RSN: Robert Reich | Fire, Pestilence and a Country at War With Itself: The Trump Presidency Is Over

02 June 20

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Robert Reich | Fire, Pestilence and a Country at War With Itself: The Trump Presidency Is Over

Robert Reich, Guardian UK
Reich writes: "You'd be forgiven if you hadn't noticed. His verbal bombshells are louder than ever, but Donald J Trump is no longer president of the United States."

A pandemic unabated, an economy in meltdown, cities in chaos over police killings. All our supposed leader does is tweet

By having no constructive response to any of the monumental crises now convulsing America, Trump has abdicated his office. 

He is not governing. He’s golfing, watching cable TV and tweeting.

How has Trump responded to the widespread unrest following the murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for minutes as he was handcuffed on the ground?

Trump called the protesters “thugs” and threatened to have them shot. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, parroting a former Miami police chief whose words spurred race riots in the late 1960s.

On Saturday, he gloated about “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons” awaiting protesters outside the White House, should they ever break through Secret Service lines. 

Trump’s response to the last three ghastly months of mounting disease and death has been just as heedless. Since claiming Covid-19 was a “Democratic hoax” and muzzling public health officials, he has punted management of the coronavirus to the states.

Governors have had to find ventilators to keep patients alive and protective equipment for hospital and other essential workers who lack it, often bidding against each other. They have had to decide how, when and where to reopen their economies.

Trump has claimed “no responsibility at all” for testing and contact-tracing – the keys to containing the virus. His new “plan” places responsibility on states to do their own testing and contact-tracing.

Trump is also awol in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

More than 41 million Americans are jobless. In the coming weeks temporary eviction moratoriums are set to end in half of the states. One-fifth of Americans missed rent payments this month. Extra unemployment benefits are set to expire at the end of July.

What is Trump’s response? Like Herbert Hoover, who in 1930 said “the worst is behind us” as thousands starved, Trump says the economy will improve and does nothing about the growing hardship. The Democratic-led House passed a $3tn relief package on 15 May. Mitch McConnell has recessed the Senate without taking action and Trump calls the bill dead on arrival. 

What about other pressing issues a real president would be addressing? The House has passed nearly 400 bills this term, including measures to reduce climate change, enhance election security, require background checks on gun sales, reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act and reform campaign finance. All are languishing in McConnell’s inbox. Trump doesn’t seem to be aware of any of them.

There is nothing inherently wrong with golfing, watching television and tweeting. But if that’s pretty much all that a president does when the nation is engulfed in crises, he is not a president.

Trump’s tweets are no substitute for governing. They are mostly about getting even.

When he’s not fomenting violence against black protesters, he’s accusing a media personality of committing murder, retweeting slurs about a black female politician’s weight and the House speaker’s looks, conjuring up conspiracies against himself supposedly organized by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and encouraging his followers to “liberate” their states from lockdown restrictions.

He tweets bogus threats that he has no power to carry out – withholding funds from states that expand absentee voting, “overruling” governors who don’t allow places of worship to reopen “right away”, and punishing Twitter for factchecking him.

And he lies incessantly.

In reality, Donald Trump doesn’t run the government of the United States. He doesn’t manage anything. He doesn’t organize anyone. He doesn’t administer or oversee or supervise. He doesn’t read memos. He hates meetings. He has no patience for briefings. His White House is in perpetual chaos. 

His advisers aren’t truth-tellers. They’re toadies, lackeys, sycophants and relatives.

Since moving into the Oval Office in January 2017, Trump hasn’t shown an ounce of interest in governing. He obsesses only about himself.

But it has taken the present set of crises to reveal the depths of his self-absorbed abdication – his utter contempt for his job, his total repudiation of his office.

Trump’s nonfeasance goes far beyond an absence of leadership or inattention to traditional norms and roles. In a time of national trauma, he has relinquished the core duties and responsibilities of the presidency.

He is no longer president. The sooner we stop treating him as if he were, the better.

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California National Guard troops stand in front of Los Angeles City Hall Sunday amid protests. (photo: BBC)

ALSO SEE: In Louisville a Black Man Is Shot, Police and National
Guard Were on the Scene

Trump Says He'll Deploy Military to States if They Don't Stop Violent Protests
Alana Wise, NPR
Wise writes: "Trump on Monday threatened to deploy the U.S. military to cities or states that don't take 'necessary' actions to halt violent protests, saying the armed forces will 'quickly solve the problem for them.'"

EXCERPT:

Nation in crisis

Protests, which have at times broken out into violence and looting, continued from the weekend into Monday, following the video-recorded death of Floyd, who died after a white officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Protesters — many of whom have worn masks because of the coronavirus pandemic — have demanded that the officers involved be held accountable for Floyd's death.

Derek Chauvin, the officer who knelt on Floyd's neck, has been arrested and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Three other officers who were involved in the incident have been fired but have not been charged.

Several major cities, including Washington, D.C., were placed under curfews following the unrest. Trump's walk to the nearby church, which he does not typically visit, technically violated the District of Columbia's Monday curfew for a little time.

The National Guard has been deployed in many states, and the president on Monday called for governors to "dominate" in their states to put an end to the protests.

His remarks Monday stand in stark contrast to the position he took toward heavily armed majority-white protesters last month, who stormed the Michigan statehouse in defiance of stay-at-home orders to demand a reopening of the state economy amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump described those protesters as "very good people" and called on the governor to "give a little" to appease them. 

The protests against police violence come against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, which has caused more than 100,000 deaths in the U.S., with black Americans disproportionately affected.

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William Barr. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

ALSO SEE: DOJ Seeks New Emergency Powers Amid Coronavirus Pandemic

DOJ Wants to Suspend Certain Constitutional Rights During Coronavirus Emergency
Peter Wade, Rolling Stone
Wade writes: "The Trump Department of Justice has asked Congress to craft legislation allowing chief judges to indefinitely hold people without trial and suspend other constitutionally protected rights during the coronavirus and other emergencies."
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A demonstrator in Chicago calls on the governor of Illinois to suspend rent and mortgage payments for those who have lost income during the covid-19 pandemic. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

'It's Like a Nightmare': Options Dwindle for Renters Facing Economic Distress
Ari Shapiro, NPR
Shapiro writes: "As one of the country's worst economic and health crises in history deepens, rent is due again for millions of people who are struggling to make ends meet."
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Protesters rally outside the Fifth Police Precinct on May 29, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

Don't Fall for the Myth of the "Outside Agitator" in Racial Justice Protests
Glenn Houlihan, Jacobin
Houlihan writes: "It's a trope that should be immediately recognized as both false and designed to downplay and write off the widespread anger that led to these rebellions."


EXCERPT:

Richard Seymour wrote in 2014, in response to the term being employed by both liberals and reactionaries during the Ferguson uprising, “The ‘outside agitator’ line reeks of good old boy vigilantism, the commingling of race-baiting and red-baiting that was typical of Southern counterrevolution in the dying days of Jim Crow.”

Segregationists sought to preserve Jim Crow law by branding black radicals as communists, condemning black activists to destructive investigations from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and elsewhere. As Paul Heideman states, “The anticommunist purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s dealt a hammer blow to the movement for racial equality.” A reactionary crusade against communists, aided and abetted by liberal Democrats and premised in many ways in the myth of the outside agitator radical being responsible for civil rights unrest, successfully demolished an emerging coalition between left-led workers’ unions and civil rights activists.

In 2020, the phrase, and these tactics, have once again reared their ugly head. The myth of “outside agitators” is being simultaneously weaponized by conservatives and liberals to demean and intimidate protesters. We shouldn’t let them — it’s an accusation designed to downplay the widespread anger so many are feeling and acting on in this country.

King warned us, “We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools.”

Don’t fall for defenders of the status quo continuing to blame “outside agitators” for the rebellions sweeping the country right now — they want us to perish together as fools.

READ MORE

Rodrigo Duterte. (photo: ABS-CBN News)

Alarm Over Duterte's New Anti-Terrorism Bill for Philippines
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "The Philippine Congress moved closer on Monday towards enacting a new anti-terrorism law that would allow longer detentions without charge, and give the executive branch more power against dissent."
READ MORE

A south-eastern red-tailed black cockatoo. (photo: Sean Garnsworthy/Getty Images)

The Language of Extinction
Holly Haworth, In These Times
Haworth writes: "The modern industrial and capitalist mindset pits human culture against nature, and the conservation movement, with different intentions, has tended to do the same."

When wildfires destroy habitats, more than species are lost.

t is often the case now that we do not know of an animal’s or insect’s or plant’s existence—do not ever hear its name—until it is almost gone.

When that species lives across the globe from where we live, this is, in one sense, not surprising. And still, it’s strange that language travels this way, the names of things populating faraway tongues for the first time at the moment they are disappearing. Such was the case this winter when I obtained a list published by the Australian Department of Environment and Energy of vulnerable, endangered and critically endangered species whose habitats have diminished since the bushfires began in July 2019. The fires had spread red on the maps, red on the aerial news cameras, as I watched from afar in horror in the midst of winter in the United States, a winter that hadn’t yet made me shiver until I saw the summer flames engulfing the Australian continent, and the images of koalas and kangaroos trying to escape the blazes.

I also wanted to know the names of living beings that weren’t mentioned on the news; I had never heard of the more than 330 species that filled the list. The names alone—to say nothing of the lives of the things in their various habitats—are a poem, the entire bulk of which would not fit here. I felt compelled to read them aloud:

spectacled monarch, magenta lilly pilly, spiral sun-orchid, austral toadflax, shrubby hazelwood, grey-headed flying-fox, glossy black-cockatoo, long-nosed potoroo, Wallum leek-orchid, Wollumbin dogwood, Booroolong frog, marble daisy-bush, regent honeyeater, satin flycatcher, satin-top grass, velvet wattle, milky silkpod, pale golden moth …

For 114 of the species, the report stated, more than half their known habitat has been damaged by fire. As I said their names, I imagined the list not only as a poem but as a roster, with fewer and fewer answering “here.”

It is not lost on me that almost all the names of the species are given in English, the language I write and speak in, and Australia’s dominant language. The inhabitants of the continent once spoke roughly 250 different languages with 800 distinct dialects, Rhonda Smith at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies tells me; now there are only 13. What names were these insects and plants and animals called in the 800 dialects? And what living things were lost entirely along with the people who shared a habitat with them?

The sweeping flames seem to mirror the way one worldview—that of domination and extraction—has engulfed the globe, leaving behind cultural homogeneity, what environmentalist Vandana Shiva calls “monoculture of the mind.”

The modern industrial and capitalist mindset pits human culture against nature, and the conservation movement, with different intentions, has tended to do the same. But a wave of anthropological and biological scholarship since the 1990s has made it clear that cultural diversity and biological diversity are intertwined. One study, for example, shows 70% of the world’s languages are found “within the planet’s biodiversity hotspots.” A proliferation of life goes hand in hand with a richness of human language, story, song and oral histories, all of which serve as vessels in indigenous cultures for the complex ecological knowledge needed for good land management. That there is no word for “nature” in indigenous languages the world over indicates the degree to which indigenous people have seen their cultures as interwoven with their living habitats.

Though fire is the source of the destruction in Australia, the tragedy has compelled indigenous people across the continent to share their cultural stories about how fire has been used to nurture biodiversity since before European colonization, before indigenous fires, songs and stories began to be suppressed.

“Our ancestors managed this landscape for millennia and fire was one of our [principal] management tools,” writes Oliver Costello, of the Bundjalung people, in an article for The Guardian’s IndigenousX series. “Through colonization we have seen a rapid decline in our practices and, equally, a rapid decline in the values associated with this country,” Costello writes. 

Controlled burning removes vegetation that is more likely to worsen wildfires; it encourages new growth and avoids burning the canopy. “In traditional times, you would’ve been punished for [burning the canopy],” former firefighter and member of the Wiradjuri people, Den Barber, tells Earther. “If you’re burning the canopy, you’re burning not only the shade that the trees offer, but you’re burning perhaps the seedbed. You’re burning habitat. You’re burning flowers. That’s where all the magic is, where all the things that sustain us are.”

The canopy is where the birds sing, another language in itself. Birds can fly away in managed fires, but in large wildfires, they become disoriented by smoke and flames. They die, their lilting songs going with them.

In his book Cultures of Habitat: On Nature, Culture, and Story, ethnobiologist Gary Paul Nabhan writes of how the Warlpiri people of Australia’s Tanami Desert once hunted an animal they called mala, a marsupial weighing less than five pounds. “[The Warlpiri] did not eat them into extinction,” writes Nabhan. They managed their habitat with controlled burning. Nabhan quotes a naturalist who explained the burning practice to him:

Aboriginal fire created a mix of old and new vegetation, and therefore of shelter and food. … The mala’s well-being is very much governed by the right kind of fire. The patchiness of aboriginal burning leaves part of the vegetation untouched. Clumps of old spinifex provide the mala with its shelter, from which it moves to new growth to feed on the seed heads and young leaves of forbs and grasses. 

But with colonization came the disconnection of Warlpiri from their land, fire suppression and rabbits—an introduced species that took over the habitat. When the mala began to disappear, Nabhan writes, so did what is known as its Dreaming tradition—the rituals of songs and stories performed for the mala were stopped. A terrible silence. And then the mala were gone from the continent.

While fires raged uncontrolled this past winter, sweeping at 60 miles per hour across the continent, they once were lit with careful precision, small fires licking at the little mounds of vegetation, kindled with knowledge of each unique habitat across the country, where the 250 languages and 800 dialects were used to speak of them. The insects, plants and animals on my list are only the ones that have survived colonization and the disruption of their homes, as the 13 languages have survived the same.

And still, they survive. Native voices are still speaking. Malarndirri McCarthy, senator of Australia’s Northern Territory, said in a speech responding to the wildfires that fire “runs through all aspects of [First Nations] lives, our spirituality and the way we interact with the ecology, and it has done so for many thousands of years. … It’s knowledge that we so want to share.” And many in the country seem to be ready to receive it. Since 2007, Australia’s Indigenous Ranger program has recognized the value of traditional knowledge for conservation. More than 2,000 First Australians now manage the country’s Indigenous Protected Areas to protect biodiversity on more than 166 million acres of land and waters. These rangers are working harder than ever to bring back traditional burning.

In a New York Times article, Alexis Wright, professor of Australian literature at the University of Melbourne and member of the Waanyi nation, spoke with Murrandoo Yanner, a Gangalidda leader who runs the Jigija Indigenous Fire Training Program. “If we can understand, learn from and imagine our place through the laws and stories of our ancestors … then we will have true knowledge on how to live, adapt and survive in Australia, just as our ancestors did,” Yanner said.

Yet, the ancestors did not face climate change and its increase of drought and fire.

In a Cherokee story I have heard from the original inhabitants of the place I am from—the Smoky Mountains, some of the world’s most diverse temperate forests, which saw unprecedented wildfires blazing the ridges in 2016—the animals decide to steal fire from a lightningstruck sycamore tree because they are cold. When Känäne’skï Amai’yëhï, the Water Spider, finally gets it for them, they gather around it, grateful. 

That humans could wield fire and control it made us unique and helped us survive. The ability to cook our food may be what made us intelligent enough to drill into the earth for the fuel of ancient fossilized forests. But when we lit fossil fuels on fire, our population skyrocketed and the world changed. Now it’s getting hotter each day, due to the warming caused by the billions of fires in our gas furnaces, coal plants and combustion engines. All these fires have led to a world now suffering from more uncontrollable fire, wild fire. 

“Consciousness is kin to fire,” Christopher Camuto writes in Another Country: Journeying Toward the Cherokee Mountains, and I imagine the first stories of our origins told around the fire, flames leaping across the face of storytellers and dancing at the edges of the night. Now we sit around a different fire with a different story on our lips—not of origins but of the ends of so many things. We’re not cold anymore. The animals once contrived to steal fire to warm themselves, but now they are running from it. If fire is kin to consciousness, then humankind is more conscious than ever of the role we have played in this catastrophe, of how much our stories, whether of domination and extraction or of stewardship and care, matter.

If fire is kin to consciousness, our imaginations must be sparked greater than ever before, and faster, by these large blazes—in order that we might remember how to wield fire consciously, so that our stories, our names for animals, insects and plants, might still be spoken. So that the languages of all the living things might still be heard.

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