Category Archives: Politics

Books, Observation, Politics

How should Dostoevsky and Tolstoy be read during Russia’s war against Ukraine?

As someone who teaches Russian literature, I can’t help but process the world through the country’s novels, stories, poems and plays, even at a time when Russian cultural productions are being canceled around the world.

With the Russian army perpetrating devastating violence in Ukraine – which includes the slaughter of civilians in Bucha – the discussion of what to do with Russian literature has naturally arisen.

I’m not worried that truly valuable art can ever be canceled. Enduring works of literature are enduring, in part, because they are capacious enough to be read critically against the vicissitudes of the present.

You could make this argument about any great work of Russian literature, but as a scholar of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, I will stick with Russia’s most famous literary exports.

After World War II, German critic Theodore Adorno described the Holocaust as a profound blow to Western culture and philosophy, even going so far as to question the very ability of human beings to “live after Auschwitz.”

This idea, born of the very specific context of the Holocaust, shouldn’t be haphazardly applied to the present moment. But following Adorno’s moral lead, I wonder whether – after the brutal shelling of the city of Mariupol, after the horrors on the streets of Bucha, along with atrocities committed in Kharkiv, Mykolaev, Kyiv and many more – the indiscriminate violence ought to change how readers approach Russia’s great authors.

Confronting suffering with clear eyes

Upon learning that Russian writer Ivan Turgenev had looked away at the last minute when witnessing the execution of a man, Dostoevsky made his own position clear: “[A] human being living on the surface of the earth has no right to turn away and ignore what is happening on earth, and there are higher moral imperatives for this.”

Seeing the rubble of a theater in Mariupol, hearing of Mariupol citizens starving because of Russian airstrikes, I wonder what Dostoevsky – who specifically focused his piercing moral eye on the question of the suffering of children in his 1880 novel “The Brothers Karamazov” – would say in response to the Russian army’s bombing a theater where children were sheltering. The word “children” was spelled out on the pavement outside the theater in large type so it could be seen from the sky. There was no misunderstanding of who was there.

Ivan Karamazov, the central protagonist in “The Brothers Karamazov,” is far more focused on questions of moral accountability than Christian acceptance or forgiveness and reconciliation. In conversation, Ivan routinely brings up examples of children’s being harmed, imploring the other characters to recognize the atrocities in their midst. He is determined to seek retribution.

Surely the intentional shelling of children in Mariupol is something Dostoevsky couldn’t possibly look away from either. Could he possibly defend a vision of Russian morality while seeing innocent civilians – men, women and children – lying on the streets of Bucha?

At the same time, nor should readers look away from the unseemliness of Dostoevsky and his sense of Russian exceptionalism. These dogmatic ideas about Russian greatness and Russia’s messianic mission are connected to the broader ideology that has fueled Russia’s past colonial mission, and current Russian foreign politics on violent display in Ukraine.

Yet Dostoevsky was also a great humanist thinker who tied this vision of Russian greatness to Russian suffering and faith. Seeing the spiritual value of human suffering was perhaps a natural outcome for a man sent to a labor camp in Siberia for five years for simply participating in a glorified socialist book club. Dostoevsky grew out of his suffering, but, arguably, not to a place where he could accept state-sponsored terror.

Would an author who, in his 1866 novel “Crime and Punishment,” explains in excruciating detail the toll of murder on the murderer – who explains that when someone takes a life, they kill part of themselves – possibly accept Putin’s vision of Russia? Warts and all, would Russia’s greatest metaphysical rebel have recoiled and rebelled against Russian violence in Ukraine?

I hope that he would, as many contemporary Russian writers have. But the dogmas of the Kremlin are pervasive, and many Russians accept them. Many Russians look away.

Tolstoy’s path to pacifism

No writer captures warfare in Russia more poignantly than Tolstoy, a former soldier turned Russia’s most famous pacifist. In his last work, “Hadji Murat,” which scrutinizes Russia’s colonial exploits in North Caucasus, Tolstoy showed how senseless Russian violence toward a Chechen village caused instant hatred of Russians.

Tolstoy’s greatest work about Russian warfare, “War and Peace,” is a novel that Russians have traditionally read during great wars, including World War II. In “War and Peace,” Tolstoy contends that the morale of the Russian military is the key to victory. The battles most likely to succeed are defensive ones, in which soldiers understand why they are fighting and what they are fighting to protect: their home.

Even then, he’s able to convey the harrowing experiences of young Russian soldiers coming into direct confrontation with the instruments of death and destruction on the battlefield. They disappear into the crowd of their battalion, but even a single loss is devastating for the families awaiting their safe return.

After publishing “War and Peace,” Tolstoy publicly denounced many Russian military campaigns. The last part of his 1878 novel “Anna Karenina” originally wasn’t published because it criticized Russia’s actions in the Russo-Turkish war. Tolstoy’s alter ego in that novel, Konstantin Levin, calls the Russian intervention in the war “murder” and thinks it is inappropriate that Russian people are dragged into it.

“The people sacrifice and are always prepared to sacrifice themselves for their soul, not for murder,” he says.

In 1904, Tolstoy penned a public letter denouncing the Russo-Japanese War, which has sometimes been compared with Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“Again war,” he wrote. “Again sufferings, necessary to nobody, utterly uncalled for; again fraud, again the universal stupefaction and brutalization of men.” One can almost hear him shouting “Bethink Yourselves,” the title of that essay, to his countrymen now.

In one of his most famous pacifist writings, 1900’s “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” Tolstoy presciently diagnosed the problem of today’s Russia.

“The misery of nations is caused not by particular persons, but by the particular order of Society under which the people are so bound up together that they find themselves all in the power of a few men, or more often in the power of one single man: a man so perverted by his unnatural position as arbiter of the fate and lives of millions, that he is always in an unhealthy state, and always suffers more or less from a mania of self-aggrandizement.”

The importance of action

If Dostoevsky would insist that one not look away, it is fair to say that Tolstoy would contend that people must act upon what they see.

During the Russian famine of 1891 to 1892, he started soup kitchens to help his countrymen who were starving and had been abandoned by the Russian government. He worked to help Russian soldiers evade the draft in the Russian empire, visiting and supporting jailed soldiers who did not wish to fight. In 1899 he sold his last novel, “Resurrection,” to help a Russian Christian sect, the Doukhobors, emigrate to Canada so they would not need to fight in the Russian army.

These writers have little to do with the current war. They cannot expunge or mitigate the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine. But they’re embedded on some level within the Russian cultural fabric, and how their books are still read matters. Not because Russian literature can explain any of what is happening, because it cannot. But because, as Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan wrote in March 2022, Russia’s war in Ukraine marked a defeat for Russia’s great humanist tradition.

As this culture copes with a Russian army that has indiscriminately bombed and massacred Ukrainians, Russia’s great authors can and should be read critically, with one urgent question in mind: how to stop the violence. Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny noted during his March 2022 trial that Tolstoy urged his countrymen to fight both despotism and war because one enables the other.

And Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze cited “War and Peace” in a February 2022 entry in her graphic diary.

“I’ve read your f—ing literature,” she wrote. “But looks like Putin did not, and you have forgotten.”

By: Ani Kokobobo, Associate Professor of Russian Literature, University of Kansas

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Climate Solutions, News, Observation, Politics

New Analysis Details ‘Master Class in War Profiteering’ by US Oil Giants

“Oil and gas companies are feeding off humanitarian disaster and consumer suffering in order to reward Wall Street,” said Lukas Ross at Friends of the Earth.

An analysis released Tuesday by a trio of groups highlights how Big Oil has cashed in on various crises over the past year—including the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and the global climate emergency—while enriching wealthy shareholders.

“Big Oil is living the second half of their unspoken mantra ‘socialize losses, privatize gains.'”

The new report from BailoutWatch, Friends of the Earth, and Public Citizen explains that there are two main tactics that fossil fuel giants use to benefit investors: “First, they repurchase shares of their own stock and retire them, reducing the number of shares outstanding and driving up the value of each share remaining in investors’ hands.”

“Second, they increase dividends, the quarterly payments investors receive for owning shares,” the report continues. “Oil and gas dividends, historically bigger than other sectors’, have spiked in recent months, outstripping every other industry group.”

“Amid high gas prices and war in recent months, oil and gas companies have kicked both tactics into overdrive,” the groups found, based on reviewing public statements and securities filings from the 20 largest U.S.-headquartered fossil fuel corporations.

During the first two months of 2022, “seven companies’ boards authorized their corporate treasuries to buy back and retire $24.35 billion in stock—a 15% increase over all of the buybacks authorized in 2021,” the report states. “Six of those decisions came in February 2022, after Russian warmongering lifted stock prices. The total since the start of 2021 is $45.6 billion.”

The analysis also reveals that in January and February, 11 companies raised their dividends—”often extravagantly”—and notes that “nine were increases of more than 15% and four were increases of more than 40%.”

“Six companies have begun paying additional dividends on top of their routine quarterly payments, including by implementing new variable dividends based on company earnings—a way of directing windfall profits immediately into private hands without any possibility of investment, employee benefits, or other uses,” the document points out.

“So far in 2022, these companies have started paying out an initial $3 billion in special windfall dividends,” the report adds. “Four of these companies—Pioneer, Chesapeake, Conoco, and Coterra—announced variable dividends beginning August 2021, as prices began to rise.”

Chris Kuveke of BailoutWatch said in a statement that “Big Oil is living the second half of their unspoken mantra ‘socialize losses, privatize gains.'”

“Two years after winning multi-billion dollar bailouts from the Trump administration, these newly flush companies are pocketing billions from an international crisis, and they don’t care how it affects regular Americans,” Kuveke added.

As Public Citizen researcher Alan Zibel put it: “Big Oil executives are reaping windfall profits while accelerating the climate crisis and sticking consumers with the bill.”

Zibel also acknowledged efforts to blame President Joe Biden for rising prices, rather than industry profiteering.

“The oil industry and their allies on Capitol Hill falsely claim that the Biden administration’s acceptance of mainstream climate science is stifling investment in the domestic oil industry,” he said. “But the industry’s actions show that they are intently focused on funneling cash to their shareholders rather than lowering prices for consumers.”

According to Lukas Ross, climate and energy program manager at Friends of the Earth: “This is a master class in war profiteering. Oil and gas companies are feeding off humanitarian disaster and consumer suffering in order to reward Wall Street.”

“Oil companies drove us into a climate crisis and are now price gouging us to extinction,” he warned. “Congress and President Biden must take action by passing a windfall profits tax to rein in Big Oil’s cash grab.”

The new analysis follows the introduction of multiple bills targeting Big Oil’s windfall profits, including a proposal spearheaded by Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) designed to crack down on such behavior in all sectors, not just the fossil fuel industry.

Sanders on Tuesday morning held a hearing to call out how corporate greed and profiteering are fueling inflation. During his opening remarks, the chair took aim at Big Oil specifically while listing some examples.

“Yesterday, at a time when gasoline in America is now at a near-record high at $4.17 a gallon, guess what?” Sanders said. “ExxonMobil reported that its profit from pumping oil and gas alone in the first quarter will likely hit a record high of $9.3 billion.”

“Meanwhile,” he added, “Big Oil CEOs are on track to spend $88 billion this year not to decrease supply constraints, not to address the climate crisis, but to buy back their own stock and hand out dividends to enrich their wealthy shareholders.”

The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations plans to hold a hearing Wednesday titled “Gouged at the Gas Station: Big Oil and America’s Pain at the Pump.” Top executives from BP America, Chevron, Devon Energy, ExxonMobil, Pioneer Natural Resources, and Shell USA are set to appear before the panel.

Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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News, Observation, Politics

How the Supreme Court Could Make Your Life More Dangerous: new video by Robert Reich

Video

Below we’ve embedded the new video, along with the text of the video.

Your life could get a lot more dangerous. Republican appointees on the Supreme Court seem poised to strip away basic safety standards for our workplaces, our food, our air and water. 

Congress gives federal agencies the authority to enact regulations that protect us in our daily lives. Congress defines the goals, but leaves it up to the health and safety experts in those agencies to craft and enforce regulations. I know regulations don’t sound very exciting, but they’re how our government keeps us safe.

Remember when lots of romaine lettuce was recalled because it was causing E.coli outbreaks? That was the Food and Drug Administration protecting us from getting sick. Working in a warehouse? The Occupational Safety and Health Administration sets standards to ensure you don’t breathe in dangerous chemicals like asbestos. Enjoying the fresh air on a clear, sunny day? Thank the Environmental Protection Agency for limiting the amount of pollution that can go into our air.

These agencies save lives. Since OSHA was established a half-century ago, its workplace safety regulations have saved more than 618,000 workers’ lives.

Republicans have been trying to gut these agencies for decades. Now, with the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority solidly in place, they have their best chance yet.

In January 2022, the Supreme Court blocked OSHA’s vaccine-or-testing mandate from going into effect, which was estimated to prevent a quarter-million hospitalizations.

The Court claimed that Covid isn’t an “occupational hazard” because people can become infected outside of work, and that allowing OSHA to regulate in this manner “would significantly expand” its authority without clear Congressional authorization.

This is absurd on its face. Section 2 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 clearly spells out OSHA’s authority to enact and enforce regulations that protect workers from illness, injury, and death in the workplace. Congress doesn’t need to list every specific workplace hazard before OSHA can protect workers.

What this ruling tells us is that the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court are intent on gutting the power of agencies to issue regulations.

This term, the Court will also hear a case regarding the EPA’s authority to enforce the Clean Water Act. If the Court undermines the EPA’s authority, it will put our environment – and our health – at risk. Remember when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire because it was brimming with oil, acid, and factory chemicals? That’s what we may be returning to.

And what’s next? Will they gut the Federal Trade Commission and put us all at risk of being defrauded? Target the Securities and Exchange Commission and deregulate the financial sector, sparking another financial crisis?

Beware. If Republican appointees on the Supreme Court succeed in gutting regulatory agencies, we all lose. This agenda is anti-worker, anti-consumer, and anti-environment. The only thing it’s good for is corporate profits.

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Climate Solutions, Politics, Science, Tesla

Revolutionary changes in transportation, from electric vehicles to ride sharing, could slow global warming – if they’re done right, IPCC says

Electric vehicle sales are growing quickly. Michael Fousert/Unsplash

Alan Jenn, University of California, Davis

Around the world, revolutionary changes are under way in transportation. More electric vehicles are on the road, people are taking advantage of sharing mobility services such as Uber and Lyft, and the rise in telework during the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted the way people think about commuting.

Transportation is a growing source of the global greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change, accounting for 23% of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions worldwide in 2019 and 29% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

The systemic changes under way in the transportation sector could begin lowering that emissions footprint. But will they reduce emissions enough?

In a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released April 4, 2022, scientists examined the latest research on efforts to mitigate climate change. The report concludes that falling costs for renewable energy and electric vehicle batteries, in addition to policy changes, have slowed the growth of climate change in the past decade, but that deep, immediate cuts are necessary. Emissions will have to peak by 2025 to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F), a Paris Agreement goal, the report says.

Costs are falling for key forms of renewable energy and EV batteries, and adoption of these technologies is rising. IPCC Sixth Assessment Report

The transportation chapter, which I contributed to, homed in on transportation transformations – some just starting and others expanding – that in the most aggressive scenarios could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions from transportation by 80% to 90% of current levels by 2050. That sort of drastic reduction would require a major, rapid rethinking of how people get around globally.

The future of EVs

All-electric vehicles have grown dramatically since the Tesla Roadster and Nissan Leaf arrived on the market a little over a decade ago, following the popularity of hybrids.

In 2021 alone, the sales of electric passenger vehicles, including plug-in hybrids, doubled worldwide to 6.6 million, about 9% of all car sales that year.

Strong regulatory policies have encouraged the production of electric vehicles, including California’s Zero Emission Vehicle regulation, which requires automakers to produce a certain number of zero-emission vehicles based on their total vehicles sold in California; the European Union’s CO2 emissions standards for new vehicles; and China’s New Energy Vehicle policy, all of which have helped push EV adoption to where we are today.

Pickups, Vans and SUVs, which typically have much lower gas mileage than cars, make up the majority of new car sales in the U.S. Electric versions could be game-changers for emissions.

Beyond passenger vehicles, many micro-mobility options – such as autorickshaws, scooters and bikes – as well as buses, have been electrified. As the cost of lithium-ion batteries decreases, these transportation options will become increasingly affordable and further boost sales of battery-powered vehicles that traditionally have run on fossil fuels.

An important aspect to remember about electrifying the transportation system is that its ability to cut greenhouse gas emissions ultimately depends on how clean the electricity grid is. China, for example, is aiming for 20% of its vehicles to be electric by 2025, but its electric grid is still heavily reliant on coal.

With the global trends toward more renewable generation, these vehicles will be connected with fewer carbon emissions over time. There are also many developing and potentially promising co-benefits of electromobility when coupled with the power system. The batteries within electric vehicles have the potential to act as storage devices for the grid, which can assist in stabilizing the intermittency of renewable resources in the power sector, among many other benefits.

Other areas of transportation are more challenging to electrify. Larger and heavier vehicles generally aren’t as conducive to electrification because the size and weight of the batteries needed rapidly becomes untenable.

For some heavy-duty trucks, ships and airplanes, alternative fuels such as hydrogen, advanced biofuels and synthetic fuels are being explored as replacements for fossil fuels. Most aren’t economically feasible yet, and substantial advances in the technology are still needed to ensure they are either low- or zero-carbon.

Other ways to cut emissions from transportation

While new fuel and vehicle technologies are often highlighted as decarbonization solutions, behavioral and other systemic changes will also be needed to meet to cut greenhouse gas emissions dramatically from this sector. We are already in the midst of these changes.

Telecommuting: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the explosion of teleworking and video conferencing reduced travel, and, with it, emissions associated with commuting. While some of that will rebound, telework is likely to continue for many sectors of the economy.

Shared mobility: Some shared mobility options, like bike and scooter sharing programs, can get more people out of vehicles entirely.

Car-sharing and on-demand services such as Uber and Lyft also have the potential to reduce emissions if they use high-efficiency or zero-emission vehicles, or if their services lean more toward car pooling, with each driver picking up multiple passengers. Unfortunately, there is substantial uncertainty about the impact of these services. They might also increase vehicle use and, with it, greenhouse gas emissions.

New policies such as the California Clean Miles Standard are helping to push companies like Uber and Lyft to use cleaner vehicles and increase their passenger loads, though it remains to be seen whether other regions will adopt similar policies.

Public transit-friendly cities: Another systemic change involves urban planning and design. Transportation in urban areas is responsible for approximately 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Efficient city planning and land use can reduce travel demand and shift transportation modes, from cars to public transit, through strategies that avoid urban sprawl and disincentivize personal cars. These improvements not only decrease greenhouse gas emissions, but can decrease congestion, air pollution and noise, while improving the safety of transportation systems.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/OcmIT/5/

How do these advances translate to lower emissions?

Much of the uncertainty in how much technological change and other systemic shifts in transportation affects global warming is related to the speed of transition.

The new IPCC report includes several potential scenarios for how much improvements in transportation will be able to cut emissions. On average, the scenarios indicate that the carbon intensity of the transportation sector would need to decrease by about 50% by 2050 and as much as 91% by 2100 when combined with a cleaner electricity grid to stay within the 1.5-degree Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) target for global warming.

These decreases would require a complete reversal of current trends of increasing emissions in the transportation sector, but the recent advances in transportation provide many opportunities to meet this challenge.

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Alan Jenn, Assistant Professional Researcher in Transportation, University of California, Davis

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News, Observation, Politics

Ukraine war: inside the complex web of Russia’s warring intelligence agencies

Russian intelligence chief Sergey Beseda and his deputy, Anatoly Bolyukh, were placed under house arrest on March 9. Beseda and Bolyukh oversaw the foreign intelligence branch of the FSB, which is the Russian security service. They were allegedly the main proponents of the assumption that Ukraine would swiftly collapse, which has proved deeply flawed.

But, as has become increasingly clear over many years, Vladimir Putin has become intolerant of opinions that contradict his preferred course of action. So although the intelligence was flawed, Beseda’s claims likely manipulated facts to fit what the Russian president wanted to believe. Having led the foreign intelligence branch since 2009, it is likely Beseda knew what his boss wanted to hear. Yet both he and Bolyukh have taken the blame for the wider invasion failure.

Putin has been living in a virtual bunker. The presidential administration, his primary information source, is a secretive organisation and has been feeding Putin a controlled information flow for over a decade. The institution acts as a gatekeeper to Putin and blocks non-positive intelligence from reaching him.

This twisting of facts to fit a particular worldview is only part of the problem. Another factor is that the different security services compete and undertake their own projects in the hope that this pleases Putin.

The Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB) or Federal Security Service, is one of many agencies. While the FSB is commonly thought of as a domestic intelligence agency, it also operates in other post-Soviet countries, except the Baltic states. Meanwhile the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedkiis (SVR), or Foreign Intelligence Service is involved in foreign intelligence gathering outside the post-Soviet space. The Federalnaya Sluzhba Okhrany (FSO), or Federal Protective Service, protects high-ranking officials. The Glavnoye upravleniye (GU), or Main Directorate – previously the GRU – is military intelligence.

The Rosgvardiya, or National Guard, which was created in 2016, is not strictly an intelligence agency but is effectively Putin’s praetorian guard. It is increasingly involved in external operations and has a direct line to Putin through its chief, Viktor Zolotov. He was Putin’s personal bodyguard from 2000 to 2013 before becoming minister of internal affairs and head of the internal troops from 2014 to 2016.

Spy v spy

Ostensibly the different Russian security services are like their western counterparts. But the FSB in particular is more carnivorous than its western equivalents, having largely consumed the signal-intelligence service, FAPSI. Putin as a former KGB Officer himself views them as crucial to his personal survival and making Russia great again. In 2020 Russia spent 5.5 trillion roubles (US$69 billion) on the security services. This amounts to 28% of the annual budget or 3.5 times the amount spent on health and education combined.

This comes at a price, though, with Putin demanding results. Each service is aware that they need to come up with the scariest crisis – or intelligence that fits Putin’s worldview – to increase their budget and influence. One example of this scare tactic was FSB chief, Aleksandr Bortnikov, claiming that the 2012 Siberian forest fires were the work of al-Qaeda. Scare tactics and only providing positive information to Putin results in a lack of coherence.

Each security service jealously guards its own territory and views the others with suspicion. This makes working together for a common good difficult. This rivalry is intense, and is built on a combination of mistrust and wanting Putin’s attention. In particular, the FSB appears to have the highest level of mistrust for other services and is constantly sniping at them. Competition also occurs at the intra-service level, with different groups conducting their own policies sometimes to the detriment of the agenda of their own branch.

All this makes for a very confusing picture, which is likely by design. By having inter and intra-service rivalries, the security services are too focused on their own jealousies, rather than other issues. With the war not going to plan there have also been murmurings that some security personnel are considering a coup.

Isolated and out of touch

Increasingly Putin’s inner circle is getting smaller and there is a growing level of mistrust and discontentment both by and against Putin. Rosgvardiya deputy Roman Gavrilov resigned in March over alleged claims of leaking information. Like Zolotov, Gavrilov was part of Putin’s personal bodyguard and when Zolotov tried to intervene, Putin refused to see him.

In the past month, eight generals have allegedly been sacked, in another sign that Putin is growing more isolated. His rambling speech and potted history in the build-up to recognising the independence of the two Donbas people’s republics were from someone who appears increasingly out of touch.

Since the pandemic’s start, Putin was isolated in a bunker with disinfection tunnels and largely sequestered from face-to-face meetings. The March 18 rally at Moscow’s Luzhniki stadium is one of many pointers that Putin remains in – or very close to – a bunker, only appearing for crucial meetings.

The long table in the Kremlin is another sign that Putin fears face-to-face meetings. For years, he has had food tasters. This creates a certain paranoia and the Ukraine conflict – and before it the pandemic – has turbocharged it.

Putin has long believed he is the most informed politician in the world. But this simply is not the case. Like the emperor with no clothes, Putin suffers from a warped reality where only positive information is allowed. This is what makes the current Ukrainian conflict particularly dangerous.

Stephen Hall, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Politics, International Relations and Russia, University of Bath

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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News, Observation, Politics

Ketanji Brown Jackson set for historic Supreme Court confirmation vote: 3 essential reads

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are scheduled to vote April 4, 2022, on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination for the Supreme Court. It kicks off a potentially historic week in which a full Senate vote could set course for the nation’s highest court seating it’s first Black female judge.

The elevation of Jackson to the Supreme Court would not change the ideological setup of the bench – which would continue to be split 6-3 in favor of conservative justices.

Nonetheless, it would be an important landmark in the history of the Court – of the 115 justices on the Supreme Court since it was established in 1789, 108 have been white men.

Race featured in Jackson’s confirmation process; so too attempts to define her “judicial philosophy.” The Conversation has turned to legal scholars to explain the meaning of Jackson’s potential ascension to the court.

On the shoulders of pioneers

Jackson, if she wins confirmation at the next stage, a vote by the full Senate, will have broken through the ultimate glass ceiling in terms of legal careers. She would have done so on the shoulders of pioneering Black female judges.

University of Florida’s Sharon D. Wright Austin notes, even now, “relatively few Black women are judges at the state or federal level” – which makes the achievement of those who have made it to this level all the more remarkable.

Of the judges highlighted by Austin, there is Judge Jane Bolin, who became the country’s first Black female judge in 1939, serving as a domestic relations court judge in New York for almost four decades. Later, in 1961, Constance Baker Motley became the first Black woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court. In all she argued 10 cases before the Court, winning nine of them. Meanwhile, Judge Julia Cooper Mack is noted as the first Black woman to sit on a federal appellate court, being appointed in 1975 and serving 14 years on the bench.

These women are to be celebrated and remembered. As Wright Austin writes: “Representation matters: It is easier for young girls of color to aspire to reach their highest goals when they see others who have done so before them, in the same way that women like Jane Bolin, Constance Baker Motley and Julia Cooper Mack encouraged Ketanji Brown Jackson to reach hers.

Echoes of the past

The fact that a Black female Supreme Court justice is long overdue is testament to the slow progress the U.S. has made toward racial – and gender – equality.

Margaret Russell, a constitutional law professor from Santa Clara University, saw signs of this lack of advancement during parts of Jackson’s Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings.

Questions directed at the would-be Supreme Court justice were, according to Russell, tantamount to race-baiting. They also sounded eerily similar to criticisms that then-Supreme Court nominee Thurgood Marshall, the first Black American nominee to the court, faced in his own confirmation hearings in 1967.

Both Jackson now, and Marshall then, stood accused by senators of being soft on crime and were asked about how they intended to bring race into their legal decisions. “Are you prejudiced against white people in the South?” Marshall was asked by a known white supremacist senator. Similarly, Jackson was asked during her confirmation hearings if she had a “hidden agenda” to incorporate critical race theory, which holds that racism is structural in nature rather than expressed solely through personal bias, into the legal system.

“I find it striking,” Russell writes, “that race has surfaced in such a major way in these hearings, more than five decades after Marshall’s nomination. In some respects, there has been progress on racial equity in the U.S., but aspects of these hearings demonstrate that too much remains the same.”

What Jackson would bring to the Supreme Court

Jackson’s potentially historic achievement of becoming the first Black female Supreme Court justice may distract from the fact she is also eminently qualified to sit on the highest court in her own rights.

Alexis Karteron of Rutgers University-Newark notes that the Harvard law-trained Jackson went on to clerk for Stephen Breyer, the retiring justice she is set to replace. She has served on the U.S. Sentencing Commission as well as acting as both a trial court and appellate judge.

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Jackson is also the first former criminal defense attorney to be nominated to the Supreme Court since Marshall. This puts Jackson in a unique position on the bench. Karteron writes that having served as a public defender “will help [Jackson] understand the very real human toll of our criminal justice system. … The criminal justice system takes an enormous toll on both the people in the system and their loved ones. I believe having a Supreme Court justice who is familiar with that is incredibly valuable.”

Matt Williams, Breaking News Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Climate Solutions, News, Observation, Politics

These energy innovations could transform how we mitigate climate change, and save money in the process – 5 essential reads

To most people, a solar farm or a geothermal plant is simply a power producer. Scientists and engineers see far more potential.

They envision offshore wind turbines capturing and storing carbon beneath the sea, and geothermal plants producing essential metals for powering electric vehicles. Electric vehicle batteries, too, can be transformed to power homes, saving their owners money.

photo credit / pexels

With scientists worldwide sounding the alarm about the increasing dangers and costs of climate change, let’s explore some cutting-edge ideas that could transform how today’s technologies reduce the effects of global warming, from five recent articles in The Conversation.

1. Solar canals: Power + water protection

What if solar panels did double duty, protecting water supplies while producing more power?

California is developing the United States’ first solar canals, with solar panels built atop some of the state’s water distribution canals. These canals run for thousands of miles through arid environments, where the dry air boosts evaporation in a state frequently troubled by water shortages.

“In a 2021 study, we showed that covering all 4,000 miles of California’s canals with solar panels would save more than 65 billion gallons of water annually by reducing evaporation. That’s enough to irrigate 50,000 acres of farmland or meet the residential water needs of more than 2 million people,” writes engineering professor Roger Bales of the University of California, Merced. They would also expand renewable energy without taking up farmable land.

Research shows that human activities, particularly using fossil fuels for energy and transportation, are unequivocally warming the planet and increasing extreme weather. Increasing renewable energy, currently about 20% of U.S. utility-scale electricity generation, can reduce fossil fuel demand.

Putting solar panels over shaded water can also improve their power output. The cooler water lowers the temperature of the panels by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 Celsius), boosting their efficiency, Bales writes.

2. Geothermal power could boost battery supplies

For renewable energy to slash global greenhouse gas emissions, buildings and vehicles have to be able to use it. Batteries are essential, but the industry has a supply chain problem.

Most batteries used in electric vehicles and utility-scale energy storage are lithium-ion batteries, and most lithium used in the U.S. comes from Argentina, Chile, China and Russia. China is the leader in lithium processing.

Geologist and engineers are working on an innovative method that could boost the U.S. lithium supply at home by extracting lithium from geothermal brines in California’s Salton Sea region.

Brines are the liquid leftover in a geothermal plant after heat and steam are used to produce power. That liquid contains lithium and other metals such as manganese, zinc and boron. Normally, it is pumped back underground, but the metals can also be filtered out. https://www.youtube.com/embed/oYtyEVPGEU8?wmode=transparent&start=0 How lithium is extracted during geothermal energy production. Courtesy of Controlled Thermal Resources.

“If test projects now underway prove that battery-grade lithium can be extracted from these brines cost effectively, 11 existing geothermal plants along the Salton Sea alone could have the potential to produce enough lithium metal to provide about 10 times the current U.S. demand,” write geologist Michael McKibben of the University of California, Riverside, and energy policy scholar Bryant Jones of Boise State University.

President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act on March 31, 2022, to provide incentives for U.S. companies to mine and process more critical minerals for batteries.

3. Green hydrogen and other storage ideas

Scientists are working on other ways to boost batteries’ mineral supply chain, too, including recycling lithium and cobalt from old batteries. They’re also developing designs with other materials, explained Kerry Rippy, a researcher with the National Renewable Energy Lab.

Concentrated solar power, for example, stores energy from the sun by heating molten salt and using it to produce steam to drive electric generators, similar to how a coal power plant would generate electricity. It’s expensive, though, and the salts currently used aren’t stable at higher temperature, Rippy writes. The Department of Energy is funding a similar project that is experimenting with heated sand. https://www.youtube.com/embed/fkX-H24Chfw?wmode=transparent&start=0 Hydrogen’s challenges, including its fossil fuel history.

Renewable fuels, such as green hydrogen and ammonia, provide a different type of storage. Since they store energy as liquid, they can be transported and used for shipping or rocket fuel.

Hydrogen gets a lot of attention, but not all hydrogen is green. Most hydrogen used today is actually produced with natural gas – a fossil fuel. Green hydrogen, in contrast, could be produced using renewable energy to power electrolysis, which splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, but again, it’s expensive.

“The key challenge is optimizing the process to make it efficient and economical,” Rippy writes. “The potential payoff is enormous: inexhaustible, completely renewable energy.”

4. Using your EV to power your home

Batteries could also soon turn your electric vehicle into a giant, mobile battery capable of powering your home.

Only a few vehicles are currently designed for vehicle-to-home charging, or V2H, but that’s changing, writes energy economist Seth Blumsack of Penn State University. Ford, for example, says its new F-150 Lightning pickup truck will be able to power an average house for three days on a single charge. https://www.youtube.com/embed/w4XLBOnzE6Q?wmode=transparent&start=0 How bidirectional charging allows EVs to power homes.

Blumsack explores the technical challenges as V2H grows and its potential to change how people manage energy use and how utilities store power.

For example, he writes, “some homeowners might hope to use their vehicle for what utility planners call ‘peak shaving’ – drawing household power from their EV during the day instead of relying on the grid, thus reducing their electricity purchases during peak demand hours.”

5. Capturing carbon from air and locking it away

Another emerging technology is more controversial.

Humans have put so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the past two centuries that just stopping fossil fuel use won’t be enough to quickly stabilize the climate. Most scenarios, including in recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, show the world will have to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as well.

The technology to capture carbon dioxide from the air exists – it’s called direct air capture – but it’s expensive.

Engineers and geophysicists like David Goldberg of Columbia University are exploring ways to cut those costs by combining direct air capture technology with renewable energy production and carbon storage, like offshore wind turbines built above undersea rock formations where captured carbon could be locked away.

The world’s largest direct air capture plant, launched in 2021 in Iceland, uses geothermal energy to power its equipment. The captured carbon dioxide is mixed with water and pumped into volcanic basalt formations underground. Chemical reactions with the basalt turn it into a hard carbonate.

Goldberg, who helped developed the mineralization process used in Iceland, sees similar potential for future U.S. offshore wind farms. Wind turbines often produce more energy than their customers need at any given time, making excess energy available.

“Built together, these technologies could reduce the energy costs of carbon capture and minimize the need for onshore pipelines, reducing impacts on the environment,” Goldberg writes.

Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.

Stacy Morford, Environment + Climate Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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News, Observation, Politics, Science

Nuclear fusion hit a milestone thanks to better reactor walls – this engineering advance is building toward reactors of the future

Scientists at a laboratory in England have shattered the record for the amount of energy produced during a controlled, sustained fusion reaction. The production of 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds at the Joint European Torus – or JET – experiment in England has been called “a breakthrough” by some news outlets and caused quite a lot of excitement among physicists. But a common line regarding fusion electricity production is that it is “always 20 years away.”

photo collage / Lynxotic / adobe stock

We are a nuclear physicist and a nuclear engineer who study how to develop controlled nuclear fusion for the purpose of generating electricity.

The JET result demonstrates remarkable advancements in the understanding of the physics of fusion. But just as importantly, it shows that the new materials used to construct the inner walls of the fusion reactor worked as intended. The fact that the new wall construction performed as well as it did is what separates these results from previous milestones and elevates magnetic fusion from a dream toward a reality.

Fusing particles together

Nuclear fusion is the merging of two atomic nuclei into one compound nucleus. This nucleus then breaks apart and releases energy in the form of new atoms and particles that speed away from the reaction. A fusion power plant would capture the escaping particles and use their energy to generate electricity.

There are a few different ways to safely control fusion on Earth. Our research focuses on the approach taken by JET – using powerful magnetic fields to confine atoms until they are heated to a high enough temperature for them to fuse.

The fuel for current and future reactors are two different isotopes of hydrogen – meaning they have the one proton, but different numbers of neutrons – called deuterium and tritium. Normal hydrogen has one proton and no neutrons in its nucleus. Deuterium has one proton and one neutron while tritium has one proton and two neutrons.

For a fusion reaction to be successful, the fuel atoms must first become so hot that the electrons break free from the nuclei. This creates plasma – a collection of positive ions and electrons. You then need to keep heating that plasma until it reaches a temperature over 200 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 million Celsius). This plasma must then be kept in a confined space at high densities for a long enough period of time for the fuel atoms to collide into each other and fuse together.

To control fusion on Earth, researchers developed donut-shaped devices – called tokamaks – which use magnetic fields to contain the plasma. Magnetic field lines wrapping around the inside of the donut act like train tracks that the ions and electrons follow. By injecting energy into the plasma and heating it up, it is possible to accelerate the fuel particles to such high speeds that when they collide, instead of bouncing off each other, the fuel nuclei fuse together. When this happens, they release energy, primarily in the form of fast-moving neutrons.

During the fusion process, fuel particles gradually drift away from the hot, dense core and eventually collide with the inner wall of the fusion vessel. To prevent the walls from degrading due to these collisions – which in turn also contaminates the fusion fuel – reactors are built so that they channel the wayward particles toward a heavily armored chamber called the divertor. This pumps out the diverted particles and removes any excess heat to protect the tokamak.

The walls are important

A major limitation of past reactors has been the fact that divertors can’t survive the constant particle bombardment for more than a few seconds. To make fusion power work commercially, engineers need to build a tokamak vessel that will survive for years of use under the conditions necessary for fusion.

The divertor wall is the first consideration. Though the fuel particles are much cooler when they reach the divertor, they still have enough energy to knock atoms loose from the wall material of the divertor when they collide with it. Previously, JET’s divertor had a wall made of graphite, but graphite absorbs and traps too much of the fuel for practical use.

Around 2011, engineers at JET upgraded the divertor and inner vessel walls to tungsten. Tungsten was chosen in part because it has the highest melting point of any metal – an extremely important trait when the divertor is likely to experience heat loads nearly 10 times higher than the nose cone of a space shuttle reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. The inner vessel wall of the tokamak was upgraded from graphite to beryllium. Beryllium has excellent thermal and mechanical properties for a fusion reactor – it absorbs less fuel than graphite but can still withstand the high temperatures.

The energy JET produced was what made the headlines, but we’d argue it is in fact the use of the new wall materials which make the experiment truly impressive because future devices will need these more robust walls to operate at high power for even longer periods of time. JET is a successful proof of concept for how to build the next generation of fusion reactors.

The next fusion reactors

The JET tokamak is the largest and most advanced magnetic fusion reactor currently operating. But the next generation of reactors is already in the works, most notably the ITER experiment, set to begin operations in 2027. ITER – which is Latin for “the way” – is under construction in France and funded and directed by an international organization that includes the U.S.

ITER is going to put to use many of the material advances JET showed to be viable. But there are also some key differences. First, ITER is massive. The fusion chamber is 37 feet (11.4 meters) tall and 63 feet (19.4 meters) around – more than eight times larger than JET. In addition, ITER will utilize superconducting magnets capable of producing stronger magnetic fields for longer periods of time compared to JET’s magnets. With these upgrades, ITER is expected to smash JET’s fusion records – both for energy output and how long the reaction will run.

ITER is also expected to do something central to the idea of a fusion powerplant: produce more energy than it takes to heat the fuel. Models predict that ITER will produce around 500 megawatts of power continuously for 400 seconds while only consuming 50 MW of energy to heat the fuel. This mean the reactor produced 10 times more energy than it consumed – a huge improvement over JET, which required roughly three times more energy to heat the fuel than it produced for its recent 59 megajoule record.

JET’s recent record has shown that years of research in plasma physics and materials science have paid off and brought scientists to the doorstep of harnessing fusion for power generation. ITER will provide an enormous leap forward toward the goal of industrial scale fusion power plants.

[You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter.]

David Donovan, Associate Professor of Nuclear Engineering, University of Tennessee and Livia Casali, Assistant Professor of Nuclear Engineering, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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News, Observation, Politics

The Outrageous Story About the Postal Service Too Many Know Nothing About

Following a 16-year bet Republicans laid down in 2006 to block Postal EVs, DeJoy just told Biden to go screw himself: he’s going to buy fossil-fuel vehicles for 90% of the fleet instead of electric.

The Republicans are about to win a major battle in their war on electric vehicles, this time with the second largest vehicle fleet in America owned by the US Postal Service. It’s an outrageous story that most Americans don’t know a thing about.

Transportation, after all, is the single largest source of global warming emissions from the United States. And the Post Office once thought they could do something about it.

To understand what’s going on with the Post Office right now, you first must know the backstory that, it seems, most media outlets aren’t interested in discussing. It’s an issue that’s hitting millions of Americans right now.

One of our kids, for example, recently became the first member of our family to buy a fully 100% electric car. She was so excited and has loved it driving around Portland…until she had to drive to another state for a conference, when she discovered what a problem America not having an electric charging infrastructure causes.

The way to solve this problem, of course, is to have a substantial and massive increase in electric vehicles and that’s exactly what the Post Office set out to jump-start back in 2006.  

Transportation, after all, is the single largest source of global warming emissions from the United States. And the Post Office once thought they could do something about it.

Things were going well for the Post Office in 2006.

They were making money and had a surplus. They were therefore seriously considering replacing a large part of their fleet—the largest fleet of civilian vehicles in the nation—with electric and hybrid vehicles.

It would be a mighty boost for the electric car, and a huge slap in the face of the fossil fuel barons who had an outsized say in the Republican Party.

On May 17, 2006 Walter O’Tormey, the Post Office’s Vice President, Engineering, unveiled a new hybrid gas/electric mail delivery vehicle in Boston to an audience of “nearly 100 industry representatives, environmentalists, and Postal Service employees,” saying:

“As an agency that delivers mail to 145 million businesses and households six days a week, drives approximately 1.1 billion miles a year, and consumes more than 125 million gallons of motor fuel annually, we are in a unique position to demonstrate to the public and other businesses the growing viability and positive environmental and energy-savings benefits of alternate-fuel technologies.”

In their 2006 annual report the Postal Service openly bragged about their ambition to move away from relying entirely on fossil fuels:

“With more than 216,000 vehicles, the Postal Service has the largest civilian fleet in the United States.  We continue to evaluate various fuel types and alternative fuel vehicles including hybrid trucks, hydrogen fuel cell vans, electric step vans and liquid natural gas delivery vehicles.”

If the Post Office pulled off a massive transition away from fossil fuels, it would jump-start the then-new electric, hybrid and fuel cell technologies, paving the way for wider use, a large national electric “refueling” infrastructure, and a significant reduction in greenhouse gasses.

Americans were excited by the possibility. Speaking on behalf of a coalition of mayors from all parts of the country to the World Congress on Information Technology annual conference in Austin on May 6, 2006, Austin Mayor Will Winn proudly announced:

“Transitioning the Postal fleet to plug-ins would serve as a springboard for the commercial production of delivery vehicles that could be extended to a wide variety of delivery services across America.

“The commercial market would also provide the economic certainty needed by automakers to make the production investments necessary for the mass production of plug-ins.

“The plug-in technology is available right now and represents a realistic near-term solution to the serious problems of over-reliance on foreign oil, out of control gasoline prices, as well as greenhouse emissions.”

Given that postal vehicles typically have a 30-year lifespan, this would produce a huge tilt in the balance of alternative-versus-fossil-fuel vehicles on the road.

But the possibility of that transition happening to the nation’s largest vehicle fleet was, in a word, intolerable to the morbidly rich rightwingers who’d made their fortunes drilling, refining, shipping and selling fossil fuels, particularly oil, diesel and gasoline.

The Post Office had to be stopped, and Republican Congressman John McHugh (NY) was just the man to do it. He’d been a member of the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and was deeply in the pocket of right-wing interests.

As Wikipedia notes in an exercise of gentle understatement:

“[McHugh] was chairman of the Oversight Committee’s Postal Service Subcommittee for six years and worked to pass legislation to significantly reform the U.S. Postal Service for the first time since it was demoted from a Cabinet-rank department with passage of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (Pub.L. 109–435) in 2006.”

ALEC, which writes corporate-friendly legislation and relies on its membership of Republican lawmakers around the nation to pass that legislation, just happened to have a model 2006 bill known as the Unfunded Pensions Liabilities Act, which called on state governments to account for exactly how they plan to fund future retiree benefits.

Adapting that ALEC concept to the Post Office, McHugh’s bill was passed by a voice vote in a Republican Congress and signed by Republican President George W. Bush. There is no record whatsoever of who voted or how they voted on the legislation. 

It was preceded, however, by a virtual waterfall of op-eds and PR efforts by groups affiliated with the Koch network including the Reason Foundation, the National Taxpayer’s Union, and the CATO Institute.

What the law did was ram a poison pill down the throat of the Post Office.

It required the USPS to pre-fund its Retiree Health Benefits Fund for seventy years into the future, forcing the Post Office to take the money they planned to spend on electric vehicles and set it aside for the health benefits of future retirees who weren’t even born yet (and should be eligible for Medicare, anyway).

It’s an obligation that no other private business or government agency has ever had to comply with before.

Costing the Post Office $5 billion a year, it succeeded in stopping their plan to electrify their fleet dead in its tracks.

And it set it up more cleanly for eventual privatization, once enough infrastructure like postal drop boxes and million-dollar high-speed sorting machines was destroyed—a process Reagan called “Starve the Beast”—that “customers” were complaining about the service and public opinion finally agreed the Post Office would work better in private hands.

Reagan had tried to do the same thing to Social Security and the IRS, and Trump doubled down on that plan, offering tens of thousands of staffers early retirement to gut both agencies; they’re now so hobbled by underfunding and worker shortages that Social Security disability claims can take two years, and extremely wealthy people are no longer generally audited at all because of the cost and manpower needs determined by their complexity.

Which brings us to Louis DeJoy. 

The Post Office is finally on the verge of getting out from under that $5 billion-a-year prefunding burden so they can now start buying that new fleet they proposed in 2006. 

Postmaster General DeJoy was strongly encouraged by the Biden administration to give the contract to a company that would manufacture electric and electric/hybrid vehicles.

But DeJoy essentially told Biden to go screw himself: he’s going to buy fossil-fuel vehicles for 90% of the fleet instead.  

The Washington Post laid it all out in the open to an article last week titled: Biden Officials Push to Hold Up $11.3 Billion USPS Truck Contract, Citing Climate Damage, noting:

“The Biden administration launched a last-minute push Wednesday to derail the U.S. Postal Service’s plan to spend billions of dollars on a new fleet of gasoline-powered delivery trucks, citing the damage the polluting vehicles could inflict on the climate and Americans’ health.

“The dispute over the Postal Service’s plans to spend up to $11.3 billion on as many as 165,000 new delivery trucks over the next decade has major implications for President Biden’s goal of converting all federal cars and trucks to clean power.”

And it’s not just the White House that’s outraged. CNN reported yesterday:

“Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, called for DeJoy’s resignation.

“‘Postmaster General DeJoy’s plan to spend billions on brand new gas-powered vehicles is in direct contradiction to the stated goals of Congress and the President to eliminate emissions from the federal fleet,’ Connolly said in a statement. ‘If Mr. DeJoy won’t resign, the Board of Governors has got to fire him — now.'”

Because Republican senators are holding up confirmation of Biden’s Postal Board of Governors’ appointees, DeJoy can’t be fired by the current Trump-appointee-dominated board, a fact that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse pointed out last week, demanding the Senate move the Democratic nominees forward over GOP objections.

But DeJoy is itching to sign the contract for all those gas and diesel vehicles, and he still has the power to do so.

So, now that the possibility of electrifying the nation’s (now second) largest fleet of vehicles is pretty much dead and they’re planning to go ahead with fossil fuels, Republicans in Congress are fine with eliminating the retirement prefunding dead weight on the Post Office. 

The vote in the House this week was 342-90 to end the prefunding requirement and give DeJoy the money to buy the gas-powered vehicles. Now it goes to the Senate, where the AP noted:

“Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said he expects his chamber to ‘move quickly’ on the measure. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he’s planning a vote before a recess that starts after next week. The bill has 14 GOP sponsors and, with strong Democratic support expected, seems on track to gain the 60 votes most bills need for Senate passage.”

When asked Wednesday night on MSNBC why Congress had crippled the Post Office with that bizarre prefunding requirement in the first place, Senator Peters—one of the truly good guys in the US Senate—answered that he had no idea.

As is the case with most members of Congress; the pre-funding was essentially slipped into the bill at the behest of the fossil fuel industry and, at the time, got virtually no publicity. Thus, I tweeted him:

It was incomplete on my part to miss the privatization bonus in the tweet, and the vendor will supply gasoline vehicles as well, but you get the point.

Like so many other weirdnesses in American politics, when you pull back the veil you find the hands of a fossil fuel industry that values profits and right wing ideology over the future of our children, our nation and the planet.

This article was first published on The Hartmann Report.

Originally published on Common Dreams by THOM HARTMANN under a  Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

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News, Observation, Politics

Biden Urged to Fire Entire USPS Board for Complicity in ‘Devastating Arson’ by Trump and DeJoy

This article originally appeared at Common Dreams. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

Democratic Congressman Bill Pascrell, Jr. of New Jersey on Monday urged President Joe Biden to terminate all six sitting members of the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors for their “silence and complicity” in the face of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and former President Donald Trump’s full-scale assault on the beloved government mail agency.

“Through the devastating arson of the Trump regime, the USPS Board of Governors sat silent,” Pascrell wrote in a letter to Biden.

“Their dereliction cannot now be forgotten. Therefore, I urge you to fire the entire Board of Governors and nominate a new slate of leaders to begin the hard work of rebuilding our Postal Service for the next century.”

–Bill Pascrell, Jr

While the president does not have the authority under current law to fire DeJoy—a Republican megadonor to Trump who was unanimously appointed by the USPS Board of Governors last May—Biden does have the power to remove postal governors “for cause.” At present, the board consists entirely of Trump appointees—two Democrats and four Republicans.

Pascrell argued Monday that “the board members’ refusal to oppose the worst destruction ever inflicted on the Postal Service was a betrayal of their duties and unquestionably constitutes good cause for their removal.”

Election season chaos comes back to haunt

Far from opposing DeJoy’s sweeping operational changes—which resulted in massively disruptive, nationwide mail delays that persisted through the November election and holiday season—USPS governors publicly praised the postmaster general, with one Republican board member gushing in September that “the board is tickled pink, every single board member, with the impact” DeJoy was having on the agency.

That glowing assessment of DeJoy’s performance during his first several months on the job did not comport with the experiences of postal workers—who in some cases resisted DeJoy’s policies—or the agency’s own internal evaluations, which showed that widespread delays followed the postmaster general’s changes.

DeJoy put his damaging policy moves on hold in August amid nationwide outrage and accusations that he was working to disrupt the election for Trump’s benefit. With the presidential election now in the past, DeJoy has recently signaled he plans to push ahead with his agenda.

In his letter to Biden, Pascrell wrote that the “continued challenges in preserving our Postal Service to survive and endure are gargantuan, and so demand bold solutions to meet them.”

“To begin that work,” Pascrell added, “we must have a governing body that can be trusted to represent the public interest.”

There are currently four vacancies in top leadership positions at USPS, including three governor spots and the deputy postmaster general role. If Biden fills the remaining vacancies—USPS governors must be confirmed by the Senate—Democrats will have a majority on the board and potentially the votes needed to remove DeJoy from office.

“Trump confessed he was wrecking USPS to rig the election. His toady Postmaster General DeJoy carried out that arson. It’s time to clean house,”

Pascrell tweeted Monday. “DeJoy should be fired but also prosecuted.”

Asked about Pascrell’s demand during a briefing on Monday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, “It’s an interesting question.”

“We all love the mailman and mailwoman,” said Psaki. “I don’t have anything for you on it. I’m happy to check with our team on it and see if we have any specifics. I’m not aware of anything, but we’ll circle back with you.”

Read Pascrell’s full letter:

Dear President Biden:

After several years of unprecedented sabotage, the United States Postal Service (USPS) is teetering on the brink of collapse. Through the devastating arson of the Trump regime, the USPS Board of Governors sat silent. Their dereliction cannot now be forgotten. Therefore, I urge you to fire the entire Board of Governors and nominate a new slate of leaders to begin the hard work of rebuilding our Postal Service for the next century.

According to a report by the USPS Office of Inspector General, operational changes imposed by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy “negatively impacted the quality and timeliness of mail service nationally” and were “implemented quickly and communicated primarily orally,” resulting in confusion and inconsistent application across the country. As DeJoy’s efforts to dismantle mail sorting machines, cut overtime, restrict deliveries, and remove mailboxes slowed mail nationally, Donald Trump himself openly admitted that his administration was withholding funding for the Postal Service in order to make it harder to process mail-in ballots.

Things became so bad that on August 14, 2020, I filed a complaint with our state’s Attorney General calling on him to seek indictments against your predecessor and the Postmaster General for election subversion. Postal operations have continued to severely lag benchmark levels under DeJoy and this slate of Governors. This holiday season, USPS reported an unprecedented level of mail disruption, with only 64 percent of first-class mail delivered on time in late December. Through it all, the Governors were either silent or in support of DeJoy’s havoc.

The members of the USPS Board of Governors have but one central responsibility: “represent[ing] the public interest.” Members may be removed by the President “only for cause.” The board members’ refusal to oppose the worst destruction ever inflicted on the Postal Service was a betrayal of their duties and unquestionably constitutes good cause for their removal.

As America’s perhaps most enduringly trusted institution, a central economic and social engine for every community in America, and a vital vanguard of the democratic tradition, the Post Office must play an essential role in our national life for generations to come. The continued challenges in preserving our Postal Service to survive and endure are gargantuan, and so demand bold solutions to meet them. To begin that work, we must have a governing body that can be trusted to represent the public interest. Thank you for your continued dedication to saving our Post Office.

Sincerely,

Bill Pascrell, Jr.

Member of Congress

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News, Politics

Biden bets a million barrels a day will drive down soaring gas prices – what you need to know about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve

Several sites, such as one near Freeport, Texas, store the hundreds of million of barrels in the United States’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Department of Energy via AP

Scott L. Montgomery, University of Washington

The Biden administration on March 31, 2022, said it plans to release an unprecedented 180 million barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to combat the recent spike in gas and diesel prices. About a million barrels of oil will be released every day for up to six months.

If all the oil is released, it would represent almost one-third of the current volume of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It follows a release of 30 million barrels in early March, a large withdrawal until the latest one.

But what is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, why was it created, and when has it been used? And does it still serve a purpose, given that the U.S. exports more oil and other petroleum products than it imports?

As an energy researcher, I believe considering the reserve’s history can help answer these questions.

Origins of the reserve

Congress created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 in response to a global oil crisis.

Arab oil-exporting states led by Saudi Arabia had cut supply to the world market because of Western support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Oil prices quadrupled, resulting in major economic damage to the U.S. and other countries. This also shook the average American, who had grown used to cheap oil.

The oil crisis caused the U.S., Japan and 15 other advanced countries to form the International Energy Agency in 1974 to recommend policies that would forestall such events in the future. One of the agency’s key ideas was to create emergency petroleum reserves that could be drawn on in case of a severe supply disruption.

The map shows the locations of the oil held in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Department of Energy

The Energy Policy and Conservation Act originally stipulated the reserve should hold up to 1 billion barrels of crude and refined petroleum products. Though it has never reached that size, the U.S. reserve is the largest in the world, with a maximum volume of 714 million barrels. The cap was previously set at 727 million barrels.

As of March 25, 2022, the reserve contained about 568 million barrels.

Oil in the reserve is stored underground in a series of large underground salt domes in four locations along the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana, and is linked to major supply pipelines in the region.

Salt domes, formed when a mass of salt is forced upward, are a good choice for storage since salt is impermeable and has low solubility in crude oil. Most of the storage sites were acquired by the federal government in 1977 and became fully operational in the 1980s.

History of drawdowns

In the 1975 act, Congress specified that the reserve was intended to prevent “severe supply interruptions” – that is, actual oil shortages.

Over time, as the oil market has changed, Congress expanded the list of reasons for which the Strategic Petroleum Reserve could be tapped, such as domestic supply interruptions due to extreme weather.

Prior to March 2022, about 280 million barrels of crude oil had been released since the reserve’s creation, including a 50 million release that began in November 2021.

There have only been three emergency releases in the reserve’s history. The first was in 1991 after Iraq invaded Kuwait the year before, which resulted in a sharp drop in oil supply to the world market. The U.S. released 34 million barrels.

The second release, of 30 million barrels, came in 2005 after Hurricanes Rita and Katrina knocked out Gulf of Mexico production, which then comprised about 25% of U.S. domestic supply.

The third was a coordinated release by the International Energy Agency in 2011 as a result of supply disruptions from several oil-producing countries, including Libya, then facing civil unrest during the Arab Spring. In all, the agency coordinated a release of 60 million barrels of crude, half of which came from the U.S.

In addition, there have been 11 planned sales of oil from the reserve, mainly to generate federal revenue. One of these – the 1996-1997 sale to reduce the federal budget deficit – seemed to serve political ends rather than supply-related ones.

A better way to avoid pain at the pump

President Joe Biden’s November decision to tap the reserve was also seen as political by Republicans because there was no emergency shortage of supply at that time.

Similarly, the latest historic release of 180 million barrels could also be seen as serving a political purpose – in an election year, no less. But I believe it also seems perfectly legitimate in terms of fulfilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve’s original purpose: reducing the negative impacts of a major oil price shock.

Though the U.S. is today a net petroleum exporter, it continues to import as much as 8.2 million barrels of crude oil every day.

[Over 150,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletters to understand the world. Sign up today.]

But in my view, the best way to avoid the pain of oil price shocks is to lower oil demand by reducing global carbon emissions – rather than mainly relying on releases from the reserve.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Nov. 24, 2021.

Scott L. Montgomery, Lecturer, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Crypto, Politics

Behind the Crypto Hype is an Ideology of Social Change

For some, promoting cryptocurrencies is political activism.Photo collage – // Lynxotic / Adobe

Rick Wash, Michigan State University

Ads for blockchain, NFTs and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin seem to be everywhere. Crypto technologies are being promoted as a replacement for banks; a new way to buy art; the next big investment opportunity, and an essential part of the metaverse.

To many, these technologies are confusing or risky. But enthusiasts ardently promote them.

As a cybersecurity and social media researcher, I’ve found that behind the hype is an ideology about social change: Hardcore enthusiasts argue that crypto will get people to trust in technology rather than government, which they see as inherently untrustworthy. This ideology leads people to encourage its use while downplaying its risks.

The true believers

My colleagues and I studied almost three months of discussions on Reddit forums about cryptocurrencies to try to understand how people talk about crypto and Bitcoin. The loudest voices on the forum were a group of crypto enthusiasts who called themselves “True Bitcoiners.” Unlike technology enthusiasts or crypto marketers, “true bitcoiners” didn’t talk about technology, or about their own use of crypto. Instead, they talked about trust and corruption.

These crypto enthusiasts often cite examples of what they see as government corruption and corporate corruption. They recognize that society depends on governments and corporations setting and enforcing rules, and they complain that people are stuck with these “corrupt” institutions. Corruption, they say, is an inevitable flaw in humanity and leads to trying to control and mistreat others.

The enthusiasts see Bitcoin, blockchain and other crypto technologies as providing an alternative to the corruption. They argue that these new technologies are “trustless” and don’t depend on institutions. You can buy and sell things using bitcoin without checking with a bank or using government-issued cash. https://www.youtube.com/embed/3xGLc-zz9cA?wmode=transparent&start=0 Blockchain, the technology underlying cryptocurrencies, keeps records of ownership and transactions without requiring trust in anyone or any institution.

These two beliefs – that governments are corrupt and that crypto avoids that corruption – are common among the crypto enthusiasts we studied. But enthusiasts go one step further. They seek change. They want to change who has power and who doesn’t.

They argue that crypto is how that change will happen. For crypto enthusiasts, using crypto isn’t just a way to buy and sell things. By using crypto technologies, they argue, society will become less dependent on governments and corporations. That is, using crypto – and getting as many people as possible to use it as much as possible – is a way to change the world and take power away from governments.

Pushing an ideology

These beliefs about who should and should not have power in society embody an ideology. An important part of the crypto ideology is that this change can’t happen unless people use crypto. The technology and the ideology are tied together.

For many of these enthusiasts, recommending crypto to other people is not just a technology recommendation. To them, buying and selling crypto is a form of political and social activism. They argue that buying crypto will remove corruption and change society to trust technology over government.

This ideology is a more extreme version of technolibertarianism, which seeks to replace government with technology. Like technolibertarians, true bitcoiners want technology to control society. But they focus on financial and economic control more than civil liberties. And because promoting crypto is part of this ideology, crypto has often been compared with a religion.

Crypto dangers

An important aspect of any ideology is the way it emphasizes some dangers and downplays others. True bitcoiners emphasize the problems with government corruption. But they downplay the financial risks of crypto. The price of Bitcoin fluctuates wildly, and many people have lost money buying crypto. Crypto wallets are difficult to understand and use, and fraudulent transactions are difficult to reverse.

Crypto enthusiasts frequently downplay the technology’s risks to people and society. They also dismiss the valuable role that governments and corporations play in protecting people’s money, providing insurance for bank accounts and returning money that’s been stolen.

Beliefs in crypto’s ability to create social change are also overstated. Crypto technologies don’t necessarily eliminate corporations or avoid government control. There are private, corporate blockchains and many government regulations about cryptocurrencies. As I see it, simply using the technology doesn’t necessarily lead to the social change these enthusiasts seek.

[Science, politics, religion or just plain interesting articles: Check out The Conversation’s weekly newsletters.]

Rick Wash, Associate Professor of Information Science and Cybersecurity, Michigan State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Business, News, Observation, Politics

Workers in New York Vote to Form Amazon’s First-Ever Union in US

“We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space, because while he was up there, we were organizing a union,” said Christian Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union.

Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic / Pixels / Adobe Stock

Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island, New York won their election Friday to form the retail giant’s first-ever union in the United States, a landmark victory for the labor movement in the face of aggressive union-busting efforts from one of the world’s most powerful companies.

According to an initial tally released by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), there were 2,654 votes in favor of recognizing a union and 2,131 against. The number of disputed ballots, 67, is not nearly enough to change the outcome.

The historic unionization drive was spearheaded by the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), a worker-led group not affiliated with any established union. Christian Smalls, the president of ALU, was fired by Amazon in 2020 after he led a protest against the company’s poor workplace safety standards in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.

“When Covid-19 came into play, Amazon failed us,” Smalls said during a press conference after the union victory was announced. “We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space, because while he was up there, we were organizing a union.”

Long-time labor journalist Steven Greenhouse wrote Friday that “the unionization victory at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island is by far the biggest, beating-the-odds, David-versus-Goliath unionization win I’ve seen.”

“America’s wealthiest, most powerful, most seemingly indispensable company has lost to a pop-up coalition of workers,” Greenhouse added. “A generation, the younger generation, is stirring.”

Amazon, which spent $4.3 million on anti-union consultants in 2021 alone, worked hard to crush the unionization effort, forcing employees to attend hundreds of captive-audience meetings and threatening workers with pay cuts and other potential consequences.

But the company’s union-busting campaign wasn’t enough to overcome the upstart revolt led by ALU, which was founded just months ago.

Derrick Palmer, a co-founder of ALU and an employee at the Staten Island warehouse, said he expects Friday’s victory to be one of many.

“This will be the first union,” said Palmer, “but moving forward, that will motivate other workers to get on board with us.”

Widespread celebration followed the official announcement of the union’s election win, with progressive lawmakers and activists hailing the victory as a potential watershed moment for the U.S. labor movement, which has struggled for decades in the face of corporate America’s relentless assault. Union membership in the U.S. declined by 241,000 workers in 2021, according to Labor Department figures.

“The organizing victory at Amazon on Staten Island is a signal that American workers will no longer accept exploitation,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted Friday. “They’re tired of working longer hours for lower wages. They want an economy that works for all, not just Jeff Bezos.”

The union has much work ahead of it. As HuffPost labor reporter Dave Jamieson noted, the union must now negotiate “a first collective bargaining agreement with one of the most powerful companies in the world.”

“It can take years for a union to secure a first contract, and some never manage to,” Jamieson wrote. “Amazon would have a strong incentive not to offer the union a decent deal, for fear it would only encourage more unionization elsewhere.”

 Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

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Business, Climate Solutions, News, Politics

As Consumers Pay, Oil CEO’s Refuse to Testify to Congress About Soaring Prices

“While Americans struggle with high gas prices, these companies are doing victory laps, showering their already wealthy executives and shareholders with billions in stock buybacks and bonus compensation,” said one watchdog group. “They should be ashamed.”

As people across the United States face record-high gas prices—compounded by rising grocery bills and prices for other essentials—executives at three major oil companies are refusing to testify before Congress about what their firms could do to lessen the burden on U.S. households, leaving Democratic lawmakers and consumer advocates to condemn the companies for profiting amid lower and middle-class people’s financial pain.

Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, had invited the CEOs of EOG Resources Inc., Devon Energy Corp. and Occidental Petroleum Corp. to testify next week, only to be rebuffedTuesday by the executives, who have personally profited off gas prices which averaged $4.24 per gallon on Monday.

“I invited these companies to come before the committee and make their case, but apparently they don’t think it’s worth defending,” Grijalva said in a statement Tuesday. “Their silence tells us all we need to know—that cries for more drilling and looser regulations are nothing more than another age-old attempt to line their own pockets.

Since oil and gas prices began rising earlier this year as traveling and commuting increased, and went up further following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the fossil fuel industry has claimed the Biden administration should release more permits for drilling on public lands and accelerate approval of permits for building energy infrastructure, with the American Petroleum Institute pushing for what Grijalva called “a domestic drilling free-for-all” earlier this month.

Lawmakers including Grijalva have argued that the companies could easily stabilize gas prices immediately, considering the billions of dollars in profits EOG Resources, Devon Energy, and Occidental Petroleum raked in last year.

Instead, watchdog group Accountable.US said Tuesday, Occidental Petroleum planned to use $3 billion for stock buybacks in 2022, while Devon Energy gave nearly $2 billion in share buybacks and dividends to shareholders last year. EOG Resources gave CEO William R. Thomas a $150,000 raise in 2021, making his total compensation $9.8 million.

“We want to work with them to reduce gas prices, but it seems as though they’re too busy taking in record profits while refusing to pass savings on to consumers,” said Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.), a member of the Natural Resources Committee.

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) sarcastically expressed empathy for the “spineless” executives who refused to testify before Grijalva’s committee.

“It is hardly surprising that EOG Resources, Devon Energy, and Occidental Petroleum are dodging accountability by refusing to testify in Congress,” said Kyle Herrig, president of watchdog group Accountable.US. “While Americans struggle with high gas prices, these companies are doing victory laps, showering their already wealthy executives and shareholders with billions in stock buybacks and bonus compensation. They should be ashamed.”

Grijalva noted that while the industry has used the Russian invasion of Ukraine to call for even more freedom to drill for oil and gas, fossil fuel companies hold leases on 26 million acres of land.

“These same companies already have over 9,000 approved permits they can use whenever they want,” Grijalva told Public News Service on Tuesday. “And the very companies with thousands of acres of existing leases and hundreds of unused permits are the same ones shouting that they need more land for drilling.”

According to Accountable.US, the three companies refusing to speak to Grijalva’s committee “are among the top leaseholders of public lands oil and gas leases with 4,114 leases covering nearly 1.5 million acres.”

Companies including BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Shell have also been invited to testify at upcoming hearings on their business practices and impacts on consumers. In February, board members from the four companies refused to testify about the firms’ climate pledges.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) noted last week that oil prices dropped in recent days, but no savings were passed onto consumers.

“The bewildering incongruity between falling oil prices and rising gas prices smacks of price gouging and is deeply damaging to working Americans,” Schumer said last week. “The Senate is going to get answers.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by JULIA CONLEY  and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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Finance, News, Politics

Taking Aim at Billionaire Tax Avoiders, Biden Proposes Minimum Tax for Ultrarich

by Paul Kiel, Jesse Eisinger and Jeff Ernsthausen

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.Series: The Secret IRS Files Inside the Tax Records of the .001%

Last year ProPublica, drawing on a trove of IRS data, gave the public its most extensive view ever of the taxes of the wealthiest Americans. The first article in the Secret IRS Files series put real numbers to a core truth about the U.S. tax system: Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett can easily shield their fortunes from taxation by avoiding the sorts of income captured on a tax return.

A proposal released today by the Biden administration takes direct aim at this issue. The policy, if enacted, would, for a sliver of the very wealthiest, close that escape hatch. Vast increases in wealth would result in owing taxes.

Generally, the IRS does not tax gains unless they are “realized,” typically when a person sells a stock that has gained in value. Billionaires who hold on to assets that have appreciated get the benefit of those unrealized gains — they often borrow against them — without owing any tax.

This is by no means a new bug in the U.S. system. But as ProPublica explained last year, the explosion of wealth inequality in recent decades, coupled with the particular nature of how these new fortunes have been built, has made unrealized gains particularly important at this point in our history.

Past U.S. presidents have, on occasion, pushed for higher taxes on the rich, but usually by hiking traditional income tax rates. Biden’s proposal calls for a paradigm shift: It would change what gets counted as income. “Although the taxation of unrealized gain is still far from enactment, and even if enacted would await an uncertain fate in the Supreme Court, presidential endorsement of the concept is a milestone in the history of the income tax,” said Lawrence Zelenak, a Duke University School of Law professor whose expertise includes income and corporate tax and tax policy.

As outlined by the White House, the new tax would apply only to households worth over $100 million. They would owe a tax of at least 20% on their “full income,” as a White House document terms it, a definition that includes unrealized gains. News of the proposal, which was included as part of Biden’s 2023 budget plan, was first reported by The Washington Post.

Under the current system, the wealthiest Americans pay nowhere close to that tax rate on gains in their wealth. The 25 richest Americans, as measured by Forbes, got $401 billion richer from 2014 to 2018. ProPublica’s analysis of the IRS data found that the group paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes during that time, a rate of only 3.4%.

In an analysis posted on Twitter, University of California Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman estimated that the 10 richest Americans alone would owe at least $215 billion under the plan.

In all, the Biden Administration estimates, the new tax would generate $360 billion in extra revenue over 10 years.

The plan would allow those hit by the tax a period of nine years to pay their “initial” obligations: In other words, someone whose fortune has increased by $10 billion as of when the bill became law would have that time to pay the $2 billion they owe. Going forward, further increases of wealth would result in taxes owed over a five-year period.

Although Biden’s Billionaire Minimum Income Tax, as it’s called, is a major departure from past presidential proposals, it would deploy features that are already part of current tax law.

For instance, there is the Alternative Minimum Tax, a measure first enacted decades ago in response to revelations that the richest were easily avoiding paying income taxes. The AMT is supposed to work as a kind of fail-safe, imposing taxes on rich people who have used huge deductions to wipe out income for tax purposes and thus avoid taxes. But it often fails. For instance, we found multiple examples of billionaires paying not a penny in income taxes, sometimes for years at a time.

Like the AMT, Biden’s minimum tax would work alongside the current tax code. If a billionaire happened to already be paying 20% of their full income, the Biden plan would result in no extra tax.

The existing tax code also has provisions that tax unrealized gains in certain situations. For instance, professionals who trade in securities, such as hedge fund managers, often elect to have their portfolios “marked to market” and owe tax based on their gains or losses relative to the previous year. Similarly, another provision hits wealthy Americans who choose to renounce their citizenship: All their property is valued and taxed as if it had been sold.

Versions of a tax on mark-to-market gains have been proposed before, going back several years, most notably last year by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chair of the Senate Finance Committee. The idea, however, has its share of critics, both Republicans and tax experts who worry it would be too complicated to administer and would risk being struck down by the Supreme Court.

John Brooks of Georgetown University Law Center is among the supporters. He argued the idea is squarely constitutional, given “the many examples of taxing unrealized gain already in the tax code.” And as for complaints about its complexity, the wealthy already value their assets for their own financial purposes, he told ProPublica: “In the end, it would be a simple, formulaic approach that would require minimal work in addition to what wealthy taxpayers are already doing.”

republished under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

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Breaking News, News, Politics

New Documentary by Frontline and ProPublica Reveals Origins of the Stolen Election Myth

by ProPublica

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.Series: The Insurrection The Effort to Overturn the Election

Tonight, PBS stations across the U.S. will premiere “Plot to Overturn the Election,” a collaboration between ProPublica and Frontline. (The documentary will also appear at pbs.org/frontline.) “Plot to Overturn the Election” examines the roles and impact of key members of the movement to spread the belief that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was rigged. The documentary also explores how members of the movement helped launch and fund the audit of Arizona’s vote count and how they are working to influence future elections, in part by supporting secretary of state candidates who share their views that America’s voting systems are irredeemably corrupt.

Correspondent A.C. Thompson, along with reporters Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Kirsten Berg, obtained new information that helps explain why two-thirds of Republicans believe President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. In the coming weeks, ProPublica and Frontline will publish stories that further examine the movement’s past and ongoing efforts to find evidence of election fraud.

Part of the Frontline and ProPublica project focuses on a group that gathered in the weeks after the 2020 election on a South Carolina plantation owned by conservative defamation attorney Lin Wood. Using the property as a temporary headquarters, a team of lawyers and cybersecurity experts gathered and synthesized what they claimed was evidence of election fraud. This group, which included Michael Flynn, the retired three-star Army general and former national security adviser to Trump, and Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, became a key originator of the since-discredited idea that foreign communist governments had hacked voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems. The belief was central to justifying the efforts of Trump and his allies to reverse the results of the election.

The reporting on the group’s activities draws on more than a thousand private emails, photos and videos, hundreds of text messages and dozens of hours of audio recordings, none of which have been previously reported on.

“It was almost like finding a key to understanding, you know, why much of the country believes that the election was stolen,” Clark tells Thompson in the documentary.

republished under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

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News, Observation, Politics, Tech

Consumer Rights Groups Applaud EU Passage of Law to Rein in Tech Titans

Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic / Adobe Stock

The new law “will put an end to some of the most harmful practices of Big Tech and narrow the power imbalance between people and online platforms.”

Digital and consumer rights advocates on Friday hailed a landmark European Union law aimed at curbing Big Tech’s monopolistic behavior.

“This is a big moment for consumers and businesses who have suffered from Big Tech’s harmful practices.”

Negotiators from the European Parliament and European Council agreed late Thursday on the language of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which aims to prevent major tech companies from anti-competitive practices by threatening large fines or possible breakup.

Ursula Pachl, deputy director-general at the European Consumer Organization (BEUC), an umbrella advocacy group, said in a statement that “this is a big moment for consumers and businesses who have suffered from Big Tech’s harmful practices.”

“This legislation will rebalance digital markets, increase consumer choice, and put an end to many of the worst practices that Big Tech has engaged in over the years,” she added. “It is a landmark law for the E.U.’s digital transformation.”

Cédric O, the French minister of state with responsibility for digital, said in a statement that “the European Union has had to impose record fines over the past 10 years for certain harmful business practices by very large digital players. The DMA will directly ban these practices and create a fairer and more competitive economic space for new players and European businesses.”

“These rules are key to stimulating and unlocking digital markets, enhancing consumer choice, enabling better value sharing in the digital economy, and boosting innovation,” he added.

Andreas Schwab, a member of the European Parliament from Germany, said that “the Digital Markets Act puts an end to the ever-increasing dominance of Big Tech companies. From now on, Big Tech companies must show that they also allow for fair competition on the internet. The new rules will help enforce that basic principle.”

BEUC’s Pachl offered examples of the new law’s benefits:

Google must stop promoting its own local, travel, or job services over those of competitors in Google Search results, while Apple will be unable to force users to use its payment service for app purchases. Consumers will also be able to collectively enforce their rights if a company breaks the rules in the Digital Markets Act.

Companies are also barred from pre-installing certain software and reusing certain private data collected “during a service for the purposes of another service.”

The DMA applies to companies deemed both “platforms” and “gatekeepers”—those with market capitalization greater than €75 billion ($82.4 billion), 45 million or more monthly end-users, and at least 10,000 E.U. business users. Companies that violate the law can be fined up to 10% of their total annual worldwide turnover, with repeat offenders subject to a doubling of the penalty.

“The DMA is a major step towards limiting the tremendous market power that today’s gatekeeper tech firms have.”

Diego Naranjo, head of policy at the advocacy group European Digital Rights (EDRi), said in a statement that “the DMA will put an end to some of the most harmful practices of Big Tech and narrow the power imbalance between people and online platforms. If correctly implemented, the new agreement will empower individuals to choose more freely the type of online experience and society we want to build in the digital era.”

To ensure effective implementation, BEUC’s Pachl called on E.U. member states to “now also provide the [European] Commission with the necessary enforcement resources to step in the moment there is foul play.”

EDRi senior policy adviser Jan Penfrat said that while “the DMA is a major step towards limiting the tremendous market power that today’s gatekeeper tech firms have,” policymakers “must now make sure that the new obligations not to reuse personal data and the prohibition of using sensitive data for surveillance advertising are respected and properly enforced by the European Commission.”

“Only then will the change be felt by people who depend on digital services every day,” he added.

Originally published on Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINS and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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Breaking News, News, Politics

Watchdogs Say if Clarance Thomas Resign, ‘Congress Must Move to Impeach’

Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic Pixels / Adobe Stock

Fresh calls for the Supreme Court justice’s removal came amid “damning” new evidence of his wife’s involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

JAKE JOHNSON March 25, 2022 first published on Common Dreams

Calls for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to resign—or face impeachment proceedings—mounted late Thursday after text messages revealed that his wife urged former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to aggressively pursue efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

The Washington Post and CBS News obtained dozens of texts that Ginni Thomas, a long-time far-right activist who attended the January 6 rally that preceded the Capitol assault, sent to Meadows in the wake of Trump’s election loss, which she characterized as fraudulent while her husband was hearing election-related cases.

“Clarence Thomas must immediately resign from his seat on the Supreme Court.”

“Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down,” Thomas wrote in a November 19 message to Meadows, echoing a slogan that served as a rallying cry for pro-Trump groups.

All but one of the texts between Thomas and Meadows, most of which were written by Thomas, were sent between November 4 and November 24, 2020. One text was sent on January 10, 2021 in the wake of the Capitol insurrection.

“Clarence Thomas must immediately resign from his seat on the Supreme Court.”

Justice Thomas, who is currently hospitalized with an infection, has thus far declined to recuse himself from Supreme Court cases in which his wife’s right-wing activism could pose a conflict of interest.

Thomas was the only justice to publicly argue that the high court should have granted former President Donald Trump’s motion to block the National Archives from handing White House documents over to a congressional panel investigating the January 6 attack. The Supreme Court ultimately rejected Trump’s request.

Sarah Lipton-Lubet, executive director of the Take Back the Court Action Fund, said in a statement Thursday night that “if one thing is clear” from the newly revealed text messages, “it’s that there’s much more to the story of Ginni Thomas’ participation in the January 6 attack that the House Select Committee and the American public deserve to know.”

“Given that Justice Thomas has already made known he won’t recuse himself from cases related to his wife’s right-wing activism, and the damning evidence of his wife’s involvement in this attack on our democracy, Thomas is clearly unfit to serve on the nation’s highest court,” said Lipton-Lubet. “Clarence Thomas must immediately resign from his seat on the Supreme Court.”

“If he refuses, Congress must move to impeach him,” she added. “The integrity of the court, our judicial system, and our democracy as a whole depends on it.”

At least one member of Congress, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), echoed the call for Thomas’ impeachment. The House can impeach a Supreme Court justice with a simple-majority vote, but a two-thirds majority is required in the Senate for conviction and removal.

At the very least, the new revelations demonstrate why Thomas “must recuse from any Supreme Court cases or petitions related to the January 6 Committee or efforts to overturn the election,” argued Gabe Roth, executive director of the nonpartisan advocacy group Fix the Court.

“Democrats should be loudly drawing attention to the fact that the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice supported Trump’s coup attempt.”

“Ginni’s direct participation in this odious anti-democracy work, coupled with the new reporting that seems to indicate she may have spoken to Justice Thomas about it, leads to the conclusion that the justice’s continued participation in cases related to these efforts would only further tarnish the court’s already fading public reputation,” Roth said.

“Democrats should be loudly drawing attention to the fact that the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice supported Trump’s coup attempt.”

The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer reported in January that Ginni Thomas has in recent years aligned herself “with many activists who have brought issues in front of” the Supreme Court.

“She has been one of the directors of CNP Action, a dark-money wing of the conservative pressure group the Council for National Policy,” Mayer noted. “CNP Action, behind closed doors, connects wealthy donors with some of the most radical right-wing figures in America. Ginni Thomas has also been on the advisory board of Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump student group, whose founder, Charlie Kirk, boasted of sending busloads of protesters to Washington on January 6th.”

Mayer also observed that Ginni Thomas received payments from the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a right-wing anti-Muslim think tank. Despite disclosure requirements, Justice Thomas failed to report his wife’s income from CSP in 2017 and 2018.

In an op-ed published before the text messages between Ginni Thomas and Meadows surfaced, MSNBC‘s Mehdi Hasan cited Mayer’s reporting to argue that “Democrats should be loudly drawing attention to the fact that the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice supported Trump’s coup attempt.”

“There is a clear value in holding impeachment hearings to draw attention to Thomas and his wife and their inappropriate behavior, especially as an increasingly partisan, conservative-majority court guts voting and reproductive rights,” Hasan wrote. “What would Republicans be doing if they had held a House majority and, say, Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s spouse had supported attempts to block a duly elected GOP president from taking office and she refused to recuse herself from related cases?”

This article was first published on Common Dreams and republished under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

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Breaking News, Politics

Suggesting Kremlin Regime Change, Biden says Putin ‘Cannot Remain in Power’

Video

The remarks, though later walked back by the White House, are the most explicit yet from the U.S. president that he sees no future for Putin as Russia’s head of state.

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Originally published by JON QUEALLY March 26, 2022 in CommonDreams.ORG

Bucking those who warn that a push for regime change in Moscow could prolong the war in Ukraine and intensify the suffering of its people, U.S. President Joe Biden appeared to openly call for the overthrow of Russian Vladimir Putin on Saturday during a speech in Warsaw, Poland.

“Whenever the United States tried regime change, it didn’t turn out very well.”

While applauding the international unity that has mobilized to condemn and push back against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a war now entering its second month, Biden suggested it has now become intolerable for Putin to remain.

Near the very end of his speech, Biden declared, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

“Whenever the United States tried regime change, it didn’t turn out very well.”

The remarks were the most explicit yet from the U.S. president that he sees no future for Putin as Russia’s head of state, but the comment also raised immediate alarm bells among those who recognized that such rhetoric could make it harder to a negotiated peace settlement to take hold or for the diplomatic strategy known as the “Golden Bridge” which would allow for a dignified exit from hostilities.

In a Democracy Now! interview that aired Friday, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis explained why Putin must be given a viable exit strategy—not because he isn’t a contemptible war criminal, which Varoufakis readily admitted—but because it would be the fastest way to end the invasion and mass slaughter of innocent Ukrainian civilians.

“What is exactly the aim?” asks Varoufakis during the exchange. “Is it regime change in Russia? Well, whenever the United States tried regime change, it didn’t turn out very well, and has never been tried with a nuclear power. This is like playing with fire, or nuclear fire, I should say. If it’s not regime change, what exactly is it?”

In his assessment, Varoufakis said that if Biden and his NATO allies are “not leaving any room for a compromise” with Putin, then they are “effectively jeopardizing the interests of Ukrainians, because a quagmire in—an Afghanistan-like quagmire in the Ukraine is not exactly in the interests of any Ukrainian I know of.”

“The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change,” said the official.

Following the walk back, Varoufakis responded on Sunday morning by saying the need for such a clarification is itself a worrying sign.

“A U.S. president who, during an atrocious war, does not mean what he says on matters of war and peace, and must be corrected by his hyperventilating staff,” said Varoufakis, “is a clear and present danger to all.”

Update: This piece was updated to include news comments from Varoufakis.

This article was first published on Common Dreams and republished under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

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Observation, Politics

Why Abortion Bans Aren’t Pro-Life: New Video by Robert Reich

Video

As a new Supreme Court appointment looms…

In another great new video Robert Reich talks about the unspoken downsides of Abortion bans and why they are not “Pro-LIfe”. The video is one of many that can be seen on the Inequality Media YouTube channel – which adds at least a new video weekly.

Abortion bans are not pro-life. They’re pro-poverty and pro-inequality.

I’ll tell you what we can do about it in a moment. But first, let me explain how these bans worsen inequalities.

You’ve probably heard of the two abortion cases making their way through the courts. But it’s not just Texas and Mississippi’s new bans. For years, Republican state lawmakers – almost entirely white men – have been chipping away at reproductive freedom: enacting laws that lead to clinic closures, force people to travel hundreds of miles for abortions, and create near-insurmountable barriers for low-income people, especially people of color.

Make no mistake: bans like those in Texas and Mississippi won’t stop abortions. Wealthy people will always have access, but millions of low-income people will be forced to give birth – with dire consequences for both parent and child.

Pregnant people in Texas now have to travel an average of 247 miles to get an abortion. Who but the wealthy can afford this? Only one third of the lowest paid workers receive paid sick days, while 95% of the highest paid do. Taking just one unpaid day off from a low-wage job can mean sacrificing groceries, electricity, or gas.

These restrictions worsen inequality, and have lifelong effects.

One study found that being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term makes it nearly 4 times more likely that parent and child will live below the poverty line. They’re also less likely to have full-time work, and more likely to have public assistance four years later. Decades of research confirm that abortion access improves education, employment, and earnings — and the differences are especially large for Black people.

It’s not just economics. Restricting abortion puts people’s health at risk. Researchers found that abortion legalization in the 1970s reduced deaths among Black mothers by 30 to 40 percent.

The Supreme Court’s right-wing majority is poised to gut or even overturn Roe v. Wade. If they do, 21 states already have laws that will go into effect to severely restrict or outright ban all abortions immediately – threatening the livelihoods and health of millions of low-income Americans.

Congress must codify Roe v. Wade into federal law — now — by passing the Women’s Health Protection Act. It’s already been passed in the House but is being blocked in the Senate by – you guessed it – a Republican filibuster.

Let’s be clear: there is nothing “pro-life” about forced pregnancy and forced birth. The freedom to choose when, how, and with whom you start a family should not be dictated by your income or where you live. Congress must act to protect reproductive now, freedom before it’s too late.

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Climate Solutions, News, Observation, Politics

‘Addiction to Fossil Fuels Is Mutually Assured Destruction,’ Warns UN Chief

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“Instead of hitting the brakes on the decarbonization of the global economy” amid Russia’s war on Ukraine, “now is the time to put the pedal to the metal towards a renewable energy future,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.

“The 1.5-degree goal is on life support. It is in intensive care.”

So said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday, as he stressed that a swift and just transition to clean energy is necessary to meet the Paris agreement’s objective of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels—and warned against using Russia’s deadly assault on Ukraine as an excuse to ramp up fossil fuel production worldwide.

“We are sleepwalking to climate catastrophe.”

“The science is clear. So is the math,” the U.N. leader said during a speech delivered at a Sustainability Summit hosted by The Economist. “Keeping 1.5 alive requires a 45% reduction in global emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by mid-century.” And yet, “according to present national commitments, global emissions are set to increase by almost 14% in the 2020s.”

“We are sleepwalking to climate catastrophe,” Guterres continued. “Our planet has already warmed by as much as 1.2 degrees—and we see the devastating consequences everywhere. In 2020, climate disasters forced 30 million people to flee their homes—three times more than those displaced by war and violence.”

Just this past weekend, scientists conveyed shock and alarm in response to reports that temperatures at both of Earth’s poles reached more than 50°F above average last week. Peer-reviewed research published on Friday foundthat increasingly frequent and intense wildfires around the globe are exacerbating Arctic warming, which is worsening the conditions that make future blazes more likely.

“Two weeks ago,” said Guterres, citing part two of the U.N.’s landmark climate assessment, “the IPCC confirmed that half of humanity is already living in the danger zone. Small island nations, least developed countries, and poor and vulnerable people everywhere are one climate shock away from doomsday. In our globally connected world, no country and no corporation can insulate itself from these levels of chaos.”

“If we continue with more of the same, we can kiss 1.5 goodbye,” he added. “Even 2 degrees may be out of reach. And that would be catastrophe.”

Making matters worse, said Guterres, “the fallout from Russia’s war in Ukraine risks upending global food and energy markets—with major implications for the global climate agenda.”

“As major economies pursue an ‘all-of-the-above’ strategy to replace Russian fossil fuels, short-term measures might create long-term fossil fuel dependence.”

The United States, United Kingdom, and European Union have moved to restrict imports of Russian fossil fuels in response to Moscow’s military offensive. Although progressives have emphasized that the ongoing invasion should lead to an intensification of efforts to move awayfrom dirty energy, profit-hungry proponents of oil, gas, and coal have seized on surging prices to push for boosting extraction and exports.

Guterres warned that “as major economies pursue an ‘all-of-the-above’ strategy to replace Russian fossil fuels, short-term measures might create long-term fossil fuel dependence and close the window to 1.5 degrees.”

Think like a Monk

“Countries could become so consumed by the immediate fossil fuel supply gap that they neglect or knee-cap policies to cut fossil fuel use,” he said. “This is madness. Addiction to fossil fuels is mutually assured destruction.”

“As current events make all too clear, our continued reliance on fossil fuels puts the global economy and energy security at the mercy of geopolitical shocks and crises,” added Guterres. “We need to fix the broken global energy mix.”

Noting that “the timeline to cut emissions by 45% is extremely tight,” the U.N. leader stressed that “instead of hitting the brakes on the decarbonization of the global economy, now is the time to put the pedal to the metal towards a renewable energy future.”

His remarks came just hours before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) kicked off a two-week meeting to validate part three of its report, which focuses on the need to drastically slash carbon pollution to avoid the most disastrous outcomes.

Guterres argued that cooperation between the developed and emerging economies of the G20—responsible for 80% of global emissions—is essential to addressing the planetary emergency.

“Accelerating the phase-out of coal and all fossil fuels and implementing a rapid, just, and sustainable energy transition,” he said, is “the only true pathway to energy security.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

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News, Observation, Politics

The ‘Doom Loop’ of American Oligarchy

Some democracies fall apart because of invasion by a neighbor, terrorism, or a natural disaster, but most are taken down by their own own greedy oligarchs.

Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic / CC

It’s important now, in light of both world events and the way the Republican party has been captured by a small group of rightwing billionaires and white supremacists, to introduce Americans to an 18th century word that is new to most people alive today, at least in the context of partisan politics.

That word is: faction.

The crises caused by faction were a big deal at the founding of our republic. Faction was a matter of conversation among average people.

Prior to Reagan’s deregulation and tax-cutting binge, America didn’t have a single billionaire and the average income of American CEOs—restrained as they were by a top income tax rate of 74 percent—was only around 30 times that of the average worker. 

It was the same when the South was seized by an oligarchic faction of plantation owners and turned from a whites-only democracy into a neofascist oligarchy in the 1840s and 1850s.

Factions are destroyers of democracies.

It was a faction of oligarchs led by Vladimir Putin that took over Russia after that country adopted Milton Friedman’s neoliberal policies of privatization, low taxes, and deregulation, producing an explosion of billionaires who weakened the new Russian democracy by pouring outsized chunks of their money into Russia’s politics.

Russian President Putin’s disastrous decision to invade Ukraine was caused by a deficiency of democracy in Russia; whenever a country is taken over by a single person or a small group of people, such terrible decisions are inevitable. History is littered with them.

And it all starts with a faction of wealthy people corrupting politics.

Faction always leads to the “doom loop” of democracy, which is why Aristotle warned about faction as much as does Bernie Sanders. It happens pretty much the same way all over the world, all across the centuries.

Here in America, it’s something the Founding generation, Lincoln’s generation, and FDR’s generation each had to deal with. FDR called the faction of his day the “Economic Royalists.”

Today, we’re again facing the doom loop caused by what the Founders called faction.

The faction-caused Doom Loop goes like this:

  • Government makes the rules that regulate taxes and corporations, and uses those rules to prevent wealthy people or businesses from corrupting the government itself. 
  • These “guardrails of democracy” include taxation that’s high enough that oligarchy doesn’t emerge, along with tight regulation of money in politics.
  • Those corporations and individuals who mostly own/control the marketplace want to “throw off the shackles of government.”
  • So they get together and pour money into the political process, essentially buying all the politicians and judges they need.
  • Then their wholly-owned legislators and judges remove laws or change their interpretation to weaken or even eliminate those guardrails of taxation and regulation that protect democracy.
  • Removing the taxation and regulation guardrails increases the profits of the corporations and the wealth of the morbidly rich oligarchs.
  • They then recycle a small portion of that “new” money back to the politicians to either maintain the status quo or deteriorate the guardrails even further.
  • Eventually the guardrails become so weak that the government’s ability to control the excesses of the faction breaks down and the oligarchs take over, transitioning the democracy into oligarchy.
  • Oligarchic government then, typically within a decade or so, turns into a strongman autocracy, as we see with today’s Russia and almost saw with Trump’s presidency.

This analysis is not, by the way, a radical position or one do you need a college degree to understand.

President Jimmy Carter explained it to me on the radio seven years ago, and any reading of history finds it scattered through the accounts of the Revolutionary, Civil War, and New Deal eras.

And with a billionaire in the White House for four years, with several billionaires in his cabinet, signing billionaire-friendly executive orders and corruptly devastating the EPA, IRS, and several other federal agencies, we approached the brink.

To put it in straightforward terms:

Powerful rich people motivated primarily by a desire to increase their own wealth and power—when they act together as a faction to accomplish that goal, like Lewis Powell suggested to America’s business leaders and wealthiest men in 1971—will always try to change a democracy into an oligarchy.

In this process, democracies and their working classes lose—but the oligarchs, who drive this disintegrative process, win. In most cases, in fact, they win big as I document in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.

Investing in politicians and think-tanks, it turns out, is the single most effective investment a faction of oligarchs can make in a republic once its guardrails are sufficiently weakened to allow it to happen on a large scale.

Consider how, prior to Reagan’s deregulation and tax-cutting binge, America didn’t have a single billionaire and the average income of American CEOs—restrained as they were by a top income tax rate of 74 percent—was only around 30 times that of the average worker. 

Congress routinely passed laws that were widely popular, like Medicare and the Voting Rights Act, because back then politicians were more responsive to the people than to the morbidly rich.

Today, after Reagan’s massive tax cuts and deregulation efforts, we have hundreds of billionaires, and CEO pay in some industries runs a thousand times that of their workers. And legislation with approval rates as high as 80 percent—like funding education and healthcare—are blocked in the Senate.

Democracies were growing and strengthening around the world from the time of the American Civil War until the 1980s. But, around that time, country after country began to consider Reagan/Thatcher style neoliberalism.

Some countries, like China, explicitly rejected neoliberalism and trickle down economics, and instead adopted Alexander Hamilton’s “American Plan.” As a result, their economies and their middle-classes grew. China’s middle class today, for example, is larger than the population of the entire United States.

But far too many others, encouraged by their elites, took the plunge and drastically cut taxes on the morbidly rich, cut business oversight and regulation, and loosened their laws regulating money in politics.

By 2005, as Reagan’s neoliberalism spread around the world, countries that were losing their middle classes (like America has over the last 40 years) began to flip into oligarchies and then autocracies.

Democracies around the world began to backslide.

Like the USA, country after country has followed Reaganism/neoliberalism to set aside limits on corporate and oligarch participation in politics, with predictable results.  As Freedom House noted in their most recent annual report:

“The present threat to democracy is the product of 16 consecutive years of decline in global freedom. A total of 60 countries suffered declines over the past year, while only 25 improved.”

America, they note, is one of the countries in a “decline” of democracy.

While a few of those democracies in decline fell apart because of invasion by a neighbor, terrorism, or a natural disaster, most are being taken down by their own internal factions, typically the nation’s own oligarchs.

It’s not like we weren’t warned, as Dan Sisson and I pointed out in The American Revolution of 1800.

In 1776 the United States was the first major experiment in democracy in the past several thousand years and, although it was badly flawed by both slavery and a lack of rights for women, the idea of even the minority of white men deciding the future of their country was a revolutionary departure from thousands of years of kings, popes and brutal warlords.

The era of the Enlightenment, particularly throughout the 1700s, brought vigorous discussions of whether democracy was even possible, or if it would always be doomed to collapse back into oligarchy and autocracy.

The recurrent concern of the people of that era was that wealthy factions would arise and corrupt any democracy back into something resembling a kingdom with wealthy lords and autocratic rulers.

As Lord Bolingbroke wrote in his Memoirs, published in 1752 (the year after Bolingbroke died and James Madison—who would later midwife our Constitution—was born):

“A Party then is, as I take it, a set of men connected together … pretending to have the same private opinion with respect to public concerns; … but when it proceeds further, and influences men’s conduct in any considerable degree, it becomes Faction.”

And what are factions that have seized control of political parties almost always all about?  Bolingbroke laid it out with a clarity that still resonates today:

“In all such cases there are revealed reasons, and a reserved Motive. By revealed reasons, I mean a set of plausible doctrines, which may be styled [called] the creed of the party; but the reserved motive belongs to Faction only, and is the THIRST OF POWER. [emphasis Bolingbroke’s]

When greedy people rise up as a faction to try to seize a government, Bolingbroke wrote, they always claim to be acting in the best interests of the people. 

Consider today’s Republican Party, backed by billionaires and openly opposed to union rights while reaching out to blue-collar voters, as you read Bolingbroke’s words:

“The creeds of parties vary like those of sects; but all Factions have the same motive, which never implies more or less than a lust of dominion, though they … generally are covered with the specious pretenses of … zeal for the public, which flows, in fact, from Avarice, Self-Interest, Resentment and other private views.”

Bolingbroke was widely read among the Founding generation, and Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” echoed his sentiments in Federalist 10, in which he warns us of the dangers of faction. 

First, he defines the term “faction,” to separate it from the notion of just being a political party or a special interest group:

“By a faction,” Madison writes in Federalist 10, “I understand a number of citizens … who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse [opposed] to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” [emphasis mine]

In other words, factions aren’t political parties or advocates for the public good. They are, pure and simple, politically active wealthy people opposed to the public good and thus a poison in the bloodstream of a democracy. 

Madison devotes the entirety of Federalist 10 to warning both his colleagues and future generations of Americans against them. Controlling faction, he wrote, was the most important function of the Constitution:

“To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed.”

Even the most famous British historian of that era, author of The History of England David Hume, wrote in his essay Of Parties in General (1741) about the dangers of wealthy people getting together to form a faction that could take over and corrupt a government, all to increase their own profits and wealth: 

“As much as legislators and founders of states ought to be honoured and respected among men, as much ought the founders of sects and factions to be detested and hated; because the influence of faction is directly contrary to that of laws.”

By “contrary to that of laws,” Hume meant that a faction—a group of wealthy and powerful people—would do everything they could to corrupt the political process and weaken or destroy laws that might restrain their greed:

“Factions subvert government, render laws impotent, and beget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation, who ought to give mutual assistance and protection to each other.”

Hume, being a conservative of that era, was skeptical that any democracy could ever survive the assault of political parties that had been taken over by factions of the rich:

“And what should render the founders of parties more odious is, the difficulty of extirpating these weeds, when once they have taken root in any state. They naturally propagate themselves for many centuries, and seldom end but by the total dissolution of that government, in which they are sown.”

And, wrote Hume, once they’ve taken over a “free” government, they’re even harder to get rid of than weeds. Eventually, if not stopped, they’ll consume the only thing that could restrain them, the government itself:

“They are, besides, plants which grow most plentifully in the richest soil; and … they rise more easily, and propagate themselves faster in free governments, where they always infect the legislature itself, which alone could be able, by the steady application of rewards and punishments, to eradicate them.”

As President Jimmy Carter told me seven years ago when we were discussing the Supreme Court’s corrupt Citizens United decision:

“It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. …  So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”

We’re quite far down the road to wealthy factions so corrupting our government that it has ceased to operate as a functioning republican democracy. 

Our best hope for stopping a further slide into oligarchy and ultimately strongman autocracy is to pass legislation that will regulate money in politics.

Tragically, every Republican in the US Senate except Lisa Murkowski voted against strengthening our voting rights and removing some of the power of money in politics. 

Hopefully such legislation can be revived this year, although with both Manchin and Sinema now openly taking money from the same billionaire faction that funds the GOP, it’s going to be a hell of a lift.

Nonetheless, reversing the core of Reaganism’s oligarchic agenda is the only way to stop the ongoing faction-driven collapse of American democracy. If we are to break out of the doom loop of democracies that consumed Russia 20 years ago, we must:

  • Regulate great wealth by raising personal and corporate taxes back to where they were before Reagan.
  • Restore the hundreds of good-government-protecting regulations on money in politics Congress passed and were signed into law by Presidents Ford and Carter (and in almost every state legislature) but overturned in 2010 by the Supreme Court in their corrupt 5:4 Citizens United decision.

We must continue to work and speak out against faction and do everything we can to make America “a more perfect union.”  Otherwise, our nation will be consumed by what Bolingbroke called the “THIRST of POWER.”

This article was first published on The Hartmann Report and published on Common Dreams and republished under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

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