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The New Face of Climate Activism Is Young, Angry - and Effective |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47775"><span class="small">Ella Nilsen, Vox</span></a>
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Tuesday, 17 September 2019 12:57 |
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Nilsen writes: "Unlike some recent college graduates, Sunrise Movement activist Paul Campion doesn't have a five-year plan. Climate change doesn't let him plan that far into the future."
Sunrise Movement activists rally in support of a Green New Deal outside of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's office on April 30, 2019. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The New Face of Climate Activism Is Young, Angry - and Effective
By Ella Nilsen, Vox
17 September 19
A growing sea of crusaders known as the Sunrise Movement has helped put climate change on the national agenda. Most aren’t even 30.
 nlike some recent college graduates, Sunrise Movement activist Paul Campion doesn’t have a five-year plan. Climate change doesn’t let him plan that far into the future.
“I can’t think more than 16 months out. The other day I was talking with my partner about the magnitude of what we face, and it’s a weight that’s always there,” Campion told me as he sat on the couch in the apartment he shares with four other young Sunrise Movement activists in Northwest Washington, DC.
Their apartment looks like a stereotypical DC group house, but it feels more transient, like its inhabitants could be ready to pick up and move at a moment’s notice. There is no-frills furniture and basic cooking supplies; small “Green New Deal” posters and a huge “Our Time to Rise” banner adorn sparse white walls.
The three-bedroom apartment in Washington’s Columbia Heights neighborhood is one of a handful of so-called movement houses around the country where Sunrise Movement activists live and work together. Their mission is twofold: trying to force politicians to act on one of the most dire issues facing humankind and building an army of young people to send the message.
After they spend their days working at the Sunrise office in downtown DC or meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, they come home to share vegetarian meals at their table each night. A small sign in their kitchen says “everyday I’m brusselin’,” and the apartment wifi password alludes to their shared love of eggplant. They try to minimize their trash impact by composting, which they can take to the local farmer’s market for free.
This small group is part of a much larger national organization whose members are disproportionately in their teens or 20s. (The Sunrise Movement doesn’t have formal membership.) But its core leaders — a small group of activists in their mid-20s — estimate that 15,000 young people have showed up to in-person actions across the country and that 80,000 have participated in less direct actions such as emailing and calling their representatives. As of this month, the group has 290 small, autonomous chapters of activists (called “hubs”) across the country. In November 2018, there were just 11.
The 15,000 people who have turned out in person have spent the past year occupying the offices and hallways of the US Capitol, state houses, and Democratic National Committee meetings across the country, yelling at the top of their lungs.
Their methods are straight out of the playbook of the civil rights movement of the 1960s: Frequently, they sing protest songs. They stand quietly as police officers zip-tie their hands behind their backs and lead them into vans for civil disobedience. Their eyes pleading, they carry signs, including ones that say, “The Youth are Coming for You.”
The new face of climate resistance is young and diverse. It is scared, and it is loud.
In a short amount of time, the Sunrise Movement’s assertive tactics have brought about a profound change, forcing climate change and the Green New Deal — their vision to solve it — to become defining issues of the 2020 election. These would-be young voters have pushed Democrats running for president to release serious, detailed plans to drastically cut America’s fossil fuel emissions.
These recent college graduates are forgoing the entry-level professional jobs their peers get to throw themselves into climate activism full-time. Everyone in the DC apartment is in their early or mid-20s; no one has a permanent plan, other than working like hell to try to stop climate change.
“Traditional adult markers of getting a house, getting married, having kids ... that’s 11 years,” said housemate Lauren Maunus, tallying up how long it might have taken her, under more ordinary circumstances, to achieve them all. Eleven years has a different significance for her and her friends; it marks the year 2030, the deadline set by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for countries worldwide to drastically lower their emissions or suffer the effects of a climate catastrophe after average worldwide temperatures pass 1.5 or 2 degrees celsius.
Some of those effects are already apparent. Hurricane Dorian wreaked devastation on the Bahamas, and wildfires are raging worldwide, from the Amazon to Siberian forests and the western United States. It can also be felt closer to home; the day I interviewed the group in early September, it was a sweltering 96 degrees in Washington, DC, a new heat record for that date.
The stakes are high this year. The administration of President Donald Trump, a climate-change denier, is doing everything it can to roll back environmental standards.
“We’ve got to lay it all out on the line over the next year,” Campion said. His housemates nod gravely.
Sunrise has been incredibly effective at drawing attention to climate
Sunrise is known for two things: how young it is, and how effective it has been so quickly.
The group was born out of the college divestment movement, in which student activists pushed administrators to divest assets and holdings from fossil fuel companies. Sunrise co-founder and executive director Varshini Prakash spearheaded the movement at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, using protests and sit-ins to accomplish the goal. Fellow Sunrise founders Sara Blazevic and Stephen O’Hanlon (now the group’s managing director and spokesperson, respectively) helped lead the divestment movement at Swarthmore College, while organizing director Dyanna Jaye did the same at the University of Virginia.
In 2013, the rough outline of a Green New Deal was being drafted by Sunrise co-founder and current political director Evan Weber when he was a senior at Wesleyan University. Their project was a response to then-President Barack Obama’s Climate Action Plan, which Weber believed was “wholly insufficient to tackle the climate crisis.” He and his co-authors, fellow student Matthew Lichtash and then-visiting professor and environmentalist Michael Dorsey, wanted to put out an alternative vision that was much bolder in scope.
“We started coming up with an idea. What would it look like to actually demand action at the scale that was needed and put forward solutions actually at the scale of the problem?” Weber, 27, said. Their report made some waves as a dissenting voice criticizing a Democratic administration on climate, and Weber started noticing young people in particular were latching onto their idea. Soon after, he met Jaye at the 2014 People’s Climate March in New York City.
Sunrise’s co-founders spent much of 2016 preparing for Hillary Clinton’s election. The rise of Donald Trump raised the stakes dramatically.
“Our old plan exploded, and when the dust settled, one thing was crystal clear: We’ve gotta figure out how to win some elections,” Prakash and Jaye wrote in a 2017 Medium post. “Trump’s victory has blown over the barriers between young people and political engagement, pointing towards the possibility of a sea change at every level of government.”
The group officially launched in April 2017 with some grant seed money from the Sierra Club and 350.org. But the world first took notice of Sunrise on November 13, 2018, when 200 of its activists filed into incoming Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and refused to leave.
The protesters sang and shouted in the hallways of the Cannon Office Building. They weren’t asking for action on climate; they were demanding it. They got a high-profile boost from progressive star and representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who stopped by to high-five them and encourage them to keep up their work. They stayed for hours, continuing even after police arrested 51 of them.
“It felt like divine intervention,” Weber said. “No members of Congress gave a shit about what we did before we occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office, and now we’re one of the most influential groups in the progressive movement that almost every single presidential candidate has reached out to before releasing their climate plans.”
Since 2017, the group has called on state and national politicians to forgo donations from fossil fuel companies. It has taken its occupations to state houses around the country, calling for Green New Deals on the state level. A month after occupying Pelosi’s office, Sunrise came back to Congress with 1,000 young people, quintupling the size of the protest.
And this month, the activists of Sunrise will join thousands — perhaps even millions — of other young people in global youth climate strikes calling for action on climate change. The Global Climate Strike, set for September 20 and 27, aims to capitalize on the United Nations Climate Action Summit on September 23. The protests are being organized by multiple groups, including Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future, and the US Youth Climate Strike (a group led by Isra Hirsi, the 16-year-old daughter of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota).
“I’m incredibly excited. I think the youth mobilization and the mobilization of environmental activists and frontline mobilization as well, that kind of activism is what’s actually moving a lot of the legislative agenda on climate and making it much more pressing,” Ocasio-Cortez told Vox. “I think their work has been invaluable, there’s no way we’d be in this moment without groups like Sunrise and Climate Justice Alliance.”
The group has also done electoral work that has paid off, especially in state and local elections. They helped elect progressive politicians to the New York state legislature, which passed the wide-reaching Climate & Communities Protection Act, modeled after the Green New Deal, this summer.
Sunrise caught lightning in a bottle; the climate is a growing concern for many voters, especially Democrats. A July Pew Research Center survey showed that 84 percent of Democrats surveyed are worried about climate change. Republicans aren’t nearly as concerned, but polling shows rising climate anxiety among young Republicans. A global poll by Glocalities showed 67 percent of US Republicans ages 18 to 34 “agreed” or “strongly agreed” humans were causing damage to the planet.
This speaks to the fact that climate is a huge generational issue. A May Gallup poll showed 70 percent of Americans ages 18 to 34 were worried “a great deal” or “a fair amount” about climate change, compared to 56 percent of Americans 55 and older.
“It creates an aggrieved party,” said Andy Hoffman, a professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan. “It’s young people, it’s their future. I do think that’s significant in terms of getting a group to cluster around a common cause, to say, ‘I am being harmed.’”
With the effects of climate change so noticeable and with a climate-change denier in the White House, it makes sense for a coalition of young people to come together in the US, Europe, and elsewhere around the globe to demand action on climate. Their message is clear: If older generations won’t do anything, we will.
“We have grown up our entire lives watching this issue completely sidelined in the political discourse,” said Prakash, 26. The recent attention on climate policy “is not because members of the media or political establishment woke up one day. It is a direct result of the active energy and the demand from thousands of young people on the front lines of the crisis.”
This has most recently been seen in the group’s work to secure a climate change forum on national television. Despite the Democratic National Committee voting down a climate-specific presidential debate, major networks like CNN and MSNBC stepped up to fill the void after months of Sunrise activists protesting, showing up to DNC meetings, and tweeting. CNN recently held a seven-hour climate town hall — the longest, most substantial discussion of climate change ever held on primetime television. MSNBC is set to hold another one on September 19.
And media attention begets policy; the day before the CNN town hall, Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Julian Castro put forward a fresh wave of climate change plans, joining much of the rest of the field. Climate experts and even presidential candidates including Beto O’Rourke credited Sunrise with making the change, saying “they have forced those in power, and those in public trust, to solve these challenges.”
Though Warren didn’t address Sunrise by name, she filmed a short video after the forum thanking youth climate protesters for their persistence.
“The best part was who was in the audience; it was a bunch of young people who made it happen,” Warren said, comparing youth activists to generations of civil rights marchers, suffragettes, and LGBTQ activists that came before them. “They’re going to make their voices heard in 2020.”
Sunrise’s place in the larger environmental movement
As the youth climate movement rises to prominence, older groups in the environmental movement are grappling with where exactly they went wrong on climate change.
“The movement has evolved, because it wasn’t working. We’re losing,” Greenpeace USA executive director Annie Leonard said. “The science is stronger than ever, and we’re still losing.”
What’s been missing, according to Leonard, is a mass movement to galvanize public sentiment on climate change. Older groups have historically pursued their own projects, such as land conservation, protecting endangered species, or trying to ban plastic bags. Few have been as overtly political as Sunrise, and few have been able to offer as succinct a tagline as a Green New Deal for their proposed climate change solution.
“The environmental movement started with talking about climate change as an environmental issue, and I think still in a lot of ways is stuck in that box,” said Susan Ruffo, the executive director of the Circulate Initiative, who formerly worked at the Nature Conservancy and Ocean Conservancy. “It’s still stuck in that box, the classic picture of a polar bear. It’s much more about the future and their lives, and not as much about, ‘This is an environmental issue.’”
Sunrise sees itself as more akin to the civil rights movement of the 1960s or the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011 than it does to older environmental groups. It does draw similarity from 350.org, the group founded by environmentalist Bill McKibben and a group of college students also active in the divestment movement.
“It takes time to build movements,” McKibben said in an email interview. “We’ve gone from the place where we could organize small, scattered protests a decade ago, to putting 400,000 people in the streets in New York in 2014 [during the People’s Climate March] to events like the big all-ages climate strike coming on Sept. 20, which I imagine will be the largest day of climate action yet.”
Part of the reason Sunrise has been so effective is the way it communicates the scale of the crisis. This component is important because Republicans and fossil fuel companies successfully muddled the message for years, claiming climate change either wasn’t happening, or wasn’t manmade. The environmental movement thought science would convince the public, but that hasn’t worked, in part because scientists aren’t the best messengers.
“They’re not very effective,” said Leah Stokes, a political science professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, who studies environmental movements. “Scientists trade on uncertainties and caveats. We needed a voice to say climate change is happening now, and get that into the media and public consciousness.”
Rather than focusing on abstract or far-away things like melting ice caps in the Arctic or rising CO2 levels that no one can see, Sunrise strategically focuses on something much more immediate and — in some ways — selfish. It homes in on what climate change will do to humans.
“I know a very small number of people who get very excited about decarbonization as a thing,” Prakash told me. What she and her colleagues at Sunrise are trying to get at is their vision for solving climate change through massive mobilization and, most importantly, the creation of green jobs.
“Those are things people intuitively understand because they relate to their everyday lives,” Prakash said. “I feel like climate activists are always frustrated people don’t care about their issue ... the problem is we’re not listening to what people care about.”
It’s not to discount the work of past environmental groups, which Leonard, the executive director of Greenpeace US, calls “formidable.”
“Forests still standing, chemicals banned. The world is a better place because Greenpeace did that work, and if we did the same things in the next 50 years, we’re toast,” she said. “It’s not enough.”
Sunrise has a bold, controversial five-year plan
Sunrise’s purpose over the past year has been championing the Green New Deal. But the difference between laying out the boldest vision and actually passing something Democrats and Republicans — or even just liberal and moderate Democrats — can agree on are two totally different things.
As it stands, the Green New Deal is a broad framework rather than a single piece of legislation. It aims to make the United States carbon neutral by 2030, turning the country into a global leader of renewable energy along the way. It’s no accident the Green New Deal takes its name from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal; it would amount to a massive transformation of the US economy, calling for everything from making every residential and industrial building energy efficient, to decarbonizing major industries and infrastructure. It aims to create millions of jobs in the process, a key component of the plan that Sunrise leaders believe will boost its chances with moderates and Republicans.
But Sunrise’s hopes for enacting a Green New Deal rest on everything going right for Democrats in 2020. Democrats would need to win the White House, keep the House, and win the Senate (where they would either have to win by a large margin or abolish the filibuster to get big pieces of legislation through).
“I think that getting climate change legislation done is doable,” former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, who supports abolishing the filibuster, told Vox recently. “If we have a Democratic Congress and president that will make it a lot easier, and that’s an understatement.”
Activists are under no impression that they’ll get everything they want, but they act like they will.
“We believe the people in power are ultimately most responsive to power,” Weber said. “We believe you can shift the terrain of what’s possible by shifting the conversation and by building power.”
Ahead of the election, Sunrise plans to use the climate issue to mobilize thousands of young people across the country to get out and vote for a Democratic president and lawmakers. They will turn activists participating in the September climate strikes into get-out-the-vote leaders ahead of November 2020. To mobilize youth voters, the number of movement houses like the one in Northwest DC is planned to grow in pivotal states for the next presidential election.
There are plenty of Democratic members of Congress who are content nibbling around the edges of climate policy and concerned with passing a bipartisan package that Republicans can get on board with. And even the most moderate Republicans on climate regard the Green New Deal as a pipe dream.
“We’re grateful to [Sunrise] raising the salience of the issue, but it’s vital conservatives hear the message of climate action in their own language, rather than the language of the left, because it’s a totally different language,” said former South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis, who founded RepublicEN, a Republican climate group working to persuade the GOP to act on climate. “It’s a language of scarcity, doing less. It’s a left-tilting, moralistic message. And we talk about energy abundance and the power of the free enterprise system to deliver innovation.”
We’re far from knowing whether these discussions will even be able to take place. If Donald Trump is reelected in 2020, they most certainly won’t. But Sunrise is preparing for the alternative scenario, continuing to needle members of Congress by whatever means necessary.
“Sunrise should keep doing what it’s doing. It’s not their job to be reasonable and cultivate favor with Republican leaders,” Stokes said.
The climate pessimism and optimism of Sunrise
A number of Sunrise members talk about the concept of “millennial dread” or “millennial nihilism,” the sense that things are bad and won’t get better for younger generations. That encompasses a lot of things, like student loan debt and the inability to save enough to buy a home, but the climate crisis is a huge part of it.
Joanna Zhu, one of the DC house activists, tells me about a dark joke circulating among her friends: “I don’t have a 401(k). I’m just counting on the apocalypse taking me out sometime soon.”
And so, at its essence, Sunrise is a group of scared young people looking for a way to do something. While they’ve speedily become savvy, they are kids — not seasoned activists.
“I’d say a lot of our members are showing up for the first time,” Weber, the Sunrise political director, told me. “They’re young adults that are just kind of freaked out about the climate crisis and political moment we’re in.” Sunrise’s name alludes to that feeling, that the night is always darkest before the dawn of a new day. The youth are scared, but they’re also hopeful.
Almost every Sunrise member of the DC house has a story about how climate dramatically made a mark on their lives.
Maunus grew up in Palm City, Florida, which had back-to-back Category 3 and 4 hurricanes when she was in the fourth grade. After one of the storms hit, she and her sister took inner tubes and floated down their street like it was a waterpark. They were the lucky ones; their house was still standing, she told me.
For Christian Galo from Houston, it was another hurricane. Hurricane Mitch slammed into his family’s home country of Honduras in 1998 as a Category 5 storm, killing more than 7,000 people and displacing thousands more.
“Most of my mom’s family ended up moving outside of Honduras as refugees after,” Galo told me. “Just thinking how vulnerable those populations are now, it feels more urgent now with the migrant crisis.” In 2017, he was afraid for his family again as they took shelter from Hurricane Harvey, when the storm dumped more than four feet of rain on Houston.
Gabbi Pierce remembers the earthquakes that started in her hometown of Wichita, Kansas, after oil and gas companies started fracking there. (Wichita is home base for Koch Industries.)
“Kansas had never had earthquakes, but around the time I was 14-15, that was the time I felt my first earthquake in Kansas,” she said. A few years later, when she moved to California, she witnessed the wildfires near Los Angeles and the clouds of smoke rolling over the mountains.
“I could smell the smoke in the air, everyone was walking past wearing masks,” Pierce said. “Dimming out the sun, it was apocalyptic.”
It was Galo who summed up why they were all in DC, working with Sunrise: “I would not know how to live with myself if I were not involved.”
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FOCUS: No, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren Aren't Too Far Left to Win the Presidential Election |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51633"><span class="small">Adrian Pecotic, NBC News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 17 September 2019 12:19 |
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Pecotic writes: "The Democratic presidential candidates verbally jousting on the debate stage and selling themselves at campaign stops include a self-declared democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders, and several other leading candidates who embrace policies similar to his."
Vermont senator Bernie Sanders shakes hands with supporters at a rally in Denver on Sept. 9. (photo: Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)
No, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren Aren't Too Far Left to Win the Presidential Election
By Adrian Pecotic, NBC News
17 September 19
Voters don't choose the candidate that best represents their ideas about government but adapt their ideas to the candidate they prefer.
 he Democratic presidential candidates verbally jousting on the debate stage and selling themselves at campaign stops include a self-declared democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders, and several other leading candidates who embrace policies similar to his. That gives rise to one of the campaign’s key questions: Might the eventual nominee be too far left to win the general election?
I doubt it. It’s become clear that Americans are willing to countenance far more ideological options than we would have expected even a few years ago, on both the left and the right. One explanation for this growing ideological diversity should reassure Bernie Sanders, the most radical Democratic presidential candidate and the only one who proudly wears the socialist label: According to some political scientists, voters will often follow the lead of their political figures to greater extremes of political thought. Indeed, researchers have found that American voters shift toward increasingly radical political views, and even entire ideologies, to match those of the candidate they intend to vote for, rather than voting for the candidate whose views are closest to their own.
Since there’s a large bloc of enthusiastic voters of the left who will participate in the Democratic primary process, they might push the nominee further toward socialism than the rest of the country would prefer. In one such indicator, a Suffolk University poll found that nearly 60 percent of Democrats in New Hampshire, which will hold the first presidential primary in February 2020, said they would “be satisfied with a presidential candidate who thinks the United States should be more socialist.”
But strong support for socialism tapers off outside of the Democratic base. That same Suffolk poll found that only 30 percent of all voters would be satisfied with a socialist candidate — and 61 percent wouldn’t be. Moreover, we know that socialism is a scary word in American politics. Twenty-one percent of respondents to a Business Insider survey believe that socialism threatens America.
If the concept is this unpopular, it raises the fear that a Democratic nominee who can easily be painted as a socialist might not be “electable,” thereby handing four more years to the incumbent. So why shouldn’t Democrats, assessing candidates with the general election in mind because they see defeating President Donald Trump as so important, pick a safer option like, say, good old Joe Biden?
It’s a compelling argument that relies on a simple, well-known and coherent story about what determines the way people vote: Citizens decide which politician to support based on how well the candidates' positions align with their own policy preferences. Therefore, if someone doesn’t believe in socialism, they won’t vote for candidates who call themselves socialists.
But Gabriel Lenz, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, takes a different view of how political opinions are linked to voting choice. In 2009, he wrote that voters tend to “adopt their preferred party’s or candidate’s position as their own.” In other words, they aren’t choosing the candidate that best represents their ideas about government, but rather adapting their ideas to the candidate.
So those who support the Democratic Party are likely to prefer Bernie to Trump from the get-go, and from that starting point they’ll be inclined to like Bernie’s plans and policies. (Political scientists have proposed dozens of mechanisms to try to explain how we form our still fairly inexplicable allegiances to politicians, including our party identity, our family history and so-called “bread and peace” societal fundamentals.)
To back up his claims, Lenz uses the results of panel surveys that repeatedly poll the same individuals over a long period of time. By using these surveys from past elections, like George W. Bush versus Al Gore in 2000, he can watch voters update their opinions to “follow the lead” of their preferred candidate.
For instance, Bush’s plan to release Social Security funds to individuals to invest in the market and Gore’s “lockbox” plan, which promised the opposite, drew a lot of coverage during the closing stages of that election. Most people didn’t know much about the arcane issue of investing Social Security monies before it became a flashpoint in the race, so they had to learn about it through news coverage and campaign ads.
Generally, they did so while already preferring one of the candidates, which predisposed them to agree with that candidate on the issue. “When people who like Bush learn that he supports investing Social Security funds,” Lenz found, “they also become supportive of investing.”
Now, you could say that both Sanders and socialism are known quantities in American politics, so voters have less to learn about them than Social Security solvency. And the specter of socialism evokes such strong feelings that one would assume that people have already made up their minds about it. Yet polling data suggests that people can be further educated about the modern version of the ideology. Nearly a quarter of millennial respondents to a Buzzfeed poll conducted in September 2018 said they weren’t socialists or democratic socialists but did need to “learn more.”
It’s clear that Americans do, indeed, have a lot to learn about socialism — and that education could dispel some of their fears. An Axios poll found that 57 percent of people believe socialism entails state-controlled media and communications, and half believe leaders would be selected nondemocratically in such a system. Sanders, of course, wouldn’t agree with either statement.
And although Bernie has been in the public eye a lot over the past five years, his exposure isn’t the same as that enjoyed by a presidential nominee, which comes with a unified party apparatus and messaging infrastructure as well as heightened media coverage. In such circumstances, voters would be able to learn a great deal about socialism, as they learn about all major topics during elections.
It may also seem doubtful that voters would be open to changing their opinions about socialism given the ideology’s long history steeped in Cold War animosity. But Americans have shifted on highly emotional and history-laden topics before.
After the 2016 election, Peter Enns, a Cornell political scientist, used the same panel survey methodology as Lenz to measure the way people’s opinions on racial issues and immigration had changed throughout the campaign. After asking people for their opinions on issues both before the campaign and after voting, he found that many Republicans shifted their opinions about race and immigration to fit with Trump.
In May 2015, before Trump became the nominee, for example, panelists who believed negative statements about black people weren’t more likely to support Trump than any other Rebulican candidate. More than a year later, and just months before the election, things had changed. In one case, for instance, Enns showed that those who supported Trump in 2015 had become more opposed by August 2016 to Black Lives Matter — an advocacy group critical of police over the fatal shootings of African-Americans. Again, as Trump’s supporters learned of his stances, they took them on as their own.
If Trump supporters were willing to change their opinions about race, it seems less likely that Democrats could nominate someone sufficiently outside the mainstream to scare off voters inclined to support the party. Whether Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg or another top candidate wins the nomination, we can expect all of their policies to attract support as people come to learn about them during the saturation coverage of a general election.
And for the all-important independent voters who can swing the election in key states, Trump’s singular unpopularity will give the Democratic nominee a welcome nudge toward being the preferred candidate at the outset of the race. According to Gallup, only 34 percent of independents approve of Trump’s job performance right now, and that will push them toward whomever the Democrats select.
Once that candidate gets their attention and preliminary support, the nominee will then have the opportunity to educate them about his or her policies — starting by choosing the curriculum.
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RSN: The 'Official Secrets' Movie vs. Joe Biden's Lies About the Iraq War |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48990"><span class="small">Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 17 September 2019 12:13 |
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Solomon writes: "Joe Biden's recent efforts to deny his record of support for invading Iraq are marvels of evasion, with falsehoods that have been refuted by one well-documented appraisal after another after another."
Joe Biden. (photo: Frank Franklin II/AP)
The 'Official Secrets' Movie vs. Joe Biden's Lies About the Iraq War
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
17 September 19
 oe Biden’s recent efforts to deny his record of support for invading Iraq are marvels of evasion, with falsehoods that have been refuted by one well-documented appraisal after another after another. This month, Biden claimed that his vote for war on the Senate floor was somehow not a vote for war. Ironically, while he was spinning anew to deny the undeniable, theaters nationwide began screening a movie that exposes the deceptive approach to the Iraq war that Biden exemplifies.
Historically factual, “Official Secrets” is concerned with truth — and the human consequences of evading or telling it. Katharine Gun, portrayed by actress Keira Knightley, was a worker at the British intelligence agency GCHQ. Risking years in prison, she did everything she could to prevent the Iraq war, and took responsibility for doing so.
Biden did everything he could to enable the Iraq war, and — still — takes no responsibility for doing so.
More than 16 years ago, Biden and Gun were at cross-purposes as the Iraq invasion neared. Subterfuge vs. candor. Misinformation vs. information. War vs. peace. Today, their public voices contrast just as sharply.
Gun recalls that both President George W. Bush and especially British prime minister Tony Blair were “desperate to get U.N. cover” for the impending invasion of Iraq in early 2003. On the last day of January of that year, Gun saw a memo from the U.S. National Security Agency that showed the two governments were working together to wiretap and otherwise surveil diplomats from countries on the U.N. Security Council — for purposes such as blackmail — to win a vote to authorize an invasion.
Gun became a whistleblower by providing the memo to the Observer newspaper in London. As she said in a recent interview with Salon, “My intention was to prevent the war…. I felt there was this information that was absolutely crucial, it had the potential to derail the rush to war, and I felt people had the right to know.”
Biden — who played a pivotal role in the rush to war as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — proceeded as though people had no right to know. He excluded critical voices and key information from the committee’s high-profile hearings in mid-summer 2002, deceptively serving as the most important lawmaker ushering the war resolution to the Senate floor, where he voted for it in mid-October. The war began five months later. It has never ended.
But now, on the campaign trail, Biden is eager to scramble and rewrite history. He’s displaying the kind of disregard for facts that paved the way for the invasion of Iraq in the first place.
A basic flaw in Biden’s latest Iraq double-talk has to do with his inversion of actual timing. Either he can’t remember when the Iraqi government agreed to allow U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq — or he’s so desperate to keep lying about his actual record on the Iraq war that he can’t bring himself to be truthful.
Biden is claiming that he voted for the war resolution so it would be possible to get U.N. weapons inspectors into Iraq. During the ABC debate last week, Biden said that he voted for the Iraq invasion authorization “to allow inspectors to go in to determine whether or not anything was being done with chemical weapons or nuclear weapons.” But his claim has the timing backward.
The Iraqi government announced on September 16, 2002 — with a letter hand-delivered to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan — that it would allow the U.N. weapons inspectors back in “without conditions.” The New York Times reported the big news under the headline “U.N. Inspectors Can Return Unconditionally, Iraq Says.” That was a full 25 days before Biden voted with virtually every Republican and most Democratic senators to approve the Iraq war resolution.
How could that resolution he voted for on October 11 be viewed as a tool for leverage so the Iraqi government would (in Biden’s words) “allow inspectors to go in” — when the Iraqi government had already agreed to allow inspectors several weeks earlier?
I have a vivid memory of when the news of that agreement broke. I was in Baghdad near the end of a trip with an independent delegation organized and sponsored by the Institute for Public Accuracy (where I’m executive director) that included then-congressman Nick Rahall and former senator James Abourezk. We had just met with Iraq’s number two official, Tariq Aziz. In its coverage, The Washington Post reported on September 16: “Iraq maintains that all its weapons of mass destruction have been destroyed. The deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, insisted … that even if his government readmitted the weapons inspectors, the United States and Britain would proceed with military action. ‘It’s doomed if you do, doomed if you don’t,’ he said.”
Hours later, when the news came that Iraq would allow U.N. weapons inspectors without restrictions, it removed the get-the-inspectors-into-Iraq excuse for the war resolution that was then making its way through Congress. But it’s an excuse that Biden has now dusted off and pressed into service, twisting the timeline of actual events.
The Congressional resolution that Biden spoke for and voted for on the Senate floor was clear, stating: “The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.”
Four months later, in February 2003, at a time when Katharine Gun was anxiously waiting to see whether the NSA document that she had leaked to a British news outlet would actually be revealed to the public, Biden was proclaiming his support for the imminent invasion. He told a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Delaware: “I supported the resolution to go to war. I am not opposed to war to remove weapons of mass destruction from Iraq.”
After the invasion, Biden continued to support the war. At the end of July 2003, four months after the war began, he said in a speech at the Brookings Institution: “Nine months ago, I voted with my colleagues to give the president of the United States of America the authority to use force, and I would vote that way again today. It was the right vote then and it would be a correct vote today.”
After another year had gone by, Biden wrote a magazine article that tactically criticized how the war was being waged while still defending his role in helping to launch it: “A year and a half ago, I voted to give President Bush the authority to use force in Iraq. I still believe my vote was just — but the president’s use of that authority was unwise in ways I never imagined.”
As The Washington Post recently noted, “Not until November 2005 did Biden acknowledge that his vote was a mistake.” Even then, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Biden tried to shift the blame onto President Bush for turning out to be unworthy of his trust. “In hindsight,” the interviewer asked, “knowing everything you know now about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, was your vote a mistake?” Biden replied: “It was a mistake. It was a mistake to assume the president would use the authority we gave him properly.”
Only one of Biden’s opponents for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination was in Congress at the time of the Iraq war resolution. Bernie Sanders (who I’m actively supporting) voted no.
This summer, Biden has spun out with new mendacity about the Iraq invasion. On the debate stage at the end of July, he upped the dishonest ante by claiming: “From the moment ‘shock and awe’ started, from that moment, I was opposed to the effort, and I was outspoken as much as anyone at all in the Congress.” The historical record shows that claim to be preposterous.
And backward timing is not the only major flaw in Biden’s claim that he voted for the war resolution to increase the prospects for U.N. weapons inspectors to get into Iraq. An underlying problem with his current narrative is the reality that going to the United Nations Security Council for authorization to launch a war on Iraq was always a quest for a fig leaf to cover U.S. plans for naked aggression.
New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman was unusually candid when, on November 13, 2002 — one month after Biden had voted to approve the war resolution — he wrote in a column: “The Bush team discovered that the best way to legitimize its overwhelming might — in a war of choice — was not by simply imposing it, but by channeling it through the U.N.”
It was this bogus push to supposedly legitimize the pending invasion that Katharine Gun took such a huge personal risk to expose, informing the world about the intense surveillance underway to gain illicit leverage over U.N. Security Council delegations.
“Gun’s revelation showed that the U.S. and British governments were not only lying to get to invade Iraq, they were engaging in outright violations of international law to blackmail whole countries to get in line,” Institute for Public Accuracy senior analyst Sam Husseini wrote. He told me: “The insidiousness of Biden is that he’s effectively saying that Bush should have manipulated the U.N. better.”
Overall, as he pursues the presidency, Joe Biden is persisting with dismal innovations to falsify his record on the Iraq war. In the process, he’s operating completely at odds with what the “Official Secrets” film and Katharine Gun are all about.
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He is the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and the author of a dozen books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. Solomon is currently a coordinator of the independent Bernie Delegates Network.
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.
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Only a Green New Deal Can Douse the Fires of Eco-Fascism |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=43707"><span class="small">Naomi Klein, The Intercept</span></a>
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Tuesday, 17 September 2019 08:12 |
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Klein writes: "Organizers are expecting huge numbers to turn out for the Global Climate Strike, beginning on September 20 and continuing through September 27."
Naomi Klein. (photo: Ed Kashi)
Only a Green New Deal Can Douse the Fires of Eco-Fascism
By Naomi Klein, The Intercept
17 September 19
 rganizers are expecting huge numbers to turn out for the Global Climate Strike, beginning on September 20 and continuing through September 27. It builds on the first global climate strike, which took place on March 15, and attracted an estimated 1.6 million young people, who walked out of class at schools on every continent.
But this week’s strike will be different. This time, young organizers have called on adults from all walks of life to join them in the streets. So in addition to schools in over 150 countries, almost 1,000 workers at Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle have pledged to walk out, as have some faculty unions, Britain’s Trades Union Congress, and many others. There is a plan to shut down Washington, D.C. on September 23.
This diversity of the groups involved may well prove to be a new stage in the climate movement, with many more movements and constituencies seeing themselves in the struggle against climate breakdown — as well as in the emerging vision for an intersectional justice-based Green New Deal.
And it’s a good thing too, because as Donald Trump spews racist hate at Bahamian refugees fleeing the wreckage of Hurricane Dorian and growing numbers of far-right killers cite environmental damage as a justification for their rampages, there is a pressing need to confront the ways in which the fires of climate breakdown are already intersecting with the fires of white supremacy and surging xenophobia globally.
These are themes I explore in-depth in my new book, “On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal,” from which this essay is excerpted.
An Eco-Fascist Massacre
In Christchurch, New Zealand, the March 15 School Strike for Climate started in much the same way as in so many other cities and towns: Rowdy students poured out of their schools in the middle of the day, holding up signs demanding a new era of climate action. Some were sweet and earnest (I STAND 4 WHAT I STAND ON), some less so (KEEP EARTH CLEAN. IT’S NOT URANUS!).
By 1 p.m., about 2,000 kids had made their way into Cathedral Square, at the city center, where they gathered around a makeshift stage and donated sound system to listen to speeches and music.
There were students of all ages there, and an entire Maori school had walked out together. “I was so proud of the whole of Christchurch,” one of the organizers, 17-year-old Mia Sutherland, told me. “All of these people had been so brave. It isn’t easy to walk out.”
Just as Sutherland was psyching herself up to deliver the final testimony of the day, one of her friends gave her a tug and told her, “You have to shut it down. Now!” Sutherland was confused — had they been too loud? Surely that was their right! Just then, a police officer walked onto the stage and took the mic away from her. Everyone needs to leave the square, the officer said over the sound system. Go home. Go back to school. But stay away from Hagley Park.
A couple hundred students decided to march together to City Hall to keep the protest going. Sutherland, still confused, went to catch a bus — and that’s when she saw a headline on her phone about a shooting 10 minutes away from where she was standing.
It would be several hours before the young strikers grasped the full horror of what had transpired that day — and why they had been told to stay away from a park near the Al Noor Mosque. We now know that at the very same time as the students’ climate strike, a 28-year-old Australian man living in New Zealand drove to that mosque, walked inside, and, during Friday prayers, opened fire. After six minutes of carnage, he calmly left Al Noor, drove to another mosque, and continued his rampage. By the end, 50 people were dead, including a 3-year-old child. Another would die in the hospital weeks later. An additional 49 were seriously injured. It was the largest massacre in modern New Zealand history.
In his manifesto (posted to multiple social media sites) and in inscriptions on his weapon, the killer expressed admiration for the men responsible for other, similar massacres: in downtown Oslo and at a Norwegian summer camp in 2011 (77 people killed); at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 (nine people murdered); at a Quebec City mosque in 2017 (six people dead); and at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 (11 people murdered). Like all these other terrorists, the Christchurch shooter was obsessed with the concept of “white genocide,” a supposed threat posed by the growing presence of nonwhite populations in majority-white nations, which he blamed on immigrant “invaders.”
The horror in Christchurch was part of this clear and escalating pattern of far-right hate crimes, but it was also distinct in a couple of ways. One was the extent to which the killer planned and executed his massacre as a made-for-the-internet spectacle. Before beginning his rampage, he announced on the message board 8chan that “it’s time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort post,” as if a mass killing were merely a particularly shocking meme waiting to be shared.
The hypermediated nature of the Christchurch massacre, with the killer’s obvious bid to game-ify his “real life effort post,” made for an unbearable contrast with the searing reality of his horrific crime — of bullets tearing through flesh, of families stricken by grief, and of a global Muslim community sent a terrorizing message that its members were safe nowhere, not even in the sanctity of prayer.
It also made for a wrenching contrast with the youth climate strikers who had gathered at the exact same time for such a different purpose. Where the killer gleefully toyed with the lines between fact, fiction, and conspiracy, as if the very idea of truth were #FakeNews, the strikers painstakingly insisted that hard realities like accumulated greenhouse gases and carbon footprints and spiraling extinctions really did matter, and demanded that politicians close the yawning gap between their words and their actions.
When I spoke to her six weeks after that terrible day, Mia Sutherland was still having trouble prying the strike and the massacre apart; they had somehow fused together in her memory. “In no one’s mind are they separate,” she told me, her voice just above a whisper.
When intense events happen in close proximity to one another, the human mind often tries to draw connections that are not there, a phenomenon known as apophenia. But in this case, there were connections. In fact, the strike and the massacre can be understood as mirror opposite reactions to some of the same historical forces. And this relates to the other way that the Christchurch killer is distinct from the white supremacist mass murderers from whom he openly drew inspiration. Unlike them, he identifies explicitly as an “ethno-nationalist eco-fascist.” In his rambling manifesto, he framed his actions as a twisted kind of environmentalism, railing against population growth and asserting that “Continued immigration into Europe is environmental warfare.”
To be clear, the killer was not driven by environmental concern — his motivation was unadulterated racist hate — but ecological breakdown was one of the forces that seemed to be stoking that hatred, much as we are seeing it act as an accelerant for hatred and violence in armed conflicts around the world. My fear is that, unless something significant changes in how our societies rise to the ecological crisis, we are going to see this kind of white power eco-fascism emerge with much greater frequency, as a ferocious rationalization for refusing to live up to our collective climate responsibilities.
Much of this is due to the hard calculus of global warming. This is a crisis overwhelmingly created by the wealthiest strata of society: Almost 50 percent of global emissions are produced by the richest 10 percent of the world’s population; the wealthiest 20 percent are responsible for 70 percent. But the impacts of those emissions are hurting the poorest first and worst, forcing growing numbers of people to move, with many more on the way. A 2018 World Bank study estimates that by 2050, more than 140 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America will be displaced because of climate stresses, an estimate many consider conservative. Most will stay in their own countries, crowding into already overstressed cities and slums; many will try for a better life elsewhere.
In any moral universe, guided by basic human rights principles, these victims of a crisis of other people’s making would be owed justice. That justice would and should take many forms. First and foremost, justice requires that the wealthiest 10-20 percent stop the underlying cause of this deepening crisis by lowering emissions as rapidly as technology allows (the premise of the Green New Deal). Justice also demands that we heed the call for a “Marshall Plan for the Earth” that Bolivia’s climate negotiator called for a decade ago: to roll out resources in the global south so communities can fortify themselves against extreme weather, pull themselves out of poverty with clean tech, and protect their ways of life wherever possible.
When protection is not possible — when the land is simply too parched to grow crops and when the seas are rising too fast to hold them back — then justice demands that we clearly recognize that all people have the human right to move and seek safety. That means they are owed asylum and status on arrival. In truth, amid so much loss and suffering, they are owed much more than that: They are owed kindness, compensation, and a heartfelt apology.
In other words, climate disruption demands a reckoning on the terrain most repellent to conservative minds: wealth redistribution, resource sharing, and reparations. And a growing number of people on the hard right realize this all too well, which is why they are developing various twisted rationales for why none of this can take place.
The first phase is to scream “socialist conspiracy” and flat out deny reality. We’ve been in that phase for quite some time now. That was the tack taken by Anders Breivik, the sociopath who opened fire at the Norwegian summer camp in 2011. Breivik was convinced that in addition to immigration, one of the ways that white Western culture was being weakened was through calls for Europe and the Anglosphere to pay its “climate debt.” In a section of his manifesto titled “Green Is the New Red — Stop EnviroCommunism!,” in which he cites several prominent climate change deniers, he casts demands for climate financing as an attempt to “‘punish’ European countries (US included) for capitalism and success.” Climate action, he asserts, “is the new Redistribution of Wealth.”
But if straight-up denial seemed a viable strategy then, nine years later (with six of those years among the 10 hottest ever recorded) it is less so today. That does not mean, however, that onetime deniers are suddenly going to embrace a response to the climate crisis based on agreed-upon international frameworks. It is far more likely that many who currently claim to deny climate change will simply switch abruptly to the sinister worldview espoused by the Christchurch killer, a recognition that we are indeed facing a convulsive future and that is all the more reason for wealthy, majority-white countries to fortress their borders, as well as their identities as white Christians, and wage war on any and all “invaders.”
The climate science will no longer be denied; what will be denied is the idea that the nations that are the largest historical emitters of carbon owe anything to the black and brown people impacted by that pollution. This will be denied based on the only rationale possible: that those non-white and non-Christian people are lesser than, are the other, are dangerous invaders.
In much of Europe and the Anglosphere, this hardening is already well under way. The European Union, Australia, and the United States have all embraced immigration policies that are variations on “prevention through deterrence.” The brutal logic is to treat migrants with so much callousness and cruelty that desperate people will be deterred from seeking safety by crossing borders.
With this in mind, migrants are left to drown in the Mediterranean, or to die of dehydration in the rugged Arizona desert. And if they survive, they are put in conditions tantamount to torture: in the Libyan camps where European countries now send the migrants who try to reach their shores; in Australia’s offshore island detention camps; in a cavernous Walmart turned child jail in Texas. In Italy, if migrants do make it to a port, they are now regularly prevented from disembarking, held captive in rescue boats under conditions a court has ruled to be tantamount to kidnapping.
Canada’s prime minister, meanwhile, tweets pictures of himself welcoming refugees and visiting mosques — even as his government makes massive new investments in militarizing the border and tightening the noose of the Safe Third Country Agreement, which bars asylum-seekers from requesting protection at official Canadian border crossings if they are coming from the supposedly “safe” country of Trump’s United States.
The goal of this fortification around Europe and the Anglosphere is all too clear: Convince people to stay where they are, no matter how miserable it is, no matter how deadly. In this worldview, the emergency is not people’s suffering; it is their inconvenient desire to escape that suffering.
That is why, just hours after the Christchurch massacre, Trump could shrug off the surge of far-right violence and immediately change the subject to the “invasion” of migrants at the United States’s southern border and his recent declaration of a “national emergency,” a move meant to free up billions for a border wall. Three weeks later, Trump tweeted, “Our Country is FULL!” This followed Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini, responding to the arrival of a small group of migrants rescued at sea by tweeting, “Our ports were and remain CLOSED.”
Murtaza Hussain, an investigative reporter who studied the Christchurch killer’s manifesto closely, stresses that it is filled with ideas that are anything but marginal. His words, Hussain writes, are “both lucid and chillingly familiar. His references to immigrants as invaders find echoes in the language used by the president of the United States and far-right leaders across Europe. For those wondering where [he] was radicalized, the answer is right out in the open. It is in our media and politics, where minorities, Muslims or otherwise, are vilified as a matter of course.”
Toxic Ideologies
The drivers of mass migration are complex: war, gang violence, sexual violence, deepening poverty. What is clear is that climate disruption is intensifying all these other crises, and it’s only going to get worse as it gets hotter. But rather than helping, the wealthiest countries on the planet seem determined to deepen the crisis on every front.
They are failing to provide meaningful new aid so poorer nations can better protect themselves from weather extremes. When impoverished and debt-ridden Mozambique was pummeled by Cyclone Idai, the International Monetary Fund offered the country $118 million, a loan (not a grant) it would somehow have to pay back; the Jubilee Debt Campaign described the move as “a shocking indictment of the international community.” Worse, in March 2019, Trump announced that he intended to cut $700 million in current aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, some of which was earmarked for programs that help farmers cope with drought. In an equally explicit expression of its priorities, in June 2018, at the start of hurricane season, the Department of Homeland Security diverted $10 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is tasked with responding to natural disasters at home, and moved it over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to pay for migrant detention.
Let there be no mistake: This is the dawn of climate barbarism. And unless there is a radical change not only in politics but in the underlying values that govern our politics, this is how the wealthy world is going to “adapt” to more climate disruption: by fully unleashing the toxic ideologies that rank the relative value of human lives in order to justify the monstrous discarding of huge swaths of humanity. And what starts as brutality at the border will most certainly infect societies as a whole.
These supremacist ideas are not new; nor have they ever gone away. For those of us in North America, they are deeply embedded in the legal basis for our nations’ very existence (from the Doctrine of Christian Discovery to terra nullius). Their power has ebbed and flowed throughout our histories, depending on what immoral behaviors demanded ideological justification. And just as these toxic ideas surged when they were required to rationalize slavery, land theft, and segregation, they are surging once more now that they are needed to justify climate recalcitrance and the barbarism at our borders.
The rapidly escalating cruelty of our present moment cannot be overstated; nor can the long-term damage to the collective psyche should this go unchallenged. Beneath the theater of some governments denying climate change and others claiming to be doing something about it while they fortress their borders from its effects, there is one overarching question facing us. In the rough and rocky future that has already begun, what kind of people are we going to be? Will we share what’s left and try to look after one another? Or are we instead going to attempt to hoard what’s left, look after “our own,” and lock everyone else out?
In this time of rising seas and rising fascism, these are the stark choices before us. There are options besides full-blown climate barbarism, but given how far down that road we are, there is no point pretending that they are easy. It’s going to take a lot more than a carbon tax or cap-and-trade. It’s going to take an all-out war on pollution and poverty and racism and colonialism and despair all at the same time.
The message coming from the school strikes is that a great many young people are ready for this kind of deep change. They know all too well that the sixth mass extinction is not the only crisis they have inherited. They are also growing up in the rubble of market euphoria, in which the dreams of endlessly rising living standards have given way to rampant austerity and economic insecurity. And techno-utopianism, which imagined a frictionless future of limitless connection and community, has morphed into addiction to the algorithms of envy, relentless corporate surveillance, and spiraling online misogyny and white supremacy.
“Once you have done your homework,” the young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg says, “you realize that we need new politics. We need a new economics, where everything is based on our rapidly declining and extremely limited carbon budget. But that is not enough. We need a whole new way of thinking. … We must stop competing with each other. We need to start cooperating and sharing the remaining resources of this planet in a fair way.”
Because our house is on fire, and this should come as no surprise. Built on false promises, discounted futures, and sacrificial people, it was rigged to blow from the start. It’s too late to save all our stuff, but we can still save each other and a great many other species, too. Let’s put out the flames and build something different in its place. Something a little less ornate, but with room for all those who need shelter and care.
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ast week, 
