Politics

FOCUS: A Future Without Fossil Fuels?

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=16831">Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books</a>

Friday, 15 March 2019 11:35

McKibben writes: "At what point does a new technology cause an existing industry to start losing significant value?"

The John Amos coal-fired power plant is seen behind a home in Poca, West Virginia, in 2014. (photo: Robert Galbraith/Reuters)

A Future Without Fossil Fuels?

By Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books

15 March 19

ingsmill Bond� certainly sounds like a proper name for a City of London financial analyst. He looks the part, too: gray hair expertly trimmed, well-cut suit. He�s lived in Moscow and Hong Kong and worked for Deutsche Bank, the Russian financial firm Troika Dialog, and Citibank. He�s currently �new energy strategist� for a small British think tank called Carbon Tracker, and last fall he published a short paper called �2020 Vision: Why You Should See the Fossil Fuel Peak Coming.� It asks an interesting question: At what point does a new technology cause an existing industry to start losing significant value?

This may turn out to be the most important economic and political question of the first half of this century, and the answer might tell us much about our chances of getting through the climate crisis without completely destroying the planet. Based on earlier technological transitions�horses to cars, sails to steam, land lines to cell phones�it seems possible that the fossil fuel industry may begin to weaken much sooner than you�d think. The British-Venezuelan scholar Carlota Perez has observed that over a period of twenty years, trains made redundant a four-thousand-mile network of canals and dredged rivers across the UK: �The canal builders�fought hard and even finished a couple of major canals in the 1830s, but defeat was inevitable,� as it later was for American railroads (and horses) when they were replaced by trucks and cars.

Major technological transitions often take a while. The Czech-Canadian academic Vaclav Smil has pointed out that although James Watt developed the coal-powered steam engine in 1776, coal supplied less than 5 percent of the planet�s energy until 1840, and it didn�t reach 50 percent until 1900. But the economic effect of those transitions can happen much earlier, Bond writes, as soon as it becomes clear to investors that a new technology is accounting for all the growth in a particular sector.

Over the last decade, there has been a staggering fall in the price of solar and wind power, and of the lithium-ion batteries used to store energy. This has led to rapid expansion of these technologies, even though they are still used much less than fossil fuels: in 2017, for instance, sun and wind produced just 6 percent of the world�s electric supply, but they made up 45 percent of the growth in supply, and the cost of sun and wind power continues to fall by about 20 percent with each doubling of capacity. Bond�s analysis suggests that in the next few years, they will represent all the growth. We will then reach peak use of fossil fuels, not because we�re running out of them but because renewables will have become so cheap that anyone needing a new energy supply will likely turn to solar or wind power.

Bond writes that in the 2020s�probably the early 2020s�the demand for fossil fuels will stop growing. The turning point in such transitions �is typically the moment when the impact is felt in financial markets��when stock prices tumble and never recover. Who is going to invest in an industry that is clearly destined to shrink? Though we�ll still be using lots of oil, its price should fall if it has to compete with the price of sunshine. Hence the huge investments in pipelines and tankers and undersea exploration will be increasingly unrecoverable. Precisely how long it will take is impossible to predict, but the outcome seems clear.

This transition is already obvious in the coal markets. To understand, for example, why Peabody, the world�s largest private-sector coal-mining company, went from being on Fortune�s list of most admired companies in 2008 to bankrupt in 2016, consider its difficulties in expanding its market. India, until very recently, was expected to provide much of the growth for coal. As late as 2015, its coal use was expected to triple by 2030; the country was resisting global efforts like the Paris Accords to rein in its carbon emissions. But the price of renewable energy began to fall precipitously, and because India suffered from dire air pollution but has inexhaustible supplies of sunlight, its use of solar power started to increase dramatically.

�In 2017, the price in India of wind and solar power dropped 50 percent to $35�40 a megawatt hour,� said Tim Buckley, who analyzes Australasia/South Asia for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. �Fifty percent in one year. And a zero inflation indexation for the next twenty-five years. Just amazing.� This price drop occurred not because India subsidizes renewable energy (it doesn�t), but because engineers did such a good job of making solar panels more efficient. The cost of power from a newly built coal plant using Indian coal is, by comparison, about $60 a megawatt hour. If you have to import the coal, the price of power is $70/megawatt hour. And solar�s $40/megawatt hour price is guaranteed not to rise over the thirty-year life of the contract the suppliers sign�their bids are based on building and then running a facility for the life of the contract. No wonder that over the first nine months of 2018, India installed forty times more capacity for renewable than for coal-fired power.

Much the same is happening around the world. President Trump has spared no effort to help the coal industry, but more coal-fired power plants shut down during the first two years of his presidency than during President Obama�s entire first term. American coal consumption fell 4 percent in 2018. In 2017 Kentucky�s coal-mining museum installed solar panels on its roof in order to save $10,000 a year on electric costs.

And it�s not just coal that�s on the way out. Natural gas was supposed to be the planet�s next big fuel source, since it produces less carbon than coal (although its production releases great clouds of methane, another potent greenhouse gas). While fracking has produced high volumes of natural gas�especially in the US, where it was pioneered�wells tend to dry out quickly, and despite enormous investment, the International Energy Agency estimates that between 2010 and 2014 the shale industry operated with negative cash flows of more than $200 billion.

Even �cheap� natural gas is now starting to look expensive compared to the combination of sun, wind, and batteries. In an essay for Vox, the energy reporter David Roberts listed all the natural gas plants�many of them designed to provide quick bursts of �peaking power� on heavy demand days�whose planned construction has been canceled in recent months, as utilities and banks began to figure out that over the projected forty-year life of a new plant, there was a good chance it would become an uncompetitive �stranded asset� producing pointlessly expensive electricity. The chief executive of one US solar company said in January, �I can beat a gas peaker anywhere in the country today with a solar-plus-storage power plant. Who in their right mind today would build a new gas peaker? We are a factor of two cheaper.�

You get some sense of the future from the stunning fall of General Electric. �They were the world leader, the thought leader, the finance leader, the IT leader,� said Buckley. �And their share price is down 70 percent in the last two and a half years, in a market that�s up 50 percent. It�s a thermal power�reliant basket case.� That�s in large measure because manufacturing turbines for coal- and gas-fired power plants was a significant part of the company�s business; in 2015, it hugely expanded that capacity by buying its largest European competitor, Alstom. But then the bottom dropped out of the industry as proposed new generating plants couldn�t find financing. GE makes wind turbines, too, but that�s a lower-margin business with many more competitors. The fall in GE�s stock has meant �hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder value reduction,� according to Buckley. Last June, after more than a century, General Electric was dropped from the Dow Industrial Index, replaced by a drugstore chain.

Oil was believed to be better protected than coal and gas from competition because cars have long needed liquid fuel to run. But electric cars are becoming affordable for more and more consumers. In 2017 only three million out of a worldwide total of 800 million cars were electric, but they accounted for 22 percent of the growth in global car sales. The world�s leading car companies have become convinced that electric vehicles will account for all the growth in demand by the early 2020s. That�s why, by January 2018, they had committed $90 billion to developing electric vehicles�and why, by 2017, Tesla was worth more than GM or Ford. And for every Tesla that rolls off the assembly line, Chinese manufacturers are producing five electric cars. Auto analysts are already warning consumers to think twice before buying a gas-powered car, since its resale value may fall dramatically over just the next three years.

The oil companies tell investors not to worry. In mid-February Exxon announced that it had found huge new deepwater oil deposits off the coast of Guyana, and that overall it planned to pump 25 percent more oil and gas in 2025 than it had in 2017, which, it claimed, would triple its profits. In September, OPEC released a report predicting higher oil demand due to increases in jet travel and the production of plastics, which are made from petrochemicals. Analysts like Bond are skeptical of such claims. Although oil has been the planet�s most important industry for over a century, over the last five years it�s been the slowest-growing sector of the stock market. Petrochemicals and jet fuel are indeed harder to replace with renewable energy, but they make up a relatively small part of the market for oil�even if demand for them grows, it can�t offset the losses in core uses like pumping gas for cars.

The recent history of European utilities may provide a more realistic preview of what will happen in the rest of the world. In the early years of this century the German government increased the pace of decarbonization, subsidizing solar and wind energy. As more and cheaper renewable supplies became available, the existing utilities were slow to react. They had built new gas plants to account for what they assumed would be rising demand, but solar and wind cut into that demand, and the price of electricity began to fall. So far, European utilities have written down about $150 billion in stranded assets: fossil fuel installations that are no longer needed. �In the Netherlands, by the time the last three coal plants were turned on, their owners had already written them down by 70 percent,� said Buckley. And they�re scheduled to close by 2030.

One obvious question is why the fossil fuel companies don�t simply transform themselves into renewable energy companies and use the huge cash flows they still have to gain control of future markets. �They�re putting under ten percent of capital expenditures into renewables,� says Bond, which translates into about one percent of their balance sheets. As Exxon�s CEO recently told The Economist, �we have much higher expectations for the returns on the capital we invest� than sun and wind can provide. From their point of view, there�s some money to be made from putting up solar panels, but once they�re on the roof the sunshine is free. For corporations that made vast profits by selling their customers fuel every day for a century, that�s not an attractive business model.

Another important question is whether this transition will crash the world economy. Investors have money at risk, and not just in fossil fuel shares: a shift of this size will affect car companies, machinery companies, and many others. But as the climate activist and billionaire investor Tom Steyer has pointed out, most technological transitions damage existing industries without wrecking the economy because they create value even as they destroy it. �Look at the communications industry over the last two decades, as the Internet came of age,� Steyer said. �Some of the most valuable businesses on the planet that had been around for more than a century got decimated. I mean, Newsweek sold for a dollar. But a lot of new businesses got created that were worth more.�

And banks have had at least some warning to prepare for this enormous shift. In 2015 Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, began issuing strident warnings about stranded fossil fuel assets, urging the banks he regulated to begin taking close account of their exposure. He gave a memorable speech on the trading floor of Lloyds of London, pointing out that if countries made serious efforts to meet climate targets, vast amounts of money spent on oil wells, pipelines, coal mines, and tankers would be written off. He had to issue the warnings, he said, because the normal time horizon for financiers was too short. �Once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late,� he said, noting that �the exposure of UK investors, including insurance companies, to these shifts is potentially huge.� He urged them to start preparing for a lower-carbon world. Companies, he said, should �disclose not only what they are emitting today, but how they plan their transition to the net-zero world of the future.�

Carney�s warning�which reverberated out from the financial center of London�seems to have spurred a reevaluation of fossil fuel exposure by many big financial institutions. �The major banks are now addressing this risk, whereas three years ago they were asleep to it,� Buckley said. �Now in Australia all our banks have climate policy, where they didn�t three years ago. We didn�t even have data.� A report in late February from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis showed that since 2013 a hundred major banks had restricted coal lending or gotten out of the business altogether. [See �Over 100 Global Financial Institutions Are Exiting Coal, With More to Come,� February 27, 2019; available at IEEFA.org.?]

A far more important question, of course, is whether the changes now underway will happen fast enough to alter our grim climatic future. Here, the answers are less positive. Scientists, conservative by nature, have routinely underestimated the pace of planetary disruption: the enormous melt now observed at the poles was not supposed to happen until late in the century, for instance, and the galloping pace of ocean acidification wasn�t even recognized as a threat two decades ago. That means that we have very little time to act�not enough, certainly, for business cycles to do the job alone. The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released last autumn, laid out a strict timeline: we need to effectively halve our use of fossil fuels within a dozen years to prevent the worst damage, which is why activists and politicians have called for dramatic government interventions like the Green New Deal recently proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Democratic colleagues. [See my �A Very Grim Forecast,� The New York Review, November 22, 2018]

Government action is required because, for one thing, there�s vast inertia in the energy system. Plants are built to last decades, and even if plants that use fossil fuels aren�t built today, banks will insist that existing ones operate long enough to pay back their investments. And in some parts of the world, fossil fuel expansion continues: China, for instance, is trying to close down its own coal-fired power plants because its cities are choked in smog, but Chinese companies are using their expertise to build coal-powered plants abroad. Buckley noted that the opportunities for bribes on colossal projects mean, among other things, that a number of developing countries may indeed continue down the fossil fuel path.

In countries like the US or Canada, the political power of the fossil fuel industry is still considerable. Barack Obama boasted to a Texas audience last year that during his administration the US had passed Russia and Saudi Arabia as the biggest producer of hydrocarbons; even the progressive Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau recently spent billions in tax dollars to finance a pipeline designed to increase exports from the country�s environmentally ruinous tar sands.

That�s why the most important aspect of the decline of fossil fuel companies might be a corresponding decline in their political influence. The coal, oil, and gas industries have been the architects of the disinformation campaigns that kept us from responding earlier to scientists� warnings about climate change, and they are using every trick they know to keep us from making a quick transition. History indicates that �the oil majors�and those who invest in them�will�bribe and fund Trump-type candidates and use their money in any other way� to slow down change, Carlota Perez said.

But change is here. While engineers are doing their part by making renewable energy cheaper, activists are mounting efforts to weaken the companies directly, and there are some signs that the pressure is working. An effort that I helped launch beginning in 2012 to persuade universities and churches to divest their fossil fuel shares has spread rapidly and become the largest divestment campaign in history. Over the last five years, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds have joined in, raising the total value of endowments and portfolios involved to over $8 trillion, and prompting Shell to declare the campaign a material risk to its future business. (Early last year, the governments of New York City and London pledged to divest their pension funds, and the entire nation of Ireland joined in midsummer.) Campaigns have also targeted banks like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase to force them to stop supporting particular pipelines.

The bottom line is clear: to the degree that the fossil fuel industry is weakened by some combination of technological change and furious activism, the chances for serious change increase. If energy barons like the Koch Brothers and Exxon remain flush with cash, they can probably delay or undermine initiatives like the Green New Deal. But if their businesses are under strong pressure from a rapidly changing energy economy, polities around the world would be freer to take the steps that scientists insist are necessary with the speed required to prevent global catastrophe. Should these changes happen quickly, they could do more than save us from planetary peril.

�A New World,� the January report on the geopolitics of energy transformation from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), is one of the most hopeful documents I�ve read in a long time: it points out that for the 80 percent of the world�s population that lives in countries that are net importers of fossil fuels, the transition to renewable energy means the end of a crushing import burden. �The long-term consequences of a switch to renewables are very positive,� said Bond, who helped write the report. �Fossil fuels are produced by a small number of companies and countries and the benefits flow to a small number of people. With solar and wind you get a lot more local jobs, a lot more local investment. You get a whole new geopolitics.�

Take India, the poorest large nation on earth. It imports 80 percent of its oil and 40 percent of its gas, along with much of its coal. Currently that costs the country $240 billion a year; if, as its leaders hope, its economy grows 7 percent annually, that figure would double in a decade�which is economically unsustainable. �Renewables also offer developing economies an opportunity to leapfrog, not only fossil fuels, but, to some extent, the need for a centralized electricity grid,� the IRENA report concludes.

Countries in Africa and South Asia have a golden opportunity to avoid expensive fixed investments in fossil fuels and centralized grids by adopting mini-grids and decentralized solar and wind energy deployed off-grid�just as they jumped straight to mobile phones and obviated the need to lay expensive copper-wired telephone networks.

The changeover, of course, would be rocky. Beyond the effects on the global economy or on particular companies and their investors, countries like Russia or Saudi Arabia (and increasingly parts of the US) are essentially oil companies themselves. As these petro-states face a fall in the value of their only real asset, there is a risk of destabilization on a vast scale; in fact, it�s possible that we�re in the early stages of this process, with mischief and cruelty increasingly on display as countries with no other source of economic power struggle to maintain profits while they can. The worst damage will, as usual, be inflicted on the poorest oil producers: Kuwait might be able to manage the transition, but could Angola?

Yet overall the benefits would be immeasurable. Imagine a world in which the tortured politics of the Middle East weren�t magnified in importance by the value of the hydrocarbons beneath its sands. And imagine a world in which the greatest driver of climate change�the unrelenting political power of the fossil-fuel industry�had begun to shrink. The question, of course, is whether we can reach that new world in time.

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FOCUS: Speaker Pelosi and the Norms of Impeachment

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=45295">Bob Bauer, Lawfare</a>

Friday, 15 March 2019 11:12

"Speaker Nancy Pelosi has now joined Gerald Ford as a House leader putting on the record an influential view of the boundaries of impeachment."

Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Speaker Pelosi and the Norms of Impeachment

By Bob Bauer, Lawfare

15 March 19

peaker Nancy Pelosi has now joined Gerald Ford as a House leader putting on the record an influential view of the boundaries of impeachment. In 1970, when Ford was House minority leader, he spoke from the floor arguing against any boundaries at all: An impeachable offense, said the future president, was whatever the House decided that it was at any given time. Now, almost a half-century later, Pelosi was markedly more guarded in an interview with the Washington Post, advising that impeachments so divided the country that only �overwhelming� or �compelling� evidence, recognized as such by both Democrats and Republicans, could justify resort to this extraordinary constitutional remedy.

Some commentators have saluted the speaker�s political realism. The country is clearly polarized, and the president�s die-hard supporters reject any talk of impeachment as purely political and illegitimate. The 2020 election is around the corner, the logic goes, and the House has other mechanisms, such as vigorous oversight, to expose presidential misdeeds for voters to judge. Others worry that Speaker Pelosi went too far, that she created in some way a precedent, or at least a statement liable to be interpreted that way, and that she raised the impeachment bar dangerously high.

Whatever may be said about the merits of the speaker�s position, her remarks are certainly not �precedent.� They carry great weight but only in the current circumstances. They do not establish constraints on future Congresses any more than Ford�s remarks did. It is, moreover, not clear that what Pelosi said would hamper any move toward impeachment in the wake of evidence that is arguably �overwhelming� or �compelling.� Here, Ford�s view comes to mind: What passes for overwhelming or compelling is most likely whatever the House decides at any time.

Even the standard for bipartisanship that Pelosi articulated is open to reasonable interpretation. Some Republican support may be enough. (One example: the so-named Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, sponsored by Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, passed over majority Republican opposition in both chambers.)

However, Pelosi spoke after considerable debate for 18 months about impeachment: a stream of op-eds, several book-length treatments and punditry galore. There is no shrewder, more insightful or more accomplished senior political leader in America today. And so what she had to say could be viewed as a distillation of where practical judgments about the imperatives and limits of impeachment may have settled at this time. (This not to say, for the record, that the place at which we have arrived is satisfactory. I am among those who wish for much less reticence overall to hold presidents accountable through the impeachment process.)

Pelosi�s remarks tend to support a few broad conclusions about the state of the debate over�and the politics of�the impeachment process.

1. Impeachment is most likely if the president has committed serious crimes, and not all serious crimes are serious enough for this purpose. The speaker did not specifically say so, but a criminal offense, and one understood to be serious, certainly crosses the threshold of overwhelming or compelling. This president is Individual No. 1 in the Southern District of New York�s federal criminal indictment of Michael Cohen. It seems reasonably clear that Trump faces prosecution in that case when he leaves office and has lost the protection of Office of Legal Counsel opinions that immunize him only while he remains president. Yet Trump�s direct involvement in criminal activity has provided little support for even an impeachment inquiry. It has been widely seen as bearing only marginally on his fitness for office: It is �just a campaign finance case,� some say, which involves the very personal subject matter of payments to silence allegations of extramarital affairs.

2. Congress versus the special counsel: This is yet another modern impeachment controversy whose course seems largely contingent on the conclusions reached by a special or independent counsel. It appears that as a process matter, and especially in view of Pelosi�s concern with the divisiveness of the impeachment process, using a special or independent counsel process to overcome the partisan divide�to provide some benchmark of expertise or neutral judgment�may become standard operating procedure. Looking to some source of neutral fact-finding assumes special urgency in an age of a highly fractured, polarized and polarizing media environment of targeted communications in which news consumers feel increasingly entitled to their �own facts.�

Of course, the special counsel investigative process is itself controversial, as in the case of Ken Starr�s investigation of Bill Clinton in the 1990s and now again in the course of Trump and his allies� attacks on the integrity of the Mueller investigation. Nevertheless, Mueller continues to enjoy markedly better trust numbers than does the president.

The continued embrace of a high threshold, which is mostly easily cleared by a credible finding of criminal misconduct, suggests that the role of a special counsel will remain central to the development and the fate of cases for impeachment. This points toward the importance and likelihood of a review and strengthening of the special counsel regulations. The proposals made, and not so far acted on, will be ripe for reconsideration in the years ahead.

3. The demagogue. One consequence of the focus on evidence of discrete legal offenses is to remove the president-as-demagogue from much risk of impeachment. Donald Trump has introduced the country to demagoguery in the Oval Office, traveling the road paved by the likes of Huey Long and Joe McCarthy to the highest office of the land. This critique of his leadership style is often couched in terms of his contempt for norms and willingness to shatter them.

Norms are part of the story but not all of it. The demagogue, as the founders pictured this type, is a ruthlessly self-interested schemer who lies and defies rules and norms as necessary to vilify his opposition. Just as the House of Representatives voted, but the Senate did not take up, an article of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson that cited his penchant for demagoguery, so it appears in the case of Donald Trump that he can carry on in demagogic fashion. Only the voters, not Congress, will decide how long he can continue on this course.

4. Impeachment versus elections. The steady democratization of the presidential selection process over the past 50 years is a major obstacle to removing a president by means other than the ballot box. Primary elections have replaced party conventions and closed-door bargaining in the choosing of nominees; party leaders and insiders do not �vet� or screen candidates. It is not surprising that many members of Congress�who have been pushed to the periphery of the presidential primary nominating process, now hanging on to restricted roles as �superdelegates��feel keenly the political limits on their constitutional authority to oust a president who has been chosen by �the people.� This makes the impeachment a presidential election cycle an especially hard case in this day and age.

Despite it all, Donald Trump could well still face impeachment. The Mueller report could supply the compelling or overwhelming grounds, causing some Republican defections and the necessary degree of bipartisanship. Other scandals could break into the open. A new rash of mendacious, fecklessly self-serving presidential behaviors could spell the end to the tolerance of Trump�s demagogic leadership. But even if so, this norm-busting president has working in his favor certain other norms�namely, those that govern the choice of impeachment as the answer to presidential misconduct and abuse of power.

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Give Diplomacy a Chance in Venezuela

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36907">Jesse Jackson, CounterPunch</a>

Friday, 15 March 2019 08:15

Jackson writes: "Nicolas Maduro is far from blameless, but no one nominated the United States to decide who should govern Venezuela. Fomenting regime change - by a soft coup, by economic sabotage, by fostering a military revolt - is likely to lead to more violence and more suffering."

Reverend Jesse Jackson. (photo: Michael Wyke)

Give Diplomacy a Chance in Venezuela

By Jesse Jackson, CounterPunch

15 March 19

he United States is pushing for an overthrow of the government of Venezuela. The Trump administration has denounced Nicolas Maduro as a �dictator,� dismissing the 2018 election, which the opposition boycotted. Instead of a good neighbor policy or a policy of non-intervention, the Trump administration has set out intentionally to overthrow the regime.

Long before Trump, the United States was a bitter opponent of the Hugo Chavez regime. The fact that Chavez was wildly popular and freely elected made no difference. He represented a revolution that embraced Fidel Castro�s Cuba and implemented plans to redistribute wealth and empower the poor. In 2002, when the Venezuelan military moved to overthrow Chavez, an official in the Bush administration reportedly met with the coup leaders. The coup attempt was frustrated, however, when Venezuelans rose up in mass against the plotters.

Now with Chavez gone, the current president Nicolas Maduro unpopular, the economy a mess � in significant degree because the price of oil is near record lows � the Trump administration is apparently orchestrating another attempt.

It has continued to ratchet up pressure. It has imposed brutal sanctions on Venezuela, making a bad situation far worse, all the while blaming the government for the misery. Trump has openly threatened a �military option� for Venezuela. His bellicose national security adviser, John Bolton, boasted that �The troika of tyranny in this hemisphere � Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua � has finally met its match.�

The New York Times reported that Trump administration officials met with Venezuelan military officers who were considering a coup attempt.

Then, Juan Guaido, an obscure politician from a right-wing party, declared himself interim president, claiming that he had that right as head of the National Assembly. The U.S. immediately recognized Guaido, and right-wing governments across the region did the same.

Trump then named Elliott Abrams, infamous for committing perjury before Congress over the Iran-Contra fiasco, and for championing vicious military and paramilitary repression across Central America, as special envoy for Venezuela. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) pumped up demands for intervention, growing so rabid that he tweeted a gruesome picture of the murder of Libya�s Qaddafi as a prediction of Maduro�s fate.

Bolton admitted that he was �in conversation with major American [oil] companies now,� stating that �it would make a difference if we could have American companies produce the oil in Venezuela. We both have a lot at stake here.�

Now Venezuela has been hit with a power blackout, taking out electricity, phone service and internet. In Forbes Magazine, an expert details how easily this could be done by the U.S. in a cyber first-strike.

The U.S. has a long and shameful history of intervention in this hemisphere, too often aligning itself with rapacious elites and the military against the vast majority. In the �50s, the CIA overthrew a popularly elected government in Guatemala. After the Cuban revolution, the U.S. launched an invasion, terrorist attacks, economic sabotage and boycott, and assassination attempts to get rid of Castro. In 1973, the U.S. embraced the brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet when he led the overthrow of the popularly elected government of Salvador Allende. As recent as 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton endorsed the overthrow of the elected government of Honduras, a disaster that has resulted in bands of desperate Hondurans seeking refuge in this country.

Now Trump and his bellicose advisers seem intent on adding another chapter to this shameful history. There is another way. Instead of starving the Venezuelans into submission, we should be engaging with them. Instead of seeking to control their oil, we should recognize their national sovereignty. Instead of fanning coup attempts, we should be leading international negotiations to seek a diplomatic settlement that might lead to new elections.

Nicolas Maduro is far from blameless, but no one nominated the United States to decide who should govern Venezuela. Fomenting regime change � by a soft coup, by economic sabotage, by fostering a military revolt � is likely to lead to more violence and more suffering.

It is time for Congress to step up � to investigate exactly what the Trump administration is doing overtly and covertly, and to call for a return to diplomacy before it is too late.

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Betsy DeVos Suggests That Bribing Colleges Helps Students Learn Math

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</a>

Thursday, 14 March 2019 12:46

Borowitz writes: "Offering an upbeat assessment of the headline-grabbing college-admissions scandal, Betsy DeVos said on Thursday that bribing colleges gave students 'a really neat opportunity' to learn math."

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. (photo: Tom Williams/Getty)

Betsy DeVos Suggests That Bribing Colleges Helps Students Learn Math

By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker

14 March 19

The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."

ffering an upbeat assessment of the headline-grabbing college-admissions scandal, Betsy DeVos said on Thursday that bribing colleges gave students �a really neat opportunity� to learn math.

The Secretary of Education suggested that, rather than keeping children in the dark about the bribes that enable their college acceptances, �Parents should sit around the kitchen table with their kids and work on some fun math problems together.�

�Let�s say it�ll cost Amber seventy-five thousand dollars to get into Stanford, and it�ll cost her twin brother Dylan seventy-five thousand to get into Georgetown,� she said. �How much money total will their parents have to wire?�

�Or let�s say Jenna has a 470 verbal score, but she needs a 730 to get into Yale,� DeVos said. �How much will she have to pay to get her score changed?�

DeVos said that, as regrettable as the criminal charges against the parents in the bribery scandal were, the arrests themselves provided a teachable moment. �Lori Loughlin posted a million dollars in bail, and Felicity Huffman posted two hundred fifty thousand,� she said. �How much bail did Lori and Felicity post?�

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School Shooters and Drones, Linking Gun Violence at Home to America's Wars Abroad

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50358">Allegra Harpootlian, TomDispatch</a>

Thursday, 14 March 2019 12:46

Harpootlian writes: "In the wake of the February 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 students and staff members, a teacher said the school looked 'like a war zone.'"

Shana Rosenthal, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, visits a makeshift memorial set up in front of the school, February 18, 2018. (photo: AFP)

School Shooters and Drones, Linking Gun Violence at Home to America's Wars Abroad

By Allegra Harpootlian, TomDispatch

14 March 19

Here�s something that should still stun anyone, but has had no discernible impact in this country. Between December 29, 2001, when B-52 and B-1B bombers killed more than 100 revelers in a village in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, and December 2013, when a drone slaughtered perhaps 15 members of a car caravan headed for a wedding in Yemen, U.S. air power wiped out at least eight wedding parties -- brides, grooms, musicians, relatives, celebrating villagers, you name it -- in three countries across the Greater Middle East. To the best of my knowledge, only this website has ever tried to either count such incidents up or keep track of them over the years. As I�ve written in the past, if an Islamist terrorist had ever taken out an American wedding party here in the United States, the media coverage would have been overwhelming and unending -- and I doubt the event would have been forgotten any time soon, if ever.

In 2004, then-Major General James Mattis caught the spirit of the era perfectly. Responding to reports of the deaths of at least 40 celebrants in an Iraqi wedding party, including women and children, he asked, "How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?" In fact, the almost- or just-wedded dead across the Greater Middle East never registered here at all. There were certainly individual news stories about such incidents, but no shock, no horror, no self-reflection whatsoever. Assumedly, the departed and instantly forgotten of Washington's distant wars since September 11, 2001 -- a day that will live in infamy, unlike the days when those wedding slaughters occurred -- don�t matter a whit to Americans. Today, I doubt that one in a million of us even knows that the U.S. military ever did such things again and again and again.

Sadly, the tradition -- if that�s even the word for it -- of such wedding slaughters has only continued. In April 2018 and again that July, Saudi air strikes in a war being fought with American planes, bombs, and intelligence assistance took out two Yemeni wedding parties. In the first, at least 23 villagers were killed and many more wounded. (�It took us over a week to find all the body parts,� said one survivor.) In the second, 11 people in a caravan on their way to a wedding were killed, mostly women and children. Add it all up and, in those 10 brutal attacks, hundreds and hundreds of civilians in those three countries have died or been wounded while attending (or heading for) weddings.

Today, Allegra Harpootlian, a media associate at ReThink Media and a specialist on American drone strikes, considers the upsurge in emotion and protest against gun violence, especially school shootings, in this country by a mobilized new generation. In the process, given her professional focus, she asks an all-too-appropriate (and rare) question: When will Americans, young or old, start to think about the civilians that have died in striking numbers in these years of �infinite war� across the Greater Middle East and Africa?

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

n the wake of the February 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 students and staff members, a teacher said the school looked �like a war zone.� And to many young Americans, that�s exactly what it felt like. But this shooting was different. Refusing to be victims, Parkland survivors disrupted the �thoughts and prayers� cycle by immediately rallying student activists and adults across the country, mobilizing them around such tragedies and the weapons of war that often facilitate them.

Recent history suggested that such a movement, sure to be unable to keep the public�s attention or exert significant pressure on lawmakers, would collapse almost instantly. Yet, miraculously enough, the same fear -- of their school being next -- that had kept young Americans paralyzed for almost 20 years was what drove these newly impassioned activists not to back down.

Let me say that, much as I admire them, I look at their remarkable movement from an odd perspective. You see, I grew up in the �school-shooting era� and now work for a non-profit called ReThink Media tracking coverage of the American drone war that has been going on for 17 years.

To me, the U.S. military and CIA drones that hover constantly over eight countries across the Greater Middle East and Africa, and regularly ter rorize, maim, and kill civilians, including children, are the equivalents of the disturbed shooters in American schools. But that story is hard to find anywhere in this country. What reports Americans do read about those drone strikes usually focus on successes (a major terrorist taken out in a distant land), not the �collateral damage.�

With that in mind, let me return to those teenage activists against gun violence who quickly grasped three crucial things. The first was that such violence can�t be dealt with by focusing on gun control alone. You also have to confront the other endemic problems exacerbating the gun violence epidemic, including inadequate mental health resources, systemic racism and police brutality, and the depth of economic inequality. As Parkland teen organizer Edna Chavez explained, �Instead of police officers we should have a department specializing in restorative justice. We need to tackle the root causes of the issues we face and come to an understanding of how to resolve them.�

The second was that, no matter how much you shouted, you had to be aware of the privilege of being heard. In other words, when you shouted, you had to do so not just for yourself but for all those voices so regularly drowned out in this country. After all, black Americans represent the majority of gun homicide victims. Black children are 10 times as likely to die by gun and yet their activism on the subject has been largely demonized or overlooked even as support for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students rolled in.

The third was that apathy is the enemy of progress, which means that to make change you have to give people a sense of engagement and empowerment. As one of the Parkland students, Emma Gonzalez, put it: �What matters is that the majority of American people have become complacent in a senseless injustice that occurs all around them.�

Washington�s Expanding Drone Wars

Here�s the irony, though: while those teenagers continue to talk about the repeated killing of innocents in this country, their broader message could easily be applied to another type of violence that, in all these years, Americans have paid next to no attention to: the U.S. drone war.

Unlike school shootings, drone strikes killing civilians in distant lands rarely make the news here, much less the headlines. Most of us at least now know what it means to live in a country where school shootings are an almost weekly news story. Drones are another matter entirely, and beyond the innocents they so regularly slaughter, there are long-term effects on the communities they are attacking.

As Veterans for Peace put it, �Here at home, deaths of students and others killed in mass shootings and gun violence, including suicide gun deaths, are said to be the price of freedom to bear arms. Civilian casualties in war are written off as �collateral damage,� the price of freedom and U.S. security.�

And yet, after 17 years, three presidents, and little transparency, America�s drone wars have never truly made it into the national conversation. Regularly marketed over those years as �precise� and �surgical,� drones have always been seen by lawmakers as a �sexy,� casualty-free solution to fighting the bad guys, while protecting American blood and treasure.

According to reports, President Trump actually expanded the U.S. global drone war, while removing the last shreds of transparency about what those drones are doing -- and even who�s launching them. One of his first orders on entering the Oval Office was to secretly reinstate the CIA�s ability to launch drone strikes that are, in most cases, not even officially acknowledged. And since then, it�s only gotten worse. Just last week, he revoked an Obama-era executive order that required the director of national intelligence to release an annual report on civilian and combatant casualties caused by CIA drones and other lethal operations. Now, not only are the rules of engagement -- whom you can strike and under what circumstances -- secret, but the Pentagon no longer even reveals when drones have been used, no less when civilians die from them. Because of this purposeful opaqueness, even an estimate of the drone death toll no longer exists.

Still, in the data available on all U.S. airstrikes since Trump was elected, an alarming trend is discernible: there are more of them, more casualties from them, and ever less accountability about them. In Iraq and Syria alone, the monitoring group Airwars believes that the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS is responsible for between 7,468 and 11,841 civilian deaths, around 2,000 of whom were children. (The U.S.-led coalition, however, only admits to killing 1,139 civilians.)

In Afghanistan, the U.N. recently found that U.S. airstrikes (including drone strikes) had killed approximately the same number of Afghan civilians in 2018 as in the previous three years put together. In response to this report, the U.S.-led NATO mission there claimed that �all feasible precautions� were being taken to limit civilian casualties and that it investigates all allegations of their occurrence. According to such NATO investigations, airstrikes by foreign forces caused 117 civilian casualties last year, including 62 deaths -- about a fifth of the U.N. tally.

And those are only the numbers for places where Washington is officially at war. In Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Libya, even less information is available on the number of civilians the U.S. has killed. Experts who track drone strikes in such gray areas of conflict, however, place that number in the thousands, though there is no way to confirm them, as even our military acknowledges. U.S. Army Colonel Thomas Veale, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, put it this way last year: �As far as how do we know how many civilians were killed, I am just being honest, no one will ever know. Anyone who claims they will know is lying, and there�s no possible way.�

After a U.S. strike killed or injured an entire Afghan family, the trauma surgeon treating a four-year-old survivor told NBC, �I am sad. A young boy with such big injuries. No eyes, brain out. What will be his future?�

In other words, while America�s teenagers fight in the most public way possible for their right to live, a world away Afghanistan�s teenagers are marching for the same thing -- except instead of gun control, in that heavily armed land, they want peace.

Trauma Is Trauma Is Trauma

Gun violence -- and school shootings in particular -- have become the preeminent fear of American teenagers. A Pew poll taken last year found that 57% of teens are worried about a shooting at their school. (One in four are �very worried.�) This is even truer of nonwhite teens, with roughly two-thirds of them expressing such fear.

As one student told Teen Vogue: �How could you not feel a little bit terrified knowing that it happens so randomly and so often?� And she�s not exaggerating. More than 150,000 students in the U.S have experienced a shooting on campus since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, considered the first modern mass school shooting.

And in such anticipatory anxiety, American students have much in common with victims of drone warfare. Speaking to researchers from Stanford University, Haroon Quddoos, a Pakistani taxi driver who survived two U.S. drone strikes, explained it this way:

�No matter what we are doing, that fear is always inculcated in us. Because whether we are driving a car, or we are working on a farm, or we are sitting home playing... cards -- no matter what we are doing, we are always thinking the drone will strike us. So we are scared to do anything, no matter what.�

Similar symptoms of post-traumatic stress, trauma, and anxiety are commonplace emotions in countries where U.S. drones are active, just as in American communities like Parkland that have lived through a mass shooting. Visiting communities in Yemen that experienced drone strikes, forensic psychologist Peter Schaapveld found that 92% of their inhabitants were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, with children the most significantly affected. Psychologists have come up with similar figures when studying both survivors of school shootings and children who have been psychologically affected by school-lockdown drills, by the media�s focus on violence, and by the culture of fear that has developed in response to mass shootings.

The Voices Left Out of the Conversation

The Parkland students have created a coherent movement that brings together an incredibly diverse group united around a common goal and a belief that all gun violence victims, not just those who have experienced a mass shooting, need to be heard. As one Parkland survivor and leader of the March For Our Lives movement, David Hogg, put it, the goal isn�t to talk for different communities, but to let them �speak for themselves and ask them how we can help.�

The Parkland survivors have essentially created an echo chamber, amplifying the previously unheard voices of young African-Americans and Latinos in particular. At last year�s March For Our Lives, for instance, 11-year-old Naomi Wadler started her speech this way: �I am here today to acknowledge and represent the African-American girls whose stories don't make the front page of every national newspaper, whose stories don't lead the evening news.�

In 2016, there were nearly 39,000 gun deaths, more than 14,000 of them homicides and almost 23,000 suicides. Such routine gun violence disproportionately affects black Americans. Mass shootings accounted for only about 1.2% of all gun deaths that year. Yet the Parkland students made headlines and gained praise for their activism -- Oprah Winfrey even donated $500,000 to the movement -- while black communities that had been fighting gun violence for years never received anything similar.

As someone who spends a lot of her time engrossed in the undercovered news of drone strikes, I can�t help but notice the parallels. Stories about U.S. drone strikes taking out dangerous terrorists proliferate, while reports on U.S.-caused civilian casualties disappear into the void. For example, in January, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command claimed that a precision drone strike finally killed Jamel Ahmed Mohammed Ali al-Badawi, the alleged mastermind behind the deadly October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Within a day, more than 24 media outlets had covered the story.

Few, however, focused on the fact that the U.S. command only claimed al-Badawi�s death was �likely,� despite similar reports about such terrorists that have repeatedly been proven wrong. The British human rights group Reprieve found back in 2014 that even when drone operators end up successfully targeting specific individuals like al-Badawi, they regularly kill vastly more people than their chosen targets. Attempts to kill 41 terror figures, Reprieve reported, resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people. That was five years ago, but there�s no reason to believe anything has changed.

In contrast, when a U.S. airstrike -- it�s not clear whether it was a drone or a manned aircraft -- killed at least 20 civilians in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in December, 2018, only four American media outlets (Reuters, the Associated Press, Voice of America, and the New York Times) covered the story and none followed up with a report on those civilians and their families. That has largely been the norm since the war on terror began with the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. In the Trump years so far, while headlines scream about mass school shootings and other slaughters of civilians here, the civilian casualties of America�s wars and the drone strikes that often go with them are, if anything, even more strikingly missing in action in the media.

When Safa al-Ahmad, a journalist for PBS�s Frontline, was asked why she thought it was important to hear from Yemenis experiencing American drone strikes, she responded:

�I think if you�re going to talk about people, you should go talk to them. It�s just basic respect for other human beings. It really bothered me that everyone was just talking about the Americans... The other civilians, they weren�t given any names, they weren�t given any details. It was like an aside to the story... This is part of the struggle when you construct stories on foreign countries, when it comes to the American public. I think we�ve done [Americans] a disservice, by not doing more of this... We impact the world, we should understand it. An informed public is the only way there can be a functioning democracy. That is our duty as a democracy, to be informed.�

This one-sided view of America�s never-ending air wars fails everyone, from the people being asked to carry out Washington�s decisions in those lands to ordinary Americans who have little idea what�s being done in their name to the many people living under those drones. Americans should know that, to them, it�s we who seem like the school shooters of the planet.

Waking Up An Apathetic Nation

For the better part of two decades, young Americans have been trapped in a cycle of violence at home and abroad with little way to speak out. Gun violence in this country was a headline-grabbing given. School shootings, like so many other mass killings here, were deemed �tragic� and worthy of thoughts, prayers, and much fervid media attention, but little else.

Until Parkland.

What changed? Well, a new cohort, Generation Z, came on the scene and, unlike their millennial predecessors, many of them are refusing to accept the status quo, especially when it comes to issues like gun violence.

Every time there was a mass shooting, millennials would hold their breath, wondering if today would be the day the country finally woke up. After Newtown. After San Bernadino. After Las Vegas. And each time, it wasn�t. Parkland could have been the same, if it hadn�t been for those meddling kids. Having witnessed the dangers of apathy, Gen-Z seems increasingly to be about movement and action. In fact, in a Vice youth survey, 71% of respondents reported feeling �capable� of enacting change around global warming and 85% felt the same about social problems. And that�s new.

For so long, gun violence seemed like an unstoppable, incurable plague. Fed up with the �adults in the room,� however, these young activists have begun to take matters into their own hands, giving those particularly at risk of gun violence, children, a sense of newfound power -- the power to determine their own futures. Whether it�s testifying in front of Congress in the first hearing on gun violence since 2011, protesting at the stores and offices of gun manufacturers, or participating in �die-ins,� these kids are making their voices heard.

Since the Parkland massacre, there has been actual movement on gun control, something that America has not seen for a long time. Under pressure, the Justice Department moved to ban the bump stocks that can make semi-automatic weapons fire almost like machine guns, Florida signed a $400 million bill to tighten the state�s gun laws, companies began to cut ties with the National Rifle Association, and public support grew for stricter gun control laws.

Although the new Gen Z activists have focused on issues close to home, sooner or later they may start to look beyond the water�s edge and find themselves in touch with their counterparts across the globe, who are showing every day how dedicated they are to changing the world they live in, with or without anyone�s help. And if they do, they will find that, in its endless wars, America has been the true school shooter on this planet, terrorizing the global classroom with a remarkable lack of consequences.

In March 2018, according to Human Rights Watch, American planes bombed a school that housed displaced people in Syria, killing dozens of them, including children. Similarly, in Yemen that August, a Saudi plane, using a Pentagon-supplied laser-guided bomb, blew away a school bus, killing 40 schoolchildren. Just as at home, it�s not only about the weaponry like those planes or drones. Activists will find that they have to focus their attention as well on the root causes of such violence and the scars they leave behind in the communities of survivors.

More tolerant, more diverse, less trustful of major institutions and less inclined to believe in American exceptionalism than any generation before them, Generation Z may be primed to care about what their country is doing in their name from Afghanistan to Syria, Yemen to Libya. But first they have to know it�s happening.

Allegra Harpootlian is a media associate at ReThink Media, where she works with leading experts and organizations at the intersection of national security, politics, and the media. She principally focuses on U.S. drone policies and related use-of-force issues. She is also a political partner with the Truman National Security Project. Find her on Twitter @ally_harp.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer�s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

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