Brett Kavanaugh's Latest Opinion Should Terrify Democrats
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51809"><span class="small">Ian Millhiser, Vox</span></a>
Tuesday, 26 November 2019 14:34
Millhiser writes: "If you've spent any time around the Federalist Society - the hugely influential conservative legal society that plays an outsized role in choosing President Trump's judicial nominees - then you've probably noticed their obsession with a singular issue."
Brett Kavanaugh's Latest Opinion Should Terrify Democrats
By Ian Millhiser, Vox
26 November 19
The Supreme Court now has five votes to sabotage the next Democratic presidency.
f you’ve spent any time around the Federalist Society — the hugely influential conservative legal society that plays an outsized role in choosing President Trump’s judicial nominees — then you’ve probably noticed their obsession with a singular issue.
Kavanaugh’s opinion is not especially surprising. The Trump appointee to the Supreme Court keynoted the Federalist Society’s annual banquet earlier this month and he spent much of the Obama years frustrating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other federal agencies. But his opinion is nonetheless significant because it shows that there are almost certainly five votes on the Supreme Court to slash agencies’ regulatory power.
Last June, in Gundy v. United States, all four of Kavanaugh’s Republican colleagues indicated they want to limit agency regulation. Kavanaugh, however, did not participate in the Gundy case because he was not a member of the Court when it was argued.
On Monday, the Supreme Court announced it would not hear Paul v. United States, a case asking whether a federal law delegates too much authority to the Justice Department to determine whether certain sex offenders need to register with the government. That’s the very same issue that the Supreme Court considered in Gundy.
Kavanaugh, however, took the unusual step of releasing an opinion explaining why he thought the Court should not hear Paul. His brief opinionpraises Justice Neil Gorsuch’s effort to toss out decades of settled law regarding the power of agencies to regulate. Indeed, if anything, Kavanaugh’s Paul opinion suggests that he would restrict federal power even more than Gorsuch would.
It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of this issue. Countless federal laws, from the Clean Air Act to the Affordable Care Act, lay out a broad federal policy and delegate to an agency the power to implement the details of that policy. Under Kavanaugh’s approach, many of these laws are unconstitutional, as are numerous existing regulations governing polluters, health providers, and employers.
A revolution against the regulatory state looms on the horizon, and the biggest losers are likely to be Democrats who hope to regain the White House in 2020.
The Nondelegation Doctrine, briefly explained
Both Gundy and Paul concern a largely defunct legal doctrine known as “nondelegation.”
Broadly speaking, Congress can make laws in two ways. The most straightforward way is it can simply command a person or industry to conduct their business in a certain way. If Congress wants to restrict pollution, for example, it can pass a law commanding power plants to use a particular technology that reduces emissions.
The problem with this approach, however, is that acts of Congress are difficult to change. If Congress had enacted a law in the 1970s requiring power plants to use the best emissions reduction technology that existed back then, it could have locked those plants into using technology that is vastly inferior to the methods of reducing emissions that exist today. At the very least, Congress would have struggled to keep abreast of new technology and to update the law as better methods of reducing emissions were invented.
So that’s not what Congress did. Instead, the Clean Air Act provides that certain power plants must use “the best system of emission reduction” that currently exists, while also taking into account factors such as cost. Congress also tasked the EPA with studying what technology is available to reduce emissions and with creating binding regulations instructing energy companies on which systems they must use to reduce emissions.
As the technology evolves, the EPA may update its regulations, so that power plants in 2019 use the best system of emission reduction that exists in 2019 — not the one that existed in the 1970s.
In this way, federal policy can be both democratic and dynamic. It is democratic because the goals of federal policy are ultimately set by the people’s representatives in Congress. But it is also dynamic because Congress doesn’t have to pass a new law every time a new innovation arrives on the scene.
“Nondelegation” is the idea that the Constitution imposes limits — potentially very strict limits — on Congress’s power to give regulatory authority to federal agencies.
Under current law, “a statutory delegation is constitutional as long as Congress ‘lay[s] down by legislative act an intelligible principle to which the person or body authorized to [exercise the delegated authority] is directed to conform.’” That is, Congress has broad authority to delegate power to federal agencies so long as it explains with sufficient clarity what the agency is supposed to accomplish with its power.
In Gundy, however, Gorsuch sharply criticized this long-standing rule and called for the Court to revive the Nondelegation Doctrine.
In that opinion, Gorsuch suggested that current law risks giving agencies “unbounded policy choices.” His explanation of what new limits he would impose on federal agencies is vague and it’s hard to find a clear legal rule in the opinion. Nevertheless, Gorsuch writes that a federal law permitting agencies to regulate must be “‘sufficiently definite and precise to enable Congress, the courts, and the public to ascertain’ whether Congress’s guidance has been followed.”
As a practical matter, when the Supreme Court hands down such a vague and open-ended legal standard, it is effectively shifting power to the judiciary. What does it mean for a statute to be “sufficiently definite and precise” that people can “ascertain whether Congress’s guidance has been followed”? I honestly have no idea. But, as a practical matter, the answer to this question will be decided by the Supreme Court’s Republican majority whenever it is confronted with an agency regulation.
Gorsuch, in other words, would give the Republican-controlled Supreme Court a veto power over all federal regulations. That prospect should chill each of the Democratic presidential candidates to the bone. If any of them prevail, their administration would have to seek a permission slip from the Court if it wants to regulate, if Gorsuch’s view holds sway.
Now, Gorsuch’s Gundy opinion was actually a dissent — but only for reasons that are unlikely to repeat in a future case. As mentioned above, Kavanaugh did not participate in the case. And Justice Samuel Alito wrote an unusual opinion where he said that “if a majority of this Court were willing to reconsider the approach we have taken for the past 84 years, I would support that effort.” Nevertheless, Alito voted to keep existing law in place until such a majority sits together on the same case.
It’s unclear why Alito did so, but Alito is a former prosecutor with very pro-prosecution instincts, so he may not have wanted to side with a sex offender in a case where he lacked the votes to move legal doctrine to the right.
The two remaining Republican justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas, both voted with Gorsuch. So that’s four votes to revive the Nondelegation Doctrine.
Kavanaugh’s solo opinion in Paul makes five.
The issue in Paul is very similar to the issue in Gundy, so the Supreme Court ultimately decided not to hear the Paul case — most likely because it wanted to avoid the spectacle of reaching two opposite conclusions on the same legal question in just two years. Nevertheless, Kavanaugh used this occasion to write that Gorsuch’s “scholarly analysis of the Constitution’s nondelegation doctrine in his Gundy dissent may warrant further consideration in future cases.”
That’s the sort of language justices often use to signal that they would like to see a past dissent become a future majority opinion.
Kavanaugh reads Gorsuch’s opinion to state that Congress may not allow an “agency to exercise regulatory authority over a major policy question of great economic and political importance.” Again, this standard is vague and would effectively give the Supreme Court broad authority to veto regulations that its Republican majority dislikes. Kavanaugh’s Paul opinion also signals that he would shrink agency power to only include “less-major or fill-up-the-details decisions.”
Nondelegation would be a disaster for Democrats and a big win for Republicans
In theory, the Nondelegation Doctrine could be applied in a neutral way to administrations controlled by either party. In practice, it would be a boon to Republicans and an albatross around the neck of Democrats.
One reason why is that Democrats tend to support robust regulation while Republicans do not. An anti-regulatory doctrine inherently favors conservatives.
A second reason is that the Supreme Court is controlled by Republicans. So, even if it is possible for the Nondelegation Doctrine to be applied in a neutral way, this Supreme Court seems unlikely to do so.
Meanwhile, the biggest problem facing Democrats for the foreseeable future is Senate malapportionment. Currently, the Republican Senate “majority” represents 15 million fewer people than the Democratic “minority,” and that’s a significant Republican gain over the previous Senate. In the Senate that confirmed Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, the Republican “majority” represented almost 40 million fewer people than the Democratic “minority.”
Similarly, when the Republican Senate “majority” refused to give a hearing or a confirmation vote to Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, Democratic senators represented about 20 million more people than Republicans.
Republicans, in other words, owe their Supreme Court majority to the fact that the Senate, which gives each person in Wyoming about 66 times more representation than residents of California, is malapportioned to strongly favor the GOP. That same thumb on the scale in favor of Republicans, moreover, also gives Republicans an enormous advantage in the legislative process.
Republican presidents are likely to serve alongside Republican Senates, and thus they will be able to enact a legislative agenda unless Democrats control the House. Democratic presidents, by contrast, must win by commanding margins to even have a shot at a Senate majority. And, even then, they must overcome the Senate’s filibuster rules — which allow just 41 Republican senators to block any regulatory legislation — in order to pass a bill through the Senate.
Thus, if a Republican Supreme Court disables major legislation like the Clean Air Act, that law is likely to remain disabled for the foreseeable future.
That is why the Nondelegation Doctrine could be a recipe for one-party rule. Republican justices can disable regulations at their leisure — or even strike down the very laws permitting such regulation. And Democrats are unlikely to ever win a Senate majority large enough to do anything about it.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6396"><span class="small">Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch</span></a>
Tuesday, 26 November 2019 14:34
Engelhardt writes: "French king Louis XV reputedly said, 'Après moi, le déluge.' ('After me, the flood.') Whether that line was really his or not remains unclear, but not long after his death did come the French Revolution."
Donald Trump supporters. (photo: Damon Winter/NYT)
Après Moi, le Déluge: The Age of Trump, the End of What?
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
26 November 19
Note for TomDispatch Readers:The next piece will be posted on Sunday evening, December 1st. Have a fine Thanksgiving!
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
rench king Louis XV reputedly said, “Aprèsmoi, le déluge.” (“After me, the flood.”) Whether that line was really his or not remains unclear, but not long after his death did come the French Revolution. We should be so lucky! Our all-American version of Louis XV, Donald I, is incapable, I suspect, of even imagining a world after him. Given the historically unprecedented way he’s covered by the “fake” or “corrupt” news media, that “enemy of the people,” I doubt they really can either.
Never, you might say, have we, as a nation, been plunged quite so fully not just into the ever-present, but into one man’s version of it. In other words, for us, the deluge is distinctly now and it has an orange tint, a hefty body, and the belligerent face of every 1950s father I ever knew -- my own, in his angrier moods, included -- as well as of redbaiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. Of course, you have to be at least as old as me to remember that Trump-anticipating political showman and his own extreme moment. After all, in distinctly Trumpian fashion (though without Twitter), he accused President Truman’s secretary of defense, George Marshall, and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, of being Russian agents. As McCarthy said at the time, “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?” McCarthy (whose aide, Roy Cohn, was once Donald Trump’s mentor) offers a reminder that Trumpian-style personalities were not unknown in our history and that, in the case of McCarthy, their antics were, however minimally by twenty-first-century standards, actually televised.
Our very own Louis XV is, of course, something else again: a deluge of tweets, insults, self-praise, lies and false claims, and strange acts of almost every imaginable sort. In other words, thanks in significant part to the media and social media, Donald J. Trump is indeed the definition of a deluge and we, the American people, are -- thought about a certain way -- present-day Venice; we are, that is, six feet under water, even if we don’t quite know it.
And here’s what may be the strangest thing of all: while HE -- and, given the last three-plus years, those caps are anything but an exaggeration -- is dealt with by the media in deluge fashion, there’s one story that’s in our faces everyday and yet, in some sense -- a sense that drives me bonkers -- is simply missing in action. To be clear: since 2016, Donald Trump has been covered in our ever-shrinking yet ever-expanding media universe like no other individual in history from Nebuchadnezzar’s moment to our own.
You know that. I know that. Everyone knows that -- and yet, in case you haven’t noticed, the fact that HE’s in all our faces like no king, no emperor, no autocrat, no president, no entertainer, no performer ever is hardly being covered, hardly even acknowledged from day to day, week to week, month to month, or even sadly, given how long the Trumpian moment has already lasted, year to year. In other words, HE is eternally there, but the media, omnipresent as it may be when it comes to him, in some sense isn’t.
Winter Is Coming in Trumpian Fashion
The way that omnipresence is linked to his omnipresence must, I suppose, be obvious to everyone. Still, no one is really covering the coverage, not the way it should be covered in all its mind-boggling strangeness. Take the other day, a perfectly typical passing moment in my life in the age of Trump. On my way into the men’s locker room at my local gym, I stopped to have a sandwich in a room with a giant TV screen and a few tables and chairs. On any day as I wander through, the TV is almost invariably on -- tuned in to (where else?) CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News -- and if you-know-whose angry face isn’t on screen, then there are almost invariably several talking heads discussing HIM or something related to HIM anyway.
That particular day, when I sat down to eat my sandwich, CNN was on and the story being covered concerned an unscheduled visit the president had paid to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The White House claimed that Trump was simply getting part of his yearly physical early because he happened to have a free weekend in Washington. But the visit was (gasp!) “unannounced” and evidently unexpected by the hospital staff -- as if much that Donald Trump does is announced and expected -- and who knew what that meant.
In truth, the answer was: no one about to be onscreen yakking had much of anything to offer. The only news, beyond the visit itself, was that there was no news at all about HIM. Still, medical experts were interviewed and, by the time I had finished my sandwich and headed into the locker room, the talking heads were still discussing... well, essentially the same nothing much because nothing much was known.
And when I walked through that same room on my way out after my swim, another set of talking heads was, of course, discussing the president’s unscheduled visit to Walter Reed. Several days later, when I began writing this piece, the issue was still being chewed over by columnists and on TV and, as with so much else about this president, days after Trump’s “mysterious, unannounced visit to the hospital,” as the New York Timesput it all too accurately, there remained “a torrent of speculation” about it. Then again, such a description could be applied endlessly to stories about Donald J. Trump.
Now, there would be nothing particularly wrong with any of this, story by story, if it weren’t seemingly our only media present, past, and future in the Trump era. But the historically unprecedented nature of all this yakking, writing, interviewing, speculating, Tweeting, Facebooking, discussing, arguing, reporting, and perhaps, above all, the 24/7 talking heads on cable news going on and on about everything faintly related to one distinctly over-present personage (who was evidently God’s gift to them in 2016) has yet to truly sink in.
At some level, it’s not even complicated, especially in this impeachment moment. The shambling body of that president of ours -- thanks to a set of media decisions about what truly draws eyeballs on this planet -- simply blocks out much of the rest of the world, everything but HIM and anything or anyone faintly relevant to or associated with or ready to attack him and his strange imperial solar system. In media terms, he is now something akin to a force of nature, a Category 5 (or maybe 6) hurricane, but so, of course, is the coverage of him.
There’s obviously a unique history to be written of how King Donald I, still officially “president” of the United States (though he often acts as if he were something far more than that), proved so capable of drawing every camera, every bit of media attention to himself alone, how he kept “the red light” of those cameras and their social media equivalents ever on. It’s a feat for the ages and, it seems, a successful gamble in a media world that found itself in a scramble for ad dollars, for existence and eyeballs, a world that made some hard, if seldom publicly delineated, decisions about what, in the twenty-first century, the news was becoming.
After all, in a world in which so much is, in fact, happening (and going wrong), other decisions, though hard to imagine today, might have been possible and Donald Trump’s all-enveloping, all-absorbing presidency, under less of a media glare and stare, might have taken quite a different turn.
Right now, it doesn’t matter what the subject is: Sports? It’s him. Movies? It’s The Godfather Part II, Roger Stone, and him. And believe me, if there’s an expert on the Godfather films -- and I know one! -- he’ll be interviewed. Or if you were truly curious about how former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley managed to remain “all in” with the president as her new book comes out (despite a misstep or two and thanks to some advice from Ivanka and Jared), no problem. Hey, believe me, winter is coming and winter, it turns out, is HIM, too. It’s all him, all the time.
This is not, of course, the only way this world could be covered.
The Donald as a Perspective Problem
I remember the first moment I saw this kind of coverage and I was living in a very different world. It was Friday, November 22, 1963, and President John F. Kennedy had just been gunned down. I was 19 years old and, in those days when you didn’t have a screen in every room (or every hand), I was in the basement of my college dorm (along with so many others), near a pool table, watching the only accessible TV around. It was the closest we would come, except perhaps in the O.J. Simpson White Ford Bronco moment, to the sort of 24/7 coverage that has become the norm of the post-9/11 world.
In that case, of course, a president had been assassinated, something that hadn’t happened in my lifetime, not in fact in the lifetime of the TV set. And the reportage on the three major networks of that moment went on without commercials for four days -- from soon after the fatal shots were fired that Friday, through the on-camera shooting of suspect Lee Harvey Oswald during a perp walk in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters that Sunday, until Kennedy’s funeral the following Monday (when 81% of home TVs were reportedly on). According to Nielsen, 93% of Americans were watching, “more than half of them for 13 or more straight hours.” But a president had been murdered and the coverage, while unique for its moment, did end.
Donald Trump exists in a very different universe, one in which the screen is with you, day and night, in which HE and you and it are often alone together for what seems like forever. At 75, I’m not quite as screened in as much of our world. I still read an actual newspaper, the New York Times, in print. (Who knows how much longer that will even be possible, as the paper newspaper continues to shrink?) And the truth is that, for me, it’s become a kind of daily nightmare. I have no doubt that the paper, which got rid of a number of its copy editors (and now has visible typos and errors daily), has assigned more reporters to cover you-know-who (& company) than it has ever assigned to cover anyone or anything long-term before. (Back in March 2018, for instance, I counted a typical day on the Trump beat and found “15 reporters, three op-ed writers, and the unnamed people who produced those editorials.”)
On some days, as in the week the impeachment hearings began, it’s no longer uncommon to have up to six interior pages of the paper covered with Trumpian “news” -- at least two or three of those pieces continuations from the front page and many of them filled with material that’s distinctly repetitive. Think of it as the newspaper version of those endlessly talking heads on cable TV.
To take a recent example, on November 21st, the morning after U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified in the impeachment hearings, of the six columns that normally make up the Times’s front page, three were devoted to giant quotes from Sondland’s testimony in large white and yellow print against a dark background. The other three atop the page were articles on the same subject, all under a single giant headline, another quote from Sondland, “We Followed the President’s Orders.” One was headlined “A Witness Places Pompeo Firmly 'in the Loop'”; a second, “Democrats Detect Watergate Echo”; a third, “Sondland Names Top Officials in Ukraine Push.” At the bottom of the page was a piece on the Democratic debate of that night, headlined “Democrats Soften Disagreements and Sharpen Attacks on Trump.” Only a single piece, Sabrina Tavernise’s “Moving Vans Idle as Migration Stalls in a Reshaped Economy,” snugly lodged at the bottom right corner of the page, and one of the eight reporters involved in front-page coverage, had nothing to do with the president or his possible impeachment.
On the editorial pages, there was a giant editorial, “Implicating the President and His Men,” while three of the four op-eds opposite it had Trump in their titles (“Should Trump Tromp Rudy?,” “The Cowardice Behind Trump’s Vaping-Ban Retreat,” and “Trump Is Doing What He Was Elected to Do”). Inside the paper, there were another 5½ pages of pieces with Trump in the headline or on subjects related to the impeachment process, involving 11 more reporters. More than 20 reporters, op-ed and editorial writers, in other words, were dealing with the world of Donald Trump on that single day.
And yet that kind of coverage itself is never front-page news, even if he invariably is. In a sense, what that means is that you can neither see him for what he is nor see around him. Once upon a distant time -- it was the 1990s, just after the Cold War ended -- I wrote a book that I called The End of Victory Culture. In it, I explored how, “between 1945 and 1975, victory culture ended in America” and traced it to “its graveyard for all to see,” the disastrous war in Vietnam," or as I put it: “It was a bare two decades from the beaches of Normandy to the beachfronts of Danang, from Overlord to Operation Hades, from GIs as liberators to grunts as perpetrators, from home front mobilization to antiwar demonstrations organized by ‘the Mobe.’”
And in truth, despite the dreams of Washington’s political elite in the immediate post-Cold War moment and then of top officials of the Bush administration in the post-9/11 moment, “victory” has turned out to be a truly lost cause for the planet’s most “indispensable” nation, as our never-ending wars of this century have made all too clear. Whether we know it or not, we are now in a distinctly post-post-triumphalist American world. Otherwise, of course, there's no way Donald Trump would be in the White House.
But here’s my question for someone who isn’t 75 years old and is ready to write a new book: What exactly are we at the end of now? It must be something, mustn’t it? What does the Trump phenomenon really represent? And far more important, what lurks behind all the attention paid to him (other, of course, than a climate-changed planet)?
He’s our “witch hunt” president and, if nothing else, he's presented us, Escher-style, with a remarkable perspective problem. Thanks to certain essential media decisions about what matters (especially when it comes to gluing eyeballs to screens), we’re eternally in close-up. It isn’t just that Donald Trump is somewhat overweight. He’s the sumo wrestler as president. He fills the screen. Every screen. All the time.
Thanks to the media, he’s impeaching us. But really -- and I’m just asking -- which witches are we actually hunting these days?
Why You Should Care About the Current Wave of Mass Extinctions
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52336"><span class="small">Gianluca Serra, Mongabay</span></a>
Tuesday, 26 November 2019 14:34
Serra writes: "The scientific imprimatur fell on us just six months ago: Yes, the extinction crisis we are witnessing is only the beginning of a wave of mass ecocide of non-human life on Earth, a process that could wipe out a million species of plants and animals from our planet in the short term (read: decades)."
Green turtle (Chelonia mydas) on the reef of Fiji in 2013. Nearly all turtles species are classified as endangered and threatened with extinction. (photo: Isabella Chowra/Mongabay)
Why You Should Care About the Current Wave of Mass Extinctions
By Gianluca Serra, Mongabay
26 November 19
he scientific imprimatur fell on us just six months ago: Yes, the extinction crisis we are witnessing is only the beginning of a wave of mass ecocide of non-human life on Earth, a process that could wipe out a million species of plants and animals from our planet in the short term (read: decades).
As it turns out, us environmental activists were not so much “catastrophists” during the past decades, in campaigning to protect nature and ringing alarms now and then about the plight of single wildlife species, as we were realists.
Gloom and doom
Certainly this is not what I dreamed of as a child in love with nature and wildlife. But how could I have ever imagined back then, in the 1970s, that during my first 50 years of life the global human population would literally double? That the global economy would increase four-fold, and that in parallel — and not by coincidence — wildlife populations would drop by a staggering 60 percent globally? How could I have ever imagined back then that I would personally witness and document, as a field conservationist, actual extinctions on the ground?
Now we have scientific “certification” of the extinction crisis, implicitly admitting that the Convention on Biodiversity, signed by most countries of the world following the UN Rio Summit in 1992, has failed. It was the classic “too little, too late” scenario. For years, us ecologists and activists have maintained (and feared) that we won’t achieve much under the current consumeristic, ecologically unsustainable socio-economic system — and the IPBES report now confirms this viewpoint.
Needless to say, for a naturalist and wildlife lover like me, this is not the best historic period to have been born in. Still, I am fully aware that I have had the chance to study and focus on my passions and interests precisely because of the socio-economic development that followed the second world war. In fact, no serious and pragmatic environmentalist would argue that socio-economic progress is unnecessary: instead, we have been saying for decades that a new socio-economic paradigm is needed based on ecological and ethical sustainability rather than on magic assumptions like the infinite economic growth and a radical laissez faire approach, derived from the dominant free market ideology.
There is some relief in exercising historical and biological relativism and by reflecting on the grand scheme of things. What we are witnessing today is just the final stage of a process that began about 70 thousand years ago, when some unknown change in the neural wiring of human brains unleashed the so-called “cognitive revolution.”
Since then, what used to be a quite low-profile species, ranking in the mid to lower levels of the food chain, gradually advanced to become a feared top predator, able to kill prey much larger than its size. Thanks to its unmatched communication and organizational skills, Homo sapiens set out to colonize and invade the entire planet, causing the annihilation of other species — often on such a grand scale that it became the #1 Ecological Serial Killer of the Planet.
As early as 45 thousand years ago, the sapiens landed in Australia, causing an ecological disaster that wiped out most larger marsupial predators. Similar fates befell the megafauna of North America (ca. 16,000 years ago), of Madagascar, and of New Zealand (only a few hundred years ago in both the latter two cases).
Not to mention that, in parallel with the advance of the sapiens, all other species of humans (i.e. those, like us, belonging to the genus Homo, i.e. our closest kinship) also vanished. Only a coincidence? (Probably not, we have most likely even caused human species annihilations…)
With the advent of agriculture and monotheistic religions some 10 thousand years ago, the anthropocentric view of the planet was sacralized and institutionalized: since then we have convinced ourselves that we are not part of nature anymore, we are of a superior level; and that animals and plants were created for our own use and consumption.
Three human-induced ecocide waves
During the last two hundred years, a sudden acceleration in the rate of nature consumption by the sapiens took place following the scientific and industrial revolutions, the imperialism of European nations, and the simultaneous advent of capitalism. The booming of the human population and of the global economic market in the past five decades have delivered the last blow to the planet’s ecosystems and wildlife.
So, in brief, there have been three pulses of ecocides directly caused by the sapiens’ inexorable expansion: the first provoked by hunter-gatherers during the epic process of colonizing the entire planet on foot and through sea vessels; the second prompted by agriculture; and the third being the current one we are living through right now.
As a result, while 10 thousand years ago wildlife was 99 percent of the whole planet’s biomass, today it is only 1 percent; the rest being humans and their “commodity” domestic animals and plants.
We should actually be thrilled to be part of and witnesses to another historical turn in Homo sapiens’ “evolution.” The problem is that we are now under a UN ultimatum: Just last year, top scientists informed us that we are left with another 12 years if we are to avoid a climate catastrophe on the planet. So, following the threat to human survival posed by the prospect of global nuclear war just a few decades ago, we are again under another dire threat of self-immolation.
A much needed change
If there is one important lesson I’ve learned in my experience on the front lines of nature devastation, it’s that individual virtuosity — or single virtuous projects — won’t make any difference or have any impact globally under the current dominant system. Yet, for decades, an emphasis on individual virtuosity (use the bike instead of the car, collect garbage at the beach, turn off the lights when not needed, etc.) has been the main leit motif for environmental engagement.
On the contrary, “transformative changes” are needed to tackle the current global ecological challenge, a term very appropriately used in the IPBES report. Given the fact that, until now, governments and international organizations (tightly “supervised” by the oil-dependent economic and financial élite of the world) have not shown any willingness to enact such transformative changes, the only hope left is a mass global grassroots movement pushing governments for the bold reforms required — before it really is too late.
What is needed is a high-level political global reform — a “green new deal” — with a focus on both limiting consumption of resources and curbing the global population’s exponential growth. Focusing on only one of these two issues won’t save us. (Yes, industrialized countries still fantasize that the latter is the main issue to be tackled, removing from their conscience the former one).
Greta Thunberg and the current global movement of students pursuing the climate strikes are a ray of hope, as is the Extinction Rebellion movement. I can barely believe my eyes: the “new generations” we have mentioned so many times in the past decades have grown up and taken to the streets with their own legs and brains! Here there is hope — but they need support.
A key question
In order to create a critical mass of awareness globally, there is still an important question to answer: Why should we care to conserve what is left of wild ecosystems and species of our planet?
This is a question we should be ready to answer clearly, especially considering that most of the world population currently lives in urban centers, remains quite unaware of ecological matters, and is disconnected from nature — and therefore can’t fully appreciate how much our survival as a species is still deeply dependent on ecosystems and nature.
One of the key lessons of ecology and life sciences is that everything is interconnected on the planet in ways we are barely aware of. How can we establish that we do not need a given ecosystem or a species? Especially considering that our knowledge on these subjects is still so sketchy in terms of ecological processes, ecosystems, and species. Do you reckon Dr. Pyron would accept to fly on an aircraft from which a few “unimportant” rivets have been removed by the company to save money, just before taking off?
The answer
We should care about nature and wildlife simply because we are still part of it and because we still need functional ecosystems around us to provide basic life needs like clean air, water and soil; and to get nutrients of all sorts, as well as food and scientific knowledge (we tend to forget that most drugs routinely used in modern medicine were discovered thanks to studying the secrets of nature).
Not to mention that the importance of having healthy nature and wild lands around us has deep spiritual, aesthetic, and psychological implications for our well being that we are just beginning to understand (see conservation psychology).
Perhaps more importantly, we should be deeply empathetic about the future of the Greta Thunbergs of the world – our children and grandchildren. As a commonsense measure of precaution, we should leave them a living planet that is still ecologically functional and alive. This seems like a basic ethical call.
Let’s not get enchanted and daydream again about the myths and shallow promises of high-tech utopians always claiming to be able to fix everything. The truth is that we don’t yet fully understand and we are therefore not able to tackle complex phenomenons related to life-supporting systems of the planet; the approach of high-tech utopians in these fields is still so naive and clumsily reductionist.
The economy is important, no doubt: we need it for our survival and well being. But its formulation and implementation during the past two centuries has driven us into a dangerous no-return, life-threatening development path.
Just common sense
In other words, the economy, in order to be sustainable and viable for the whole of humanity nowadays, should be based on the most elementary principles on which life is based on Earth. These are basic rules of common sense. Even a tree or a sea urchin may have a sense that planet Earth will not be able to support 10 billion bipeds, each of them with the American dream imprinted in her/his head.
Infinite economic growth is a magic buzz invented by once-euphoric positivist economists and capitalists. Within the span of a century or so it has turned into an archaic and dangerous notion. It’s time to wake up for a serious life reality check.
After all, there is no infinite anything in the whole galaxy!
RSN | Campaigning: The Unbearable Exposure of Seeing Your Name on Yard Signs
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=33196"><span class="small">Angela Watters, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Tuesday, 26 November 2019 13:28
Watters writes: "During campaign season, yard signs are ubiquitous on private lawns. When it's your name on the signs, it can feel downright indecent to see them littered about town. If you're an introvert, the exposure can feel akin to listening to The Five Man Electrical Band's classic-rock stalwart 'Signs' on repeat, while circling a lion cage."
My son rockin' out next to my campaign sign. (photo: Angela Watters/RSN)
Campaigning: The Unbearable Exposure of Seeing Your Name on Yard Signs
By Angela Watters, Reader Supported News
26 November 19
Part Four of “How to Run for Public Office When You Score Low on the Narcissism Scale”
uring campaign season, yard signs are ubiquitous on private lawns. When it’s your name on the signs, it can feel downright indecent to see them littered about town. If you’re an introvert, the exposure can feel akin to listening to The Five Man Electrical Band’s classic-rock stalwart “Signs” on repeat, while circling a lion cage. The sneaking suspicion that you’re no longer anonymous may rev up your latent imposter syndrome. That six-pack of beer you buy on an occasional Thursday will take on added significance in your mind as you worry your every move is being watched and judged. Or you will like the attention it brings. Really, it depends on your personality. My five-year-old loved the signs.
Canadian rock band The Five Man Electrical Band, 1971.
Luckily, there’s a limited time frame in which you’re allowed to display your signs. Every municipality or jurisdiction varies, but in “Coaltown” you are given six weeks before early voting begins to place your signs in yards (and two weeks to take them down after the election). Don’t put them up yet – wait. You don’t want them up for longer than a month. First off, if you’re not a narcissist you may eventually start to feel nauseous when you encounter a yard sign. Secondly, weather can be unkind to yard signs during springtime, the season for many local elections and primaries. Finally, you risk really pissing off the real estate agents – and they talk.
But if you’re not a local, but a transplant without an office job like me, and networking at night means missing your kid’s bedtime, then you’ll need the name recognition. I can’t tell you the number of people who came up to me and said, “Oh, you’re Angela Watters! I’ve seen your yard signs.” Some even imagined we went to high school together. No, we did not. I’m from Houston – um, I mean “Oil and Gas Town” – not “Coaltown,” Illinois.
If you are running for a particular political party, your campaign signs may be paid for by your party. As a candidate in a non-partisan race like school board, I was on my own. I funded my campaign through a “Go Fund Me” drive, asking friends and family members to donate. They did, and my campaign was funded.
As I mentioned in Part 3 of this series, other board members used direct mail and threw a party at a bar on behalf of their efforts. I spent about $600 from my online drive on campaign materials like yard signs and flyers. Had I ended up running in a non-competitive election, I would have been able to scrap the fundraising altogether. Don’t discount the possibility of running unopposed. In certain races in smaller communities, filing for office can be the beginning and end of your campaign.
Other candidates running for the same office as I did ordered between 25 and 100 signs. I ordered 50, which was the same number of people who signed my petitions. You can purchase signs more cheaply on the internet, but I went with a local shop with union-made signs. They came out to about ten bucks a pop. Expect about a two-week turnaround. I kept as many as I could after it was over, in case I decided to run for re-election.
The expense is just one of the factors that makes yard signs controversial. The efficacy of yard signs translating into increased voter support is also in question. You will definitely want to save some of your campaign money to print flyers or door hangers to pass out, once you start canvassing. You will need to allocate your funds for campaign materials based on what you feel works best for your supporters, your community, and your own peace of mind.
Despite the controversy, yard signs make friends and supporters more invested in your campaign. It feels really validating when a neighbor or acquaintance requests to put a sign of yours in their yard. Placement matters. Busy streets, streets with traffic lights, or large intersections are a major score because of their visibility.
With fewer and fewer local papers and reporters, your local race won’t always be covered as closely as you would like. Word of mouth from a neighbor or friend you admire and respect can make all the difference. A sign in anyone’s yard is a personal endorsement, and you may feel laid bare, but that vulnerability is the key to a personal connection with your community – a connection you will need, if god forbid, you actually win.
Coming soon … Part Five: Talking About Race to the NAACP and Labor to the Teachers’ Union: How to Survive the Community Forums.
Angela Watters is the Managing Editor for Reader Supported News. She was elected to the school board in her town in April of this year.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44501"><span class="small">Michael Harriot, The Root</span></a>
Tuesday, 26 November 2019 12:08
Harriot writes: "I am from what most people would call 'the hood.' The bad section of town. You know - where black people live."
Pete Buttigieg. (photo: WP)
Pete Buttigieg Is a Lying MF
By Michael Harriot, The Root
26 November 19
even thousand three hundred twenty-two dollars.
I hid it in a white Piggly Wiggly bag in the back of the dishwasher. Every single time I returned to that tiny apartment, I opened up that Navajo-white Kenmore dishwasher and made sure it was there. It was not a gift. It was not a reward. It wasn’t even mine.
And it still wasn’t enough.
I am from what most people would call “the hood.” The bad section of town. You know—where black people live. During the crack revolution of the late ’80s, to get to school every day, I would give a friendly nod as I walked past the early-rising dope boys. I meandered through the projects and—if it had recently rained—I waited for someone to help me put a 10-foot long wooden plank across the ditch that separated the black part of town from the bucolic neighborhood where the only high school in town was located. If no one was there, or if a prankster had hidden the makeshift bridge, then I had to either leap across or walk the long way around, adding an extra 15 minutes to my morning walk. Our neighborhood had no bus, so either you walked that balance beam behind the projects, took the 30-minute stroll or you said: “fuck it.”
I never said fuck it.
But if I did, it wouldn’t have been because of a lack of role models. If I had chosen to keep my mama’s lights on instead of making that daily trek, my decision wouldn’t have been based on a tropological dearth of “motivation” or communal ambivalence. As I grow older, I realize that I was not gifted, talented or even diligent.
I’m just a lucky motherfucker.
Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is a lucky motherfucker, too.
He attended one of the best private schools in the country that was quite literally on the campus of one of the best colleges in the country, University of Notre Dame, where his father worked as a professor for 29 years. His mother taught at an even better, more eliteschool. And if you ask how he got into Harvard or became a Rhodes Scholar, Mayor Pete would probably insist that it had nothing to do with whiteness. He would likely tell you that he valued education and had great role models, both of which are probably true. There is no question that he is intelligent, hard-working and well-educated.
But he didn’t have to jump a ditch.
So, when a clip surfaced of Buttigieg explaining why negro kids fail at school so often, his answer made perfect sense.
“Kids need to see evidence that education is going to work for them,” Buttigieg explained whitely, when he was running for mayor in 2011. You’re motivated because you believe that at the end of your education, there is a reward; there’s a stable life; there’s a job. And there are a lot of kids—especially [in] the lower-income, minority neighborhoods, who literally just haven’t seen it work. There isn’t someone who they know personally who testifies to the value of education.”
I want to be clear: Pete Buttigieg is a lying motherfucker.
This is not a misunderstanding. This is not a misstatement. Pete Buttigieg went to the best educational institutions America has to offer and he—more than anyone on the goddamned planet—knows that everything he just said is a baldfaced lie.
Majority-minority schools receive $23 billion less in funding than majority-white schools, according to a recent study by EdBuild. Black students in Indiana, the state where Buttigieg serves as mayor, and across the country, are disciplined more harshly than white students. But even though Buttigieg has never attended a school with more than 10 percent black students, he thinks he knows what’s stopping black kids from achieving their educational dreams.
Apparently, it’s not the fact that the unemployment rate for black college graduates is twice as high as the unemployment rate for white grads. Black college graduates are paid 80 cents for every dollar a white person with the same education earns. White people leave college with lower debt and higher earnings. White kids get more resources, more advanced classes and have access to more technology. But Pete says it could all be solved with a vision-board.
Mayor Pete’s bullshittery is not just wrong, it is proof.
It proves men like him are more willing to perpetuate the fantastic narrative of negro neighborhoods needing more role models and briefcase-carriers than make the people in power stare into the sun and see the blinding light of racism. Get-along moderates would rather make shit up out of whole cloth than wade into the waters of reality. Pete Buttigieg doesn’t want to change anything. He just wants to be something.
This is not just a lie of omission, it is a dangerous precedent. This is why institutional inequality persists. Not because of white hoods and racial slurs. It is because this insidious double-talk erases the problem by camouflaging it. Because it is painted as a problem of black lethargy and not white apathy. Pete Buttigieg is standing over a dying man, holding the oxygen machine in his hand and telling everyone:
“Nah, he doesn’t need CPR. He’s just holding his breath.”
Negligent homicide is still homicide.
Occasionally someone would invariably fall in the ditch. It wasn’t because they didn’t see someone cross successfully, it was because the banks of that ditch was slippery and muddy when it rained. To this day, no one has ever built a bridge over that ditch. But over the years, so many people have walked that same path, that the banks eventually wore down and became crossable.
No one ever gave a fuck.
But motherfuckers never stopped jumping.
In the summer of 1992, for weeks, those same D-boys I walked past every day collected all of the ones (and a few five-dollar bills) from guys on the block and handed it to me when I left for college. It was seven thousand three hundred twenty-two dollars.
I didn’t have a driver’s license and my mother is legally blind, so they hired someone to drive me to college. None of my college friends ever knew that I had a hidden treasure in my dishwasher but a few of them noticed that it seemed like I always had a wad of cash. When I arrived to campus in a chauffeured, 1965 drop-top Cadillac (white, with hydraulics and gold specks), a couple even said:
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f you’ve spent any time around the Federalist Society — the 
rench king Louis XV reputedly 
he scientific imprimatur fell on us just six months ago: Yes, the extinction crisis we are witnessing is only the beginning of a wave of mass ecocide of non-human life on Earth, a process that 
uring campaign season, yard signs are ubiquitous on private lawns. When it’s your name on the signs, it can feel downright indecent to see them littered about town. If you’re an introvert, the exposure can feel akin to listening to The Five Man Electrical Band’s classic-rock stalwart “Signs” on repeat, while circling a lion cage. The sneaking suspicion that you’re no longer anonymous may rev up your latent imposter syndrome. That six-pack of beer you buy on an occasional Thursday will take on added significance in your mind as you worry your every move is being watched and judged. Or you will like the attention it brings. Really, it depends on your personality. My five-year-old loved the signs. 
even thousand three hundred twenty-two dollars.
