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Winter Is Winter, It's Not the Tribulation |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47905"><span class="small">Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website</span></a>
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Friday, 08 February 2019 13:48 |
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Keillor writes: "It irks me, the notion that winter is a dreadful tribulation. Weather forecasts delivered in funereal tones as if two or three inches of snow were an outbreak of typhus, a front-page story about a snowstorm 'lashing' New England."
Garrison Keillor. (photo: MPR)
Winter Is Winter, It's Not the Tribulation
By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
08 February 19
 t irks me, the notion that winter is a dreadful tribulation. Weather forecasts delivered in funereal tones as if two or three inches of snow were an outbreak of typhus, a front-page story about a snowstorm “lashing” New England. A whip lashes; snow falls gently to earth.
This bitter cold weather of the past two weeks has drawn many couples closer together, my wife and me included, and has bonded communities in wonderful ways and also raised the social status of plumbers. In New York, a water main broke at 99th and Broadway, turning a main thoroughfare into a river, and city workers shut off water, fixed the main, and repaved the street in twenty-four hours. It’s a neighborhood populated by expert complainers and lifelong grumblers, and in the cafés and coffee shops, you heard, for the first time since the Dutch ran the place, people talking with wonderment about municipal efficiency.
In winter, we learn once again that what it really comes down to is plumbing. Schools may close, shops, offices, but if your pipes freeze and the plumber is too busy with other people’s frozen pipes to tend to yours, you are up the creek. Executive vice presidents can take the week off and nobody notices, but the plumber is crucial.
As for the closeness of couples in cold weather, it is a social phenomenon for which we lack accurate statistics — the increased ratios of hugging to wind chill and of desire for skin-on-skin contact to the coldness of the night, and the subsequent rise of the birth rate in the fall months — but a few minutes ago she walked in to where I am writing this column and said, “My back itches. Scratch the upper left quadrant.” So I did. She said, “Scratch it hard. Use your fingernails.” I heard murmurs of pleasure. Cold weather makes the skin dry and it feels good to be scratched. This is basic animal behavior; it’s called “social grooming.” Baboons do it, lions, horses, vampire bats. Why not us?
My wife and I are a mismatch — she’s restless and I’m a homebody, she’s a near-vegan and I’m a carnivore, she goes to art museums, I go to hockey games, she works out daily and I occasionally get up and walk to the refrigerator. We could go into counseling and confront our issues, but for now, tactile spousal contact in that area between the shoulder blades seems to be the answer.
Silence is another winter benefit. The windows are closed, sound is muffled by snow, mouths are covered by scarves. I can hear the ticking of the big clock in our dining room, the soft ding of the hours. It is an 1830 clock, a grandfather clock that was thirty years old when my grandfather James was born. My father loved that song: “Many years without slumbering, his life seconds numbering. And it stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died.” This clock does not stop because I wind it every few days. To hear it ticking is to feel grateful for the basic fact of existence.
The main hazard of winter is not the lashing of snow but the danger of icy sidewalks, you creeping along penguin-like, and suddenly your arms fly up and your back twists and you enter a world of pain and the road to orthopedic surgery, all because your center of gravity is too high, you should’ve put rocks in your pockets, but the remedy is simple: stay home until the ice melts.
The beauty of winter, aside from aesthetics, is the fact that we go through it all together. In Minnesota, where I live, it’s universal. I am a left-wing Democrat and support the idea of equality though I don’t practice it, and so this appeals to the egalitarian in me. On a minus-forty day in Minneapolis, when I walk into the grocery store, I feel comradeship. The women pushing their carts down the aisles do not understand what a prostate biopsy feels like — how can they? — and the young people behind the deli counter cannot know what it was like trying to read a roadmap before GPS, and few in the store can appreciate the rigors of growing up fundamentalist, but by God, we have all felt the wind in our face and ice underfoot and we look around with a sense of kinship. We are citizens of winter. For all its faults, it has blessings to bestow. Praise God.
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RSN | On the Border: Prosecuting Americans for Saving Lives |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27921"><span class="small">Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Friday, 08 February 2019 12:11 |
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Rosenblum writes: "Nine defendants now await federal sentencing, found guilty of traversing the reserve without a permit to leave water and canned beans in the desert. They could spend six months in jail. A tenth also faces a felony charge of harboring and conspiracy for his humanitarian aid."
Gallons of water on the path to the top of a mountain in Nogales, Arizona. (photo: Leah Goldberg/Cronkite News)
On the Border: Prosecuting Americans for Saving Lives
By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News
08 February 19
 ASABE, Arizona – A U.S. Army grunt freshly arrived from the Northwest was still puzzling over how to unwrap a tamale at the tumbledown general store and bar at this flyblown border outpost, but he had already sized up his mission to make America safe again.
“Kind of silly,” he said, with a chuckle. “Before, it would take a guy about ten seconds to get over that fence.” Now that troops have garlanded the steel uprights with concertina wire, he figures, “it’d take a little longer.” In any case, the fence ends five miles from here.
At the checkpoint, a veteran Customs and Border Protection agent, with a German shepherd and sharp eyes, echoed the soldier’s mirth. “I wish all those guys in Washington would spend just one day down here to see what the hell they’re talking about,” he said.
Not even the Berlin Wall was impervious, despite its machine-gun towers and obstacle-strewn no man’s zone. Down here, 50 miles of forbidding desert watched by high-tech surveillance and green-striped SUVs do the job without evoking a hateful Evil Empire.
After squandering perhaps half a billion dollars on a show of military farce, Donald Trump is sending another 3,750 troops to chew up the desert until September.
A clearly marked border, with sturdy fencing where useful, is hard to call immoral, as Nancy Pelosi does. Yet immoral is tepid understatement for Trump’s wild distortions to stoke fear and loathing among his base with a jihad aimed at anguished migrants and refugees.
Sasabe is 68 miles southwest of Tucson down a two-lane blacktop that runs through the Buenos Aires Wildlife Reserve. Noble pronghorn antelope run free again, ranging across the border, after hunters hammered them to near extinction early last century.
Most crossers head northwest, avoiding ranches near the free-spirited artisan town of Arivaca up the road. They brave the larger, wilder Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Reserve through dense cactus and rocky outcrops along what Spanish explorers dubbed El Camino del Diablo.
The name stuck. In “The Devil’s Highway,” Luis Alberto Urrea traces 26 men who set out on it in 2001; 12 survived. He faulted what one Mexican consul called “the politics of stupidity that rules both sides of the border.” Today, stupidity is more prevalent on the north side.
Feelings run high in Arivaca, northeast of Sasabe, where early last century a camp of Buffalo Soldiers, black U.S. cavalrymen, kept Mexico’s revolution from spilling into Arizona. Now it is a waypoint for armed vigilantes in 4-by-4s who hunt down migrants.
Tensions are not new. No More Deaths reported last year that its teams counted 3,586 water jugs destroyed across 800 square miles of southern Arizona from 2012 to 2015, where 155 bodies have been found since 2001. It said the Border Patrol authorized and normalized “acts of cruelty against border crossers.”
The pace has quickened since, along with prosecutions for unauthorized trespass on federal land and for littering – i.e., leaving water and food – although summer temperatures soar above 110 degrees. Travelers routinely happen upon human remains, some without even shoes, let alone drugs.
Nine defendants now await federal sentencing, found guilty of traversing the reserve without a permit to leave water and canned beans in the desert. They could spend six months in jail. A tenth also faces a felony charge of harboring and conspiracy for his humanitarian aid.
Last year, the volunteer group No More Deaths videoed Border Patrol agents dropkicking gallon jugs of water. In a second video, a laughing agent empties jugs, one by one, and says to the camera: “Somebody left trash on the trail. It’s not yours, is it? All you have to do is tell me.”
A letter signed Patty Miller to Connection, Arivaca’s monthly paper, caught the mood: “What is next? Are they going to tell us to walk or drive by a person who may be dying just because they don’t have papers? That they would imprison us if we did try to help?”
As that Sasabe border guard observed, a simple look at reality shows an elaborate wall would not only squander money but also devastate ecosystems and animal habitats. The criminals Trump targets find easier ways in. Desperate people on foot carry little on their backs.
Most illegal contraband comes in through official ports of entry. Last month, agents at Nogales seized fentanyl and meth with a reported value of $4.2 million. It was hidden among produce and in secret compartments of an 18-wheeler stopped for a search.
The Arizona Republic in Phoenix won a Pulitzer last year for an exhaustive investigation of the 2,000-mile border, probing every aspect with data sets, anecdotes, maps, photos and interviews. The upshot: A Great Wall of Trump poses far more problems than it solves.
And there are those echoes of the Berlin Wall. Nogales notables beseeched Martha McSally, Arizona’s hardline Republican senator, to spare them from coils of barbed concertina wire, which give their relaxed little border city the air of an armed camp.
With little else to do, troops are now attaching wire at ground level, where children play and passersby risk serious injury.
Perla Treviso follows border issues for Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star. She grew up in Juarez and El Paso and, recently, she spent a year in Europe with trips to Africa to study immigration. In a piece this week, Treviso quoted Evan Kory, whose prominent family owns Kory’s and La Cinderella stores:
“In Nogales we are used to seeing the federal government make decisions about our surroundings. But the razor wire was way more aggressive than anything we had seen, which scared me … You feel powerless, like your voices aren’t heard.”
Later, Treviso told me her own thoughts on walls. They are only a symptom of far larger problems, she said, a deterrent that slows crossers down in populated areas so that agents have more time to react. But they are no solution to crime, a demand for drugs, or poverty.
That sentiment is echoed all down the line. In Texas, Republican congressman Will Hurd’s district skirts nearly half of the U.S.-Mexico frontier. He ridicules the wall as a misguided boondoggle. An ex-CIA field agent, he knows that only intelligence in its various meanings can protect a nation.
Trump claims a wall made El Paso safe. In fact, crime increased 17 percent after a barrier was fortified in 2009, and yet El Paso is still among America’s safest cities because of community interaction. That dog-whistle slur, “bad hombres,” hardly defines all Mexicans.
Democratic Rep. Juan Vargas represents San Diego, another safe and prosperous border city. He summed up his thoughts in a tweet: “President Trump and Republicans in Congress should ask themselves: what would Reagan do on immigration? Hint: it wasn’t building a wall.”
During Trump’s myth-laced State of the Union that took credit for an inherited economic boom and ignored allies’ role in past American triumphs, I saw that Mussolini jaw set. Sycophants chanted, “USA.” It was the classic demagogy I’ve covered elsewhere for decades.
Defending his harsh treatment of asylum seekers and refugees, he declared: “Tolerance for illegal immigration is not compassion – it is actually very cruel.” Later, Stacey Abrams, from Georgia, set him straight: “Compassion is not the same as open borders.”
Down around Sasabe, that “under God” in the pledge of allegiance takes on practical meaning. Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Moses, Buddha and other brand-name prophets shared a simple precept: When lost people wander in the wilderness, at least show a little humanity.
Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS: Trump Versus the Socialist Menace |
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Friday, 08 February 2019 11:48 |
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Krugman writes: "The Commies are coming for your pickup trucks."
Democrats sponsor Medicare-for-All bill. (photo: Getty)
Trump Versus the Socialist Menace
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
08 February 19
The Commies are coming for your pickup trucks.
n 1961, America faced what conservatives considered a mortal threat: calls for a national health insurance program covering senior citizens. In an attempt to avert this awful fate, the American Medical Association launched what it called Operation Coffee Cup, a pioneering attempt at viral marketing.
Here’s how it worked: Doctors’ wives (hey, it was 1961) were asked to invite their friends over and play them a recording in which Ronald Reagan explained that socialized medicine would destroy American freedom. The housewives, in turn, were supposed to write letters to Congress denouncing the menace of Medicare.
Obviously the strategy didn’t work; Medicare not only came into existence, but it became so popular that these days Republicans routinely (and falsely) accuse Democrats of planning to cut the program’s funding. But the strategy — claiming that any attempt to strengthen the social safety net or limit inequality will put us on a slippery slope to totalitarianism — endures.
READ MORE
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No Thank You, Mr. Pecker |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50118"><span class="small">Jeff Bezos, Medium</span></a>
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Friday, 08 February 2019 09:26 |
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Bezos writes: "Something unusual happened to me yesterday. Actually, for me it wasn't just unusual - it was a first. I was made an offer I couldn't refuse. Or at least that's what the top people at the National Enquirer thought."
Jeff Bezos. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Accuses National Enquirer
of Extortion Over Intimate Photos
No Thank You, Mr. Pecker
By Jeff Bezos, Medium
08 February 19
omething unusual happened to me yesterday. Actually, for me it wasn’t just unusual?—?it was a first. I was made an offer I couldn’t refuse. Or at least that’s what the top people at the National Enquirer thought. I’m glad they thought that, because it emboldened them to put it all in writing. Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I’ve decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten.
AMI, the owner of the National Enquirer, led by David Pecker, recently entered into an immunity deal with the Department of Justice related to their role in the so-called “Catch and Kill” process on behalf of President Trump and his election campaign. Mr. Pecker and his company have also been investigated for various actions they’ve taken on behalf of the Saudi Government.
And sometimes Mr. Pecker mixes it all together:
“After Mr. Trump became president, he rewarded Mr. Pecker’s loyalty with a White House dinner to which the media executive brought a guest with important ties to the royals in Saudi Arabia. At the time, Mr. Pecker was pursuing business there while also hunting for financing for acquisitions…”
Federal investigators and legitimate media have of course suspected and proved that Mr. Pecker has used the Enquirer and AMI for political reasons. And yet AMI keeps claiming otherwise:
“American Media emphatically rejects any assertion that its reporting was instigated, dictated or influenced in any manner by external forces, political or otherwise.”
Of course, legitimate media have been challenging that assertion for a long time:
Mystery Grows Over Pro-Saudi Tabloid: Embassy Got Sneak Peek
I didn’t know much about most of that a few weeks ago when intimate texts messages from me were published in the National Enquirer. I engaged investigators to learn how those texts were obtained, and to determine the motives for the many unusual actions taken by the Enquirer. As it turns out, there are now several independent investigations looking into this matter.
To lead my investigation, I retained Gavin de Becker. I’ve known Mr. de Becker for twenty years, his expertise in this arena is excellent, and he’s one of the smartest and most capable leaders I know. I asked him to prioritize protecting my time since I have other things I prefer to work on and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter.
Here’s a piece of context: My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me. It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy.
President Trump is one of those people, obvious by his many tweets. Also, The Post’s essential and unrelenting coverage of the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi is undoubtedly unpopular in certain circles.
(Even though The Post is a complexifier for me, I do not at all regret my investment. The Post is a critical institution with a critical mission. My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long, regardless of any complexities it creates for me.)
Back to the story: Several days ago, an AMI leader advised us that Mr. Pecker is “apoplectic” about our investigation. For reasons still to be better understood, the Saudi angle seems to hit a particularly sensitive nerve.
A few days after hearing about Mr. Pecker’s apoplexy, we were approached, verbally at first, with an offer. They said they had more of my text messages and photos that they would publish if we didn’t stop our investigation.
My lawyers argued that AMI has no right to publish photos since any person holds the copyright to their own photos, and since the photos in themselves don’t add anything newsworthy.
AMI’s claim of newsworthiness is that the photos are necessary to show Amazon shareholders that my business judgment is terrible. I founded Amazon in my garage 24 years ago, and drove all the packages to the post office myself. Today, Amazon employs more than 600,000 people, just finished its most profitable year ever, even while investing heavily in new initiatives, and it’s usually somewhere between the #1 and #5 most valuable company in the world. I will let those results speak for themselves.
OK, back to their threat to publish intimate photos of me. I guess we (me, my lawyers, and Gavin de Becker) didn’t react to the generalized threat with enough fear, so they sent this:
From: Howard, Dylan [
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
] (Chief Content Officer, AMI)
Sent: Tuesday, February 5, 2019 3:33 PM
To: Martin Singer (litigation counsel for Mr. de Becker)
Subject:. Jeff Bezos & Ms. Lauren Sanchez Photos
CONFIDENTIAL & NOT FOR DISTRIBIUTION
Marty:
I am leaving the office for the night. I will be available on my cell?—?917 XXX-XXXX.
However, in the interests of expediating this situation, and with The Washington Post poised to publish unsubstantiated rumors of The National Enquirer’s initial report, I wanted to describe to you the photos obtained during our newsgathering.
In addition to the “below the belt selfie?—?otherwise colloquially known as a ‘d*ck pick’”?—?The Enquirer obtained a further nine images. These include:
- Mr. Bezos face selfie at what appears to be a business meeting.
- Ms. Sanchez response?—?a photograph of her smoking a cigar in what appears to be a simulated oral sex scene.
- A shirtless Mr. Bezos holding his phone in his left hand?—?while wearing his wedding ring. He’s wearing either tight black cargo pants or shorts?—?and his semi-erect manhood is penetrating the zipper of said garment.
- A full-length body selfie of Mr. Bezos wearing just a pair of tight black boxer-briefs or trunks, with his phone in his left hand?—?while wearing his wedding ring.
- A selfie of Mr. Bezos fully clothed.
- A full-length scantily-clad body shot with short trunks.
- A naked selfie in a bathroom?—?while wearing his wedding ring. Mr. Bezos is wearing nothing but a white towel?—?and the top of his pubic region can be seen.
- Ms. Sanchez wearing a plunging red neckline dress revealing her cleavage and a glimpse of her nether region.
- Ms. Sanchez wearing a two-piece red bikini with gold detail dress revealing her cleavage.
It would give no editor pleasure to send this email. I hope common sense can prevail?—?and quickly.
Dylan.
Well, that got my attention. But not in the way they likely hoped. Any personal embarrassment AMI could cause me takes a back seat because there’s a much more important matter involved here. If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can? (On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.)
In the AMI letters I’m making public, you will see the precise details of their extortionate proposal: They will publish the personal photos unless Gavin de Becker and I make the specific false public statement to the press that we “have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.”
If we do not agree to affirmatively publicize that specific lie, they say they’ll publish the photos, and quickly. And there’s an associated threat: They’ll keep the photos on hand and publish them in the future if we ever deviate from that lie.
Be assured, no real journalists ever propose anything like what is happening here: I will not report embarrassing information about you if you do X for me. And if you don’t do X quickly, I will report the embarrassing information.
Nothing I might write here could tell the National Enquirer story as eloquently as their own words below.
These communications cement AMI’s long-earned reputation for weaponizing journalistic privileges, hiding behind important protections, and ignoring the tenets and purpose of true journalism. Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption. I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.
Sincerely,
Jeff Bezos
From: Fine, Jon [
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
] (Deputy General Counsel, AMI)
Sent: Wednesday, February 6, 2019 5:57 PM
To: Martin Singer (Mr de Becker’s attorney)
Subject: Re: EXTERNAL* RE: Bezos et al / American Media et al
Marty -
Here are our proposed terms:
- A full and complete mutual release of all claims that American Media, on the one hand, and Jeff Bezos and Gavin de Becker (the “Bezos Parties”), on the other, may have against each other.
- A public, mutually-agreed upon acknowledgment from the Bezos Parties, released through a mutually-agreeable news outlet, affirming that they have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AM’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces, and an agreement that they will cease referring to such a possibility.
- AM agrees not to publish, distribute, share, or describe unpublished texts and photos (the “Unpublished Materials”).
- AM affirms that it undertook no electronic eavesdropping in connection with its reporting and has no knowledge of such conduct.
- The agreement is completely confidential.
- In the case of a breach of the agreement by one or more of the Bezos Parties, AM is released from its obligations under the agreement, and may publish the Unpublished Materials.
- Any other disputes arising out of this agreement shall first be submitted to JAMS mediation in California
Thank you,
Jon
Deputy General Counsel, Media
American Media, LLC
Jon P. Fine
Deputy General Counsel, Media
O: (212) 743–6513 C: (347) 920–6541
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
February 5, 2019
Via email:
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Martin D. Singer
Laveley & Singer
Re: Jeff Bezos / American Media, LLC, et al.
Dear Mr. Singer:
I write in response to your February 4, 2019, letter to Dylan Howard, and to address serious concerns we have regarding the continuing defamatory activities of your client and his representatives regarding American Media’s motivations in its recent reporting about your client.
As a primary matter, please be advised that our newsgathering and reporting on matters involving your client, including any use of your client’s “private photographs,” has been, and will continue to be, consistent with applicable laws. As you know, “the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies . . . for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting . . . is not an infringement of copyright.” 17 USC Sec. 107. With millions of Americans having a vested interest in the success of Amazon, of which your client remains founder, chairman, CEO, and president, an exploration of Mr. Bezos’ judgment as reflected by his texts and photos is indeed newsworthy and in the public interest.
Beyond the copyright issues you raise, we also find it necessary to address various unsubstantiated defamatory statements and scurrilous rumors attributed to your client’s representatives in the press suggesting that “strong leads point to political motives”1 in the publication of The National Enquirer story. Indeed, you yourself declared the “politically motivated underpinnings” of our reporting to be “self-evident” in your correspondence on Mr. de Becker’s behalf to Mr. Howard dated January 31, 2019.
Once again, as I advised you in my February 1 response to your January 31 correspondence, American Media emphatically rejects any assertion that its reporting was instigated, dictated or influenced in any manner by external forces, political or otherwise. Simply put, this was and is a news story.
Yet, it is our understanding that your client’s representatives, including the Washington Post, continue to pursue and to disseminate these false and spurious allegations in a manner that is injurious to American Media and its executives.
Accordingly, we hereby demand that you cease and desist such defamatory conduct immediately. Any further dissemination of these false, vicious, speculative and unsubstantiated statements is done at your client’s peril. Absent the immediate cessation of the defamatory conduct, we will have no choice but to pursue all remedies available under applicable law.
As I advised previously, we stand by the legality of our newsgathering and reporting on this matter of public interest and concern. Moreover, American Media is undeterred from continuing its reporting on a story that is unambiguously in the public interest?—?a position Mr. Bezos clearly appreciates as reflected in Boies Schiller January 9 letter to American Media stating that your client “does not intend to discourage reporting about him” and “supports journalistic efforts.”
That said, if your client agrees to cease and desist such defamatory behavior, we are willing to engage in constructive conversations regarding the texts and photos which we have in our possession. Dylan Howard stands ready to discuss the matter at your convenience.
All other rights, claims, counterclaims and defenses are specifically reserved and not waived.
Sincerely,
1 https://www.thedailybeast.com/bezos-investigators-question-the-brother-of-his-mistress-lauren-sanchez-in-national-enquirer-leak-probe(Attributed to your client Gavin de Becker)
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t the end of 2018, the Green New Deal (GND) was suddenly on the tip of everyone’s tongue thanks to everyone’s favorite new congresswoman from the Bronx, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But the Green New Deal isn’t a new idea. It’s been bandied about by United Nations economists, Barack Obama, the US Green Party, and even New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (who claims he coined the phrase — Friedman’s version was so unabashedly capitalist that he pitched wind and solar on the grounds that “the only thing as powerful as Mother Nature is Father Greed”).
