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Robert Reich | Jimmy Carter and the End of Democratic Capitalism
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
Reich writes: "I'm honoring Presidents' Day by sharing with you some thoughts about Jimmy Carter, who is now in hospice care."
The myth and reality of our 39th president
Friends,
I’m honoring Presidents’ Day by sharing with you some thoughts about Jimmy Carter, who is now in hospice care.
Carter’s administration marked the end of 45 years of democratic capitalism, whose goal had been to harness the private sector for the common good.
It’s important to understand what happened and why.
For years, the rap on President Carter has been that his presidency failed yet his post-presidency was the best in modern history.
This is way too simplistic.
Carter’s life after his presidency was exemplary for the same reason he was elected president after the disasters of Richard Nixon and Nixon’s vice president, Gerald Ford (who unconditionally pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed): Carter’s modesty, decency, and humanity.
Not only were these traits the opposite of Nixon’s, but they would shine even brighter 40 years later in contrast to the loathsome Donald Trump.
One-term presidents are always presumed failures because voters didn’t reelect them. But Carter lost his reelection bid (as would George H.W. Bush 12 years later) not because his presidency failed but because the Federal Reserve Board hiked interest rates so high as to bring on a recession. Recessions do not just choke off inflation; they also choke off presidencies.
During Carter’s term of office, the OPEC oil cartel raised oil prices from $13 a barrel to over $34, resulting in double-digit price increases across the economy. Paul Volcker, Carter’s appointee as Fed chair, was determined to “break the back of inflation” by hiking interest rates to nearly 20 percent by 1981, bringing on a deep recession and causing millions of people to lose their jobs — including Carter.
It was not Carter’s fault that democratic capitalism ended with him. To the contrary, he appointed many consumer, labor, and environmental advocates to his administration.
Full disclosure: I was a Carter appointee, but met him only twice, once at a Rose Garden ceremony and years later at a dinner party at the home of Sen. Dianne Feinstein. (He was uncharacteristically late for dinner but made a surprise entry, coming down the stairs from a bedroom where he had taken a nap. He apologized profusely, making two un-Trump-like concessions in a single sentence: “I’m getting old and need my nap,” he said with a self-effacing grin, “but I should have told someone I was heading upstairs.”)
Many of his initiatives — ending funding for the B-1 bomber, seeking a comprehensive consumer-protection bill, proposing broad-based tax reform, opposing traditional “pork barrel” spending, establishing a “superfund” to clean up toxic waste sites, and deregulating the airline, trucking, and railroad industries (resulting in lower transportation costs for industry and consumers) — were commendable.
But much of what he did seemed to justify Lewis Powell’s warning to corporate America in a 1971 memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that corporations must bulk up their lobbying muscle in Washington or suffer political defeat.
The untold story of the Carter years is the vast increase in corporate political firepower during this time. Trade associations, law firms, lobbying firms, political operatives, and public-relations specialists swarmed Washington, offering executives so much money that most retiring members of Congress also became lobbyists.
The city went from being a sleepy if not seedy backwater to the hub of America’s political wealth — replete with tony restaurants, upscale hotels, expensive bistros, and 25-bedroom mansions (one of them now owned by Jeff Bezos), and bordered by two of the richest counties in the nation.
With the defeat of Carter’s consumer protection legislation in 1978 at the hands of corporate lobbyists, Richard Lesher, then president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, presciently boasted that: “30 to 40 years from now people will look back and say ‘These were the years when the transition took place.’ … We're waking up. And big business is going to be in the forefront of this drive.”
Perhaps Carter could have staved this off had he been more politically cunning, but I doubt it. After 45 years playing defense, corporate America was eager to grab back the reins of power. Despite his best efforts, Carter paved the way for Ronald Reagan — and America’s return to the corporate capitalism that had dominated the nation before the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
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Michigan State University students and others attend a rally outside of the state capitol building in Lansing, Michigan, in honor of those who died in a school shooting on Feb. 13. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Molly Olmstead | The Bystander
Molly Olmstead, Slate
Olmstead writes: "While the toll of directly experiencing or witnessing a shooting is, in many ways, self-evident, it's easy for us to forget that the students who were just there - who experience a shooting from the periphery, from relative safety - have no roadmap for how to cope."
How one college student is grappling with the “gasp” of emotions that flooded him after the shooting at Michigan State.
The day after the mass shooting at Michigan State University, Ted, a student there, was holed up in his dorm room, trying to distract himself from his thoughts, desperate to stop replaying the night in his mind. He played video games. He cleaned his room. He texted his friends, chatted with strangers on Reddit. But when a helicopter circled over his building, he was brought back mentally to the hours he spent hiding, and the thoughts he was trying to avoid came crashing down on him.
“When I was hiding, for a long while, the only thing I could hear was silence,” he said in a recent phone call. “You’d hear sirens occasionally. And this helicopter was flying over my head the whole night.”
Ted, who asked not to share his last name, was not in Berkey Hall on Feb. 13 at the time the gunman opened fire. Nor was he in the MSU Union, the site of the second attack. But he has found himself grappling with feelings of overwhelming depression, anger, and intense anxiety. He now knows he was never in any direct danger, but he still existed, for several hours, in a state of suspended fear, helplessly watching as false but frightening reports came in through texts and on social media—as they often do, in situations like these. The first reports of the shooting came in at 8:18 p.m. and the police sent out an alert that the shelter-in-place order had been lifted at 12:28 a.m. Ted had spent the whole night wondering if he was in the gunman’s path.
In the aftermath of the shooting, which claimed the lives of three people and left five critically wounded, the university set up extensive counseling programs, open to the public, no insurance needed. But survivor’s guilt is complicated; Ted said he felt bad about feeling so anguished. “I thought that I wasn’t allowed to use these resources because they weren’t for me, because I didn’t get shot at,” he said.
“Why should I feel so affected?” he asked. “It’s weird. I don’t feel like I have the right to feel like a victim.”
While the toll of directly experiencing or witnessing a shooting is, in many ways, self-evident, it’s easy for us to forget that the students who were just there—who experience a shooting from the periphery, from relative safety—have no roadmap for how to cope. And the aftermath often comes as a surprise to the students themselves, many of whom struggle with denial, frustration, and, above all, guilt.
The first indication Ted had that something was wrong came as he was pulling into the garage near his dorm on Monday after dinner at an off-campus shopping center. A dozen or more police cars were parked around Berkey Hall, two buildings down. In the opposite direction, toward the MSU Union, there were a couple more. It was a little odd, but not too alarming: He was used to seeing an unnecessarily strong police response to any kind of report on campus.
He parked and got out of his car. The time, he would later estimate, was around 8:25 or 8:30—a time when no one knew the gunman’s whereabouts. But Ted didn’t yet know this. He had no indication of just how horrible the night would be until he spotted a woman acting strangely. She was standing between cars, partially hiding her body from view, while also swiveling her head to look around the garage. Ted approached her and asked what was going on.
“‘Someone came in and shot up my classroom,’” Ted recalled her saying. Stunned, he asked if she knew where the gunman was, or if she knew what was going on. She didn’t.
“And then I saw her, too. Really saw her. She was covered in blood. Her hands were completely covered in blood. She had blood on her shirt, her jacket, blood on her pants, her shoes,” he said. “I said, ‘Oh my God, you’re covered in blood. Are you OK?’ She said, ‘It’s my friend’s blood.’ And I said, ‘Is your friend OK?’ Like, fuck, obviously not. But I just said that. And she said, ‘I don’t know.’ I think she was in shock, too.”
Ted asked the woman if she needed help, but she told him a friend was picking her up. She got on the phone, walked away, and he heard her crying. Later, in his mind, Ted would replay this conversation, envision the bloody woman, piece together the timing and location, over and over.
Ted didn’t know what to do, so he left the parking garage and walked toward the MSU Union, where there were now “a million police everywhere.” He hadn’t yet heard of the second shooting at the student union, so he approached an officer with an assault rifle to ask for information. The officer told Ted to turn back. He returned to his car, drove to the top of the parking ramp, and waited.
For around three hours, Ted waited there. For a while he hid under a blanket he had in his car, hunched in a state of anxiety. He scrolled through texts and tried to keep up with the new reports of sightings or of gunfire, many of which turned out later to all be false. He, unlike many other students, refused to listen to the police scanner; he felt like he couldn’t handle it. “I was genuinely scared that this guy might come and try to find me,” he said.
His worst moment came when a man appeared at the top level of the parking ramp; for a split second, before Ted realized that the man didn’t match the description of the shooter, Ted experienced a jolt of intense fear. But the second man was visibly terrified. Ted waved at him; the man stayed away. Later that night, Ted would find out that the man had been in Berkey Hall studying when the shooting started.
Eventually, around 11:30 or 11:45 p.m., by Ted’s estimate, police arrived to question him and then told Ted it was safe to walk home as long as he stuck to the main road. Ted and the second man, who had also been hiding in the parking area, walked back together. Shortly afterward, he saw the news that the gunman had killed himself.
“I didn’t really have a chance to deal with anything that night, I was so in shock,” Ted said. “I couldn’t process anything. I felt, like, nothing for a while.”
But he stayed up late, unable to sleep. Once the fear ebbed, it left a strange void of emotion. “I felt numb, like, ‘this isn’t even real.’ It felt weird. I wasn’t sad or angry; I didn’t feel anything. Just nothing at all.”
The next day, that same numbness continued, even as his thoughts fixated on the events. “I was telling myself I wasn’t really affected by this,” he said. “I don’t think I’d really realized the gravity of it.”
Then, around 7 p.m., he said, “it just all came through and hit me.”
He was sitting in his dorm room, in a largely empty campus, keenly aware of just how quiet it was—most students in his building had gone home for the week. The emotions hit him, he said, like a “gasp.” He felt overwhelmed by anxiety and anger and a feeling of isolation and hopelessness. “It really messed me up, to be honest,” he said.
He found himself unable to stop replaying the night’s events in his head. His actions, his words, the small decisions that led him to be in that car that night, and not more directly in harm’s way. “I kept thinking, ‘I could have been there, so easily. How did I not end up being there?’”
Despair took hold. “I felt hopeless knowing this is never going to change, that nothing is going to get better, nothing is going to get done,” he said. “It’s just going to keep happening. This hopeless feeling, I can’t shake.”
He reached out to friends to talk to them, and sharing their grief helped, he said. So did distracting himself with video games. But these measures didn’t fully resolve the turmoil. “I just wanted it to stop,” he said. “I wanted it to go away, and there was nothing to make it stop, all the feelings and the thoughts.”
Then, there was the guilt. The shooting “had an impact on the whole community,” Ted said. “Multiple people have told me that. But it still feels wrong.”
After talking to friends, Ted decided to join online “listening groups,” over Zoom, to discuss his feelings with other students. Talking helped. It also helped to hear other students struggling with the same guilt and bewilderment. Ted remembers hearing from one international student who felt particularly confused. “They lived off campus, and they didn’t feel, necessarily, that they belonged to this community in the same sense,” Ted recalled. “And yet they felt traumatized by what happened. They felt like a victim. And they said something about how they can’t talk with any of their friends because they’re from overseas, and no one understands this kind of thing over there, because it just doesn’t happen. I was thinking, ‘I don’t understand this either. I’m from here, and this shit happens here, but I don’t understand it. I don’t understand what I’m feeling or why I’m feeling this way.’”
Counselors told Ted that many of the students had struggled with these feelings—the sense they hadn’t earned the right to feel traumatized. “The people there told me they were there for me, that the resources are for everybody, because we’re all affected,” Ted said. “Hearing those people tell me that and actually believing it—it’s a different thing.”
In recent days, students who lived through the shooting have attempted, in so many different ways, to express their shock, horror, fear, and guilt—some by sharing what their phones looked like during an onslaught of alerts and terrified text exchanges, some with bitterly dark humor. They’re leaning on each other, but they’re also the TikTok generation, inclined to show their experiences, and process their grief and anger on social media. It’s a form of coping that has given us real-time insight into the immediate world of college shooting survivors.
The sharing doesn’t necessarily ease their minds, but for many, it feels like the only form of immediate action they can take. (As Ted put it, some friends seemed to be coping much better than he was, and it caused him to question himself. “In a way that made me feel worse,” he said. “It’s just like, they’re fine, I should be fine, too.”)
Ted decided not to leave campus and go home to his family, as many students did. He figured he would feel just as alone there as he does on campus, given that his friends and family at home wouldn’t understand. All he wants, he says, is to be around people who feel what he feels.
“Talking about it with other people is the only thing that’s helping; When I’m sitting here alone, it’s really bad,” he said. “I don’t feel like a real victim. And yet I feel so messed up by it all.”
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Elon Musk. (image: CNN)
I Watched Elon Musk Kill Twitter's Culture From the Inside
Rumman Chowdhury, The Atlantic
Chowdhury writes: "Everyone has an opinion about Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. I lived it. I saw firsthand the harms that can flow from unchecked power in tech. But it's not too late to turn things around."
This bizarre episode in social-media history proves that it’s well past time for meaningful tech oversight.
Everyone has an opinion about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. I lived it. I saw firsthand the harms that can flow from unchecked power in tech. But it’s not too late to turn things around.
I joined Twitter in 2021 from Parity AI, a company I founded to identify and fix biases in algorithms used in a range of industries, including banking, education, and pharmaceuticals. It was hard to leave my company behind, but I believed in the mission: Twitter offered an opportunity to improve how millions of people around the world are seen and heard. I would lead the company’s efforts to develop more ethical and transparent approaches to artificial intelligence as the engineering director of the Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability (META) team.
In retrospect, it’s notable that the team existed at all. It was focused on community, public engagement, and accountability. We pushed the company to be better, providing ways for our leaders to prioritize more than revenue. Unsurprisingly, we were wiped out when Musk arrived.
He might not have seen the value in the type of work that META did. Take our investigation into Twitter’s automated image-crop feature. The tool was designed to automatically identify the most relevant subjects in an image when only a portion is visible in a user’s feed. If you posted a group photograph of your friends at the lake, it would zero in on faces rather than feet or shrubbery. It was a simple premise, but flawed: Users noticed that the tool seemed to favor white people over people of color in its crops. We decided to conduct a full audit, and there was indeed a small but statistically significant bias. When Twitter used AI to determine which portion of a large image to show on a user’s feed, it had a slight tendency to favor white people (and, additionally, to favor women). Our solution was straightforward: Image cropping wasn’t a function that needed to be automated, so Twitter disabled the algorithm.
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Beatriz Gonzalez and Jose Hernandez, the mother and stepfather of Nohemi Gonzalez, who died in a terrorist attack in Paris in 2015. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in Gonzalez v. Google on Tuesday. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Supreme Court to Hear Case That Targets a Legal Shield of Tech Giants
David McCabe, The New York Times
McCabe writes: "Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old California college student, was studying abroad in Paris in November 2015 when she was among the 130 people killed in a coordinated series of terrorist attacks throughout the city. The next year, her father sued Google and other tech companies."
The justices are set to hear a case challenging Section 230, a law that protects Google, Facebook and others from lawsuits over what their users post online.
Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old California college student, was studying abroad in Paris in November 2015 when she was among the 130 people killed in a coordinated series of terrorist attacks throughout the city.
The next year, her father sued Google and other tech companies. He accused the firms of spreading content that radicalized users into becoming terrorists, and said they were therefore legally responsible for the harm inflicted on Ms. Gonzalez’s family. Her mother, stepfather and brothers eventually joined the lawsuit, too.
Their claims will be heard in the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. And their lawsuit, with Google now the exclusive defendant, could have potentially seismic ramifications for the social media platforms that have become conduits of communication, commerce and culture for billions of people.
Their suit takes aim at a federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Google’s YouTube from lawsuits over content posted by their users or their decisions to take content down. The case gives the Supreme Court’s justices the opportunity to narrow how that legal shield is applied or to gut it entirely, potentially opening up the companies to liability for what users post and to lawsuits over libel, discriminatory advertising and extremist propaganda.
A day after hearing the Gonzalez v. Google case, the court is scheduled to hear a second tech lawsuit, Twitter v. Taamneh, over whether Twitter has contributed to terrorism.
What the Supreme Court ultimately decides on the cases will add to a pitched battle around the world over how to regulate online speech. Many governments say that social networks have become fertile ground for hate speech and misinformation. Some have required the platforms to take down those posts. But in the United States, the First Amendment makes it difficult for Congress to do the same.
Critics of Section 230 say that it lets the tech companies avoid responsibility for harms facilitated on their watch. But supporters counter that without the legal shield, the companies will take down more content than ever to avoid lawsuits, stifling free expression.
The Supreme Court case “can have an impact on how those companies do business and how we interact with the internet, too,” said Hany Farid, a professor at the school of information at the University of California, Berkeley. He filed a brief with the Supreme Court supporting the Gonzalez family members who are suing Google.
Ms. Gonzalez, a first-generation college student who was studying design at California State University, Long Beach, was killed while out with friends during the Paris attacks in 2015. The Islamic State later claimed responsibility. She was the only American killed.
Her father, Reynaldo Gonzalez, sued Google, Facebook and Twitter in 2016, arguing the platforms were spreading extremist content. That included propaganda, messages from the Islamic State’s leaders and videos of graphic violence, he said. Citing media reports, the lawsuit mentioned specific videos that showed footage of Islamic State fighters in the field and updates from a media outlet affiliated with the group. The online platforms didn’t do enough to keep the terrorist group off their sites, the lawsuit said.
YouTube and other platforms say they screen for such videos and take down many of them. But in 2018, research that was based on a tool developed by Mr. Farid found that some Islamic State videos stayed up for hours, including one that encouraged violent attacks in Western nations.
Facebook and Twitter were removed as defendants in the lawsuit in 2017, the same year Ms. Gonzalez’s mother, stepfather and siblings joined plaintiffs. Last year, a federal appeals court ruled that Google did not have to face the Gonzalez family members’ claims because the company was protected by Section 230.
In May, lawyers for Ms. Gonzalez’s family asked the Supreme Court to step in. By using algorithms to recommend content to users, the lawyers argued, YouTube was essentially engaging in its own form of speech, which was not protected by Section 230.
Ms. Gonzalez’s father and the plaintiffs in the Twitter case declined to comment through their lawyer, Keith Altman. Mr. Altman said that courts had “pushed the limits” of the Section 230 legal shield to the point that it was “unrecognizable.” A lawyer for Ms. Gonzalez’s other family members did not respond to a request for comment. The lawyer who will argue both cases before the Supreme Court, Eric Schnapper, also declined to comment.
Google has denied the Gonzalez family’s arguments about Section 230. It has said that the family’s claims that Google supported terrorism are based on “threadbare assertions” and “speculative” arguments.
In Congress, efforts to reform Section 230 have stalled. Republicans, spurred by accusations that internet companies are more likely to take down conservative posts, proposed tweaking the law. Democrats said the platforms should take more content down when it spreads misinformation or hate speech.
Instead, courts started exploring the limits to how the law should be applied.
In one case in 2021, a federal appeals court in California ruled that Snap, the parent of Snapchat, could not use Section 230 to dodge a lawsuit involving three people who died in a car crash after using a Snapchat filter that displayed a user’s speed.
Last year, a federal judge in California said that Apple, Google and Meta, Facebook’s parent, could not use the legal shield to avoid some claims from consumers who said they were harmed by casino apps. A federal judge in Oregon also ruled that the statute didn’t shield Omegle, the chat site that connects users at random, from a lawsuit that said an 11-year-old girl met a predator through its service.
Tech companies say it will be devastating if the Supreme Court undercuts Section 230. Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google’s general counsel, said in an interview in December that the protections had been “crucial to allowing not just Google but the internet to flourish in its infancy, to actually become a major part of the broader U.S. economy.”
“It’s critically important that it stands as it is,” she said.
A spokesman for Meta pointed to a blog post where the company’s top lawyer said the case “could make it much harder for millions of online companies like Meta to provide the type of services that people enjoy using every day.”
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
Activists have raised concerns that changes to the law could cause the platforms to crack down on content posted by vulnerable people. In 2018, a new law ended the protections of Section 230 when platforms knowingly facilitated sex trafficking. The activists say that caused sites to take down content from adult sex workers and posts about L.G.B.T.Q. people.
The Gonzalez case has also attracted interest from the Justice Department. In a December brief, the agency told the Supreme Court it believed that Section 230 “does not bar claims based on YouTube’s alleged targeted recommendations of ISIS content.” The White House has said the legal shield should be removed.
Mr. Farid acknowledged it was possible the court could gut the Section 230 protections, leading to unintended consequences. But he noted that the social networks already comply with laws governing how they treat certain types of content, like German restrictions on digital hate speech. He said they could navigate narrow changes to the legal shield, too.
“The companies figured it out,” he said.
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Russian president Vladimir Putin. (photo: Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik/AP)
Putin Pulls Back From Last Remaining Nuclear Arms Control Pact With the US
Associated Press
Excerpt: "Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended Moscow's participation in the last remaining nuclear arms control pact with the U.S., announcing the move Tuesday in a bitter speech where he made clear he would not change his strategy in the war in Ukraine."
Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended Moscow’s participation in the last remaining nuclear arms control pact with the U.S., announcing the move Tuesday in a bitter speech where he made clear he would not change his strategy in the war in Ukraine.
In his long-delayed state-of-the-nation address, Putin cast his country — and Ukraine — as victims of Western double-dealing and said it was Russia, not Ukraine, fighting for its very existence.
“We aren’t fighting the Ukrainian people,” Putin said in a speech days before the war’s first anniversary on Friday. “The Ukrainian people have become hostages of the Kyiv regime and its Western masters, which have effectively occupied the country.”
The speech reiterated a litany of grievances that the Russian leader has frequently offered as justification for the widely condemned military campaign while vowing no military let-up in a conflict that has reawakened fears of a new Cold War.
On top of that, Putin sharply upped the ante by declaring that Moscow would suspend its participation in the so-called New START Treaty. The pact, signed in 2010 by the U.S. and Russia, caps the number of long-range nuclear warheads the two sides can deploy and limits the use of missiles that can carry atomic weapons.
Putin also said that Russia should stand ready to resume nuclear weapons tests if the U.S. does so, a move that would end a global ban on such tests in place since the Cold War era.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described Moscow’s decision as “really unfortunate and very irresponsible.”
“We’ll be watching carefully to see what Russia actually does,” he said during a visit to Greece.
Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and made a dash toward Kyiv, apparently expecting to quickly overrun the capital. But stiff resistance from Ukrainian forces — backed by Western weapons — turned back Moscow’s troops. While Ukraine has reclaimed many areas initially seized by Russia, the two sides have become bogged down in tit-for-tat battles in others.
The war has revived the old Russia-West divide, reinvigorated the NATO alliance, and created the biggest threat to Putin’s more than two-decade rule. U.S. President Joe Biden, fresh off a surprise visit to Kyiv, was in Poland on Tuesday on a mission to solidify that Western unity — and planned his own speech.
Observers were expected to scour Putin’s address for any signs of how the Russian leader sees the conflict, where he might take it and how it might end. While the Constitution mandates that the president deliver the speech annually, Putin never gave one in 2022, as his troops rolled into Ukraine and suffered repeated setbacks.
Much of the speech covered old ground, as Putin offered his own version of recent history, discounting arguments by the Ukrainian government that it needed Western help to thwart a Russian military takeover.
“Western elites aren’t trying to conceal their goals, to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ to Russia,” Putin said in the speech broadcast by all state TV channels. “They intend to transform the local conflict into a global confrontation.”
He added that Russia was prepared to respond since “it will be a matter of our country’s existence.” He has repeatedly depicted NATO’s expansion to include countries close to Russia as an existential threat to his country.
Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, who was in Ukraine on Tuesday, said she had hoped that Putin might have taken a different approach.
“What we heard this morning was propaganda that we already know,” Meloni said in English. “He says (Russia) worked on diplomacy to avoid the conflict, but the truth is that there is somebody who is the invader and somebody who is defending itself.”
Putin denied any wrongdoing, even as the Kremlin’s forces in Ukraine strike civilian targets, including hospitals, and are widely accused of war crimes. On the ground Tuesday, the Ukrainian military reported that Russian forces shelled southern cities of Kherson and Ochakiv while Putin spoke, killing six people.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy lamented that Russian forces were “again mercilessly killing the civilian population.”
Many observers predicted Putin’s speech would address Moscow’s fallout with the West — and Putin began with strong words for those countries that have provided Kyiv with crucial military support and warned them against supplying any longer-range weapons.
“It’s they who have started the war. And we are using force to end it,” Putin said before an audience of lawmakers, state officials and soldiers who have fought in Ukraine.
Putin also accused the West of taking aim at Russian culture, religion and values because it is aware that “it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield.”
Likewise, he said Western sanctions would have no effect, saying they hadn’t “achieved anything and will not achieve anything.”
Underscoring the anticipation ahead of the speech, some state TV channels put out a countdown for the event starting on Monday.
Reflecting the Kremlin’s clampdown on free speech and press, this year it barred media from “unfriendly” countries, the list of which includes the U.S., the U.K. and those in the EU. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said journalists from those nations will be able to cover the speech by watching the broadcast.
He previously told reporters that the speech’s delay had to do with Putin’s “work schedule,” but Russian media reports linked it to the setbacks of Russian forces. The Russian president postponed the state-of-the-nation address before, in 2017.
Last year, the Kremlin also canceled two other big annual events — Putin’s press conference and a highly scripted phone-in marathon where people ask the president questions.
Analysts expected Putin’s speech would be tough in the wake of Biden’s visit to Kyiv on Monday. In his his own speech later Tuesday, Biden is expected to highlight the commitment of the central European country and other allies to Ukraine over the past year.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that Biden’s address would not be “some kind of head to head” with Putin’s.
“This is not a rhetorical contest with anyone else,” said.
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A Drug Enforcement Administration chemist checks confiscated pills containing fentanyl at the DEA's Northeast Regional Laboratory in New York. (photo: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)
Politicians Say They'll Stop Fentanyl Smugglers. Experts Say New Drug War Won't Work
Brian Mann, NPR
Mann writes: "President Biden said this weekend that he wants to launch a 'major surge to stop fentanyl production and sale' that's driving 70,000 fatal overdoses in the U.S. every year."
President Biden said this weekend that he wants to launch a "major surge to stop fentanyl production and sale" that's driving 70,000 fatal overdoses in the U.S. every year.
There's fierce bipartisan pressure in Washington right now to do whatever it takes to stop Mexican drug cartels smuggling illicit fentanyl over the border.
But reporting by NPR found a broad consensus among drug policy experts that strategies now being put forward are unrealistic and won't keep fentanyl off American streets.
"My belief is there's absolutely no way to stop it," said Rep. David Trone, a Maryland Democrat who co-chaired a bipartisan commission on fentanyl smuggling.
Mexico's former ambassador to the United States, Arturo Sarukhan, agrees drug interdiction efforts likely won't stop fentanyl.
"As long as both countries continue to hew to the old paradigms, which have not worked, absolutely not, we will not be moving the needle," Sarukhan told NPR.
Despite widespread skepticism, there's growing bipartisan talk of a renewed drug war, and tougher border policies, driven by the unprecedented surge of fentanyl deaths across the U.S.
What U.S. politicians are promising
In recent months, fentanyl has exploded to the top of the agenda in Washington.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border last week and called for more aggressive measures to stop traffickers.
"You cannot tell us this border is secure when now there's enough fentanyl in this country to kill every single American more than 20 times over," the California Republican said. "This has all got to change. That's our commitment and that's what we'll make happen."
Republicans first politicized the fentanyl crisis during the midterms last November, falsely linking drug smuggling with undocumented migrants.
Now Democrats, too, are calling on the Biden administration to do more to pressure Mexican officials to crack down on the cartels.
"We work with our Mexican friends with kid gloves on this issue, and it's fundamentally wrong," Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, said at a hearing on fentanyl last week. "I don't know how many more lives have to be lost for Mexico to get engaged."
During that hearing, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Anne Milgram, said her agency is building an international effort designed to take down the Jalisco and Sinaloa cartels, which produce and smuggle most of the fentanyl entering the U.S.
"The DEA has made defeating those two cartels our top operational priority," she said.
But drug policy experts interviewed by NPR say these ideas — pressuring Mexico, further securing the border and defeating the cartels — are unlikely to succeed.
Experts say fentanyl smuggling increased sharply in recent years. In 2022 alone, the DEA seized more than 50 million fake prescription pills laced with fentanyl along with more than 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder.
That's a doubling of fentanyl seizures from just a year before. It's widely believed far more fentanyl is reaching American streets.
The cartels just keep getting stronger, fueled by fentanyl profits
One flaw in the U.S. strategy, experts say, is that the Mexican government is simply too weak to take on the cartels no matter how much diplomatic pressure Washington applies.
Sarukhan, Mexico's former ambassador to the U.S., said only a handful of law enforcement agencies in his country are willing or able to engage with the powerful drug gangs.
"There's no doubt that endemic corruption, impunity, a weak rule of law are Mexico's achilles heels," Sarukhan said. "That means fentanyl and methamphetamine labs operate in Mexico with almost no pressure."
The first time the U.S. can do anything about these drugs is when they cross the border, almost always passing through official checkpoints hidden in cars or commercial trucks driven by American citizens.
President Biden and others have argued for improving technology designed to detect fentanyl at those crossings, but the drug is uniquely difficult to detect and stop.
Fentanyl is so powerful, it can be smuggled in tiny quantities. If a single backpack full of the synthetic opioid reaches the U.S., it can feed the street demand in an entire region of the country.
Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on the Mexican cartels at The Brookings Institution, says while Washington talks tough, the cartels have grown stronger.
"They govern territories, people, economies and in fact they also govern institutions," she said.
Felbab-Brown points to "dramatic levels of corruption and dramatic levels of infiltration of the cartels into judicial and law enforcement institutions in Mexico" that make it nearly impossible for the Mexican government to help the U.S. in the drug war.
In recent years, U.S. officials have identified cartel-related corruption at the highest levels of the Mexican government. The former head of Mexico's equivalent of the FBI, Genaro Garcia Luna, is currently on trial in New York City, after being arrested in Dallas, Texas, in 2019.
Diplomatic breakdowns make the fentanyl fight even harder
During the Trump administration, Mexico backed away from almost all drug interdiction partnerships with the U.S., and things haven't improved much since.
At last week's Senate hearing, the DEA's Milgram said there's so little cooperation that her agents can't take down known fentanyl labs or even get good intel from Mexican cops. "We are not getting information on fentanyl seizures; we are not getting information on seizures of precursor chemicals," she acknowledged.
Mexico is not the only problem for U.S. officials focused on the fentanyl problem.
The chemicals used to make the synthetic opioid come from China. But as disputes over Taiwan and other issues have escalated, the Chinese government has suspended most drug-fighting collaborations with Washington.
"Rather than demonstrate global leadership by engaging in efforts to rein in illicit precursor production and trafficking ... [Beijing] is instead choosing to not engage," Dr. Rahul Gupta, who heads the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, testified during last week's Senate hearing.
Could this drug war become an actual war?
Some Republican governors, lawmakers and state attorneys general have called for the U.S. government to designate the Jalisco and Sinaloa cartels as terrorist organizations comparable to al-Qaida or ISIS.
In September, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a symbolic executive order in his state classifying drug smugglers as terrorists. "Fentanyl is a clandestine killer, and Texans are falling victim to the Mexican cartels that are producing it," he said. "Cartels are terrorists, and it's time we treated them that way.
Former President Donald Trump considered a terrorist classification for the cartels and reportedly entertained the idea of missile strikes against drug labs inside Mexico.
The Biden administration has resisted that kind of escalation, and Rep. Trone agrees that it would be a grave mistake. "We could do major raids in Mexico with our military [but] it's not our country," Trone said. "It's their country. They've chosen not to go after the drug traffickers."
He believes that were the U.S. to fight an actual war against the cartels inside Mexico, it would destabilize that country in much the way wars in Afghanistan and Iraq destabilized those nations.
If fentanyl is here to stay, what do we do?
Even if China and Mexico were willing or able to help fight the cartels, stopping fentanyl smugglers would still be incredibly difficult.
The U.S. is actually seizing record amounts of fentanyl in drug busts, but the drug is so cheap to manufacture, the cartels just make more.
That doesn't mean the fentanyl crisis is hopeless. According to Trone, a more promising strategy is to focus on reducing American hunger for drugs.
"That's the only chance we've got," he said. "Without the Mexican government's help, without the Chinese government's help, we can't win [against the smugglers]. So we have to go on the demand side, work on all the things with education, work on treatment, work on prevention."
Most drug policy experts agree the public health model is a more promising way to save lives. They also say public fears about fentanyl will likely raise political pressure in Washington for a tough response on the border, whether it's effective or not.
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Deforestation near Humaita, in Amazonas state, Brazil. (photo: Bruno Kelly/Reuters)
Invisible Destruction: 38% of Remaining Amazon Forest Already Degraded
Suzana Camargo, Mongabay
Camargo writes: "When we speak about destruction of the Amazon, deforestation data are often the reference. Over the last few decades, it is the rates of clear cutting that are best documented, making headlines and guiding environmental protection strategies."
When we speak about destruction of the Amazon, deforestation data are often the reference. Over the last few decades, it is the rates of clear cutting that are best documented, making headlines and guiding environmental protection strategies.
“Historically, deforestation was the main driver of land use change in the Amazon. Between 1975 and 1985, almost 115,000 square miles were deforested in the Brazilian Amazon, especially by removing forests and replacing them with pastures and livestock,” says climatologist Carlos Nobre, chair of the Brazilian Panel on Climate Change and senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Federal University of São Paulo.
However, over time, there has been an increase in the areas that were not completely deforested but suffered various stages of degradation.
“Deforestation is really important – but yes, if we only look at that, we ignore changes in the remaining forests that can emit as much CO2 as deforestation,” warns professor Jos Barlow from the UK’s Lancaster University, co-founder of the Sustainable Amazon Network and one of the co-authors of an article recently published in the journal Science titled “The drivers and impacts of Amazon forest degradation.”
A group of 35 scientists from various international institutions, including several Brazilian researchers, conducted a new study that not only measures the exact extent of degradation in all Amazonian countries but also assesses the intensity of that disturbance, locates the areas most affected, reveals key drivers and presents their impacts at local, regional and global levels.
To begin with, the researchers emphasize the distinction between deforestation and degradation.
“Deforestation is the removal of trees and the conversion to another land use, which is normally agriculture. Degradation occurs in the forest that is left. Severe disturbances could lead to the loss of most trees, but if the land use does not change, it is degradation and not deforestation,” Barlow explains.
According to the analysis, based on previous studies conducted between 2001 and 2018, 38% of what remains of the Amazon Forest — that is, what has not been deforested yet — suffers from some type of degradation caused by human action.
“We are talking about 1 million square miles; that’s more than 10 times the size of the UK,” Professor Barlow points out.
The authors point out that degradation is being driven by four main disturbances: forest fires, timber extraction, extreme droughts — intensified by human-induced climate change — and edge effects (impact of open areas on adjacent forests).
“It’s surprising that 38% of the forest is already undergoing this process, unfortunately,” says Patricia Pinho, deputy science director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute and one of the co-authors of the study. “When you look at the magnitude of this, not counting the areas that have already been deforested, it really sounds like a warning sign for our forest.”
Loss of biodiversity and increase in CO2
The researchers also demonstrated an association between the vectors for degradation and the drivers of deforestation, which often “co-occur and interact,” as the article points out.
Timber extraction, for example, is driven by market demand but facilitated by corruption and weak governance (85% of logging in the Amazon is illegal). Forest fires are usually caused by agricultural practices and are often exacerbated by extreme droughts. They also become more intense in areas where there is already an edge effect.
And both deforestation and what are called “forest disturbances” mean the Amazon ceases to play its extremely important environmental role in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — and, in a perverse change of function, becomes a source of CO2 emissions.
“We compared estimates from a range of studies, and show that deforestation and degradation emission are actually very similar. Although deforestation is obviously more severe, degradation affects a much larger area,” says Barlow.
While degraded areas emit enormous amounts of greenhouse gases, they are not included in national emissions inventories. “These are not official numbers, but there are many emissions in these areas,” Nobre points out.
In addition to contributing to increased global temperature, a forest degraded by serious disturbances such as fires has a very different structure, and this impacts the species that live in it, whether they are animals or plants. As a domino effect, after its biodiversity is affected, the communities that live around it will also begin to suffer from these ills.
“This is a very important point made by the study. We expose those who benefit from these forest degradation disturbances and those who bear the brunt of the losses,” Pinho says.
In the case of timber extraction, for example, it is the regional and global actors, including companies and industries, that pocket the highest profits, leaving local workers to deal with any conflicts and violence arising from the activity or at least with the impact of the scarcity of vegetation on the supply of water resources.
Extreme droughts have become more frequent
One of today’s main experts in mapping land cover and land use — forestry engineer Tasso Azevedo, who is the co-founder and head of the MapBiomas initiative – recognizes that clear-cutting is always easier to identify, while forest degradation is much more difficult to pinpoint.
“For example, signs of regeneration can be confused with degradation, and that makes us pay less attention,” he says. “But it also affects the forest’s functionalities. Deforested, it loses its function completely and degrades part of those functions.”
For Azevedo, among the vectors presented by the new study, climate change is certainly the most important cause for concern since it does not depend on a specific and local action; rather, it demands global reduction of greenhouse gases.
“However, this degradation caused by climate change is intensified and amplified by what is done directly in the forest. So, if there is no deforestation, the effect of climate change on it will be smaller,” he says.
One of the points raised by the researchers in the article is precisely the higher frequency of extreme droughts in the Amazon, mainly in its southern and central regions. During almost two decades covered by the study, four of these events of greater magnitude were recorded.
Increasingly frequent, long and intense, these “megadroughts” induce the expansion of fire, which spreads rapidly across the forest floor and causes the death of thousands of trees.
In order to halt this scenario of devastation, the authors of the article recommend relentless fights against deforestation and measures to contain degradation activities in the Amazon.
“Despite the results of the study, there is room for hope,” says Barlow. Curtailing further deforestation will help, as it will avoid new edge effects and reduce the expansion of ignition sources that start forest fires. But we need measures that also address the drivers of disturbances too – cracking down on illegal logging, finding ways to manage fire with fewer risks. Globally, we need action to limit climate change too, as this may be linked to extreme droughts. There are many challenges – but given the importance of the region for people and nature, failure is not an option”.
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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