On ‘Hottest Day in History of France,’ World Told ‘Do Not Look Away’ as Police Tear-Gas Climate Campaigners in Paris

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by Andrea Germanos,
staff writer, Common Dreams

Published on Friday, June 28, 2019

"Watch this video and ask yourself," said Greta Thunberg, "who is defending who?"

350 Europe described the display of police violence as "shocking."

Activists with Extinction Rebellion (XR) were occupying a bridge over the Seine to demand the French government declare a climate emergency and take necessary action to avert planetary catastrophe.

"We need to civilly disrupt because, otherwise, nothing is going to be done," a British woman who took part in the protest told Euronews.

Meanwhile, on the hottest day in the history of France, here’s shocking video of police spraying tear gas in the faces of climate activists in Paris.

This happened today. Do not look away. https://t.co/F43YoxANT5

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) June 28, 2019

Extinction Rebellion acts have been seen in other parts of Europe, too (this one in Britain) even if most Americans remain shamefully unaware of such movement.

Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen who ignited the School Strike for Climate movement, said on social media: "Watch this video and ask yourself; who is defending who?"

La police doucement, on fait ça pour vos enfants???? chantent les militant.e.s de @XtinctionRebel face aux #violencespolicières pic.twitter.com/MVcwvAGkpv

— Paris en commun (@Paris_en_commun) June 28, 2019

The action also drew praise from the U.S.-based Sunrise Movement, who gave props to the protesters for "putting their bodies on the line for climate justice."

The XR action took place as temperatures hovered in near 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32° C) in Paris—far cooler than in some other parts of the country.

At almost the same time as French police tear gas #ExtinctionRebellion protesters in Paris, the temperature in the south of the country has broken all-time records.

We are in an emergency. Governments must #TellTheTruth and #ActNow.#RebelForLife. https://t.co/O2y4AAHclV

— Extinction Rebellion Berlin (@XRBerlin) June 28, 2019

The French meteorological agency said that temperatures topped 45° C (113° F) for the first time on the books, with the threshold being passed in three cities.

The steamiest reading was in Gallargues-le-Montueux, where it hit 45.9 °C (114.6° F) in the late afternoon.

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‘Now We Know Oil Is More Toxic Than We Thought’ (CounterSpin interview with Riki Ott on Exxon Valdez spill)

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BECAUSE THE CAPITALO-IMPERIALIST MEDIA WON'T EVER REPORT PROPERLY ABOUT THESE MATTERS

A Report by FAIR.org

The Exxon-Valdez

Janine Jackson interviewed Riki Ott about looking back on the Exxon Valdez oil spill for the March 27, 2009, episode of CounterSpin—an interview that was reaired for the June 14, 2019, show. This is a lightly edited transcript

MP3 Link

Mobile Press-Register (6/12/10)

Janine Jackson: The BP Gulf of Mexico spill is still ongoing, really; 2019 reports describe lingering health impacts on cleanup workers, for instance.

But in June of 2010, the spill was front-page news. And that was about the time when BP hired regular CNN commentators Alex Castellanos and Hilary Rosen as lobbyists. Rosen lost her job at the Huffington Post, where she’d been Washington editor-at-large, but they both kept their jobs as CNN pundits. It’s OK, CNN explained, because

both Alex and Hillary are political contributors, used to comment on political issues. They are not being used to discuss the oil disaster story.

That sort of malfeasance never seems to play a role in corporate media “looks back” or “lessons learned” at catastrophic events like major oil spills. The press was part of the story when CounterSpin spoke with Riki Ott in 2009. Riki Ott is an activist and marine biologist, and author of Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. When I spoke to her in 2009, my first question was to what extent the Exxon Valdez was a live story, and not one 20 years old.

Riki Ott: We still do not have the herring back in Prince William Sound. Herring are a foundational species in Prince William Sound; they’re the forage fish that whales, seals, sea lions, sea birds all rely on. Realistically. without herring, Prince William Sound cannot recover. So we are waiting for the herring to recover, and they collapsed, really, in 1989, when the young of the year did not survive their oil bath. And four years later, when those fish should have become adults, they weren’t there. And that’s when the population crashed.

We also rely on herring for our economy. So there are still fishermen, to this day, the herring fishermen—it’s closed indefinitely—they are out of that line of work. We are still incurring long-term harm from something that happened 20 years ago now. So that’s sort of the environmental and economic side.

But there’s more. And this is where it’s in the interest of all Americans to really understand what happened in our Supreme Court decision, back in June of 2008.

The Supreme Court decided to break the link between punishment and profit; the jury had decided that it would really take a link between punishment and profit to punish a corporation. This big $5 billion was one year’s net profit in 1994. The Supreme Court decided, “No, punishment should instead be linked to damages.”

As I’ve just explained, we were only compensated for short-term damages. But this set precedent, now, this capping of punitive damages to a one-to-one ratio of punitive to compensatory, this makes every community in America vulnerable to corporate greed, and the most—let’s stay with Exxon Valdez — if $5 billion had indeed been punishment, then Exxon should have been the first company to double-hull its tanker fleet and make them safer, rather than the last.

And what we see now is Exxon, of the top 10 oil shippers, Exxon has more single-hull tankers afloat in the world’s oceans than the other nine companies combined, all to earn its shareholders an extra penny a year on their stocks.

SIDEBAR

Countless animals paid with their lives for a human-made calamity born out of disrespect for nature and humans themselves.

The huge spill remains an eloquent portrait of ecologically blind devious capitalism
The Exxon Valdez oil spill was a manmade disaster that occurred when Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker owned by the Exxon Shipping Company, spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989. It was the worst oil spill in U.S. history until the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. The Exxon Valdez oil slick covered 1,300 miles of coastline and killed hundreds of thousands of seabirds, otters, seals and whales. Nearly 30 years later, pockets of crude oil remain in some locations.

Fate of the Exxon Valdez
The fate of the ship is testament to the stubborn disregard shown by capitalists toward the environment.
After the spill, Exxon Valdez—first commissioned in 1986—was repaired and returned to service a year after the spill in a different ocean and under a different name.

The single-hulled ship could no longer transport oil in U.S. waters, due to the new regulations. The ship began running oil transport routes in Europe, where single-hulled oil tankers were still allowed. There it was renamed the Exxon Mediterranean, then the SeaRiver Mediterranean and finally the S/R Mediterranean.

In 2002, the European Union banned single-hulled tankers and the former Exxon Valdez moved to Asian waters.

Exxon sold the infamous tanker in 2008 to a Hong Kong-based shipping company. The company converted the old oil tanker to an ore carrier, renaming it the Dong Feng Ocean. In 2010, the star-crossed ship collided with another bulk carrier in the Yellow Sea and was once again severely damaged.

The ship was renamed once more after the collision, becoming the Oriental Nicety. The Oriental Nicety was sold for scrap to an Indian company and dismantled in 2012.

JJ: On that hulling note, I was interested in the New York Times editorial that declared matter of factly that supertankers are now double-hulled because of the Valdez. They made it sound as though policies flowed sort of naturally and immediately from the disaster. And that’s not at all how it went. I mean, you’ve just indicated that the company that ought to have gone straight to double-hulling, Exxon, is lagging, and it’s been a lot of activism that has made the other companies take the steps that they’ve had, hasn’t it?

RO: It’s only been activism. Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 that requires double-hull tankers by the year 2015. That essentially gave these big, powerful oil companies 25 years to try to weaken and reduce that standard. And try they have. And the only thing that has kept that standard, there were two things: One was citizen oversight, citizen activism, also required by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. It pushed back each end-run that the oil companies tried, four times. And, finally, the Prestige and the Ericka oil spills in Spain and France sealed the deal, when the international community just got outraged and demanded double-hull tankers by the year 2012. The fleet is largely shifting; over and again, it’s been Exxon who’s the most recalcitrant company of all.

JJ: So if the theme is “lessons learned,” I guess maybe the most important lessons have to do with activism. Let me ask you: You’ve watched media operate now in Alaska and nationally for decades now. And you describe a process that I’ve heard you call “media capture.” What do you mean by that? How does that work?

Riki Ott: “I was shocked to see how easily Exxon could make its story the dominant story.”

RO: I was shocked to see how easily these big oil companies, in this case Exxon, could make its story the dominant story in the news, and this has actually driven me to write two books, trying to correct 20 years of wrong-headedness by the media.

The lies started on day one. I landed in Valdez, and within 12 hours of the grounding, I was down with the federal scientists, the NOAA people. And they were estimating the size of the spill, based on computer modeling. And it was between 11 (low-end estimate) million gallons to 38 million gallons. Exxon captured the low-end number.

When the press started asking, I was in the room, watching. Who validated that? Who verified that? Exxon spokesperson Frank Iarossi kind of threw out that “alcohol may have been involved” quote. And just like that, I watched the national media switch tracks like a railroad, and it became 11 million gallons ever since that day. The reason that’s important, and I knew it would be, was because penalties are based on spill volume, right, and correction measured based on spill volume.

So what do we have in Alaska right now? We are prepared to respond to an “Exxon Valdez-size” oil spill, which means three times less than what really spilled.

JJ: …than what actually happened. Well, that 11 million —or even 10.8, is what is on the record—that’s what’s being reported in the anniversary coverage.

In 1989, FAIR did a study of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, then as now considered among the most serious news programs. And between February and August of that year, they did seven segments on the Valdez spill, not one of which included an environmentalist. Debate on that show was illustrated by the then-chairman of Exxon and the governor of Alaska, who sat down to have a cozy conversation, in which the governor of Alaska said that the chairman of Exxon was being far “too heavy on his own company.”

So we found that a kind of top-down bias in media—talking to just the corporate officials and government officials — really left out what were the key perspectives at the time.

RO: And, you know, it’s not just at the time; that’s another huge problem, is that these stories evolve. The killing did not stop in 1989. Where was the media to cover the 1992 pink salmon run collapse, the 1993 pink salmon run collapse? I mean, we actually held a blockade of the Valdez Narrows, held up oil tanker traffic, that brought in the media and attention, and it started the ecosystem studies, which took 10 years to complete. And now we know that oil is more toxic than we thought.

And where is the news on this? This should be tied into the debates right now on global climate crisis. Do we need to get off oil, not only for the sake of the planet, but also that this stuff is much more toxic than we thought in the 1970s, when we passed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act? We’re talking 1 percent of a child’s lung capacity for every one year of their life, just by breathing urban air that the federal government regulates as safe and is not. Bush administration standards are now being challenged by Obama. And this is the fine soot standard, this is polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, the fraction of oil that we now know causes long-term harm, in wildlife and in people.

Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, by Riki Ott

JJ: Let me ask you, how then do we sanction corporations that commit acts of devastation like that of the Valdez?

RO: I would like to see us take a good look at what we’ve done with these big corporations. We have given them, through the Supreme Court, rights that were only intended for humans. We have created, literally, a monster in our midst; we have created a way to consolidate wealth and power and privilege that is destroying our ability to hold these companies accountable.

So I am advocating coalescing this sort of unrest across the nation, that we saw starting with WTO protests in Seattle, into a citizen movement, and to pass the 28th amendment to the Constitution, stripping corporations of human rights. This gets to the heart of campaign abuse, the legal system abuse, lack of enforcement of our law officials, and actually strikes at the heart of globalization.

JJ: That was Riki Ott, activist, marine biologist and author of, among other titles, Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. You can catch up with her work at her website RikiOtt.com

About the Author

Janine Jackson is FAIR’s program director and producer/host of FAIR’s syndicated weekly radio show CounterSpin. She contributes frequently to FAIR’s newsletter Extra!, and co-edited The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the ’90s (Westview Press). She has appeared on ABC‘s Nightline and CNN Headline News, among other outlets, and has testified to the Senate Communications Subcommittee on budget reauthorization for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Her articles have appeared in various publications, including In These Times and the UAW’s Solidarity, and in books including Civil Rights Since 1787 (New York University Press) and Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism (New World Library). Jackson is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and has an M.A. in sociology from the New School for Social Research.

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BURNING THE PLANET FOR PROFIT (Revisited • A Media Lens exposé)

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Corporate Lobbying, A Lapsed 'Ecowarrior' and Compromised Media

Front men for the global corporate mafia. A numbskull plutocrat and a cynical social democrat lapdog. Could such men get elected anywhere without the active complicity of the mainstream media?

A MEDIA LENS ANALYSIS • First published on simulpost on sister site Cyrano's Journal, on 6 December 2005

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]fter 4.6 billion years of planetary history, we may become the first species to monitor our own extinction. In impressive detail, humankind is amassing evidence of devastating changes in the atmosphere, oceans, ice cover, land and biodiversity.

And yet mass media, politics, the education system and other realms of public inquiry demonstrate a stunning capacity to focus on what does not really matter. Meanwhile, the truly vital issues receive scant attention to the point of invisibility: the parlous prospects for humanity's survival and the root causes underlying the global environmental threat.

Current patterns of 'development' and consumerism, fuelled annually by billions of advertising dollars, are unsustainable. Huge corporations and powerful investors have governments and societal institutions in a stranglehold, delivering policies that demand endless 'growth' on a finite planet.

The Corporate Killers
Take the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the most influential business lobby group in the UK. Friends of the Earth (FoE) note that the core objective of the CBI, and other "corporate lobby groups who favour short-term profit over sustainable development", is to promote endless opportunities for business 'growth', and to do so by bending the ear of the UK government. (Friends of the Earth, 'Hidden Voices: The CBI, corporate lobbying and sustainability', June 2005)

FoE reported: "many companies are using their influence over Government to promote public policies that are bad for communities and the environment." As years of New Labour in power have shown: "the Government seems to readily accept the CBI arguments at face value." A major consequence is that the government "is failing to reach its targets to reduce greenhouse gases because it is promoting policies that encourage more pollution, such as significantly expanding airports following intense lobbying by big business lobby groups."

Tony Juniper, head of FoE in England & Wales, observes that the "CBI agenda is a simple one - to increase deregulation and reduce business taxes." There are "serious concerns about how the CBI uses the threat of potential damage to UK business and job losses to oppose regulations that would improve workers' rights, benefit the environment and deliver economic benefits." (FoE, ibid.)

Thus, Sir Digby Jones, CBI director-general, criticised even the government's modest target to reduce carbon dioxide as "risking the sacrifice of UK jobs on the altar of green credentials." (Andrew Taylor, 'Jobs warning over tough move on emissions', Financial Times, January 20, 2004). Note the standard rhetorical device of expressing concern for "jobs" when the focus of business worries is, in fact, "profits."

The CBI not only has a discernible influence over state policies, the government is "in thrall to the CBI." FoE explains why:

"There is a clear 'alignment of values' between the CBI and many similar figures in Government [in] that they broadly agree in minimising Government intervention in the market (ie neo-liberal economics)."

Moreover, the CBI is able to get "critical comments on Government policy put out through the media, which obviously attracts Government attention. This is further entrenched by many business journalists who simply do not challenge the CBI claims and accept them as representing totally the views of business." (FoE, ibid.)

As we have noted before, the corporate media industry is a vital component of the business world. It is therefore not surprising that journalists working in the business sections of the media - indeed, throughout the news media as a whole - promote corporate aims.

Corporate Defenders of Climate Myths

There are other corporate groups which, like the CBI, are determined to prioritise short-term greed. One of them is the Cato Institute, a US "non-profit public policy research foundation" which "seeks to broaden the parameters of public policy debate" to promote the "traditional American principles of limited government, individual liberty, free markets and peace."

This perspective satisfies the Institute's sponsors who mainly consist of "entrepreneurs, securities and commodities traders, and corporations such as oil and gas companies, Federal Express, and Philip Morris that abhor government regulation." ('"Evidence-based" research? Anti-environmental organisations and the corporations that fund them', October 19, 2005; www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=2099)

One of the Institute's "adjunct scholars" is Steven Milloy who publishes a website devoted to exposing “junk science.” Milloy has a background in lobbying for the tobacco industry. John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, analysts of the 'spin' industry, explain that “junk science" is the term that "corporate defenders apply to any research, no matter how rigorous, that justifies regulations to protect the environment and public health. The opposing term, 'sound science,' is used in reference to any research, no matter how flawed, that can be used to challenge, defeat, or reverse environmental and public health protection." (Corporate Watch, ibid.)

The Institute has published reports with titles such as 'Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn't Worry About Global Warming', and 'Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.' In May 2003, in response to a report by the Worldwatch Institute which linked climate change and severe weather events, Jerry Taylor, the Cato Institute's "director of natural resource studies" retorted:

"It's false. There is absolutely no evidence that extreme weather events are on the increase. None. The argument that more and more dollar damages accrue is a reflection of the greater amount of wealth we've created." (www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=21)

Another major US-based lobby group whose tentacles of influence extend across the Atlantic is the American Petroleum Institute, a powerful trade association for the US oil industry - an industry which has sister companies in many other countries, including the UK. Among the API's members are Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Halliburton, BP Amoco and Shell. Researcher Robert Blackhurst has described how the API has "sustained a long guerrilla campaign against climate scientists." A memo leaked to the New York Times in 1998 exposed its strategy of investing millions to muddy the science on climate change among "congress, the media and other key audiences." (Blackhurst, 'Clouding the atmosphere', The Independent, September 19, 2005)

The API recently funded a scientific paper in the journal Climate Research denying that 20th century temperatures had been unusually high, giving well-publicised ammunition to climate sceptics. After finding the paper's methods and assumptions had been flawed, five of the journal's editors resigned.

Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), an Amsterdam-based research and campaign group, notes that "Shell and BP Amoco, both formerly ardent critics of global warming theory, have shifted their strategies dramatically." CEO continues:

"These masters of climate greenwash have undergone expensive corporate makeovers and now present themselves as leaders in reducing CO2 emissions and supporting renewable energy." (www.corporateeurope.org/greenhouse/greenwash.html)

Shell and BP Amoco employ a sophisticated public relations approach:

"Expensive TV and newspaper advertisements portraying an environmentally-friendly image are at the heart of this strategy. In many cases, small-scale environmental projects which the companies fund are used to justify the green credentials of the corporation as a whole – projects which often cost less than the advertisements used to showcase them to the general public... Both Shell and BP Amoco continue to increase oil production year after year and have no intention of changing that in the next decades." (CEO, ibid.)

Corporate news media rarely report the influence of corporate lobby groups on governments, or expose their expensive PR campaigns, and how detrimental these business activities are for the climate stability of the planet.

The news media also take capitalism as a given, much like the laws of physics. What rare discussion there might be is only permitted to reinforce the corporate prejudice that the system is irreplaceable.

The 'Ecowarrior' and the War Criminal
For instance, the Independent recently granted extensive space to Sir Jonathan Porritt, formerly a great green hope in Britain, to promote his new book, 'Capitalism: As If The World Matters'.

He believes that "the emerging solutions [to the climate crisis] have to be made within the embrace of capitalism." (Porritt, 'How capitalism can save the world', Independent Extra, 8-page supplement, Independent, November 4, 2005)

Porritt, Blair's top environmental adviser, fails to see that current government policies are almost wholly opposed to social justice and environmental health. Instead, he claims that "almost all key policy processes continue to move slowly in the right direction" and that "the benefits of today's globalisation process still outweigh the costs."

For Porritt, once leader of the Green Party in England & Wales, this: "means working with the grain of markets and free choice, not against it. It means embracing capitalism as the only overarching system capable of achieving any kind of reconciliation between ecological sustainability, on the one hand, and the pursuit of prosperity and personal wellbeing, on the other." As for current ecological activism: "Unless it throws in its lot with this kind of progressive political agenda, conventional environmentalism will continue to decline."

We are to believe that Tony Blair - forever bending to the will of business and exposed as one of the most cynical and dishonest politicians in living memory - is at the vanguard of this "progressive political agenda":

"I admire a lot about him [Blair]. I do, genuinely. I have to keep saying this because people forget it: on climate change, if he hadn't done what he has done, we would be looking at a world in which there was no political leadership on this agenda." (Marie Woolf, 'Jonathon Porritt: The constant ecowarrior', The Independent, November 6 2005)

The Independent, owned by billionaire Sir Tony O'Reilly, can manage to provide an eight-page supplement for a former 'ecowarrior' to explain why environmentalism must throw in its lot with capitalism. But there are no multi-page supplements to present community initiatives and grassroot debates around the world on alternatives to the present disastrous system. We await the day when the Independent, or any other mainstream newspaper, publishes a major supplement on, for example, participatory economics, a radical vision detailed by ZNet's Michael Albert (see Albert, 'Parecon: Life After Capitalism', Verso, London, 2003; and www.parecon.org).

Tony Blair has put down his corporate cards on the table, declaring bluntly:

"The truth is no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially because of a long-term environmental problem." (Andrew Balls and Alan Beattie, 'Insurance for terror risk is "key to Gaza"', Financial Times, September 16, 2005)

But Ross Gelbspan, author and journalist, points to the essential truth that economics is subservient to nature, not the other way around:

“...nature’s laws are not about supply and demand. Nature’s laws are about limits, thresholds, and surprises. The progress of the Dow does not seem to influence the increasing rate of melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet; the collapse of the ecosystems of the North Sea will not be arrested by an upswing in consumer confidence.” (Gelbspan, ‘Boiling Point’, Perseus Books, 2004, pp. 128-129)

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About the Author

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Green New Deal “Climate Kids” Should Hijack the Impeachment Conversation

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Patrick Walker
tactics & strategies

Forged in the fire--and sharpened by heated arguments with critics of my climate impeachment scheme--this piece is my comprehensive strategic case explaining why impeaching Trump for his climate crimes may be the key to saving the Green New Deal, and thereby civilization itself. All fans of the GND--especially heroic young climate activists--have a vital interest in reading my passionate arguments here.

::::::::

Turning Wasteful Loss into Brilliant Gain--While Having Juvenile Fun

[dropcap]A [/dropcap]wise old political adage says, "When you're 'splainin', you ain't gainin'." We need a new, ad hoc version to wake up "climate kid" supporters of an existentially crucial Green New Deal, now sitting politely bored--as through their principal's speech--while Democrat elders crowd them off stage with their heated-but-trivial Mueller-based debate on whether or not to impeach Trump. I propose this: "When they're 'splainin', you ain't gainin'." It's frankly depressing to see passionate, idealistic kids hold still like respectable middle-aged Rotarians while adults with shallow, juvenile agendas waste civilization's ever-more-precious time and dominate the floor.

Mature values and a youthful middle finger--just what we need now!
(Image by fabola)

Hey, climate kids, it's time to act like kids and get seriously rowdy. This is one "adult" conversation you desperately need to disrupt. And not merely disrupt but actually hijack. The future of the Green New Deal--and therefore of civilization itself--may depend on you remembering that you're still kids and therefore totally smashing up what the old farts had planned. You've already earned your maturity street creds by your incredibly sane, responsible climate activism; it's time to have some delinquent, disruptive, old-fart-torturing fun.

As an old fart who never quite grew up--what the Sunrise climate kids more politely call a "Young at Heart" supporter--I've already started fracking with the old folks' minds like someone a fraction of my age. In fact, not just once but twice. But see, I can't do this alone; after a few hours of "delinquent" head-butting with fellow AARP types, I desperately need a nap. And juvenile delinquency--however urgently needed--can quickly look a little pathetic when not perpetrated by actual juveniles. Still, I do a pretty decent job, and the seriously pissed-off comments under the Nation of Change versions of my two "delinquent" articles (see here and here) show I've gotten deeply under Democrat geezers' sagging skins.

Now I know, this isn't just about flipping off the pathetic old gasbags. You really, desperately want to do something about climate, since your generation has a bigger stake in this than anyone else. Fair enough. That's why I totally grok the Sunrise approach of letting younger folks be the climate leaders. And your wise approach of politely but forcefully confronting political leaders proves you fully grok the value of maintaining respectability amidst planned disruption. I passionately support you precisely because your approach is so effective.

"If Democrats are unwilling to do the right thing and further assist that suicide, today's real grownups--you climate kids--must embarrass them into doing so..."

But my pet disruption idea--impeaching Trump for his extremist attack on climate--already takes care of the respectability element. See, you won't be disrupting the conversation just to disrupt it; you'll actually be contributing something highly relevant--or as overpaid respectable attorneys say, "on point." In fact, far more on point than what the purported grownups are saying. Therein lies the special beauty of my climate impeachment scheme: it's rationally and morally sounder than anything the so-called adults are pushing, while having the added juvenile thrill value of pissing them off to the maximal max.

As a passive-aggressive old fart desperately clinging to the last tatters of youth, I passionately relish that juvenile thrill. I believe the relevant juvenile joy here is called "hostile obedience": obeying so totally and pointlessly that your very obedience is an act of satiric ridicule toward your "respectable" elders. What you're obeying is the ardent desire of "progressive" Democrat elders to impeach Trump--who richly deserves impeachment. But your stated reason for impeaching him--his way-beyond-criminal climate policy--makes a cosmic mockery of the far shallower reasons put forth by his conventionally progressive would-be impeachers.

Though I hope you'll fully savor the juvenile thrill of one-upping one's hypocritical elders--one of my fondest youthful memories--there's far more to gain here (as I'm sure you'll realize) than sumptuous juvenile thrills. What may be at stake is the entire future of the Green New Deal (GND)and therefore of humanity itself. That's what I'll address in the rest of my article.

Cleared for Takeoff: The Constitutional Legitimacy of Our Impeachment Talk Hijack

As I just noted, Trump richly deserves impeachment; he probably did from Inauguration Day. Congressional Democrats never seemed much interested in the many promising grounds for impeaching Trump; instead, fixated on a flimsy Russia-collusion narrative that might be their party's undoing, they've focused exclusively on obstruction-of-justice charges related to the recently ended Mueller investigation. An investigation that, by the way, cleared Trump of the charge Democrat-friendly media had obsessed over. Unless powerful Democrat House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi can be persuaded it's politically wise to do so (knowing the failure of Russiagate, she's rightly concerned about the 2020 election), Trump's impeachment for obstructing the Mueller investigation probably isn't happening. But numerous progressive House Democrats disagree with Pelosi, and a noisy--and from a climate perspective, time-wasting, debate--is taking place.

So, young climate warrior friends, what does Democrats' impeachment kerfuffle have to do with us? A lot--and a lot more than meets the eye.

As I already highlighted, we're being crowded off stage: public air time spent debating Trump's impeachment for obstruction of justice is time not spent discussing humanity's climate crisis and the Green New Deal. Considering politicians' and media's long years of indefensible silence about the climate change, now grown into a global emergency, any prolonged distraction from climate talk seems intolerable.

But here's a perfectly satisfactory solution: hijack the impeachment conversation and make it--provided we have legitimate constitutional grounds--all about Trump's way-beyond-criminal climate policy.

Constitutional questions aside, no reasonable person can doubt the moral abomination of Trump's assault on climate--amidst a global climate emergency. Columnist (and The Nation publisher) Katrina vanden Heuvel rightly lambastes Trump's policy as not merely climate denial but "embracing climate destruction"; she scathingly--but accurately--brands Trump himself "a warrior for climate calamity." TomDispatch's founding editor Tom Engelhardt notes that--should civilization survive to remember Trump at all--Trump will be remembered for none of his deeds and misdeeds that now obsess digital and print media, but for the historic "crime against humanity" of his climate policy.

So shouldn't we be impeaching Trump for the extremist attack on climate, the unprecedented crime against humanity he's committing? Common sense says hell yes; what good are constitutional impeachment provisions if they can't remove a madman who's endangering--perhaps knowingly endangering--not just our nation but human civilization itself?

Fortunately, a large body of reputable legal opinion backs common sense. According to constitutional scholars consulted by Politico, grave misdeeds by presidents and other high officers need not be crimes under any statutory law to be impeachable offenses. An article by Albert Broderick, originally published in the American Bar Association Journal around the time of Nixon's impeachment, confirms this nicely (emphases mine): "Impeachment must be understood as a political, rather than judicial, process that does not require a criminal offense but must be grounded on serious misconduct."

It's hard to imagine more serious misconduct than aggressively attacking an endangered climate in ways that put the future of civilization in jeopardy. Unlike actual hijacks of planes, which are of course crimes, our "delinquent" hijack of the impeachment conversation seems legally cleared for takeoff.

(Not to engage in overkill, but since our constitutional legitimacy in calling for Trump's climate-based impeachment is vitally important, I thought I'd cite a few more reputable legal sources backing our position. These articles from the Constitutional Rights Foundation and Common Cause support the notion that grave misdeeds violating the public trust--not statutory crimes--are the standards for impeachment. And this piece, created by a Findlaw team of lawyer writers and editors, enumerates four legal interpretation schools--of which only one holds that impeachable offense must be crimes--without endorsing any. Interested readers could easily find many more reputable sources showing that impeachment based on grievous misdeeds that aren't indictable legal crimes has extremely solid legal standing.).

How Trump's Climate Impeachment Is Key to GND Strategy

In my previous article, I'd already pointed out one huge advantage of climate and GND activists demanding that Democrats impeach Trump over his criminally insane climate policy. Namely--and this applies only to Democrats' overcrowded field of presidential candidates--it's the perfect, unavoidable litmus test for finding out which Democrats are serious, gutsy, and committed enough to do the unprecedented political heavy lifting an effective GND will demand.

Only candidates willing to buck their party leadership and stick their necks out for as radical and unconventional an idea as impeaching Trump for his worse-than-criminal climate policy are ready to lead the long, uphill fight for an effective GND. No one rejecting this impeachment scheme--which is really merely principled common sense--is likely to have what it takes. And this is an almost-perfect litmus test; it doesn't involve any easy present promise easily forgotten after the election, but demands taking a public, gutsy position right now. See who's willing to make that gutsy position, and you know who has the goods to fight with commitment for an effective GND.

But the value of impeaching Trump over climate policy goes way beyond being a powerful GND litmus test for Democrat presidential candidates. It's actually part of a grand GND political strategy--the only strategy I know of that's fully addressed the almost-insurmountable political obstacles facing the GND. If the strategy seems radical, it's because the obstacles are radical--and totally undiscussed by any candidate now claiming support for the GND. Because Sunrise and the other "climate kids" were the only ones radical and principled enough to publicly demand the GND, I'm addressing you with this strategy, because most of my fellow older adults are clearly not radical and principled enough to get it. So please listen up, because this strategy is perhaps the only truly valuable thing I as an older, experienced activist have to offer you.

No GND advocates I know of are discussing it, but by far the biggest obstacle to passing an effective GND is today's Republican Party. As haters of climate science and government spending on behalf of average people--two crucial elements of the GND--Republicans see the GND as an existential threat to everything their party stands for. They're not wrong, which is why Sunrise was so smart to take its fight for the GND to Congressional Democrats. It's totally fair to say today's GOP is incompatible with an effective GND: one or the other has to die. That's why a Democratic candidate like Joe Biden, who wants to get along with congressional Republicans, is such a horrible, suicidal choice to lead the long, uphill fight for the GND. We need a Democrat GND champion who wants 1) to smash Republicans in a 2020 electoral landslide and 2) to put the GOP as a climate-denying party on permanent life support--much as it was in the days of FDR's original New Deal.

Please don't think I'm being partisan. Anyone who's even glanced at my writings knows how scathing I can be about Democrats. In fact, no one could propose anything that disgusts and threatens the Democrat leadership as much as the principled climate impeachment proposal I'm making here. But the facts are clear: the climate-killing extremism of today's GOP is suicidal for humanity and therefore should be suicidal for the party itself. The problem with Democrats is that they like to keep the GOP around as a scapegoat for their own unwillingness to abandon their own rich donors and pass rational popular policies like Medicare for All. Or the Green New Deal. Don't think for a second the Democrat leadership wants to defeat Republicans in a 2020 landslide. In that case, all the blame for not passing the GND--or for watering it down and fatally weakening it--would be on them. Only Democrats looking to demolish Republicans in a 2020 landslide are real friends to the GND.

Which brings us back to impeaching Trump for his terrorist war on climate. As I've said myself, Trump's insanely extremist climate policies are just normal Republican climate policies--on steroids. To some extent, Trump being history's foremost climate criminal is just a matter of timing: Trump became president when news of humanity's climate crisis was at its worst, though any Republican president would have done some version of the same.

But Trump brought unique personality elements to the presidency--elements that caused him to deliver standard Republican climate policies at their extremist worst. Trump is both a headstrong authoritarian and a high-stakes gambler, two qualities that have made putting him in charge of climate policy catastrophic for humanity. But by intensifying the extremism of normal Republican climate policy (elevating it to climate terrorism), Trump has probably done more than any single person to assist the suicide of today's GOP.

If Democrats are unwilling to do the right thing and further assist that suicide, today's real grownups--you climate kids--must embarrass them into doing so. By demanding Trump be impeached for the most morally and intellectually compelling reason--an essentially Republican climate policy that threatens to end civilization itself--climate kids would set Republicans up for electoral demolition in 2020. If we offer voters a stark choice between a popular Green New Deal and civilization-threatening climate terrorism, which side would you bet on to win in a landslide?

Publicizing Republican climate terrorism by impeaching Trump for it now is the best way to set Republicans up for catastrophic defeat in 2020, paving the way for passing the GND. I strongly urge our heroic climate kids to demand Trump's impeachment for climate terrorism now. Any Senate Republicans who wouldn't convict simply prove that Trump's climate terrorism is standard GOP policy.

In my next piece, I'll discuss another brilliant part of this strategy: how it exposes Democrats as frauds if they won't take up the commonsense call to impeach Trump for by far his worst crime.

About the Author

Distinguished Collaborator Patrick Walker is co-founder of Revolt Against Plutocracy (RAP) and the Bernie or Bust movement it spawned. Before that, he cut his activist teeth with the anti-fracking and Occupy Scranton PA movements. No longer with RAP, he actively seeks collaborators to build a Bernie or Bust successor movement--one dedicated to fighting neoliberals of both parties (but especially neoliberal Democrats) under Trump. A happily married man for over 10 years, Patrick has lost his beloved wife Ginger to colon cancer. He resides with his clever stepdaughter and two ineffably charming Sheltie dogs in East Amherst, NY. Patrick can be reached at: pjwalkerzorro@yahoo.com.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

Americans’ Extinction Denial Syndrome

Another important dispatch from The Greanville Post. Be sure to share it widely.

[dropcap]I [/dropcap]was talking yesterday with a woman at HealthGuard, a water testing firm we’ve used in the past to test the water in our artesian well for contaminants. We hadn’t done it in five years because the last test showed it to be free of anything nasty, from coliform bacteria to pesticide traces and heavy metals — so pure in fact we could bottle it and sell it.

We decided to test the well again because although we live on 2.3 wooded acres and don’t use chemicals on the property ourselves, we are surrounded by suburban homes that, as evidenced by most of their lawns being totally lacking in dandelions, clearly use gallons glyphosate-laced Roundup property.

I turns out the test we had done before tested for everything but herbicides, so we are testing now for glyphosate too. The woman at HealthGuard said it was becoming a popular test, and that, as I know, the chemical is showing up everywhere.

I don’t know what the test results will be. Our well is 160 feet deep, so we may be lucky. I’m sure that any glyphosate will be minimal compared to what’s in the public water supply in our town, which had to shut down several of its system’s wells because of contamination with PFAs from a now closed Naval air station two miles from us. Fingers crossed.

But the situation with our well and the paucity of dandelions in our neighborhood got me thinking about how crazy our society is.

When I go into a Lowe’s or Home Depot store to buy plumbing or electrical supplies, I’m assaulted as soon as I go in the door by the smell of lawn chemicals. Plastic jugs of Roundup are stacked six feet high right near the entrance of these stores for easy grabbing by shoppers heading for the garden supply area. At Costco, I found myself in line at the checkout counter behind a man who had a huge bag of grass seed that the label on the bag promised was already treated with “fertilizer and weed killer for a perfect lawn.” The weed killer, I discovered on checking further, is of course Roundup.

Most of Europe has banned Roundup because of both a determination that is carcinogenic and because its widespread use has been linked to the decimation of the world’s bees, essential for the pollination of some 90 percent of all plants and of 30 percent of food crops, and Monsanto/Bayer has so far lost three major lawsuits levying a total of over $2.4 billion in punitive damages against the company for cancers found caused by their glyphosate herbicide. Yet despite all this, the American public wants its pristine green lawns, unblemished by dandelions and other transgressors like violets, buttercups and wild strawberries.

Glyphosate cancer risk and bee die-offs be damned!

Mentioning this bizarre attitude to the woman at HealthGuard, she replied, “I know. It’s crazy. People actually tell me they’re stocking up on Roundup because they say, ‘I’m sure the government is going to ban it eventually, but it really works, so I want to have it to use.’”

This is a bit like the people who insist on buying incandescent light bulbs and stocking up on them for fear they’ll eventually disappear, even as LED lighting keeps getting better and cheaper, and uses a fraction of the electricity required by incandescent light bulbs. In our house, switching to LEDs has reduced our electrical bill by nearly two-thirds, lighting being the main share of our home’s electrical use.

What are Americans thinking? Are they even thinking?

We just had a report issued by a group of environmental scientists in Australia from the National Centre for Climate Restoration. They predict that if climate change continues on its present track, human civilization (such as it is!) and even humanity itself as a species, will face an “existential risk” as soon as 2050, which is just 31 years from now. The frightening report got major play on the major networks like CBS, ABC and CNN, and in USA Today, but it was basically a one-shot deal. The story came out early this week and by Friday the news cycle had moved on and the dire prediction of mankind’s doom is now history. People are still buying oversized cars, flying hither and yon for vacations, scarfing down beef that is produced on vast tracts of land and from cows that emit huge amounts of the global warming gas methane, commuting to and from work in cars driven by single drivers with no passengers that create massive traffic jams and living in outsized show homes requiring vast inputs of energy. And more incredibly, many are planning to vote in 2020 to re-elect President Trump, whose administration has been actively working to remove whatever minor measures were taken by the Obama administration to moderate US reliance on carbon-based fuels! Or for Democrats whose party leadership won’t even permit a presidential campaign debate on climate change policy!

This is of course all certifiable madness.

When a person lives in an abusive relationship and continues to stay with the abuser, we call it denial — a psychological problem that calls for professional intervention. When a soldier returns from war suffering from nightmares, hearing voices and having thoughts of violence or self-harm, but tries to “tough it out” and ends up killing him or herself, or others, we call it denial, a problem that should have been addressed by psychological experts at the Veterans Administration or elsewhere.

But when a whole nation of people, or half or more of them, hear that our whole civilization could collapse within a generation, that billions around the globe could die of climate induced starvation, war and weather disasters, that hundreds of millions, and indeed some entire countries like Bangladesh and Holland, as well as storied cities like New York, Los Angeles, Boston, New Orleans, Miami, London and Shanghai could be engulfed by the sea forcing epic migrations to higher ground, and they just go about their lives as if nothing will happen, it’s not called denial. When our corporate media ignore the biggest story in the history of humankind, or give it only passing attention for a day and then move on to talk about Trump’s latest lie about nobody protesting his visit to London or J. Lo’s latest wardrobe malfunction, it’s not called denial. It’s called normal behavior or “professional journalism.”

This report from Australia — a country that is already facing appalling heat waves as the globe heats up — should be producing screaming headlines on news channels and front pages everywhere. So should reports, also low-balled so far, that the ice sheets in Greenland and in both eastern and western Antarctica are melting far faster than almost anyone imagined earlier, such that a sea-level rise of not three or six feet, but 20 feet or more by 2100, is probable unless drastic changes are made in the burning of fossil fuels. Indeed the reality is most of us who are adults today could witness seas that are 3-6 feet higher by 2050.

Without such honest, responsible, and continuing news reporting Americans, most of whom prefer to get their news homogenized, filtered, sterilized and censored by the likes of Fox News and CNN, or curated and buried by “serious” papers like the New York Times or Washington Post, will just continue doing what they’ve been doing: voting — if they vote — on the basis of diversionary issues like abortion, gay and lesbian rights, terror “threats,” and the latest gaffes by candidates for high political office, all the while running their air-cons set to 60 degrees in summer and their furnaces set to 70 in winter, mindlessly opposing regulations to reduce or eliminate coal and oil as fuels, stockpiling wasteful incandescent lightbulbs and that damned Roundup herbicide, and in the process sending us all — including much of innocent creation — marching to extinction.

What about the kids and the grandkids, you might well ask. Well, on the evidence, people these days don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about their progeny.

In fact, as I think of it, that is one of the things that happen in stressed environments in the natural world. Birds and mammals faced with a loss of habitat and stressed with the day-to-day and minute-to-minute challenge of surviving are known to often abandon their young, or to stop reproducing. Maybe that is the stage many of us are in now without realizing it. As the mad globalization of the economy and the funneling of all wealth to the tiniest segment of the ultra-rich carries on apace, perhaps the rest of us, struggling just to make the monthly payments for shelter and food, are losing that primal urge so critical to species survival: a drive to raise and protect our young.

If so, and if the rest of the world acts similarly to us Americans, the story of mankind is probably already over.

The battle against the Big Lie killing the world will not be won by you just reading this article. It will be won when you pass it on to at least 2 other people, requesting they do the same.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS


	REVOLUTIONARY WISDOM
	“There are three kinds of violence. The first, the mother of all the others, is the institutional violence, the one that legalizes and perpetuates the dominations, the oppressions and the exploitations, the one that crushes and flattens millions of men in its silent and well oiled wheels. The second is revolutionary violence, which arises from the desire to abolish the first. The third is repressive violence, the object of which is to stifle the second by making itself the auxiliary and the accomplice of the first violence, the one that engenders all the others. There is no worse hypocrisy to call violence only the second, by pretending to forget the first, which gives birth to it, and the third which kills it. ” –Dom Helder Camara, Brazilian Archbishop and liberation theologian

On ‘Hottest Day in History of France,’ World Told ‘Do Not Look Away’ as Police Tear-Gas Climate Campaigners in Paris

by Andrea Germanos, staff writer, Common Dreams

"Watch this video and ask yourself," said Greta Thunberg, "who is defending who?"

The battle against the Big Lie killing the world will not be won by you just reading this article. It will be won when you pass it on to at least 2 other people, requesting they do the same.

‘Now We Know Oil Is More Toxic Than We Thought’ (CounterSpin interview with Riki Ott on Exxon Valdez spill)

Janine Jackson interviewed Riki Ott about looking back on the Exxon Valdez oil spill for the March 27, 2009, episode of CounterSpin—an interview that was reaired for the June 14, 2019, show. This is a lightly edited transcript

BURNING THE PLANET FOR PROFIT (Revisited • A Media Lens exposé)

Corporate Lobbying, A Lapsed 'Ecowarrior' and Compromised Media

Green New Deal “Climate Kids” Should Hijack the Impeachment Conversation

Patrick Walker tactics & strategies

Americans’ Extinction Denial Syndrome

The battle against the Big Lie killing the world will not be won by you just reading this article. It will be won when you pass it on to at least 2 other people, requesting they do the same.

by Andrea Germanos,
staff writer, Common Dreams

Patrick Walker
tactics & strategies