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rachel maddow
Requiem for a President
It’s time for someone to write the final scene and tell us how this story ends.
Jul 21, 2024
Joe Biden may no longer be running for president by the time you read these words. Or he may be clinging to his diminishing hopes of victory. Either way, we’ve seen this movie before. It’s the one where an aging, punch-drunk fighter stays in the ring for too long, suffering humiliation after humiliation on his journey from the top to the bottom. Rod Serling’s teleplay Requiem for a Heavyweight is a classic example of this vintage storyline of battered boxers and their cynical managers.
I should add that I don’t dislike Joe Biden. I’ve always had a soft spot for old-school Irish politicos, having covered a couple in my day (see here). I was always somewhat fond of Joe, despite our ideological differences—at least until the genocide in Gaza. But today, I feel something politicians should fear even more than hostility: I feel sorry for him.
I do dislike being gaslit. Most people do. Biden’s allies have been gaslighting voters for too long, creating distrust that could doom Democratic candidates up and down the ballot. And they’re not the only ones being gaslit. So is Biden himself. Like an aging pugilist in an old movie, he’s being manipulated by people who have put their own interests above his. They’ve let Biden think he can still win. That’s cruel. It’s even crueler to keep pushing him into appearances where he says things like, “By the way, I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice president, first black woman, to serve with a black president.”
Listen, I don’t care if he says he was the star of Medea’s Family Reunion—if he does it in private. Sentences like that are common for people with neurological problems, as anyone who’s cared for a declining loved one knows. They should be met with compassion and patience. But it’s heartless to let them be said on a global stage.
Biden’s supporters are starting to embarrass themselves, too. Operatives who promoted Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama in 2008 by summoning the specter of a “3 am phone call” now back a president who reportedly told a group of governors that, as the New York Times puts it, “he needs to get more sleep and work fewer hours, including curtailing events after 8 pm.” (The White House did not directly deny these second-hand reports but said that such limits are typical of recent presidents.)
MSNBC’s assertions have further degraded its credibility with all but the most avowedly partisan Democrats, as when Rachel Maddow praised Biden’s NATO press conference. The president demonstrated “a startlingly impressive command of the issues” and was “a master of the field of foreign policy,” Maddow said, despite Biden’s lack of coherent plans for Ukraine, Gaza, or the accelerating Cold War with China.
What about the press conference’s syntax, you ask? The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner writes, “I encourage you to read the White House’s transcript of the event and try to follow the train of thought in almost any of Biden’s answers.”
Lawrence O’Donnell blended his trademark pomposity and condescension with a profound—and profoundly partisan—misreading of history. “Pundits suggest replacing President Biden as the Democratic nominee,” said O’Donnell, “because they don’t understand the job of the presidency or how conventions work.”
That’s flim-flam. Party rules allow Biden to step aside. And while O’Donnell gamely attempted to equate Biden’s condition with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s physical impairment, FDR’s health did not affect his cognition or his ability to communicate with the public—both of which are presidential job requirements.
“It's not the time for someone to decide that the pilot who has flown this plane before successfully should be pulled out of the cockpit because he's too old,” says O’Donnell. But what if the pilot becomes ill and can’t do his job? We’ve seen that movie, too.
I have now heard confidential comments from multiple doctors—including a neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, and geriatrician—who say they believe the president has a progressive brain disease. Each said that his outward appearance suggested Parkinsonism, which is described in the National Library of Medicine as “a broad term referring to various neurodegenerative diseases that manifest with motor symptoms such as rigidity, tremors, and bradykinesia” (a movement disorder).
There are several diseases associated with Parkinsonism, of which Parkinson’s Disease is the most common. I am told that signs of these diseases can be seen in a person’s gait, facial expressions, speech, and other outward indicators.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has been vague, evasive, and self-contradictory about Biden’s health. (Read this briefing transcript and see for yourself.) Then there are those eight visits from a Parkinson’s specialist, followed by a doctor’s letter with an oddly worded sentence that, upon careful reading, excluded several conditions but not Parkinsonism.
Jean-Pierre made another heavily parsed statement: “Has the president been treated for Parkinson’s? No. Is he being treated for Parkinson’s? No, he’s not. Is he taking medication for Parkinson’s? No.” “Parkinson’s” refers to Parkinson’s disease. It does not exclude other forms of Parkinsonism or other neurological disorders.
The doctors could be wrong, of course. We can’t be certain because Biden won’t undergo an independent medical examination. Maybe the White House’s word pretzels created a false impression of secrecy. But the fact remains that Biden could allay these fears overnight with a medical exam and refuses.
Still, it doesn’t take an MD to know that Biden is unfit to run for president for one simple reason: he can’t convince voters he’s healthy enough to be president. Ergo, he probably can’t win. (And, no, voters don’t doubt Biden’s health because of biased media coverage. Polls show that they’ve been concerned for years.)
To be clear, the president doesn’t suffer from the syndrome that afflicts boxers. The phrase “punch-drunk” describes a condition now called Dementia pugilistica, caused by repeated blows to the head. It’s another form of Parkinsonism, with symptoms that include slowed movement, speech and memory problems, unsteady gait, and paranoia.
Which brings us back to Requiem for a Heavyweight, a drama with two different endings. In the 1956 TV play, the boxer quits fighting. He’s last seen coaching a child, hinting at a kinder future for the battered veteran. But in the 1962 movie his self-serving manager frustrates his attempt to leave the ring. This description of the film’s final scene says it all: “As his saddened [trainer] watches, [the boxer] dons his humiliating outfit, then faces the crude, bloodthirsty crowd.”
The public has waited long enough. It’s time for someone to write the final scene and tell us how this story ends.
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MSNBC Declines to Voluntarily Recognize Newsroom Union Effort
Organizers said that "we want to support one another and make this an even better place to build a career."
Jun 17, 2021
As current and former employees, media colleagues, and labor rights advocates on Thursday celebrated an announcement that MSNBC's workers have decided to form a union, the cable news channel's president made clear that leadership won't voluntarily recognize the effort.
"At a time when journalists and journalism itself are under siege, we want to join our peers who have paved the road before us in standing up for our rights."
--MSNBC bargaining unit
MSNBC is owned by a division of NBCUniversal, which is a subsidiary of Comcast. In a series of tweets, the editorial staff of MSNBC and The Choice--a news channel on the streaming service Peacock--said that over 200 workers have signed a union petition to join the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE).
"We are organizing to advocate for equal pay for equal work; diversity at every level of production; clear job descriptions and access to career development; a say in the post-Covid-19 workplace; and fair compensation for the hours we all spend to deliver the news," organizers said.
"We are standing up for each other and our work--because this is who we are," organizers added. "After 10 months of organizing, we are asking for voluntary recognition of our union and look forward to constructive negotiations with MSNBC and Comcast for a fair contract. #ThisIsWhoWeAre."
The tweets echoed a lengthy statement from the MSNBC bargaining unit shared by WGAE, which said in part that "at a time when journalists and journalism itself are under siege, we want to join our peers who have paved the road before us in standing up for our rights."
"We are proud that the hard-working newsroom employees at MSNBC decided to unionize with the WGAE," said Lowell Peterson, the union's executive director. "They join thousands of their colleagues in the news and entertainment industries who recognize that collective bargaining is the most effective way to win a voice at work and to build sustainable careers."
WGAE represents about 7,000 workers, including newsrooms at ABC News, Bustle, CBS News, Fast Company, HuffPost, The Intercept, Salon, Slate, VICE, and Vox as well as Gizmodo Media Group and Hearst Magazines.
"We hope and expect MSNBC to remain true to its commitment to progressive values by respecting its employees' decision and recognizing our union promptly."
Rashida Jones, president of MSNBC, said Thursday in a statement to the New York Times that "we're looking forward to continuing the type of direct, open, and honest communication that has already resulted in meaningful change at the network."
In a message to employees that circulated on social media, Jones said that the network will not recognize the union without a secret ballot election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB.)
"I respect our employees' right to decide whether they want to be represented by a union, and I believe our employees should be able to make such an important decision through a standard election process," she said.
"An election supervised by the government allows all affected employees the chance to express their view on unionizing through a secret ballot," Jones added. "It is important to give everyone who would be included the chance to understand what this would mean before making their choice."
The Hill noted that "unions have long criticized requests for NLRB secret ballot elections as being designed to give management opportunities to dissuade employees from joining the union."
MSNBC show hosts Chris Hayes and Joy-Ann Reid expressed support for the union effort on Twitter:
Others in the media industry, including former MSNBC employees, highlighted pay concerns among off-camera workers and called the union effort "overdue."
The American Federation of Teachers--the nation's second-largest education union--and the Labor Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives also expressed support for the organizing at MSNBC:
Andrew Joyce, a segment producer at "The Rachel Maddow Show" who helped lead the MSNBC union effort, told the Times that "we as journalists believe that democracy works, as a nation, state, country, city or in a workplace; things work better when policies are made with input from the people."
The developments came as The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Ars Technica unions announced that after more than two years of negotiations between the NewsGuild of New York and Conde Nast, they averted a strike and reached an agreement in principle on first contracts.
Congratulating the unions on "accomplishing a groundbreaking agreement that sets new standards for fair compensation, equity, and job security in our industry," president Susan DeCarava said that the NewsGuild of New York "is immensely proud of all that our members have achieved due to their unflinching solidarity and resolve in addressing long-standing inequities at Conde Nast."
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Mary Trump Says 'Crushing Defeat' of Her Uncle Needed
"He is somebody who needs to be right all the time and needs to be winning all the time, and will need desperately to spin away from a crushing defeat."
Jul 17, 2020
In an interview on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show" on Thursday evening, Mary L. Trump warned viewers that anything less than a "resounding" victory for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in November will make it all the more likely that her uncle, President Donald Trump, refuses to leave the White House.
Mary Trump, the daughter of Trump's late brother, released her book about the president earlier this week. The tell-all, "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man," describes Trump as openly racist and incapable of admitting errors or shortcomings. As Mary Trump told Maddow, "I don't think that should surprise anybody, given how virulently racist he is today."
Far more pressing for the American public and for Biden's campaign to consider, the president's niece said, is the danger of allowing Trump to win re-election or to lose by a slim enough margin that he can claim that Biden does not have a mandate to take over as president.
As Maddow noted, a number of political observers have expressed fears that Trump will refuse to leave the White House even if Biden wins the election on November 3.
"I think it's perfectly reasonable to worry about that, but how he responds depends a lot on if he loses, how badly he loses," Trump said. "I think the more resounding a Joe Biden victory, the less likely it is for Donald to stick around. He is somebody who needs to be right all the time and needs to be winning all the time, and will need desperately to spin away from a crushing defeat."
"As far as I'm concerned," Trump continued, a decisive victory for Biden "is the only way to--not guarantee--but at least give us a better possibility that there will be a peaceful transition after the election."
Trump's warning echoed an article written by Ed Kilgore at New York magazine earlier this week titled "Joe Biden Needs to Win Big to Avoid a Contested Election."
The Democratic Party must prepare for Trump to contest election results, Kilgore wrote, particularly since he has called into question the use of mail-in ballots, which many states have already used during the primaries due to the coronavirus pandemic.
"Anything other than a landslide may lead Donald Trump to contest the results on the phony-baloney grounds that the mail ballots almost certain to be cast in large numbers are fraudulent and represent a 'rigged' election he actually won," Kilgore wrote.
Because polls are also indicating a partisan divide regarding willingness to vote by mail as the president calls the process into question--and mail-in votes cast largely by Democratic voters will likely be counted after in-person votes, Kilgore wrote, "misleading early returns may show Trump and other Republicans doing much better than they will eventually do, enabling Trump to claim fraud when those evil mail ballots turn it all around for Biden and his Democrats."
"Anyone doubting this is a plausible scenario needs to look back to 2018, when Republican congressional leaders Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy made specious claims of voter fraud when late-arriving mail ballots predictably shifted the results in key House races in California," he added. "It could have been a dress rehearsal for what might happen this November."
Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million votes, but he won key battleground states including Wisconsin and Michigan, securing an electoral college victory.
A similar result could have the same effect as a clear victory for the president, Mary Trump told Maddow, saying that Trump's retention of power would "be the end of the American experiment."
"I do not believe there's any coming back from this" if Trump wins re-election, the president's niece said. "There are too many enablers who are for whatever reason continuing to enable him. Bill Barr has gutted the Justice Department, Mike Pompeo has gutted the State Department. We are in serious danger here."
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Endangering Public, Trump Lies Mount as Coronavirus Spreads Across United States
"It turns out it has serious consequences when in the middle of a serious public health emergency the president just lies about it over and over and over again."
Mar 13, 2020
New polling shows public trust is eroding regarding the Trump administration's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, as news outlets attempt to catalogue President Donald Trump's lies about the crisis.
Yahoo! News and YouGov surveyed 1,635 adults across the country this week, finding that 53% of Americans do not trust the president to tell the truth about the virus, officially known as COVID-19.
Seventy-nine percent of Democrats surveyed said they agreed that Trump can't be trusted, while just 16% of Republicans agreed.
The poll revealed lopsided levels of trust along partisan lines, with 79% of Democrats saying they believe Trump is lying to the U.S. public about the crisis and just 16% of Republicans reporting the same.
On MSNBC Thursday night, Rachel Maddow was among the journalists attempting to clear up the president's misinformation about the coronavirus and public health experts' views on the crisis.
After playing a clip showing Trump claiming that Americans who return from overseas are currently being tested "very heavily" for the coronavirus, Maddow stated emphatically, "That is not true at all."
"This is just, flat, not happening, no matter how many times he says it," Maddow said. "Americans are not being very heavily tested for the coronavirus before they get here from another country, once they get here from another country, or if they're just here and haven't gone to another country... That is a whole logistical operational thing that the president has just imagined."
Watch:
As of Wednesday, according to Business Insider and The Atlantic, fewer than 8,000 Americans had been tested for the coronavirus, which has been confirmed in more than 1,600 people and has killed at least 40 people in the U.S. so far.
By contrast, South Korea has been running about 10,000 tests per day since February.
The CDC and state health departments are only allowing Americans to be tested for the virus if they have traveled to one of five heavily affected countries in the past 14 days or if they have been exposed to someone with a confirmed case of coronavirus.
As The Washington Post reported Thursday, "The constraints are squeezing out patients who don't meet rigid government eligibility criteria, even if their doctors want them tested, according to dozens of interviews with doctors and patients this week."
Cases have increasingly being detected in people with no connection to recent travel and who have contracted the illness through "community spread" within the United States.
"We do not know the actual number of people in the U.S. who are infected because so few Americans have actually been tested," said Jake Tapper on CNN in another Thursday evening segment.
As a result, many Americans may be unknowingly spreading the illness to others, including the elderly and medically vulnerable.
On MSNBC, Maddow shared a number of other clips of Trump and Vice President Mike Pence telling the press that the coronavirus outbreak is expected to dissipate as spring approaches, that there is little to no risk for the general public, and that COVID-19 is not much more dangerous to the U.S. public than the seasonal flu--along with statements from public health experts debunking the claims.
"It turns out it has serious consequences when in the middle of a serious public health emergency the president just lies about it over and over and over again," said Maddow. "For us as a country it is just unfortunate that we have the kind of president who has that easy a time lying."
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Unless Democrats Refute the Myth of a "Good Economy," Trump Likely to Win Second Term
Why silence on the real economic picture could spell disaster for Democrats in 2020
May 08, 2019
Many in the mainstream media are telling us that the "good economy" favors Trump in 2020, and the Democrats are mostly mum on the subject, with Nancy Pelosi and the neoliberals hoping an anti-Trump campaign will win the day in the next election.
But simply running against Trump won't work. Democrats have to refute the myth of a "good economy," then talk about what they're for, what their values are, and what they are going to do for the American people. Sadly, the party's leadership seems loathe to advocate progressive values, and incapable of explaining why the economy isn't so great.
The reason an anti-Trump campaign won't work is because the 2020 election will be determined by turnout. Anything less than 60 percent risks a Trump victory; and failing to embrace the progressive values embraced by the majority of Americans will likely keep turnout below that.
"The neoliberals in charge of the Democratic Party pay lip service to progressive policies around election time, but govern for the elite, special interests, corporations and the rich."
Of course, economic policies are all about values, but as we'll see, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have been eager to adopt policies that implement a values-based agenda.
But before we get to values, let's expose the myth of Trump's "good economy."
What you're hearing a lot about is the unemployment rate, the stock market indices and the GDP. And they are pretty good. But they aren't the whole story, and they really aren't due to Trump's policies.
For example, job growth started in 2009 under Obama, and it has increased steadily since then. In fact, when you compare job creation under Obama's last two years with that of Trump's first two, job growth slowed down under Trump.
How about the stock market? Here again, Obama's numbers are much better than Trump's, with the market going up by more than 71 percent from its low point in Obama's first two years, compared to a gain of only 21 percent in Trump's.
Trump has a slight edge in GDP growth, but that's because he and his Republican allies in Congress gave the economy a short-term goose with a giant tax cut to corporations and the ultra-rich. If past is prologue, this and the Republicans' mania for deregulation will cause a deep recession, but not in time to save us from Trump. But either way, the effects of the tax cut will disappear quickly, leaving a giant deficit. Besides, as many have pointed out, GDP isn't a measure of wealth or welfare, merely a summary of the country's gross receipts. Money spent to counter floods, fires, famine or the liquidation of natural systems gets booked in the GDP account the same as money invested in renewable energy, advanced medical care, or investments in education.
This gets us close to the giant fallacy the press and both parties are ignoring - GDP, job growth, and the stock market don't tell us much about individual welfare. For example, if you put Jeff Bezos and 1,000 other people with zero net worth in a room, they'd all be millionaires on average. And that's essentially what we're doing nationally, and we have been for some time now. For example, between 1980 and 2015, the top .01 percent saw their income rise by 322 percent, while income for the bottom 90 percent rose by just .03 percent.
Now, about those jobs. Some 20 percent of them are contract jobs having no or few benefits, and this is the fastest growing sector in terms of employment. In fact, within a decade, freelancers and contractors could make up half the American workforce.
Having a job is one thing. Having a job that affords a decent quality of life is quite another, and fewer and fewer Americans have that. Until recently, workers haven't had a raise for going on four decades. Wages finally started to go up under Obama, and they've continued to, but not enough to put a dent in the effects of decades of stagnation. For example, in April and March, the increases were a measly 6 cents and 4 cents respectively for the entire month. Meanwhile, corporations and the one percent are still walking away with a grossly disproportionate share of wealth.
The plight of many wage earners is even worse than those grim statistics suggest. Jobs without benefits lower our standard of living, even in the presence of the chump change raises people have managed to pry out of the hands of the oligarchy. When you consider that in 2018 the average cost of a health care policy for a family was about $19, 616, and employers paid $13,917 of that, two things become obvious. First, for folks who don't get benefits, earnings are only a part of their economic story. With no retirement, no health care, no paid vacation or sick pay, they actually have to earn substantially more than someone who receives benefits to break even. But then, with more of those new jobs going to freelancers and contract workers more and more of us are getting screwed, regardless of what the unemployment statistics and the leading indicators say.
"We're living with the lessons of 2016, and they threaten to destroy the country."
One can imagine a skilled communicator like Reagan whipping out a few simple charts and showing Americans how the real economy is leaving them behind, and showing them how the policies embraced by the government are the primary cause of this. Of course, this is something he would never have done, but he was adept at distilling down--and often distorting--seemingly complex issues.
So why can't the Democrats do it? Basically, because there's not that much daylight between what Roger Cohen referred to as the Davos Democrats in charge of the party and the conservatives in charge of the Republicans. As Cohen put it, Davos Democrats are:
... the network of elites whose economic and cultural prescriptions came to be seen by myriad voters across the United States and Europe as camouflage for a self-serving heist.
And with good reason. The neoliberals in charge of the Democratic Party pay lip service to progressive policies around election time but govern for the elite, special interests, corporations and the rich. And yes, Republicans are worse, but at the end of the day, too many voters seem inclined to punish hypocrisy more than straight out economic hooliganism. This means that more of those who would support Democrats are prone to stay home if Democrats present them with another centrist candidate like Hillary on election day. Yet that's exactly what the party leaders, the elite media, and the rest of the party old guard are doing - fostering a centrist candidate like Joe Biden who's dragging around enough neoliberal, corporate-friendly, history to: 1) make him an easy target for Trump, and 2) alienate enough real progressives that turnout won't be high enough to overcome the myth of Trump's good economy.
We're living with the lessons of 2016, and they threaten to destroy the country. Yet somehow, that's not enough to convince Pelosi and the rest of the neoliberal crew to run a campaign based on values like fairness, equity, economic justice, protecting our climate, assuring that democracy isn't co-opted by corporate cash, or constraining the wretched excesses of capitalism so that the people can get a piece of the pie.
Instead, the people within the party advocating these things are getting marginalized; the policies that might actualize them are getting labeled as a dream; proposals to get corporate money out of elections are being rejected; and tax and fiscal policies that attack the injustices of capitalism are being ignored.
The only way Trump can win is to keep turnout low. The Davos Democrats are doing everything in their power to oblige him.
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Climate Denier Trump Can't Handle the Tuth About Why Central Americans Flock to U.S.
Climate change-driven migration—and the famines, wars and other crises created by this—are only going to get worse
Apr 26, 2019
Let's stipulate right here that President Trump doesn't understand a lot of things, even as he enters his 28th month in charge of the massive bureaucratic battleship that is the U.S. government. But no issue has flummoxed our rage-prone 45th president more than the rise in unauthorized crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border -- even after promising his xenophobic base that his harsh immigration crackdown would make America great again.
When numbers came into the White House showing this decade's biggest surge in refugees at the border -- with Border Patrol agents detaining as many as 4,000 migrants, many of them women and children, in a single day -- Trump reportedly went ballistic. He yelled and fumed at his then-Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen until he finally forced her out of the job, partly because she wouldn't buy into the president's ideas to fight migration with moves that were probably illegal and unworkable and certainly immoral.The commander-in-chief wanted even harsher family separation policies, even after the first wave of ripping toddlers and even infants from their mommies and daddies, in 2018, had shocked consciences around the globe. He threatened to completely shut down the border with Mexico, which would have crippled commerce and maybe triggered a recession. He killed the nomination of a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief who wasn't "tough enough, fired other top Homeland Security officials, and flirted with ideas like sending detained children to Gitmo. A senior aide told CNN's Jake Tapper that the president was "increasingly unhinged" about border crossings, even as he furiously tweeted out more fear.
To Trump, migration is a ridiculously simplistic zero-sum game. The immigrants are cheaters, frauds or out-and-out criminals, trying to take advantage of us (and, specifically, of Trump). Whether they "get away with it" is solely an equation that depends on how "tough" we are -- on hard-nosed, head-shaved Border Patrol agents named Steve (probably), until Trump can force Congress to build a glorious wall that will make the problem go away.
Donald Trump can't handle the truth.
Because to do that, the Trump administration would have to do something alien to every xenophobic bone in its body: Embrace science. The president would have to stop cursing out and firing every official at DHS, stop rescuing oil lobbyists from the swamp and installing them in his Cabinet, and start accepting that climate change is real, that it's occurring right now, and that responses like mass migration are an unavoidably human reaction to drought, floods and misery.
Experts (admittedly, non-persons in Trumpland) believe that a sizable portion of the recent steep increase in migrants making the long and dangerous journey from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are doing so because record drought in the region -- the result of a warming planet -- has destroyed crops and left destitute farmers desperate to save their families. Simply put, images of armed U.S. officers seizing kids at the border still won't deter parents who see the only alternative as famine and crushing poverty.
"People have been displaced by climate for millennia, but we are now at a particular historical moment, facing a new type of environmentally driven migration that will be more fast and furious," Maria Cristina Garcia, a Cornell University professor publishing a book on climate-driven migration, said recently. "It will require incredible adaptability and political will to keep up with the changes that are forecasted to happen."
Conor Walsh, who works for Catholic Family Services in Honduras, wrote recently in the Arizona Daily Star that severe drought in neighboring Guatemala in 2018 resulted in significant crop loss for as many as 300,000 subsistence farmers there. Indeed, the cycle of arid days without rain and severe floods has become so pronounced in the key growing regions of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras during the 2010s that the area is now called "the dry corridor." Experts note that the last big drought in 2014 matched up with the last big surge in U.S. border crossings. And the World Bank says climate change may cause as many as 1.4 million people to leave Central America and Mexico over the next 30 years.
But "incredible adaptability," to steal professor Garcia's phrase, is not a hallmark of the Donald Trump presidency. Imagine a world where, instead of yelling at Cabinet members to lock up more kids in cages, the president sat at the Resolute Desk and listened to the story of Fredi Onan Vicen Pena, a 41-year-old Honduran coffee farmer who told the New York Times he's seen a drought-fueled disease called coffee rust destroy 70 percent of his crop, while most of his family members have already left for the U.S. or elsewhere.
That world, sadly, does not exist.
Can the United States -- a.k.a. "the Colossus of the North" -- do anything to help the struggling farmers of Honduras and Guatemala? The answer, not surprisingly, is "yes." Sebastian Charchalac, a Guatemalan agronomist who was running a program with about $200,000 in U.S. aid -- a mere pittance in the Land of Billion-Dollar Stealth Bombers -- told the New Yorker he was seeing real success in helping farmers diversify crops, conserve water, and, as a result, save their land. Then in 2017 the Trump administration arrived and killed the program.
Indeed, one element of Trump's rage-frenzied rampage over border crossings has been an announcement that the U.S. will end all foreign aid to the three key Central American nations -- about $350 million to 400 million a year, already down sharply from the Obama years -- as a spiteful punishment for the supposed failure to curb migration. That money goes not just for farm aid but also for programs that attack problems like urban gang violence -- i.e., all of the horrible things that would cause people to abandon their native countries, undertake an arduous and dangerous long journey, and seek freedom and safety in the United States.
Ending foreign aid and covering our eyes and pretending that climate change doesn't exist are all but guaranteed to drive the number of refugees from Central America even higher. It may be the ultimate case of adopting hurtful, counter-productive policies because they "trigger the libs" and sate the bloodlust of Trump rally crowds chanting "build the wall!" Instead of spending a few dollars to help struggling farmers, Team Trump will spend millions on tent cities that sure as hell look like concentration camps -- dragging America further into the muck.
Meanwhile, climate change-driven migration -- and the famines, wars and other crises created by this -- are only going to get worse. In January, the Pentagon warned yet again that climate change is a major national security issue for this country. But Trump, who won the presidency insisting he knows more than the generals, didn't listen. He definitely won't listen to the scientists, either. The president only listens to the narcissistic rantings of his damaged psyche -- and that is creating a human rights crisis on this continent.
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Plenty of 'Collusion' for The Ultimate Crime: Lighting the Earth on Fire
Despite knowing the flames were rising, the arsonists all got together
Apr 25, 2019
As Notre Dame burned, as the flames leapt from its roof of ancient timbers, many of us watched in grim horror. Hour after hour, on screen after screen, channel after channel, you could see that 850-year-old cathedral, a visiting spot for 13 million people annually, being gutted, its roof timbers flaring into the evening sky, its steeple collapsing in a ball of fire. It was dramatic and deeply disturbing -- and, of course, unwilling to be left out of any headline-making event, President Trump promptly tweeted his advice to the French authorities: "Perhaps flying water tankers could be used to put it out. Must act quickly!" No matter that water from such planes would probably have taken the cathedral's towers down and endangered lives as well -- "the equivalent," according to a French fire chief, "of dropping three tons of concrete at 250 kilometers per hour [on] the ancient monument."
Still, who could doubt that watching such a monument to the human endeavor being transformed into a shell of its former self was a reminder that everything human is mortal; that, whether in a single lifetime or 850 years, even the most ancient of our artifacts, like those in Iraq and Syria recently, will sooner or later be scourged by the equivalent of (or even quite literally by) fire and sword; that nothing truly lasts, even the most seemingly permanent of things like, until now, Notre Dame?
"We are, of course, talking about nothing short of the ultimate crime, but on any given day of our lives, you'd hardly notice that it was underway."
That cathedral in flames, unlike so much else in our moment (including you-know-who in his every waking moment), deserved the front-and-center media attention it got. Historically speaking, it was a burning event of the first order. Still, it's strange that the most unnerving, deeply terrifying burning underway today, not of that ancient place of worship that lived with humanity for so many tumultuous centuries but of the planet itself, remains largely in the background.
When the cathedral in which Napoleon briefly crowned himself emperor seemed likely to collapse, it was certifiably an event of headline importance. When, however, the cathedral (if you care to think of it that way) in which humanity has been nurtured all these tens of thousands of years, on which we spread, developed, and became what we are today -- I mean, of course, the planet itself -- is in danger of an unprecedented sort from fires we continue to set, that's hardly news at all. It's largely relegated to the back pages of our attention, lost any day of the week to headlines about a disturbed, suicidal young woman obsessed with the Columbine school massacre or an attorney general obsessed with protecting the president.
And let's not kid ourselves, this planet of ours is beginning to burn -- and not just last week or month either. It's been smoldering for decades now. Last summer, for instance, amid global heat records (Ouargla, Algeria, 124 degrees Fahrenheit; Hong Kong, over 91 degrees Fahrenheit for 16 straight days; Nawabsha, Pakistan, 122 degrees Fahrenheit; Oslo, Norway, over 86 degrees Fahrenheit for 16 consecutive days; Los Angeles, 108 degrees Fahrenheit), wildfires raged inside the Arctic Circle. This March, in case you hadn't noticed -- and why would you, since it's gotten so little attention? -- the temperature in Alaska was, on average, 20 degrees (yes, that is not a misprint) above normal and typical ice roads between villages and towns across parts of that state were melting and collapsing with deaths ensuing.
Meanwhile, in the Antarctic, ice is melting at a rate startling to scientists. If the process accelerates, global sea levels could rise far faster than expected, beginning to drown coastal cities like Miami, New York, and Shanghai more quickly than previously imagined. Meanwhile, globally, the wildfire season is lengthening. Fearsome fires are on the rise, as are droughts, and that's just to begin to paint a picture of a heating planet and its ever more extreme weather systems and storms, of (if you care to think of it that way) a Whole Earth version of Notre Dame.
The Arsonists Arrive
As was true with Notre Dame, when it comes to the planet, there were fire alarms before an actual blaze was fully noted. Take, for example, the advisory panel of scientists reporting to President Lyndon Johnson on the phenomenon of global warming back in 1965. They would, in fact, predict with remarkable accuracy how our world was going to change for the worse by this twenty-first-century moment. (And Johnson, in turn, would bring the subject up officially for perhaps the first time in a Special Message to Congress on February 5, 1965, 54 years before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal proposal.) As that panel wrote at the time, "Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years..." In other words, the alarm was first sounded more than half a century ago.
When it comes to climate change, however, as the smoke began to appear and, in our own moment, the first flames began to leap--after all, the last four years have been the hottest on record and, despite the growth of ever less expensive alternative energy sources, carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere are still rising, not falling--no firemen arrived (just children). There were essentially no adults to put out the blaze. Yes, there was the Paris climate accord but it was largely an agreement in principle without enforcement powerof any genuine sort.
In fact, across significant parts of the planet, those who appeared weren't firefighters at all, but fire feeders who will likely prove to be the ultimate arsonists of human history. In a way, it's been an extraordinary performance. Leaders who vied for, or actually gained, power not only refused to recognize the existence of climate change but were quite literally eager to aid and abet the phenomenon. This is true, for instance, of the new president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who came to power prepared to turn the already endangered carbon sink of the Amazon rain forest into a playground for corporate and agricultural destroyers. It is similarly true in Europe, where right-wing populist movements have begun to successfully oppose gestures toward dealing with climate change, gaining both attention and votes in the process. In Poland, for instance, just such a party led by President Andrzej Duda has come to power and the promotion of coal production has become the order of the day.
And none of that compared to developments in the richest, most powerful country of all, the one that historically has put more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere than any other. On taking office, Donald Trump appointed more climate-change deniers to his cabinet than might have previously seemed possible and swore fealty to "American energy dominance," while working to kneecap the development of alternative energy systems. He and his men tried to open new areas to oil and gas drilling, while in every way imaginable striving to remove what limits there had been on Big Energy, so that it could release its carbon emissions into the atmosphere unimpeded. And as the planetary cathedral began to burn, the president set the mood for the moment (at least for his vaunted "base") by tweeting such things as "It's really cold outside, they are calling it a major freeze, weeks ahead of normal. Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming!" or, on alternative energy, "You would be doing wind, windmills, and if it doesn't if it doesn't blow you can forget about television for that night... Darling, I want to watch television. I'm sorry, the wind isn't blowing."
Among those who will someday be considered the greatest criminals in history, don't forget the Big Energy CEOs who, knowing the truth about climate change from their own hired scientists, did everything they could to increase global doubts by funding climate-denying groups, while continuing to be among the most profitable companies around. They even hedged their bets by, among other things, investing in alternative energy and using it to more effectively drill for oil and natural gas.
Meanwhile, of course, the planet that had proven such a comfortable home for humanity was visibly going down. No, climate change won't actually destroy the Earth itself, just the conditions under which humanity (and so many other species) thrived on it. Sooner or later, if the global temperature is indeed allowed to rise a catastrophic seven degrees Fahrenheit or four degrees Celsius, as an environmental impact statement from the Trump administration suggested it would by 2100, parts of the planet could become uninhabitable, hundreds of millions of human beings could be set in desperate motion, and the weather could intensify in ways that might be nearly unbearable for human habitation. Just read David Wallace-Wells's The Uninhabitable Earth, if you doubt me.
This isn't even contestable information anymore and yet it's perfectly possible that Donald Trump could be elected to a second term in 2020. It's perfectly possible that more right-wing populist movements could sweep into power in Europe. It's perfectly possible that Vladimir Putin's version of great powerdom--a sagging Russian petro-state--could continue on its present globally warming path well into the future.
Understand this: Trump, Bolsonaro, Duda, Putin, and the others are just part of human history. Sooner or later, they will be gone. Climate change, however, is not part of human history (whatever it may do to civilization as we know it). Its effects could, in human terms, last for almostunimaginable periods of time. It operates on a different time scale entirely, which means that, unlike the tragedies and nightmares of human history, it is not just a passing matter.
Of course, the planet will survive, as will some life forms (as would be true even if humanity were to succumb to that other possible path to an apocalypse, a nuclear holocaust resulting in "nuclear winter"). But that should be considered small consolation indeed.
Putting the Planet on a Suicide Watch
Consider global warming a story for the ages, one that should put Notre Dame's near-destruction after almost nine centuries in grim perspective. And yet the planetary version of burning, which should be humanity's crisis of all crises, has been met with a general lack of media attention, reflecting a lack of just about every other kind of attention in our world (except by those outraged children who know that they are going to inherit a degraded world and are increasingly making their displeasure about it felt).
To take just one example of that lack of obvious attention, the response of the mega-wealthy to the burning of Notre Dame was an almost instantaneous burst of giving. The euro equivalent of nearly a billion dollars was raised more or less overnight from the wealthiest of French families and other .01%ers. Remind me of the equivalent for climate change as the planet's spire threatens to come down?
As for arsonists like Donald Trump and the matter of collusion, there's not even a question mark on the subject. In the United States, such collusion with the destroyers of human life on Planet Earth is written all over their actions. It's beyond evident in the appointment of former oil and gas lobbyists and fellow travelers to positions of power. Will there, however, be the equivalent of a Mueller investigation? Will the president be howling "witch hunt" again? Not a chance. When it comes to Donald Trump and climate change, there will be neither a Mueller Report, nor the need for a classic Barr defense. And yet collusion--hell, yeah! The evidence is beyond overwhelming.
We are, of course, talking about nothing short of the ultimate crime, but on any given day of our lives, you'd hardly notice that it was underway. Even for an old man like me, it's a terrifying thing to watch humanity make a decision, however inchoate, to essentially commit suicide. In effect, there is now a suicide watch on Planet Earth. Let's hope the kids can make a difference.
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Demanding to Hear Directly From Mueller, Nadler Subpoenas Full, Unredacted Report Friday
"We need the entire report, unredacted, and the underlying documents in order to make informed decisions."
Apr 19, 2019
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said Friday morning that the committee would issue a subpoena for the entire unredacted Mueller report "in the next couple of hours."
The demand reinforced a sense of dissatisfaction from House Democrats with the Trump administration's suggestion that the report is a closed matter.
On ABC's "Good Morning America," Nadler told George Stephanopoulos his committee would demand access to the full report, which, while it did not establish a criminal conspiracy between President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and Russia, also did not exonerate the president of potential obstruction of justice.
Attorney General William Barr, Nadler said, "misled the country" when he held a press conference focusing largely on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's findings regarding collusion.
"We have to hear from Mueller," Nadler said. "We need the entire report, unredacted, and the underlying documents in order to make informed decisions...and we will subpoena that entire report today."
Watch:
The New York Democrat wants the full report in his committee's possession by May 1, the day before Barr is expected to testify before the Judiciary Committee.
Other Democrats have also called for the full report to be subpoenaed since the redacted report was released Thursday morning.
The impending subpoena will begin just the latest investigation by Democrats into allegations against Trump. Nadler's committee is also seeking documents from more than 80 individuals linked to the Mueller probe, while the House Intelligence Committee is examining potential money laundering connected with Russian interference with the 2016 election, and has also called Mueller to testify by the end of May.
"We want to make sure the Department of Justice doesn't hide behind the Gang of Eight or anything else to try to prevent the American people from seeing this evidence," House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said on "The Rachel Maddow Show" Thursday night.
"At the end of the day when you read this lengthy report you learn that the president has repeatedly misled the country, he's urged others to mislead the country," added Schiff. "All of this is damning and we all ought to expect more from our president than merely the protestration that he's not a crook."
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Bill to End Yemen Siege Passes--No Thanks to MSNBC
After Khashoggi outrage passes, cable network goes back to ignoring US-backed humanitarian disaster
Apr 10, 2019
Progressives--along with a handful of libertarian-leaning Republicans--finally passed a bill in both houses of Congress last week to invoke the War Powers act and end US support for the Saudi-led bombing of Yemen, an entirely one-sided war that's killed thousands of Yemeni civilians over the last four years with assistance and direction of the US military.
The bill's proponents achieved this human rights victory with virtually no help from America's leading liberal cable network.
As activist pressure on lawmakers mounted over the past few months, the nominally liberal media powerhouse MSNBC was once again AWOL. The 24-hour cable news channel has yet to cover the war in all of 2019, repeating a similar no-show record when activists were attempting to end the war last spring; MSNBC ignored Yemen entirely from September 2016 through July 2018 (FAIR.org, 3/20/18).
In August 2018, after almost two years of not doing a single segment on the US war on Yemen (August 31, 2016-August 9, 2018), Chris Hayes finally reported on a US-made bomb that killed over 40 children in a Yemen school bus. (A widely circulated FAIR Action Alert two weeks prior--7/23/18--pointing out MSNBC had 455 mentions of Stormy Daniels and 0 of Yemen from July 2017 to July 2018 may have contributed, but it's impossible to know for sure.)
The October 2, 2018, murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents, and the subsequent bipartisan, CIA-sanctioned outrage by US media that one of their own was killed, did provide cover for a handful of MSNBC segments on the Yemen siege in the final three months of 2018. But as that outrage receded, so too did the interest of Hayes (and MSNBC's other big name hosts) to highlight Yemen. It's been 116 days since December 14, 2018, the last time anyone on the network has mentioned Yemen, according to a search of MSNBC's website and Twitter feed--a time period when anti-war activists needed it the most.
With a bill making its way to Trump's desk that would finally end US arms sales, as well as intelligence and logistical support, for the Saudi campaign (which, CIA veteran Bruce Riedel insists, the war could not continue without), it's worth reckoning with how inadequate and jingoistic liberal corporate media are when it comes to matters of US violence overseas. Big name progressives like Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell should be leading the charge on ending the war, inviting the likes of Bernie Sanders and Barbara Lee to come on to explain in real time why liberals should support anti-war legislation making its way through Congress.
Instead, the anti-war mantle is mostly ceded to grotesque, tabloid antisemites on the right--like Breitbart, which has run half a dozen articles in favor of ending US support for Saudi Arabia in 2019. Progressives in Congress, who have been leading the fight for peace in Yemen for years, are given little to no support from the media's most prominent liberal messaging platform.
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Spain Not Satisfied With CIA Answers on Embassy Attack
Burglars sought files of Kim Jong-un adviser
Apr 03, 2019
The story of the February 22 break-in at the North Korean embassy in Madrid gets more intriguing by the day.
The brazen daytime attack, involving 10 men (some of whom escaped via Uber), is rather more shocking (and entertaining) than parsing the Talmudic texts of Barr and Mueller. (Plus, Rachel Maddow doesn't have a theory, Glenn Greenwald doesn't have an opinion, John Brennan is mum. And Anderson Cooper isn't on the scene, at least not yet.)
The North Korean embassy attack is not another elite journo-spat but a real-life Hollywood thriller screenplay that is being written in media cliches in real time. As a historian of the CIA I'm all too familiar with the agency's many cock-ups and crimes, and I have to ask myself, is this one of them?
El Pais, the most reliable newspaper in Spain, can bring you up to speed on the incident, which North Korea is now suddenly calling a "terror attack."
What gives?
The Perps
The cast of characters will be familiar to observers of secret intelligence operations.
The embassy burglars sought information, a la Watergate. Unlike Watergate, they came by day. They invaded the embassy in a quiet residential neighborhood, assaulted the staff, tied people up, and demanded computers and files.
A BBC report says they were especially interested in the former ambassador to Madrid, Kim Hyok-chol, a confidant of Kim Jong-un.
He was a natural target for those seeking intelligence about North Korea's nuclear program. In February, Thae Yong-ho, "a former North Korean diplomat who defected to South Korea in 2016," told Bloomberg he was a nuclear expert. "At a very young age, Kim Hyok Chol was placed on the task force that wrote the drafts for North Korea's nuclear strategy documents at its foreign ministry," Thae said.
El Pais explains the possible motive for the brazen attack:
"Investigators believe that the intruders were looking for 'sensitive information regarding North Korea's nuclear and arms program' just days ahead of the Hanoi summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump, which ended abruptly without a deal."
The self-confessed burglar-in-chief, Adrian Hong Chang, reportedly debriefed the FBI on February 27, the first day of the summit. Did he provide information of interest to the U.S. negotiators?
Covert Actions
There is other possible evidence of an intelligence operation. The perpetrators:
- recorded their symbolic provocations for media distribution;
- carried many passports;
- absconded to the United States and debriefed U.S. officials.
Then came this Watergate-style denial from State Department spokesman Robert Palladino last Tuesday: "the government of the United States had nothing to do" with the break-in.
Shades of Ron Ziegler, the Nixon White House spokesman who dismissed the Watergate break-in as a "third-rate burglary."
Palladino, by the way, is a spokesman for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, formerly director of the CIA.
The CIA Link
El Pais provides new details about how Spanish authorities came to suspect CIA involvement.
It turns out U.S. officials waited three weeks to tell Spanish law enforcement authorities that Adrian Hong Chang had shared the fruits of the raid with the FBI within five days of the attack.
(I speculate that a CIA representative sat in on the Chang debrief at some point. That would be standard operating procedure, but I have no evidence that it happened.)
After the Spanish cops absorbed the FBI's report, they made inquiries in Langley. The CIA provided answers that are still undisclosed. The Spanish investigators came away dissatisfied.
El Pais explained why:
"According to the judge's report, the group leader got in touch with the FBI on February 27, five days after the operation, to share information and hand over the material obtained in Madrid. Hong Chang was not arrested, and Spanish authorities were only informed after the story had made news headlines.
"Spanish authorities contacted the CIA, which offered an 'unconvincing' reply. Sources at the US embassy in Madrid said they do not comment on intelligence matters being handled by Spanish authorities, and that even if there had been any kind of official or informal call, no comments would be provided either."
Sounds like the CIA doesn't want to answer perfectly legitimate questions about a politically motivated crime.
Here's a question that the House and Senate intelligence committees might want to ask as part of their post-Mueller oversight duties: What did Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel know about the North Korea embassy break-in? And when did they know it?
This article was produced by the Deep State, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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