last month — right-wing governments throwing up border walls and defining the needs of their own people, in a resource-scarce world, as infinitely more important than the needs of anyone else. There could also be ecofascism of the environmentalist stripe, governments running roughshod over the rights of their citizens to impose deeply disruptive responses to warming and all its impacts — eminent domain on environmental-panic steroids, decarbonization on a military footing. There will likely be more moderated forms of both — some rise in nativism that doesn’t totally revolutionize existing political cultures, some expansion of government authority that adds to rather than obliterates status-quo powers. There may be some form of ecosocialism and, elsewhere, some rejection of economic growth and an embrace of what’s been called “de-growth.” But on the left, some modulated versions are probably likelier, too: a more empathic and redistributive politics that stops short of true collectivization, for instance, and some growing awareness among left-wing leaders around the world that growth is merely one measure of progress, and perhaps a misleading or counterproductive one. In New Zealand, prime minister Jacinda Adern is already pointing the way there.

And probably it won’t be any one of these futures but something more like all of them, all at once, in different places at different times — with different nations responding differently to the challenge, even different parts of single nations, with some regions and some parts of government acting from one set of ideological goals while others move in different directions. That is to say, it is likely to be all quite messy, as politics always is, however much we might wish to imagine a single future, or a single climate “solution” — and however much the neoliberal order of the last political generation promised that all plots moved predictably markets-ward.

In a weird way, the G-7 bullying this past weekend extends the same promise — and makes the awakening of climate conscience among the world’s most powerful nations look somewhat less like a radical political departure than the simple extension of existing (and imperiled) neoliberalism into the realm of climate concern. Still, this is progress. In fact, quite significant progress, I think, since market forces remain quite powerful tools, and since we need all the tools we can get in addressing a crisis of this scale. But, of course, it also has some blindspots.

To begin with, the fires, judged on their own, actually aren’t all that significant a climate event. They are bad, since all fires are bad, climate-wise. But the relatively limited aid the G7 will be sending to fight them is a sign that these fires are neither catastrophic in the short term nor hard to control—$20 million being less than one percent the annual budget of CalFire, the California state fire program. Of course, Bolsonaro’s broader plan to develop and deforest the Amazon would be such an outrageous carbon catastrophe — it could release, over a decade, as much carbon as the U.S. and China, the world’s two biggest emitters, release in a year — that it would represent the enactment of a sort of great-man theory of climate disaster. But the fires burning this month are, as the New York Times has shown, mostly on land that has already been deforested — farmers clearing their land as part of their annual rhythm, if on land that was once rainforest and perhaps in a coordinated way to make an ugly gesture of solidarity with their president and his plan to open up yet more of the land. There are more fires burning today in Congo and Angola than in Brazil, almost none of which are true wildfires, like those we’ve seen devastate California and Siberia, but are controlled and defeatable with a relatively minimal effort.

This all makes the G-7 campaign an important symbolic gesture, but perhaps only that, and one for which the ultimate test is what happens after the fires are put out: Will Bolsonaro’s deforestation plan continue, or not? Or perhaps that is only the penultimate test, since there is also the question of whether pressure like this can be employed by nations like France and Canada and the UK to punch up and not just punch down — to influence the world’s biggest carbon emitters, namely China and the United States.

And if the gesture is mostly symbolic, what is the symbol obscuring? Canada’s Justin Trudeau was the first leader to echo Macron’s call to action, but he recently approved the TransMountain pipeline; Japan is financing coal plants built abroad that are as much as 40 times more polluting than those they allow within their borders. In fact, every single member nation of the G-7 is hiding some significant climate hypocrisy behind their pressure on Bolsonaro, however laudable that pressure is. But if the sum total of their collective action this year will be effectively dispatching the Brazilian military to fight fires local farmers had mostly under control, it will be a critically insufficient response. If their pressure forces Bolsonaro to abandon his plans for the Amazon, that would be considerably better. And yet there is much more to be done still, in each of their home countries, none of which are meeting the pledges they made under the Paris accords just three years ago. To pretend that Bolsonaro is the world’s only climate villain, or the Amazon the only region in the world currently in climate crisis, is an act of grand self-delusion.

Still, the value of symbolism is not to be discarded. For a very long time, climate scientists and activists lamented the disinterest of the average person in the issue, in part blaming the media for failing to communicate the scale of the crisis and the urgency of action. They were right, in a way: climate change simply wasn’t on the front page of the New York Times or Washington Post every day, and almost never made it onto television news. On the newspaper side, that has already changed, with quite remarkable speed: It’s not every day yet, but the country’s major papers do now devote enviable acreage to the story, often several times a week and frequently illustrated with dramatic above-the-fold photography. The progress in television has been slower, but here the Amazon fires may mark a different kind of turning point — and a recognition among producers that, while climate change may have a longstanding reputation as a ratings-killer, natural disasters do not, especially those that produce fire. Perhaps the blockbuster wall-to-wall coverage of the recent burning of Notre Dame was good training on this point, too.

This fire season has been an unusually mild one, so far, for California, and we’ve yet to see the major hurricane events that have whipped through the Caribbean each of the past two summers. But the coverage of the Amazon fires suggests that, when those terrifying impacts happen, producers may finally be ready to showcase them in the way they should. It is horrible for anyone living in their path, of course, that disasters are getting more frequent and more punishing. But judged strictly from the semi-sociopathic perspective of journalistic narrative, the climate change story is getting “better.” Rather than relying on dry-sounding predictions of centuries-long sea-level rise measured in the centimeters or inches, natural disasters and extreme weather are teaching us all how to tell stories that horrify us into action, even of an imperfect kind.

nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/climate-at-the-g-7-glimmers-of-a-new-world-order.html

Trump's words of warning: "I always find a way to win." Take him seriously
We're nearing a crucial election and Trump's poll numbers are dreadful. So why does he sound so confident?


When the authoritarian leader speaks, it is best to believe him.

Last Friday on Twitter, Donald Trump proclaimed that Democrats' attempts to defeat him would prove fruitless:

But it won’t work because I always find a way to win, especially for the people! The greatest political movement in the history of our Country will have another big win in 2020!

Such words are a promise and a threat. They are made even more ominous in the context of polls that show Trump trailing most of the likely Democratic nominees in the 2020 election, other surveys that show his support dropping to 36 percent, and clear evidence that the U.S. economy is now on the brink of recession, which makes Trump even more vulnerable in the voting booth.

Past behavior is usually an indicator of future behavior.

Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened not to leave office in 2021. During the 2016 presidential campaign Trump also threatened that he would not respect the outcome of the election if Hillary Clinton won. This is part of a much larger pattern of contempt for American democracy, the rule of law, and the U.S. Constitution by Donald Trump and his allies. He has threatened — leading Democrats and other "enemies" with prison, attempted to silence and intimidate journalists he sees as critical, and has declared individuals and groups to be "treasonous" if they do not submit to his will.

Trump and his allies are already moving to delegitimate the 2020 presidential election by claiming that "illegal aliens" and "voter fraud" are part of a larger conspiracy by the Democrats and the news media, who even want to cause a recession to prevent him from being re-elected.

As conclusively proven by Robert Mueller, as well as by other investigators and experts, Vladimir Putin's operatives interfered in the 2016 presidential election with the aim of installing Donald Trump in the White House. Russia and other hostile foreign countries are continuing to subvert American democracy by engaging in online propaganda and other influence campaigns in support of Trump and the Republican Party. These efforts will increase as the 2020 presidential election approaches.

Last week featured a whirlwind of events which showed how Trump's authoritarian behavior and politics are being amplified and enabled by his apparent mental health issues.

Trump believes that he is “King of Israel” and “the second coming of God.” Trump also said that he is the "Chosen One" sent by god or preordained by Fate to rule. He claimed that Jewish Americans who support the Democratic Party are somehow disloyal to their faith. For Trump, his supporters and their media, "real" Jewish people only support him and the Republican Party.

As part of Trump and the Republican Party's feverish ongoing campaign of racism and white supremacy he has again suggested that the 14th Amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship — added to the Constitution after the Civil War to ensure the rights of black Americans — should be overturned.

There was the surreal: Trump proclaimed his desire to buy Greenland. Rebuffed by Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, he then threw (another) public temper tantrum, calling her "nasty," an epithet he reserves for women who challenge him.

As part of his trade war, Trump ordered American companies not to do business with China. (This is well outside the normal range of presidential power.) He also raised tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods — a de facto tax increase on the American people. His actions caused panic among investors, causing the Dow Jones average to drop hundreds of points on Friday.

Trump also compared Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell to Chinese President Xi Jinping, a leader whose government engages in ethnic cleansing, kills and imprisons political dissidents and other rivals, and is currently brutalizing the people of Hong Kong and other parts of China.

Writing for the Daily News, former Republican strategist Rick Wilson summarized last week's events in Trump's America this way:

Nothing about the week we just lived through is comforting. Nothing about it can be excused or ignored. Donald Trump is not a well man. Here in the dog days of August, Washington should be its usual sleepy self, the political class having wisely fled the humidity and misery of D.C. Instead, Trump’s performance left people both inside and out of the political class wondering about the president’s sanity and fitness for office.

Most states have some form of involuntary commitment law for people who are a danger to themselves and others.

With Donald Trump's election in 2016, America took more baby steps towards fascism and authoritarianism. Almost three years into Trump's regime, he and his movement are now running towards that ignoble destination. Unfortunately, the majority of Americans seem stuck in a state of learned helplessness, watching the disaster unfold but doing nothing to stop it.

Trump and his allies know that the 2020 presidential election is their opportunity to turn Trumpism from a fascistic aberration into America's new normal. They will steamroll the opposition to achieve that goal.

This will surely be one of the most important elections in American history. The American people have an opportunity to vote Donald Trump out of office. This is a critical moment where alternative possibilities and futures can be won or lost for the country.

There have been other such fulcrum points in American history: the premature end of Reconstruction, FDR's "Economic Bill of Rights," the 2000 Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, Sept. 11, 2001, the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and then the backlash-fueled election of Donald Trump.

In his new book "The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy," columnist and American Prospect co-founder Robert Kuttner explains the perils of the upcoming presidential election:

If the Republicans win another election in 2020, the supposedly exceptional United States will become more like other nations that display the forms of democracy but little substance. In such nations the incumbent party is effectively the permanent government. The opposition gets to make noise but not to take power. A corrupt alliance between the governing party and its supporters in the corporate plutocracy sustains the incumbent regime. ...

We must believe that American democracy is not quite done for. America, in Lincoln's words, could enjoy a new birth of freedom in 2020. But that will not happen automatically or passively through the swing of some historical pendulum. It will take inspired radical leadership, mass organizing, and citizen mobilization of the kind that we see only in America's finest hours.

The 2020 presidential election and the Age of Trump also force another long overdue confrontation between the myths and realities of American democracy and the country's history.

America was founded as a democracy for white landowning men. Black people were deemed to be human property. Indigenous people were to be exterminated as part of the country's "manifest destiny." Nonwhites en masse were viewed by white society as not being fit for democracy. Women effectively had no voice in the polity — except through their husbands, fathers, brothers or other men. To improve, American democracy has required a lengthy ongoing struggle against those defects and the country's core character as a democracy structured around domination for some groups and subordination for others.

Is America really a democracy? And what would a real democracy actually look like? In the post-Trump era, what type of democracy should the American people be fighting to create?

In her new book "Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone," Astra Taylor signals to those difficult questions:

I don't believe democracy exists; indeed, it never has. Instead the ideal of self-rule is exactly that, an ideal, a principle that always occupies a distant and retreating horizon, something we must continue to reach toward yet fail to grasp. The promise of democracy is not the one made and betrayed by the powerful; it is a promise that can be kept only by regular people through vigilance, invention and struggle. ... Defining the contours of this still-unseen democracy is something we can do only collectively. Think and reason the mob must, including thinking through democracy's abiding paradoxes.

On Friday night Donald Trump left the White House to travel to France for the G-7 summit. Before boarding Air Force One, Trump paced about on the tarmac, like a professional wrestling villain, insulting his opponents, telling lies, boasting about his greatness and of course making threats as he spoke to reporters.

This was a national embarrassment — and an irresistible spectacle.

During his verbal fusillade, Trump he cited an obscure law — the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act — and claimed he could use it to command American businesses to follow his orders. Many legal observers initially scoffed at Trump's claims to possess such power. In the coming days and weeks, they may well be proven wrong.

The would-be or actual dictator's threats must always be taken seriously. This is especially true in a failing democracy like the United States, whose political norms are based on assumptions that the president and the country's other elected officials are reasonable people with some respect for the rule of law and democratic traditions.

In a country where fascism has been so quickly normalized, many people have already forgotten that the United States is in a declared state of national emergency. As the Brennan Center's Elizabeth's Goitein warned last year, Trump could,

with the flick of his pen, activate laws allowing him to shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the United States or freeze Americans’ bank accounts. Other powers are available even without a declaration of emergency, including laws that allow the president to deploy troops inside the country to subdue domestic unrest.

This edifice of extraordinary powers has historically rested on the assumption that the president will act in the country’s best interest when using them. With a handful of noteworthy exceptions, this assumption has held up. But what if a president, backed into a corner and facing electoral defeat or impeachment, were to declare an emergency for the sake of holding on to power? In that scenario, our laws and institutions might not save us from a presidential power grab. They might be what takes us down.

No one person should have all that power; Nonetheless, Donald Trump does.

Donald Trump will likely, somehow, gets his way in his trade war with China through manipulating the law, bullying, intimidation or some combination of all three.

Once again American democracy and the rule of law (and the health of the world economy) will be further imperiled. The 2020 presidential election, now 14 months away, may be too late to save the United States from the harm done by Donald Trump, the Republican Party, their media and their voters.

Donald Trump and his movement are like slow-acting poison. The question is whether American democracy has received a lethal dose, and will shamble on for a few more years or decades before succumbing.

www.salon.com/2019/08/26/trumps-words-of-warning-i-always-find-a-way-to-win-take-him-seriously/

Bolsonaro tells the world to go fuck itself; rejects G7 aid package and the supplementals from Canada and the UK

www.cbc.ca/news/world/amazon-fires-bolsonaro-1.5260944

He also might go and send some troops into the region... but he's not sure.

Dear Police,

I get it. It sucks having every moment of your time as an employee being constantly monitored. It feels like an infringement on your privacy, like someone is constantly looking over your shoulder. But guess what. Most of us have that in some form. Go into a McDonalds, they have cameras on their tills. Go into a bank, they have cameras *everywhere*. Go into an office, there is software to monitor anyone's machine. It sucks. I hate it. But we all have to put up with it because a small minority abuse their position and steal and cheat and just generally make the rest of our lives worse. They're assholes so we have to pay. And that's exactly why you have to put up with the same bullshit the rest of us do.

Sorry.

                                                            Monday Gold Prospecting Trip.

Since we found a spot last week that had promise we went back to the Iowa Hill bridge again yesterday to see if
it would pay out.  The spot we hiked to was in the shade of the mountain until about 10am.  It's a good thing
we got there at about 830am because it got real hot fast.  And there wasn't much more gold than we found last
week. It was roast-a-rama hiking out.  But it's nice to be in the woods anytime.

Destroying the farm economy and then mocking the farmers right in their faces?  A hundred years ago he would have
tarred and feathered and run out of town.  The whole Trump admin. wants to destroy our whole way of life.  Pure evil!    

Didn't he do the same shit like a week ago?  Well, not in front of farmers but...