The Bill, The Bill, The Bill... And, Don't Forget For A Moment That The Bill Will Come Due

The House passed the $2.2 trillion Wall Street bailout, filled with goodies for corporate America, by voice vote today-- but not before Trump lost his shit on Twitter this morning when someone told him Thomas Massie (R-KY) had decided to force a roll call vote. Here's a narrative version of Massie's tweet storm after being savaged by Señor Trumpanmzee (above), who is now likely to back Massie's very right-wing primary supporter, Todd McMurtry. "I swore an oath to uphold the constitution, and I take that oath seriously," he began. "In a few moments I will request a vote on the CARES Act which means members of Congress will vote on it by pushing 'yes' or 'no' or 'present.'" Actually, what it means is that every member of the House might have had to go on record as being for it or against it, something both Pelosi and McCarthy wanted to avoid-- and were able to. And it meant that enough members of Congress had to drag their asses back to DC to give leadership a quorum. It's Pelosi's own fault that she refused to pay attention to the Members who have been urging her to institute remote voting during the pandemic. Back to Massie:

The Constitution requires that a quorum of members be present to conduct business in the House. Right now, millions of essential, working-class Americans are still required to go to work during this pandemic such as manufacturing line workers, healthcare professionals, I am not delaying the bill like Nancy Pelosi did last week. The bill that was worked on in the Senate late last week was much better before Speaker Pelosi showed up to destroy it and add days and days to the process. This bill should have been voted on much sooner in both the Senate and House and it shouldn’t be stuffed full of Nancy Pelosi’s pork-- including $25 million for the Kennedy Center, grants for the National Endowment for the Humanities and Arts, and millions more other measures that have no direct relation to the Coronavirus Pandemic. That $25 million, for example, should go directly to purchasing test kits. The number one priority of this bill should have been to expand testing availability and creation of tests so that every American, not just the wealthy and privileged, have access to testing. We have shut down the world’s economy without adequate data. Everyone, even those with no symptoms, needs immediate access to a test. This bill creates even more secrecy around a Federal Reserve that still refuses to be audited. It allows the Federal Reserve to make decisions about who gets what, how much money we’ll print. With no transparency. If getting us into $6 trillion more debt doesn’t matter, then why are we not getting $350 trillion more in debt so that we can give a check of $1 million to every person in the country? This stimulus should go straight to the people rather than being funneled through banks and corporations like this bill is doing. 2 trillion divided by 150 million workers is about $13,333.00 per person. That’s much more than the $1,200 per person check authorized by this bill."

Oh, look-- two mega-rich worthless Wall Street suck-ups agree with each other that Massie is a bad, bad boy:

Massie amigo and fellow Libertarian, Justin Amash, who fled the Trump version of the GOP and became the House's only Independent, defended him in a twitter battle with Trump-worshipping Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw. Amash tweeted "Crenshaw has learned a lot from Donald Trump during his time in Congress. He mischaracterizes a $500 billion corporate welfare fund that will mostly benefit a few large corporations hand-picked by government. Then, when called on it, he changes the topic and calls others liars."

The Washington Post, as always, spoke for the ruling class Establishment: Mike DeBonis with a quintessential Postism: "The scores of lawmakers who rushed back to Washington Friday to secure passage of a $2.2 trillion rescue bill expressed shock and dismay at having to defy the advice of experts and risk their health amid a global pandemic that has already killed more than 1,000 Americans. But many were not surprised at which of their colleagues forced them to do it. During his seven years in Congress, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) has established a reputation as a uniquely irascible congressional gadfly-- one who is frequently at odds with his own party’s leadership, rarely votes for major bills negotiated with Democrats, and, to make an ideological point, is willing to use the House rule book to inconvenience his colleagues. Now, with the coronavirus pandemic threatening the nation, many believe Massie has gone well beyond inconvenience into threatening the health-- and potentially the lives-- of lawmakers and staff. And while Massie’s GOP colleagues have long grumbled about his tactics, he has now attracted the scorn of the most powerful Republican: President Trump. Massie opposes the rescue bill on fiscal and constitutional grounds and threatened ahead of a planned voice vote Friday to require a quorum be present-- 216 members, half the House. Trump called him a 'third-rate Grandstander' on Twitter Friday. 'He just wants the publicity. He can’t stop it, only delay,' he said, calling on voters to 'throw Massie out of Republican Party!'"

Suicide Is Painless

There's disagreement on the left as well. Matt Stoller, writing for The Guardian this past Sunday, said it most clearly-- and most disturbingly: America will be unrecognizable after this pandemic if big corporations walk away with trillions of dollars and no strings attached.

Now, I’m not opposed to supporting industries. This is a crisis, and we do not want a lot of the productive capacity of the United States to fall apart because of a pandemic. But the key to supporting enterprises is to make sure that there are strict conditions, so that power doesn’t consolidate into the hands of monopolists and financiers cherry-picking distressed assets. Otherwise, America will simply be unrecognizable after this pandemic. CNBC personality Jim Cramer, for instance, is worried that after this pandemic America will have just three retailers. And he’s right to be worried about that.

Here’s how we can stop it. There are enough members of Congress to act and prevent what really looks less like a relief package and more a corporate coup. However, the problem is that this group is split into different political parties, and Congressional leadership is taking advantage of that dynamic to jam this through. US Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell wants big business to rule, so he’s playing a trick. He is refusing aid to workers. Democrats are negotiating with him to try to get unemployment assistance and social welfare. McConnell knows Democrats won’t pay attention to corporate bailouts if he takes the public hostage, and Democrats know that they can hand out favors to big business if they just talk about how they got larger checks for workers.

Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal, in the lead-up to the vote, said she's able to overcome her instincts about the very things Stoller is most worried about. Her own state, Washington "is reeling from the spread of COVID-19, and I have worked tirelessly to ensure the federal government steps up and responds to this crisis."

This bill is an important step forward. It significantly expands unemployment insurance benefits for laid-off and furloughed workers, puts money directly into the pockets of struggling working people and families, provides critical relief in the form of emergency grants and forgivable loans to devastated small businesses and nonprofits, infuses cash into strained local and state governments and health care systems, increases the amounts of personal protective equipment in the Strategic National Stockpile, and supports struggling industries that do right by their employees.

It is not perfect and there is far more Congress must do to do to fully meet our obligation to our constituents. We need to get more money to our health care system, states and localities, guarantee testing and treatment for everyone, expand benefits to those that have been left out and protect the health and safety of people in the criminal justice and immigration detention systems. Congress must also conduct vigorous oversight of industry assistance to ensure taxpayer dollars are used to support workers, not to further inequality.

We are already at work immediately on the next package to ensure it includes provisions we fought for but did not get this time. This is a crisis of epic proportions and we must continue to do everything we can to respond with the scale sufficient to meet the suffering of people across our country. I am proud to represent a district and a state with so much compassion and commitment, and I will continue to fight for all my constituents as we weather this together.

AOC, in the other hand, feels that the House could work a little harder before being stampeded into a bill so foul.





I don't know what to make of these three pictures from a #1 best selling book, The Eyes of Darkness written by Dean Koontz four decades ago and published in 1981. Amazing coincidence... right? CNN has already debunked it as a conspiracy theory. So has Snopes, based on the purported origin of the disease. OK.

Why Do Young People Have Such Contempt For The Republican Party? That's Easy

Last month Paul Ryan's corporately funded, sleazy SuperPAC ran thousands of dollars of really nasty radio ads beating up on progressive Democrat Kara Eastman for having been in a punk band, Pieces of Fuck, when she was in college. Ryan's PAC is desperate to save the Omaha congressional seat-- which is quickly slipping from their grasp-- for failed Trump rubber-step Don Bacon. That's why they've dug up something inocuous from when Kara was in school. What clowns they are-- and they pulled they same sort of silliness on Beto O'Rourke yesterday, in both cases to get voters' minds off the issues that contrast Kara with Bacon and Beto with Cruz.



Today, Philip Trapp, at Alternative Press, wrote about the GOP's rock'n'roll problem. The Texas Republican Party must have thought they were helping their pathetic U.S. Senate candidate-- and former mime-- Ted Cruz, by "tweeting photos of O’Rourke skating, rocking and just generally appearing relatable (as opposed to being a two-faced morality robot) in what seems a misguided effort to discredit the congressman and save Cruz’s [rapidly shrinking] lead."

Failed mime failed U.S. senator, Ted Cruz

Conservatives from both parties have always feared young people and feared and hated everything to do with young people. I remember spending too much time fighting with right-wing asshole Joe Lieberman when he started attacking one of the artists on my label, Ice-T. But it's usually Republicans who are the culprits. Now, they seem to believe that Beto can't be a senator from Texas because he was in a popular El Paso emo band, Foss, that started when he was in high school. One of his bandmates, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, became famous as the lead single for Mars Volta and At The Drive-In. Beto will be even more famous when Texans send him to the U.S. Senate. Here he is, more recently, playing with Texas music icon, Willy Nelson. Anything you want to say about that, Ted Cruz?

And it's not like Beto is the first politician-- or even first member of Congress-- to have been in a band. Probably the only nice thing that anyone can say about Dana Rohrabacher (R-Moscow) is that he was too. And when I asked someone in Palm Springs, some years ago, why they elected a goof ball like Republican Sonny Bono to the House, he said it was because everyone hoped Cher would show up in town sometimes. She didn't.



A few years ago, Blue America backed John Hall for Congress in upstate New York-- and he won. The fact that he had been a member of the band Orleans didn't play much of a part in the race but, if anything, it helped him with name recognition running against an entrenched Republican incumbent. People still love his song, "Still the One," which music-hating conservative Joe Lieberman tried appropriating as a campaign song, forcing Hall to serve him with a cease and desist order. It's still being payed on the radio today-- over 4 decades later. It had a positive impact on people's lives, more than you can say for most politicians.



I'm pretty sure Orrin Hatch was in a band too. He's definitely a serious songwriter. Here he was (below) at a recording session for one of his hit songs, "Eight Days of Hanukkah." It looks like he's trying to be the producer. Maybe he was. He definitely was eager to show everyone he was wearing a mezuzah, at least for the session.



Not my cup of tea but I'll give equal time to another well-known senator who served with Hatch, John Kerry whose 1960 high school band, The Electras has songs all over YouTube. Kerry was the bass player. Give it up or "Guitar Boogie Shuffle":



Back to Utah for a minute-- former governor (and serial presidential hopeful) Jon Huntsman dropped out of high school in the 1970s to join a Salt Lake City band called Wizard. He sported a mullet and played keyboards while they did covers of REO Speedwagon and Led Zeppelin.

In 1978, Senate majority whip Robert Byrd released an album called Mountain Fiddler with covers of folksy West Virginia standards like "Rye Whiskey" and "Cripple Creek." Like Beto and Kara, he was proud of his musical roots regardless of what assholes like Ted Cruz have to say. Here he was on TV-- fiddlin' and singing while he was already Senate Majority Whip. Audience loved it too!



Republican senators Connie Mack (FL), Larry Craig (ID, later caught trying to blow an undercover policeman in a public toilet), John Ashcroft (MO), Jim Jeffords (VT) and Trent Lott (MS) were in a barber-shop quartet, more of a Republican thing than a rock band. They released an album, Let Freedom Sing in 1998. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) is always trying to jam with anyone and he was in a band called Capitol Offense, a band that mostly covered Boston songs, until Tom Scholz had him served with a cease and desist order for fucking up "More Than a Feeling" so badly. A video of them playing "Mustang Sally" can still be found on YouTube. Unfortunately, neither Mack Rice nor Wilson Pickett ever made them stop performing it.



Florida congressman-- now MSNBC host-- Joe Scarborough fronts-- to this day-- an eponymous nine-piece band, Scarborough, mostly performing covers of Prince and Eagles tunes.

I can't remember, but did the Texas GOP complain when Kinky Friedman ran for governor of their state? He sucked up 13% of the vote too. Others elected to office include Jon Fishman (Phish) who was elected a selectman (like city council member) in Lincolnville, Maine; Martha Reeves-- from Martha and the Vandellas-- who was elected to serve a term on the Detroit City Council; and Jerry Butler, the longest-serving Board Commissioner for Cook County, Illinois.




And still threatening to run for something or other every now and then are three somewhat crazy Republican crackpots, Ted Nugent, Kanye West and Kid Rock. Look, in the course of writing this, I was listening to a lot of songs and when I heard this song just below I literally could.not.keep.myself. from jumping up and dancing my ass off as if I was back at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater waiting to give Maxine Brown a kiss backstage.



One last thing-- this tweet by Dayna Steele, east Texas congressional candidate, absolutely owning the Republican Party of Texas:

UPDATE: Kara

Kara Eastman's Communications Director got me this statement, which is worth reading: "The Congressional Leadership Fund was quick to villanize Kara's membership in her college's performance art band, Pieces of Fuck. In high school, she was in a singing group called the All Americans (but you don't see the CLF talking about that band name). We find it ironic that the opposition would want to attack Kara, and Beto, for doing something many American teens do - join a band, sing songs about issues that matter to them, and express themselves through music. Congress would be a better place with more musicians, and while we were joking about a College Band Congressional Caucus, Kara is looking forward to working with politicians like Beto who lead with heart-- and music."

If you like music and free expression, you can contribute to Kara's campaign here.

Resistance In The Age Of Trump, A Theme You Can Expect To Read About For 4 Years

Last year, one of the very first candidates Blue America endorsed for Congress was Jamie Raskin, a Maryland state Senator and constitutional law professor at American University. We knew him from his work as a counsel at People for the American Way and as the very skilled and successful majority whip in the state legislature. A decade ago he made news when he told his fellow senators that "People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don't put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible." This year, his primary opponents were a bunch of self-funders, lobbyists and ambitious careerists' Jamie won the hard-fought election convincingly.

Like Ted Lieu, Jamie has been speaking out about resistance to Trumpism. This weekend he told an enthusiastic crowd in Maryland that progressives aren't going away. "They can put Goldman Sachs back in charge of the Treasury Department, but we are still here. They can try to dismantle the EPA, but we are still here. They can put a fox in charge of every hen house. They can put The Joker, The Riddler and The Penguin in charge of Gotham City but we are still here-- and we're not going anywhere! They can subordinate the foreign policy values and interests of the American people to the profit motives of 144 different Trump corporations operating in 25 different companies from the Philippines to Russia to Turkey to Saudi Arabia but we're still here in the USA and we're not going anywhere... [W]e're not letting any Harvard Business School neo-Nazi strategize us into becoming Germany 1933 and we will not let a Cabinet of robber barons & white nationalists destroy what the civilizing movements of the last century created for us. We're not letting go of those legacies and those victories."

In a conversation with Steve Innskeep at NPR over the weekend, President Obama talked about a "scrambled political landscape" of voters who backed him twice and still support him and still voted for Donald Trump. His party, he said, did so badly because they didn't reach out and campaign in hard hit areas of the country. "You’ve got a situation where they’re not only entire states but also big chunks of states where, if we’re not showing up, if we’re not in there making an argument, then we’re going to lose. And we can lose badly, and that’s what happened in this election... There are clearly failures on our part to give people in rural areas or in exurban areas a sense day-to-day that we’re fighting for them or connected to them. Part of the reason it’s important to show up…is because it then builds trust and it gives you a better sense of how should you talk about issues in a way that feel salient and feel meaningful to people."

So it wasn't Comey or Putin? It was the Democrat's establishment, status quo candidates' failures-- not just Hillary, but even worse local candidates forced on Democratic voters by the DSCC and DCCC from garbage Senate candidates like Katie McGinty (PA), Patrick Murphy (FL), Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ), Patty Judge (IA) and Ted Strickland (OH) to garbage House candidates like Joe Garcia (FL), LuAnn Bennett (VA), Pete Gallego (TX), Lon Johnson (MI), Monica Vernon (IA), Colleen Deacon (NY), and Kim Myers )NY), Randy Perkins (FL)... not to mention the dozens of winnable seats the DCCC refused to contest at all.

We've got to do better in 2018. Taking back the House is the only hope to slow down Trumpism-- and I'm optimistic that it can be done. The Democrats need to pick up a net of 24 Republican seats. If Trump and Ryan do as much damage as they're promising, not even the inevitable DCCC failures, incompetence and criminal recruiting will prevent the Republicans from losing. Monday morning Wasserman Schultz antagonist (2016 and, hopefully 2018), Tim Canova emphasized that "Dems must look in the mirror. We need bold leadership now more than ever." Unfortunately, not all Democrats see it the same way.

Monday morning, one of the Democrats who pushed the weak foil to Trump's fascist candidacy forward, Paul Krugman, was pontificating in his NY Times column about how "it takes willful blindness not to see the parallels between the rise of fascism and our current political nightmare" and about the parallels between the rise of Trumpism and the fall of the Roman Republic. Yeah, thanks, Paul. Many of us mentioned that-- the Nazi part at least-- while you were denigrating Bernie's approach to heading it off.

Krugman's point was that when the Roman Republic was toppled it was because republican institutions didn’t protect against tyranny when powerful people started defying political norms. "And tyranny," he warned, "when it comes, can flourish even while maintaining a republican facade."

Roman politics involved fierce competition among ambitious men. But for centuries that competition was constrained by some seemingly unbreakable rules. Here’s what Adrian Goldsworthy’s In the Name of Rome says: “However important it was for an individual to win fame and add to his and his family’s reputation, this should always be subordinated to the good of the Republic … no disappointed Roman politician sought the aid of a foreign power.”

America used to be like that, with prominent senators declaring that we must stop “partisan politics at the water’s edge.” But now we have a president-elect who openly asked Russia to help smear his opponent, and all indications are that the bulk of his party was and is just fine with that. (A new poll shows that Republican approval of Vladimir Putin has surged even though-- or, more likely, precisely because-- it has become clear that Russian intervention played an important role in the U.S. election.) Winning domestic political struggles is all that matters, the good of the republic be damned.

And what happens to the republic as a result? Famously, on paper the transformation of Rome from republic to empire never happened. Officially, imperial Rome was still ruled by a Senate that just happened to defer to the emperor, whose title originally just meant “commander,” on everything that mattered. We may not go down exactly the same route-- although are we even sure of that?-- but the process of destroying democratic substance while preserving forms is already underway.

Consider what just happened in North Carolina. The voters made a clear choice, electing a Democratic governor. The Republican legislature didn’t openly overturn the result-- not this time, anyway-- but it effectively stripped the governor’s office of power, ensuring that the will of the voters wouldn’t actually matter.

Combine this sort of thing with continuing efforts to disenfranchise or at least discourage voting by minority groups, and you have the potential making of a de facto one-party state: one that maintains the fiction of democracy, but has rigged the game so that the other side can never win.

Why is this happening? I’m not asking why white working-class voters support politicians whose policies will hurt them-- I’ll be coming back to that issue in future columns. My question, instead, is why one party’s politicians and officials no longer seem to care about what we used to think were essential American values. And let’s be clear: This is a Republican story, not a case of “both sides do it.”

So what’s driving this story? I don’t think it’s truly ideological. Supposedly free-market politicians are already discovering that crony capitalism is fine as long as it involves the right cronies. It does have to do with class warfare-- redistribution from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy is a consistent theme of all modern Republican policies. But what directly drives the attack on democracy, I’d argue, is simple careerism on the part of people who are apparatchiks within a system insulated from outside pressures by gerrymandered districts, unshakable partisan loyalty, and lots and lots of plutocratic financial support.

For such people, toeing the party line and defending the party’s rule are all that matters. And if they sometimes seem consumed with rage at anyone who challenges their actions, well, that’s how hacks always respond when called on their hackery.

One thing all of this makes clear is that the sickness of American politics didn’t begin with Donald Trump, any more than the sickness of the Roman Republic began with Caesar. The erosion of democratic foundations has been underway for decades, and there’s no guarantee that we will ever be able to recover.

But if there is any hope of redemption, it will have to begin with a clear recognition of how bad things are. American democracy is very much on the edge.

Regardless of what the real reasons were for the toppling of the Roman Republic-- endemic slavery might have played a role-- this weekend we had John Kerry praising Putin crony and oil oligarch Rex Tillerson as Trump's nominee to replace him at the State Department, within hours of the latest report, this one in The Guardian, of Tillerson's utter unsuitability for the job. Leaked documents show that he was "the long-time director of a US-Russian oil firm based in the tax haven of the Bahamas." In any case, Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone report on Goldman speaks more directly to Krugman's point than Krugman: The Vampire Squid Occupies Trump's White House.

Reminding his readers about a Trump speech in Myrtle Beach last February, Taibbi quotes the now victorious buffoon: "I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over [Cruz]. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton."

Trump demonized the bank enough that it almost seemed like genuine animosity existed between candidate and squid. When Goldman announced in September that it was banning employees from donating to Trump's campaign, it seemed official.

In October, Trump was even more specific in pointing the finger at Goldman. Referencing speeches Clinton gave to Goldman, Trump said that "Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors."

Trump's tales sounded like classic Rothschild/Bilderberg conspiracy lore. They would have been absurd, were it not for the fact that so much of the innuendo around Goldman Sachs often turns out to be true.

The bank has an extraordinary history of placing its executives in high-ranking governmental and quasi-governmental positions, from treasury secretaries to senators to the heads of the World and European Central Banks. Goldman has been implicated in the trafficking of toxic mortgages, a sprawling state corruption case in Malaysia, the manipulation of world commodity prices and a heinous episode involving Greece in which the bank helped to mask the country's ballooning debt while simultaneously working with JPMorgan Chase to create an index for betting against Greece's economy.

Nonetheless, Trump's insinuations about a Goldman-Hillary secret conspiracy were so pointed that CEO Lloyd Blankfein was forced to respond.

"If there's some secret international cabal, I've been left out of the party again," he quipped.

In his final pitch to voters in the days before the election, Trump used the image of Blankfein in a TV ad to argue that insiders had ruined the lives of ordinary Americans to enrich themselves. Here is the narration you heard when Blankfein's face came on screen:

"It's a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities."

One surprise election result and a mountain of jubilant #draintheswamp hashtags later, Donald Trump has filled his White House with, you guessed it, Goldman veterans.

Trump's recent appointments from Goldman, concludes Taibbi "are absolute proof that his 'populist' message was a crock all along." Can anyone doubt it? Sure... More than half the country is living in a state of reality denial. That's really how Trump got elected. The pain headed their way is likely to wake them up... quickly.

When Truth Falls Apart-- How do we restore consensus in an age so divorced from fact?

by Maria Bustillos

If I have recognized the spread in drug warnings and financial doublespeak, where the corporate use of language approaches the absurd, where the shell of a communicative form is used to foreclose communication, I have also recognized it in forms of poetry that deliberately push us to confront the contingency and craziness of our culture’s use and abuse of words.
-Ben Lerner, Contest of Words, Harper's, October 2012

The lunatic notion of a “post-truth” or “post-fact” society gained traction during the administration of George W. Bush, whose lackeys lied their heads off so spectacularly and for so long, with the aid of the effectively state-sponsored Fox News Network. Mocked as “truthiness” by Stephen Colbert in 2005, and soberly analyzed in various books, the key idea of the “post-truth” society was this: if a given public utterance had sufficient appeal-- emotional, political or otherwise-- its empirical truth was immaterial. What we can be persuaded to wish to believe, in other words, is as good as the truth. How else to explain the long currency of such whoppers as the connection between Iraq and 9/11, the likely cost and duration of the “necessary” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, “the smoking gun that would be a mushroom cloud,” the lawfulness of torture, and of domestic surveillance, etc. ad nauseam?

The peculiar mendacity of that catastrophic presidency left us with worse problems than a bunch of lies to put straight and reflect on. There’s a broken trust to restore-- to the extent that it’s possible to replace toxic cynicism with healthy skepticism-- in media and in government.

In 2004,a decorated Vietnam War hero ran for the presidency. This was an inconvenient fact for George W. Bush, his draft-dodging preppie opponent. It was vital, then, for the Republicans backing him to find a way to tarnish John Kerry’s service record while still noisily maintaining their “respect for the troops,” whom they were in the process of sending to the Middle East to be blown to bits by the thousand. The Republicans succeeded in discrediting Kerry through a new type of propaganda that effectively destroyed the obvious and instinctive assumption that a battle-hardened veteran and pacifist-- and not the soft rich boy-- would be better qualified to lead the country out of war.

The story of Kerry’s treatment in the media in the 2004 campaign provides a clear illustration of the cleverness and novelty of the Republican attack against him. Many politicians have resorted to the same playbook in the years since. As we enter the home stretch of this substantially more ghastly election, a review of their strategy, which I will call dismediation, is in order.

Dismediation is a form of propaganda that seeks to undermine the medium by which it travels, like a computer virus that bricks the whole machine. Thus, for example,

• Information: John Kerry is a war hero who was awarded three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star;
• Misinformation: John Kerry was never wounded in the Vietnam War;
• Disinformation: John Kerry is a coward;
• Dismediation: ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’ are disinterested sources of information about John Kerry, equivalent in integrity to any other source that might be presented on the evening news.

These four narratives were distributed simultaneously across various channels during the 2004 election, though only one of them (the first) is true. To begin with, there was some criticism of how readily Purple Hearts were handed out during the Vietnam war. Two of Kerry’s wounds didn’t require time off duty, though that doesn’t matter a bit: the rules governing the award are quite clear that even the slightest wound sustained in enemy combat qualifies for the medal. That’s how the misinformation that Kerry hadn’t been wounded was spread, perhaps unintentionally giving a biased impression of his service. Accusations of cowardice followed, and these were disinformation-- false information planted by partisans for Bush.

When he came home, Kerry became one of the best-known protestors against the Vietnam War. He testified in 1971, at the age of twenty-eight, before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations as a leader of the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War:

In our opinion… there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom […] is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.

(Thirty-eight years hence, he would chair the committee he addressed on that day.)

The portion of the electorate predisposed against dirty hippie pacifists was as eager to hear criticism of Kerry then as it would be in 2004, but by the time of his campaign, many were unaware of either Kerry’s bravery in battle or his anti-war activism. This relative ignorance gave Bush Republicans an opening. The Swift Boat group was financed by Bob J. Perry-- a rich Republican donor and associate of Karl Rove’s-- and real estate tycoon Harlan Crow, a trustee of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation. Together with Houston lawyer and former Swift Boat commander John O’Neill and conservative author Jerome Corsi, they cobbled together a book full of whoppers called “Unfit for Command.”

They also hired the guys who took down Michael Dukakis to make TV commercials attacking Kerry’s service. Swift Boater William Schachte shamefully insinuated that Kerry had deliberately wounded himself in order to secure a quick discharge. By the time the Kerry campaign realized people were paying attention to the Swift Boaters, the damage was done. Kerry had risked his own life in combat to save others, but a circus troupe of charlatans had sown the requisite doubts in the American electorate.

“Only in an election year ruled by fiction,” wrote Times columnist Frank Rich, “could a sissy who used Daddy’s connections to escape Vietnam turn an actual war hero into a girlie-man.” The lasting harm of this unfortunate episode, however, was not to Kerry’s reputation or to his candidacy. It was that afterward, millions of minds were uncertain as to what really constitutes “news,” or “reporting,” or “fact-checking.” This state of uncertainty hasn’t ever been adequately addressed, let alone mended.

In other words, the problem with my Republican relatives isn’t what they think of Fox News; everybody knows it’s propagandistic. The real problem is what Fox News et al., over time, have made them think of NPR, or MSNBC, or the New York Times. The Swift Boat style of twisting the facts has poisoned the well of public discourse for a whole generation of American adults-- for all of us-- by persuading so many that the confected “news” peddled on Fox is more or less equivalent to that on any other channel.

Dismediation isn’t discourse. It doesn’t disinform, and it’s not quite propaganda, as that term has long been understood. Instead, dismediation seeks to break the systems of trust without which civilized society hasn’t got a chance. Disinformation, once it’s done telling its lie, is finished with you. Dismediation is looking to make you never really trust or believe a news story, ever again. Not on Fox, and not on NPR. It’s not that we can’t agree on what the facts are. It’s that we cannot agree on what counts as fact. The machinery of discourse is bricked. That’s why we can’t think together, talk together, or vote together.

The success of dismediation projects like Fox News, Drudge Report and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show set the stage for Donald Trump, a buffoon beyond the satires of Dr. Strangelove or Infinite Jest. Trump happened in part because some of my cousins are now literally incapable of identifying facts, let alone weighing them. They apparently still intend to vote for a man who describes himself as “a genius” and in the same breath proposes to commit literal war crimes, break treaties, and steal the resources of other nations.

Dismediation is hard to combat, as it distorts not the facts, but the means by which facts can be understood. It’s like trying to win a chess game when the board has been flung into the air and the pieces scattered; quite often the bewildered victim finds himself trying in vain still to play e5 Qxe5 or whatever.

It’s easier to see dismediation when it’s practiced abroad, because foreign blinders are different from our own. Adrian Chen wrote in the New Yorker of the Russian troll farms he has been studying since 2014--  outfits operating armies of sock-puppet social media accounts churning out an avalanche of fake posts in order to produce the appearance of pro-government grassroots movements. But the real point of the troll farms, Russian activists told Chen, isn’t to make anyone believe the trolls. “The real effect… was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space.” The point is to prevent dissidents from finding one another, and to prevent any given individual from standing up and raising his voice.

There’s credible evidence that the Chinese government is engaging in similarly deceitful propagandistic practices on social media such as Weibo through its so-called “Fifty Cent Party.” A recent working paper published by Gary King, a social scientist at Harvard, estimates that the Chinese government fabricates in excess of 448 million “astroturf” posts annually (more than one million posts, every single day). “The goal of this massive secretive operation is… to regularly distract the public and change the subject,” King writes; the goal is to alter what constitutes “common knowledge.”

The Trump campaign is a would-be dismediation project almost certain to fail, simply because it was bound to hit the adamantine wall of his dishonesty and stupidity. He is so manifestly a con artist, a racist and an incompetent gross creepo that it’s nearly impossible to blur, confuse or fudge his true nature. All but the most willfully blind and/or deranged Republicans have therefore deserted him, and self-described conservatives find themselves, for the first time in years, actively questioning their own leadership. It’s become near impossible for Republicans to say to themselves, “Trump is only saying these false things for expediency’s sake, until he can get elected; after that, he’ll be fine.”

Trump is a black cloud with a silver lining. It’s so easy to see where the lies are. He is a grotesque, small-minded man unbelievably posing as the savior of the nation. The curtain has been drawn aside, and there he is, a sad little bullshitter, grabbling and pointing with his mean little hands into the camera, always at the camera.

The mammoth amount of available media in the internet age almost guarantees that we will see everything through the pinhole of our own worldview. We can so easily choose to experience only what we wish, and too often it’s the things we already agree with and believe. The walls of our gardens are grown very thick. What does “trust” mean in this new atmosphere? What will it mean, on November 9th?

“In theory,” wrote Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew (“the father of public relations”) in Propaganda (1928):

[E]very citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything… from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.

That is to say, we choose not to investigate and reason out every question, but to trust authorities in whom to place our confidence to do so for us. It is an old vulnerability become newly dangerous, as the sources of information and disinformation have spread and multiplied.

Dismediation isn’t limited to politics. Business is a past master at it; Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool is particularly fine on that subject. More recently, Elizabeth Holmes proved herself a skilled dismediator, actively endangering people with faulty blood testing technology while ginning up a Silicon Valley fairytale around herself and her company, Theranos. It took government agencies and dedicated journalists who gave a shit about the truth to put a stop to her TED-talking baloney. What will you think, the next time a Silicon Valley triumphalist comes along bragging about “changing the world”?

The advent of Brexit in the United Kingdom, and of the presidential bid of Donald Trump-- two national campaigns characterized by the wholesale spread of disinformation in mass media-- resuscitated the concept of “post-truth” in a number of recent pieces. If anything good can be said to have come of this election, it may be that the Republican candidate has demolished what remains of the “post-truth” era by demonstrating the poverty and malignity of lying as a campaign strategy.

The most heartening comment on the election so far came from Wisconsin conservative Marybeth Glenn, who made her feelings limpidly clear in a seventeen-part tweetstorm, condensed here:

When I saw Republican men getting attacked I stood up for them. I came to their defense. I fought on their behalf. I fought on behalf of a movement I believed in. I fought on behalf of my principles while other women told me I hated my own sex.

Not only charges of sexism, but I defended @marcorubio during Go8, I fought in my state to stop the @ScottWalker recall, etc… Now some Trojan horse nationalist sexual predator invades the @GOP, eating it alive, and you cowards sit this one out?

He treats women like dogs, and you go against everything I --  and other female conservatives --  said you were & back down like cowards. Get this straight: We don’t need you to stand up for us, YOU needed [us] to stand up for us for YOU. For YOUR dignity. For YOUR reputation…

I’m sooo done. If you can’t stand up for women & unendorse this piece of human garbage, you deserve every charge of sexism thrown at you.

I’m just one woman, you won’t even notice my lack of presence at rallies, fair booths, etc., You won’t really care that I’m offended by your silence, and your inability to take a stand. But one by one you’ll watch more women like me go, & you’ll watch men of ACTUAL character follow us out the door. And what you’ll be left with are the corrupt masses that foam at the mouth every time you step outside the lines. Men who truly see women as lesser beings, & women without self-respect. & your “guiding faith” & “principles” will be attached to them as well. And when it’s all said and done, all you’ll have left is the party The Left always accused you of being. Scum.

Here is an opportunity to make our politics better and more honest. To repudiate dismediation, to promote nuance rather than dogma, and to find such goals and policies that all principled people can agree on and move forward. It was a great thing to be able to unite with @MBGlenn. I was so happy to be able to find some common ground at last. We agree about the need to respect women! And we can fight for that together. Who knows where this rapprochement might end? Because it’s not possible for dismediation to occur in an atmosphere of mutual respect among citizens, re-establishing that respect should be our first goal.

Contrary to conventional opinion, it’s neither necessary nor remotely okay to lie in order to participate in politics. You can be a passionate partisan, make the best case you can for your side; nothing wrong with that. But there is an incandescently bright line between making your best case, and saying things that you know to be untrue. The latter is no good, not in any cause, however just.

There’s a chance, for the first time in many years, of restoring at least the goal of consensus among people of varying politics. We should be able to distinguish between good-faith attempts to inform us-- partisan or otherwise-- and self-interested, lying charlatanism. If the above is any evidence, that process of healing has already begun.

Maria Bustillos is a journalist and critic living in Los Angeles. This piece originally appeared in The Awl.

About That Blackmail Deal in Paris...

"Loss and Damage": U.S. Stymies Push for Compensation for Climate Devastation at U.N. Climate Summit (source)

by Gaius Publius

More about the Paris climate blackmail deal we wrote about recently, the offer by the U.S. delegation (and others in its camp) that they would agree to a lower cap on global warming — a less-damaging 1.5°C ceiling instead of 2°C — in exchange for the most vulnerable nations never again asking for reparations, i.e., damage liability claims.

The video at the top is telling and not very long. I suggest listening through. The transcript with my annotations is below. But first, five climate-related terms you should know:

• Adaptation — How a group or a nation protects itself against damage due to climate change. For example, putting up a sea wall to offset sea level rise is an adaptation.
   
• Mitigation — How a group or a nation helps to lessen the severity of climate-caused damage. For example, eliminating carbon emissions and replanting forests are mitigations.
   
• "Loss and damage" — Destruction of property or well-being, suffered by of a group or nation, caused by climate change. For example, loss can include destruction of a coastal village or a town due to flooding after permanent sea level rise. Examples of loss are numerous and varied; economically, for instance, a whole region's agriculture industry could completely disappear if a climate-induced drought never lifts.
   
• "Liability and compensation" — Payment for climate-induced "loss and damage" by those responsible for climate change. The developed countries are universally recognized as the greatest cause of climate change, since they burned the most accumulated atmospheric carbon. "Loss" is what's suffered. "Compensation" is what's paid by those responsible.
   
• "Finance" — In the world of U.N. climate negotiations, finance is code for "money made available to nations like India so that they can pay for ("finance") solar power projects, for example, instead of coal-fired power plants. Under the reported U.S.-backed offer, no additional money will be made available for "finance."

Losses occur to the small, poor, vulnerable nations first — low-lying Bangladesh, for example, or any number of small island countries. It's beyond question that the majority of climate-caused losses result from the two centuries of fossil fuel use that created the wealth of the developed nations, like the U.S. and Western Europe. Most of those emissions are still in the air and they still warm the earth.

Cumulative CO2 emissions since 1850 (click to enlarge; source)

The U.S.-led group of developed nations is telling the poorer and more vulnerable nations, in effect, "We'll commit to a lower warming limit, and we'll put more money for damage compensation on the table. But if you agree to this deal, that's all you get. You agree to never again to ask for more money. You release the developed nations, in other words, from all future claims of liability." In short, you can talk about your losses, but not about compensation for them.

As you'll hear in the interview, there's also a certain amount of strong-arm going on to get the smaller nations to accept this deal. Ugly stuff.

The Democracy Now piece is introduced this way:

On Monday, the prime minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sopoaga, said world leaders must prevent the world from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Many of the countries most impacted by climate change—but who did little to cause it—are also calling for the U.N. climate agreement to include compensation for adjusting to climate change, known as "Loss and Damage." But documents obtained by our guest reveal the United States is pushing these countries to forgo such rights. Nitin Sethi is senior associate editor at the Business Standard in India. His recent piece is called "US and EU want Loss and Damage as a toothless tiger in Paris agreement."

Now the transcript with my interspersed comments.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re broadcasting from Le Bourget, Paris, France, from the COP21, the U.N. climate summit. We’re here for the full two weeks. We end today’s show with an update in the negotiations taking place here at the summit. On Monday, the prime minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sopoaga, said world leaders must prevent the world from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

PRIME MINISTER ENELE SOPOAGA: At the current warming, my country, Tuvalu, and many others like us in the Pacific, Caribbean and Indian Ocean, our future is already bleak. We must urgently cut greenhouse gases and dramatically transform the global economy to a renewable energy pathway. Any further temperature increase beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius will spell—will spell the total demise of Tuvalu and other low-lying and island nations.

As you'll see later in this piece, the minister quoted above was the subject of some "pressure" to take a less strong stance. Now the main interview (my emphasis throughout):

AMY GOODMAN: Joining us now is Nitin Sethi, senior associate editor at the Business Standard in India. His recent piece is called "US and EU want Loss and Damage as a toothless tiger in Paris agreement." "Toothless tiger," Nitin, what exactly do you mean? You got a hold of documents that most people haven’t seen.

NITIN SETHI: Loss and damage, as an issue, refers to a couple of things. One, primarily, it’s been about that if you cannot adapt to inevitable climate change, what do countries do? They will suffer loss and damage. And will they be able to seek compensation? Will they be able to claim liability cases against countries which have not cut their emissions enough? Now, in this case, the U.S., particularly, on the Umbrella Group [presumably a group of developed nations that the U.S. is negotiating for], and then supported by EU, they’ve come back and said, "We want to make sure that in Paris you actually forgo all your compensation rights in the future," saying, "You must explicitly say that you shall never, ever ask for compensation hereafter the"—

AMY GOODMAN: Wait. Wait, wait, wait. So they’re saying you can use the words "loss and damage."

NITIN SETHI: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: The United States is saying.

NITIN SETHI: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: But only if you agree that you don’t get compensation.

NITIN SETHI: Absolutely. Now, that really means loss and damage is only a notional idea at the end of the day. You’re looking at risk insurance at the best of the times that might comfort some countries, but the poor countries can’t afford insurance because the premiums are going to be so high. So consider the fact that if you have sea level change, no insurance company is going to ensure you against sea level rise, because it’s almost a certainty. The risk levels are so high. The premiums are going to be so high, the poor countries can’t afford it. So the only option they had in the long run was some hope that you would be compensated, in different ways, and there could be liability charges, where if the countries haven’t cut their emissions enough, which causes the climate change, they should be paying for it. Now, U.S. is saying, "We want to cut this off right away. We should never have a conversation about it hereafter."

Notice the bolded part above. Sethi is saying that the vulnerable nations, if they suffer "loss and damage," might seek "compensation" from nations that are liable because they have not met their carbon emissions goals. The U.S. (Obama and Kerry) and the group of nations on whose behalf they are offering this deal want to forestall those claims.

Now about the framing. I think in the U.S. particularly, claims against the money of the wealthy are positioned as requests, claims against our generosity. Goodman asks about that:

AMY GOODMAN: So, I think it’s framed in the United States as a kind of—should the U.S. be charitable for those who are less able to take care of themselves in other parts of the world?

NITIN SETHI: Well, I don’t think it’s about charity. You’re paying compensation for the damage you’ve caused to your neighbor, in some sense. You break somebody’s fence, you set it upright. This is when you’re destroying lives of people, you’re paying them compensation for the fact that they will never be able to live in their homelands, perhaps, thereafter. This is not charity. This is a completely different ballgame.

Sethi has gotten his hands on some documents that back this up:

AMY GOODMAN: So what are these documents that you’ve gotten?

NITIN SETHI: Well, the document is an offer that the U.S. made informally to the G77 and other developing country groups, saying, "This is loss and damage. I agree to this. But if you have this explicit one sentence saying you shall forgo all rights to compensation and lability."

Barack Obama is personally involved in these "negotiations," in presenting this offer. Note how Obama first positions himself:

AMY GOODMAN: Now, President Obama met with small island nation presidents.

NITIN SETHI: Mm-hmm, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: This is—is this actually what he was telling them? We got the word he said, "I’m an island boy myself, right, grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia."

NITIN SETHI: Absolutely. Well, as per all countries, I think there’s a big degree of game that they all play, a theatric that they play. If you look at what happened after President Obama met these few countries—say, Marshall Islands, Saint Lucia and others—each of them came out saying, "Well, we’re working with the U.S. for a language which is convenient to the U.S." Now, that actually signifies that there’s a break even amongst what’s called the Association of Small Island States, which is comprised of Caribbean island states, those in the Pacific, those in the Indian Ocean and the African region. The Association of the Island States are cracking away under the pressure from U.S. We’ve seen the Caribbean islands move away. In fact, we hear now that even Tuvalu is saying, "Maybe we can live with the fact that we’ll not have compensation." This has happened just about an hour ago, where Tuvalu, behind closed doors, said, "We can look for language that, you know, kind of makes you happy. Just don’t say it so loudly. Say it in a polite fashion that we have a face saver at the end of the day."

The bolded part above refers to the representative from Tuvalu, whose minister is quoted speaking in strong terms at the beginning of this clip. This speaks to the strong-arm going on. These nations really are weak, pawns in the game of international chess, finance and development. There are many ways the powerful can "influence" them to back away from threats to the money of the wealthier nations.

Which leads to this exchange, about strong-arming from the U.N. itself:

AMY GOODMAN: You also talk about U.N. censorship. What is that?

NITIN SETHI: Sorry. Could you say that again?

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about U.N. censorship? What I mean is, we spoke to Yeb Saño the other day. Now he is a pilgrim who walked from Rome here to Paris, but he’s not the chief climate negotiator for the Philippines, as he was. He was pulled right before Lima, Peru, the last COP ["Conference of the Parties"].

NITIN SETHI: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: What happens to climate negotiators who speak out?

NITIN SETHI: I mean, if you remember, you can go back to Copenhagen, where you had Di-Aping Lumumba from Sudan. If you remember, he was the first one to talk about issues of apartheid, the way developing countries were being treated. We never saw him back in the negotiations thereafter. It’s happened to Yeb Saño two years ago, because he fought really hard to get loss and damage in when nobody else was standing up for it. He disappeared. In fact, so far, the Philippines had to walk away. Philippines was forced to move away from the like-minded developing countries, because they were pretty strong. Now Philippines is part of the vulnerable countries group, where they actually don’t have a stand on loss and damage anymore. This year, again, if you remember, a few days ago, the G77 chair, Ambassador Diseko from South Africa, she actually on the court said, "My country is getting phone calls saying take certain negotiators out of the talking rooms because they’re being hardliners." And we’ve seen one of the key negotiators for the G77 group was Juan Hoffmaister from Bolivia, and he’s nowhere in the room anymore. And he’s the key guy on loss and damage and adaptation.

AMY GOODMAN: Who’s taking him out? Who’s taking all these people out?

NITIN SETHI: Well, nobody said who’s taking them out. But you clearly know in whose favor it is if you take these guys out. It’s primarily the U.S. and other developed countries. They’re the only ones who make this call to say these specific guys should be removed. And this is not the first time it’s happened. If you remember Bernarditas Muller from Philippines, she doesn’t come from the Philippines badge anymore. Again, Philippines being under pressure not to have these people who know the convention, who know the rules, who know the history of these negotiations.

See what I mean? This is beyond ugly. It's criminal.

Three Takeaways

First, it should be clear by now that no one currently in power in the U.S. — not Obama nor anyone working for him — is negotiating on your behalf. They're negotiating on the behalf of those who put them in power in the first place. That won't change until he is out of office, if then.

Second, the idea of using the force of international litigation is clearly something the Obamas, the Merkels and the Camerons are worried could happen — worried enough that they're willing to burn cred floating a dirty little blackmail deal like this one. That possibility, using international litigation with failure to meet national climate targets as evidence of liability, should be investigated and pursued.

Third, I still think that the main avenue for change will be force of some kind, perhaps of all kinds combined. But if you're electorally inclined, you can support this guy. Of the Democratic candidates with a chance of winning, I take him at his word; he gets it about climate disaster and the need to address it. (You can adjust the split any way you want at the link.)

More on this as it develops. This isn't Copenhagen 2009, with no one paying attention. This is Paris, and the eyes of the drought-filled, drowning world are watching closely.

GP

U.S. Offers Vulnerable Nations a Deal, But They Can Never Ask for Climate Money Again

"Those who are despoiling the earth do so for personal gain, believing they can use their privilege to escape their fate" –Chris Hedges (full-size image; source).

by Gaius Publius

Shameful. If the these reports are true, the U.S. is offering a deal to the poor and climate-vulnerable on the planet, as well as to emerging nations like India, and it's not a good one for them. Here's the shape of the deal in five easy pieces (quotes are from Mark Hertsgaard at The Nation and KC Golden at Climate Solutions).

1. Two degrees is too much. KC Golden:

Two [degrees warming] is too much. A 2 degree C. increase in the global average temperature – the working redline for climate catastrophe – would mean a “significantly different planet,” disrupting food and water supplies, inundating coastal cities, obliterating island nations… Look at what 1 degree is doing already, as extreme record rainfall reports come in almost daily.

2. Poor and climate-vulnerable nations will suffer enormously under two-degrees warming — they're suffering already under one degrees warming. Golden:

Climate justice advocates, led by the world’s most vulnerable nations, are pushing in Paris to move the target to 1.5 degrees C. Science, sanity, and moral responsibility are with them, but rarely are those enough to win the day. Sober COP-watchers gave the drive for 1.5 little chance to prevail, as Big Fossil continues to box the negotiators.

The cost of climate-change adaptation for these nations is more than they can bear. ("Adaptation" is climate-speak for what you do to protect yourself from the climate "storm." Adaptation includes, for example, building sea walls for future sea level rise. Adaptation, naturally enough, costs money, and some of the poorest nations, like Bangladesh and low-lying island states, are the most vulnerable.)

3. But if the target of two degrees is lowered, emerging nations like India will have to go to capital-intensive energy projects like solar almost immediately, bypassing coal and oil, since the remaining "carbon budget" will be almost zero if a target like 1.5°C is adopted. (That "budget" is actually zero now, but for the sake of this discussion, let's pretend along with the UN that this isn't so.)

It's very expensive to finance capital-intensive projects in places like India. Yet making sure all power facilities, including new facilities, are emissions-free is critical for mitigating future effects of climate change. ("Mitigation" is climate-speak for what you do to soften the future climate "storm," to make it less powerful. Mitigation includes conversion away from emissions-causing power, for example, at the fastest possible rate, so the climate stabilizes at a less damaging place. Like adaptation, climate mitigation also costs money, especially for emerging countries like India.)

4. John Kerry and the U.S. team are reportedly floating an offer — they will back a 1.5-degree target. Hertzgaard:

Entering the closing 48 hours of the global climate negotiations, US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday that “we will not leave the most vulnerable nations among us to quite literally weather the storm alone.” Speaking an hour before newly updated negotiating text was released, Kerry also referenced the surprising news from Monday that a temperature limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius—“or as low as we can go” beneath 2 degrees, he said—might be included in the final agreement.

5. But the U.S. wants a price. Climate-vulnerable nations get paid once for their trouble, then never get to ask for money again by claims for compensation and liability. Hertsgaard (my emphasis):

But representatives of developing nations complained that behind closed doors, the US was demanding a deal-breaking quid pro quo: in return for referencing the 1.5 C target, poor and vulnerable nations must agree to never again raise the issue of “liability and compensation” for the climate impacts bound to increasingly afflict those nations in the years ahead.

In addition, even though the offer includes backing a more aggressive 1.5°C warming limit (as opposed to the current 2°C warming limit), the cost of financing mitigation in places like India are reportedly entirely absent from the proposal. Hertsgaard again:

Second, the US has refused to provide the financial assistance poor nations need to pursue a development path consistent with a 1.5 C target—for India, for example, to forego coal-fired power plants in favor of wind and solar.

And that's the deal on offer.

Blackmail With a Twist

If true, this is a form of blackmail for places like Bangladesh and the island nations. The poor and vulnerable will get a more climate-friendly international ceiling and a small, certainly inadequate, one-time settlement from the U.S. and presumably, other rich nations backing the U.S. offer (Hertsgaard) ...

In an uncharacteristically animated speech, Kerry made news by announcing that the US will double its funding for vulnerable countries’ adaptation to climate impacts to $800 million a year by 2020.

... so long as they never ask for money to alleviate their suffering again. And nations like India are shut out of the compensation game altogether, despite the lower warming limit.

And the ironic twist is this: What does the U.S. offer in exchange? To back a tighter standard — to try to keep global warming below 1.5°C — when even the current standard can't be met by any of the rich nations' commitments. Bhaskar Chakravorti, Assoc. Dean of International Finance at Tufts, writing in the Washington Post (my emphasis):

Looking ahead, the forecast calls for overcast skies. A Paris climate deal is already framed by an impossible goal: a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius, the collective target for warming set by the 2009 Copenhagen Accord. The concern is that increases beyond this could amplify the many negative effects of climate change: a decline of crop yields, famines, extreme weather events with greater frequency, the break-up of the major ice sheets in Greenland and in Antarctica and locking-in rises in sea levels by at least 20 feet.

Even if countries keep to their commitments anticipated in Paris, warming will exceed the 2 degree Celsius cap during this century; to make matters worse, the commitments are voluntary and are, thus, vulnerable to political and economic realities back home.

The U.S.-led offer appears to be entirely empty (perhaps even cynical, but that goes to motive), an offer that can never be met under the current commitment plan. It's no wonder Hertzgaard calls the quid pro quo "deal-breaking."

It's Always Going to Be About the Money

This shameful offer — and I blame Barack Obama for it — is just another instance of the rich, in this case, the wealthiest nations on earth, protecting their wealth from humans whose suffering they cause in acquiring it. The entire climate crisis is always about the money, always was, always will be.

Consider: In a just world, who should pay when California loses its agriculture industry, when south Florida returns to the sea and real estate values collapse, when storms and floods make increasing millions homeless and vulnerable to disease, starvation and chaos? How is the answer not Exxon, the Kochs (Koch Industries is privately owned), Chevron, Total and Shell Oil, the sheikhs of Saudi Arabia, and all the rest?

How are the thieves, the top financial predators, not responsible for the poverty and suffering around them? Yet what is David Koch's primary goal on earth? To keep his share of the Koch fortune — $100 billion and counting — to never give a dime to those he despoiled, and to acquire yet more at the fastest rate he can before he dies. If you want to pay for the damage done to the poor by the rich, justice says, "Take back from the rich to finance it." And the rich of the earth know that better than anyone. Thus Kerry's, and Obama's, (yes, cynical) deal.

It's always about the money and it always will be. Barack Obama, speaking for the U.S. and other wealthy nations, want the poor to take a small settlement, pennies on the dollar for their woes, then suck it up and never bother them again. It's what the rich always want, be to left to enjoy the spoils. It's left to us not to let them.

Will the Destruction Be Total This Time?

Sometimes when you loot the town, you can return to your castle and enjoy what you took in peace. But if you burn down the wheat fields as well, everyone starves. This kind of behavior, Kerry's and Obama's, in the face of a real global emergency, makes rants like this sound reasonable:

Apocalyptic Capitalism

The charade of the 21st United Nations climate summit will end, as past climate summits have ended, with lofty rhetoric and ineffectual cosmetic reforms. Since the first summit more than 20 years ago, carbon dioxide emissions have soared. Placing faith in our political and economic elites, who have mastered the arts of duplicity and propaganda on behalf of corporate power, is the triumph of hope over experience. There are only a few ways left to deal honestly with climate change: sustained civil disobedience that disrupts the machinery of exploitation; preparing for the inevitable dislocations and catastrophes that will come from irreversible rising temperatures; and cutting our personal carbon footprints, which means drastically reducing our consumption, particularly of animal products. ...

The global elites have no intention of interfering with the profits, or ending government subsidies, for the fossil fuel industry and the extraction industries. They will not curtail extraction or impose hefty carbon taxes to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They will not limit the overconsumption that is the engine of global capitalism. They act as if the greatest contributor of greenhouse gases—the animal agriculture industry—does not exist. They siphon off trillions of dollars and employ scientific and technical expertise—expertise that should be directed toward preparing for environmental catastrophe and investing in renewable energy—to wage endless wars in the Middle East. What they airily hold out as a distant solution to the crisis—wind turbines and solar panels—is, as the scientist James Lovelock says, the equivalent of 18th-century doctors attempting to cure serious diseases with leeches and mercury. And as the elites mouth platitudes about saving the climate they are shoving still another trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), down our throats. The TPP permits corporations to ignore nonbinding climate accords made at conferences such as the one in Paris, and it allows them, in secret trade tribunals, to defy environmental regulations imposed by individual states. ...

The elites, trained in business schools and managerial programs not to solve real problems but to maintain at any cost the systems of global capitalism, profit personally from the assault. They amass inconceivable sums of wealth while their victims, the underclasses around the globe, are thrust into increasing distress from global warming, poverty and societal breakdown. The apparatus of government, seized by this corporate cabal, is hostile to genuine change. It passes laws, as it did for Denton, Texas, after residents voted to outlaw fracking in their city, to overturn the ability of local communities to control their own resources. It persecutes dissidents, along with environmental and animal rights activists, who try to halt the insanity. The elites don’t work for us. They don’t work for the planet. They orchestrate the gaiacide. And they are well paid for it.

In sum, for Hedges (my emphasis):

Those who are despoiling the earth do so for personal gain, believing they can use their privilege to escape the fate that will befall the human species. We may not be able to stop the assault. But we can refuse to abet it.

Resistance is not futile, not yet anyway. But we do have to resist, we have to use force, because no one, from the rich to those who serve them, from David Koch to Obama, is going to solve this for us. Their goals are not your goals, and they never were.

I'm actually more optimistic than this guy, but sometimes you have to be willing to make a few changes.

One place to start — Bernie Sanders, who actually gets it on climate, now holds a double-digit lead over Clinton in New Hampshire. You might give him a hand (adjust the split anyway you want at the link).

GP