Donald Trump and maga Republicans must fire Robert F. Kennedy Jr. he is incompetent and bat shit crazy

Who knows you better than the family you grew up with❓

Published in The Nation by Greg Gonslaves: RFKjr is a psycho❗

You might not remember the letter Caroline Kennedy wrote to the US Senate in January about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—or “Bobby,” as she called him. But it was vitally important then, and it remains so now—because she was speaking not as a political actor but as RFK Jr.’s cousin, someone she grew up with and has known all her life.

Here’s Caroline Kennedy’s stark conclusion: The American healthcare system, for all its flaws, is the envy of the world. Its doctors and nurses, researchers, scientists, and caregivers are the most dedicated people I know. Every day, they give their lives to heal and save others. They deserve a knowledgeable leader who is committed to evidence and excellence. They deserve a Secretary committed to advancing cutting-edge medicine to save lives, not rejecting the advances we have already made. They deserve a stable, moral, and ethical person at the helm of this crucial agency. They deserve better than Bobby Kennedy—and so do the rest of us.

Earlier in her letter, Kennedy said, “I have known Bobby my wh

ole life; we grew up together. It’s no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets, because he himself is a predator.”

These words are shocking; all the more so because this is one family member rendering this judgment about another family member. Imagine what it would take to talk like this, so publicly, about someone you have known forever.

We can’t say we weren’t warned—and the truth of Caroline Kennedy’s words rings louder with each passing day.

Last week at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we saw this predator in action.

Over the past few months, RFK Jr. brought the internationally renowned agency to its knees.

He has proposed cutting the agency’s budget by close to 50 percent, destroyed programs responsible for monitoring maternal health and lead poisoning of children in the US at CDC, disbanded the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics and the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice within the National Center for Environmental Health, which is meant to keep our water safe to drink and address environmental causes of childhood asthma. In an article in April, reporters at Wired documented the thousands of CDC employees who had been laid off, endangering these programs and others serving millions of Americans.

But all of this was a mere prologue to the Wednesday Night Massacre at CDC last week, in which RFK Jr. tried to fire the new CDC director, Dr. Susan Monarez, whom he had selected to run the agency and had just been confirmed by the Senate earlier this summer.

The precipitating events here concern vaccines. Kennedy has been waging a full-scale campaign to destroy vaccination in the United States. Many who follow these issues will know about his purge of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the installation of his cronies to take over the key body; the unilateral decision by RFK and his puppets, FDA’s Marty Makary and NIH’s Jay Bhattacharya, to yank Covid vaccines from children and pregnant women; and his cancellation of research on mRNA vaccines (including those targeted at preventing cancer).

But when Kennedy told CDC director Monarez she had to rubber-stamp the recommendations coming out of the upcoming September ACIP meeting—which would likely restrict access to Covid vaccines and subject a host of other important vaccines to the scrutiny of his new handpicked committee of incompetents and ideologues, as well as fire senior CDC staff with responsibility over vaccines—she said no. She also called Senate majority leader John Thune and Senators Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, and Shelley Moore Capito to enlist their support.

This set in motion her dismissal by RFK Jr. However, Monarez rejected his authority to do this and hired two of the biggest lawyers in DC to fight for her. 

Many outside of CDC didn’t and don’t know Monarez, but in this moment, she has shown more courage and guts than anyone in the Trump administration to date.

And it didn’t stop there. Three senior staff— CDC chief medical officer Debra Houry, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases director Demetre Daskalakis, and National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases director Dan Jernigan—resigned together in protest. I urge people to read the resignation letters of all three of these former civil servants; along with Monarez, they have shown what courage and guts, self-sacrifice, and sense of duty mean in a time of universal moral degradation among our leaders.

By last Thursday afternoon, hundreds of CDC staffers had staged a clap-out, left their offices, and took to the streets to suppor Monarez, Houry, Daskalakis, and Jernigan. And the revolt has continued: This Wednesday, more than 1,000 current and former HHS staffers had signed a letter calling on RFK Jr. to resign.

While the CDC has been damaged considerably, and it will take years and years to rebuild, I think RFK Jr. miscalculated how much backlash his actions last week would face. The tactical brilliance of Houry, Daskalakis, and Jernigan’s coordinated resignations galvanized many in the public health world, and, more importantly, woke up politicians on both sides of the aisle who have slumbered during this long siege of the CDC. Even Bill Cassidy has found a spine and called for the September ACIP meeting to be postponed and for the recent firings to be scrutinized by his committee—though whether he’ll follow through or RFK Jr. will just ignore him as he has since his confirmation is yet to be seen.

RFK Jr., American PsychoRFK Jr., American Psycho

Gregg Gonsalves

Within hours, columns and in-house editorials criticizing RFK Jr. appeared in the usually supine mainstream media, in The Washington Post, USA Today, and elsewhere, with USA Today’s Rex Huppke summing it up nicely: “RFK Jr. is an anti-vaccine kook destroying the CDC. Impeach him.”

In The New York Times, Bernie Sanders called for RFK Jr.’s resignation, and Maureen Dowd, who almost died of rubella when she was 3 years old, savaged Kennedy, his enablers like Cassidy, and his White House champions, notably Stephen Miller.

It is easy to frame what is happening now through the usual filter of politics, and the White House is eager to do so, making the critique of RFK Jr. just another partisan battle. But I want us to go back and sit with Caroline Kennedy’s letter:

His basement, his garage, and his dorm room were the centers of the action where drugs were available, and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.

Forget the drugs. Reflect on the pathology, the cruelty, the “perverse scene of despair and violence.” Ms. Kennedy paints a chilling picture. This isn’t a political critique of our HHS secretary; it’s the origin story of a new American psycho. And before you reduce this to name-calling on my part, read the letter again. Then juxtapose the portrait Caroline Kennedy provides with the man today, the enormous power he has to do damage, to inflict suffering and death upon us all, and what he has done thus far. The case is clear: He should never have been let anywhere near public health, healthcare and biomedical science in this country. Congress needs to act. And we need to make them do it. RFK Jr. needs to go. Now❗

Gregg Gonsalves
Nation public health correspondent Gregg Gonsalves is the codirector of the Global Health Justice Partnership and an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.

Emoluments Clause is pseudonym for Grand Grift: Donald Trump violates the Constitution on a daily basis

The Sky-High Corruption of Donald Trump

Echo report published in The Nation by Chris Lehmann.

The Democrats missed their first chance to spotlight Trump’s repeated violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. They shouldn’t miss their second.

Back when outrage over Donald Trump’s blatant Oval Office corruption was still a novelty, a group of former national security officials filed an amicus brief in a 2019, lawsuit Democratic congressional leaders brought over Trump’s repeated violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. They cited one scenario as a clear and present threat to US national security interests: “A nation that plays a central role in the balance of power in the Middle East, one of the most fraught regions for U.S. national security in the world [could] curry favor with the President by purchasing real estate from one of his companies.”

Like much of the grim constitutional prophesying of that bygone era, this hypothetical illustration now looks laughably naive. 

Like much of the grim constitutional prophesying of that bygone era, this hypothetical illustration now looks laughably naive. 

Trump-branded real-estate conflicts in the Middle East still abound, of course—most notoriously via Trump’s son-in-law and erstwhile Middle East envoy Jared Kushner’s billion-dollar dealings with the Saudis. Yet Trump’s own newly announced deal with the Qatari royal family to deliver him a new Air Force One jet worth $400 million marks a breathtaking new level of presidential corruption. Indeed, the transaction, which has been hastily packaged as a “gift” from the Qatari government to the Pentagon, is a textbook illustration of the imperial corruption that the founders targeted in drafting the Emoluments Clause, which forbids the president from using his office for personal enrichment. Trump announced the deal on the eve of his first Middle East junket in his second term. The president’s visit to Qatar is bound to be steeped in superlative appreciations of his customized Boeing 747-8, which its original owners have quaintly dubbed “a palace in the sky.”

You can instantly gauge the depth of the self-dealing here by Trump’s overheated defense of the transaction. 

In an X post, the president announced, “The fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT (grand grift❗), FREE OF CHARGE of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist that we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. 

Anybody can do that! The Democrats are World Class Losers!!! MAGA.” Yet Trump’s own newly announced deal with the Qatari royal family to deliver him a new Air Force One jet worth $400 million marks a breathtaking new level of presidential corruption. Indeed, the transaction, which has been hastily packaged as a “gift” from the Qatari government to the Pentagon, is a textbook illustration of the imperial corruption that the founders targeted in drafting the Emoluments Clause, which forbids the president from using his office for personal enrichment. Trump announced the deal on the eve of his first Middle East junket in his second term. The president’s visit to Qatar is bound to be steeped in superlative appreciations of his customized Boeing 747-8, which its original owners have quaintly dubbed “a palace in the sky.”

Republican grand grift and Donald Trump's violation of the Constitution's Emoluments Clause

You can instantly gauge the depth of the self-dealing here by Trump’s overheated defense of the transaction. In an X post, the president announced, “The fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT (grand grift❗), FREE OF CHARGE of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist that we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. Anybody can do that! The Democrats are World Class Losers!!! MAGA.”

This outburst showcases every element of the Trumpian defense of corruption, starting with the mind-bending assertion that insulating the presidency from foreign financial influence is somehow a “Crooked” political maneuver, as opposed to a central plank of constitutional governance. There’s also the ludicrous notion that the Qatari emolument is a savvy piece of deal-making, and not a quid-pro-quo arrangement to benefit the donor. The tell here is Trump’s adverbial stipulation that the deal is temporary; if it were such a self-evident boon to the country, shouldn’t it be permanent? 

In reality, of course, ownership of the airborne decadent palace will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation at the end of his term—the deal employs the federal government as a dummy corporation that’s hosting a pass-through arrangement to land the aircraft safely in Trump’s gilded empire of grand grift❗

The Qatari payoff also defies Trump’s bogus image as the heroic savior of American industry, as he’s gone out of his way to engineer a disastrous global trade war in order to preside over a “golden age” in US manufacturing. The American aerospace giant Boeing has an existing $5 billion contract to replace both Air Force One jets—a project that’s now five years behind its delivery date with reported company losses of more than $2.5 billion. 

$400 million 💲Donald Trump's BribeJet

Part of that overrun is due to the technical challenges of outfitting a plane with the basic security and communications safeguards required in a presidential aircraft—indeed, the economies Trump boasts he’s achieving in the Qatari “GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE” will soon evaporate when the government will have to essentially disassemble and rebuild the craft to ensure that it operates free of foreign surveillance.

Beyond that, though, Boeing has become a purveyor of hazardous and performance-challenged aircraft thanks to a regime of financialized corporate governance that scorns basic engineering protocols and safeguards. 

In other words, Trump is scurrying to a foreign monarchy to meet his air travel demands because the American contractor originally charged with producing a pair of Air Force Ones has failed to meet its obligations under a Trumpian model of commerce that privileges stock buybacks over performance fundamentals. 

Small wonder, then, that Trump’s own tirade trails off into a phoned-in show of rancor: “Anybody can do that! The Democrats are World Class Losers!!! MAGA”

But, alas, Trump isn’t wrong to call out Democratic fecklessness. During Trump’s first term, Democratic congressional leaders failed to bring emoluments charges in their impeachment actions against the president. That’s why national security advisers were reduced to weighing in on a civil suit against Trump for his many emoluments violations, which ranged from trademark deals with China for the Trump Organization to the proposed use of his Doral golf compound for a G-7 meeting to his doubling of the Mar-a-Lago initiation fee to $200,000 shortly after his election. 

And the civil suit eventually ran aground once it reached the US Supreme Court, which predictably declared the issue moot after Trump completed his first term. (Indeed, the Trump-stacked right-wing court is itself a plain instance of executive branch corruption run amok, but that is a sermon for another occasion.)

The timorousness of Democratic leaders in the face of such blatant abuse of power failed to exploit a political opportunity. 

At the time, Trump was using the Oval Office to benefit himself on a scale unseen in the annals of presidential corruption—and exposing his fraudulent business practices would upend the chief basis of his demagogic appeal as a master dealmaker. 

Instead, Democrats first homed in on the effort to bribe Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with a military aid package and then sought to impeach Trump for fomenting the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Both of those shameful criminal episodes were founded in Trump’s bedrock conviction that he’s an unparalleled gamer of the governing racket, and the effort to police them in Congress would have been greatly advanced by emoluments charges undercutting Trump’s phony standing as a maestro of the deal.

The same core dynamic holds true today—there’s nothing stopping Democrats from stressing the ways in which Trump’s corruption is integral to how he rules and to his transformation of the federal government into a transactional mob syndicate enforced by goons such as Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Kash Patel. 

Indeed, the impeachment resolution introduced last month by Michigan Democratic Representative Shri Thanedar includes an article on “bribery and corruption” that cites the Emoluments Clause. A Democratic Party serious about combating MAGA authoritarianism and graft could start by reversing its policy of treating Thanedar like a fringe pariah.

Instead, Congress’s functional silence on emoluments has further enabled the posture of MAGA impunity in Trump’s second term, which has, among other things, transformed January 6 into a model of right-wing governance. Congress’s dilatory treatment of Trumpian corruption is also why, for all Trump’s whining over the Qatar deal, Democratic responses somehow manage to be worse. “Nothing says ‘America First’ like Air Force One, brought to you by Qatar,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement on X. “It’s not just bribery, it’s premium foreign influence with legroom.” No, Chuck—nothing says “failing to do your job” like thinking you can combat executive-branch influence-peddling with some staffer’s pathetic idea of a social media zinger.

Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).

Donald Trump's loosing political issue is overt racism

Racism Is Not a Winning Issue for Trump
Pundits think Trump’s bigotry benefits him—but a united Democratic Party can easily win.  By Jeet Heer published in The Nation

Like the proverbial dog returning to his vomit, Donald Trump can be trusted to go back to his racism. 

Racism has been a running motif of Trump’s life, from his inheritance of a real estate empire that was sued for not renting to African-Americans, to his calls for the execution of the (innocent) Central Park Five, to his Obama birtherism, to his recent Twitter attack on four Democratic congresswomen, all people of color.

“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” Trump wrote in reference to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley. Collectively, these women are known as the Squad. Their outspoken progressivism makes them a thorn in the side of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which might be why Trump decided that by cruelly insulting them he could stir up trouble among the Democrats.

Trump’s remarks were intemperate, but not devoid of strategy. 

Much political reporting suggests that the president made his comments with intent. “Trump is all-in on us-versus-them politics and does not care if he occasionally crosses the line into racism,” Mike Allen argued at Axios. One might question whether racism is an external line or more accurately seen as a deeply held internal view. Allen quoted one Trump ally as saying, Trump “believes the more he puts ‘The Squad’ front and center, the better his re-election chances get.”

Many analysts believe that Trump’s strategic racism is a shrewd play. Amy Walter, national editor of Cook Political Report, tweeted, “This fight w/ the squad is exactly where Trump wants 2020 fought. The more media/Dems engage him, the better for him. All this fight does is re-polarize the partisans and leaves the up-for-grabs voters (who want to hear about bread-butter issues) tuned out.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper retweeted Walter and added in a quote from Steve Bannon, “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

This diagnosis misreads the role racism plays in Trump’s politics. While it’s true that racism has been crucial for allowing Trump to take over the Republican party and remains key to his strength among GOP partisans, there’s little evidence that racism is actually a winning gambit in national elections. A close look at recent elections shows that if Democrats stay united, they can crush Trumpian racism.

The electoral potency of racism has been tested in subsequent elections. Bannon’s comment about wanting the Democrats to talk about racism was made in August of 2017, in the wake of Trump’s notorious “both sides” comment about violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. In that state’s special election in November, where Republican Ed Gillespie ran a Trumpian campaign playing up fear of undocumented immigrants, Gillespie was soundly trounced in the gubernatorial election by Ralph Northam, a not very inspiring candidate who still won 53.9 percent of the vote against Gillespie’s 45 percent. Democrats also swept down ticket races in a state-wide GOP wipeout.

Trump also tried to make the 2018 midterms another referendum setting his racist vision of America against what he claimed was the weakness of the Democrats in protecting the border. The president filled the airwaves with scare stories about migrant caravans and sent the army to man his beloved border wall. The upshot was a nation-wide Democratic wave that made Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House.

Ramping up xenophobia might not help Republicans win elections, but it does serve Trump’s purpose by keeping the GOP in line. Even Republicans who say they don’t like Trump’s overt expressions of prejudice tend to rally behind the president when he’s being attacked by outsiders. According to Reuters, since Trump’s tweets against the Squad his approval rating among Republicans has gone up five percent (to 72 percent) while slipping among independents (from 40 percent to 30 percent) and Democrats. Overall, Trump’s position remains unchanged, but he created a more polarized electorate, with greater passion both for him and against him.

The behavior of both Democratic and Republican politicians supports the contention that racism is energizing the electorate—not necessarily to the advantage of Republicans. 

Democrats have been quick to attack Trump and pushed through a House resolution condemning the tweets. Amid parliamentary chaos that was farcical even for the Trump era (Republicans had already put in place rules against calling a president racist), Democrats united behind the motion and Republicans, with only four members of Congress breaking rank, united in opposition.

Trump’s 2016 election was precarious—a defeat in the popular vote and a fluke win in the electoral college, that rested on fewer than 80,000 votes in three states. While racism was certainly a factor, Trump also ran on a populist economic agenda (one he’s largely abandoned in office) and a smear campaign emphasizing the alleged criminality of his opponent (aided by a last minute intervention of FBI director James Comey). Given the narrowness of the victory, it’s hard to credit any one factor, such as racism, with being decisive.

The electoral potency of racism has been tested in subsequent elections. Bannon’s comment about wanting the Democrats to talk about racism was made in August of 2017, in the wake of Trump’s notorious “both sides” comment about violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. In that state’s special election in November, where Republican Ed Gillespie ran a Trumpian campaign playing up fear of undocumented immigrants, Gillespie was soundly trounced in the gubernatorial election by Ralph Northam, a not very inspiring candidate who still won 53.9 percent of the vote against Gillespie’s 45 percent. 

Democrats also swept down ticket races in a state-wide GOP wipeout.

Trump also tried to make the 2018 midterms another referendum setting his racist vision of America against what he claimed was the weakness of the Democrats in protecting the border. The president filled the airwaves with scare stories about migrant caravans and sent the army to man his beloved border wall. The upshot was a nation-wide Democratic wave that made Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House.

Ramping up xenophobia might not help Republicans win elections, but it does serve Trump’s purpose by keeping the GOP in line. Even Republicans who say they don’t like Trump’s overt expressions of prejudice tend to rally behind the president when he’s being attacked by outsiders. According to Reuters, since Trump’s tweets against the Squad his approval rating among Republicans has gone up five percent (to 72 percent) while slipping among independents (from 40 percent to 30 percent) and Democrats. Overall, Trump’s position remains unchanged, but he created a more polarized electorate, with greater passion both for him and against him.

The behavior of both Democratic and Republican politicians supports the contention that racism is energizing the electorate—not necessarily to the advantage of Republicans. Democrats have been quick to attack Trump and pushed through a House resolution condemning the tweets. Amid parliamentary chaos that was farcical even for the Trump era (Republicans had already put in place rules against calling a president racist), Democrats united behind the motion and Republicans, with only four members of Congress breaking rank, united in opposition.

While Trump has made racism a litmus-test issue, this will help the Republicans only if the electorate is actually becoming more racist. There’s reason to doubt that it has, both because of demographic change (with every election the electorate becomes less white) and also, perhaps as importantly, because of revulsion against Trump’s policies and governing style.

In fact, Trump’s racism has been pushing popular opinion away from his preferred policy stance. In 2018, for the first time on record, Pew found the number of Americans who wanted the country to take in more immigrants was greater than those who wanted fewer immigrants.

A 2019 paper from Daniel J. Hopkins and Samantha Washington, both at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted polls on racial attitudes and concluded that “white Americans’ expressed anti-Black and anti-Hispanic prejudice declined after the 2016 campaign and election.” They suggest that Trump’s expressions of bigotry provoke parts of the public to go in the opposite direction. Trump is so unpopular, he’s giving racism a bad name.

Trump will almost certainly want to make the 2020 election all about racism. It’s the magic formula that has brought him far in life, and he’s on solid ground in thinking that it’s the best way to unify the Republican party, which is ever more reliant on squeezing out the white vote—and suppressing voters of color. But Democrats can’t duck out of this fight: The lesson from 2016 and subsequent midterms is that Democrats do best when they mobilize their own base, a multiracial coalition that is larger than the GOP base.

The one sure way Democrats could lose is to become divided on race by having the party leadership attack the Squad. That’s the wedge that Trump has been trying to push hard, exploiting the feud between Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez. But if there’s any saving grace in Trump’s crude bigotry, it’s that he can bring even Democrats together.

Echo opinion published in Texas - students must speak out against bigotry

Racism is not a winning issue for Donald Trump!

This isn’t even about immigration anymore. It’s about dividing all Americans.

This opinion letter was published in the Texas newspaper the San Antonio Express News:

Kids deserve more - they must speak out against bigotry!

First, let me explain that I am white and I grew up with — and continue to benefit from — white privilege, but the bigotry in this country still affects me and this nation.
I am the mother of two Hispanic boys, but I have hundreds of black and brown children in the city. Because, I taught government to high school students. But, I didn’t teach my students that the government only worked for those who are white. I taught them that government is about the rule of law and not the rule of man. I taught them that the First Amendment was for all opinions — especially if you disagreed with them. I taught them that when the Ku Klux Klan marched, the best insult was to not attend. 

But I did not teach them to stay silent. I taught them to speak up, question, criticize and fight. That is their right in this country.

I had students who were citizens and some who weren’t, but I taught them the rights and liberties of our country were for all. 

I did not mean to lie to those students, because I had no idea we would end up with what I consider an illegitimate president Donald Trump, who has systematically ignored everything lawful, decent and right.

When proof is in the form of a video and followers still lie about its content, we are in deep trouble. All the children of this country deserve better examples and better treatment than that demonstrated by this cruel administration.

From Helen Chouinard

MaineWriter P.S. - A warning about the use of bigotry by Donald Trump was published in the Jewish News:

Speak out against bigotry and hatred – and urge our leaders to do the same, The Jewish Voice, RI/MA- published by the anti-defamation league:
- https://newengland.adl.org/news/speak-out-against-bigotry-and-hatred-and-urge-our-leaders-to-do-the-same-the-jewish-voice-rima/

Crimes against the environment- Donald Trump on trial

Donald Trump has lost even more credibility and American stature among world leaders. He descends into this situation as he continues to put political ego above the moral obligatioin he has to lead improvements in the human condition. Obviously, Donald Trump doesn't understand how his children, and grandchildren will join in being embarrassed by his failed attempt to boost his ego at the expense of the earth's fragile environment.


In the blog "Moyers and Company", the decision to pull America out of the international Paris Climate Accord is considered to be a "crime against humanity". 

Environment: (a blog originally published in The Nation- by Mark Hertsgaard )

Donald Trump’s Withdrawal From the Paris Accords Is a Crime Against Humanity

"This is murder — even if Trump’s willful ignorance of climate science prevents him from seeing it as such." by Mark Hertsgaard
Posted June 2, 2017

Donald Trump confirmed his status as climate denier in chief Thursday, guaranteeing his place in history as an enemy of both science and humanity. 

Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Accord on climate change will not stop the rest of the world from continuing to advance toward a clean-energy future. 

Solar, wind, batteries and other technologies are growing tremendously fast, rewarding investors and employing far more people than the heat-trapping fuels of the past. Three million Americans now work in the clean-energy sector, more than the oil, gas and coal industries combined. 

California Gov. Jerry Brown, who heads the world’s sixth-largest economy and a hot spot of green-energy innovation, insisted that Trump’s efforts are doomed to failure. 

“The momentum is all the other way,” Brown said, “and I think Trump, paradoxically, is giving climate denial such a bad name that he’s actually building the very [climate action] movement that he is [purporting] to undermine.”

But no one should pretend that it does not matter when the world’s biggest economy rejects an agreement that put unprecedented international support behind ambitious climate action. By removing rules and regulations that require polluters in the United States to change their ways, Trump’s repudiation of the Paris Accord will slow progress at the very time when humanity’s survival requires faster action than ever.

“Crimes against humanity” is a phrase to use with caution, but it fits Trump’s repudiation of the Paris Accord and indeed his entire climate policy. Timothy Wirth, who as the undersecretary of state in the Bill Clinton administration negotiated the Kyoto Protocol that sought to limit global warming, has said that those who deny the well-established science of climate change “ought to be tried for crimes against humanity.” 

Wirth told The Nation after Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Accord that he stood by his remark, adding that the president’s action was “a stunning moral abdication of responsibility to future generations.” To refuse to act against global warming is to condemn thousands of people to death and suffering today and millions more tomorrow. This is murder, even if Trump’s willful ignorance of climate science prevents him from seeing it. History will not be so blind.

Of course, the Paris Accord is far from perfect: Its emissions reductions are voluntary and do not go far enough, at least not yet. Nevertheless, the accord commits the world’s governments to leave behind oil, gas and coal by midcentury — a historic shift. It commits them to limit global temperature rise to the 2 degrees Celsius that scientists say is the maximum compatible with civilization as we know it, and to aim for the 1.5 Celsius limit that poor and island nations rightfully regard as essential to their survival. Thus the accord provides citizens, activists and the rest of civil society worldwide with a strong mandate they can use to hold governments and corporations to account.

Thanks largely to such pressure from civil society, reinforced by the growing recognition of global elites that the climate crisis is indeed dire, the Paris Accord has already accelerated real climate progress. Some of the greatest change is underway in China, which is rapidly shutting down coal plants and mines and adding solar and wind plants, notwithstanding Trump’s shameless lies at the White House about China’s supposedly doing nothing. Meanwhile, the leaders of China and the European Union announced that they remain committed to the Paris Accord and plan to intensify cooperation on clean energy, a huge and growing global market that US businesses will now find harder to navigate. 

So much for America First

Remarkably, Trump did not deny climate science outright in his remarks in the Rose Garden. 

Reading (IMO, trying to read, because it was obviously a difficult task for him especially in front of all those made for TV people), from a prepared text, he refrained from repeating his favorite falsehood about climate change — that it is “a hoax” invented by the Chinese to undermine the US economy. 

Perhaps his aides have learned this much: Although fooled for decades by the disinformation campaigns funded by such polluters as ExxonMobil and voiced by Republicans in Congress, a majority of Americans now realize that climate change is real, caused by humans and dangerous. Instead, Trump portrayed his withdrawal from the Paris Accord as a matter of economic fairness and patriotism, of standing up for American workers, businesses and taxpayers who, he said, are being taken advantage of and, worst of all, laughed at by foreigners who foisted a “very unfair” deal on the hapless negotiators of the Obama administration.

This narrative could be consistent, however, only by ignoring what is now a truism within the business press and financial class: The jobs, profits and market opportunities of the future are in clean energy — not oil, gas and coal. Indeed, two days before Trump’s announcement, the shareholders of ExxonMobil delivered a stunning rebuke to the oil giant’s management: By a 62 percent majority, they voted to require the company to produce annual reports on how it will remain profitable in a future when governments and science will limit oil and gas production.

But make no mistake: Trump’s speech was climate denial with a vengeance. At this point in the climate crisis, the science is terrifyingly clear. Global emissions of heat-trapping gases must peak by 2020 if the 1.5C target is to remain feasible, by 2030 for the 2C target. Physics does not compromise; it does not do the deals so beloved by Trump. And that means that pledging to unleash America’s “abundant domestic energy” sources — by which Trump explained he meant oil, gas and coal — will make it immensely more difficult to honor those temperature targets, even if the rest of the world continues galloping forward.

In human terms, this increase in US energy production will mean more of the killer cyclones that killed hundreds and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka this week. It will mean more of the massive storms such as Hurricane Sandy that leveled vast parts of New York and New Jersey days before the 2012 presidential election and inspired Businessweek’s cover headline, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid!” 

It will mean that the extinction crisis that has already claimed countless plant, and animal species will intensify, furthering impoverishing the planet both ecologically and spiritually. 

All of this is a crime against humanity — and against Earth.

As the preponderance of evidence grows, and climate change is undeniable, it is Donald Trump and his ego that will be convicted of the crime against Mother Earth. In fact, at this point, regardless of what other nations decide to do about climate change, the guilty verdict will always (and I mean "Always!") be declared against Donald Trump, for perpetrating environmental devastation.)

Americans in Europe observe a backward US

Ann Jones writes an abrasive essay about how life in the US might be a lot better if politicans started paying attention to how the Scandanavians run their governments. Her experience living in beautiful Norway is compared to how things are done here, in the US.  Although many points Jones made are valid, she never talked about how to pay for the quality of life she described in her article about Norway. In fact, the Noriwegans pay plenty in taxes and therefore, they deserve every benefit they receive. As Hillary Clinton said (and Jones criticized her for it), "We are the United States of America...."  Of course, I envy the Europeans for their egalitarian governments where "socialist" isn't a curse word. Neverthelless, I also agree with Hillary Clinton, we cannot be Denmark or Norway....we simply can't.  Of course, I did enjoy this article by Ann Jones, but I only agree with about half of what she supported in her essay.

Norway's flag - an egalitarian government where everyone conributes, via shared wealth, to the quality of life.

Maine Writer says: Americans who have the opportunity to live outside of the US, even for a little while, quickly learn how the universe doesn't revolved around the United States of America. Every nation on earth has it's special culture and history, unique to them. European nations, particulary, are progressive because of the quality of life their cutlures promote for their citizens. High speed rail travel? No problem. There's Eurostar. Universal Health Care? Absolutely, in fact it's socialized medicine provided as a right of citizenship. Feedom of religion? You betcha! As a matter of fact, after hundreds of years of European religious wars, the nations want nothing to do with religion. As a result, Europeans practice worship anyway they want to. How about "freedom of speech"?  Just look at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, as an example. Of course, "second amendment rights" are not constitutional, but the gun violence rate in Europe is close to zero. Therefore, there's little cost of caring for gun violence trauma, either by subsidizing emergency care or for providing public safety training, to defend against gun incidents.

An article by Ann Jones describes living in Norway was published in The Nation. (Obviously, most American have no idea what it's like to enjoy living in Europe; but we also have no intention of paying the percentage of income in taxes, like the Noriegans, to earn the same benefits.)

After I Lived in Norway, America Felt Backward. 
Here’s Why. A crash course in social democracy from "The Nation"  JANUARY 28, 2016
Years ago, Jones faced up to the futility of reporting truths about America’s disastrous wars, and so she left Afghanistan for another mountainous country far away. It was the polar opposite of Afghanistan: a peaceful, prosperous land where nearly everybody seemed to enjoy a good life, on the job and in the family.

Jones writes, ....they didn’t work much–not by American standards, anyway. In the United States, full-time salaried workers supposedly laboring 40 hours a week actually average 49, with almost 20 percent clocking more than 60. These people, on the other hand, worked only about 37 hours a week, when they weren’t away on long paid vacations. At the end of the workday, about four in the afternoon (perhaps three during the summer), they had time to enjoy a hike in the forest, a swim with the kids, or a beer with friends—which helps explain why, unlike so many Americans, they are pleased with their jobs.

Often, I was invited to go along. I found it refreshing to hike and ski in a country with no land mines, and to hang out in cafés unlikely to be bombed. Gradually, my war-zone jitters subsided and I settled into the slow, calm, pleasantly uneventful stream of life there.

Four years on, thinking I should settle down, I returned to the United States. It felt quite a lot like stepping back into that other violent, impoverished world, where anxiety runs high and people are quarrelsome. 

In fact, writes Jones, she had come back to the flip side of Afghanistan and Iraq: (back) to what America’s wars have done to America. 

Where I live now, in the homeland, there are not enough shelters for the homeless. Most people are either overworked or hurting for jobs; the housing is overpriced, the hospitals crowded and understaffed, the schools largely segregated and not so good. Opioid or heroin overdose is a popular form of death, and men in the street threaten women wearing hijabs. Did the American soldiers I covered in Afghanistan know they were fighting for this?

DUCKING THE SUBJECT


One night I tuned in to the Democrats’ presidential debate to see if they had any plans to restore the America I used to know. To my amazement, I heard the name of my peaceful mountain hideaway: Norway. Bernie Sanders was denouncing America’s crooked version of “casino capitalism” that floats the already-rich ever higher and flushes the working class. He said that we ought to “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.”

He believes, he added, in “a society where all people do well. Not just a handful of billionaires.” That certainly sounds like Norway. For ages, they’ve worked at producing things for the use of everyone—not the profit of a few—so I was all ears, waiting for Sanders to spell it out for Americans.

But Hillary Clinton quickly countered, “We are not Denmark.” Smiling, she said, “I love Denmark,” and then delivered a patriotic punch line: “We are the United States of America.” (Well, there’s no denying that.) She also praised capitalism and “all the small businesses that were started because we have the opportunity and the freedom in our country for people to do that and to make a good living for themselves and their families.” She didn’t seem to know that Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians do that too, and with much higher rates of success.

The truth is that almost a quarter of American start-ups are not founded on brilliant new ideas, but on the desperation of men or women who can’t get a decent job. The majority of all American enterprises are solo ventures having zero payrolls, employing no one but the entrepreneur, and often quickly wasting away. 

Sanders said that he was all for small business too, but that meant nothing “if all of the new income and wealth is going to the top 1 percent.” (As George Carlin said, “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”)

In that debate, no more was heard of Denmark, Sweden, or Norway. The audience was left in the dark. Later, in a speech at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, Sanders tried to clarify his identity as a democratic socialist. He said he’s not the kind of socialist (with a capital S) who favors state ownership of the means of production. The Norwegian government, on the other hand, owns the means of producing lots of public assets and is the major stockholder in many a vital private enterprise.

I was dumbfounded. Norway, Denmark, and Sweden practice variations of a system that works much better than ours. Yet even the Democratic presidential candidates, who say they love or want to learn from those countries, don’t seem know how they actually work.

WHY WE’RE NOT DENMARK

Proof that they do work is delivered every year in data-rich evaluations by the United Nations and other international bodies. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s annual report on international well-being, for example, measures 11 factors, ranging from material conditions such as affordable housing and employment to quality-of-life matters like education, health, life expectancy, voter participation, and overall citizen satisfaction. Year after year, all the Nordic countries cluster at the top, while the United States lags far behind. In addition, Norway has ranked first on the UN Development Program’s Human Development Index for 12 of the last 15 years, and it consistently tops international comparisons in such areas as democracy, civil and political rights, and freedom of expression and the press.

What makes the Scandinavians so different? Since the Democrats can’t tell you and the Republicans wouldn’t want you to know, let me offer you a quick introduction. What Scandinavians call the Nordic model is a smart and simple system that starts with a deep commitment to equality and democracy. That’s two concepts combined in a single goal because, as far as they’re concerned, you can’t have one without the other.

Right there, they part company with capitalist America, now the most unequal of all the developed nations, and consequently a democracy no more. Political scientists say it has become an oligarchy, run at the expense of its citizenry by and for the superrich. Perhaps you’ve noticed that.

In the last century, Scandinavians, aiming for their egalitarian goal, refused to settle solely for any of the ideologies competing for power—not capitalism or fascism, not Marxist socialism or communism. Geographically stuck between powerful nations waging hot and cold wars for such doctrines, Scandinavians set out to find a middle path. That path was contested—by socialist-inspired workers on the one hand, and by capitalist owners and their elite cronies on the other—but in the end, it led to a mixed economy. Thanks largely to the solidarity and savvy of organized labor and the political parties it backed, the long struggle produced a system that makes capitalism more or less cooperative, and then redistributes equitably the wealth it helps to produce. Struggles like this took place around the world in the 20th century, but the Scandinavians alone managed to combine the best ideas of both camps while chucking out the worst.

In 1936, the popular US journalist Marquis Childs first described the result to Americans in the book Sweden: The Middle Way. Since then, all the Scandinavian countries, and their Nordic neighbors Finland and Iceland, have been improving upon that hybrid system. Today in Norway, negotiations between the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions and the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise determine the wages and working conditions of most capitalist enterprises, public and private, that create wealth, while high but fair progressive income taxes fund the state’s universal welfare system, benefiting everyone. In addition, those confederations work together to minimize the disparity between high-wage and lower-wage jobs. 

As a result, Norway ranks with Sweden, Denmark, and Finland as among the most income-equal countries in the world, and its standard of living tops the charts.

 So here’s the big difference: In Norway, capitalism serves the people. The government, elected by the people, sees to that. All eight of the parties that won parliamentary seats in the last national election—including the conservative Høyre party now leading the government—are committed to maintaining the welfare state. In the United States, however, neoliberal politics puts the foxes in charge of the henhouse, and capitalists have used the wealth generated by their enterprises (as well as financial and political manipulations) to capture the state and pluck the chickens.

They’ve done a masterful job of chewing up organized labor. Today, only 11 percent of American workers belong to a union. In Norway, that number is 52 percent; in Denmark, 67 percent; in Sweden, 70 percent. Thus, in the United States, oligarchs maximize their wealth and keep it, using the “democratically elected” government to shape policies and laws favorable to the interests of their foxy class. They bamboozle the people by insisting, as Hillary Clinton did at that debate, that all of us have the “freedom” to create a business in the “free” marketplace, which implies that being hard up is our own fault.  (Woah...wait a minute....this is not what she said....!)

In the Nordic countries, on the other hand, democratically elected governments give their populations freedom fromthe market by using capitalism as a tool to benefit everyone. That liberates their people from the tyranny of the mighty profit motive that warps so many American lives, leaving them freer to follow their own dreams—to become poets or philosophers, bartenders or business owners, as they please.

FAMILY MATTERS


Maybe our politicians don’t want to talk about the Nordic model because it shows so clearly that capitalism can be put to work for the many, not just the few.

Consider the Norwegian welfare state. It’s universal. In other words, aid to the sick or the elderly is not charity, grudgingly donated by elites to those in need. Rather, it is the right of every individual citizen. That includes every woman, whether or not she is somebody’s wife, and every child, no matter its parentage. Treating every person as a citizen frees each one from being legally possessed by another—a husband, for example, or a tyrannical father.

Which brings us to the heart of Scandinavian democracy: the equality of women and men. In the 1970s, Norwegian feminists marched into politics and picked up the pace of democratic change. Norway needed a larger labor force, and women were the answer. Housewives moved into paid work on equal footing with men, nearly doubling the tax base. That has, in fact, meant more to Norwegian prosperity than the coincidental discovery of North Atlantic oil reserves. The Ministry of Finance recently calculated that those additional working mothers add to Norway’s net national wealth a value equivalent to its “total petroleum wealth”—currently held in the world’s largest sovereign-wealth fund, worth over $873 billion. By 1981, women were sitting in parliament, in the prime minister’s chair, and in her cabinet.

American feminists also marched for such goals in the 1970s, but the big boys, busy with their own White House intrigues, initiated a war on women that set the country back and still rages today in brutal attacks on women’s basic civil rights, healthcare, and reproductive freedom. In 1971, thanks to the hard work of organized feminists, Congress passed the bipartisan Comprehensive Child Development Bill to establish a multibillion-dollar national daycare system for the children of working parents. In 1972, President Richard Nixon vetoed it, and that was that. In 1972, Congress also passed a bill (first proposed in 1923) to amend the Constitution to grant equal rights of citizenship to women. Ratified by only 35 states—three short of the required 38—that Equal Rights Amendment was declared dead in 1982, leaving American women in legal limbo. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, obliterating six decades of US social-welfare policy “as we know it,” ending federal cash payments to the nation’s poor, and consigning millions of female heads of household and their children to poverty, where many still dwell 20 years later. Today, even privileged women, torn between their underpaid work and their kids, are overwhelmed.

Things happened very differently in Norway. There, feminists and sociologists pushed hard against the biggest obstacle still standing in the path to full democracy: the nuclear family. In the 1950s, the world-famous American sociologist Talcott Parsons had pronounced that arrangement—with the hubby at work and the little wife at home—the ideal setup in which to socialize children. But in the 1970s, the Norwegian state began to deconstruct that undemocratic ideal by taking upon itself the traditional, unpaid household duties of women. Caring for children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled became the basic responsibilities of the universal welfare state, freeing women in the workforce to enjoy both their jobs and their families.  (Well, Jones is a little too nostalgic with this imagry...)

Paradoxically, setting women free made family life more genuine. Many in Norway say it has made both men and women more themselves and more alike: more understanding and happier. It also helped kids slip from the shadow of helicopter parents. In Norway, both mother and father in turn take paid parental leave from work during the child’s first year or longer. At age 1, however, children start attending a neighborhood barnehage (kindergarten) for schooling spent largely outdoors. By the time kids enter free primary school at age 6, they are remarkably self-sufficient, confident, and good-natured. They know their way around town, and if caught in a snowstorm in the forest, how to build a fire and find the makings of a meal. (One kindergarten teacher explained, “We teach them early to use an ax so they understand it’s a tool, not a weapon.”)

To Americans, the notion of a school “taking away” your child to make her an ax wielder is monstrous. Yet though it’s hard to measure, it’s likely that Scandinavian children actually spend more quality time with their non-work-obsessed parents than does a typical middle-class American child being driven by a stressed-out mother from music lessons to karate. For all these reasons and more, the international organization Save the Children cites Norway as the best country on earth in which to raise kids, while the United States finishes far down the list, in 33rd place.
DON’T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT


This little summary just scratches the surface of Scandinavia, so I urge curious readers to Google away. But be forewarned: You’ll find much criticism of all the Nordic-model countries. Worse, neoliberal pundits, especially the Brits, are always beating up on the Scandinavians, predicting the imminent demise of their social democracies. Self-styled experts still in thrall to Margaret Thatcher tell Norwegians they must liberalize their economy and privatize everything short of the royal palace. Mostly, the Norwegian government does the opposite—or nothing at all—and social democracy keeps on ticking.

It’s not perfect, of course. It has always been a carefully considered work in progress (and expensive too!). Governance by consensus takes time and effort. You might think of it as slow democracy. Even so, it’s light-years ahead of us. (In the opinion of Ann Jones.)