Monday, August 17, 2020

Business as Usual Equals Many Extra Deaths from Global Warming

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Is it already too late to stop global warming? That question is not asked with thoughts of throwing up hands in despair and giving up. Rather, that question must be asked in the context of mitigating future damage to whatever degree might yet be possible.

The context here is that the carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases thrown into the atmosphere don’t magically disappear but will have effects that will persist for centuries. A ton saved today is a ton saved tomorrow.

There are the mass disruptions that humanity will almost certainly see from dramatic rises in sea levels and the disruptions to agricultural patterns and sea life. Then there is the human health impact. In what its authors say is the most detailed attempt yet undertaken to quantify what the future cost of global warming will be in terms of mortality, a new scientific paper predicts the future will see significant increases in deaths.

Sixteen researchers, collaborating on a National Bureau of Economic Research paper titled “Valuing the Global Mortality Consequences of Climate Change Accounting for Adaptation Costs and Benefits,” estimate that under “business as usual” — that is, Earth’s current trend of steadily increasing greenhouse gas emissions continues — there would be 85 extra deaths per 100,000 people annually by the end of the 21st century. To put that statistic in perspective, all the world’s cancers currently are responsible for 125 deaths per 100,000 people, according to World Health Organization data. Or to be put it another way, the 85 extra deaths represent a toll comparable to the global total of deaths from infectious diseases in 2018.

As would be expected, the increased deaths will be disproportionally suffered in the Global South. Although the financial cost of mitigation is predicted to be higher in the advanced capitalist countries than elsewhere, the easing of cold weather in winter months might actually cause death rates to decline in high-latitude, high-income locations. The authors put that possibility in stark terms with this comparison:

“The costs of climate change induced mortality risks are distributed unevenly around the world. Despite the gains from adaptation … there are large increases in mortality risk in the global south. For example, in Accra, Ghana, climate change is predicted to cause damages equivalent to approximately 160 additional deaths per 100,000 annually under [the business as usual scenario] in 2100. In contrast, there are gains in many impact regions in the global north, including in Oslo, Norway, where we predict that the equivalent of approximately 230 lives per 100,000 are saved annually. These changes are equal to an 18% increase in Accra’s annual mortality rate and a 28% decline in Oslo’s.”

And thus their conclusion that “Today’s poor bear a disproportionately high share of the global mortality risks of climate change, as current incomes (as well as current average temperatures) are strongly correlated with future climate change impacts.” In other words, those least responsible for global warming will pay the highest price for it.

To make these predictions, the authors gathered mortality statistics from 41 countries accounting for 55 percent of the world’s population, which they say enables them to have put together a more comprehensive analysis than previously attempted by earlier studies.

It won’t be pretty for our descendants

In a different scenario, under which greenhouse gases are stabilized in coming years, the expected number of excess deaths would be less, although still concentrated in the Global South. Under this scenario, the amount of carbon dioxide equivalent is presumed to stabilize at above 500 parts per million (ppm), and although that is far less than the “business as usual” scenario, it should be remembered that today’s carbon dioxide equivalent content is 407 ppm. And that is with the recent downward blip thanks to the pandemic. To use non-scientific terminology for what would happen in a 500 ppm world, our descendants will be screwed.

To have a hope of keeping the eventual total of global warming from the start of the Industrial Revolution to under 2 degrees Celsius, considered the outside limit before uncontrollable, catastrophic environmental disruptions are triggered, atmospheric greenhouse gases will have to be held to not much more than present-day levels and then brought down.

Without a drastic change, soon, in global output of greenhouse gases — and no such change is anywhere in sight — even the scenario of stabilizing greenhouse gases at 500 ppm seems out of reach. But even if we could suddenly convert to a carbon-neutral economy and cease adding net gains to atmospheric greenhouse gases, it may already be too late. More worrisome still, the effects of global warming are occurring faster than expected.

The Arctic is warming two to three times faster than Earth is overall. The resulting faster than expected loss of land ice contributes to a faster sea level rise and the loss of sea ice adds to global warming in a feedback loop. That’s because a dark ocean surface absorbs solar radiation up to 10 times more readily than the brighter sea ice surface. In a 2019 paper, “Radiative Heating of an Ice-Free Arctic Ocean,” published in Geophysical Research Letters, three oceanographers and atmospheric researchers calculate that if the Arctic Ocean becomes ice-free, the loss of the ice’s reflective power radiating solar energy back into space would be the equivalent to adding one trillion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That would be roughly equal to adding 25 years of additional global CO₂ emissions.

Although an ice-free Arctic Ocean is still generally predicted to be well into the future, that future might arrive much sooner than expected. Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey, publishing this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, believe it is possible for the Arctic to be ice-free as soon as 2035, a possibility based on study of Arctic sea ice during the last interglacial period, when Arctic land summer temperatures were 4 to 5 degrees C. higher than the pre-industrial baseline. By one measure, current temperatures above 60 degrees north latitude have already risen about 3 degrees C. since 1900.

There’s plenty of bad news to go around

As it is, predictions of what the world will look like are increasingly dire. For example, a 2015 paper by nine scientists led by geologist Andrea Dutton at the University of Florida published in the journal Science found that when global temperatures in the past were between 1 and 2 degrees C. above the pre-industrial base temperature, sea levels rose six to nine meters. What that finding means is that humanity may have already committed itself to an eventual sea level rise of that magnitude.

Need more? A 2016 paper published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, authored by 19 climate scientists from the United States, France, Germany and China and led by James Hansen, predicts that the melted freshwater from melting glaciers will add to the other scenarios to create a feedback loop that could culminate in a sea level rise of “several meters” in 50 to 150 years.

Still another paper, “Explaining Ocean Warming: Causes, Effects and Consequences,” concludes that the mean global ocean temperature will increase by as much as 4 degrees C. by 2100. This 2016 paper states that Earth has tipped into a heat imbalance since 1970, and this excess heating has thus far been greatly ameliorated because the world’s oceans have absorbed 93 percent of the enhanced heating since the 1970s. This accumulated heat is not permanently stored, but can be released back into the atmosphere, potentially providing significant feedback that would accelerate global warming. Dozens of climate scientists from around the world contributed peer-reviewed work to this report, research that in turn is based on more than 500 peer-reviews papers.

There is plenty more, but perhaps the foregoing is sufficient. And so what is the world doing? Very little. The December 2019 meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 25) in Madrid concluded with the world’s governments saying the conference “Notes with concern the state of the global climate system” and “Decides to hold, at its twenty-sixth (2020) and twenty-seventh (2021) sessions, round tables among Parties and non-Party stakeholders on pre-2020 implementation and ambition.” The time for “noting” there may be a problem would seem to be well past. A year earlier, at COP24 in Katowice, Poland, the world’s governments agreed to a rulebook with no real enforcement mechanism. And at COP23 in Bonn, participants congratulated themselves for their willingness to talk and agreed they would talk some more.

And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut liked to say. We are fortunate that hot air from political leaders doesn’t add to global warming, however weighed down they are by the piles of corporate money that keep “solutions” at the level of talking rather than action. Our descendants are not likely to be amused.

White Christian Bigotry

by JAMES HAUGHT
AUGUST 17, 2020

Racism is much stronger among America’s white Christians than among churchless whites – and it always has been. That’s the message of a new book by social analyst Robert Jones, head of the Public Religion Research Institute.

White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity contends that white churches didn’t merely adapt the nation’s surrounding racism – but actually fostered it, locking it into the culture. Today, white Christians display more prejudice than non-Christians.

Here’s a sample: PRRI agents asked thousands of people whether police killings of unarmed black men are mere “isolated incidents” or if they reveal deep-rooted hostility to African Americans. Among white evangelicals – the heart of the Republican Party – 71 percent chose “isolated incidents.” But just 38 percent of churchless whites agreed.

Another example: Some 86 percent of white evangelicals think the Confederate flag is “more a symbol of southern pride than of racism” – but only 41 percent of unafilliated whites share that view.

When PRRI interviewers read this statement – “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class” – churchless whites agreed at a much higher rate than white Christians did.

Obviously, white Americans who don’t attend church are more sympathetic to downtrodden minorities than white Christians are.

Jones grew up a Southern Baptist and studied at a Southern Baptist seminary before he awakened to the entrenched racism engulfing him. Now he is combating it.

Personally, when I grew up in the 1940s, racism was absolute in America. Blacks were treated as an inferior subspecies. They were forced to live in squalid ghettos, forbidden to enter all-white restaurants, hotels, theaters, pools, parks, clubs, schools, neighborhoods, jobs and the rest of white society. White supremacy steeped America so much that it seemed normal.

I became an adolescent newspaper reporter in the early 1950s, when the civil rights movement barely had begun. In a staff meeing, our editor vowed that our paper never would print “n—-r weddings.” Later, under a new publisher, the paper became a fierce crusader for integration and equality.

The private lake where I lived had bylaws requiring members to be “white Christians,” excluding Jews also. When I filed a proposal to admit minorities, leaders panicked and canceled the annual meeting. But the lake eventually integrated. (Technically, I didn’t fit the Christian requirement, because I was a renegade Unitarian.)

At that time, I didn’t notice that white churches fostered segregation any more than all other elements of society did. But I defer to the greater knowledge of Jones, who has spent his life studying this field.

As PRRI agents surveyed thousands of Americans, Jones created a “racism index” to identify which groups are most bigoted. White evangelicals scored highest at 78 percent. Irreligious whites rated 42 percent. He told CNN:

President Trump, who has put white supremacy front and center, has brought these issues from just barely below the surface into plain view…. White Christians have inherited a worldview that has Christians on top of other religions, men over women, whites over blacks.

Mining the Deep Sea

by JULIA BARNES

AUGUST 17, 2020

They want to mine the deep sea.

We shouldn’t be surprised. This culture has stolen 90% of the large fish, created 450 deoxygenated areas, and murdered 50% of the coral reefs. It has wiped out 40% of the plankton. It has warmed and acidified the water to a level not seen since the Permian mass extinction. And indeed, there is another mass extinction underway. Given the ongoing assault on the ocean by this culture, there is serious question as to whether the upper ocean will be inhabitable by the end of this century.

For some people, a best-case scenario for the future is that some bacteria will survive around volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean. Deep sea mining is about to make that an unlikely possibility.

It’s being touted as history’s largest mining operation.

They have plans to extract metals from deposits concentrated around hydrothermal vents and nodules – potato sized rocks – which are scattered across the sea floor.

Sediment will be vacuumed up from the deep sea, processed onboard mining vessels, then the remaining slurry will be dumped back into the ocean. Estimates of the amount of slurry that will be processed by a single mining vessel range from 2 to 6 million cubic feet per day.

I’ve seen water go from clear to opaque when an inexperienced diver gives a few kicks to the sea floor.

Now imagine 6 million cubic feet of sediment being dumped into the ocean. To put that in perspective, that’s about 22,000 dump trucks full of sediment – and that’s just one mining vessel operating for one day. Imagine what happens when there are hundreds of them. Thousands of them.

Plumes at the mining site are expected to smother and bury organisms on the sea floor. Light pollution from the mining equipment would disrupt species that depend on bioluminescence. Sediment plumes released at the surface or in the water column would increase turbidity and reduce light, disrupting the photosynthesis of plankton.

A few environmental groups are calling for a moratorium on deep sea mining. Meanwhile, exploratory mining is already underway. An obscure organization known as the International Seabed Authority has been given the responsibility of drafting an underwater mining code, selecting locations for extraction, and issuing licenses to mining companies.

Some companies claim that the damage from deep sea mining could be mitigated with proper regulations. For example, instead of dumping slurry at the surface, they would pump it back down and release it somewhere deeper. Obviously, regulations will not stop the direct harm to the area being mined. But even if the most stringent regulations were put in place, there still exists the near-certainty of human error, pipe breakage, sediment spills, and outright disregard for the rules. As we’ve seen with fisheries, regulations are essentially meaningless when there is no enforcement. 40% of the total catch comes from illegal fishing. Quotas are routinely ignored and vastly exceeded. On land, we know that corporations will gladly pay a fine when it is cheaper to do so than it is to follow the rules.

But all this misses the point which is that some activities are so immoral, they should not be permitted under any circumstances. Permits and regulations only serve to legalize and legitimize the act of deep sea mining, when a moratorium is the only acceptable response.

Canadian legislation effectively prohibits deep sea mining in Canada’s territorial waters. Ironically, Canadian corporations are leading the effort to mine the oceans elsewhere.

A spokesperson from the Vancouver-based company Deep Green Metals attempted to defend deep sea mining from an environmental perspective, “Mining on land now takes place in some of the most biodiverse places on the planet. The ocean floor, on the other hand, is a food-poor environment with no plant life and an order of magnitude less biomass living in a larger area. We can’t avoid disturbing wildlife, to be clear, but we will be putting fewer organisms at risk than land-based operations mining the same metals.” (as cited in Mining Watch https://miningwatch.ca/news/2020/6/16/deep-sea-mining-environmental-solution-or-impending-catastrophe).

This argument centers on a false choice. It presumes that mining must occur, which is absurd. Then, it paints a picture that the only area affected will be the area that is mined. In reality, the toxic slurry from deep sea mining will poison the surrounding ocean for hundreds of miles, with heavy metals like mercury and lead expected to bio-accumulate in everyone from plankton, to tuna, to sharks, to cetaceans.

A study from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stated that “A very large area will be blanketed by sediment to such an extent that many animals will not be able to cope with the impact and whole communities will be severely affected by the loss of individuals and species.”

The idea that fewer organisms are at risk from deep sea mining is an egregious lie. Scientists have known since 1977 that photosynthesis is not the basis of every natural community. There are entire food webs that begin with organic chemicals floating from hydrothermal vents. These communities include giant clams, octopuses, crabs, and 10-foot tube worms, to name a few. Conducting mining in these habitats is bad enough, but the effects go far beyond the mined area.

Deep sea mining literally threatens every level of the ocean from surface to seabed. In doing so, it puts all life on the planet at risk. From smothering the deep sea, to toxifying the food web, to disrupting plankton, the tiny organisms who produce two thirds of the earth’s oxygen, it’s just one environmental disaster after another.

The most common justification for deep sea mining is that it will be necessary to create a bright green future. A report by the World Bank found that production of minerals such as graphite, lithium, and cobalt would need to increase by nearly 500% by 2050 to meet the growing demand for so-called renewable energy.

There is an article from the BBC titled “Electric Car future May Depend on Deep Sea Mining”. What if we switched the variables, and instead said “the future of the ocean depends on stopping car culture” or “the future of the ocean depends on opposing so-called renewable energy”. If we take into account all of the industries that are eviscerating the ocean, it must also be said that “the future of the ocean depends on stopping industrial civilization”.

Evidently this culture does not care whether the ocean has a future. It’s more interested in justifying continued exploitation under the banner of green consumerism.

I do not detail the horrors of deep sea mining to make a moral appeal to those who are destroying the ocean. They will not stop voluntarily. Instead, I am appealing to you, the reader, to do whatever is necessary to make it so this industry cannot destroy the ocean.

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August 12-22, 1945: Washington Starts the Korean and Vietnam Wars

by H. BRUCE FRANKLIN

AUGUST 14, 2020

Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

August 14, 1945. The day Japan surrendered. I was eleven year old. I was crammed in the back of a pickup packed with other boys and girls, all yelling our hearts out as loud as we could to be heard over the cacophony of honking horns and howling air raid sirens. We were part of an impromptu motorcade weaving through the evening streets of our Flatbush neighborhood in Brooklyn. Everywhere we went—past the sidewalk fruit and vegetable stands, the storefront A&P exuding the smell of freshly ground coffee, the fish market and the kosher delicatessen along Avenue J, the small row houses and big apartment houses on the side streets, along Coney Island Avenue, with its rows of small stores dotted with small restaurants and soda fountains, where the electric trolley cars were clanging their bells nonstop—more and more cheering people poured onto the sidewalks, waving American flags and homemade signs, hugging, dancing. We kids in the truck were all screaming, “Peace! Peace! The war is over!” We believed this was the end of not just this war but of war itself, that we were all going to live the rest of our lives in a prosperous and victorious nation, on a peaceful planet.

Little did we know that our government, in the two weeks spanning our joyous day, was building the highway into two calamitous wars and a future of unending war. Nor did we know that this would be the last victory celebration of our lifetime.

On August 8, the Soviet Union (just as it promised at Potsdam) launched the largest land battle of the entire war against Japan. In Manchuria, they were joined by tens of thousands of Korean guerrillas, who had been fighting the Japanese invaders since 1932. Within a few days, Soviet forces destroyed the huge Japanese army on the Asia mainland. Six hundred thousand Japanese soldiers and hundreds of Japanese generals surrendered. Eighty thousand were killed, along with thirty thousand Soviet soldiers. Soviet troops and Korean partisans poured across Korea’s northern border with the USSR, pursuing the retreating Japanese forces and pro-Japanese Korean units.

Japan’s occupation of Korea was about to end. It had been brutal. During World War II, hundreds of thousands of Koreans were forced to

work in Japanese mines and factories, and countless numbers perished under the U.S. bombing, including ten thousand or more who died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Tens of thousands of Korean girls and young women had been forced to become “comfort women,” sex slaves for the Japanese army.

The fate of Korea had not previously been discussed by Washington and Moscow. The nearest U.S. forces were six hundred miles away in Okinawa and would be unable to get there for about a month. Frantic, the U.S. War Department (today called the Defense Department), decided to act, and to act fast.

On the night of August 10–11, 1945, Army Colonels Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel were ordered by the War Department to draw a line across Korea, a nation with a two-thousand-year history. They were given thirty minutes to complete the task. Neither of the two young men, each born a year before Japan annexed Korea in 1910, was familiar with Korea’s history or even its geography, other than what they could glean from a small outdated National Geographic map.^[1] The colonels chose the 38th parallel north latitude, simply because that put the capital city of Seoul under U.S. control. Their decision was forwarded to President Truman, who proposed to Premier Stalin that Japanese forces south of the line would be instructed to surrender to U.S. forces; those to the north were to surrender to the Soviets. Stalin made no objection, although Soviet forces could easily have occupied all of Korea weeks before American forces could arrive.^[2] Neither Washington nor Moscow consulted the Korean people about this decision.

Except for Seoul, most of southern Korea was agricultural, and most of the people were peasants working for a small class of large landowners. When the American military finally did arrive on September 8, they discovered two competing infrastructures in their occupation zone. One was a police state created by the Japanese occupiers, designed to protect the wealth and power of the large landowners and the mercantile elite in the cities and towns. The other consisted of hundreds of “People’s Committees” throughout the land, all part of the “Korean People’s Republic” proclaimed in Seoul just prior to the U.S. arrival. Guess which side the United States chose. Thus very quickly the Japanese military occupation was replaced by a strikingly similar American one.

All that was missing was a puppet government. This gap was filled a month after the U.S. Army began its occupation. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the predecessor of the CIA) anointed Syngman Rhee, who had been living in the United States for thirty-five years, as the head of government. A military plane flew Rhee from Washington to a secret meeting with General Douglas MacArthur in Tokyo, and MacArthur’s private plane, The Bataan, then whisked Rhee to his new capital of Seoul. In the ensuing three years of overt U.S. military occupation, Rhee’s Japanese- and now American-trained police waged a remorseless campaign to eradicate all dissidents suspected of being Communists or having communist leanings, including land reformers and those seeking independence from the United States.^[3]

In March 1948, during the third year of the occupation, the year-old Central Intelligence Agency, along with the intelligence divisions of the Departments of State, Navy, Air Force, and Army, prepared an eye-opening secret report: “The Current Situation in Korea.” This document recognized a fundamental class conflict between the overwhelming majority of poor people in the south and a “numerically small class which virtually monopolizes the native wealth and education of the country,” a “class that could not have acquired and maintained its favored position under Japanese rule” without “collaboration” with the occupiers. Seeking a ruler untainted by this collaboration left only such “imported expatriate politicians” as Syngman Rhee, “demagogues bent on autocratic rule.” The report recognized a “reservoir of popular resentment against the police,” who are “ruthlessly brutal in suppressing disorder.” It predicted that “Extreme Rightist Rhee” would sweep forthcoming elections held under the auspices of the U.N. because of “the demagogic appeal of the Extreme Right” and because “the Left will boycott the elections.” Then “Soviet propaganda would be provided with a substantial basis in fact for charging the regime with being ‘corrupt, reactionary, and oppressive.’” As for northern Korea, the CIA analysis acknowledged that “there is no reliable evidence of any serious disaffection” because of “the characteristically shrewd Soviet recognition of the basic needs of the native population (land reform, political participation, education, etc.).”

The report concluded that it is “unlikely that any government erected in South Korea under UN auspices could long survive the withdrawal of US forces unless it were to receive continuing and extensive US economic, technical, and military aid.”^[4] The CIA was quite right. From the election of Rhee until the outbreak of the full-scale Korean War in June 1950, civil war raged in South Korea. Major rebellions were put down only with the assistance of the U.S. military, and over a hundred thousand South Korean civilians were killed, many tortured to death.^[5]

Soviet forces withdrew from North Korea in 1948, leaving behind a government led by Kim Il Sung, a Communist who had spent much of his life as an anti-Japanese guerrilla leader in Manchuria. The southern government in Seoul and the northern government in Pyongyang have always agreed, then and now, on one thing: Korea is one nation, not two. Each has always claimed, then and now, that it is the legitimate government of Korea. Leading up to the events of June 1950, Seoul and Pyongyang each initiated attempts to reunify the nation—on its own terms, of course. The southern government’s attempts were crippled by several problems. As the CIA report made clear, it lacked a viable economy independent of massive U.S. aid. Historically, it had been dependent on the north for coal, industrial products, and, crucially, electric power generated by power plants on the Yalu River. In February 1950, the U.S. Congress enacted the Korean Aid Bill, mandating that all U.S. aid would cease “in the event of the formation in the Republic of Korea of a coalition government which includes one or more members of the Communist Party or of the party now in control of the government of North Korea.” The United States thus nullified any possibility of near-term peaceful unification. Then in May, South Korea’s first somewhat free election was a disastrous defeat for Rhee’s government, leaving him with only forty-five seats in the 210-seat Assembly, but not stopping his threats to invade North Korea.^[6]

Armed conflict across the 38th parallel between the equal-size armies of the two governments had been going on intermittently since 1949. There is still conflicting evidence about which one started the fighting before dawn on June 25, but the issue is unimportant. The North Korean army was in a position to drive across the foreign-imposed and arbitrary dividing line of the 38th parallel, taking advantage of the illegitimacy and unpopularity of the Rhee government, which helps explain the immediate collapse of the South Korean army.

But this was not the narrative we Americans heard. For us, the “beginning” of the war was framed as a repeat of the beginning of our World War II narrative: an unprovoked surprise attack by treacherous Asians. Washington still insists the 38^th Parallel, that line chosen by two young U.S. colonels, is an international border between two independent nations. It refuses to agree with North Korea that a state of war between the U.S. and North Korea no longer exists.

On the same day as our celebration of V-J Day, eight thousand miles away another people were celebrating the surrender of Japan quite differently. August 14 was the first day of the August Revolution, when the Vietnamese people rose up and in less than three weeks swept away Japanese and French control and established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

On September 2, Ho Chi Minh read Vietnam’s Declaration of Independence to half a million Vietnamese people jam-packed before him in Hanoi, the old capital of a new nation that had been fighting for its independence for more than two thousand years. “‘All men are created equal,’” he began. “‘They are endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.”^[7] Suddenly two warplanes appeared overhead. The crowd gazed up. They saw two of those weird-looking P-38 Lightning fighter-bombers. When they recognized the U.S. insignia on the planes, those half million people, acting like a single being, let out an earthshaking cheer. Just as we kids in the truck believed in America’s peaceful future, the Vietnamese believed that we Americans were their friends and allies, that we would be the champions of their freedom and independence from colonialism.

Little did they know that ten days earlier, on August 22, French president Charles de Gaulle had flown to Washington, where the Truman administration had agreed to finance, arm, transport, and sponsor a French invasion designed to overthrow the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and restore French colonial rule. This would be a joint French-American project. The United States would not only supply the weapons and the financing. It would also turn over to the French tens of thousands of Nazi troops, including Waffen-SS units, many of whom would be forced into the French Foreign Legion to be shock troops for invasion. A dozen U.S. troopships would be diverted from bringing GIs home from Europe to carrying the French invasion army—equipped with American weapons, tanks, warplanes, and jeeps—to Vietnam.^[8] This was arguably the beginning of America’s Vietnam War. It was also, as it turns out, the beginning of the American people’s movement against that war.

British troops that had been sent to Saigon to disarm the remaining Japanese forces had instead rearmed the Japanese, who had already been disarmed by the Vietnamese. Soon the Japanese joined the British and remnants of the French colonial forces to wage war against the newly declared independent nation of Vietnam. What was left of the Japanese air force, together with the British RAF, bombed and strafed any concentrations of armed Vietnamese they could find.^[9] Japanese troops were deployed to control the Saigon waterfront and port facilities.

So when the U.S. troopships carrying the French invasion army arrived in Saigon in the late fall of 1945, they were met by uniformed and armed Japanese soldiers, who saluted them on the docks and commanded machine guns on towers overlooking the U.S. ships. The sailors manning the American flotilla were profoundly shocked and outraged. Every single enlisted crewman on these ships signed petitions to Congress and the president condemning the U.S. government for participating in “imperialist policies” designed “to subjugate the native population of Vietnam.”^[10]

Much of the essay is excerpted from Franklin’s book Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War.

Notes.

1/ James F. Schnabel, United States Army in the Korean War: Policy and Direction; The First Year (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, United States Army, 1972), 8–11; Dean Rusk as told to Richard Rusk, As I Saw It (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 124. Rusk remembers the date of the line drawing as August 14, but here as in many places in this book, his memory is faulty. ↑

2/ Schnabel, United States Army in the Korean War. ↑

3/ Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 104–107. This widely available paperback is essential reading with a fine updated introduction to Cumings’s prodigious scholarship and cogent analysis, which have fundamentally changed our (and certainly my) knowledge and understanding of the history of Korea and the Korean War. ↑

4/ Central Intelligence Agency, “The Current Situation in Korea,” ORE 15-48, March 18, 1948. The nine-page report can be downloaded from the CIA’s online library at https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000258335.pdf. ↑

5/ See the excellent and well-documented account in Cumings, The Korean War, 110–146. ↑

6/ I. F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War (New York: Monthly Review Press, Second Modern Reader Paper Edition, 1971), 18. Originally published in 1952 after being rejected by twenty-eight publishers at the height of the Red Scare, Stone’s volume, with its priceless information and piercing analysis, remains an essential read for anyone interested in the political history of the Korean War even though subsequent scholarship has of course contradicted some of his surmises. ↑

7/ Ho Chi Minh, Selected Works, 4 vols. (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960–1962), 3:17–21. ↑

8/ Michel Gillen, “Roots of Opposition: The Critical Response to U.S. Indochina Policy, 1945–1954” (unpublished dissertation, New York University, 1991), 106–107. ↑

9/ Archimedes L. A. Patti, Why Viet Nam? Prelude to America’s Albatross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 325. ↑

10/ Gillen, “Roots of Opposition,” 117–122. ↑

Alliance for the Wild Rockies Stops Trump From Logging and Burning Another 85,000 acres of Idaho National Forest

by MIKE GARRITY AUGUST 17, 2020

Old-growth in Payette National Forest. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Two years ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Lost Creek-Boulder Creek Project in Idaho violated the Payette National Forest Plan and the National Forest Management Act. Trump’s lawless Forest Service disregarded the Court’s decision and approved the same project again late last year. The Alliance took the issue back to court and now Federal District Court Judge Winmill has stopped the project again, ruling that the Lost Creek Boulder Creek project continues to violate the Payette Forest Plan.

By ignoring a federal court’s mandate and moving forward with this project, the Forest Service attempts to insulate itself from a challenge on this crucial policy question: Is logging and burning 85,000 acres and bulldozing 25 miles of new roads forest restoration? The Alliance and the best available science contend that “restoration logging” is an oxymoron.

In terms Trump might comprehend, 85,000 acres is almost six times the size of Manhattan Island. Although the Payette Forest Plan limits the number of trees that could be cut to protect wildlife habitat, the agency thought it could get away with more logging by simply claiming logging isn’t logging – it’s “restoration but to do this they had to violate the Forest Plan.

What the Forest Plan requires

The Payette Forest Plan guides natural resource management activities on the Payette National Forest. It provides forest-wide, long-term management direction in the form of goals, objectives, standards, and guidelines designed to ensure that while there is a sustainable supply of timber, a sustainable population of native species in the forest must also be maintained. Considering the project is in federally-designated Critical Habitat for Bull Trout, which have been on the Endangered Species List for more than 20 years, extensive road-building and logging would do anything but restore a sustainable population of these iconic native fish.

In 2018 the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that the Forest Service’s decision to approve the Lost Creek-Boulder Creek Project was “arbitrary and capricious,” “constituted a violation of the National Forest Management Act,” and ordered the project be vacated. Specifically, the Court held that the project was not only inconsistent with the Payette Forest Plan, but that the agency had improperly adopted a new definition of “old forest habitat” for the Lost Creek Project area. The Court then directed the lower court to send the proposal back to the Forest Service to force the agency to comply with the law and Forest Plan.

While the national debt is skyrocketing Trump’s Forest Service decided it was more important to have taxpayers subsidize a $22 million project for the timber industry than to protect bull trout Critical Habit and the Rapid River Inventoried Roadless Area as required by law.

Conclusion

The undeniable fact is that Federal Court decisions are binding on the Forest Service. But the lawless Trump administration has a growing record of ignoring both the U.S. Constitution and Federal Court orders. Therefore we had little choice except to exercise our First Amendment rights under the Constitution and take Trump’s Forest Service back to court — especially considering the horrific precedent ignoring the Court sets for other illegal actions by federal agencies.

Dedication

Winning environmental lawsuits is always hard – but we are happy to dedicate this victory to one of Idaho’s environmental heroes, Ron Mitchell, who directed Idaho Sporting Congress and joined the Alliance and Native Ecosystems Council lawsuit to stop Trump’s Forest Service from decimating his beloved Payette National Forest.

Ron unfortunately died from a COVID-19 induced heart attack this summer. But while we are primarily interested in protecting forest ecosystems and bull trout critical habitat, we won this case in Ron Mitchell’s memory because he believed it is vitally important to ensure that the federal government honor the separation of powers and the checks and balances ensconced in our Constitution – and right now that’s the only thing keeping Trump from totally destroying America’s national forests and native species.

We would also like to thank Claudia Newman of the Bricklin Newman law firm in Seattle for representing and winning this case for us.

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