Monthly Archives: August 2023

The U.S. at a crossroads: How Donald Trump is criminalizing American politics

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Henry Giroux, McMaster University

Donald Trump has made history again. He is the first president of the United States charged with attempting to overturn a presidential election, violating the rights of citizens to have their votes counted, tampering with a witness and obstructing an official proceeding, among other criminal offences.

He’s also the first president to be indicted. And this is his third indictment in four months — and all of this is playing out amid his campaign for re-election in 2024.

None of the charges brought against Trump are surprising. His legacy as an accused serial liar, self-serving crook, sexual predator and white nationalist
— coupled with his assaults on the courts and supporter of authoritarians globally — are well known.

In effect, he has become the chief annihilator of democracy.

Seven protesters in neon yellow T-shirts hold orange letters that spell out 'justice.'
Anti-Donald Trump protesters hold letters that spell out ‘justice’ in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 3 as former president Donald Trump was set to appear in federal court on charges that he sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
(AP Photo/Jess Rapfogel)

Racism, xenophobia

As Washington Post political columnist Max Boot has observed, Trump has made a mockery out of political leadership, embraced widespread corruption and provided a model for being one of the worst presidents in American history. Boot writes:

“He has trafficked in racism and xenophobia. He has incited violence. He has kowtowed to dictators and trashed our alliances. He has welcomed Russian attacks on our elections. He has locked children in cages. He has called for his opponents to be locked up.”

Put differently, Trump has criminalized both social problems and politics itself.

Trump and his allies have long created a culture of lies, illusions, cruelty and misrepresentation. He has waged an incessant attack on reason, critical thinking, informed judgment and social responsibility. His distaste for Black people, migrants and others he considers disposable is matched by his support for the financial and corporate elite.

His populist pose is not only at odds with his policies, such as reducing taxes for the rich and hollowing out the social safety net, but has also pushed American society closer to an upgraded form of white supremacy and fascism.

Yet, despite the damage Trump has done to democracy, he has almost complete support of the Republican Party and a majority of Republican voters — slightly more than 58 per cent say they still plan to vote for him in the 2024 presidential election if he wins the Republican nomination. He appears poised to clinch that nomination.

Even more troubling are recent polls indicating he’s in a dead heat with U.S. President Joe Biden if they’re the presidential nominees in 2024.

Two men are seen arguing on a large stage from behind their respective podiums.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden participate in a presidential debate in Nashville, Tenn., in October 2020.
(Jim Bourg/Pool via AP)

What explains Trump’s appeal?

Most of media is focused on Trump’s legal troubles. But too little has been written about the conditions that have given rise to his authoritarian politics or why Trump is a national disgrace still backed by millions of Americans.

Trump’s grip on power is a collective nightmare that can only be understood in terms of the historical, economic, political and cultural conditions of which he is the endpoint.

As American anthropologist Wade Davis has observed:

“Odious as he may be, Trump is less the cause of America’s decline than a product of its descent.”

Trump embodies a society that has been in crisis for decades, but especially since the 1980s. This was a period when the right-wing counter-revolution emerged with the election of Ronald Reagan.

A dark-haired man gives a thumbs up while a woman dressed in red waves from a limousine.
Ronald Reagan gives a thumbs up to the crowd while his wife, first lady Nancy Reagan, waves from a limousine during the inaugural parade in Washington following Reagan’s swearing in as the 40th president of the United States in January 1981.
(AP Photo/File)

Since that time, the democratic values that informed the social contract and common good have been increasingly displaced by market values that stress self-interest, privatization, commodification, deregulation and the accumulation of profit and celebration of greed. Civic culture came under attack along with the erosion of the values of shared citizenship.

The market became a template for controlling not just the economy, but all of society. The language of rabid individualism replaced the notion of the common good and gave way to a disdain for community.

Snubbing social responsibility

Under the regime of neoliberalism, social responsibility is now viewed as a liability.

Government was discredited as a force for good, its public infrastructure was eroded and replaced by a culture of cruelty in which matters of compassion, care, and ethical responsibility began to disappear.

What emerged was society marked by precarity, loneliness and mass anxiety. The rising cult of individualism made it difficult for the public to translate private troubles into systemic considerations, weakening the public imagination. The rise of a media environment where politics becomes a form of entertainment helped silence any resistance to a growing culture of lies and greed.

Staggering levels of economic inequality also emerged, setting the ground for dark money shaping politics. This neoliberal poison helped to create a society of political monsters, immune to the virtues and conditions of democracy.

An ornate domed building is seen behind a homeless person lying on a steam vent in a grassy area.
A homeless man resting on a steam vent on the National Mall in 2019 in Washington.
(AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

Democratic freedoms rooted in equality, freedom from fear, poverty and precarity gave way to what are known as ugly freedoms used to mine depths of hatred and selfishness, and redefine citizenship as the exclusive privilege of white Christian nationalists and radical evangelicals.

Harnessed to exclusion and bigotry, the language of freedom was invoked eventually by Trump and other Republican Party politicians to produce policies that have banned books, crushed dissent, limited classroom and workplace discussions about race, whitewashed African American history and justified a virulent anti-democratic politics that echo the ghosts of a fascist past.

America at a crossroads

The most important issues Americans face today are not solely about Trump’s corruption, lawlessness or open authoritarianism — it’s about learning from history.

We must rethink the lies that neoliberal capitalism have told us about how American society defines itself while rethinking what it will take to challenge and overcome the anti-democratic forces that gave rise to Trump.

The 2024 election should be about more than Trump’s ongoing legal travails. It should be a directive for what kind of society Americans want and what kind of future they desire for their children. They should regard the election as a choice between democracy and the further criminalization of American politics.The Conversation

Henry Giroux, Chaired professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue ReadingThe U.S. at a crossroads: How Donald Trump is criminalizing American politics

North-east mayor slams Starmer’s green rollback after quitting Labour

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Labour leader Keir Starmer (centre) with then US secretary of state Mike Pompeo (R) and then US ambassador to Britain, Woody Johnson, in London, 21 July 2020.
Labour leader Keir Starmer (centre) with then US secretary of state Mike Pompeo (R) and then US ambassador to Britain, Woody Johnson, in London, 21 July 2020. Pompeo said in 2019 “we will do our level best” to stop Jeremy Corbyn getting elected. (Photo: US State Department)

Original article by Adam Ramsay republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Exclusive: Jamie Driscoll says some voters think Starmer is ‘a liar’ and backing ULEZ would win votes

The ex-Labour mayor of the UK’s poorest region has slammed Keir Starmer for watering down the party’s environmental commitments.

In an exclusive interview with openDemocracy in his office in Newcastle, North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll said: “There is no contradiction between protecting us from the climate emergency, and prosperity. In fact, if you fail to protect us from the climate emergency, you’re going to lose all prosperity in the future.”

Labour’s leadership has blamed its failure to take Boris Johnson’s former constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip in the recent by-election on London mayor Sadiq Khan’s plan to expand the city’s ‘ultra-low emission zone’ (ULEZ) into the area. But Driscoll, who dramatically quit Labour last month, said the party would have won the seat if it had stood by the scheme and campaigned against Tory cuts to bus services in the capital.

“Labour would have won the Uxbridge by-election if they had said: ‘Yes, it [ULEZ] is a problem, because the Tories have cut public transport in London – if we had better buses here, which we will do, you’ll be better off,’” he said. “That would have won them it… A lot of people who voted Green because they were outraged by Labour’s abandonment [of ULEZ] probably would have voted Labour.”

Labour’s candidate in the by-election had publicly opposed the ULEZ expansion during the campaign; the Green candidate won 893 votes, more than the margin separating Labour from the Tories.

Driscoll also argued that politicians’ failure to take climate breakdown seriously contributed to falling trust in politics: “We’ve got a climate juggernaut hurtling towards us, and [politicians] are saying ‘some people in outer London didn’t like ULEZ so let’s just burn the planet because we need their votes’. Almost any rational person, which is the majority of the electorate, I still believe, would say: ‘It doesn’t add up any more.’”

Deselected by Labour

Driscoll is currently mayor of the North of Tyne region, which extends northwards from Newcastle to the Scottish border. He has successfully negotiated an expansion of the region, meaning that when the post comes up for re-election next year, it will also cover areas of north-east England south of the Tyne, including Sunderland, Gateshead and County Durham.

With an engineering background and his own software business, Driscoll was first elected as a councillor in Newcastle in 2018. He was quickly chosen by Labour members to be the party’s candidate for North of Tyne mayor when the post was created in 2019, beating the longstanding leader of Newcastle Council in the selection. Calling himself a “pragmatic socialist”, he is generally identified with the left of the party, and was supported by Momentum.

But when Labour announced its shortlist of candidates for the mayor of the newly expanded North East seat, Driscoll’s name was notably absent. Party insiders briefed that he had been ‘purged’ because he once spoke at an event alongside the filmmaker Ken Loach, who was himself banned from Labour because of his prior support for the Left Unity party. While much of the media parroted this line, a simpler explanation is that he was binned because of his left-wing views, and as revenge for defeating one of the party’s big beasts.

Driscoll’s deselection was slammed by politicians across the political spectrum, with Labour mayors Andy Burnham and Steve Rotherham praising his approach to the role. His interview with openDemocracy is the first time he has so clearly attacked the Labour leadership since standing down from the party.

Speaking about Starmer’s recent equivocation on previous climate spending commitments, Driscoll characterised the Labour position as: “We might put £28bn into tackling the climate emergency at some point in the future if the fiscal rule allows it – a fiscal rule which we decided on, which is not real and has no legal basis in anything, on the basis that we just think it makes us look a bit more credible to some people.”

If you do a vox pop and say ‘do you think Keir Starmer keeps his word?’ you would have no one say ‘yes’

He added: “There is an underlying reality to people’s lives. Either your bus comes, or it doesn’t. Either you can get an operation, or you can’t. These are the things that are concrete and in the real world. The climate emergency is absolutely one of those.

“The science is uncontroversial – we already now have enough CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that even if they remain stable at that level, global heating is going to continue and we will pass way beyond 1.5°C. Even if we live in a magic world where no tipping points kick in, that will lead to mass people movements and crop failures around the world.”

For Labour’s leadership to respond to this reality by saying “yeah, but we need a fiscal rule” isn’t good enough, he argued. Criticising his former party for saying it won’t cancel oil and gas licences recently issued by the Tories, and for comments Starmer reportedly made to shadow climate change secretary Ed Miliband that he “hates tree huggers” (which he denied) and isn’t “into hope and change”, Driscoll asked: “What are they there for?”

‘Dishonest’

Speaking more broadly, Driscoll said some people perceive Starmer as a “liar”. He claimed: “If you would go out and do a vox pop and say ‘do you think Keir Starmer keeps his word?’ you would have no one say ‘yes’. Or some people think, ‘yes, he’s a liar but he’s not as much of a liar as the Tories’ – you know, lesser of two evils. But the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil.”

Referring to an event during Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign, Driscoll added: “I interviewed him in 2019. He said that you have to inspire people to party unity – you don’t discipline people to party unity.” Referring to Starmer’s promises at the time, Driscoll said: “Ten pledges, has he kept any of them? I don’t think he has. And the public know that.”

He added: “Regardless of what people say in politics, regardless of their ideologies, there is an objective reality. And when politicians forget that, they find themselves unable to tell the truth. The reason they are unable to tell the truth is that what they propose does not tally with reality.”

He also claimed Starmer and shadow health secretary Wes Streeting are unduly influenced by big business, pointing to Streeting’s donations from a hedge fund manager heavily invested in private healthcare and Starmer rowing back on commitments to tax Big Tech after a meeting with Google. “To abandon that,” he said, “shows you in whose interests they are operating.”

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Original article by Adam Ramsay republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingNorth-east mayor slams Starmer’s green rollback after quitting Labour

Climate chaos – with the UK government wilfully looking the other way

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/climate-emergency-wilfully-looking-other-way

Greenpeace cover Rishi Sunak's home in black oily fabric in protests at Sunak's intended huge expansion of North Sea fossil fuel exploration.
Greenpeace cover Rishi Sunak’s home in black oily fabric in protests at Sunak’s intended huge expansion of North Sea fossil fuel exploration. Image © Greenpeace.

The British government’s current policies are about as far from being consistent with Britain’s net zero plan as it is possible to be, argues RICHARD HEBBERT

…

Last week Sunak announced that his government is granting over 100 new licences for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, claiming in a peculiarly Orwellian statement that to do so is “consistent with the UK’s net zero plan.”

It isn’t. How could it possibly be?

Nor should we forget that the Tory government has approved the opening of a new coalmine in Cumbria and effectively banned on-shore windfarms — one of the quickest, cheapest and cleanest forms of renewable energy.

The British government cannot be ignorant of the manifest signs that the Earth’s climate is racing towards catastrophe, even quicker than has been previously forecast and yet it wilfully looks the other way.

…

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/climate-emergency-wilfully-looking-other-way

Continue ReadingClimate chaos – with the UK government wilfully looking the other way

‘Terrifying’: Scientists Raise Alarm Over Unprecedented Global Ocean Heat

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Greenpeace image, sign reads CHOOSE OCEANS, NOT OIL
Greenpeace image, sign reads CHOOSE OCEANS, NOT OIL

Original article by JULIA CONLEY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

The global average ocean surface temperature is expected to rise even further in the coming months as El Niño strengthens.

Climate scientists on Friday said the rapidly rising temperature of the planet’s oceans is cause for major concern, particularly as policymakers in the top fossil fuel emissions-producing countries show no sign of ending planet-heating oil and gas extraction.

The European Union’s climate agency, Copernicus Climate Change Service, reported this week that the average daily global ocean surface temperature across the planet reached 20.96°C (69.7°F), breaking the record of 20.95°C that was previously set in 2016.

The record set in 2016 was reported during an El Niño event, a naturally occurring phenomenon which causes warm water to rise to the surface off the western coast of South America. The weather pattern was at its strongest when the high ocean temperature was recorded that year.

El Niño is forming this year as well, but has not yet reached its strongest point—suggesting new records for ocean heat will be set in the coming months and potentially wreak havoc in the world’s marine ecosystems.

Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, told the BBC that March is typically when the oceans are at their hottest.

“The fact that we’ve seen the record now makes me nervous about how much warmer the ocean may get between now and next March,” she told the outlet.

The warming oceans are part of a feedback loop that’s developed as fossil fuel emissions have increasingly trapped heat in the atmosphere.

Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are warming the oceans, leaving them less able to absorb the emissions and contributing to intensifying weather patterns.

“Warmer sea surface temperatures lead to a warmer atmosphere and more evaporation, and both of these lead to more moisture in the atmosphere which can also lead to more intense rainfall events,” Burgess told “Today” on BBC Radio 4. “And warmer sea surface temperatures may also lead to more energy being available for hurricanes.”

The warming ocean could have cascading effects on the world’s ecosystems and economies, reducing fish stocks as marine species migrate to find cooler waters.

“We are seeing changes already in terms of species distributions, prevalence of harmful algae blooms popping up maybe where we would not necessarily expect them, and the species shifting from warmer southern locations up into the colder regions as well which is quite worrying,” Helen Findlay, a biological oceanographer at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the United Kingdom, toldThe Evening Standard.

“We are also seeing more species coming up from the south, things like European anchovy or recently examples of Mediterranean octopus coming up into our waters and that is having a knock-on impact for the fish that we catch, and consequences of economics,” she added.

Certain parts of the world’s oceans provoked particular alarm among scientists in recent days, with water off the coast of Florida hitting 38.44°C—over 101°F—last week.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told the BBC that ocean temperatures in that area typically hover between 23°C and 31°C at this time of year.

Since scientists first began measuring ocean temperatures using satellites and research buoys about four decades ago, the global average sea surface temperature has gone up by roughly 0.6°C.

On social media, climate scientists urged news outlets to explicitly connect the rising ocean temperatures to fossil fuel companies and the policymakers who are enabling them to continue fueling the climate emergency—such as British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who announced more than 100 new oil and gas licenses in the North Sea this week.

The New York Times this week reported “terrifying Earth breakdown but barely [mentioned] the cause is the fossil fuel industry,” said National Aeronautics and Space Administration climate scientist Peter Kalmus.

“The more we burn fossil fuels, the more excess heat will be taken out by the oceans, which means the longer it will take to stabilize them and get them back to where they were,” Burgess told the BBC.

Original article by JULIA CONLEY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue Reading‘Terrifying’: Scientists Raise Alarm Over Unprecedented Global Ocean Heat