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Plastic Pollution: Could We Have Solved the Problem Nearly 50 Years Ago? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50457"><span class="small">Erica Cirino, The Revelator</span></a>
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Thursday, 28 March 2019 12:24 |
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Cirino writes: "It's a challenge to turn to the news these days without reading or hearing the latest horror story about plastic pollution. These updates seem new and striking and scary, but in reality much of the fundamental information contained in these stories is actually far from fresh."
Plastic pollution. (photo: Bo Eide/Public Domain)
Plastic Pollution: Could We Have Solved the Problem Nearly 50 Years Ago?
By Erica Cirino, The Revelator
28 March 19
What if we’d listened to the researchers who first warned us about plastic pollution in the 1970s?
 here’s plastic in seabirds, in the middle of the remote Pacific Ocean, even in people. It’s a challenge to turn to the news these days without reading or hearing the latest horror story about plastic pollution. These updates seem new and striking and scary, but in reality much of the fundamental information contained in these stories is actually far from fresh.
“In the last five years there has been more published research on plastics than in the previous 50 years,” says Marcus Eriksen, 5 Gyres Institute cofounder and research director, who’s a well-known contemporary documentarian of microplastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other parts of the oceans. “In the past the public did not get adequate information, or the right information, early enough to act.”
The Revelator took a deep dive into reams of historic plastic pollution research and uncovered that much of what’s considered “new” today has actually been known by scientists for decades but was not well publicized in the popular media until recently.
That delay in spreading the news about the threats of plastic came with a major cost. In the time since scientific research on plastic pollution was first published in the early 1970s, billions of metric tons of plastic waste has been tossed in landfills and accumulated in terrestrial and marine ecosystems — and in the bodies of countless people and animals.
That scientists knew plastic pollution was a growing problem back in the Seventies begs two essential questions: What would the world be like if we had listened to early researchers much earlier? And what prevented us from listening?
The earliest peer-reviewed research on plastic pollution in the oceans was based in observation of how the materials were behaving in the environment.
One paper, published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies in 1972, identified the phenomenon of plastic consumer packaging washing up on isolated shorelines as an ecological concern. Written by University of Aston chemist Gerald Scott, the paper discussed the problematically slow biodegradation speed of plastic in the marine environment and outlined a “need for the acceleration of this process” to prevent further ecological harm.
That same year a scientist named Edward J. Carpenter, who now works as a professor at San Francisco State University, became the first to publish warnings about what would eventually be known as “microplastics.” While posted as a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Carpenter published two landmark 1972 papers describing “plastic particles” in the Sargasso Sea and plastic spheres used for plastic production (called nurdles) that had absorbed PCBs in waters off Southern New England and were found inside several fish caught there.
The decades following Carpenter’s initial work saw the publication of just a few dozen papers on marine plastic pollution. In fact, from the time Carpenter announced finding small plastic particles in the oceans, it took more than three decades for the scientific term “microplastic” to be published in major international publications. Today publication of these papers is much more frequent. A search of Google Scholar found 771 papers containing the words “microplastic” or “microplastics” published in 2018 alone.
Although plastic pollution wasn’t making news headlines decades ago, the research did continue, with several important early findings made. This includes the 1973 discovery of small plastic particles accumulating in the bodies of seabirds (today we know more than 90 percent of all seabirds have eaten plastic at some point in their lives) and the identification of large quantities of plastic floating on the Pacific Ocean between California and Japan (where we now know the Great Pacific Garbage Patch lies).
Early research suggests that scientists knew from the start that the biggest issue with plastic is that it never decomposes. It only breaks up into tiny pieces that can be ingested by marine wildlife and humans, with unclear — but almost certainly negative — consequences.
One major concern is toxins, which plastic can both absorb and leach out. While this issue has gotten significant amounts of media coverage in the past few years, some of the earliest plastic pollution researchers supposed that if ingested in small amounts, “consumed particles of plastic could release sufficient amounts of PCB’s to affect seabirds,” as Stephen I. Rothstein wrote in a 1973 paper on marine plastic pollution.
It took more than a decade after publication of the papers by Carpenter and other early researchers before the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States’ main ocean science agency, convened the world’s top marine scientists to discuss plastic pollution. In 1984 the agency hosted the First International Conference on Marine Debris. As former NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center deputy director Jim Coe later recalled, the goal of the conference was to discuss whether or not marine debris, specifically lost and abandoned fishing gear, “was a problem worth people’s attention.”
They quickly agreed that it was. Scientists at the conference concluded that plastic was accumulating in the natural environment and called for more research to better understand what seemed to be a growing problem. They also made the earliest call for legal action to prevent pollution from ships, which prompted Congress to fund an early version of NOAA’s Marine Debris Program called the Marine Entanglement and Research Program — which had a responsibility of facilitating research, publicizing data and minimizing the problem.
During the early 1980s, plastic manufacturers continued to sell consumers on the utility of their products, specifically plastic bags, without publicly acknowledging that the materials were harming the environment. In fact, they tried to show the opposite by pushing ideas about plastic’s abilities to be reused and recycled.
“Plastic bags can be reused in more than 17 different ways, including as a wrap for frozen foods, a jogger’s wind breaker or a beach bag,” the industry-backed Plastic Grocery Sack Council told the Los Angeles Times in 1986. A New York Times story published a few years prior lightly debates whether or not consumers would prefer using plastic bags to paper, given the industry’s push to get them into grocery stores around the world — without mentioning any of the environmental consequences.
But the real push for plastic started even earlier. Plastics-history expert Rebecca Altman recalls how a 1950s packaging magazine editor told industry insiders that “The future of plastics is in the trash can.” Altman, who has deeply explored the human connection to plastic, says that the world had to be conditioned to carelessly consume. Prior to that time, “it was not in the culture to use something once and throw it away.” Today the items most commonly found in nature are so-called “single-use” plastics.
Promoting public narratives about litter to focus on recycling as a solution has, for a long time, “been a way to deflect attention and responsibility for product design away from industry, and has been very effective,” says Eriksen.
Despite this focus on recycling, recent research finds just 9 percent of plastics ever made have been recycled, and the large majority has either ended up in landfills or the natural environment.
Though contemporary plastic pollution scientists say they are aware of these past studies and their significance, they claim the public is not — due to insufficient news coverage of the issue and industry campaigns designed to keep them in the dark.
“Industry has aggressively defended themselves, manipulating public perception, and attacking scientists perceived as a threat,” Eriksen says.
“For both papers in Science the Society of the Plastics Industry sent a representative (twice) to Woods Hole, basically to intimidate me,” claims Carpenter, the early plastics researcher. “I was not given tenure at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and I think the plastic papers hurt my career there.”
That trade group is now known as the Plastics Industry Association. When reached for comment, it refused to confirm or deny Carpenter’s claims.
But it’s well known that certain industries have covered up the link between tobacco use and cancer, and fossil fuel use and climate change. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists’ “Disinformation Playbook,” corporations have followed a specific pattern when attempting to block legislation and minimize their liability for problems created by their products. The plastics industry appears to have followed the same predictable plays as other deceptive businesses: blitzing scientists who speak out with “inconvenient” results or views, diverting attention from scientific recommendations (to cut plastic use), and making strong attempts to block unfavorable policies (banning or restricting plastic use), among other strategies.
Besides industry silencing of research and shaping consumers’ mindsets around waste, Altman suggests the media also played a part in the issue of global plastic pollution first being overlooked and then finally coming to the fore of global consciousness. It’s a combination of plastic pollution worsening and the nature of media changing over time, Altman says. Today social platforms have the ability for anyone, anywhere, to share what has been ignored long enough to become an enormous and visually compelling story. Just think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and all the media attention that’s gotten in the past decade, she says.
“Culturally we focus on environmental problems of a spectacular nature, the kind of havoc that happens in a bewildering instant,” she says. “It’s hard to see the slow-moving disasters or tragedies that happen over time — the drip, drip, drip — until it’s of a disastrous proportion.”
Carpenter agrees, emphasizing the gap between the scientific discovery of plastic pollution in the oceans and publicity about the problem. “I believe that the Captain Moore TED Talk on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, plus Marcus Eriksen of 5 Gyres, plus a video on dying albatrosses at Midway Island, plus the graphic video of the sea turtle with the plastic straw up its nose began to finally wake up the public,” he says.
Nonprofits like 5 Gyres are now pushing an agenda toward public awareness, corporate responsibility and the idea of a circular economy — an economy that focuses on keeping waste to a minimum while maximizing materials’ use. NGOs’ activism has also kick-started a spurt of municipal and national policies aimed at reducing use of plastic items worldwide in a bid to cut pollution. If people won’t stop using plastic items on their own accord, recent research suggests rules limiting their use of plastic items by charging a fee for its use or banning it outright is the best way to get them to stop.
The plastics industry has actively fought such legislation, and despite the publication of research calling for a reduction in plastic use it continues to sell its products while pushing recycling as the best method to reduce waste and litter. In one recent example, major beverage corporations led by the Coca-Cola Company sent a letter of opposition last year to the European Commission following the EU’s proposal to require that plastic bottles have tethered caps. Traditional bottle caps are commonly lost in the marine environment because they so easily separate from bottles. In the letter the corporations cite the efficacy of deposit return schemes and recycling in reducing plastic litter. They proposed increased efforts to “reinforce and incentivize [the] right consumer behaviors” in lieu of changing their product designs. Coca-Cola recently revealed that it produces 3 million metric tons of plastic packaging every year.
When asked about the issue of plastic pollution and how to best address it, the Plastics Industry Association sent a statement to The Revelator saying the association “believes uncollected plastics do not belong in the natural environment and that is why we partner with other associations, non-governmental organizations and intergovernmental authorities to coordinate efforts to strengthen recovery systems around the globe to prevent the loss of any plastics into the environment. Our members understand that our industry needs to be a part of the solution. We encourage education and call for the enhancement of our recycling infrastructure in order to encourage new end markets for plastics.”
But experts say product redesigns and infrastructure don’t solve the problem. “Ocean plastics are a symptom of poor upstream waste management, poor product design, as well as consumer littering behavior,” Eriksen says. “It’s a perpetuation of old narratives, where pollution is caused by consumers. Regulation of products and packaging must be fought for intensively.”
The quick solution to the problem: Use less plastic.
As Carpenter pointed out nearly five decades ago, the more plastic we make and use, the more will end up in the natural environment. As he wrote in 1972: “Increasing production of plastics, combined with present waste-disposal practices, will undoubtedly lead to increases in the concentration of these particles.”
That’s a message we should have listened to decades ago, which still needs to be heard today.
“The public did not get adequate information, or the right information, early enough to act,” says Eriksen. “Industry has been very effective at controlling the public narrative, but today they cannot control things the way they did in the past. Social media and mass communications have allowed people to organize.” And that’s starting to make a difference.
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FOCUS: Is Obamacare Really Dead? |
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Thursday, 28 March 2019 12:02 |
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Dickinson writes: "The Trump administration has endorsed a federal court judgment that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. The administration now seeks to dismantle not only protections for patients with pre-existing conditions, but to end Medicaid expansion in more than three dozen states and to upend the insurance marketplaces for individuals across the country."
A child holds up a sign at a demonstration against Trump's repeal of the Affordable Care Act. (photo: Al Drago/Getty)
Is Obamacare Really Dead?
By Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone
28 March 19
The Justice Department is now backing a lower-court ruling that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional
he Trump administration has endorsed a federal court judgment that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. The administration now seeks to dismantle not only protections for patients with pre-existing conditions, but to end Medicaid expansion in more than three dozen states and to upend the insurance marketplaces for individuals across the country.
On Monday, the Department of Justice submitted a brief notice to a federal appellate court announcing that it now believes Obamacare should be thrown out in its entirety, as called for by a December 2018 ruling in district court. “The Department of Justice has determined that the district court’s judgment should be affirmed,” wrote Assistant Attorney General Joseph Hunt, underscoring that “the United States is not urging that any portion of the district court’s judgment be reversed.”
The current case against the ACA was brought by Texas and 17 other state attorneys general, and late last year federal district Judge Reed O’Connor ruled for the plaintiffs. The twists of the case are complex: The Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that a penalty imposed on people who did not buy insurance under the law’s “individual mandate” provision was a tax, and therefore constitutional. But because the Trump tax-cut law of 2017 eliminated the financial penalty associated with the mandate, Judge O’Connor ruled, the ACA is no longer protected under Congress’ taxing authorities — and has become unconstitutional in full. In his controversial ruling, O’Connor likened passage of the Trump tax bill to pulling a crucial block out of a Jenga tower, causing the entire ACA to collapse.
Previously, the Trump administration had argued that parts of Obamacare should survive in this case. In a June 2018 legal brief, the Justice Department argued that the individual mandate was unconstitutional, and that the court should also do away with the “guaranteed issue and community rating requirements” of the law; these provisions ensure that anyone can purchase an insurance policy regardless of a preexisting condition. At the time, the Trump administration argued that these three provisions of Obamacare were “severable from the ACA’s other provisions,” meaning the rest of the law could stand.
With Monday’s reversal, the Trump administration is advocating to blow up the American health-care system. The tentacles of the Affordable Care Act extend well beyond the individual insurance marketplace, into Medicaid, Medicare, the coverage guarantees of most employer-based health plans — and even into public health measures like calorie counts on restaurant menus.
Democrats of all stripes are sounding the alarm. On Twitter, Hillary Clinton called this “dramatic escalation” of the Trump administration’s legal crusade against Obamacare a “sickening attack on people with pre-existing conditions, seniors, and young people.” Clinton — whose 2008 health-care platform served as the template for the Affordable Care Act — laid out the dire consequences if the lower court ruling is upheld:
Trump’s attack on the ACA has already become a flashpoint in the 2020 campaign. Surging presidential contender Pete Buttigieg highlighted the lack of a Plan B by the administration and the GOP:
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) — another Democratic presidential candidate — seized on the political opportunity presented by the administration’s broadside at a law that’s become popular with voters:
In response to the chorus of criticism, our extremely online president surfaced to make a vague and sweeping promise:
Despite the administration’s striking about-face Monday, nothing is changing in relation to the enforcement of Obamacare, for now. The lower-court ruling is on hold, pending appeal. And the ultimate fate of the Affordable Care Act seems destined, once again, to be decided by the Supreme Court.
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FOCUS: How Ivanka's Lawyer Tried to Influence Cohen's Testimony |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=46677"><span class="small">Emily Jane Fox, Vanity Fair</span></a>
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Thursday, 28 March 2019 11:57 |
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Fox writes: "Not terribly long into Michael Cohen's public testimony before Congress last month - after he referred to President Donald Trump as a cheat, racist, and con man, but before he showed the Oversight Committee financial documents that he said proved his former boss manipulated his assets in order to deceive banks and insurance companies - Cohen took a moment to apologize."
Ivanka Trump. (photo: Al Drago/Getty)
How Ivanka's Lawyer Tried to Influence Cohen's Testimony
By Emily Jane Fox, Vanity Fair
28 March 19
A previously unreported e-mail exchange alleges how attorney Abbe Lowell suggested changes to Cohen’s testimony that would distance Ivanka from the Moscow Tower deal.
 ot terribly long into Michael Cohen’s public testimony before Congress last month—after he referred to President Donald Trump as a cheat, racist, and con man, but before he showed the Oversight Committee financial documents that he said proved his former boss manipulated his assets in order to deceive banks and insurance companies—Cohen took a moment to apologize. When he last appeared on Capitol Hill, Cohen had lied about a Moscow real-estate project Trump pursued while seeking the Republican presidential nomination. To align with Trump’s denials of any business dealings with Russia, Cohen told Congress that his negotiations ended before February, 2016, when in fact they had stretched well into June.
“The last time I appeared before Congress, I came to protect Mr. Trump,” he said. “Today, I’m here to tell the truth about Mr. Trump.”
Cohen, who has been sentenced to three years in prison, also made another explosive claim. President Trump, he said, had spoken in “code” to prompt Cohen to lie about the Moscow project. Moreover, Cohen said, his false testimony was coordinated with the president’s attorneys. “Trump’s personal lawyers reviewed and edited my statement to Congress about the timing of the Moscow Tower negotiations before I gave it,” he said in his prepared remarks. At the time, Cohen had a joint defense agreement with the president, so the document was reviewed by Trump’s attorney, Jay Sekulow, as well as Abbe Lowell, the lawyer representing Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. According to Cohen, neither attorney raised objections to the document, which included his false statement about the Moscow project.
Sekulow issued a statement protesting Cohen’s assertions: “Today’s testimony by Michael Cohen that attorneys for the president edited or changed his statement to Congress to alter the duration of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations is completely false.” But Cohen had communications detailing these alleged edits, some of which lawmakers requested in a closed-door hearing with the House Intelligence Committee the following week. One document, which I have reviewed, was an e-mail exchange between Cohen and his then attorney, Stephen Ryan, outlining changes that Ryan said Lowell had asked them to make in order to distance Ivanka from the Moscow deal. Attached to the e-mail were drafts he said were Lowell's suggested edits. The extent of Lowell’s involvement has not been previously reported.
“Abbe asks for us to affirmatively address in our statement on the 25th:
-[Ivanka] was not involved in the backs and forths with FS [Felix Sater] and MC [Michael Cohen]
-she did not know FS was involved in the possible project in that country
-she was not in any meetings or calls with people putting it together (esp. from that country)
-and maybe that, by then, MC knew she was at least skeptical about him.”
Ryan included his response to Lowell. “Yes, am developing the writing and shared it this am with MC to see if I have it right. MC will want me to do anything your client asks that is accurate, which is not really an issue—but it may be perceived as awkward to go as specific as your requests.” Ryan added that he was hoping to share a version “only with” Lowell that week. Later, in the e-mail chain, Ryan attached a document that he said had Lowell’s red-line edits included. A spokesman for Lowell declined to comment.
Ivanka said in an interview earlier this year that she knew “literally almost nothing” about the Trump-branded tower in Moscow and the negotiations surrounding it throughout the campaign. But Cohen, under oath, told Congress last month that he briefed the Trump family, including Ivanka, on the project on “approximately 10” occasions. In a December memo detailing Cohen’s cooperation as he pleaded guilty to lying to Congress, the special counsel’s office also noted that Cohen had “briefed family members” of Trump about the project. Initial documents suggest the Moscow tower would have included a “Spa by Ivanka Trump.” They also would have given Ivanka the power to approve “all interior design elements of the spa or fitness facilities.”
Ivanka, who then served as executive vice president of development and acquisition at the Trump Organization, had been involved in these sorts of decisions as part of her role. In November 2015, Ivanka forwarded Cohen an e-mail from a Russian weightlifter who said he could help arrange a meeting between Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin to discuss real-estate opportunities in Russia. That same year, she e-mailed Cohen a suggestion for an architect who could work on the Moscow tower. (Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Lowell, said at the time that Ivanka was merely passing on an “unsolicited e-mail” from the weightlifter’s wife, and that Ivanka’s role in the project was limited to “reminding Mr. Cohen that, should an actual deal come to fruition . . . the project, like any other with the Trump name, conform with the highest design and architectural standards.”)
Cohen’s false testimony to Congress in 2017 ultimately did not include all of the provisos and caveats that Ryan said Lowell had asked for. They determined that Cohen going out of his way to be so specific about Ivanka's involvement would, in fact, have seemed awkward. Instead, Cohen’s commentary about Ivanka was boiled down to about one sentence.
Still, the revelation of Lowell’s involvement, as the e-mails suggest, in Cohen’s original testimony will likely be of interest to congressional investigators. After Cohen appeared before Congress for four marathon days last month, the House Judiciary Committee sent sweeping document requests to 81 individuals and organizations—many brought up by Cohen in his appearances—including Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Jared Kushner, the Trump Organization, and its C.F.O., Allen Weisselberg. Ivanka herself was not asked for documents, though 52 individuals and organizations were asked for documents related to Ivanka or her businesses. Many, like former attorney general Jeff Sessions, former White House communications director Hope Hicks, and former Trump bodyguard Matthew Calamari, were asked for documents that could pertain to conversations between Ivanka and foreign governments. Cohen was also asked for documents related to Ivanka and any potential emolument violations, discussions with foreign governments, financial transactions with the Russian government or businesses, the Trump Tower Moscow project, and changes made to his initial congressional testimony.
Since his appearance on Capitol Hill, Cohen has continued to cooperate with Congress and investigators in the Southern District of New York and the New York Attorney General's office, who are pursuing a number of investigations that focus on Trump, his family, and their business, including the hush-money payments to women alleging affairs with Trump, matters related to the presidential inauguration, whether the Trump Organization inflated insurance claims in the past, and if the president offered Cohen a pardon.
The e-mail between Cohen and his attorney about his testimony sheds light on the potential new avenues for investigators to probe, as the country settles into a post-Mueller universe. One stunning feature of the saga so far is that, while the president and his family have remained unscathed, they’ve left a trail of wreckage in their wake. Paul Manafort is set to serve about six years in prison. Roger Stone awaits trial as Michael Flynn and Rick Gates anticipate their sentences. Cohen, of course, is set to report to serve his three-year sentence at the beginning of May. Equally stunning is the number of documents Trump’s former associates have saved, and how willing they’ve been to share those receipts with investigators.
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Bill Barr's Fake Mueller Report: Is This WMDs in Iraq All Over Again? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=37790"><span class="small">Amanda Marcotte, Salon</span></a>
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Thursday, 28 March 2019 08:22 |
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Marcotte writes: "Now there's a report, but whether we'll actually get to see it is unclear, as the Republicans are rapidly working in formation to keep the actual contents of the report from public view."
Attorney General Bill Barr. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
Bill Barr's Fake Mueller Report: Is This WMDs in Iraq All Over Again?
By Amanda Marcotte, Salon
28 March 19
To suppress and spin the Mueller report, GOP pulls out the playbook of lies it used to sell us on invading Iraq
 t's starting to look like the fix is in. For two years, special counsel Robert Mueller investigated the Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election, and the possibility that Donald Trump's campaign somehow colluded with this conspiracy. Now there's a report, but whether we'll actually get to see it is unclear, as the Republicans are rapidly working in formation to keep the actual contents of the report from public view.
The strategy they're using will feel awfully familiar to those of us who lived through the George W. Bush administration's conspiracy to bamboozle the American public into accepting a war with Iraq: Distort the existing evidence. Lie whenever necessary. Exaggerate any evidence, no matter how iffy, that supports the desired conclusion. Stifle any contradictory evidence as much as possible. And manipulate a gullible media into amplifying the spin instead of reporting the truth.
The Mueller report is weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq, all over again. Republicans are using the same playbook to protect Trump that they used to hype the Iraq war, and the strategy seems, yet again, to be working.
For those whose memories have gone hazy or who are too young to remember, the debacle of WMDs in Iraq is one of the great stains on our nation's history. Bush and his flunkeys -- especially Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and their neoconservative allies -- wanted a war, but knew the public wasn't on board. So his administration launched an all-out gaslighting campaign to convince the public that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was hiding WMDs.
U.S. intelligence services assured Bush and his administration that Hussein had no WMDs. So Bush and his people made up the evidence. In some cases, they lied. In others, they took faulty evidence, including forged evidence, and presented that as definitive proof to the public. All evidence that contradicted the official narrative was repeatedly buried. Supposedly straight-shooter types like Secretary of State Colin Powell lent their credibility, however reluctantly, to the lie. And the mainstream media, most notably Judith Miller at the New York Times, played along, hyping false information on the front page and relegating all contrary information to secondary stories deep in the archives.
It took a war, hundreds of thousands dead, and a scouring of Iraq before everyone quietly admitted what had always been evident to the skeptics: There were no WMDs in Iraq and the whole thing was a snowball campaign.
Republicans know, after two years of hype, that the public expects a "Mueller report," but it's starting to look like they aren't too happy about whatever is in the one that actually exists. It appears they're gearing up to do what Bush did with the intelligence regarding WMDs: Cherry-pick a few quotes to justify the Big Lie, bury the evidence they don't like and employ hyperbolic rhetoric to browbeat the media into playing along.
Attorney General William Barr, an old hand at covering up Republican malfeaseance, sent a four-page letter to Congress purporting to summarize Mueller's findings. It appears to be so heavily cherry-picked that there's only a handful of quotes, and no complete sentences, from Mueller's actual report.
There's no way to really know what's in the Mueller report. Many journalists and Democrats are trying to make this case, pointing out that way more was left unsaid by Barr than said, and that the public deserves the full report.
But by and large, the headlines — which Republicans know are all most people read — would lead audiences to believe that there is a publicly available "Mueller report" and that it clears Trump of wrongdoing. For instance, the New York Times headline Tuesday morning declares we live in a "Post-Mueller" world, which is flatly untrue, since what Robert Mueller actually wrote remains hidden from public view.
Basically, the public is being fed a fake Mueller report, just as the public was being fed what amounted to fake intelligence about WMDs in Iraq. In both cases, however, there were sprinklings of truth inserted in the fakes in order to scare journalists off calling them fabrications and to lure people into line-by-line debates that distract from the larger issues. Those would include the fact that invading Iraq was a bad idea or the fact that Trump is a corrupt president and a pathological liar and that, regardless of his level of collusion in election interference, he sold out our country's interests to Russia during the 2016 campaign, and still more during his presidency.
Replacing full, complete intelligence with a falsified or cherry-picked narrative was only step one of the Iraq War con job. The second part involved using hyperbole, with the fake intel as justification, to bamboozle the public and intimidate reporters out of expressing skepticism.
Back in 2002 and 2003, the Bush administration stifled skepticism by making the outlandish claim that we were on the verge of nuclear annihilation. This is no exaggeration. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN, "We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," and variations of that line were repeated by an anonymous source to the New York Times and by Bush himself. Bush also claimed Hussein had a "massive stockpile" of WMDs, while Cheney insisted there was "no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." All this ridiculous rhetoric was justified by heavily spinning a few bad reports out of Iraq and pointedly ignoring the substantive evidence, collected by American and international experts, showing that the Iraqi government almost certainly didn't have WMDs.
Trump and his cronies are playing the same game now, declaring that the president has been exonerated — he has not — and making public lists of journalists and Democrats who expressed concerns about Trump's dealings with Russia, trying to paint them as crazy conspiracy theorists. (Which is all the more maddening because Trump himself is a conspiracy theorist who rose to the presidency by spreading lies about Barack Obama's citizenship.) The strategy is to go so big and so hard that any potential critics will back down, out of fear of being marginalized and caricatured.
It may work, as anyone who lived through the WMDs debacle can attest. The minority of Americans who saw through Bush's lies at the time and spoke out about them tended to get written off in the cable news world and by politicians -- including most leading Democrats, to be fair -- as addled hippies who refused to take this massive threat to our national security seriously. The fact that the majority of the world, including most of our leading Western allies, agreed with the skeptics was ignored.
And frankly, if you were a skeptic — as I was, back then — you often felt you were going a little mad. Surely, you said to yourself in moments of self-doubt, Bush couldn't be so evil as to be flat-out lying about this. Surely, Republicans wouldn't do something so awful just to get us into a war. Surely, people as sober and serious as Colin Powell wouldn't play along if it weren't a real threat. Surely, the New York Times and cable news sources wouldn't be so gullible as to trumpet administration claims that were false. Right? Right?
Well, it turned out the crazy people were right and the sober, serious people were liars or, at best, completely misguided.
Now we're in the same situation. Trump's entire career has been based on lies and corruption, he has substantial ties to Russia that he tried to hide and he has repeatedly endorsed Vladimir Putin's claims of innocence over the evidence gathered by U.S. intelligence services. And there's a cover-up underway, in swing, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocking a resolution calling for the actual Mueller report — not the truncated spin document written by Bill Barr — to be released.
But those of us who are willing to speak these truths are already being written off as crazy conspiracy theorists who have been driven mad by our dislike of Trump. Others who see these truths are beginning to silence themselves and play along with the media narrative about Trump's "vindication," rather than run the risk of being called crazy, which can mean lost job opportunities and social shunning.
This is why gaslighting works: You drive people crazy with all your lies, and then write them off as crazy when they call you a liar.
When the mainstream media, Democrats, and ordinary Americans decided, in 2002 and 2003, that it was safer to simply play along with Bush's lies rather than get written off as nutjobs for pointing out the truth, the results were catastrophic. Reliable estimates put the number of dead in Iraq at 400,000. The destabilization caused by the U.S. invasion helped lead to the creation of ISIS, which in turn is one of the reasons for the refugee crisis around the world.
There's reason to fear something similar coming out of any effort to suppress the Mueller report. Already a number of people eager to deny or justify Russia's campaign to destabilize democracy around the world — including Intercept editor (and former Salon columnist) Glenn Greenwald — have seized on the Barr letter as a weapon to shame critics of Putin and Trump. There's a real danger that the Barr letter, like the "uranium tubes" that Bush falsely claimed were being used to make nuclear weapons, will become an all-purpose talking point to marginalize anyone who speaks out about Trump's lies or the rise of authoritarianism.
There is no reason to take the claims that Trump is vindicated at face value. There's no reason to believe Trump about anything, or to trust the political party that lied us into the Iraq war, and has kept on lying about everything from tax cuts to health care policies. Yet somehow everyone is expected to ignore this long history and have faith in claims that a document we haven't seen fully exonerates a man who obviously has no moral compass.
Being a skeptic about WMDs in Iraq was a lonely position. People were afraid to join you, out of fear that Bush would find some small cache of WMDs and right-wingers would never let the skeptics live it down. The same thing is happening again with the Barr letter, where the tiny chance that he is offering a good-faith reading of the Mueller report is dangled over people's heads to silence them from expressing doubts.
But the stakes are too high to give into this intimidation campaign. We must learn from the Iraq debacle that while it might seem easier to lie down and give into a misinformation campaign, the price of doing so is too high. The Mueller report must be released in full, and nothing short of that is acceptable.
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ere’s a headline you can bet my former colleagues in the health insurance business were thrilled to see last week: “DCCC chief: Medicare for All price tag ‘a little scary.’”
