14 December 19
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14 December 19
Impeachment Is On
Cameron Joseph, VICE
Joseph writes: "The House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach President Trump on Friday morning, a historic moment following an absurd marathon of hearings that sets up what will be just the third impeachment of a sitting president in U.S. history."
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Cameron Joseph, VICE
Joseph writes: "The House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach President Trump on Friday morning, a historic moment following an absurd marathon of hearings that sets up what will be just the third impeachment of a sitting president in U.S. history."
READ MORE
U.S. Special Operations personnel prepare to board a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter during a mission in Afghanistan. (photo: U.S. Department of Defense)
Afghanistan Papers Detail US Dysfunction: 'We Did Not Know What We Were Doing'
Peter Beaumont, Guardian UK
Beaumont writes: "A key theme of the trove of documents published this week was the lack of coherence in Washington's approach to Afghanistan from the outset."
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Peter Beaumont, Guardian UK
Beaumont writes: "A key theme of the trove of documents published this week was the lack of coherence in Washington's approach to Afghanistan from the outset."
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Stephen Miller. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Internal Emails Reveal How Stephen Miller Leads an Extremist Network to Push Trump's Anti-Immigrant Agenda
Andy Kroll, Rolling Stone
Kroll writes: "For nearly three years, Stephen Miller has used his White House seat to orchestrate the most extreme anti-immigrant agenda in almost a century. But he hasn't done it alone."
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Andy Kroll, Rolling Stone
Kroll writes: "For nearly three years, Stephen Miller has used his White House seat to orchestrate the most extreme anti-immigrant agenda in almost a century. But he hasn't done it alone."
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Supporters react as U.S. president Donald Trump holds a campaign rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (photo: Leah Millis/Reuters)
Is Trumpism a Cult?
Sean Illing, Vox
Illing writes: "The question almost feels like a provocation. And yet more and more people, like veteran Republican strategist John Weaver, are comfortable saying, 'Yes.'"
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Sean Illing, Vox
Illing writes: "The question almost feels like a provocation. And yet more and more people, like veteran Republican strategist John Weaver, are comfortable saying, 'Yes.'"
READ MORE
A man found unconscious after overdosing on opioids puts his hands over his head in the back of an ambulance in the Boston suburb of Malden, Massachusetts, December 2, 2017. (photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters)
Drugs, Guns, and Despair: How America Is Killing Americans
Larry Beinhart, Al Jazeera
Beinhart writes: "American life expectancy has declined. There's no foreign invasion. No war within its borders. No one to blame but ourselves. How then, is America killing Americans?"
Larry Beinhart, Al Jazeera
Beinhart writes: "American life expectancy has declined. There's no foreign invasion. No war within its borders. No one to blame but ourselves. How then, is America killing Americans?"
EXCERPTS:
An article published on BMJ (previously the British Medical Journal) looked at 18 high-income countries: Japan, Switzerland, Spain, Australia, Italy, Norway, Sweden, France, Canada, Netherlands, Finland, Austria, Portugal, the UK, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and the US.
Over the last quarter of a century, the lifespans in all of those countries have gone up. People are living four to five years longer, except in the US, where it has only increased by 3.7 years. Actually, the US fell into last place in life expectancy in 2001 and the gap has been growing since. The Germans, the next lowest on the list, get to live almost two years longer than the Americans. The Japanese make it to 84 - or almost six more years.
Drug overdoses killed more than 70,000 Americans in 2017 - an increase of 95 percent over 10 years (up from 36,000 in 2007).
Guns killed nearly 40,000 Americans in 2017, according to official statistics, which only counts cases if guns were "the principal cause" of death but not if they only "contributed" to it; that is 4.43 deaths per 100,000. By contrast, the death rate from gun violence in Japan and the United Kingdom is 0.04 and 0.06 respectively.
About two-thirds of all gun deaths in the US are suicides. This tells us there is plenty of despair. It has gone up by 33 percent in the last two decades while the global suicide rate has declined by 30 percent in roughly the same period.
Then there is fat.
The US is one of the most obese nations in the world, second only to island nations and Kuwait. It is listed as having an obesity rate of 36.2 percent. Most of the Western European countries have a rate of 20 to 25 percent.
Obesity is a relatively new problem and studies of it are even newer. The statistics are rapidly changing and becoming more dire. It started with saying that only severe obesity mattered and that it could shorten a lifespan by about 10 years. Moderate obesity was supposed to be OK, probably, but newer studies have said that it can take up to three years on average from someone's life.
America has a profit-driven health care system. Not only is it more expensive than any other system in the world, but it creates special inefficiencies and distortions. Its goal is always to sell an item, usually a drug or a service. How, then, can it address the obvious causes of the obesity epidemic - bad diet, lack of exercise, and a sedentary lifestyle? For the most part, it cannot and it does not.
The more insidious contributor to the American wideness and wallow is the food industry which uses excessive levels of sugar, fat and salt to ensure food is addictive.
The pharmaceutical industry also plays a major role in this. Its protected status allows it to spread addiction to various medications, causing more damage than the Mafia, the Colombian cartels and the Mexicans that Donald Trump accuses of bringing drugs over the border, combined.
Meanwhile, money from the gun industry and the NRA - a profit-seeking enterprise - keep Americans shooting themselves and each other.
Maps of suicide and addiction rates are maps of despair. They largely match the disappearance of American manufacturing. We can date that decline to President Ronald Reagan's economic policies of the 1980s. They gutted the industrial midlands, destroyed the unions, leaving the traditional working-class poor and powerless. A certain portion of them turned to alcoholism, addiction and suicide.
Demonstrators take cover from water fired by a riot police truck during a protest against President Sebastian Piñera on November 19 in Santiago, Chile. (photo: Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images)
UN Accuses Security Forces of Human Rights Abuses in Piñera's Chile
BBC
Excerpt: "The UN has accused the Chilean police and armed forces of committing serious human rights violations in their response to recent mass demonstrations."
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BBC
Excerpt: "The UN has accused the Chilean police and armed forces of committing serious human rights violations in their response to recent mass demonstrations."
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Protesters call for action at a COP25 climate rally. (photo: G. Bouys/Getty Images)
The US and Other Rich Countries Stonewalled $300 Billion Climate Relief Fund
Christine MacDonald, In These Times
MacDonald writes: "Furious activists protested, but mandatory measures remained lacking as negotiations continue into the night on Friday."
Christine MacDonald, In These Times
MacDonald writes: "Furious activists protested, but mandatory measures remained lacking as negotiations continue into the night on Friday."
ith climate-related disasters happening “at the rate of one a week,” according to the United Nations, more than 150 civil society organizations around the world are using the UN climate negotiations this week to stand with the Global South. They are pushing for demands set out in an open letter to negotiators in November, including a new global climate fund to aid poor countries in the midst of climate catastrophes.
The organizations say it’s about time for a rethink of climate financing as climate-related disasters like extreme storms, droughts, floods and famines take a mounting economic toll on poor countries. Worldwide costs are estimated to grow to between $300 and $700 billion a year by 2030. To cover the costs, poor countries must increasingly borrow from development aid, which is “pushing them into a debt trap,” says Harjeet Singh, global lead on climate change with ActionAid International, one of the 150-plus organizations that signed the letter.
The United States and other wealthy countries made a pledge in 2010 to commit $100 billion annually to assist poorer countries, but wealthier countries have consistently failed to pay in. The new proposal calls for a comprehensive and mandatory new fund to help poor countries recover that would make an additional $50 billion available by 2022 and gradually increase the amount to $300 billion a year by 2030.
The money would come from the wealthy countries that are responsible for the vast majority of the emissions behind climate change. Additional funds could be raised from taxes on air travel, fossil fuels and financial transactions. The money would go directly to local organizations working in frontline communities in the Global South to help with rebuilding, recovery and resilience efforts.
However, with negotiations still going on as nighttime fell in Madrid, all suggestion of additional mandatory climate funds have met stiff resistance from wealthy countries. The 47 members of the Least Developed Countries group pushed new “loss and damage” funding commitments, using much of the language culled from the environmental groups’ proposal. But the rich countries that would have to foot the bill, including the United States, Singh says, “would not even engage.”
Earlier in the week, Singh expressed optimism about proposals for beefing up climate recovery funding through something called The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage associated with Climate Change Impacts, or WIM. But by late Thursday, a draft of WIM circulating among negotiators included no mention of additional funding but merely urged developed countries and others to “scale up” their financial commitments. The reality, Singh said, is that a failure to mandate additional funding would merely spread existing funds around more thinly, thus “exposing more people to climate disasters.”
The lack of commitment to countries in the Global South has prompted unprecedented protests this year, both inside of the negotiating halls, led by youth and indigenous activists, and outside on the streets, where an estimated 500,000 people marched with Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg on Friday, December 6. On Thursday more than 300 activists from around the globe protested just outside of the room where climate talks were taking place. Banging on pots and pans in a version of what is known in Latin America as a cacerolazo, they chanted slogans and yelled “Shame!” until security guards rounded them up, snatching conference IDs from around activists’ necks and herding them out of the building.
In response, UN officials threatened to bar all international observers from the talks, saying the protests were “illegal” under the UN’s code of conduct. After tense negotiations, UN officials agreed to let some but not all of the international observers back into the conference after extracting promises not to carry out any more so-called “illegal protests.” The Fridays for Future organization responded by calling an emergency climate strike this afternoon worldwide.
Activists have denounced the UN for allowing oil company executives to roam free while controlling the access of activists. “The UN should be kicking polluters out of the talks, but instead they are kicking people out,” says Sara Shaw, international program coordinator for climate justice and energy at Friends of the Earth International.
Oil companies and the U.S. government have emerged as the biggest villains of this year’s conference. Increasingly, companies are looking to profitable approaches like trading in carbon offset projects. While wining and dining negotiators over drinks and canapes, industry experts, corporate friendly environmental groups and corporate executives have outlined an array of “market-based solutions” to the climate crisis—despite warnings from scientific experts that it’s magical thinking to assume the world can trade its way out of more than a fraction of the necessary emissions reductions. This week’s industry proposals include plans to launch broad new markets in “natural climate solutions” that will involve investing in everything from mangrove preservation to sustainable farming and more.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration, which is in the process of withdrawing from the UN Paris climate agreement, has taken advantage of its waning negotiating power to push for renewed assurances that the United States and other big polluters can’t be held accountable for historic pollution. This “liability” issue—the same one assailing the world's fossil fuel companies—have been among the most contentious issues in past climate negotiations, which is what led to the “loss and damage” provision being included to help poor countries, in the first place. As negotiations continued Friday, U.S. delegates kept pushing for a liability and compensation waiver included in the final WIM document, a move that Taylor Billings of Corporate Accountability International referred to in Buzzfeed as “an ass-covering maneuver.”
“With this waiver, the U.S. is trying to torch critical elements of climate action on its way out of the Paris Agreement—and create an escape hatch for polluting countries and potentially corporations,” Billings told In These Times. “Across the negotiations, it’s obvious that the U.S. is attempting to gut the Paris Agreement of any promise and potential. That’s what they’ve always done in these talks. Shamefully, it’s not just the U.S.—the EU, Australia and Canada are helping the U.S. do its dirty work and cowering in Trump’s shadow when questioned about it.”
“The U.S. is lighting the house in fire as it's on its way out the door and Global North governments like the EU, Australia and Canada are backing it every step of the way,” said Billings’ colleague Sriram Madhusoodanan, deputy campaigns director of Corporate Accountability, at an ActionAid press conference on the final day of the climate talks Friday.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk on the record, one person involved in negotiations told In These Times that the United States and other developed countries have been unwilling to discuss additional funding beyond the existing commitments for climate adaptation and resilience, in part because they don’t want to open the door to further discussion about climate blame. It remains a thorny issue whether wealthy industrialized countries should pay more to mitigate the impacts of climate change since they are responsible for the bulk of fossil fuel emissions, dating back to the bringing of the Industrial Revolution.
“The U.S. has been very clear that it doesn’t want anything more beyond adaption funding, because if you start talking about ‘loss and damage’ it gets into the issue of who is responsible for the fossil fuel emissions that have created the climate crisis,” the negotiator says.
“It is the U.S., EU, Canada, Japan and Australia that are not allowing any progress,” concurs Singh.
With poor and rich countries still far apart, there’s speculation that the negotiations may end without agreement on key issues. Some of the less costly ideas outlined in the open letter have found their way into the latest draft agreement. They include language stipulating a new “expert group” by 2020 to help poor countries grappling with climate damages and the creation of a “Santiago Network” for technical assistance, but without additional funding, those measures are expected to have limited effect.
Organizations that penned the open letter, which included 350.org, Friends of the Earth International and WWF International, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Indigenous Environmental Network and the Climate Justice Project, say they are not giving up and will continue to push a comprehensive new approach to climate finance even after this year’s negotiation’s wrap up. The proposal by ActionAid and the other 150-plus groups also backs a temporary interest-free moratorium on foreign debt payments of poor countries in the throes of climate disasters. But that idea didn’t even get discussed by negotiators this year.
Dylan Hamilton, a Fridays for Future activist from Scotland, said in a press conference in Madrid today that the UN process “has failed us again” and promising to bring an even bigger fight next year at the 26th annual conference in Glasgow, Scotland, a half hour from where Hamilton lives.
“Get ready,” she said. “We’re going to be even bigger next year.”
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