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06 September 20
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Matt Taibbi | The Trump Era Sucks and Needs to Be Over
Matt Taibbi, Matt Taibbi's Substack
Taibbi writes: "The race is tightening. Is America sure it's ready to give up its addiction to crazy?"
n Donald Trump’s interview with Laura Ingraham last week, he talked about the “shadow people” he believes lurk behind Joe Biden:
INGRAHAM: Who do you think is pulling Biden’s strings? Is it former Obama officials?
TRUMP: People that you’ve never heard of. People that are in the dark shadows.
Fifteen years ago, the Fox News personality was likely to be the one pushing the conspiratorial envelope. Glenn Beck playing with rubber frogs while railing about assassination plots or spinning elaborate tales connecting Barack Obama to both Hitler and Stalin represented the outward edge of crazy in mainstream discourse.
Today the Fox anchor is the voice of restraint, pleading with the President of the United States to stay on planet earth while cameras roll:
INGRAHAM: What does that mean? That sounds like conspiracy theory.
TRUMP: No, people that you haven’t heard of. They’re people that are on the streets. They’re people that are controlling the streets…
We’ve been living with Trump for so long, we’ve gotten out of the habit of asking the basic questions we normally ask, when a famous person says something odd. What is he thinking? Is he being serious? Does he mean this as metaphor — is he talking about the donors and party higher-ups who may indeed have outsize influence behind his elderly opponent’s candidacy — or does he really believe in a nebulous, Three Days of the Condor-style secret spooks’ club, working after hours to install a socialist dictatorship through Joe Biden?
Donald Trump is so unlike most people, and so especially unlike anyone raised under a conventional moral framework, that he’s perpetually misdiagnosed. The words we see slapped on him most often, like “fascist” and “authoritarian,” nowhere near describe what he really is, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s been proven across four years that Trump lacks the attention span or ambition required to implement a true dictatorial regime. He might not have a moral problem with the idea, but two minutes into the plan he’d leave the room, phone in hand, to throw on a robe and watch himself on Fox and Friends over a cheeseburger.
The elite misread of Trump is egregious because he’s an easily familiar type to the rest of America. We’re a sales culture and Trump is a salesman. Moreover he’s not just any salesman; he might be the greatest salesman ever, considering the quality of the product, i.e. himself. He’s up to his eyes in balls, and the parts of the brain that hold most people back from selling schlock online degrees or tchotchkes door-to-door are absent. He has no shame, will say anything, and experiences morality the way the rest of us deal with indigestion.
Pundits keep trying to understand him by reading political scare-tracts like The Origins of Totalitarianism or It Can’t Happen Here, but again, the books that explain Trump better tend to be about things like pro wrestling (like Controversy Creates Cash or The Business of Kayfabe) or the psychology of selling (like Pre-Suasion or Thinking Fast and Slow). The people howling about outrageous things Trump says probably never sat in a sales meeting. In Pre-Suasion, psychology professor Robert Cialdini, who went undercover with salespeople to discover their secrets, describes how one got clients to agree to his company’s $75,000 fee:
Instead, after his standard presentation… he joked, “As you can tell, I’m not going to be able to charge you a million dollars for this.” The client looked up from his written proposal and said, “Well, I can agree to that!” The meeting proceeded without a single subsequent reference to compensation and ended with a signed contract…
Sound familiar? When Trump first hit the campaign trail in 2015-2016, reporters were staggered by the outrageous promises Trump would toss out, like that he’d slap a 45% tariff on all Chinese products, build a “high” wall across the Mexican isthmus, or deport all 11.3 million undocumented immigrants (“They have to go,” he told Chuck Todd).
Those of us with liberal arts educations and professional-class jobs often have trouble processing this sort of thing. If you work in a hospital and someone asks you a patient’s hematocrit level, no one expects you to open with fifteen times the real number. But this is a huge part of Trump’s M.O.
By the end of the 2016 race, some of us in media were struggling with what to tell readers about Trump’s intentions, given that he would frequently offer contradictory proposals (with matching impassioned explanations) within minutes of each other, sometimes even within the same sentence. He would tell one crowd to whoops and hollers that he couldn’t wait to throw all them illegals back over the river, then go on Hannity that same night and say he was open to a “softening” on immigration:
Everybody agrees we get the bad ones out… But when I meet thousands and thousands of people on this subject…they’ve said, ‘Mr. Trump, I love you, but to take a person that has been here for 15 or 20 years and throw them and the family out, it’s so tough, Mr. Trump.’
Read what sales books have to say about morality or belief systems and Trump starts to make even more sense. What did Cialdini notice about John Lennon’s idealistic clarion call, Imagine? That Lennon increased his chances of selling political change with the line, “But I’m not the only one…” It turns out you can increase demand for anything from government policies to items on a Chinese menu simply by asserting, as Trump constantly does, that “everybody’s talking about it.” Ask students to draw long and short lines on a piece of paper, and when asked, the people drawing long ones think the Mississippi River is longer. Trump’s constant invocations about a future of “so much winning” worked, even with people who tried consciously to dismiss it as bullshit.
Read Brian Tracy’s The Psychology of Selling and you learn that the key to closing a sale not only involves identifying the “needs of your prospect,” but making sure to promise a big enough change to make action seem worth it:
The customer must be substantially better off with your product or service than he is without it. It cannot represent a small increment in value or benefit… [it must be] great enough to justify the amount of money you are charging, plus the amount of time and energy it will take to implement your solution.
The question, “What is Trump thinking?” is the wrong one. He’s not thinking, he’s selling. What’s he selling? Whatever pops into his head. The beauty of politics from his point of view, compared to every other damn thing he’s sold in his life — steaks, ties, pillows, college degrees, chandeliers, hotels, condominiums, wine, eyeglasses, deodorant, perfume (SUCCESS by Trump!), mattresses, etc. — is that there’s no product. The pitch is the product, and you can give different pitches to different people and they all buy.
In 2016 Trump reeled in the nativist loons and rage cases with his opening rants about walls and mass deportations, then slowly clawed his numbers up with the rest of the party with his “softening” routine. Each demographic probably came away convinced he was lying to the other, while the truth was probably more that he was lying to all of them. Obviously there are real-world consequences to courting the lowest common denominator instincts in people, but to Trump speeches aren’t moral acts in themselves, they’re just “words that he is saying,” as long-ago spokesperson Katrina Pierson put it.
In this sense the Republican Party’s 2020 platform is genius: there isn’t one, just a commitment to “enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda,” meaning whatever Trump says at any given moment. If one can pull back enough from the fact that this impacts our actual lives, it’s hard not to admire the breathtaking amorality of this, as one might admire a simple malevolent organism like a virus or liver fluke.
Trump blew through the Republican primaries in 2015-2016. His opponents, a slate of mannequins hired by energy companies and weapons contractors to be pretend-patriots and protectors of “family values,” had no answer for his insults and offer-everything-to-everyone tactics. Like most politicians, they’d been protected their whole lives by donors, party hacks, and pundits who’d turned campaigns into a club system designed to insulate paid lackeys from challenges to their phony gravitas. Trump had no institutional loyalty to the club, shat all over it in addition to its silly frontmen, and walked to the nomination.
So long as he was never going to win the actual presidency, this was funny. The Republicans deserved it. Watching GOP chair Reince Priebus try to pretend he wasn’t being forced to eat the biggest-in-history shit sandwich by embracing his obese conqueror at the 2016 convention was a delicious scene, similar to what most Americans probably felt watching Bill Belichick squirm at the podium after the Eagles pummeled him in the Super Bowl.
The Democrats aren’t much better, though, and the spectacle of “inevitable” Hillary Clinton being too shocked to ascend to the Javits Center podium, instead sending writhing campaign creature John Podesta to announce through a forced smile that the mortified audience shouldn’t worry and should get some sleep instead, was also high comedy, not that I really saw it at the time.
They all deserved it, every last politician ruined that year. The country did not, however, which is why the last four years have been a nightmare beyond all recognition. The joke ended up being on us.
The paradox ensnaring America since November, 2016 is that Trump never intended to govern, while his opponents never intended to let him try. In an alternate universe where a post-election Donald had enough self-awareness to admit he was out of his depth, and the D.C. establishment agreed to recognize his administration as legitimate for appearances’ sake, Trump might have escaped four years with the profile of a conventionally crappy president, or perhaps a few notches below that — way below average, maybe, but survivable.
Instead it was decided even before he was elected that admitting the president was the president was “normalizing” him. Normally no news is good news, and the anchorman is encouraged to smile on a day without war, earthquakes, terror attacks, or stock market crashes. Under Trump it became taboo to have a slow news day. A lack of an emergency was a failure of reporting, since Trump’s very presence in office was crisis.
We spent four years moving from panic to panic, from the pee story to the Muslim ban to Michael Flynn’s firing to the Schiff hearings in March 2017 to Jim Comey’s dismissal to Treason in Helsinki to Charlottesville to the caravan to the Kavanaugh hearings and beyond. When Trump fired Jeff Sessions, perhaps the most determined enemy of police reform in recent history — one of his last acts as Attorney General was issuing an order undermining federal civil rights investigations — liberal America exploded in media-driven street protests:
The problem was this all played into Trump’s hands. Instead of crafting a coherent, accessible plan to address the despair and cynicism that moved voters to even consider someone like Trump in the first place, Democrats instead turned politics into a paranoiac’s dream, imbuing Trump’s every move with earth-shattering importance as America became a single, never-ending, televised referendum on His Orangeness.
The last four years have been like living through an O.J. trial where O.J. testifies all day (and tweets at night). Not only has this been maddening to those of us who desire a more Trumpless existence, especially since it’s constantly implied that being anything less than enthralled by the Trump show is an inexcusable show of privilege, it’s massively increased the chances of the whole exhausting spectacle continuing, by giving Trump something to run on again.
Ever since Trump jumped into politics, the pattern has been the same. He enters the arena hauling nothing but negatives and character liabilities, but leaves every time armed with winnable issues handed to him by overreacting opponents.
His schtick is to provoke rivals to the point where they drop what they’re doing and spend their time screaming at him, which from the jump validates the primary tenet of his worldview, i.e. that everything is about him. Political opponents seem incapable of not handing him free advertising. They say his name on TV thousands of times a day, put his name on bumper stickers to be paraded before new demographics (e.g. “BERNIE BEATS TRUMP”), and then keep talking about him even off duty, at office parties, family dinners, kids’ sports events, everywhere, which sooner or later gets people wondering: who’s more annoying, the blowhard, or the people who can’t stop talking about the blowhard?
Nearly the whole of Trump’s case for re-election in 2020 comes from the wreckage of these endless, oft-overheated Spy vs. Spy-style intrigues against him. What would he be running on, if he didn’t have Russiagate, “fake news,” and impeachment? When the Democrats failed to bring the latter up even once during the recent DNC, conspicuously disinviting key impeachment players like Adam Schiff and Tom Steyer, it made Trump’s martyrdom argument for him: if Ukraine was the Most Important Issue In the Universe just eight months ago, where is it now?
American politics has become an interminable clash of off-putting pathologies. Call it the hydroxychloroquine effect. Trump one day in a press conference mutters that a drug has “tremendous promise” as a treatment of coronavirus. Within ten seconds a consensus forms that hydroxycholoroquine is snake oil, and the New York Times is running stories denouncing Trump’s “brazen willingness to distort and outright defy expert opinion and scientific evidence when it does not suit his agenda.”
Then you read the story and find out doctors have been prescribing the drug, that “early reports from doctors in China and France have said that [it] seemed to help patients,” and moreover that the actual quote about it being a “game changer” from Trump included the lines, “Maybe not” and “What do I know? I’m not a doctor.” In response to another Trump quote on the subject, “What do you have to lose?” journalists piled on again, quoting the president of the American Medical Association to remind audiences “you could lose your life” — as if Trump had recommended that people run outside and mainline the stuff.
Trump being Trump, he responded to this criticism by doubling down over and over, eventually re-tweeting a video boosting the drug by a doctor named Stella Immanuel. She turned out to believe that alien DNA had been used in medical treatments, atheist doctors were working on a religion vaccine, and uterine endometriosis is caused by demon sperm. Asked about this “misinformation,” Trump somehow managed to include both a xenophobic putdown about the Nigerian doctor and a lie about his enthusiasm for her, saying, “I don’t know what country she comes from… I know nothing about her.”
All of which is insane, but so is rooting for a drug to not work in the middle of a historic pandemic, the clear subtext of nearly every news story on this topic dating back to March. Rule #1 of the Trump era is that everything Trump touches quickly becomes as infamous as he is, maybe not the biggest deal when talking about an obscure anti-malarial drug, but problematic when the subject is America itself.
Trump’s argument is, “They lie about me.” He attracts so much negative attention, and so completely dominates the culture, that the line between him and the country that elected him becomes blurred, allowing him to make a secondary argument: “They lie about you.” This incantation works. The New York Times just ran a story about how “Chaos in Kenosha is already swaying some voters” that quoted John Geraghty, a former Marine. Geraghty’s first vote was for Barack Obama, and called Trump’s handling of coronavirus “laughable,” but still:
Mr. Geraghty said he disliked how Mr. Trump talked but said the Democratic Party’s vision for governing seemed limited to attacking him and calling him a racist, a charge being leveled so constantly that it was having the effect of alienating, instead of persuading, people. And the idea that Democrats alone were morally pure on race annoyed him.
With the election just a few months away, the country is coming apart at the seams. In addition to a pandemic, an economic disaster, and cities simmering on the edge of civil war, we’re nursing what feels like a broken culture. Life under Trump has been like an endless Twitter war: infuriating, depressing, filling us all with self-loathing, but also addictive. He is selling an experience that everyone is buying, even the people who think they oppose him the most.
My worry is with that last part. Institutional America is now organized around a Trump-led America. The news media will lose billions with him gone (and will be lost editorially). The Democratic Party has no message — literally none — apart from him. A surging activist movement will be deflated without him, along with a host of related fundraising groups and businesses (watch what happens to “dismantling white supremacy training” in a non-Trump context).
It feels like a co-dependent relationship, and the tightening poll numbers in battleground states make me wonder about self-sabotage. He’ll likely still lose, but this is all beginning to feel like a slow-motion rerun of the same car crash from four years ago, when resentment, rubbernecking, and lurid fascination pulled him just across the finish line. People claim to hate him, but they never turn off the show in time, not grasping that Trump always knows how to turn their negative attention into someone else’s vote.
Isn’t four years of this enough? I don’t even care anymore whose fault it is: Trump has made us all crazy, and it’s time for the show to be over. We deserve slow news days again.
Attorney Benjamin Crump posted a video message from Jacob Blake in his hospital bed on Saturday night. (photo: CNN)
From a Hospital Bed, Jacob Blake Says That Life Can Change in an Instant
Madeline Holcombe, CNN
Holcombe writes: "Wearing a green gown and speaking from his hospital bed, Jacob Blake delivered a message to his supporters Saturday night, warning them that everything can change in an instant."
"Your life and not only just your life, your legs -- something that you need to move around, to move forward in life -- can be taken like this, man," Blake said, snapping his fingers.
Attorney Benjamin Crump posted a video message from Jacob Blake in his hospital bed on Saturday night.
His attorney, Ben Crump, posted the video to Twitter Saturday as Blake, 29, recovers from the injuries he sustained after being shot seven times by a Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer.
A video clip of the incident shows an officer shooting Blake as he tries to enter the driver's side door of an SUV. His three children -- 3, 5 and 8 -- were in the car at the time.
The shooting left Blake paralyzed from the waist down.
The incident also reignited protests over police brutality and systemic racism that began after the death of George Floyd in police custody in May.
Blake said he has staples in his back and stomach and is in pain all day long.
"It hurts to breathe. It hurts to sleep. It hurts to move side to side. It hurts to eat," he said. "You do not want to have to deal with this."
He also called on those watching to make a change for the better.
"Please I'm telling you change your lives out there," he said. "We can stick together, make some money, make everything easier for our people."
President Trump has ordered the federal government to stop critical race theory training. The order came even after a summer of protests for racial justice across the country. (photo: Charlie Riedel/AP)
Trump Tells Agencies to End Trainings on 'White Privilege' and 'Critical Race Theory'
Matthew S. Schwartz, NPR
Schwartz writes: "The Trump administration has instructed federal agencies to end racial sensitivity trainings that address topics like white privilege and critical race theory, calling them 'divisive, anti-American propaganda.'"
READ MORE
A U.S. Postal Service truck delivers mail in Charles Town, W.V. (photo: Jared Soares/Redux)
Dead Chicks, Delayed Prescriptions: Trump's Mail Slowdown Leaves Rural America Disconnected
Phil McCausland, NBC News
McCausland writes: "When Jacob Gray opened the box of chicks he ordered, he saw that about 300 of them had been mashed to a pulp. The 100 or so birds that survived tread on their dead fellows and nibbled on what remained of them."
Gray, 28, has been ordering chicks from a breeder in California for his farm in rural southwest Colorado for more than seven years. He never lost more than about a dozen birds in a perforated box of 400 because the U.S. Postal Service delivered them within two days.
That changed over the past few months, as the boxes arrived days late to his home in Delta County, Colorado, an area larger than Rhode Island with a population of about 30,000 people.
“I opened it up and was immediately hit with the smell of death,” he said of the most recent box he received two weeks ago. “Sometimes, the post office would call us in the morning and say, ‘Get these things out of here,’ because they smelled so bad.”
Hundreds of baby birds Gray ordered this summer have died, and he said he had to cancel his remaining orders and renegotiate his farm loan because of nearly $4,000 in losses — more than 10 percent of what he’d hoped to earn this year.
Recent Postal Service delays have affected millions of Americans’ packages and letters, but the impact has been particularly widespread and difficult in rural communities, which depend on the federal agency more than densely populated regions of the United States.
In addition to chicks and other small livestock, including honeybees, farmers order seeds and specialty tools they can no longer purchase locally. Meanwhile, hundreds of rural pharmacies have closed in recent years, leaving residents dependent on mailed prescriptions. In addition, millions of people living in remote areas lack broadband internet, so they rely on the Postal Service to pay bills, receive paychecks, conduct business and correspond with family and friends.
“As important as the Postal Service is to the rest of the country,” said Arthur Sackler, manager of the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service, an independent group that advocates for the agency in Washington, D.C., “it’s considerably more so to our far-flung rural areas.”
The Postal Service came under intense scrutiny in recent weeks over the long wait times for letter and package deliveries. Many blamed recently appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Republican donor and ally of President Donald Trump.
In two tense Congressional hearings last month, Democrats accused DeJoy, a former logistics executive, of hamstringing the agency on Trump’s behalf to undermine mail-in voting. DeJoy and the president have both rejected the characterization that they were holding up the mail for political reasons, with the postmaster general largely blaming the pandemic for the widespread delay of deliveries.
“The U.S. Postal Service, like other delivery companies, has experienced some temporary service disruptions in a few locations domestically, due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Postal Service spokeswoman Kim Frum said in an email. “Things are slowly getting back to normal, however until we reach pre-COVID conditions, we continue to leverage our available resources to match the increased workload, including hiring based on local needs.”
While the Postal Service’s performance is beginning to tick back upward, after timely deliveries fell more than 10 percent beginning in July, according to the agency’s numbers, people living in rural communities say they’re still seeing the fallout of the delays. The Postal Service reported last week that its “last mile” delivery network — or mail that is carried to underserved rural communities — remained down 4.26 percent from its baseline.
Gray expanded his farm earlier this year, putting up new buildings and planning to begin selling his pasture-raised chickens to restaurant distributors in Denver. But the delays have put his business in jeopardy. He hoped to earn more than $30,000 this year, but the losses have eaten into more than 10 percent of his income, as even the birds that survive the delays have become sick and died before he can process and sell them.
“It’s delaying things,” he said. “We’re not maybe going to lose the farm, but it hurts.”
Rob Larew, the president of the National Farmers Union, a group that represents thousands of farmers across 33 states, said many of his members have complained about continued delays harming their businesses. And the effect goes beyond farmers, he said, since the Postal Service is a critical lifeline for rural communities nationwide.
“Out here, it just isn't that simple,” he said from his farm in rural West Virginia. “Everything already takes additional time, and so that adds cost. Even if it's not delivery cost, it's the cost of time. If you start to remove those last key delivery options, you put rural communities in a complete bind.”
The Federal Communications Commission estimated this year that 14.5 million Amercians in rural areas don't have access to broadband internet in an increasingly digital world. Larew pointed out that the Postal Service helps connect people who don’t have the internet at their fingertips.
Critics say the cause of the Postal Service delays is DeJoy’s insistence that mail trucks run on time, which he admitted before Congress that he did without adjusting mail processing. That meant mail trucks were leaving processing facilities close to empty, with mail and packages left behind, mail carriers have previously told NBC News. And that led to a backlog of deliveries at many post offices.
DeJoy’s detractors have also raised concerns about the Postal Service’s decision to remove letter-sorting machines and blue collection boxes, which appeared to coincide with Trump’s disparagement of mail-in voting and the Postal Service’s warning to dozens of states that they may not be able to handle the millions of mailed ballots expected this year.
After facing public pressure, DeJoy said he would suspend — though not reverse — all policy or operational changes until after the presidential election.
Postal workers, meanwhile, emphasized that DeJoy had cut back on overtime and extra trips that carriers took to ensure the swift delivery of mail. DeJoy stated in congressional testimony that overtime rates had remained the same. Extra trips, though, have dropped: Postal Service data shows that they fell from close to 150,000 at the end of June to fewer than 5,000 at the end of August.
Sackler, of the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service, said many of these decisions — particularly the removal of the mail-sorting machines and blue boxes — preceded DeJoy, but the postmaster general and the agency pursued them with a lack of transparency, causing confusion.
“There was no real consultation of any kind with postal stakeholders, with unions, with customers, with Congress about how [DeJoy] was going to be doing this, and predictably service dropped,” he said.
The drop in service, meanwhile, has many looking toward November. While many states expect to see a rise in mail-in ballots this year amid coronavirus concerns, rural residents are particularly reliant on the Postal Service for voting access.
Larew said the Farmers Union noticed that polling locations in rural places, once run by older people who sign up to be poll workers, have a deficit of volunteers this year. Local governments, including in Larew’s native West Virginia, have begun to consolidate polling locations in response, which means rural Americans will have to drive farther to cast their ballots.
Other states are seeing similar issues. Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin announced a recruitment campaign this week because of a shortage of volunteers. Texas consolidated nearly a dozen polling locations in its most rural counties before July’s election because of a lack of poll workers.
The Election Assistance Commission said that more than half of the 900,000 poll workers who served in 2016 were over the age of 60, meaning that the majority of those poll workers would be considered at high-risk during the pandemic. That has many election officials concerned they could see a major shortfall come November.
“Mail-in ballots are the only safe and reasonable alternative to that,” Larew said. “Limiting the access or reliability of that marginalizes these rural residents.”
The delays have also taken a toll on mailed prescription drugs.
With a growing number of insurance companies forcing or incentivizing Americans to receive their prescription drugs by mail, rather than from a brick-and-mortar pharmacy, the number of mailed medications has grown in recent years and even more so amid the pandemic.
The Postal Service managed 1.2 billion prescription drug shipments last year — or about 4 million each day, six days a week — the National Association of Letter Carriers reported. Rural residents in particular depend on mailed medications, as 1,231 independently owned rural pharmacies, or approximately 16 percent, closed between 2003 and 2018, according to the RUPRI Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis.
“For these isolated and marginalized rural communities, and for the farmers and ranchers in them, the Postal Service has been a great equalizer and essential service that has helped them at least be able to tap into some of what everyone else has,” Larew said. “For people out here, the Postal Service is absolutely a lifeline.”
Members of KC Tenants rally for a tenants' bill of rights, including a new Office of the Tenant Advocate, outside City Hall in Kansas City, Mo., in October 2019. (photo by Chase Castor)
Tenants Just Won a Nationwide Eviction Ban. They're Still Fighting to Cancel Rent.
Rebecca Burns, In These Times
Burns writes: "President Trump's surprise eviction moratorium is an election hail-mary. But to stave off a disastrous housing crisis, organizers say Democrats-including Joe Biden-must embrace bolder measures."
s another month of rent came due September 1, tenant organizers were greeted with a rare bit of good news. The Trump administration announced a sweeping moratorium on residential evictions through the end of the year, providing an unexpected 11th-hour reprieve to millions of renters who had run out of options. It is a stunning move from a president who began his career in a family business synonymous with housing discrimination — and an unmistakable pivot meant to draw voters’ attention away from the Trump administration’s disastrous mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic in advance of the November election.
The order, which was issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), represents the farthest-reaching eviction protection to date. The agency justified the move as an emergency measure to stop the spread of Covid-19. The CDC’s authority to take this kind of action will likely be challenged in court, but for now, all tenants who make less than $99,000 per year appear to be covered, as long as they attest they’ve made their best effort to pay rent.
“Housing organizers have been fighting for protections like this for months,” says Jake Marshall, an organizer with the Chicago-based Autonomous Tenants Union, which has been urging Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker to extend the state’s eviction moratorium and use his emergency powers to offer broader relief to tenants. “While the CDC’s order is just kicking the can down the road, it’s frightening that Trump seems to be kicking it more effectively than most Democratic officials.”
Since the start of the pandemic, a national tenants’ movement has been gathering strength and clamoring for action. In gentrifying cities like Oakland, Calif., New York and Chicago — historic hotbeds of housing activism — tenant unions, rent strikes and takeovers of vacant buildings are on the rise. And places like Kansas City, Mo., upstate New York and central Florida — places not known for this kind of activism — have seen the growth of their own housing organizing campaigns, sometimes drawing strength from Black Lives Matter protests.
“The Trump administration has been quick to celebrate the national eviction moratorium as his offering to working families,” says Tara Raghuveer, housing campaign director for the national grassroots group People’s Action. “But it must not be attributed to Trump. This is a victory for tenants.”
Raghuveer and other advocates stress, however, that it’s a temporary victory. Without further federal action, which Trump and other Republicans have fought tooth and nail, millions of renters still face an “eviction cliff” at the end of December.
In August, as $600 weekly federal unemployment payments expired and evictions proceedings restarted in more than 30 states, a report by the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program and the Covid-19 Eviction Defense Project warned than that 29 million people could be at risk of eviction by the end of 2020. That outcome would be unprecedented in modern U.S. history. Estimates put the number of unhoused people in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street crash at up to 2 million. Around 10 million people were forced out of their homes after the 2008 financial crisis.
It is impossible to predict how this current crisis will play out, says Zach Neumann, a Colorado attorney who founded the Covid-19 Eviction Defense Project to connect tenants with volunteer legal counsel. “But if even a third of the people at risk of eviction become homeless, I think we’re going to be living through something magnitudes larger than the Great Depression, in terms of the transience, the family separation, the devastating and lasting impact on every aspect of our communities.”
A patchwork of protections
Before the pandemic, nearly half of U.S. renting households spent more than a third of their income on rent, and 40% of U.S. adults reported they couldn’t cover a $400 emergency. When the U.S. unemployment rate hit 15% in April, it was obvious that rent payments were going to be a problem.
More than 40 states and territories did act to limit or stop evictions, according to Emily Benfer, a visiting law professor at Wake Forest University who has been tracking the orders in a publicly available spreadsheet.
But to date, almost none of these moratoriums had halted all stages of the eviction process, leaving many landlords free to file new court cases against tenants, proceed with hearings or seek enforcement of past eviction orders. Simply educating tenants about how to navigate the maze of partial protections has required a herculean effort from legal aid organizations.
According to Benfer, the CDC’s September 1 order prevents landlords from pursuing eviction cases for non-payment of rent until January 2021.
This a key public health intervention, Benfer says. “The CDC’s emergency action is critical to protecting public health and preventing the spread of the virus both in and across states,” she adds. “Eviction increases the risk of Covid-19 and results in long-term poor health outcomes.”
However, the moratorium does nothing to prevent tenants from racking up thousands of dollars in back rent and fees owed, nor does it help homeowners and small landlords who depend on rental income to pay their mortgages.
“While this is an extremely important measure, without rental assistance to cover the mounting debt, it will only delay eviction, shift the harm to small property owners, and result in devastating consequences,” Benfer says. “Congress must quickly bolster this necessary public health intervention with rent relief to sustain the housing market and finally end the eviction crisis.”
The CDC order also continues to allow evictions for reasons other than non-payment of rent, such as lease violations, leading to fears that landlords will find ways to skirt the moratorium.
“We know that landlords will find ways to evict and retaliate against their tenants because it’s already happening,” Tara Raghuveer says.
While the federal moratorium opens the door to criminal penalties of landlords who violate it, it also remains to be seen how rigorously the order will be enforced. Existing protections didn’t save Sara Cruz, 27, from losing her home in August. Cruz says she was already living paycheck to paycheck before the pandemic, working as a server in Vero Beach, Fla. She lost her job in March. Despite qualifying, she has yet to receive assistance from Florida’s unemployment system, one of the slowest in the nation. Cruz found a local agency willing to cover her rent but says her landlord refused it.
In July, Cruz was served an eviction notice. Under Florida law, one of the harshest in the nation for renters, tenants must respond in writing within five days or face a default judgment. Cruz says she did, but a police officer came to her door with an eviction order the next day. While even filing evictions potentially violates Florida’s statewide order, compliance varies widely depending on jurisdiction.
Cruz used the rental assistance her landlord rejected to secure the first available apartment she could find, leaving behind many of her belongings. She says she has no idea how she’ll pay for September.
According to Cruz, in central Florida, you “have the rich, and then you have the people who serve the rich.” She adds, “until the economy is back on track, they should not be allowed to be kicking people out.”
Following her eviction, Cruz connected with Organize Florida, which runs one of the largest grassroots voter registration operations in the state. The group has been flexing its muscle to stop evictions.
In addition to joining a statewide push to cancel rent and mortgage payments, Orlando-area housing organizers are joining the call from Black Lives Matter to defund police departments, says Vanessa Keverenge, an organizer with the group. Activists are targeting the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, which has requested a $15 million budget increase for 2021.
“That money could be going to help people at imminent risk of eviction,” Keverenge says. “We’re being told there’s no money, when the money’s right there.”
Building tenant power
The looming wave of evictions is expected to hit communities of color especially hard. Data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey suggests nearly half of Black and Hispanic renters were unsure they would be able to pay August rent on time, a figure twice as high as that of white renters. The risk is especially acute for Black women, who in 17 states already faced eviction at double the rate of white renters, according to an analysis from the ACLU.
“I don’t think we can talk about Black lives mattering without talking about eviction,” says Jenay Manley, a member of the housing rights group KC Tenants in Kansas City, Mo. Manley, who is Black, says she and her two children have struggled financially during the pandemic after she left an abusive relationship. “We need to talk about Black lives mattering before the point where we are brutalized or killed by police,” she says.
Manley was one of two KC Tenants members arrested and charged with trespassing during a July 30 action. The group successfully shut down eviction hearings, which had resumed in Jackson County after a two-month pandemic pause.
Since launching in February 2019, KC Tenants has grown into a formidable force in local politics. After helping make housing a central issue in local elections in the spring, the group capped off its first year with the passage of a groundbreaking tenants’ bill of rights in the Kansas City Council. It establishes a new Office of the Tenant Advocate and expands protections against discrimination and retaliation by landlords.
As the Covid-19 crisis began in March, the group helped form the Coalition to Protect Missouri Tenants, comprised of about 50 community, labor and faith organizations from across the state. Demanding a ban on evictions, foreclosures and utility shut-offs, as well as suspension of rent and mortgage payments for the duration of the crisis, the coalition staged a series of actions targeting Republican Gov. Mike Parsons. In April, protesters lined up along the shoulder of Interstate 70, stretching from Kansas City to St. Louis, and posted signs every five miles reading, “Governor Parsons is killing the poor.”
In May, they marched to the governor’s mansion and posted their own eviction notice.
KC Tenants member Tiana Caldwell, 42, was among those initially scheduled to appear in the Jackson County eviction court July 30. A two-time cancer survivor with congestive heart failure, Caldwell pays about $300 in out-of-pocket medical costs each month. Caldwell fell behind on rent after she and her husband were furloughed in March.
As soon as the eviction moratorium expired in May, Caldwell’s landlord filed to evict. Caldwell, her husband and their teenage son had already spent six months without a home following a 2018 eviction, when Caldwell was too sick to work. The prospect of repeating the ordeal was gutting.
In June, Caldwell’s husband returned to his job as a maintenance worker and their long-delayed federal stimulus checks arrived. They were able to work out an arrangement with their landlord to pay $4,000 in back rent and fees, in exchange for dropping the case. They scraped the money together by their June 30 deadline.
But in July, Caldwell received a court summons. She called the company that owns her home and was assured she had nothing to worry about. Caldwell attended the scheduled video hearing anyway, only to discover her landlord was seeking the money she had already paid. The case was dismissed after Caldwell produced receipts — but had she taken the landlord’s advice, she might have lost a judgment by default.
Caldwell believes her experience belies guidance from state and local elected officials, who have called for landlords and tenants to negotiate in good faith in lieu of formal eviction moratoriums.
“They’re telling us to make arrangements with our landlords, but the landlords aren’t being honest,” Caldwell says.
Caldwell says she’s heard scores of similar stories from renters who call the KC Tenants hotline. A group of about 15 volunteers fields as many as 200 calls a week, connecting desperate renters with legal representation, mutual aid and community support. Caldwell talked to one tenant who had come up with back rent, only to be evicted for a minor lease violation. In another call, a single mother described being sexually propositioned when she told her landlord she had lost her job and was unable to pay.
“We decided as a group that we’re not going to throw anyone away,” Caldwell says.
Cancel the rent
Temporary protections cannot substitute for further federal action, desperately needed to prevent communities from hurtling over the eviction cliff. While the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed a $100 billion rental assistance fund — as part of May’s HEROES Act and as a standalone bill — it’s dead on arrival in the GOP-controlled Senate.
By halting evictions, President Donald Trump went a step further than his Democratic opponent Joe Biden, who in August released a statement urging Congress to enact an emergency housing program, but offered few specifics. Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D‑Calif.), had called more specifically for a one-year eviction ban and has introduced a bill that would fund legal representation for tenants facing eviction.
Many tenant organizers argue that, in the midst of the pandemic, even a massive rental-assistance fund like the one supported by Democratic leadership would be inadequate — likely with long delays (similar to unemployment assistance) and leaving out undocumented immigrants and vulnerable groups.
The best solution, they say, would be to just cancel rent.
In April, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D‑Minn.) introduced a bill endorsed by KC Tenants, Organize Florida and dozens of other grassroots groups that would suspend rent and mortgage payments for the duration of the crisis, with landlords and mortgage holders receiving federal aid to cover their losses if they agree not to evict tenants without cause, among other conditions. For landlords who want out of the housing market, the bill would create a fund for nonprofits, public housing agencies, cooperatives, community land trusts and local governments to acquire their properties.
The bill has not yet attracted widespread support in Congress but is inspiring progressive state legislators.
In July, Democratic New York State Sen. Julia Salazar and Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou introduced a new bill to cancel all rent and certain mortgage payments, after a similar bill faced opposition from Democratic leadership. In this version, landlords would be required to show they are experiencing financial distress to continue collecting rent, says Rebecca Garrard, campaigns manager for housing justice at Citizen Action of New York, a grassroots group.
“We don’t need a public bailout of billionaire Wall Street landlords in New York,” Garrard says. “We hope that this approach will signal to other states and the federal government what positive solutions could actually look like.”
The push gathered momentum from grassroots organizers in Ithaca, N.Y., which in June became the first city to pass a resolution calling for rent cancellation — though the measure requires action from the state to take effect.
While it was previously “unfamiliar terrain” upstate, “tenant organizing has really bloomed,” Garrard says. “If there’s a positive, unintended consequence of the pandemic, it’s that there’s a fierce energy from tenants to mobilize and defend each other.”
According to Genevieve Rand, a member of the Ithaca Tenants Union, that energy evolved out of an active network of workplace organizing. Rand worked at a café prior to the pandemic and formed a union in May 2019. She then helped organize weekly meetings with other service-sector employees to talk about wages and local working conditions.
As in many other cities with a high concentration of low-wage service workers, Ithaca now has a high unemployment rate — and a brewing eviction crisis. Rand herself faces eviction. But the Ithaca Tenants Union has been expanding exponentially.
“Every single person” who was involved in the workplace organizing network has taken part in both tenant organizing and Black Lives Matter protests, Rand says.
On August 6, as local housing courts reopened, about 50 members of the Ithaca Tenants Union staged a blockade to prevent attorneys and landlords from entering. The same day, Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced an extension of the eviction moratorium.
These are small steps, but according to Rand, they send a message to those in power. “We’re getting ready,” Rand says. “We’re not going to let our neighbors be tossed out on the street.”
At least a dozen other groups nationwide staged physical blockades of courts and homes in July and August to protect tenants. In Prince George’s County, Md., more than 50 people showed up with only a day’s notice after the DC Tenants Union and other groups spread word that a landlord planned to change the locks on someone’s home — the kind of illegal eviction that organizers warn may persist, even with an eviction moratorium.
In Chicago, the Autonomous Tenants Union, Chicago Democratic Socialists of America, Chicago Teachers Union and other community groups took turns occupying a plaza outside the city’s eviction court in mid-August. The action resulted in an extension of Illinois’ eviction moratorium, but organizers say self-styled progressive leaders must do more to avoid the unthinkable — being outflanked by Trump on housing.
“Democrats should prove their commitment to housing justice by bridging the gaps in the CDC order,” Jake Marshall says. “Pursue ‘just cause’ for eviction legislation, legislate to cancel rent and make sure each and every tenant knows their rights.”
A courtroom artist depicts Black Panther Party Chairman Black Bobby Seale gagged and literally bound to a chair in court. (illustration: Howard Brodie)
Sunday Song: Graham Nash | Chicago
Graham Nash, YouTube
Nash writes: "So your brother's bound and gagged and they've chained him to a chair. Won't you please come to Chicago just to sing."
So your brother's bound and gagged and they've chained him to a chair
Won't you please come to Chicago just to sing
In a land that's known as freedom how can such a thing be fair
Won't you please come to Chicago for the help that we can bringWe can change the world
Rearrange the world
It's dying
To get betterPoliticians sit yourselves down there's nothing for you here
Won't you please come to Chicago for a ride
Don't ask Jack to help you 'cause he'll turn the other ear
Won't you please come to Chicago or else join the other side(We can change the world)
Yes we can change the world
(Rearrange the world)
Rearrange the world(It's dying)
If you believe in justice
(It's dying)
If you believe in freedom
(It's dying)
Let a man live his own life
(It's dying)
Rules and regulations who needs them
Open up the doorSomehow people must be free I hope the day comes soon
Won't you please come to Chicago show your face
From the bottom of the ocean to the mountains of the moon
Won't you please come to Chicago no one else can take your place(We can change the world)
Yes we can change the world
(Rearrange the world)
Rearrange the world(It's dying)
If you believe in justice
(It's dying)
If you believe in freedom
(It's dying)
Let a man live his own life
(It's dying)
Rules and regulations who needs them
Open up the door
Is the end of oil near? (photo: Kanenori/Pixabay/The Wilderness Society)
The End of Oil Is Near
Antonia Juhasz, Sierra Club
Juhasz writes: "This past spring, coastlines around the globe took on the feel of an enemy invasion as hundreds of massive oil tankers overwhelmed seaports from South Africa to Singapore. Locals and industry analysts alike used the word armada - typically applied to fleets of warships - to describe scenes such as when a group of tankers left Saudi Arabia en masse and another descended on China."
One distressed news article proclaimed that a “floating hoard” of oil sat in tankers anchored across the North Sea, “everywhere from the UK to France and the Netherlands.” In April, the US Coast Guard shared an alarming video that showed dozens of tankers spread out for miles along California’s coast.
On May 12, Greenpeace activists sailed into San Francisco Bay to issue a challenge to the public. In front of the giant Amazon Falcon oil tanker—which had been docked in the bay for weeks, loaded up with Chevron oil—they unfurled a banner reading, “Oil Is Over! The Future Is Up to You.”
The oil industry has turned the oceans into aquatic parking lots—floating storage facilities holding, at their highest levels in early May, some 390 million barrels of crude oil and refined products like gasoline. Between March and May, the amount of oil “stored” at sea nearly tripled, and it has yet to abate in many parts of the world.
This tanker invasion is only one piece of a dangerous buildup in oil supply that is the result of an unprecedented global glut. The coronavirus pandemic has gutted demand, resulting in the current surplus, but it merely exacerbated a problem that’s been plaguing the oil industry for years: the incessant overproduction of a product that the world is desperately trying to wean itself from, with growing success.
Today, the global oil industry is in a tailspin. Demand has cratered, prices have collapsed, and profits are shrinking. The oil majors (giant global corporations including BP, Chevron, and Shell) are taking billions of dollars in losses while cutting tens of thousands of jobs. Smaller companies are declaring bankruptcy, and investors are looking elsewhere for returns. Significant changes to when, where, and how much oil will be produced, and by whom, are already underway. It is clear that the oil industry will not recover from COVID-19 and return to its former self. What form it ultimately takes, or whether it will even survive, is now very much an open question.
Under President Donald Trump, the United States has joined other petroleum superpowers in efforts to maintain oil’s dominance. While government bailout programs and subsidies could provide the lifeline the industry needs to stay afloat, such policies will likely throw good money after bad. As Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Federal Reserve governor and former deputy secretary of the Treasury, has written, “Even in the short term, fossil fuels are a terrible investment. . . . It also forestalls the inevitable decline of an industry that can no longer sustain itself.”
In contrast to an agenda that doubles down on dirty fuels, a wealth of green recovery programs aim to keep fossil fuels in the ground as part of a just transition to a sustainable and equitable economy. If these policies prevail, the industry will rapidly shrink to a fraction of its former stature. Thus, as at no other time since the industry’s inception, the actions taken now by the public and by policymakers will determine oil’s fate.
The Greenpeace activists are right. Whether the pandemic marks the end of oil “is up to you.”
THE OIL INDUSTRY is in such dire straits today because of the multiple crises it has faced since well before the pandemic. These upheavals are largely the result of the decades of organizing that have cast a dark shadow over the industry and exposed the harms associated with oil. This advocacy has helped to shut down and delay fossil fuel projects through direct-action protest, bring about current and expected policies to cut demand and production, make sustainable transportation and renewable energy more accessible and affordable, and reduce the political and economic benefits of supporting the oil industry. The result of the organizing and advocacy is death by a thousand cuts, leaving behind an industry producing too much of a commodity that is of shrinking value.
For more than a decade, volatility has been a hallmark of global oil markets. Within extreme highs and lows, however, there exists a consistent trend: a fall both in oil prices since 2008 and in the growth of demand for oil since at least 2011. After reaching a record high of $148 a barrel in 2008, which helped spark the Great Recession, the price of a barrel of oil in November 2019 was just $60. The growth in demand for oil worldwide in 2015 was more than two and a half times greater than in 2019; it plunged precipitously between 2017 and 2019. Despite the contraction in demand, companies kept pumping larger amounts of oil. By 2018, the global oil supply had outstripped demand, causing a glut. The situation was dire enough that the research consulting firm McKinsey & Company warned oil-producing nations in 2019 to begin “sufficiently diversifying their economies for a post-[oil] peak demand world.”
Corporate profits and market values, as well as investor returns, have been in a nosedive. Between 2012 and 2017, the oil majors’ profits collapsed. BP’s profits dropped by 68 percent, Chevron’s by 65 percent, ExxonMobil’s by 56 percent, and Shell’s by 50 percent. In December 2019, Chevron was forced to write off $10 billion in losses.
Global indexes measuring the value of the largest oil companies hit a 50-year low in 2018; of the world’s 100 biggest stocks, only six were oil producers. By 2019, the fossil fuel industry ranked dead last among major investment sectors in the United States. This was not surprising, given that the US oil and gas industry was in debt to the tune of $200 billion, largely because of struggling small fracking companies.
Even as investors were abandoning oil company stocks, a flood of cheap money and easy credit had been keeping the industry afloat. During the past decade, the US fracking industry lost $300 billion yet was able to continue producing, thanks to the financial backing of government subsidies, banks, hedge funds, and other investors. But well before the pandemic arrived, the private-capital flows were weakening. In addition, every major Democratic candidate for president pledged to end government subsidies for fossil fuels. Painting an ominous picture for the Wall Street Journal in 2019, Raoul LeBlanc of IHS Markit said that oil companies “don’t have the ability to borrow anymore.”
The loss of investor confidence was also a result of global activism. Nearly a decade of organizing around the demand that major institutions divest themselves of fossil fuel stocks had resulted in an estimated $11 trillion worth of commitments to sell off oil, gas, and coal holdings by late 2019. The divestment effort spawned a sister movement calling on banks and hedge funds to stop financing fossil fuel projects. “It’s been critical for Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color to stop the money pipeline,” says Reverend Lennox Yearwood Jr., president of the Hip Hop Caucus. These financiers, he argues, “would rather invest in our destruction, in our genocide, than in our lives and our future.” After spending trillions propping up the industry, most major North American and European banks decreased their funding for fossil fuels between 2017 and 2018.
As their fortunes diminished, oil and gas companies and many oil-producing countries tried to drill their way out of financial crisis. To pay back lenders and stockholders—or, in the case of state-owned companies, to generate the income for government budgets—producers kept pumping oil. But recall that in the midst of overproduction, both the price of oil and demand growth had been dropping, creating a vicious cycle in which producers had to sell more oil to make the same or even less money.
Oil production rose globally, but most aggressively in the United States. After production fell in the last year of the Obama administration, Trump’s “American energy dominance” policy spurred a historic ramp-up. US oil production reached its highest levels in history in 2018, and again in 2019. The boom made the United States the world’s largest oil producer and drove production across the nation, with states including Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas all reaching record highs.
A massive oversupply, a slew of indebted and overleveraged companies, wary investors, and a hostile public: All of the signs were there of a bubble ready to burst. In an October 2019 commentary for Bloomberg, Noah Smith, a leading energy analyst and finance professor, declared, “The age of oil is coming to a close.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief the existing fragilities within the oil industry—and then made each of them worse. The pandemic has also revealed new ways that oil harms the public, as studies confirm that exposure to air pollution generated largely from fuel combustion from cars, refineries, and power plants increases COVID-19 death rates and that climate change (caused by the production and use of oil and other fossil fuels) is making outbreaks of infectious diseases more common and more dangerous.
As the pandemic took hold, governments around the world implemented stay-at-home orders. People delighted in the newly clean air as airplanes, trucks, trains, and cars went idle. Consumption of fossil fuels, especially gasoline, collapsed, and with it the price of oil.
The world’s leading petrostates took advantage of the moment to ensure their own survival. In March, US oil production increased even as Saudi Arabia and Russia entered into a price war that pushed the price of oil down even further. In April, President Trump met with US oil companies and then separately and individually with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Shortly thereafter, OPEC+ (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries plus Russia, Bahrain, Mexico, and another half dozen producers) reached a global agreement to cut oil supply. But the OPEC+ production cuts wouldn’t take effect until May, and, in the short term, oil production in many countries surged. The geopolitical and corporate machinations provide a stark demonstration of how, even when faced with the worst possible scenarios for demand, supply, and price, the oil industry simply will not stop drilling unless it is forced to do so.
The oil glut quickly became a tsunami. Under the weight of all that oil, in April the price of oil crashed to negative $40 dollars a barrel—the lowest amount in history. Yet even at that bargain-basement price, there were few takers. Panic jolted the industry. The state of Oklahoma pronounced oil to be “economic waste.” Texas briefly considered mandating production quotas. From deep inside the heart of the US fracking boom, the Bismarck Tribune editorial board declared, “North Dakota must wean itself from oil dependence.”
OPEC, Russia, and other supplier nations did finally begin to hold back oil production. By June, global oil supply had fallen by some 12 million barrels a day (nearly 13 percent). But demand had plunged by more than twice that amount, or nearly 30 million barrels. In the United States, the frackers finally caved: Production fell by 3 million barrels a day in May, with virtually all the reductions coming from the shale—or fracking—regions of the country. In Colorado, oil production in April was just one-sixth of the volume in March. In North Dakota, production fell by 17 percent in that March-to-April period. Not only have some existing wells been closed in; fewer new ones are being drilled as well. There were just 10 rigs in North Dakota fracking new wells in June versus 61 the year before.
The fall in new drilling led to a collapse in jobs. Across the United States, more than 100,000 oil and gas and associated industry jobs were lost between March and May.
While the production slowdown by the OPEC+ nations is a temporary agreement, oil analysts Casey Merriman and Abhi Rajendran of Energy Intelligence expect a good deal of the US oil production cuts to be permanent. They predict that the country has reached peak oil production and will never return to the record 13 million barrels of oil per day reached in November 2019. COVID-19 has sped up a process already well underway, the analysts contend: Oil basins in the United States outside the Bakken Formation in North Dakota and the Texas–New Mexico Permian are turning into permanent “fringe” basins. In an astounding prediction, they argue that “geologic consolidation” will now take place, with US oil production shrinking—though not ending—everywhere other than the Permian, with production concentrating in the hands of the biggest players (see “A Long Sunset”).
Big Oil, Russia, and Saudi Arabia seem to have scored at least one win. The price of oil increased from negative $40 a barrel in April to around $40 a barrel by summer. Those prices mean more income, but not enough (in the absence of external financial backing) to prop up smaller fracking companies, whose break-even price per barrel is closer to $50. Many are already declaring bankruptcy. This is good news for the largest oil companies, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell. Each partners regularly with the members of OPEC and Russia, and they have long shared the goal of burying the smaller frackers, blamed for unfettered (and unstoppable) oversupply. The oil majors were late to join the shale revolution, and they have spent years trying to buy up and push out smaller rivals, especially in the Permian Basin. Now COVID-19 appears to have provided the opening they’ve sought.
But these newfound advantages for the majors represent a minor victory in a losing effort and are simply not enough to halt these companies’ own downward slides. In June, Moody’s predicted that global oil demand may have peaked in 2019. Shell announced that it will slash up to $22 billion from the value of its assets, and BP is selling assets worth $15 billion, including its petrochemical business, and eliminating 10,000 jobs worldwide. Chevron is cutting about 6,000 workers worldwide, and ExxonMobil, after taking a $3 billion write-down in May, announced that it could drop as many as 7,500 workers in the United States alone. They join some 55 oil companies that have announced plans to cut more than $37 billion from their pre-COVID 2020 spending budgets.
“The energy industry that emerges from the crisis will be significantly different from the one before,” argued the International Energy Agency in May, before making an aggressive pitch for a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for governments worldwide to reboot their economies with $3 trillion in investments that will move us away from fossil fuels and toward “a more resilient and cleaner-energy future.”
“HISTORICALLY, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew,” the novelist and essayist Arundhati Roy wrote in April. “This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” One month later, she joined with author Naomi Klein to launch a Global Green New Deal.
We live in a world that remains hardwired to oil. Now the oil industry is balanced on a precipice. Whether it survives the COVID-19 pandemic rests with public will and government policy: Will countries remain stuck within the oil era or move into a less volatile and more sustainable future? As goes the price of oil, so too goes the global economy—and we’re dangerously close to repeating the mistakes that led to the 2008 global financial crisis. Then, the price of oil skyrocketed to almost $150 a barrel, crushing consumers and consumer nations. Today, the collapse in oil prices has pulled producers and poor producer nations down with it. To save ourselves, we must unwind from oil.
Clearly, leaving Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Mohammed bin Salman in charge of a global solution is a sure way to lock in a world order tied to oil. The extent to which governments are already stepping in to provide the capital that is otherwise draining from the industry is a testament to Big Oil’s remaining political prowess. Led by President Trump and Republicans in Congress, oil and gas companies in the United States had, by June, received billions of dollars in both direct federal COVID-19 benefits and indirect payouts through new Federal Reserve pandemic-relief spending, according to my own calculations for Sierra.
But there are alternatives that take us in another direction: actions and policies to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels and over to a just, equitable, and sustainable economy based on localized renewable energy sources and sustainable transportation systems.
First, we must acknowledge that falling demand and decreasing prices will not be enough to bring about a transition away from oil. Although Energy Intelligence analysts predict that the United States has reached its peak of oil production, their projections anticipate that some 10 million barrels of oil a day could be produced here through 2040. This amount is incompatible with the needs of social justice and public health, the Paris Agreement, and the goal of keeping average global temperatures from rising beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius.
To lock in the production cuts that have already been implemented and go beyond them requires keep-it-in-the-ground policies that are based on a “managed decline” in oil production. On the global level, turning away from oil will require wealthy countries to meet their obligations under the Paris Agreement and provide $500 billion by 2025 to support poorer countries’ transition to green, sustainable economies. These funds can be increased and should include targeted support for efforts in poor countries to keep their oil in the ground. The International Monetary Fund can help by expanding its recent decision to provide debt relief to struggling nations.
In the journal Climate Policy, Sivan Kartha, co-leader of the Stockholm Environment Institute’s Gender and Social Equality Programme, and Greg Muttitt, former research director of Oil Change International, recently laid out a path for a managed phaseout of fossil fuel extraction centered on equity and climate justice. The phaseout would begin in those communities—most typically communities of color—that disproportionately suffer the harms of extraction without the benefits. Also, wealthier, more diversified economies—led by the United States, Canada, and the UK—in which the social and economic costs of shuttering fossil fuel sectors are the least, would act most swiftly while simultaneously assisting poorer countries in their transition.
There are also many ideas for how the United States can disentangle itself from the power of the oil industry. The Freedom From Fossil Fuels platform—crafted by Governor Jay Inslee of Washington State and later adopted by Senator Elizabeth Warren—and its plans for securing environmental and climate justice (combined with the Frontlines Climate Justice Executive Action Platform from the progressive think tank Demos) may provide the most comprehensive road map for navigating a managed decline. The Freedom platform includes banning all new fossil fuel leasing on federal lands and offshore waters; ending government subsidies for fossil fuels; banning fracking; and tightening regulatory controls such that public health and safety and environmental protection are prioritized over fossil fuel production.
Going further, increasingly popular plans for local and national Green New Deals and global green stimulus packages will ensure the necessary government support for transitioning oil-dependent workers to well-paying, unionized green-energy jobs. For example, the government could provide financial support for or hire oil and gas workers to shut in and clean up abandoned wells, and oil and gas pipeline workers—whose skills are agnostic as to what flows through the pipes—could rebuild and maintain failing water and sewage lines. At the same time, more people are supporting the ongoing efforts of frontline communities, particularly Indigenous peoples, to defend their lands from fossil fuel operations.
The pandemic has made painfully clear that there are two ways the age of oil might end. There’s the status quo path, in which we are so overcome by the disasters brought about by our oil reliance—calamities in the forms of war, political upheaval, and the climate catastrophes of worsening drought, floods, hurricanes, fires, and disease—that we are unable to consume oil. And there is a more intentional, thoughtful path, one that embraces justice, equity, and sustainability. If we take that route, the “end of oil” will be a commitment to live in peace with one another and the planet.
The choice is up to us.
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