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29 January 20
Paul Krugman | Greta Versus the Greedy Grifters
Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Krugman writes: "I've never been a fan of Davos, that annual gathering of the rich and fatuous. One virtue of the pageant of preening and self-importance, however, is that it brings out the worst in some people, leading them to say things that reveal their vileness for all to see."
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Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Krugman writes: "I've never been a fan of Davos, that annual gathering of the rich and fatuous. One virtue of the pageant of preening and self-importance, however, is that it brings out the worst in some people, leading them to say things that reveal their vileness for all to see."
And so it was for Steven Mnuchin, Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary. First, Mnuchin doubled down on his claim that the 2017 tax cut will pay for itself — just days after his own department confirmed that the budget deficit in 2019 was more than $1 trillion, 75 percent higher than it was in 2016.
Then he sneered at Greta Thunberg, the young climate activist, suggesting that she go study economics before calling for an end to investment in fossil fuels.
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Joe Biden speaks with audience members during a bus tour stop in Mason City, Iowa. (photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP)
Why Does Joe Biden Keep Losing His Cool With Voters?
Luke O'Neil, Guardian UK
O'Neil writes: "Joe Biden apparently doesn't care if you vote for him. No, really. On Tuesday in Iowa the former vice-president had the latest in a series of bizarre encounters with potential voters, telling a man who asked him about the issue of building new pipelines and where he stood on the climate crisis to 'go vote for someone else.'"
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Luke O'Neil, Guardian UK
O'Neil writes: "Joe Biden apparently doesn't care if you vote for him. No, really. On Tuesday in Iowa the former vice-president had the latest in a series of bizarre encounters with potential voters, telling a man who asked him about the issue of building new pipelines and where he stood on the climate crisis to 'go vote for someone else.'"
The man, the former Iowa state representative Ed Fallon, said that he would support him in the general election against Donald Trump but not in the Iowa primary, which irked Biden, who wrongly assumed he was a Bernie Sanders supporter.
A man in Iowa asks Joe Biden to stop supporting the building of new pipelines. Joe Biden tells him to go vote for someone else and then starts accusing him of voting for Bernie Sanders. Actually, the man says, he's voting for Tom Steyer. Very awkward. pic.twitter.com/OOuGiypED8— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) January 28, 2020
“You’re asking [for] a picture of me, coming in to tell me you don’t support me, my plan,” Biden said.
“In the general. I’m running for a primary, a caucus, that’s what I’m running for, OK,” he said pointing in the man’s chest.
Biden then assumed the man was a Sanders supporter, to which the man replied: “I’m actually supporting Tom Steyer.”
“This is no way to treat an Iowan,” Steyer responded on Twitter. “He said he’d vote for the Dem in the general b/c he knows how important it is to beat Trump. We need immediate action on climate. If you don’t agree, happy to talk @ debate. But don’t take it out on voters we need to win in Nov.”
“You should vote for Trump,” Joe Biden tells @CosechaMovement protester Carlos Rojas at tonight’s town hall in Greenwood, S.C.
Rojas and other protesters from the group were criticizing Obama-era deportations and asked Biden to say he’d end all deportations — which he rejected.
3,883 people are talking about this
It wasn’t the first time Biden had suggested he didn’t want someone’s vote. In November, he dismissed questions from Carlos Rojas, a member of the immigrant support group the Movimiento Cosecha, over the Obama administration’s deportations.
“You should vote for Trump,” Biden told him.
“You have the power to stop all deportations on day one through executive actions,” Rojas continued, before chants from the crowd joined in with him. He would later be hired by the Sanders campaign.
In December, Biden had similarly tense words for a voter in Iowa who suggested he might be too old for the job of the presidency and referenced questions about his son Hunter’s work in Ukraine. “You’re a damn liar, man,” Biden said before suggesting the man was too sedentary from watching TV and challenging him to a pushups and running contest.
“If anybody’s wondering if Joe Biden can take on Donald Trump and is ready for a fight, I’d point you to the video in Iowa,” senior Biden adviser Symone D Sanders said after the video emerged.
The previous month in North Carolina, Biden was dismissive of an 18-year-old member of the Sunrise Movement who expressed concern over his acceptance of Super Pac donations. “Look at my record, child,” he said.
He would have another argument with a member of the same group in December over the issue of fracking. After being unable to see eye to eye on the issue of banning the use of fossil fuels, Biden dismissed him.
“Well, you oughta vote for someone else,” he said.
Throughout much of the primary Biden’s status as the frontrunner may have provided him some leeway to dismiss voters. But with a surging Sanders he may come to regret it. He might need all the votes he can get.
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A rancher on the bank of the Rio Grande. (photo: Bloomberg/Getty Images)
'It's Been Hell': Inside the Town Where Trumpers Are Building a Private Wall
Trevor Bach, VICE
Bach writes: "On an overcast afternoon, Jose Alfredo Cavazos and his cousin Reynaldo Anzaldua wriggled into a cluttered white Chevrolet work van."
EXCERPT:
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Trevor Bach, VICE
Bach writes: "On an overcast afternoon, Jose Alfredo Cavazos and his cousin Reynaldo Anzaldua wriggled into a cluttered white Chevrolet work van."
EXCERPT:
The latest iteration, the three-and-a-half-mile Rio Grande Valley wall, is now nearly complete, after a district judge rejected suits against it from both the federal government and the nearby National Butterfly Center. For months the project has roiled neighbors, who fear its construction will result in irreparable damage to local property and the area’s critical habitat. As a kind of rightwing cause célèbre, it’s also inflicted a different kind of damage, unleashing the kind of ugly, conspiratorial wrath that’s come to define the darkest element of Trumpism. “Oh it’s been hell,” Marianna Treviño, the executive director of the local butterfly center and a prominent project opponent, told me. “It has been hell.”
In December 2017, Brian Kolfage, a triple-amputee military veteran and right wing celebrity provocateur, declared he was “sick and tired of watching politicians in both parties obstructing President Trump’s plan to build a wall.” So he launched an effort to erect a private one. With the support of prominent immigration hardliners Steve Bannon and Kris Kobach, Kolfage’s group, We Build The Wall, went on to raise some $25 million on Kickstarter. Last May the group paid a contractor, North Dakota-based Fisher Industries, to complete its first project, a nearly one-mile segment of private wall outside El Paso. The new barrier, unsurprisingly, was highly controversial—residents worried it was simply steering vulnerable migrants to a more dangerous crossing area—but the group declared victory and announced plans for more walls.
The next barrier would go up along the Rio Grande, on private land owned by a sympathetic local businessman. Again, Fisher Industries would build it.
For Tommy Fisher, the company’s bombastic CEO, the $42 million endeavor—paid for almost entirely by the developer, with some $1.5 million donated by We Build The Wall—represented a gamble. In September 2017 Fisher Industries had been one of eight companies chosen by Customs and Border Protection to develop a border wall prototype; Fisher also kicked off his own conservative media blitz, appealing to the president on cable television, often declaring, with a decidedly Trumpian tone, that he could build Trump’s signature project better, faster and cheaper than any other contractor. Fisher Industries has a checkered history, including more than $1 million in fines over environmental and tax violations, but after seeing Fisher on television, the Washington Post first reported, Trump aggressively lobbied the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to hire his company, and last month the agency did, with a $400 million job to build 31 miles of Trump’s wall in Arizona. (The Department of Defense quickly announced it was investigating the contract for potential improper influence from the president; Fisher denied having a relationship with Trump.)
Customs and Border Protection has already contracted a different company to build a section of Trump’s wall in the Rio Grande Valley, but the developer is convinced that his riverfront version will serve as a proof-of-concept that helps him land more government contracts along the nearly 2,000-mile border. “I think the Trump administration will like this,” the developer told the media at the time. “This will 100% change the game in Texas.” In another interview, Fisher compared his wall to a Lamborghini, and other versions to a horse and carriage.
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John Bolton. (photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)
Trump Rages at John Bolton Amid Signs Former Adviser Could Be Called to Testify
Joanna Walters, Guardian UK
Walters writes: "Donald Trump launched a direct attack on his former national security adviser John Bolton on Wednesday amid signs that the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, does not have Republican votes locked down to block Democrats' efforts to call Bolton as a witness in the president's impeachment trial."
EXCERPTS:
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Joanna Walters, Guardian UK
Walters writes: "Donald Trump launched a direct attack on his former national security adviser John Bolton on Wednesday amid signs that the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, does not have Republican votes locked down to block Democrats' efforts to call Bolton as a witness in the president's impeachment trial."
EXCERPTS:
One of Trump’s defense arguments during the impeachment inquiry was that those two were not connected. Critics say he was trying to use a vulnerable Ukraine to help his re-election chances; Trump said he was just trying to root out corruption there.
....many more mistakes of judgement, gets fired because frankly, if I listened to him, we would be in World War Six by now, and goes out and IMMEDIATELY writes a nasty & untrue book. All Classified National Security. Who would do this?
36.6K people are talking about this
A furious Trump complained on Twitter on Wednesday morning that Democrats could not be satisfied. During the inquiry process in the House of Representatives last year, the White House blocked senior administration officials from testifying in the House.
No matter how many witnesses you give the Democrats, no matter how much information is given, like the quickly produced Transcripts, it will NEVER be enough for them. They will always scream UNFAIR. The Impeachment Hoax is just another political CON JOB!
71.8K people are talking about this
No witnesses have appeared at the trial in the Senate, with House managers detailing the case for the prosecution of Trump that he abused the power of his office and, in gagging officials and blocking the release of some documentary evidence, obstructed Congress – forming the two articles of impeachment relating to Trump’s conduct with regard to Ukraine.
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Members of the Torres and Ramos families pose for a photograph with the remains of Petrona Chavarria and Vilma Ramos, who were killed in the El Mozote massacre, in the village of La Joya, Meanguera, El Salvador, on Dec. 11, 2016. (photo: Jose Cabezas/Reuters)
What the El Mozote Massacre Can Teach Us About Trump's War on the Press
Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
Schwarz writes: "A retired Air Force general in El Salvador admitted in court last Friday that the country's armed forces carried out the infamous El Mozote massacre in December 1981. This acknowledgement marks the first time the Salvadoran military has taken responsibility for the atrocity."
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Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
Schwarz writes: "A retired Air Force general in El Salvador admitted in court last Friday that the country's armed forces carried out the infamous El Mozote massacre in December 1981. This acknowledgement marks the first time the Salvadoran military has taken responsibility for the atrocity."
Over a period of days, the Atlacatl Battalion, a Salvadoran army unit created and trained by the U.S., slaughtered more than 800 civilian men, women, and children in several villages in the mountains near El Salvador’s border with Honduras. The Reagan administration immediately acted to protect its Salvadoran allies, engaging in a far-reaching coverup.
There was wholesale torture and rape, and many victims were burned alive. The level of cruelty is most comparable currently to the actions of the Islamic State. One survivor remembered hearing an officer threaten to murder a soldier who wasn’t willing to kill kids.
Today, Americans may see El Mozote as an obscure tale from the misty past. But this is not the case. In fact, this week’s final, complete confirmation of the events 38 years ago holds critical lessons about the Trumpist war on the media now.
Raymond Bonner, who broke the El Mozote story for the New York Times, says that assaults on journalism by the government have “gone to an extreme [under President Trump], but it’s certainly not new. … What happened to me is an example of attacks on reporting.”
The key things to understand about this war is, first, that it didn’t start with Trump, but rather with Richard Nixon almost five decades ago. Second, the right-wing fury at journalism has never been about the press’s many faults; instead, conservatives are most enraged when reporters do their job well. Third, officials who lie successfully are not punished, but are instead rewarded by the GOP apparatus for a job well done.
The Reagan administration entered office in January 1981 filled with fervor about rolling back communism in Central America. The Cuban revolution in 1959 had been bad enough. But then the Sandinistas had overthrown Nicaragua’s dictatorship in 1979, and left-wing guerrillas in Guatemala and El Salvador threatened to do the same to their autocrats.
In retrospect, it’s clear that these were “Inevitable Revolutions,” the title of one history of the period. Tiny, cruel white oligarchies had ruled over Indigenous peasants across the region for hundreds of years, and sooner or later, the dam was going to break. But to the Reaganites, this was all the work of the international communist conspiracy, headquartered in Moscow, and had to be crushed by any means necessary.
There was a roadblock to Reagan’s plans, however: Congress was queasy about the U.S. alliance with the Salvadoran government and had required the president to certify by January 29, 1982 that El Salvador was “making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights.” If it did not, all U.S. aid would be cut off. It was therefore unwelcome at the White House when word began circulating that something extremely bad had happened in the Salvadoran mountains. That New Year’s Eve, the head of the Salvadoran’s junta was forced to declare that rumors of a massacre were just “a guerrilla trick.”
Then came — from the perspective of the Reagan administration — catastrophe. On January 27, both the New York Times and the Washington Post published accurate, front-page stories about what had happened.
Thomas Enders, a career diplomat who at the time was assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, later said that “El Mozote, if true, might have destroyed the entire effort” in El Salvador. What to do?
The answer had been articulated by Richard Nixon years earlier. As was borne out by Nixon’s direct experience during Watergate, few things are more dangerous to conservative priorities than good journalism. Therefore, as a top Nixon aide later recalled, Nixon believed that it was necessary to “fight the press through … the nutcutters as [the president] called them, forcing our own news. Make a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition.”
The Reaganites shared this perspective. News outlets were “the opposition” that had to be brutally, viciously attacked, and individual journalists were fair game as a way to discredit their employers. Bonner was therefore caught in the White House crosshairs.
The pushback began with congressional testimony by Enders. “There is no evidence to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians,” he told a House subcommittee.
What about the number of victims? Bonner’s article had mentioned a list of 733 compiled by villagers, as well as a tally of 926 from a human rights organization. Elliott Abrams, who’d just taken office as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, informed the Senate that “the numbers, first of all, were not credible. … Our information was that there were only 300 people in the canton.” This was clear, conscious deceit on the part of Abrams. Both the Times and Post articles had mentioned that the massacre had taken place in several locations.
Then came the assault from the administration’s outside allies. On February 10, the Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy editorial headlined “The Media’s War.” Americans were “badly confused” about the situation in El Salvador thanks to the U.S. press. El Mozote was not a massacre, the Journal wrote, but a “massacre.” On the one hand, the number of dead had obviously been exaggerated and on the other, maybe the killing had been carried out by rebels dressed in government uniforms. Bonner was “credulous,” “a reporter out on a limb,” and, like reporters in Vietnam, a sucker for “communist sources.” One of the editorial’s authors appeared on PBS to proclaim that “obviously Ray Bonner has a political orientation.”
Accuracy in Media, the conservative media criticism organization, went further. Bonner, it declared, was waging “a propaganda war favoring the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador.” Meanwhile, a Times editor later said, the administration was engaging in a “really vicious” whisper campaign about him.
The message was received loud and clear in the executive offices of the Times. While Bonner considers Punch Sulzberger, then the publisher of the Times, to have been “a great, great man,” he also recalls that he “supposedly said to [Times editor] Abe Rosenthal, ‘Who the hell is this guy down there that’s causing us all the trouble?’”
In August 1982, Rosenthal pulled Bonner out of Central America and back to New York for additional “training” in journalism. Bonner believes that Rosenthal made this decision not simply due to his El Mozote coverage, but because Rosenthal was a committed anti-communist who felt that Bonner was generally too sympathetic to the Salvadoran guerrillas and Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.
Within the Times newsroom, says Bonner, “It was certainly perceived as if I were being punished. I had a reporter who told me, ‘I’m not going to let this happen to me.’ … There is no question that this had a chilling effect on the reporting out of Central America.”
This coincided with a period of Grand Guignol violence by the Salvadoran government and its allied death squads that’s truly beyond human comprehension. About 75,000 Salvadorans were killed during this time, the per capita equivalent of about 5 million Americans today. According to a later U.N. investigation, the government was responsible for 85 percent of the murders, all committed with U.S. arms and training.
For Bonner’s part, he quit the Times three years later in 1984. “When I told Abe I was leaving there were no tears shed,” he remembers. He eventually returned to work for the paper after Rosenthal’s retirement. Now 77, he owns a bookstore in Australia.
Meanwhile, the key personnel who squelched the story went on to greater and greater heights. Enders retired from government service and enjoyed a lucrative career on Wall Street. Abrams was later a member of George W. Bush’s National Security Council. Today, he is the special representative for Venezuela for the Trump administration.
Given how well pressure on the media worked with El Mozote, it’s no wonder that the U.S. right has used the same strategy over and over since. With the rise of conservative talk radio, and then Fox News, it’s become ever easier for politicians to simply ignore any inconvenient aspects of reality. Trump privately explained to journalist Leslie Stahl in 2016 that he strategically attacks journalism “to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”
Thus, while Bonner lived through a lot in 1981, he believes that “today it has gotten much worse.” Today, he says, “public officials simply lie with impunity,” and there doesn’t seem to be much anyone can do about it.
Space Force vs. Starfleet. (photo: Donald Trump/Twitter/CBS/Viacom)
Trump's Space Force Debuts Logo, Draws 'Star Trek' Comparisons
Associated Press
Excerpt: "The Pentagon's new U.S. Space Force is not Star Trek's Starfleet Command, but their logos bear a striking similarity."
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Associated Press
Excerpt: "The Pentagon's new U.S. Space Force is not Star Trek's Starfleet Command, but their logos bear a striking similarity."
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A wild Woodland Bison walks in the Arctic wilderness. (photo: RyersonClark/iStock/Getty Images)
Rewilding the Arctic Could Slow the Climate Crisis
Paul Brown, Climate News Network
Brown writes: "Releasing herds of large animals onto the tundra - rewilding the Arctic - to create vast grasslands could slow down global heating by storing carbon and preserving the permafrost, UK scientists say."
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Paul Brown, Climate News Network
Brown writes: "Releasing herds of large animals onto the tundra - rewilding the Arctic - to create vast grasslands could slow down global heating by storing carbon and preserving the permafrost, UK scientists say."
With no woolly mammoths available nowadays, the scientists, from the University of Oxford, suggest an alternative in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B − importing large herds of bison and horses to provide the mega-fauna that would prevent tree growth and create huge areas of grazing land.
These big animals, originally present in the Arctic together with the reindeer, wolves and other large creatures still living there, would create a natural geo-engineering project to alter the landscape, the researchers say. The idea is to preserve as much carbon in the soil as possible and reflect more sunlight back into space.
The scientists visited Pleistocene Park, a Russian experiment in north-eastern Siberia, which is an attempt to recreate the mammoth steppe ecosystem of the last ice age by re-introducing large grazing animals.
Trees that are growing ever further north as the Arctic warms are in turn leading to the melting of more permafrost by breaking up the snow which otherwise reflects sunlight away from the earth. Instead, the snow absorbs more of the sunlight, enhancing the warming further.
By removing woody vegetation, enhancing grass growth and trampling on snow in search of winter forage, the scientists say, large mammals increase the amount of incoming solar energy that bounces back to space − the albedo effect.
Unlike shallow-rooted trees, grasslands also favor the capture of carbon in the deep roots of grasses and enable cold winter temperatures to penetrate deeper into the soil. Altogether, they say, these changes would have a net cooling effect on Arctic lands and delay permafrost melt.
"The Arctic is already changing, and fast. Taking a 'do nothing' approach now is a decision to allow rapid, irreversible changes to occur," says lead author Dr. Marc Macias-Fauria, at Oxford's School of Geography and the Environment.
"Although the science of Arctic eco-engineering is largely untested, it has the potential to make a big difference, and action in this region should be given serious consideration."
Big Emissions Savings
The study estimates that carbon emissions from thawing permafrost could be around 4.35 billion tonnes a year over this century. This is around half as much as fossil fuel emissions, and three times more than estimates of the emissions produced by current and projected land use change, for example in tropical forests.
One of the drawbacks to the scheme is the need to import large quantities of relatively scarce animals like bison into the vast expanses that would need to be rewilded. It would take time to build up the numbers of animals required.
The fossil record in the period the scientists are trying to recreate shows that each square kilometer contained an average of one mammoth, 5 bison, 7.5 horses, 15 reindeer, 0.25 cave lions, and one wolf. This is around the animal density of present-day African savanna game reserves. Rewilding efforts would initially focus on bison and horses.
The researchers believe the scheme could be economic, especially if the price of the carbon saved is factored in. They provide a detailed analysis for an experiment over a period of 10 years for the introduction and monitoring of three large-scale trial areas, which includes importing 1,000 animals for each of the three at a cost of $114 million (£88m). On an annual basis this alone would keep 72,000 tonnes of carbon in the ground.
The scientists believe that rewilding could be a cost-effective solution and bring extra benefits like new tourism and "carbon-negative wild meat," which would cut the demand for farmed beef and reduce pressure on forested areas in the tropics. They also say the study constitutes a potential opportunity for UK-Russia cooperation on climate change mitigation.
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