Rachel Maddow pinpoints the root of all evils: The fossil fuel industry
The Washington Post – October 3, 2019 – Jill Dougherty
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-root-of-all-evils-the-fossil-fuel-industry-says-rachel-maddow/2019/10/03/14273cd6-de1a-11e9-8dc8-498eabc129a0_story.html
Fulminating comes easy to Rachel Maddow. What sets her apart from other serial fulminators is that she does it with facts — and sardonic wit. Her new book, “Blowout,” takes on the fossil fuel industry or, as one person she cites puts it, the “excrement of the devil.” This is not — and who would expect it from Maddow? — an “on the one hand, on the other hand” type of journalistic endeavor. She states her thesis at the outset: The oil and gas industry “is the most consequential, the most lucrative, the most powerful, and the least-well-governed major industry in the history of mankind.”
Trump has no problem letting billionaires profit off the pandemic
The Guardian – August 9, 2020 – Robert Reich
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/09/trump-has-no-problem-letting-billionaires-profit-off-the-pandemic
Since the start of the pandemic, American billionaires have been cleaning up. As more than 50 million Americans filed for unemployment insurance, billionaires became $637bn richer. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth has ballooned 59%. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’s, 39%. Walmart’s Walton family has added $25bn… But the market also operates under laws that ban profiteering, price gouging, and monopolizing, and that tax excess profits in wartime. Where did they go? The Trump administration hasn’t enforced them.
Trump is also ignoring laws that ban trades on insider information. The White House is distributing billions in subsidies and loans to select corporations – enabling CEOs and boards to load up on stocks and stock options just before deals are announced, then rake in fat profits after stock prices surge… In the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, stock prices are almost back to where they were before the pandemic began. Big corporations and major investors are doing fine. Billionaires are doing better than ever. But most Americans are sinking fast. This isn’t just unfair. Much of it is illegal.
Meatpacking Companies Dismissed Years of Warnings but Now Say Nobody Could Have Prepared for COVID-19
ProPublica – August 20, 2020 – Michael Grabell and Bernice Yeung
https://www.propublica.org/article/meatpacking-companies-dismissed-years-of-warnings-but-now-say-nobody-could-have-prepared-for-covid-19
a ProPublica investigation has found that for more than a dozen years, critical businesses like meatpackers have been warned that a pandemic was coming. With eerie prescience, infectious disease experts and emergency planners had modeled scenarios in which a highly contagious virus would cause rampant absenteeism at processing plants, leading to food shortages and potential closures. The experts had repeatedly urged companies and government agencies to prepare for exactly the things that Smithfield’s CEO now claims were unrealistic. “It was an unmitigated disaster for food processors, and it didn’t have to be,” said John Hoffman, who developed emergency planning for the food and agriculture sector at the Department of Homeland Security during the George W. Bush administration. “There are things that could have happened in a pandemic that would have been novel, but this has unfolded pretty much as the pandemic plan has suggested it would.”
Senate report details security risk posed by 2016 Trump campaign’s Russia contacts
The Washington Post – August 18, 2020 – Greg Miller, Karoun Demirjian and Ellen Nakashima
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/senate-intelligence-trump-russia-report/2020/08/18/62a7573e-e093-11ea-b69b-64f7b0477ed4_story.html
The overall portrait that emerges from the report’s 966 pages is of repeated encounters between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, but no formal collusion. The two sides shared the same objective — the defeat of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton — and basked in one another’s admiration. But more because of ineptitude than any principled commitment to the sanctity of American democracy, the partnership was never consummated, the committee determined… The document would read more like a harrowing historical account were it not for mounting evidence that many of the same forces of disruption are lining up for the 2020 election. The top U.S. counterintelligence official recently warned that Russia is again waging a far-reaching interference campaign and favors Trump in the upcoming election.
Collusion? Yes, There Was Plenty of That
Salon – August 19, 2020 – Heather Digby Parton
https://www.salon.com/2020/08/19/senate-intelligence-report-reveals-a-vast-network-of–yes–trump-russia-collusion/
Essentially, the report shows the Trump campaign was crawling with Russians, many more than is commonly realized, and the evidence strongly indicates that any intelligence or law enforcement officials who didn’t look into this bizarre circumstance would have been derelict in their duty. The Mueller report stated explicitly that as a law enforcement investigation Mueller’s team was not concerned with the non-legal concept of “collusion” and were instead bound by the criminal code’s definition of “conspiracy,” which they were unable to prove, largely due to a lack of cooperation by those involved in the probe. The Senate committee had no such restrictions and did investigate collusion — and found it… The picture that emerges is of a presidential campaign, and an administration, so completely out of its depth that it “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.” In other words, Trump and his cronies were willing dupes and the Russian government took full advantage of it. In fact, it still is.
‘Canary in the coal mine’: Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds
Reuters – August 14, 2020 – Cassandra Garrison
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-arctic/canary-in-the-coal-mine-greenland-ice-has-shrunk-beyond-return-study-finds-idUSKCN25A2X3
Annual snowfall [is] no longer enough to replenish glaciers of the snow and ice being lost to summertime melting. That melting is already causing global seas to rise about a millimeter on average per year. If all of Greenland’s ice goes, the water released would push sea levels up by an average of 6 meters — enough to swamp many coastal cities around the world. This process, however, would take decades. “Greenland is going to be the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is already pretty much dead at this point,” said glaciologist Ian Howat at Ohio State University. He and his colleagues published the study Thursday in the Nature Communications Earth & Environment journal.
After Two Years of School Strikes, the World Is Still in a State of Climate Crisis Denial
The Guardian – August 19, 2020 – Greta Thunberg, Luisa Neubauer, Anuna De Wever and Adélaïde Charlier
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/19/climate-crisis-leaders-greta-thunberg
Today, leaders all over the world are speaking of an “existential crisis”. The climate emergency is discussed on countless panels and summits. Commitments are being made, big speeches are given. Yet, when it comes to action we are still in a state of denial. The climate and ecological crisis has never once been treated as a crisis. The gap between what we need to do and what’s actually being done is widening by the minute. Effectively, we have lost another two crucial years to political inaction… We still have the future in our own hands. But time is rapidly slipping through our fingers. We can still avoid the worst consequences. But to do that, we have to face the climate emergency and change our ways. And that is the uncomfortable truth we cannot escape.
Wait, How Much Microplastic Is Swirling in the Atlantic?
Wired Magazine – August 18, 2020 – Matt Simon
https://www.wired.com/story/how-much-microplastic-is-swirling-in-the-atlantic/
Scientists calculate that the top 200 meters of ocean alone contains up to 21 million metric tons of plastic. And that wasn’t even counting microfibers… Writing today in the journal Nature Communications, scientists from the National Oceanography Centre in the United Kingdom say they can account for that missing plastic, and in the process reveal the stunning scale of the microplastic pollution problem… This research is part of a larger effort among environmental scientists to sketch out the “microplastic cycle,” or how the tiny particles move between land and sea and air. So far, the results have been troubling, to say the least. While scientists used to think microplastics stayed in the ocean, which acts like a kind of sink, they recently showed that seawater burps up particles that then blow onto land, and likely into our lungs. Wind is also scouring cities and carrying microplastics into the atmosphere. Then the particles can fall as plastic rain into protected areas downwind.
Solar Panels Are Starting to Die, Leaving Behind Toxic Trash
Wired Magazine – August 22, 2020 – Maddie Stone
https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-leaving-behind-toxic-trash/
Photovoltaic panels are a boon for clean energy but are tricky to recycle. As the oldest ones expire, get ready for a solar e-waste glut.
High school students are demanding schools teach more Black history, include more Black authors
The Washington Post – August 17, 2020 – Hannah Natanson
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/high-schoolers-across-the-country-are-banding-together-to-demand-their-schools-teach-more-black-history-and-read-more-black-authors/2020/08/15/a42e6d12-dbef-11ea-809e-b8be57ba616e_story.html
“The education system is where people form values other than what their parents have,” [18-year-old Vanessa] Amoah said. “George Floyd, Philando Castile — none of it would have happened if this country worked on proactively teaching anti-racist values.” “It is a chain,” she said. “It starts with a racist joke, and not teaching kids about this in class, and it escalates. We have to start at the base.” They are among a wave of young people throughout the country who are banding together to demand education reform wherever they attend school: at large public systems, elite private schools or small parochial institutions. Teenagers and recent graduates are publishing online petitions, sending letters to their alma maters and testifying at virtual board meetings. They are asking for the inclusion of more Black history in curriculums, a more thorough teaching of events such as the Civil War and a more diverse range of authors in English syllabi… The need for improved education on America’s racist past and a more thoughtful consideration of its present, experts agree, is very real. This is especially true when it comes to slavery.
Calling on white Americans: Reparations for slavery are due
The Boston Globe – August 17, 2020 – David Gardinier and Karen Hilfman
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/08/17/opinion/calling-white-americans-reparations-slavery-are-due/
True Black history, which few white people — including us — learned in school, points to numerous calls for reparations for Black Americans, such as efforts centered on the passage of bills in Congress… our country still has never managed to atone for the brutal devastation that began in 1619, when enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown, Va. The legacy of slavery is far from resolved. It persists every day and everywhere, as evidenced by income and wealth inequality, disparate living conditions and health outcomes, police brutality and mass incarceration, and the overall white supremacist system that treats white and Black lives in vastly different ways… The other side of this history, the part that was rarely told, is that the wealth generated from all that “free” enslaved labor, combined with the theft of land from indigenous peoples, is what placed white Americans solidly among the wealthiest people on earth today.
At Homeland Security, I saw firsthand how dangerous Trump is for America
The Washington Post – August 17, 2020 – Miles Taylor
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/at-homeland-security-i-saw-firsthand-how-dangerous-trump-is-for-america/2020/08/17/f10bb92e-e0a3-11ea-b69b-64f7b0477ed4_story.html
It is more than a little ironic that Trump is campaigning for a second term as a law-and-order president. His first term has been dangerously chaotic. Four more years of this are unthinkable.
In Alaska, Trump Doubles Down on Environmental Vandalism
The New Yorker – August 17, 2020 – Bill McKibben
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/in-alaska-trump-doubles-down-on-environmental-vandalism
the Trump Administration has done everything in its power to gut the country’s environmental regulations—and with more success than it’s had in many other policy realms. On Monday, the Administration announced that it will start selling drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the country’s largest, by December, 2021. The move reverses more than a half-century of efforts to block drilling in the country’s largest remaining wilderness… Alaska’s salmon run ranks with the migration of the monarchs and the wandering of the caribou on the list of the world’s epoch events. Endangering it to get some “precious” metals requires a fundamental misunderstanding of the word. But it is clear what the President values: among the most famous pre-Presidency pictures of Trump are those from his hundred-million-dollar penthouse, invariably described as “decorated with 24k. gold.” Salmon, on the other hand, is the thing that your wife orders at a benefit dinner.
The president’s environmental plunder
The Boston Globe – August 19, 2020 – editorial
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/08/19/opinion/presidents-environmental-plunder/
Trump’s latest moves to open up oil-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and roll back methane regulations will have lasting consequences… The moves should tell American voters all they need to know about whether they could survive another four years of a president who seems to care not at all about protecting the environment and public health, not at all about climate change, and certainly not about the science that should govern environmental policy. But the question remains: Can this corrupt juggernaut of an administration be stopped before the damage becomes permanent?… This steady erosion of environmental protections, from the rollback of fuel economy standards for cars and trucks to this nation’s abandonment of the Paris climate accords, surely comes as no surprise from this administration. The most troubling aspect these days, however, is the accelerated pace of that erosion. It’s as if Trump believes voters dealing with a pandemic and an election won’t realize the extent of the damage until it’s too late — until his cronies get what they paid for.
How Donald Trump has constructed a legal infrastructure of fascism
Alternet – August 13, 2020 – Bill Blum
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/how-donald-trump-has-constructed-a-legal-infrastructure-of-fascism/
The debate over whether Donald Trump is a fascist is no longer confined to a narrow segment of the far left. It is now out in the open. Even mainstream columnists like the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg and the Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor and influential Democratic politicians, such as Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, have come to use the “F” word to describe our 45th commander in chief. Although it is an emotionally loaded and often misused term, fascism is as real today as a political and cultural force, a set of core beliefs and a mode of governance as it was when Benito Mussolini founded the Italian Fascist Party in 1919 and declared himself dictator six years later. Nor is fascism a foreign phenomenon restricted to South American banana republics or failed European states. As University of London professor Sarah Churchwell explained in a June 22 essay published in the New York Review of Books, fascism has deep roots in the United States, spanning the decades from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s to the rise of the German-American Bund in the 1930s, the ascendance of Depression-era demagogues like Huey Long, and the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
Obama Delivers His Gettysburg Address
The American Prospect – August 20, 2020 – Harold Meyerson
https://prospect.org/politics/unconventional-the-democrats-day-three/
Barack Obama’s remarkable speech on Wednesday night was the most Lincolnesque that he, or any post-Lincoln American, has ever given. He gave his long-muted voice not just to his presentiments about the authoritarian threat that Donald Trump has posed to the nation, and what horrors of racism, irrationality, and brutality may follow should Trump be re-elected, but to the fears of millions that American democracy itself is on the line in November. And like Lincoln at Gettysburg, Obama defined the stakes of the conflict threatening the nation more logically, more compellingly, and more movingly than anyone else could have… As Lincoln told the nation that it could either expand democracy with the “new birth of freedom” that was emancipation or risk losing it altogether, so Obama told the young that they could make American democracy more real by continuing their fight, or risk losing it altogether should Trump win.
Millions of women lose contraceptives, abortions in COVID-19
AP News – August 19, 2020 – Aniruddha Ghosal and Cara Anna
https://apnews.com/4f3f067fa843de8d3d6cec5a74581fe5
Millions of women and girls globally have lost access to contraceptives and abortion services because of the coronavirus pandemic. Now the first widespread measure of the toll says India with its abrupt, months-long lockdown has been hit especially hard. Several months into the pandemic, many women now have second-trimester pregnancies because they could not find care in time.
Reclaim Public Medicine for Public Health
Common Dreams – August 20, 2020 – Dana Brown, Alex Lawson, Christopher Morten and Fran Quigley
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/20/reclaim-public-medicine-public-health
By taking the vaccine industry into full public ownership, we can provide an internationalized response to this and future pandemics that properly recognizes vaccines as a global public good… Governments, non-profits, and industry in the U.S. and around the world are working furiously to catch up. But their efforts have been hampered by fundamental flaws in our profit-driven pharmaceutical industry… The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed shocking deficiencies in our country’s commitment to the health of all Americans. The choice to prioritize corporate profits over the research, development, and distribution of effective, affordable medicines has proven deadly, just as it has for Americans who have been facing dire access challenges for decades. We are confronting the challenge of our lifetimes without the tests, treatments and vaccines we need. Yet, more and more public money is being pumped into a system best placed to produce duplicative “me-too” drugs that generate excessive profits but have little to no impact on public health. The pandemic has taught us a brutal lesson: it is time to reclaim our medicines system for the public good. These four steps are the way to begin.
Politics slows flow of US virus funds to local public health
AP News – August 17, 2020 – Michelle R. Smith, Lauren Weber, Hannah Recht and Laura Ungar
https://apnews.com/33228796a8a66a50546c9e3ddacfef1b
So little money has flowed to some local health departments for many reasons: Bureaucracy has bogged things down, politics have crept into the process, and understaffed departments have struggled to take time away from critical needs to navigate the red tape required to justify asking for extra dollars… “It does not make sense to me how anyone thinks this is a way to do business,” said E. Oscar Alleyne, chief of programs and services at the National Association of County and City Health Officials. “We are never going to get ahead of the pandemic response if we are still handicapped.”
Israel Perfecting Surveillance Tech
The Unz Review – May 14, 2020 – Philip Giraldi
https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/israel-perfecting-surveillance-tech/
Israel, like every other authoritarian state, is currently taking advantage of the distraction caused by the coronavirus pandemic… Americans should beware when confronted by the new cyber-security software being promoted by Israel because the Jewish state is also exporting its own vision of a centrally controlled militarized state where all rights are potentially sacrificed for security. As whistleblower Edward Snowden has already revealed, the NSA has the capability to collect vast amounts of information on citizens. If the United States government falls for the bait and moves in the Israeli direction, using that data to enable the surveillance and manage all the people all the time, the temptation will be great to employ the new capability even if its use is not strictly speaking warranted.
Steve Bannon Got Busted By the Postal Service Police. Well Played, Irony.
Esquire Magazine – August 20, 2020 – Charles P. Pierce
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a33656805/steve-bannon-arrested-fraud-trump-sucker/
The vision of the last heir to House Harkonnen in cuffs is delicious enough. (The “administrative state” has got your ass now, pally.) Just as flavorful is the report that this bust happened at all because administration* house counsel Bill Barr botched the neutering of the SDNY US Attorney’s office and was forced to leave Audrey Strauss, the assistant to the US attorney he defenestrated, in charge, so that one day it would be Strauss who clapped Bannon and his co-conspirators in irons. And the single most delicious tidbit is that Bannon et. al. got themselves busted by…wait for it…the U.S. Postal Service police. Well played, Irony. Well played.
The Summer QAnon Went Mainstream
Portside – Mother Jones – August 21, 2020 – Ali Breland
https://www.portside.org/2020-08-21/summer-qanon-went-mainstream
The anticipated moment where Trump would receive this question has been a longstanding dream of the community whose members believe, without proof or evidence, that President Trump is locked in a battle with deep state government bureaucrats over his attempts to bring down a cabal of elite liberal pedophiles… Travis View, an independent conspiracy researcher who has extensively followed QAnon and hosts the podcast QAnon Anonymous, says the movement’s growing diversity is proof that it’s increasingly trending mainstream… “It was constrained to the very online far-right, then after it spilled out of 8chan it went to white boomers,” View said, referring to the message board that, until it was taken down in August 2019, hosted cryptic messages from Q, the unidentified poster at the conspiracy’s center… Exactly why QAnon is going mainstream now is a complicated question with no single answer. One of the main drivers, as in the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, is that QAnon is an extremely useful right-wing political project that can be used to justify fighting against social progress. But the main catalyst of its current round of growth is probably the coronavirus.
The Unraveling of America
Portside – RollingStone – August 13, 2020 – Wade Davis
https://www.portside.org/2020-08-13/unraveling-america
Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives. COVID didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken… The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand… Odious as he may be, Trump is less the cause of America’s decline than a product of its descent. As they stare into the mirror and perceive only the myth of their exceptionalism, Americans remain almost bizarrely incapable of seeing what has actually become of their country. The republic that defined the free flow of information as the life blood of democracy, today ranks 45th among nations when it comes to press freedom. In a land that once welcomed the huddled masses of the world, more people today favor building a wall along the southern border than supporting health care and protection for the undocumented mothers and children arriving in desperation at its doors. In a complete abandonment of the collective good, U.S. laws define freedom as an individual’s inalienable right to own a personal arsenal of weaponry, a natural entitlement that trumps even the safety of children; in the past decade alone 346 American students and teachers have been shot on school grounds… The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care. What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness… The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all people in common purpose.
A second Trump term might injure the democratic experiment beyond recovery
The Washington Post – August 21, 2020 – editorial
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/21/second-trump-term-might-injure-democratic-experiment-beyond-recovery/
History will record Mr. Trump’s presidency as a march of wanton, uninterrupted, tragic destruction. America’s standing in the world, loyalty to allies, commitment to democratic values, constitutional checks and balances, faith in reason and science, concern for Earth’s health, respect for public service, belief in civility and honest debate, beacon to refugees in need, aspirations to equality and diversity and basic decency — Mr. Trump torched them all… He has sought to undermine confidence in democracy itself, lying about the prevalence of fraud, floating the possibility of delaying the election and even suggesting he may not accept its results. These are high crimes and misdemeanors, as the framers of the Constitution understood the term. But this time it is up to us, the American people, to remove Mr. Trump from office.
Trump’s “Law and Order” Campaign Is a Distraction
Robert Reich’s Blog – August 22, 2020
https://robertreich.org/post/626815694045052928
Trump has refused to act to contain the coronavirus, opting to sit on the sidelines as the pandemic ravages the country. But when it comes to waging violence against his own people, he’s quickly risen to the occasion. Here are 6 ways Donald Trump has failed to attack the coronavirus, but instead has attacked Americans… when it comes to assaulting Americans exercising their right to protest in defense of Black lives, Trump is quick to assert strong “leadership.” He called the NYC Black Lives Matter mural a “symbol of hate” and has sent federal agents to terrorize protestors even as mayors and governors urged him to stay out… Public health authorities don’t have adequate medical equipment to quickly analyze coronavirus tests. But Trump’s police have everything they need to injure protesters, including military style armored vehicles, teargas, and tactical assault weapons – “the best equipment,” Trump boasted obnoxiously… No matter how hard he tries, we can’t let Trump shift public attention from his failure to attack the virus to his attacks on Americans protesting to create an America where Black lives matter and everyone can thrive. In fewer than 90 days, we must hold him accountable at the ballot box.