Noam Chomsky: To Make The US A Democracy, The Constitution Itself Must Change

Noam Chomsky

Why do so many people in the U.S. today find Trump’s racist rants and authoritarian mindset appealing? What are the political checks and balances — or lack thereof — that can ward off the impact of the Republican leadership’s disastrous policies? Is a constitutional crisis on its way? And how do we face the consequences of an administration that is essentially competing for the title of most dangerous organization in human history? In this exclusive Truthout interview, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at MIT and Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona Noam Chomsky, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest thinkers of all time (ranking among the top 10 cited sources of all time, along with Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Hegel and Freud), dissects Trump’s racist attacks, Trumpism and the current condition of the country in the second decade of the 21st century.

C.J. Polychroniou: According to popular conception, the United States is a “nation of immigrants,” although this formulation significantly excludes Native people — who were already here, and were subjected to colonization, displacement and genocide at the hands of European immigrants — and also excludes African Americans, whose ancestors were kidnapped and enslaved. When it is described as a “nation of immigrants,” the U.S. is often portrayed as a varied nation where people have the freedom to pursue their dreams of a better life while maintaining their own cultural, ethnic and religious distinctiveness or uniqueness. Yet, the truth of the matter is that inequality and oppression of the “Other” have been ongoing political and social realities since the origins of the republic. In fact, today we have a president in the White House who makes no bones about wishing to see non-white people, even elected representatives of the U.S. Congress, leave the country because they challenge the status quo and seek a United States with a more humane and democratic polity. Meanwhile, the very rich are enjoying political privileges like never before. Noam, what are some of the tangible and intangible factors that seem to be pushing the country — socially, politically and economically — backward rather than forward?

Noam Chomsky: Trump’s diatribes successfully inflame his audience, many of whom apparently feel deeply threatened by diversity, cultural change, or simply the recognition that the White Christian nation of their collective imagination is changing before their eyes. White supremacy is nothing new in the U.S. The late George Frederickson’s comparative studies of white supremacy found the U.S. to be almost off the chart, more extreme even than Apartheid South Africa. As late as the 1960s the U.S. had anti-miscegenation laws so extreme that the Nazis refused to adopt them as a model for their racist Nuremberg laws. And the power of Southern Democrats was so great that until ‘60s activism shattered the framework of legal racism — if not its practice by other means — even New Deal federal housing programs enforced segregation, barring Black people from new housing programs.

It goes back to the country’s origins. While progressive in many ways by the standards of the day, the U.S. was founded on two brutal racist principles: the most hideous system of slavery in human history, the source of much of its wealth (and England’s too), and the need to rid the national territory of Native Americans, whom the Declaration of Independence explicitly describes as “the merciless Indian savages,” and whom the framers saw as barring the expansion of the “superior” race.

Immigrants … were supposed to be white immigrants — in fact, basically “Anglo-Saxon,” in accord with weird racist myths of the founding fathers that persisted through the 19th century. That includes the leading Enlightenment figures. Benjamin Franklin urged that Germans and Swedes be barred because they were too “swarthy.” Thomas Jefferson was greatly interested in Anglo-Saxon language and law, part of his immersion in the “Saxon myth” that English democracy and law trace back to a pre-Norman Saxon period. The first Naturalization Act, 1790, restricted the option to whites, extended to ex-slaves after the Civil war.

The country of course needed immigrants to settle the “Indian country” from which Indigenous nations were expelled or “exterminated” (as the Founders put it). But they were supposed to be “white” — a somewhat flexible culturally constructed category. By the late 19th century, Asians were excluded by law. The first more general immigration law was in 1924, designed to bar Jews and Italians primarily. There is no need to review here the horrendous record of how Jews were prevented from fleeing Nazi barbarism, crimes that persisted even after the war. Truman sent Earl Harrison on a mission to inspect the concentration camps where Jews were still held, under grotesque conditions as he reported. About the only effect was to intensify efforts to ship them to Palestine.
The 1924 law remained in place until 1965. By the 1980s immigration began to be criminalized. Treatment of Haitians fleeing terror was particularly despicable. Guantánamo was first used as a detention center by the Bush I and Clinton administrations, a place to get rid of Black people fleeing in terror from the murderous coup regime that [U.S. leaders] were supporting, despite pretenses to the contrary. They were classified as “economic migrants,” a cynical pretense in gross violation of international law and minimal decency.

Another ugly story.
It’s not terribly surprising, then, to read a report of a conference of conservative intellectuals where one esteemed speaker, University of Pennsylvania Law professor Amy Wax, explains learnedly that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites,” since immigrants may not quickly come to “think, live and act just like us” because the social and cultural climate of their places of origin.
Wax failed to elaborate on whether her parents, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, came from a cultural and social climate where people were thinking and acting like “us.”

It’s not hard to understand why these deep currents are becoming more manifest, and ominous, today, after 40 years of the “savage capitalism” unleashed by the neoliberal assault. It’s enough to recall that for a large majority of the workforce, wages have either stagnated or declined since 1979, when the neoliberal assault was just taking off. From the country’s origins, U.S. workers benefited from the world’s highest wages…. Since the 1980s, though the unusual advantages persist, working people have fallen behind the rest of the developed world by many measures. For review of their current status, see Amanda Novella and Jeff Madrick’s February 2019 contribution to the journal Challenge.
The effects of the assault are sharp concentration of wealth and power, increasingly in largely predatory financial institutions, stagnation or decline for the majority, deterioration of benefits, astonishing collapse of infrastructure, a form of globalization designed to pit working people against one another for the benefit of international investors, weakening of institutions to protect worker rights, undermining of functioning democracy, and much else that is all too familiar.
The result, in the U.S. and in Europe, is an upsurge of anger, resentment and, all too often, a search for scapegoats — typically those even more disadvantaged, who are portrayed as being coddled by liberal elites. It’s a dangerous mix: fertile territory for demagogues.

The threats are far more extreme than the incipient fascist-style tendencies, which are severe enough. It cannot be overlooked that humans are facing a decision of extraordinary significance, which must be made very soon: Will organized human society survive in anything like its present form, or will it be devastated by global catastrophe? The two most ominous threats are nuclear war and environmental catastrophe, both increasing. On the latter, major energy corporations are apparently planning on a future with 5º Celsius above pre-industrial levels by mid-century, and with that in mind, are racing to accelerate what climate scientists recognize to be indescribable catastrophe by maximizing the profitable production of fossil fuels, joined by the biggest banks and other major capitalist institutions.

Meanwhile the Republican administration, determined to safeguard its credentials as the most dangerous organization in human history, is anticipating a slightly less overwhelming catastrophe — a rise of 4º[C] by end of the century, also far above what scientists recognize to be a colossal danger. And it concludes from this detailed environmental assessment that we should not limit automotive emissions, because — what’s the difference? We’re going over the cliff anyway.

If there is anything like this in world history, I haven’t found it. And this passes with scarcely a raised eyebrow.
Of course, this is only science, and as [right-wing radio host] Rush Limbaugh instructs his tens of millions of radio listeners, science is one of the “four corners of deceit,” along with government, academia, and media (of the wrong sort).
All of this tells us that the tasks ahead are urgent, on many fronts.

Another common (mis) perception is that American culture and society adapt easily to change. Yet, this is a country where it is immensely difficult to change even outdated and dysfunctional political processes and institutions, such as the Electoral College and the distribution of Senate seats. It is very hard to pass amendments to the Constitution. And so far, we have faced many barriers to moving away from the two-party system. How do we explain the inflexibility of U.S. political processes and institutions?

In the 19th century the U.S. Constitution was in many ways a progressive document, even though it was a “Framers’ Coup” against the democratic aspirations of most of the public — the title of Michael Klarman’s impressive study of the making of the Constitution, generally regarded as the “gold standard” in the scholarly literature.
The document has inherent problems, which are leading to a likely constitutional crisis. The problems are serious enough for law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, writing on “America’s constitutional crisis,” to entitle his article “The First Priority: Making America a Democracy” (contrary to the intentions of the Framers). He reviews some of the familiar problems. One has to do with the Electoral College, which was designed by the Framers because of their distrust of popular government. By now states with 23 percent of the population have enough electoral votes to choose the president. Even more importantly, the same radical imbalance makes the Senate a highly undemocratic institution — in accord with the intentions of the Framers. In Madison’s constitutional design, the Senate was the most powerful branch of government, and the most protected from public interference. It was to represent “the wealth of the nation,” the most “responsible” men, who have sympathy for property and its rights. Furthermore, though the Framers did not anticipate this of course, social and demographic changes have placed this excessive anti-democratic power in the hands of a part of the population that is mostly rural, white, Christian, socially conservative and traditionalist — generally sympathetic to the Wax principle.

Some of these undemocratic features were virtually unavoidable. The Constitution would never have been ratified if the smaller colonies were not granted an equal voice. But by now the effects are severe — and unchangeable by amendment because of the same radical imbalance in voting power.
These problems are exacerbated by the monopolization of politics by the two political parties and “winner take all” state laws that bar proportional representation, which can permit a variety of voices to enter the political arena, sometimes growing to major parties. Some have argued, not implausibly, that if a country with the U.S. system tried to join the European Union, the application might be rejected by the European Court of Justice.

The impending crisis is becoming more severe because of the malevolence of the Republican leadership. They are well aware that their formula of abject service to wealth and corporate power along with mobilization of a voting base of the kind that shows up at Trump rallies is not enough to overcome their growing minority status. The solution is radical gerrymandering of the kind now authorized by the reactionary Roberts Court, and stacking the judiciary with far-right justices who will be able to hold the country by the throat for many years. Here the evil genius is Mitch McConnell, who maneuvered to block appointments under Obama, a campaign of obstruction that left 106 vacancies at the end of Obama’s second term (including the scandalous case of Merrick Garland), and is now rushing through appointment of Federalist Society choices.

Another recurring theme of U.S. history involves religious fundamentalism, which is still widespread throughout the country. Does the United States, in some ways, look more like a fundamentalist nation rather than an advanced secular republic?

Throughout its history the U.S. has been an unusually fundamentalist society, with regular Great Awakenings and beliefs that are far off the spectrum of developed societies. Almost 80 percent of Americans believe in miracles. There is a huge Evangelical community, a large part of Trump’s base, which he keeps in line by throwing them crumbs. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a devout Evangelical Christian, speculated recently that God might have sent Trump to save Israel from Iran — which is threatening Israel with destruction in the fantasy world of doctrinal verities. Fully 40 percent of Americans expect Jesus to return to earth by mid-century (23 percent certainly). It’s possible that this accounts for some of the “looking away” that we were discussing earlier. All in all, it is a curious form of exceptionalism that goes back to the earliest settlers.

The United States remains a global superpower, but its domestic society is strikingly unequal and poverty is rampant. Given that, should we interpret Trumpism as a political phenomenon akin to the same dynamics that gave rise in the prewar era to fascism and other forms of authoritarian rule in Europe and elsewhere?

Already in the 1950s, economist John Kenneth Galbraith described U.S. society as marked by private affluence, public squalor. It’s true that in the public sphere it often resembles a “third world” country. The Infrastructure Report Card of the American Society of Civil Engineers regularly ranks the U.S. down at the bottom, D+. And one can hardly walk through a U.S. city or travel in poor rural areas without being shocked at the squalor. The same holds for social justice measures. Among OECD countries, the U.S. ranks near the bottom. I don’t think this relates specifically to Trumpism, except insofar as the contemporary Republican Party leadership is a virtual caricature of long-standing features of U.S. political economy, based on business power that is unusual by historical standards, with a pervasive impact on the political system and also on the “hegemonic common sense,” in Gramscian terms. The business classes are not just unusually powerful, but are also highly class conscious, constantly engaged in bitter class war, in some ways vulgar Marxists, with values inverted.

There is variation. The New Deal period brought the U.S. somewhat closer to European-style social democracy, but from the ‘80s that has been sharply reversed. By now, when Bernie Sanders calls for renewing and extending the New Deal — ideas that would not have greatly surprised Eisenhower — he is considered a radical who wants to destroy “American values.”
Trumpism and pre-war fascism seems to me a different matter. There surely are resemblances. Just speaking personally, Trump’s Greenville, North Carolina, rally evoked my childhood memories of listening on the radio to Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, not understanding the words but the mood was apparent enough, and frightening. The not-so-subtle appeals to racism, xenophobia, misogyny, the treachery of dissent, demonization of media that do not kowtow abjectly to the Grand Leader — all this and more is reminiscent of pre-war fascism. And the social base of Trumpism has similarities to prewar fascism as well: superrich power and petty bourgeois popular base.
But prewar fascism was based on control of all aspects of the society — business included — by a powerful state in the hands of a totalitarian all-powerful ruling party: Gleichschaltung. The situation here is quite different, almost the opposite, with the increasingly monopolized business world, particularly its financial sector, having overwhelming power in sociopolitical life and doctrinal management….

In the 1980s, Japan was regarded as the most likely power to replace U.S. hegemony. We know what happened to that forecast. Now, many pundits see China as a future global superpower. Is this a realistic assessment of future geopolitical developments given the huge economic and military gap that exists today between China and the United States?

The “Japan is #1” fantasy traces in large part to the incompetence of U.S. management, which was unable to compete with superior Japanese production methods. Reagan took care of that with “voluntary export restraints” — where “voluntary” means do it or else, making clear who is #1 — and a number of other devices. One was SDI (“Star Wars”), sold to the public (and maybe to Reagan himself) as defense against the evil enemy, but to the corporate world as a great business opportunity, courtesy of the taxpayer, a familiar benefactor.
As for China, it has made substantial economic and technological progress, but remains a very poor country. It is ranked 86th in the 2018 update to the UN Development Index, right below Algeria. (India is ranked 130th, barely above East Timor.) China has huge internal problems unknown in the West. It is argued that China is comparable to the U.S., maybe ahead, in Purchasing Power Parity, but that means that it is far below per capita. China has been pursuing systematic plans to expand its influence through Eurasia in a somewhat uneasy partnership with an economically much weaker Russia, first through the Shanghai Cooperation Council, now with the Belt and Road Initiative. In some areas of technology — solar panels, electric cars — it may be in the lead. But it still has a long way to go to reach the level of the rich industrial societies.
The U.S. is concerned with Chinese growth, and is seeking (pretty openly) to impede it — not a very attractive policy stance.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that in the age of neoliberal globalization, national accounts are a less meaningful measure of economic power than in the past. Political economist Sean Starrs has done informative work on a different measure: proportion of world wealth held by domestically based multinational corporations. By that measure the U.S. is far in the lead internationally, owning a spectacular 50 percent of world wealth — more than the U.S. share of global GDP at the peak of its power in 1945 — and U.S. corporations are in the lead in just about every category.
China is sure to have a major role in world affairs. A sane policy would be accommodation and cooperation, which doesn’t seem out of the range of possibility.

Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

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C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His main research interests are in European economic integration, globalization, the political economy of the United States and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project. He has published several books and his articles have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into several foreign languages, including Croatian, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. He is the author of Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change, an anthology of interviews with Chomsky originally published at Truthoutand collected by Haymarket Books.



Antonie Ladan ~ Onmacht en oorlogsverlangen

Antonie Ladan. Ills. Joseph Sassoon Semah

Het verlangen naar oorlog komt voort uit onmacht, aldus psychiater Antonie Ladan in Onmacht en oorlogsverlangen. Onmacht is het meest fundamentele aspect van ons leven. We hebben voortdurend te maken met gevoelens van angst, woede en razernij en dan kan een ‘ver weg’ oorlog een grote aantrekkingskracht uitoefenen als kapstok voor onze emoties. Via o.a. Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Gerard Reve, Donald Trump, Vladimir Poetin, Theresa May laat Ladan zien dat oorlog een geriefelijke kapstok kan bieden voor gevoelens van onmacht rond vele situaties waarin we hulpeloos zijn. Een oorlog kan als geroepen komen.
Oorlog kan daarmee iets zijn om naar te verlangen, maar alleen als de werkelijkheid van de oorlog ver weg is en vaag blijft. Als Nederland in oorlog is middels oorlogsmissies, is de afstand tot het front zo groot dat we er in onze dagelijkse leven weinig van hoeven te merken. Zo’n geriefelijke oorlog is ideaal om de gevoelens van haat en machteloze woede niet op elkaar te hoeven richten maar bij een gemeenschappelijke vijand onder te brengen, zodat we samen tegen de vijand kunnen zijn, aldus Ladan. Oorlog beantwoordt in psychologisch opzicht aan een behoefte.

We hoeven ons niet verantwoordelijk te voelen voor onze oorlogsinzet in Libië, Irak en Syrië en de schade die dat veroorzaakt. Er wordt niet veel geschreven over de ‘collateral damage’ van onze daden die voortkomen uit een machteloze verontwaardiging. Wij voelen ons niet verantwoordelijk voor onschuldige burgerslachtoffers en een sterke toename van geweld, chaos en destabilisatie. Wij hebben iets kunnen betekenen voor de buitenwereld, waardoor we ons minder machteloos voelen. De huidige manier van oorlogvoeren, met drones en lasergestuurde bommen, versterkt dat gevoel alleen maar. De afstand tot de daad van het doden wordt opnieuw vergroot.
Een oorlog die met deze wapens wordt gevoerd wordt nog geschikter als kapstok voor onze destructieve behoeften. De oorlogsvoering kan mistig blijven, zodat we ons niet hoeven te schamen. Het maakt ons leven in mentaal opzicht gemakkelijker.

Het is van groot belang oorlog niet als kapstok te gebruiken maar onder ogen te zien wat ze werkelijk inhoudt, zeker in een tijd van toenemende
internationale spanning. En in een tijd waarbij de vijand veel minder duidelijk is te lokaliseren. Die vijand bevindt zich te midden van ons en kan niet zomaar worden aangevallen. Deze vorm van oorlogsvoering voedt de gevoelens van angst en machteloosheid en is niet zo geschikt als kapstok voor onze gewelddadige fantasieën. Door deze veranderingen in de aard van oorlog geloven we niet meer in de definitieve oorlog die zal leiden tot de eeuwigdurende vrede. Tot voor kort geleden koesterden wij de illusie van vrede en veiligheid., ook al werd er overal in de wereld gevochten. Maar er is niet meer sprake van een duidelijk afgegrensde toestand van oorlog of van vrede, de oorlogsdreiging is altijd aanwezig. Om met Ignatieff te spreken, kan dat positief werken omdat we manieren moeten vinden de kwetsbare vrede te bewaren. Oorlog en vrede zijn nu ‘liminale’ toestanden, twee werkelijkheden die onontwarbaar met elkaar zijn verbonden [i]. Als we onze onmacht onder ogen durven te zien, dan zou dat kunnen helpen bij het ons realiseren dat we steeds op de grens van oorlog en vrede balanceren. Een toestand van eeuwigdurende vrede nooit zal worden bereikt, aldus Antonie Ladan. We moeten oppassen met oorlogsvoering en geweldpleging.

Het zou kunnen helpen als we ons bewust zouden zijn dat gevoelsbelangen een belangrijke rol spelen bij beslissingen over oorlogsvoering. Ladan vraagt zich af of we in staat zijn om in situaties waarin we met onmacht worden geconfronteerd, niet zozeer naar buiten, maar naar binnen durven te kijken. Niet op zoek te gaan naar de vijand die ons dit aandoet. Durven we te besluiten niets te doen?
Misschien is ‘kunst’ in staat ons enigszins te helpen bij de moeilijke opgave van het onder ogen zien wie we zijn en wat er in ons leeft.
Ladan sluit af met de woorden: Zijn wij in staat om naar binnen te kijken en onszelf in laatste instantie te nemen voor wat we zijn: een schakel in een groter geheel, waarbij we altijd plaatsmaken voor een ander?

Hij citeert de Spaanse schrijver Javier Marías: “Wie weet wie ons vervangt, we weten alleen dat we altijd worden vervangen, bij alle gelegenheden, onder alle omstandigheden en bij het vervullen van elke functie, in de liefde en de vriendschap, in de baan en de relaties, in de overheersing en in de haat die uiteindelijk ook genoeg van ons krijgt (…) en in onze manier van kussen worden we vervangen (…), in de herinneringen en de gedachten en de dromerijen en overal, ik ben niet meer dan glibberige, zachte sneeuw op de schouders, en aan het sneeuwen komt altijd een einde…”

Noot
[i] I. M. Ignatieff en Maskirovka: Liminale oorlog in deze eeuw. Nexus, 68, p. 34 – 41, 2014

Antonie Ladan – Onmacht en oorlogsverlangen. Boom uitgevers, Amsterdam, 2019. ISBN 9789024402991 (Paperback) & ISBN 9789024424627 (e-book)

Linda Bouws – St. Metropool Internationale Kunstprojecten



Noam Chomsky: “Worship of Markets” Is Threatening Human Civilization

We live in dangerous times — no doubt about it. How did we get to such a state of affairs where democracy itself is in a very fragile condition and the future of human civilization itself at stake? In this interview, renowned thinker, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at MIT and Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona Noam Chomsky, sheds light on the state of the world and the condition of the only superpower left in the global arena.

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, looking at the current state of the world, I think it is not an exaggeration at all to say that we live in ominously dangerous times — and not simply in a period of great global complexity, confusion and uncertainty, which, after all, has been the “normal” state of the global political condition in the modem era. I believe, in fact, that we are in the midst of a whirlpool of events and developments that are eroding our capacity to manage human affairs in a way that is conducive to the attainment of a political and economic order based on stability, justice and sustainability. Indeed, the contemporary world is fraught, in my own mind at least, with perils and challenges that will test severely humanity’s ability to maintain a steady course toward anything resembling a civilized life.

How did we get to such a state of affairs, with tremendous economic inequalities and the resurgence of the irrational in political affairs on the one hand, and an uncanny capacity, on the other, to look away from the existential crises such as global warming and nuclear weapons which will surely destroy civilized life as we know it if we continue with “business as usual”?

Noam Chomsky: How indeed.
The question of how we got to this state of affairs is truly vast in scope, requiring not just inquiry into the origin and nature of social and cultural institutions but also into depths of human psychology that are barely understood. We can, however, take a much more modest stab at the questions, asking about certain highly consequential decisions that could have been made differently, and about specific cases where we can identify some of the roots of looking away.

The history of nuclear weapons provides some striking cases. One critical decision was in 1944, when Germany was out of the war and it was clear that the only target was Japan. One cannot really say that a decision was made to proceed nevertheless to create devices that could devastate Japan even more thoroughly, and in the longer term threaten to destroy us as well. It seems that the question never seriously arose, apart from such isolated figures as Joseph Rotblat — who was later barred reentry to the U.S.

Another critical decision that was not made was in the early 1950s. At the time, there were still no long-range delivery systems for nuclear weapons (ICBMs). It might have been possible to reach an agreement with Russia to bar their development. That was a plausible surmise at the time, and release of Russian archives makes it seem an even more likely prospect. Remarkably, there is no trace of any consideration of pursuing steps to bar the only weapons systems that would pose a lethal threat to the U.S., so we learn from McGeorge Bundy’s standard work on the history of nuclear weapons, with access to the highest-level sources. Perhaps still more remarkably, there has, to my knowledge, been no voiced interest in this astonishing fact.

It is easy to go on. The result is 75 years of living under the threat of virtually total destruction, particularly since the successful development of thermonuclear weapons by 1953 — in this case a decision, rather than lack of one. And as the record shows all too graphically, it is a virtual miracle that we have survived the nuclear age thus far.

That raises your question of why we look away. I do not understand it, and never have. The question has been on my mind almost constantly since that grim day in August 1945 when we heard the news that an atom bomb had wiped out Hiroshima, with hideous casualties. Apart from the terrible tragedy itself, it was at once clear that human intelligence had devised the means to destroy us all — not quite yet, but there could be little doubt that once the genie was out of the bottle, technological developments would carry the threat to the end. I was then a junior counselor in a summer camp. The news was broadcast in the morning. Everyone listened — and then went off to the planned activity — a baseball game, swimming, whatever was scheduled. I couldn’t believe it. I was so shocked I just took off into the woods and sat by myself for several hours. I still can’t believe it, or understand how that has persisted even as more has been learned about the threats. The same sentiments have been voiced by others, recently by William Perry [former defense secretary], who has ample experience on the inside. He reports that he is doubly terrified: by the growing risk of terrible catastrophe, and the failure to be terrified by it.

It was not known in 1945, but the world was then entering into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which human activity is having a severe impact on the environment that sustains life. Warnings about the potential threat of global warming date back to a 1958 paper by Hans Suess and Roger Revelle, and by the 1970s, concerns were deeply troubling to climate scientists. ExxonMobil scientists were in the forefront of spelling out the severe dangers. That is the background for a crucial decision by ExxonMobil management in 1989, after (and perhaps because) James Hansen had brought the grave threat to public attention. In 1989, management decided to lead the denialist campaign.

That continues to the present. ExxonMobil now proudly declares that it intends to extract and sell all of the 25 billion barrels in its current reserves, while continuing to seek new sources.

Executives are surely aware that this is virtually a death-knell for organized human society in any form that we know, but evidently it doesn’t matter. Looking away with a vengeance.

The suicidal impulses of the fossil fuel industry have been strongly supported by Republican administrations, by now, under Trump, leaving the U.S. in splendid isolation internationally in not only refusing to participate in international efforts to address this existential threat but in devoting major efforts to accelerate the race to disaster.

It is hard to find proper words to describe what is happening — and the limited attention it receives.

This again raises your question of how we can look away. For ExxonMobil, the explanation is simple enough: The logic of the capitalist market rules — what Joseph Stiglitz 25 years ago called the “religion” that markets know best. The same reasoning extends beyond, for example to the major banks that are pouring funds into fossil fuel extraction, including the most dangerous, like Canadian tar sands, surely in full awareness of the consequences.

CEOs face a choice: They can seek to maximize profit and market share, and (consciously) labor to undermine the prospects for life on earth; or they can refuse to do so, and be removed and replaced by someone who will. The problems are not just individual; they are institutional, hence much deeper and harder to overcome.

Something similar holds for media. In the best newspapers there are regular articles by the finest journalists applauding the fracking revolution and the opening of new areas for exploitation, driving the U.S. well ahead of Saudi Arabia in the race to destroy human civilization. Sometimes there are a few words about environmental effects: fracking in Wyoming may harm the water supplies for ranchers. But scarcely if ever is there a word on the effect on the planet — which is, surely, well understood by authors and editors.

In this case, I suppose the explanation is professionalism. The ethics of the profession requires “objectivity”: reporting accurately what is going on “within the beltway” and in executive suites, and keeping to the assigned story. To add a word about the lethal broader impact would be “bias,” reserved for the opinion pages.

There are countless illustrations, but I think something deeper may be involved, something related to the “religion” that Stiglitz criticized. Worship of markets has many effects. One we see in the origins of the reigning neoliberal faiths. Their origin is in post-World War I Vienna, after the collapse of the trading system within the Hapsburg empire. Ludwig von Mises and his associates fashioned the basic doctrines that were quickly labeled “neoliberalism,” based on the principle of “sound economics”: markets know best, no interference with them is tolerable.

There are immediate consequences. One is that labor unions, which interfere with flexibility of labor markets, must be destroyed, along with social democratic measures. Mises openly welcomed the crushing of the vibrant Austrian unions and social democracy by state violence in 1928, laying the groundwork for Austrian fascism. Which Mises welcomed as well. He became economic consultant to the proto-fascist Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, and in his major work Liberalism, explained that “It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.”

These themes resonate through the modern neoliberal era. The U.S. has an unusually violent labor history, but the attack on unions gained new force under Reagan with the onset of the neoliberal era. As the business press reported, employers were effectively informed that labor laws would not be enforced, and the U.S. became the only industrial society apart from Apartheid South Africa to tolerate not just scabs, but even “permanent replacement workers.” Neoliberal globalization, precarity of employment, and other devices carry the process of destroying organized labor further.

These developments form a core part of the efforts to realize the Thatcherite dictum that “there is no society,” only atomized individuals, who face the forces of “sound economics” alone — becoming what Marx called “a sack of potatoes” in his condemnation of the policies of the authoritarian rulers of mid-19th century Europe.

A sack of potatoes cannot react in any sensible way even to existential crises. Lacking the very bases of deliberative democracy, such as functioning labor unions and other organizations, people have little choice beyond “looking away.” What can they hope to do? As Mises memorably explained, echoed by Milton Friedman and others, political democracy is superfluous — indeed an impediment to sound economics: “free competition does all that is needed” in markets that function without interference.

The pathology is not new, but can become more severe under supportive social and economic institutions and practices.

Yet, only a couple of decades ago, there was wild celebration among liberal and conservative elites alike about the “end of history,” but, even today, there are some who claim that we have made great progress and that the world is better today than it has ever been in the past. Obviously, “the end of history” thesis was something of a Hegelian illusion by staunch defenders of the global capitalist order, but what about the optimism expressed by the likes of Steven Pinker regarding the present? And how can we square the fact that this liberal optimism is not reflected by any stretch in the politico-ideological currents and trends that are in motion today both inside western nations but also around the world?

The celebrations were mostly farcical, and have been quietly shelved. On the “great progress,” there is serious work. The best I know is Robert Gordon’s compelling study of the rise and fall of American growth, which extends beyond the U.S. though with some modifications. Gordon observes that there was virtually no economic growth for millennia until 1770. Then came a period of slow growth for another century, and then a “special century” from 1870 to 1970, with important inventions ranging from indoor plumbing to electrical grids and transportation, which radically changed human life, with significant progress by many measures.

Since the 1970s the picture is much more mixed. The basis for the contemporary high-tech economy was established in the last decades of the special century, mainly through public investment, adapted to the market in the years that followed. There is currently rapid innovation in frills — new apps for iPhones, etc. — but nothing like the fundamental achievements of the special century. And in the U.S., there has been stagnation or decline in real wages for non-supervisory workers and in recent years, increased death rates among working-class, working-age whites, called “deaths of despair” by the economists who have documented these startling facts, Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

There is more to say about other societies. There are numerous complexities of major significance that disappear in unanalyzed statistical tables.

Realism, crystallized intellectually by Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince,has been the guiding principle of nation-states behind their conduct of international relations from the beginning of the modem era, while idealism and morality have been seen as values best left to individuals. Is political realism driving us to the edge of the cliff? And, if so, what should replace the behavioral stance of governments in the 21st century?

The two major doctrines of International Relations Theory are Realism and Idealism. Each has their advocates, but it’s true that the Realists have dominated: the world’s a tough place, an anarchic system, and states maneuver to establish power and security, making coalitions, offshore balancing, etc.

I think we can put aside Idealism — though it has its advocates, including, curiously, one of the founders and leading figures of the modern tough-minded Realist school, Hans Morgenthau. In his 1960 work, The Purpose of American Politics, Morgenthau argued that the U.S., unlike other societies, has a “transcendent purpose”: establishing peace and freedom at home and indeed everywhere. A serious scholar, Morgenthau recognized that the historical record is radically inconsistent with the “transcendent purpose” of America, but he advised that we should not be misled by the apparent inconsistency. In his words, we should not “confound the abuse of reality with reality itself.” Reality is the unachieved “national purpose” revealed by “the evidence of history as our minds reflect it.” What actually happened is merely the “abuse of reality.” To confound abuse of reality with reality is akin to “the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds.”

For the most part, however, realists adhere to Realism, without sentimentality. We might ask, however, how realistic Realism is. With a few exceptions — Kenneth Waltz for one — realists tend to ignore the roots of policy in the structure of domestic power, in which, of course, the corporate system is overwhelmingly dominant. This is not the place to review the matter, but I think it can be shown that much is lost by this stance. That’s true even of the core notion of Realism: security. True, states seek security, but for whom? For the general population? For the systems of power represented by the architects of policy? Such questions cannot be casually put aside.

The two existential crises we have discussed are a case in point. Does the government policy of maximization of the use of fossil fuels contribute to the security of the population? Or of ExxonMobil and its brethren. Does the current military posture of the U.S. — dismantling the INF Treaty instead of negotiating disputes over violations, rushing ahead with hypersonic weapons instead of seeking to bar these insane weapons systems by treaty, and much else — contribute to the security of the population? Or to the component of the corporate manufacturing system in which the U.S. enjoys comparative advantage: destruction. Similar questions arise constantly.

What should replace the prevailing stance is government of, by and for the people, highlighting their concerns and needs.

The advent of globalization has been interpreted frequently enough in the recent past as leading to the erosion of the nation-state. Today, however, it is globalization that is being challenged, first and foremost by the resurgence of nationalism. Is there a case to be made in defense of globalization? And, by extension, is all nationalism bad and dangerous?

Globalization is neither good nor bad in itself. It depends how it is implemented. Enhancing opportunities for ideas, innovations, aesthetic contributions to disseminate freely is a welcome form of globalization, as well as opportunities for people to circulate freely. The WTO system, designed to set working people in competition with one another while protecting investor rights with an exorbitant patent regime and other devices, is a form of globalization that has many harmful consequences that would be avoided in authentic trade agreements designed along different lines — and it should be borne in mind that much of the substance of the “free trade agreements” is not about free trade or even trade in any meaningful sense.

Same with nationalism. In the hands of the Nazis, it was extremely dangerous. If it is a form of bonding and mutual support within some community it can be a valuable part of human life.

The current resurgence of nationalism is in large part a reaction to the harsh consequences of neoliberal globalization, with special features such as the erosion of democracy in Europe by transfer of decision-making to the unelected Troika with the northern banks looking over their shoulders. And it can and does take quite ugly forms — the worst, perhaps, the reaction to the so-called “refugee crisis” — more accurately termed a moral crisis of the West, as Pope Francis has indicated.

But none of this is inherent in globalization or nationalism.

In your critiques of U.S. foreign policy, you often refer to the United States as the world’s biggest terrorist state. Is there something unique about the United States as an imperial state? And is U.S. imperialism still alive and kicking?

The U.S. is unique in many respects. That includes the opening words of the Declaration of Independence, “We the People,” a revolutionary idea, however flawed in execution. It is also a rare country that has been at war almost without a break from its first moment. One of the motives for the American Revolution was to eliminate the barrier to expansion into “Indian country” imposed by the British. With that overcome, the new nation set forth on wars against the Indian nations that inhabited what became the national territory; wars of “extermination,” as the most prominent figures recognized, notably John Quincy Adams, the architect of Manifest Destiny. Meanwhile half of Mexico was conquered in what General U.S. Grant, later president, called one of the most “wicked wars” in history.

There is no need to review record of interventions, subversion and violence, particularly since World War II, which established the U.S. in a position of global dominance with no historical precedent. The record includes the worst crime of the postwar period, the assault on Indochina, and the worst crime of this millennium, the invasion of Iraq.

Like most terms of political discourse, “imperialism” is a contested notion. Whatever term we want to use, the U.S. is alone in having hundreds of military bases and troops operating over much of the world. It is also unique in its willingness and ability to impose brutal sanctions designed to punish the people of states designated as enemies. And its market power and dominance of the international financial system provide these sanctions with extraterritorial reach, compelling even powerful states to join in, however unwillingly.

The most dramatic case is Cuba, where U.S. sanctions are strongly opposed by the entire world, to no avail. The vote against these sanctions was 189-2, U.S. and Israel, in the latest UNGA [United Nations General Assembly] condemnation. The sanctions have been in place for almost 60 years, harshly punishing Cubans for what the State Department called “successful defiance” of the U.S. Trump’s sanctions on Venezuela have turned a humanitarian crisis into a catastrophe, according to the leading economist of the opposition, Francisco Rodriguez. His sanctions on Iran are quite explicitly designed to destroy the economy and punish the population.

This is no innovation. Clinton’s sanctions on Iraq (joined by Blair) were so destructive that each of the distinguished international diplomats who administered the “oil for food” program resigned in protest, charging that the sanctions were “genocidal.” The second, Hans-Christof von Sponeck, published a detailed and incisive book about the impact of the sanctions (A Different Kind of War). It has been under a virtual ban. Too revealing, perhaps.

The brutal sanctions punished the population and devastated the society, but strengthened the tyrant, compelling people to rely on his rationing system for survival, possibly saving him from overthrow from within, as happened to a string of similar figures. That’s quite standard. The same is reportedly true in Iran today.

It could be argued that the sanctions violate the Geneva Conventions, which condemn “collective punishment” as a war crime, but legalistic shenanigans can get around that.

The U.S. no longer has the capacity it once did to overthrow governments at will or to invade other countries, but it has ample means of coercion and domination, call it “imperialism” or not.

Why is the United States the only major country in the world displaying consistently an aversion to international human rights treaties, which include, among many others, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)?

The U.S. almost never ratifies international conventions, and in the few cases where it does, it is with reservations that exclude the U.S. That’s even true of the Genocide Convention, which the U.S. finally did ratify after many years, exempting itself. The issue arose in 1999, when Yugoslavia brought a charge of war crimes to the ICJ [International Court of Justice] against NATO. One of the charges was “genocide.” The U.S. therefore rejected World Court jurisdiction on the grounds that it was not subject to the Genocide Convention, and the Court agreed — agreeing, in effect, that the U.S. is entitled to carry out genocide with impunity.

It might be noted that the U.S. is currently alone (along with China and Taiwan) in rejecting a World Court decision, namely, the 1986 Court judgment ordering the U.S. to terminate its “unlawful use of force” against Nicaragua and to pay substantial reparations. Washington’s rejection of the Court decision was applauded by the liberal media on the grounds that the Court was a “hostile forum” (New York Times), so its decisions don’t matter. A few years earlier the Court had been a stern arbiter of Justice when it ruled in favor of the U.S. in a case against Iran.

The U.S. also has laws authorizing the executive to use force to “rescue” any American brought to the Hague — sometimes called in Europe “the Hague Invasion Act.” Recently it revoked the visa of the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC [International Criminal Court] for daring to consider inquiring into U.S. actions in Afghanistan. It goes on.

Why? It’s called “power,” and a population that tolerates it — and for the most part probably doesn’t even know about it.

Since the Nuremberg trials between 1945-49, the world has witnessed many war crimes and crimes against humanity that have gone unpunished, and interestingly enough, some of the big powers (U.S., China and Russia) have refused to support the International Criminal Court which, among others things, can prosecute individuals for war crimes. In that context, does the power to hold leaders responsible for unjust wars, crimes against humanity, and crimes of aggression hold promise in the international order of today?

That depends on whether states will accept jurisdiction. Sometimes they do. The NATO powers (except for the U.S.) accepted ICJ jurisdiction in the Yugoslavia case, for example — presumably because they took for granted that the Court would never accept the Yugoslavian pleas, even when they were valid, as in the case of the targeted destruction of a TV station, killing 16 journalists. In the more free and democratic states, populations could, in principle, decide that their governments should obey international law, but that is a matter of raising the level of civilization.

John Bolton and other ultranationalists, and many others, argue that the U.S. must not abandon its sovereignty to international institutions and international law. They are therefore arguing that U.S. leaders should violate the Constitution, which declares that valid treaties are the supreme law of the land. That includes in particular the UN Charter, the foundation of modern international law, established under U.S. auspices.



We Need A Green New Deal To Defeat Fascism And Reverse Inequality

Prof.dr. Robert Pollin

In the debate about what strategy to adopt to combat climate change, the Green New Deal has quickly become the new buzzword on the left. Is it an insufficient social-democratic response to the present crisis, or is it, in fact, the only realistic project we have to save the planet? Robert Pollin, distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is a leading proponent of a green future and he shared his vision of the Green New Deal in the interview below, which appeared originally in Swedish in the left paper Flamman.

Jonas Elvander: You are one of the most well-known scientific spokespersons for a so-called “Green New Deal.” Can you explain what that means?

Robert Pollin: In my view, the core features of the Green New Deal are quite simple. They consist of a worldwide program to invest between 2-3 percent of global GDP every year to dramatically raise energy efficiency standards and equally dramatically expand lean renewable energy supplies.

Here is why this is the core of the Green New Deal. Last October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a new report emphasizing the imperative of limiting the rise in the global mean temperature as of 2100 by 1.50C [1.5 degrees Celsius] only, as opposed to 2.00C. The IPCC now concludes that limiting the global mean temperature increase to 1.50C will require global net CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions to fall by about 45 percent as of 2030 and reach net zero emissions by 2050. These new figures from the IPCC provide a clear and urgent framework for considering alternative approaches for fighting climate change.

To make real progress on climate stabilization, the single most critical project at hand is straightforward: to cut the consumption of oil, coal and natural gas dramatically and without delay, and to eliminate the use of fossil fuels altogether by 2050. The reason this is the single most critical issue at hand is because producing and consuming energy from fossil fuels is responsible for generating about 70 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from burning coal, oil and natural gas alone produce about 66 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, while another 2 percent is caused mainly by methane leakages during extraction.

At the same time, people do still need and want to consume energy to light, heat and cool buildings; to power cars, buses, trains and airplanes; and to operate computers and industrial machinery, among other uses. It is pointless to pretend this isn’t so — that is, to insist that everyone embraces permanent austerity. As such, to make progress toward climate stabilization requires a viable alternative to the existing fossil-fuel dominant infrastructure for meeting the world’s energy needs. Energy consumption and economic activity more generally therefore need to be absolutely decoupled from the consumption of fossil fuels. That is, the consumption of fossil fuels will need to fall steadily and dramatically in absolute terms, hitting net zero consumption by 2050, even while people will still be able to consume energy resources to meet their various demands.

Energy efficiency entails using less energy to achieve the same, or even higher, levels of energy services from the adoption of improved technologies and practices. Examples include insulating buildings much more effectively to stabilize indoor temperatures; driving more fuel-efficient cars or, better yet, relying increasingly on well-functioning public transportation systems; and reducing the amount of energy that is wasted both through generating and transmitting electricity and through operating industrial machinery. Expanding energy efficiency investments support rising living standards because raising energy efficiency standards, by definition, saves money for energy consumers. Raising energy efficiency levels will generate “rebound effects” — i.e. energy consumption increases resulting from lower energy costs. But such rebound effects are likely to be modest within the current context of a global project focused on reducing CO2 emissions and stabilizing the climate.

As for renewable energy, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimated in 2018 that, in all regions of the world, average costs of generating electricity … are now roughly at parity with fossil fuels. This is without even factoring in the environmental costs of burning oil, coal and natural gas. Solar energy costs remain somewhat higher on average. But, according to IRENA, as a global average, solar photovoltaic costs have fallen by over 70 percent between 2010 and 2017. Average solar photovoltaic costs are likely to also fall to parity with fossil fuels as an electricity source within five years.

Through investing about 3 percent of global GDP per year in energy efficiency and clean renewable energy sources, it becomes realistic to drive down global CO2 emissions by roughly 50 percent relative to today within 10 years while also supporting rising living standards and expanding job opportunities. CO2 emissions could be eliminated altogether in 30 years through continuing this clean energy investment project at even a somewhat more modest rate of about 2 percent of global GDP per year. It is critical to recognize that, within this framework, a more rapid economic growth rate will also accelerate the rate at which clean energy supplants fossil fuels, since higher levels of GDP will correspondingly mean a large total amount of investment funds are channeled into clean energy projects.

For 2018, global clean energy investments levels were at about $330 billion, 0.4 percent of global GDP. Thus, the increase in clean energy investments will need to be in the range of 2.5 percent of global GDP through 2030 — that is, about $2 trillion at the current global GDP level of about $80 trillion, then rising in step with global GDP growth thereafter — to achieve a 50 percent emissions reduction within 10 years. The consumption of oil, coal and natural gas will also need to fall steadily to zero over this 30-year period. This requires an absolute decline of about 3.5 percent per year, with larger cuts through 2030 and somewhat smaller ones from 2031-2050.

For this global clean energy investment project to be successful will obviously require very aggressive policies. They will include unbending regulatory commitments to forcing big cuts in fossil fuel consumption and production every year until fossil fuel consumption is driven to net zero by 2050, large-scale public investments to build clean energy infrastructures, as well as public subsidies that will support clean energy investments by private businesses. Rich countries will also have to subsidize clean energy investments in low-income countries. The rich countries have created the problem in the first place by having burned fossil fuels for nearly two centuries to undergird capitalist development. On minimal grounds of fairness, they now need to pay for the cleanup.

When private capitalists receive public subsidies for clean energy investments, they will have to accept limits on their profit opportunities in exchange, in the way that is done now with privately owned electrical utilities in the U.S. and elsewhere. This in turn raises the issue of ownership of newly created energy enterprises and assets. Specifically, how might alternative ownership forms — including public ownership, community ownership, and small-scale private companies — play a major role in advancing the clean energy investment agenda? Throughout the world, the energy sector has long operated under a variety of ownership structures, including public/municipal ownership, and various forms of private cooperative ownership in addition to private corporations. Indeed, in the oil and natural gas industry, publicly owned national companies control approximately 90 percent of the world’s reserves and 75 percent of production. They also control many of the oil and gas infrastructure systems. These national corporations include Saudi Aramco, Gazprom in Russia, China National Petroleum Corporation, the National Iranian Oil Company, Petróleos de Venezuela, Petrobras in Brazil, and Petronas in Malaysia. But there is no evidence to suggest that these publicly owned fossil fuel-based energy companies are likely to be more supportive of a clean energy transition than are the private energy corporations. National development projects, lucrative careers and political power all depend on continuing the flow of large fossil fuel revenues. In and of itself, public ownership is not a solution.

Clean energy investments will nevertheless create major new opportunities for alternative ownership forms, including various combinations of smaller-scale public, private and cooperative ownership. For example, in your region of the world, community-based wind farms have been highly successful for roughly nearly two decades. A major reason for their success is that they operate with lower profit requirements than big private corporations.

There is a widely held belief that advancing a viable climate stabilization project is necessarily in conflict with another fundamental set of goals of the left, which is to raise mass living standards, eliminate poverty and expand job opportunities. This position is wrong. The investments aimed at dramatically raising energy efficiency standards and expanding the supply of clean renewable energy will generate tens of millions of new jobs in all regions of the world. This is because, in general, building a green economy entails more labor-intensive activities than maintaining the world’s current fossil fuel-based energy infrastructure. Average incomes can therefore rise as clean energy supplants our existing dominant fossil fuel energy infrastructure. At the same time, unavoidably, workers and communities whose livelihoods depend on the fossil fuel industry will lose out in the clean energy transition. Unless strong policies are advanced to support these workers, they will face layoffs, falling incomes and declining public-sector budgets to support schools, health clinics and public safety. It follows that the global Green New Deal must commit to providing generous transitional support for workers and communities tied to the fossil fuel industry.

For many the name brings to mind FDR’s New Deal. Is that a valid comparison?

I think it is an evocative and generally useful comparison. The New Deal was, to a significant extent, a project to advance equality and social justice within U.S. capitalism while also confronting the severe crisis of the 1930s Great Depression. The 1930s New Deal happened because the labor movement and left in the U.S. fought for it, and Roosevelt was willing to be pushed. There were also specific green features of the 1930s New Deal project, in particular, the Civilian Conservation Corps, which provided jobs for unemployed workers in the areas, such as erosion and flood control, forest protection, and creating public parks and other recreation areas. At the same time, as Ira Katznelson has documented powerfully in his 2013 book, Fear Itself, FDR compromised with Southern racist politicians in enacting the New Deal, thus upholding the virulent institutionalized racism of that era. So obviously, the Green New Deal must totally reject that feature of the FDR legacy. Even more, the Green New Deal should create opportunities to advance racial and gender equality in employment, especially given that a high percentage of the new jobs generated by clean energy investments will be in construction and manufacturing. Focusing for the moment on the U.S., these are sectors of the U.S. labor market that continue to be dominated by white males.

In your recent essay in the New Left Review you criticize those eco-socialists who are skeptical of economic growth for being naive or vague. Is not economic growth incompatible with a sustainable environment?

The term “economic growth” is too general to be useful here. Under the Green New Deal project that I am proposing, in fact, it is absolutely imperative that some categories of economic activity must grow massively— those associated with the production and distribution of clean energy. Concurrently, the global fossil fuel industry needs to contract massively — i.e. to ‘de-grow’ steadily and dramatically until it has completely shut down within the next 30 years. In my view, addressing these matters in terms of their specifics is much more constructive in addressing climate change than presenting broad generalities about the nature of economic growth, positive or negative.

What are your main objections to proponents of degrowth?

Let me emphasize here that I share virtually all the values and concerns of degrowth advocates. I agree that uncontrolled economic growth produces serious environmental damage along with increases in the supply of goods and services that households, businesses and governments consume. I also agree that a significant share of what is produced and consumed in the current global capitalist economy is wasteful, especially most of what high-income people throughout the world consume. It is also obvious that growth per se as an economic category makes no reference to the distribution of the costs and benefits of an expanding economy.

Nevertheless, on the specific issue of climate change, degrowth does not provide anything resembling a viable stabilization framework. Consider some very simple arithmetic. Following the IPCC, we know that global CO2 emissions need to fall by roughly 50 percent within 10 years and need to be eliminated altogether within 30 years. Now assume that, following a degrowth agenda, global GDP contracts by 10 percent over the next decade. That would entail a reduction of global GDP four times larger than what we experienced over the 2007–09 financial crisis and Great Recession. In terms of CO2 emissions, the net effect of this 10 percent GDP contraction, considered on its own, would be to push emissions down by precisely 10 percent. The global economy would still not come close to bringing emissions down to by 50 percent by 2030.

Clearly then, even under a degrowth scenario, the overwhelming factor pushing emissions down will not be a contraction of overall GDP butmassive growth in energy efficiency and clean renewable energy investments (which, for accounting purposes, will contribute toward increasing GDP) along with similarly dramatic cuts in fossil fuel production and consumption (which will register as reducing GDP). Moreover, any global GDP contraction would result in huge job losses and declines in living standards for working people and the poor. Global unemployment rose by over 30 million during the Great Recession. I have not seen any degrowth advocate present a convincing argument as to how we could avoid a severe rise in mass unemployment if GDP were to fall twice as much as during 2007-09.

These fundamental problems with degrowth are well illustrated by the case of Japan, which has been a slow-growing economy for a generation now, even while maintaining its average per capita income at a high level. To be specific, between 1996-2015, GDP growth in Japan averaged an anemic 0.7 percent per year. This compares with an average growth rate of 4.8 percent per year for the 30-year period 1966-1995. Nevertheless, Japan remained in the upper income ranks among large economies, with average GDP per capita at about $40,000.

Despite the fact that Japan has been close to a no-growth economy for 20 years, its CO2 emissions remain among the highest in the world, at 9.5 tons per capita. This figure is 40 percent below that for the United States. But it is also five times higher than the average global figure of 2 tons per capita that must be achieved for global emissions to fall by 50 percent as of 2030. Moreover, Japan’s per capita emissions have not fallen at all since the mid-1990s. The reason is straightforward: as of 2015, 92 percent of Japan’s total energy consumption comes from burning oil, coal and natural gas.

Thus, despite having become close to a no-growth economy, Japan has accomplished virtually nothing in advancing a viable climate stabilization path. The only way it will make progress is to replace its existing fossil-fuel dominant energy infrastructure with a clean-energy infrastructure. At present, hydropower supplies 5 percent of Japan’s total energy needs and all other renewable sources supply only 3 percent. Overall then, like all large economies — whether they are growing rapidly or not at all — Japan needs to embrace the Green New Deal.

Your proposal does not only not question growth as such, but it also does not question the capitalist version of growth. Do you therefore think it is fair to characterize the GND as a social-democratic or Keynesian alternative to Marxist or other anti-capitalist climate strategies? Or are these distinctions irrelevant?

I don’t agree with your characterization of my position. As I said above, I certainly do not advocate economic growth for its own sake. Rather, the Green New Deal offers the only approach to climate stabilization that can deliver an expansion of good job opportunities and rising mass living standards. In all the literature on de-growth, I have not seen a single credible presentation as to how you expand job opportunities and raise mass living standards under a de-growth scenario. The Green New Deal is therefore the only viable climate stabilization framework that can also reverse the rise in inequality and defeat both global neoliberalism and ascendant neo-fascism.

And right, I really don’t know what exactly one means by a “Marxist” or “anti-capitalist” climate stabilization approach, as distinct from a Green New Deal. I say this sincerely. These terms are far too vague. Do we mean the overthrow of all private ownership of productive assets, and the takeover of them by public ownership? Does anybody seriously think this could happen within the timeframe we have to stabilize the climate, i.e. within no more than 30 years? And are we certain that eliminating all private ownership will be workable or desirable from a social justice standpoint — i.e. from the standpoint of advancing well-being for the global working class and poor? How do we deal with the fact that most of the world’s energy assets are already publicly owned? How, more specifically, can we be certain that a transition to complete public ownership will itself deliver zero net emissions by 2050? To me, the overarching challenge as a leftist economist is to try to understand the alternative pathways to most effectively build truly egalitarian, democratic and ecologically sustainable societies, putting all labels aside, and being willing, as Marx himself insisted, to “ruthlessly criticize” all that exists, including all past experiences with Communism/Socialism, and, for that matter, all authors, including Marx himself. Indeed, my favorite quote from Marx is “I am not a Marxist.”

What would be the effects of the GND on such phenomena as inequality and exploitation?

As noted above, the whole idea behind the Green New Deal is to advance a climate stabilization program that also expands good job opportunities and raises mass living standards on a global scale. My own research and policy work with co-authors has applied this approach globally, including to low-income countries, such as India and Indonesia, and to countries living under austerity conditions, such as Spain five years ago and Puerto Rico today. Overall, the Green New Deal is precisely a project to reverse the rise of inequality under neoliberalism while also preventing ecological catastrophe. One could call it broadly social-democratic in its approach, as was the original 1930s New Deal. But again, I think it is most helpful to get beyond labels and commit to something very specific — that is, to advancing the most fair and workable program possible to achieve climate stabilization in the very short amount of time that remains to accomplish this.

Even if the GND is the most realistic project to deal with climate change, do you think the short-sighted democratic systems in the West will allow for a program with such ambitions and far-reaching consequences to pass?

This is, of course, an open question. At the same time, the answer absolutely must be “yes” for us, for we, the citizens of planet earth, to stop courting ecological disaster through climate change. The fact that the Green New Deal is fully compatible with expanding job opportunities and raising mass living standards — in other words, that it will not require people sacrificing their current standard of living or prospects for improving their living standard — should be critical to its success.

Some significant positive developments have emerged recently both in Europe and the U.S. For example, on June 20, at the EU Summit in Brussels, 25 EU states supported the net zero emissions target by 2050. The measure was defeated by the right-wing governments of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. But it was still an important positive step. At the country level within Europe, the U.K. endorsed the 2050 emissions reduction target on June 27. Other countries are moving quickly in the same direction. Within the U.S., New York State just passed a serious policy program for reaching net zero within the state by 2050. Some other states are moving in the same direction, including California, Oregon and Colorado. Of course, all such programs need to be carried out in practice, not just supported on paper then forgotten when political resistance emerges. The support for such measures also, obviously, needs to spread to all regions and countries, with China and the U.S. being two of the three centerpieces, along with Europe.

There is no denying that we face daunting challenges. For starters, we are up against the massively powerful vested interests of the global fossil fuel industry. The fossil fuel industry will never have any problem finding politicians like Trump to do their bidding. In the face of such realities, I find it useful to regularly recall the great dictum by Antonio Gramsci, “Pessimism of the mind; optimism of the will.”

Note: A Swedish language version of this interview previously appeared in the Swedish left paper Flamman.

Jonas Elvander is a foreign editor at Flamman, a left Swedish newspaper


JOTE ~ The Journal Of Trial And Error

The Journal of Trial and Error aims to close the gap between what is researched and what is published. In scientific practice, trial and error is a fundamental process of learning and discovery. Therefore, we want to make public the lessons of the struggles in research. We are convinced about the productive role of errors, and so we aim to publish answers to the question “what went wrong?”, as well as problematising this question by reflecting on what failure means in science. You can read our manifesto to learn further about our goals, and the benefits of publishing errors.

From the Manifesto

We state that  …
Trial and Error is the elementary process in Science by which knowledge is acquired. We differentiate between two types of scientific Trial and Error processes:
– Methodological errors in a practical sense, driving improvement in the understanding and application of techniques. These errors are here understood in a broad sense, those that go beyond the learning of the individual researcher and have an impact at the scale of the scientific community.-
Conceptual flaws, arising from hypothesis being confronted with conflicting observations. When the initial hypotheses are inappropriate in the face of empirical evidence, scientists improve or reject theoretical frameworks by developing alternative theses aimed at increasing empirical adequacy. Not only hits (positive results), but also misses (negative results) are key to scientific progress.

We identify three core problems in today’s Science. Namely,  …

… a public image of Science based on breakthrough discoveries, fascinating images, and clear results. This reputation comes at a cost. Both scientists themselves, as well as philosophers, sociologists and historians of science have increasingly been highlighting the importance of science in the making. A more faithful picture of Science, the one of practices and fine-tuning methodologies, seems to be at odds with the unrealistic public image of big-discovery Science.
… a gap between what is published and what is researched. We know positive publication bias pressures scientists to conceal methodological mistakes and discard research containing negative findings, threatening proper interpretation. In the face of failed research —outcomes of Science that do not meet the initial aim of the individual researchers— scientists have two options at hand: not publishing or framing the results as productive by, for example, adding ad-hoc hypotheses in a potentially inadequate manner. This point is a consequence of the expectations of big-discovery Science and the publish-or-perish politics of this Science.
… a replication crisis. Since scientists validate their results in terms of replicability, the present-day situation of unreplicable experiments is a serious problem. Debate on this replication crisis has focused on the misuse of statistics by scientists, on methodological carelessness, or theoretical inappropriateness. Only a few venues are attentive to the potential harm.

[…] The complete Manifesto: https://www.jtrialerror.com/the-manifesto-for-trial-and-error-in-science/

URL Journal: https://www.jtrialerror.com/



Noam Chomsky: Trump Is Consolidating Far-Right Power Globally

It is no easy task to make sense of U.S. foreign policy in the current era. Trump is wildly unpredictable and lacks any semblance of a coherent view of world affairs, appearing to believe that all it takes is “the art of the deal” to turn “enemies” into friends. Meanwhile, since Trump’s rise to power, the end of U.S. hegemony has come into sight.

In the exclusive Truthout interview below, renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky — one of the world’s most astute critics of U.S. foreign policy in the postwar era — sheds considerable light on the current state of U.S. foreign policy, including Trump’s relations with the leaders of North Korea, Russia and China, as well as his so-called “Middle East Peace Plan.”

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, in 2016 Trump called U.S foreign policy “a complete and total disaster,” claiming that previous administrations in the post-Cold War era were guided by unrealistic expectations that damaged America’s national interests. Since taking office, he has withdrawn the country from a series of international agreements, demanding that countries pay for U.S. protection, and seeking to advance U.S economic interests through tariffs and protectionism. These moves have led many analysts to speak of a new era in U.S. relations with the world. What’s your own take on Trump’s foreign policy?

Noam Chomsky: One of the most appropriate comments I’ve seen on Trump’s foreign policy appeared in an article in The New Republic written by David Roth, the editor of a sports blog: “The spectacle of expert analysts and thought leaders parsing the actions of a man with no expertise or capacity for analysis is the purest acid satire — but less because of how badly that expert analysis has failed than because of how sincerely misplaced it is … there is nothing here to parse, no hidden meanings or tactical elisions or slow-rolled strategic campaign.”

That seems generally accurate. This is a man, after all, who dismisses the information and analyses of his massive intelligence system in favor of what was said this morning on “Fox and Friends,” where everyone tells him how much they love him. With all due skepticism about the quality of intelligence, this is sheer madness considering the stakes.
And it continues, in ways that are almost surreal. At the recent G20 conference, Trump was asked about Putin’s statement that Western liberalism is obsolete. Trump assumed he must be talking about California: Western liberalism. Putin “may feel that way,” Trump responded: “He sees what’s going on. And I guess, if you look at what’s happening in Los Angeles, where it’s so sad to look; and what’s happening in San Francisco and a couple of other cities which are run by an extraordinary group of liberal people.”

He was asked why the U.S. alone is refusing to join the G20 in a commitment to address global warming and responded by praising the quality of U.S. air and water, apparently not understanding the distinction.
It’s hard to find a comment on foreign policy that departs from this impressive norm. Efforts to detect some coherent global strategy indeed seem to be a kind of acid satire.
Not that there is no coherent policy. There is one policy that emerges from the chaos — the kind we would expect from an egotistical con man who has one principle: Me! It follows that any treaty or agreement reached by predecessors (particularly the despised Obama) is the worst deal in history, which will be replaced by the Greatest Deal in History negotiated by the most accomplished deal-maker of all time and greatest American president. Similarly, any other action carried out in the past was misguided and harmed America, but will be corrected by the “stable genius” now in charge of defending America from those who are cheating and assaulting it on all sides.
It makes no difference what the consequences are — terrible, decent, indifferent — as long as the imagery is preserved.

It may be recalled that a president who obtains his picture of the world from “Fox and Friends” is not an entirely new phenomenon. Forty years ago, a revered predecessor (Ronald Reagan) was learning about the world from movies, and was so mesmerized that he even came to believe that he had taken part in the liberation of Nazi concentration camps (while not leaving California).
All of this tells us something about modern politics. But Trump can’t be compared to Reagan, any more than farce can be compared to tragedy, to paraphrase Marx.
It’s understandable that the farce elicits ridicule, and no doubt some are relishing the coming photo-op of Trump and Boris Johnson upholding Anglo-American civilization. But for the world, it’s dead serious, from the destruction of the environment and the growing threats of terminal nuclear war to a long list of other crimes and horrors.

The most dangerous immediate foreign policy crisis is the conflict with Iran, which has been deemed the official source of all evil. Iran must end its “aggression” and become a “normal country” — like Saudi Arabia, which is making rapid progress in Trump’s fantasy world, even “a great job in Saudi Arabia from the standpoint of women,” he explained at G20.
The charges against Iran resonate through the media echo chamber with little effort to assess the validity of the accusations — which hardly withstand analysis. Whatever one thinks of Iranian international behavior, by the miserable standards of U.S. allies in the region — not to speak of the U.S. itself — it is not much of a competitor in the rogue state derby.

In the real world, the U.S. unilaterally decided to destroy the well-functioning nuclear agreement (JCPOA), with ludicrous charges accepted by virtually no one with the slightest credibility, and to impose extremely harsh sanctions designed to punish the Iranian people and undermine the economy. The [U.S. government] also uses its enormous economic power, including virtual control of the international financial system, to compel others to obey Washington’s dictates. None of this has even minimal legitimacy; the same is true of Cuba and other cases. The world may protest — last November, the UN General Assembly once again condemned the U.S. embargo on Cuba, 189-2 (only the U.S. and Israel voted against the resolution). But in vain. The weird idea of the founders that one might have “decent respect to the opinions of mankind” has long vanished, and the pained bleatings of the world pass in silence. On Iran as well.
This is not the place to pursue the matter, but there is a good deal more to say about the U.S. specialty of resorting to sanctions (with extraterritorial reach) to punish populations — a form of “American exceptionalism” that finds its place within what Nick Turse calls “the American system of suffering” in his harrowing expose of the U.S. assault on the civilian population of South Vietnam. The right to engage in this malicious practice is accepted as normal in the U.S. doctrinal system, with little effort to analyze the actual motives in individual cases, the legitimacy of such policies, or in fact even their legality. Matters of no slight significance.
With regard to Iran, within the government-media doctrinal system, the only question that arises is whether the victim will respond in some way, maybe by “violating” the agreement that the U.S. has demolished, maybe by some other act. And if it does, it obviously will be deemed to deserve brutal punishment.
In commentary made by U.S. officials and media, Iran “violates” agreements. The U.S. merely “withdraws” from them. The stance is reminiscent of a comment by the great anarchist writer and Wobbly activist T-Bone Slim: “Only the poor break laws — the rich evade them.”

Analysts have tried hard to detect some grand strategy behind the U.S. assault on Iran, another exercise in futility. It’s easy enough to detect the goals of the thugs surrounding Trump: for Pompeo and Bolton, the goal is to smash the miscreant — from a safe distance, so that it isn’t costly for us. And damn the consequences. Trump himself seems to see it quite differently. Whether he in fact called off a military strike because of his compassion for 150 possible victims, who knows? The only evidence comes from a source that is not famous for its credibility. But it seems clear that he doesn’t want a war, which would spoil all the fun and games that he is so greatly enjoying, and would harm his electoral prospects. It’s far better to go into the elections facing the cosmic threat of an evil enemy that only the Bold and Courageous Leader is able to confront, not any of those weak-kneed Dems, surely none of those “mere” women. Reagan grasped the principle as well when he boldly faced the threat of Nicaragua, strapping on his cowboy boots and warning that Nicaraguan troops were only two days’ march from Harlingen, Texas, and declaring a national emergency because of the extraordinary threat to the security and survival of the U.S.

This is not the place to pursue the matter again, but in the background of the Iran conflict are some unmentionable facts. The alleged threat of Iranian nuclear weapons can readily be overcome by adopting the demand of the Arab States, Iran, and in fact virtually the entire world, to establish a nuclear weapons-free zone in the region, a policy to which the U.S. and UK have a unique obligation, and which the U.S. regularly blocks — for reasons that are hardly obscure: If the U.S. were to officially acknowledge the existence of Israel’s nuclear arsenal, the huge flood of aid to Israel would be illegal under U.S. law, and of course, Israel’s weapons of mass destruction cannot be subject to inspection.

What about tariffs? “Tariff man” tells us that the tariffs are designed to promote U.S. economic interests, but whether he believes it or not, or cares, we have no idea. Political pronouncements can rarely be taken at face value, and Trump is not notorious for his truthfulness and credibility.
There is, to put it charitably, scant evidence for Trump’s boast that his tariffs are forcing China to pour “billions of dollars” into the Treasury Department. “We never had 10 cents coming into our Treasury” under past administrations, he explained. “Now we have billions coming in.” In the real world, the costs of the tariffs are borne by U.S. companies (which may choose to compensate by reducing wages) and consumers, burdened with a highly regressive tax that targets mostly less affluent. In brief, Trump’s tariffs are yet another one of his policies to harm American workers and the poor.
It is, however, true that “billions” are involved. A study by the New York Fed with Princeton and Columbia Universities estimates that U.S. companies and consumers have paid $3 billion a month in additional taxes because of tariffs on Chinese goods and on aluminum and steel from around the globe, in addition to a $1.4 billion in costs to U.S. companies related to lost efficiency in 2018.

The tariff war against China may lead to some shifting of assembly operations from China to Vietnam and other countries with even lower labor costs, but as for the U.S. economy, more typical is the decision of Apple a few days ago to shift Mac Pro computer assembly from Texas to China.
Trump’s tariff wars seem to relate primarily to domestic policy, crafted with the coming election in view. He has to somehow convince his voting base that he is the one man in the country protecting battered Americans who are suffering from the “carnage” created by his predecessors — which is real enough for a great many Americans, as illustrated dramatically by the astonishing decline in life expectancy among white working age Americans, attributed to “deaths of despair,” a phenomenon unknown in developed societies. Trump’s trick is to wave a big club and threaten others with dire consequences unless they stop torturing poor America and agree to “play fair.” When we take all this apart, a different picture emerges, much as in the case of the ominous threat of Iran. But what matters for the con game is the “alternative reality” that the conjurers are concocting.
With no little success. It’s a mistake to “mis-underestimate” Trump (to borrow W. Bush’s neologism). He is a canny demagogue and manipulator, who is managing to maintain the allegiance of the adoring crowds that believe he is standing up for them against the hated elites while also ensuring that the primary Republican constituency of extreme wealth and corporate power are doing just fine, despite some complaints. And they surely are, in fact, making out like bandits with help from Trump and his associates.

It is quite remarkable to see how effectively alternative reality is created. Iran is typical, but the successes are far broader. Consider the charge that “China is killing us,” stealing our jobs, joined by “Mexican robbers.” How is China killing us? Did China have a gun to the head of CEO Tim Cook of Apple, ordering him to end the last vestige of production of Apple computers in the U.S.? Or Boeing, or GM, or Microsoft, or any of the others who have shifted production to China? Or were the decisions made by bankers and investors in corporate boardrooms in New York and Chicago? And if the latter, is the solution to wave a fist at China or to change the mode of decision-making in the U.S. — by shifting it to the hands of stakeholders, workers and communities, or at least giving them a substantial role, as democratic theory would suggest? It seems a fairly obvious question. Oddly, it isn’t raised, while the official mantra persists unperturbed.

It’s claimed that China imposes unfair conditions on investors, demanding technology transfer (following the pattern of development of others from England and the U.S. to the East Asian tigers). Perhaps so. If Apple and others don’t like these conditions, they’re free not to invest in China. Worshippers of free enterprise and the market should surely agree.
Another charge is that China is unfairly pursuing an industrial policy that subsidizes favored industries. If so, U.S. political leaders and analysts should be cheering. According to the economic doctrines they profess, China is harming its economy by departing from the optimal free market mode of development, thus contributing to U.S. economic hegemony. What’s the problem?
Somehow, that’s not what we hear. Nor do we hear much about how this is normal policy in Western state capitalist societies, notoriously in the U.S. throughout its history, and dramatically since World War II, the basis for the creation of today’s high-tech economy, and continuing today.

What appears to be a more credible charge is that China is violating the intellectual property rights regime (TRIPS) established in the World Trade Organization. Suppose so. Several questions arise. One is: who gains, who loses? To a large extent, American consumers gain, while Big Pharma, Microsoft, and others granted exorbitant and unprecedented patent rights under TRIPS suffer some reduction in their enormous profits. That leads at once to another question: Is the TRIPS regime legitimate? True, it was established by interstate agreement, but who made those decisions? Did the public have any role, or even know what was happening? Hardly. The misnamed “free trade agreements” are more properly described as investor-rights agreements, often with little relation to trade in any meaningful sense, and not surprisingly, serving the interests of their designers in the investor class.

Other elements of the “China is killing us” complaints actually make sense. Concern is often openly expressed that Chinese progress might leave the U.S. behind — for example, that Huawei’s cheaper and superior technology may give them an “unfair advantage” in establishing 5G networks. Plainly that has to be stopped, U.S. officials argue, along with Chinese economic development generally. Their concerns are reminiscent of the 1980s, when superior Japanese manufacturing techniques were undermining inefficient U.S. enterprises, and the Reagan administration had to intervene to block Japanese imports by “voluntary export restraints” — where “voluntary” means “agree or else” — and other devices to enable backward American management to catch up.

Without proceeding, while there are some detectable strategic objectives, much of what is offered and discussed is concealing something quite different. And there is good reason to agree that the sight of experts seeking to detect some grand strategy behind Trump’s antics is “the purest acid satire.” But there is a strategy. And it is working quite well.

One of Trump’s stated objectives behind his understanding of diplomacy is to “turn enemies into friends.” Is there any evidence that he is actually pursuing such a diplomatic objective? I have in mind, in particular, the cases of North Korea and Russia.

In this case, the stated objective seems real. It elicits ridicule and bitter condemnation across the mainstream political spectrum. But whatever Trump’s motives may be, the general policy makes some sense.
The Panmunjom Declaration of the two Koreas in April 2018 was a highly significant event. It called for the two Koreas to proceed toward amicable relations and eventual denuclearization “on their own accord,” without the external interference that has often in the past undermined what seemed to be initiatives with some promise: repeated interference from the U.S., as the historical record shows, facts commonly evaded in reporting. In this Declaration and related agreements, as discussed by Korea specialist Chung-in Moon in the main establishment journalForeign Affairs, for the first time the two Koreas laid out specific timetables and took concrete and promising steps toward reduction of tensions and disarmament — developments that should be welcomed and supported.

To his credit, Trump has largely adhered to the request of the two Koreas. His recent meeting with Kim at the demilitarized zone, the symbolic border crossing, and possible tentative agreements are steps that with goodwill could have salutary consequences. They might facilitate efforts of the two Koreas to proceed on the difficult path toward accommodation and might offer a way to relieve the sanctions that are blocking badly needed aid to the North and contributing to a major humanitarian crisis there. All of this may infuriate commentators across the spectrum, but if there is a better way to bring peace to the peninsula and to take steps toward denuclearization and reform within the North Korean dictatorship, no one has yet informed us about it.

Putin’s Russia need not be turned into a “friend,” but cooperative relations with Russia are a prerequisite for survival. Trump’s record on this score is mixed. Mattis’s Nuclear Posture Review (February 2018) poses very severe threats, escalated since by the unbelievable decision to carry forward development of hypersonic weapons. Adversaries are doing likewise. The right approach is diplomacy and negotiations to prevent a suicidal course, but there is not a hint of that. The same is true of the INF Treaty negotiated by Reagan and Gorbachev, which significantly reduced the risks of terminal war. Each side claims that the other is violating the treaty. The right approach is to have neutral analysts investigate the claims and to negotiate an end to such violations as are discovered. The worst approach is to withdraw from the treaty, as the U.S. is doing, with Russia following. The same considerations hold for the other major arms control treaty, New Start. Throughout, it seems that John Bolton, consistent in his malevolence, has succeeded in blocking progress and driving policy in directions that are extremely ominous.

What’s your assessment of the Trump administration’s Middle East plan? And how instrumental is Jared Kushner’s role in this?

I presume that Kushner is the main architect, as reported. What has been released so far is fairly straightforward, and consistent with earlier policies of the administration authorizing Israel’s takeover of the Golan Heights and development of Greater Jerusalem, all in violation of Security Council orders (backed at the time by the U.S.). At the same time, the meager U.S. aid to Palestinians has been terminated on the grounds that they do not thank the boss politely enough when he is undermining their most elementary rights.
The Kushner plan carries this forward. Israel is to be granted the fondest wishes of its expansionist leadership. The Palestinians are to be bought off by development funds provided by others (not the U.S.). The essence of the Trump-Kushner “Deal of the Century” was captured succinctly by Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon, in The New York Times: Palestinians should realize that the game is over and “surrender.”
Then there can be peace, another triumph of the “great negotiator.”
In this case there is an underlying strategic objective: to consolidate the alliance of reactionary states (the oil monarchies, Egypt, Israel) as a base for U.S. power in the region. That is by no means something new, though earlier variants had somewhat different forms and were less visible than today.

These objectives fall within a broader strategy of forming a global reactionary alliance under the U.S. aegis, including the “illiberal democracies” of Eastern Europe (Hungary’s Orbán, etc.) and Brazil’s grotesque Jair Bolsonaro, who among other virtues, shares with Trump the dedication to undermine prospects for a livable environment by opening up the Amazon — “the lungs of the earth” — to exploitation by his friends in mining and agribusiness. That’s a natural strategy for today’s Trump-McConnell Republican party, well ensconced to the far right of the international spectrum, even beyond the European “populist” parties that were not long ago considered a contemptible fringe.

Without asking you to play the role of a Cassandra, how do you think history will assess Trump’s stance on climate change, which is by far the biggest global challenge facing the world?

To borrow from Wittgenstein, with a slight tweak, “Whereof one cannot speak politely, thereof one must remain silent.”

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