What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?

Posted on August 5, 2023 by Arlen Grossman

By David Brooks/ NewYork Times/ August 2, 2023

Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis. Yet he is utterly dominating his Republican rivals in the polls, and he is tiedwith Joe Biden in the general election surveys. Trump’s poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.

What’s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after all he’s done?

We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that. It was encapsulated in a quote the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington gave to my colleague Thomas B. Edsall recently: “Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.”

In this story, we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians. Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day, he’s still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentments and that’s what matters to them most.

I partly agree with this story, but it’s also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.

So let me try another story on you. I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.

This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.

The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.

Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”

The meritocracy isn’t only a system of exclusion; it’s an ethos. During his presidency, Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn’t go to Harvard Law) must be stupid.

Over the last decades, we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession; we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of college students graduate from the super-elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.

Writing in Compact magazine, Michael Lind observes that the upper-middle-class job market looks like a candelabrum: “Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”

Or, as Markovits puts it, “elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse.”

Members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin and so on. In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29 percent. Once we find our cliques, we don’t get out much. In the book “Social Class in the 21st Century,” the sociologist Mike Savage and his co-researchers found that the members of the highly educated class tend to be the most insular, measured by how often we have contact with those who have jobs unlike our own.

A crowd at a Donald Trump rally in 2023.
Credit…Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times

Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.

Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like “problematic,” “cisgender,” “Latinx” and “intersectional” is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.

We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.

After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, “The Aristocracy of Talent,” “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.” That matters, he continues, because “the rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”

Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and evil? No. Most of us are earnest, kind and public-spirited. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.

It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. He understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.

If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem like just another skirmish in the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them. Of course, the indictments don’t cause Trump supporters to abandon him. They cause them to become more fiercely loyal. That’s the polling story of the last six months.

Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.

But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists until the cows come home, but the real question is: When will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?

Posted in America, democracy, Donald Trump, Economics, government, inequality, politics, Republican Party | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Greatest Political Ad EVER!!!!!

Posted on August 4, 2023 by Arlen Grossman

Posted in Abortion, elections, government, media, politics, Republican Party | Leave a comment

How to Ignore 4.5 Million Deaths 

Posted on August 4, 2023 by Arlen Grossman

A review of Norman Solomon’s War Made Invisible

By Bryce Greene/ Fair.org/ August 1, 2023

Brown University’s Costs of War project released a study this year estimating that US-led wars since 9/11 have contributed directly and indirectly to 4.5 million deaths in the targeted countries. Those countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Syria—have also seen an estimated 40–60 million peopledisplaced from their homes. This refugee crisis is as destructive as any war, and marks the largest number of refugees since the end of World War II. By all accounts, the US-led Global War on Terror has been a disaster for tens of millions of people.

When the study was released in May, there was only one report (Washington Post, 5/15/23) in all of America’s top newspapersthat brought attention to the staggering figure. The Hill (5/16/23) and a few smaller outlets (NY1, 5/17/23; UPI, 5/16/23) published pieces on the topic, but the bulk of corporate media did not deem it worthy of any coverage at all.

No solemn reflections about the war machine, no policy pieces about how we might avoid such devastation in the future, and certainly no op-eds calling for the wars’ architects to stand trial for their crimes.

How does our media environment so easily dismiss carnage of this scale? Norman Solomon’s new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its War Machine (New Press), offers a deep look at the media system that enables a monstrous war machine to extract such a heavy toll on the world with impunity.

Solomon’s book attempts to show how our institutions came to be so casual about burying the costs of US wars. He challenges the traditional myth of the American “free press” as a check on power, and instead shows how the media act as “a fourth branch of government.” This book serves as a survey of media malfeasance in recent history, but also as a meditation on the role of our media system in manufacturing consent for a brutal foreign policy for the entire world.

Useful victims

Solomon takes aim at the common, unchallenged assumptions that often shape how media portray conflicts. Persistent tropes, like the constant appeal for America to “lead the world,” and dangerously common euphemisms like “defense spending” contribute to a culture that worships a mythical version of America, while the empire’s true nature remains hidden.

FAIR: How Much Less Newsworthy Are Civilians in Other Conflicts?

FAIR.org (3/18/22): In the Ukraine War, US corporate media discovered a “newfound ability to cover the impact on civilians—when those civilians are white and under attack by an official US enemy, rather than by the US itself.”

One key aspect of that myth-building is the selective way US media cover civilian victims. Some are covered extensively, eliciting calls for revenge, while others are ignored entirely—depending on who the aggressor is. Solomon recalls a critical moment just a few weeks into the US invasion of Afghanistan—at a time when, as the Washington Post (10/31/01) reported, “more errant US bombs have landed in residential areas, causing damage to such places as a Red Cross warehouse and senior citizens’ center.” Images of these atrocities had sparked “criticism of the American war effort.”

At CNN, chair Walter Isaacson declared in a memo to staff that it “seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” When the network did cover the toll on civilians, Isaacson told the Washington Post (10/31/01), “You want to make sure people understand…it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” John Moody, the vice president of Fox News at the time, called the directive “not at all a bad thing,” because “Americans need to remember what started this.” The coverage was designed to reinforce the US government line of a noble cause, to shield viewers from the toll on civilians, and justify them if they were shown.

The media’s expedient treatment of civilian suffering has continued to this day. In the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where civilian casualties supported rather than hindered the message the media wanted to send, the coverage was reversed (FAIR.org, 3/18/22). “By any consistent standard,” Solomon writes, “the horrors that the US military had brought to so many civilians since the autumn of 2001 were no less terrible for the victims than what Russia was doing in Ukraine.” Despite that, the media coverage of Ukraine was “vastly more immediate, graphic, extensive and outraged about Russia’s slaughter than America’s slaughter.”

During April 2022, the New York Times published 14 front-page stories on civilian casualties from Russia’s military offensive. During a comparable period after the US invasion of Iraq, there was only one front-page story about civilian victims of the US attack (FAIR.org, 6/9/22).

Media boundaries

Looming over any current discussion of news media is their abysmal reporting of the Global War on Terror. Solomon uses the case of Iraq to demonstrate the boundaries of our media system, both top-down and self-imposed.

Through social filtering, the journalists who end up covering wars for elite institutions often have internalized the assumptions that justify the empire. Journalist Reese Erlich (Target Iraq, Solomon and Erlich) recounted that he “didn’t meet a single foreign reporter in Iraq who disagreed with the notion that the US and Britain have the right to overthrow the Iraqi government by force.” This selection bias was clearly reflected in the West’s acquiescent coverage of the war.

Ashleigh Banfield speech at Kansas State

Ashleigh Banfield (4/24/03): “There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you’re getting the story.”

Other times, boundaries can be rigidly and publicly reinforced, as in the case of the young journalist Ashleigh Banfield. Banfield was a journalist who ascended the heights of cable news. A rising star, Banfield’s career at NBC hit a wall after she made a speech in April 2003 deeply critical of how the media obscured the harsh realities of the Iraq War. She told an audience at Kansas State University:

What didn’t you see? You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed… There are horrors that were completely left out of this war.

Television coverage of the war, Banfield said, was “a glorious wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited.”

NBC announced that it was “deeply disappointed and troubled by her remarks.” Her punishment was swift and harsh:

I was officeless for ten months. No phone, no computer…. Eventually after ten months of this, I was given an office that was a tape closet…. The message was crystal clear.

The message wasn’t just for Banfield. Journalists could not help but pay close attention to this destruction of one of their own.  If they stray outside the unspoken bounds set by corporate media’s owners, they could share Banfield’s fate or worse.

Accepting forever wars

NYT: America Is Giving the World a Disturbing New Kind of War

Even war critics give the US military credit for being “more humane” (New York Times, 9/3/21).

As of 2021, the last soldiers exited Afghanistan, solidifying a new era of US warfare dubbed “over the horizon.” This is a reference to the constant high-tech, “lower intensity” slaughter emanating from the hundreds of military bases the US still has across the world.

US drone warfare has been a persistent source of horror for millions. But, as Solomon notes, “the systems of remote killing get major help from reporters, producers and editors who detour around the carnage at the other end of US weaponry.” One clear way they help is by endorsing and repeating the idea that America’s campaign of air assassinations is a new form of “humane war.”

Even some of the more thoughtful critics of this kind of war fall into linguistic traps that minimize its true toll. In a New York Timesop-ed (9/3/21) that described the trend as “disturbing,” Yale historian Samuel Moyn wrote that “America’s bequest to the world…over the last 20 years” was an “endless and humane” form of “counterterrorist belligerency,” one in which “Human Rights Watch examined for violations of the law of war and…military lawyers helped pick targets.” Moyn is concerned that “more humane war became a companion to an increasingly interventionist foreign policy”—but seems to miss the irony of calling a strategy  “humane” that kills innocents by the millions.

Moyn seems partially aware that the “humane” war is more rebranding than restraint, but insists that the “improved humanity of our wars” is both “ostensible and real.” References to “humane” war should ring just as hollow as Lyndon Johnson’s proclamation in 1966 about soldiers on the way to Vietnam: “No American army in all of our long history has been so compassionate.”

The risk of truth-telling

Jacobin: Daniel Hale Went to Prison for Telling the Truth About US Drone Warfare

Jacobin (8/21) notes that “the Espionage Act makes no distinction between spies who steal information for hostile foreign governments and government employees who share information of public interest with the press, journalists, or even members of the public.”

As a sharp contrast to the media who shield the empire from any reckoning, Solomon highlights the people who take a risk to bring the world the truth about this detached, mechanized warfare. He talks to Cian Westmoreland, who “spoke sadly of the commendations he received for helping to kill more than 200 people with drone strikes.” Brandon Bryant lamented that the entire system was designed “so that no one has taken responsibility for what happens.” There was Heather Linebaugh, who recounted how she and her colleagues “always wonder if we killed the right people.”

One of these heroes was Daniel Hale, who remains in prison today for leaking information that showed that over a five-month period in 2012,  90% of the people killed in Afghanistan drone strikes were not the intended target. Solomon quotes Hale’s touching letter explaining that he leaked the information so that “I might someday humbly ask forgiveness.”

Other whistleblowers have suffered immensely for their acts of bravery.  In 2010, army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning leaked the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, showing US forces using an Apache helicopter to gun down a dozen civilians in Iraq. The dead included two Reuters employees. For leaking the video and other documents, Manning spent seven years in prison, much of that in solitary confinement. In 2019, Manning spent another year in prison for refusing to testify against the publisher of her documents, Julian Assange—who is himself incarcerated in Britain, facing extradition to the United States to face charges related to exposing US war crimes.

These whistleblowers and truth-tellers only exist on the margins in public discourse. When the 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan was bookended by yet another “unintentional” drone strike on ten civilians, the words of these whistleblowers had long left the public mind. Media shrugged when the Pentagon cleared itself of any wrongdoing, as they have done countless times before. In this so-called free press, Solomon writes, “outliers can’t compete with drumbeats.”

It really is no surprise that US media had so little to say when Brown University’s Cost of War Project released its estimates for the death toll of the US’s post-9/11 wars. They ensured America’s 4.5 million victims barely registered in the public consciousness, as they diverted audiences’ attention to another noble US cause in Ukraine. War Made Invisible lays bare the very heart of the system that allows the US war machine to grind onward, with minimal resistance from a confused and misled public.

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The Biggest Issue for 2024: Can Humanity Survive Trump & the GOP?

Posted on August 2, 2023 by Arlen Grossman

By Thom Hartmann/ ThomHartmann.com/ August 2, 2023

So, yeah, let’s take seriously the existential threat a GOP president represents to our nation, the nations of the world, and all life on Earth. The stakes have literally never been higher…

Every day that goes by, even with yesterday’s newest indictment, looks more and more like Donald Trump will be the GOP’s standard bearer in 2024. After all, his popularity stood at 44 percent when NY DA Alvin Bragg indicted him; it then rose to 49 percent when he was indicted in the documents crime; following his conviction for raping E. Jean Caroll it rose to 54 percent among Republicans. 

But even if he’s not the candidate, Republican primary voters will demand a candidate with the same affection for Putin and other dictators; the same disdain for racial, religious, and gender minorities; the same abusive attitude toward women and girls; the same faux embrace of Confederate and hillbilly values and hatred of city-dwellers and college graduates; the same cavalier attitude toward guns and fossil fuels.

There’s also the growing possibility that Trump or another MAGA Republican could win the White House. Yesterday, both the New York Times and CNN reported on polls showing that Trump and Biden are right now at a dead heat.

And even if Trump collapses in the polls as the result of the indictments, which is unlikely (Netanyahu is under indictment for bribery and some pretty terrible stuff and he just got re-elected), there are numerous other Republicans who would love to take his place. 

And no matter who it is, if they are MAGA inclined, Trump has shown them where there are levers of power and corruption that are consequential in ways that they never dreamed of before him.

Joe Biden, at 81, faces multiple possible personal scenarios that could pull him out of the race. No Labels and the Green Party’s candidates (presumably Joe Manchin and Cornell West) could pull enough votes from Biden to hand the election to Trump as Jill Stein did in three swing states in 2016 (she pulled more votes in each of those states than Trump’s margin of victory).

The prosecution of Trump (which almost certainly won’t be resolved before the election — and it’s not even remotely possible that appeals would be resolved by then — because of Garland’s dithering for two years) could backfire politically and make him into a popular martyr even with Republicans who disliked him before.

And don’t discount the impact Putin throwing millions of rubles into social media can have: his previous fleet of trolls overwhelming social media helped get Trump elected in 2016 and drove Brits to make the crazy decision to separate from the European Union.

So, it’s important to examine what a second Trump or 2025 MAGA presidency would look like, what effect it would have on America and the world, and how it will impact average Americans. 

Forewarned, after all, is forearmed, and all these predictions are based on past behavior and public statements:

Women make up 51 percent of the American populace but they won’t be spared by a MAGA presidency.

MAGA voters celebrate Trump’s “proof of manhood” through his multiple sexual assaults, from his alleged rape of 13-year-old Katie Johnson (with Jeffrey Epstein) to the adult E. Jean Carroll and more than 20 others. He publicly bragged that he just “grabs them by the…” whenever he wants, and Republicans — including more than halfof all white women voters — ran to the polls to mark his name on their ballots.

The MAGA base supports bans on abortion: the white nationalist part of that base is fervent about having more white babies (and middle class white women are the most likely to get abortions when they’re legal, according to these people).

Catholics and evangelicals even support bans on birth control, an issue that’s already been floated by Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and in several state legislatures. Fully 195 Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against protecting birth control from state bans. And all of the Republicans on the Court are conservative Catholics (Gorsuch attends his wife’s church, but was raised Catholic).

Additionally, MAGA Republicans support ending no-fault divorce and limiting alimony, putting women back under husband’s thumbs; lowering the marriage age for girls to as low as 12, as Republicans have already attempted in Idaho, Wyoming, Tennessee, Missouri, and Louisiana; and seizing and monitoring the health and doctor’s records of all childbearing-age women to catch early pregnancies so those women can be detained or surveilled “for their own good” (yes, it’s already happened).

The LGBTQ+ community will come under assault in ways not seen for decades.

Like in Germany in 1933, the trans community will be the first to come under assault, a process that’s already begun as Red state after Red state enacts laws banning gender-affirming healthcare. Drag queens are already criminalized in multiple states.

Gays and lesbians won’t be far behind; Republicans are already trying to outlaw gay marriage and adoption. Three-quarters of all House Republicans voted against a Democratic bill protecting gay marriage; all but one Republican on the House Appropriations Committee voted for a Republican bill that would allow states to ban gay and lesbian parents from adopting.

Stochastic terrorism against the LGBTQ+ community will explode, and, in a throwback to the 1980s (when Reagan refused to say the word “AIDS” for 8 long years as tens of thousands, including close friends of mine, died) and before, rural law enforcement will often yawn when queer people are assaulted or even murdered.

Terror against racial and religious minorities will become routine.

The last time Trump was president and sanctioned a “very fine people on both sides” climate of hate and bigotry, incidents of lone-wolf terrorism exploded. Jews executedat Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue; Blacks gunned down in a supermarket in Buffalo and executed at Mother Emmanuel church in Charleston; Hispanics slaughtered in El Paso. All of the killers cited or wrote what were essentially MAGA or MAGA-aligned propaganda instruments as part of their motivation.

When minority communities rise up in indignation and step out into the streets to demand protection from roving bands of street Nazis, armed vigilantes will threaten and even kill them with impunity. As I noted yesterday, Kyle Rittenhouse is now lionized by Republicans and three states have passed into law provisions that hold people who kill protestors with their cars free from prosecution.

American support for democracy around the world will end and Putin will destroy Ukraine.

During his first four years, Trump did everything he could to ridicule and minimize our democratic allies and suck up to strongman dictators around the world.

He tried to blackmail Ukraine’s president and then withheld defensive weapons from that country when Zelenskyy refused to go along.

He told the world that he trusts Putin more than America’s intelligence services. After meeting privately with Putin, he demanded a list of all of America’s spies and their stations around the world; within months, the CIA reported that their assets were being murdered with an unprecedented speed and efficiency.

He or his son-in-law conveyed top-secret documents to the brutal murderer MBS in Saudi Arabia that enabled him to stage a coup and seize control of that nation, a gift for which the Trump family has already received at least $2.5 billion with more coming every day.

Trump has now said that he will end the Ukraine war “in 24 hours.” His strategy? As Mike Pence (who would know) said, “The only way you’d solve this war in a day is if you gave Vladimir Putin what he wanted.”

Putin’s allies, in fact, have told the press that his main strategy for seizing all of Ukraine is to wait for Trump to re-take the White House (and, of course, he’ll do everything he can to make that happen). And just last week, in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump came right out and said that he’d end all arms support to Ukraine on day one.

Seeing that America will no longer defend democracies, China will take Taiwan and North Korea may well attack South Korea. It could trigger a nuclear World War III, although instead of America being the “bulwark of freedom” as we were in the 1940s, that burden will fall to Europe, Japan, and Australia. 

Reagan’s Republican War on Workers will resume and even pick up steam.

The Heritage Foundation already has a 900+ page plan to change the American government, stripping the DOJ, FBI, FCC and the Fed of their independence while ending most union rights and effectively outlawing strikes.

Billionaires will receive more tax cuts, Social Security and Medicare will be fully privatized, and public schools will be replaced with vouchers for private, segregated, religious academies as has already happened under Republican administrations in Arizona and Florida.

The EPA and other regulatory agencies that protect workers, consumers, and the environment will be gutted to the point of impotence in the face of corporate and billionaire assaults.

Efforts to mitigate the climate emergency will be rolled back and fossil fuel extraction and use will explode.

The world just lived through the hottest month in human history; ocean waters off Florida are at the temperature Jacuzzi recommends for their hot tubs; the world’s oceans are dying and winter sea ice isn’t forming in Antarctica.

Right now we humans are adding heat to the atmosphere (because of higher levels of greenhouse gasses) at a rate identical to 345,600 Hiroshima bombs going off in our atmosphere every day: four nuclear bombs per second, every second, minute, and hour of every day.

In response, our planet is screaming at us.

Fossil fuel billionaires and their shills, however, are unconcerned as they continue to fund climate denial nonprofits and Republican politicians who claim it’s all a hoax. They apparently believe their vast wealth will insulate them from the most dire effects.

And they’re probably right: a third of poverty-stricken Bangladesh was underwater this year, as drought, floods, wildfires, heat domes, bomb cyclones, tornadoes, derechos, and typhoons ravaged America with unprecedented ferocity. Increasingly, those without the financial means to withstand weather disasters are killed or wiped out, losing their family homes and often their livelihoods.

Scientists tell us we may have as few as five years, and certainly not more than 20, to end our use of fossil fuels and fully transition to clean renewables. Even within the five-year window it’s technically feasible, but if Trump or another MAGA Republican is elected, civilization-ending weather and the death of much of humanity is virtually assured.

We must wake up America.

So, yeah, let’s take seriously the existential threat a MAGA president represents to our nation, the nations of the world, and all life on Earth. The stakes have literally never been higher.

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A Plea Bargain Is Almost as Good As Seeing Orange Behind Bars

Posted on July 28, 2023 by Arlen Grossman

By Arlen Grossman

I expect there will be a plea deal soon. The only way Donald Trump can avoid prison is to promise not to run for office again. As much as I wish to see him behind bars, this is probably the next best alternative. Jack Smith will understand what could happen and probably offer the Orange Moron a plea deal. This country can’t take a chance Trump will somehow win office and pardon himself and all his friends. Oh, and while he’s at it, would repeal democracy in America. Even if Trump were not the nominee, another MAGA Republican could win and would likely use pardon powers to excuse Trump of his crimes and make his base happy.

It is almost inconceivable to me that Trump could win election as president, but our electoral system is so broken, bizarre, and outdated the possibility is there. Many nations around the world are turning to the right, and we can’t take a chance that America will be one of those. American fascism would be very ugly and hateful, and would destroy all future hope and progress in this nation. A dark cloud would descend on America and the world, and a better life would only be possible by billionaires and heads of large corporations. And those whose last name is Trump.

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Republican Overreach

Posted on July 25, 2023 by Arlen Grossman

Letter to the Editor/ Monterey Herald/ July 25, 2023

In case you were wondering what our government would be like under Republican control, consider this: last month 19 GOP state attorneys general signed on to a joint letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, seeking the power to access private medical records of its citizens who seek reproductive procedures (translation: they might choose to get an abortion in a state that allows it). Yes, these attorney generals want the power to take the medical records of their state’s citizens, for possible investigations of crimes, even from a different state! Does anybody remember when Republicans called themselves the party of small government?

— Arlen Grossman

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Marjorie Taylor Greene Endorses Biden!

Posted on July 21, 2023 by Arlen Grossman

She just doesn’t realize it!

Oh yeah, by the way, she also displayed dickpics of Hunter Biden while testifying in Congress. Thanks Marjorie, we all needed that…..or maybe not.

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Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025

Posted on July 18, 2023 by Arlen Grossman

The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies.

By Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman/ New York Times/ July 17, 2023

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”

Mr. Trump standing on a balcony at the White House, with two American flags on either side of him.
Mr. Trump and his advisers are openly discussing their plans to reshape the federal government if he wins the election in 2024.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.

“Our current executive branch,” Mr. McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”

Mr. Trump and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.

The strategy in talking openly about such “paradigm-shifting ideas” before the election, Mr. Vought said, is to “plant a flag” — both to shift the debate and to later be able to claim a mandate. He said he was delighted to see few of Mr. Trump’s Republican primary rivals defend the norm of Justice Department independence after the former president openly attacked it.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said in a statement that the former president has “laid out a bold and transparent agenda for his second term, something no other candidate has done.” He added, “Voters will know exactly how President Trump will supercharge the economy, bring down inflation, secure the border, protect communities and eradicate the deep state that works against Americans once and for all.”

Mr. Trump sitting inside his plane at a table strewn with papers, speaking and gesturing to someone out of frame.
The agenda being pursued by Mr. Trump and his associates has deep roots in a longstanding effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut the so-called administrative state.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

The two driving forces of this effort to reshape the executive branch are Mr. Trump’s own campaign policy shop and a well-funded network of conservative groups, many of which are populated by former senior Trump administration officials who would most likely play key roles in any second term.

Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.

That work at Heritage dovetails with plans on the Trump campaign website to expand presidential power that were drafted primarily by two of Mr. Trump’s advisers, Vincent Haley and Ross Worthington, with input from other advisers, including Stephen Miller, the architect of the former president’s hard-line immigration agenda.

Some elements of the plans had been floated when Mr. Trump was in office but were impeded by internal concerns that they would be unworkable and could lead to setbacks. And for some veterans of Mr. Trump’s turbulent White House who came to question his fitness for leadership, the prospect of removing guardrails and centralizing even greater power over government directly in his hands sounded like a recipe for mayhem.

“It would be chaotic,” said John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s second White House chief of staff. “It just simply would be chaotic, because he’d continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a nonstop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”

The agenda being pursued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state — agencies that enact regulations aimed at keeping the air and water clean and food, drugs and consumer products safe, but that cut into business profits.

Its legal underpinning is a maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory.

The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them. Reagan administration lawyers developed the theory as they sought to advance a deregulatory agenda.

Mr. Trump walks between rows of American flags on a red-carpet-style walkway leading from his plane.
Mr. Trump and his allies have been laying out an expansive vision of power for a potential second term.Credit…Christopher Lee for The New York Times

“The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don’t answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, adding that the contributors to Project 2025 are committed to “dismantling this rogue administrative state.”

Personal power has always been a driving force for Mr. Trump. He often gestures toward it in a more simplistic manner, such as in 2019, when he declared to a cheering crowd, “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Mr. Trump made the remark in reference to his claimed ability to directly fire Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia inquiry, which primed his hostility toward law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He also tried to get a subordinate to have Mr. Mueller ousted, but was defied.

Early in Mr. Trump’s presidency, his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, promised a “deconstruction of the administrative state.” But Mr. Trump installed people in other key roles who ended up telling him that more radical ideas were unworkable or illegal. In the final year of his presidency, he told aides he was fed up with being constrained by subordinates.

Now, Mr. Trump is laying out a far more expansive vision of power in any second term. And, in contrast with his disorganized transition after his surprise 2016 victory, he now benefits from a well-funded policymaking infrastructure, led by former officials who did not break with him after his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

One idea the people around Mr. Trump have developed centers on bringing independent agencies under his thumb.

Congress created these specialized technocratic agencies inside the executive branch and delegated to them some of its power to make rules for society. But it did so on the condition that it was not simply handing off that power to presidents to wield like kings — putting commissioners atop them whom presidents appoint but generally cannot fire before their terms end, while using its control of their budgets to keep them partly accountable to lawmakers as well. (Agency actions are also subject to court review.)

Presidents of both parties have chafed at the agencies’ independence. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal created many of them, endorsed a proposal in 1937 to fold them all into cabinet departments under his control, but Congress did not enact it.

Later presidents sought to impose greater control over nonindependent agencies Congress created, like the Environmental Protection Agency, which is run by an administrator whom a president can remove at will. For example, President Ronald Reagan issued executive orders requiring nonindependent agencies to submit proposed regulations to the White House for review. But overall, presidents have largely left the independent agencies alone.

Mr. Trump’s allies are preparing to change that, drafting an executive order requiring independent agencies to submit actions to the White House for review. Mr. Trump endorsed the idea on his campaign website, vowing to bring them “under presidential authority.”

Such an order was drafted in Mr. Trump’s first term — and blessed by the Justice Department — but never issued amid internal concerns. Some of the concerns were over how to carry out reviews for agencies that are headed by multiple commissioners and subject to administrative procedures and open-meetings laws, as well as over how the market would react if the order chipped away at the Federal Reserve’s independence, people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Trump, largely in shadow, giving a thumbs-up.
The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn in the White House.Credit…John Tully for The New York Times

The Federal Reserve was ultimately exempted in the draft executive order, but Mr. Trump did not sign it before his presidency ended. If Mr. Trump and his allies get another shot at power, the independence of the Federal Reserve — an institution Mr. Trump publicly railed at as president — could be up for debate. Notably, the Trump campaign website’s discussion of bringing independent agencies under presidential control is silent on whether that includes the Fed.

Asked whether presidents should be able to order interest rates lowered before elections, even if experts think that would hurt the long-term health of the economy, Mr. Vought said that would have to be worked out with Congress. But “at the bare minimum,” he said, the Federal Reserve’s regulatory functions should be subject to White House review.

“It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution,” Mr. Vought said.

Other former Trump administration officials involved in the planning said there would also probably be a legal challenge to the limits on a president’s power to fire heads of independent agencies. Mr. Trump could remove an agency head, teeing up the question for the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court in 1935 and 1988 upheld the power of Congress to shield some executive branch officials from being fired without cause. But after justices appointed by Republicans since Reagan took control, it has started to erode those precedents.

Peter L. Strauss, professor emeritus of law at Columbia University and a critic of the strong version of the unitary executive theory, argued that it is constitutional and desirable for Congress, in creating and empowering an agency to perform some task, to also include some checks on the president’s control over officials “because we don’t want autocracy” and to prevent abuses.

“The regrettable fact is that the judiciary at the moment seems inclined to recognize that the president does have this kind of authority,” he said. “They are clawing away agency independence in ways that I find quite unfortunate and disrespectful of congressional choice.”

Mr. Trump has also vowed to impound funds, or refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. After Nixon used the practice to aggressively block agency spending he was opposed to, on water pollution control, housing construction and other issues, Congress banned the tactic.

On his campaign website, Mr. Trump declared that presidents have a constitutional right to impound funds and said he would restore the practice — though he acknowledged it could result in a legal battle.

Mr. Trump and his allies also want to transform the civil service — government employees who are supposed to be nonpartisan professionals and experts with protections against being fired for political reasons.

The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn, including by raising legal or pragmatic objections to his immigration policies, among many other examples. Toward the end of his term, his aides drafted an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” that removed employment protections from career officials whose jobs were deemed linked to policymaking.

Mr. Trump signed the order, which became known as Schedule F, near the end of his presidency, but President Biden rescinded it. Mr. Trump has vowed to immediately reinstitute it in a second term.

Critics say he could use it for a partisan purge. But James Sherk, a former Trump administration official who came up with the idea and now works at the America First Policy Institute — a think tank stocked heavily with former Trump officials — argued it would only be used against poor performers and people who actively impeded the elected president’s agenda.

“Schedule F expressly forbids hiring or firing based on political loyalty,” Mr. Sherk said. “Schedule F employees would keep their jobs if they served effectively and impartially.”

Mr. Trump himself has characterized his intentions rather differently — promising on his campaign website to “find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education” and listing a litany of targets at a rally last month.

“We will demolish the deep state,” Mr. Trump said at the rally in Michigan. “We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”

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The outrage economy: Why social media makes everything worse

Posted on July 16, 2023 by Arlen Grossman

By Mark Sumner/ Daily Kos/ July 15, 2023

Right now, with millions of people busily shifting their alliance from the online home of of one egotistical, unchecked billionaire to that of the otheregotistical, unchecked billionaire, there seems to be hope that the shift will, at least for awhile, throw off the accumulated cruft of trolls and Nazis, allowing some sign of a vaguely remembered golden age to be restored. Good luck with that.

We live in a capitalist society that has spent centuries inventing tools to aid in the concentration of wealth. The end result of that evolution is corporations: money-moving engines which remain, to date, the most efficient form of turning the work of thousands—and the needs of millions—into a fat stack of cash for a very, very few.

Social media plays the same role with attention that a corporation does with money. Since the long-departed site Six Degrees first appeared in 1997, social media has been iterated with the speed that only online activity has made possible. Each one of those generations has resulted in a better machine for taking the interest generated by millions of users and turning it into fame for a handful of “thought leaders” or “influencers” or other labels which have passed as quickly as the sites that spawned them.

And the result is the outrage economy.

Just as late-stage capitalism is engrossed in wiping away every benefit workers gained over centuries of negotiating the relationship between labor and reward, the outrage economy has risen up to guarantee that, no matter the intention, every venture into social media trends toward disaster.

Within the past few decades, big-box stores sucked up the profits that once went to small businesses, while returning lower pay and fewer jobs. Then online retail consumed many of the big-box stores, returning even fewer jobs and even worse pay. 

Social media has done the same with both “news,” in terms of news once shared over picket fences or among those waiting for a trim at the barbershop, and News in terms of what was once printed in things called “newspapers” or broadcast in a compact half-hour format at 6 and 10 PM.

Within that news there was always a strong pull toward what was once called “yellow journalism,” also known as juicy gossip, tabloid news, and more recently as clickbait. Reasonable news about reasonable people doing reasonable things has always generated boredom. A good WTF? reaction has always been valuable, whether that was in print, on the screen, or online.

As social media has evolved, it has trended toward a system that rewards those able to gain and hold public attention, with prizes that can range from a satisfying emotional pat on the back to a lucrative contract to continue spreading f-ckery in prime time on Fox News. 

And for those who thought that Threads, the newest social media network, was going to offer some kind of break from the awfulness, The Washington Post has news for you.

Meta is done moderating … As it builds out Threads, Meta will probably offer users control over what kind of content they see—including the diciest and most controversial posts—rather than the company making those decisions on its own, Meta Global Affairs President Nick Clegg told The Washington Post. That’s a strategy that Meta has already embraced on Facebook, where the company has increasingly given users more ways to shape what appears in their news feeds.

Meta isn’t going to slow the roll of the outrage economy: It’s going to accelerate it. Which means that things will absolutely become worse.

“A wretched hive of scum and villainy” might not seem like a guarantee in a system designed around the unmoderated hunt for eyeballs, but that’s what it is. It’s almost as certain and mathematically definable as the relationship between entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. 

In the outrage economy, there are several ways to win the hunt for more gigaseconds of attention. You can be outrageously funny. Outrageously sweet. Outrageously talented. Even outrageously brilliant. All those things will capture at least some of the internet’s limited attention for some brief period. But in an unregulated system, none of them can compete with outrageously vile (link intentionally omitted). 

The reason is simple enough: Anyone can do it. To detail some point of history or science takes knowledge. To produce a moment of humor requires both empathy and serendipity. To take some musical instrument and drive it into the human heart takes years of practice and unflagging dedication. But to insult people based on their race, their gender, their sexuality, their religion, their ability, or any of another score of deeply held attributes simply takes setting aside morality for the span of 280 characters.

Anyone can be a troll. It doesn’t take years of training or research: It just takes a willingness to take joy from causing pain. The more pain, the better.

Here’s how it works, in one simple lesson:

Say something nasty. Say something mean. Dip down into the monsters of the id and let them rage. If your rant happens to involve a few misspelled words, historical mistakes, or scientific principles turned on their heads, that only makes it better. Because even people who were willing to overlook racism, misogyny, and bigotry of all kinds will step in to correct your use of a preposition or the date of Bunker Hill. Anytime you get a response that starts with, “Well actually…”—give yourself bonus points.

Other forms of outrage may take work, but to be outrageously stupid or outrageously cruel—and those are often the same thing—can be as simple as taking a crap on the sidewalk.

Just look at the list of the first people who Twitter is paying under its new program to pay “creators.”

“Wow. Elon Musk wasn’t kidding. Content monetization is real,” tweeted an anonymous account called End Wokeness, with 1.4 million followers, accompanied by a screenshot showing earnings of over $10,400. …

“This is a nice turnaround from being banned by Twitter 1.0 for almost 2 years to now being paid to post Thank you @elonmusk,” tweeted far-right influencer Rogan O’Handley, known as DC Draino.

This is a system in which cruelty, intolerance, and a disdain for truth aren’t just tolerated; they’re profitable—both for Twitter and for the most vile of its users.

There are so many ways to work this scheme. Outrageously racist. Outrageously misogynistic. Outrageously bigoted. The outrage economy holds niches for every way in which people can be hurt, and offers up an incentive to find more.

Like a bloody traffic accident, outrage seldom fails to gather attention. In the outrage economy, that attention can be translated into a kind of fame, and even into wealth. And if an outrageous claim draws outraged replies, that only increases the payout.

That’s it. That’s why things get worse. Because outrageously hard takes work, while outrageously evil is simple. The ease with which the outrage economy rewards low-effort hate, vs. the bar it sets for reward for accomplishment, drags social media—and society—inexorably down.

The only thing that can arrest that slide is moderation.  That moderation must be done by people who understand the subtleties of meaning, rather than trying to match replies to a set of simplistic rules. But moderation costs money. Good moderation costs a lot of money.

And why should Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk want to moderate in the first place? This is the outrage economy. Bring on the outrage.

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How Climate Change Accelerates the Danger of Worldwide Fascism

Posted on July 10, 2023 by Arlen Grossman

by Thom Hartmann/ hartmannreport.com/ July 10, 2023

In addition to stepping up to mitigate climate change & green the world’s economy, the free nations must harden our democracies against reactive rightwing violence & hate-based political movements…

The government of the Netherlands fell last week. The issue that tipped it over the edge was immigration driven by climate change.

If Putin wanted to destroy democracy in Europe (and he does), back in 2015 he couldn’t have picked a better strategy. Odds are, though, he was just trying to protect his deepwater ports; it wasn’t until the crisis developed that he realized how he could exploit it to overthrow liberal democracies in the EU. 

The way it’s played out gives us a glimpse into our future — and the future of democratic republics all across the world — as the global climate emergency and the refugee crisis associated with it grows more severe over the next few years.

The current rise-of-rightwing-fascism crisis building in Europe began in 2010 and started with global climate change. 

The fall of that year saw unusually severe rainfall across the wheat-growing parts of Canada, cutting that nation’s wheat harvest, along with drought across Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and China. A La Nina caused crop failures in Argentina and Peru. Worldwide prices of staple foods, particularly wheat, exploded.

On December 17 of that year a street vendor in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire to protest the high cost of the wheat he needed to make the foods he and his peers sold, and the harassment of police against their protests. It sparked what we referred to then as the Arab Spring, that lasted through most of 2011.

The steady warming and drought in that area, though, never let up and the desert in North Africa relentlessly continued to eat up millions of acres of food-producing land, particularly across Syria. By 2015 it had pushed over a million Syrian subsistence farmers off their land — that had desertified — and into Syria’s cities, particularly Damascus and Aleppo.

Northern Africa became the world’s number one food importer, and the prices kept rising relentlessly.

Newly homeless, hungry, and destitute, these Syrian farmers began demonstrations in the streets demanding food, shelter, and employment or “welfare” payments from the Syrian government.

Bashar Assad, being a psychopathic dictator, ordered his troops to fire live ammunition into the crowds in 2012 and 2013, and soon a full-blown revolt was on: “rebels” seized Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, in early 2013.

Syria was also the base for Russia’s Mediterranean fleet, with multiple deep-water ports that Putin believed were critical to his nation’s military defense. By 2015 he had a dozen battleships there, along with submarines and other warships.

He had to prevent the Assad government from falling or risk an “Arab Spring democracy” emerging — as happened for a short while in Tunisia and Egypt — that might align itself with the West and kick Russia out.

Making a long story short, Putin bombed the crap out of Syria on Assad’s behalf, virtually leveling the city of Aleppo, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. 

It was one of the worst war crimes of this century, almost as deadly as George W. Bush’s brutal and criminal invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Millions of climate and war refugees fled the country, joining Bush’s wars’ fugitives making their way into Europe by any means possible.

Thus began Europe’s refugee crisis, which just helped bring down Holland’s government.  In two weeks, it may well cause the rightwing fascist-aligned anti-immigrant People’s Party to come to power in the Spanish elections on July 23.

As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) noted in a 2021 report:

“By the end of 2016, nearly 5.2 million refugees and migrants reached European shores, undertaking treacherous journeys from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries torn apart by war and persecution.”

This flood of brown-skinned Muslims fleeing African and Middle Eastern climate change and wars into Europe over the past decade is why Italy and Sweden now have rightwing leaders; why Viktor Orbán was able to gain and hold power in Hungary with his promise to “build a wall” along Hungary’s southern border (a promise he kept); and why rightwing parties are today growing so rapidly in Germany, Greece, Norway, Austria, Belgium and France.

The legacy of five centuries of racist imperialism across four continents has been that wealth and safety from the ravages of climate change are concentrated in mostly White-run nations, while vulnerability to desertification and poverty are concentrated in mostly Brown- and Black-run nations.

When Russia intervened in British politics to tear apart the EU, their trolls’ main Facebook pitch for Brexit was that “those [Brown and Black] people” the EU had let in were now making their way to the UK.

While every country in the world can accept refugees in small numbers without crisis, when “other people” begin showing up in large numbers the response by every nation in history typically tends toward rightwing nationalism and xenophobia, an obsession with borders, and demands for racial, cultural, and religious “purity.”

Here in North America we’re seeing a similar dynamic. Reagan so severely destabilized Central America and Venezuela with his sanctions, illegal Iran-Contra program, and support for rightwing death squads that those nations never recovered. In the years since, climate change has bit these weakened governments deep, forcing millions of subsistence farmers — just like in Syria but here mostly from hard-hit Guatemala — off land that once grew crops but is now, just a few years later, scrub desert.

Exploiting the climate refugee crisis on America’s southern border, Republican politicians have spent the years since Obama’s election in 2008 falsely claiming that Democrats had thrown the border “open,” producing thousands of news stories that have been used by coyotes — human traffickers — to draw even more refugees toward the United States.

Compounding that, Trump launched his 2016 campaign on keeping Brown people out of the United States, and today racism and xenophobia form the foundation of most Republican political campaigns (when they aren’t hating on queer people or women).

The result of these trends has been a worldwide shift to the right. As Freedom House noted in a 2022 report, over 60 countries experienced “declines” in democracy the previous year; only about 20 percent of people worldwide now live in “free” nations:

“Global freedom faces a dire threat. … Authoritarian regimes have become more effective at co-opting or circumventing the norms and institutions meant to support basic liberties, and at providing aid to others who wish to do the same. …

“The global order is nearing a tipping point, and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail.”

So far, the western world’s refugee crisis has been mostly driven by massive policy errors and outright war crimes: Russia’s response to the Syrian farmers, the US invasion and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, and American meddling in Central America and Venezuela.

But all have been either triggered or exacerbated by the worldwide climate emergency. And, as we can see from this summer’s weather worldwide, that emergency is building at a rate far more rapid than even alarmist climate scientists were predicting just a decade ago.

Recent projections show that within just the next two decades as many as three billion people could be fleeing areas that will soon only marginally support human life.

As equatorial regions become uninhabitable, the mostly darker-skinned people living there will be migrating north and south into areas controlled by lighter-skinned people in numbers that will make today’s Syrian, Iraq, and Afghan refugee crisis look like a statistical blip. 

It will put worldwide white supremacist and Nazi movements into hyperdrive.

In addition to acting immediately to mitigate climate change and green the world’s economy, the free nations of the world must harden our democracies against reactive rightwing violence- and hate-based racist political movements.

That will also require radically reducing the Supreme Court-gifted political power of big money here in America — particularly from the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it has created — and returning that power and wealth to the hard-hit majority. The Democratic Party in America is increasingly committed to this, but Republicans and the dozens of billionaires in their camp are prepared to spend heretofore unimaginable sums to keep climate deniers and race-baiters in office.

We also must help those nations most hard-hit by the warming — caused largely by our carbon pollution — to deal with their own refugees internally, lest they irrecoverably destabilize first their own governments and then ours.

To paraphrase JFK, we are not helpless before this task. 

But it will require western and American media and political systems to take on these three crises — climate change, the refugees it produces, and politicians who demagogue the issue while blocking forward progress — now.  

We are quite literally out of time.

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