A billionaire who supported Trump in 2020 says he talks to Joe Manchin every week and urges him to 'stay tough'

Tom Porter

Thu, October 21, 2021, 

Nelson Peltz. David A. Grogan/CNBC/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

• Billionaire investor Nelson Peltz told CNBC that he phones Sen. Joe Manchin weekly.

• Peltz says he offers Manchin encouragement as the senator seeks to whittle down Biden's climate and social bill.

• Progressives say Manchin is in the pocket of big money donors, a claim he denies.

Billionaire investor Nelson Peltz told CNBC that he speaks to Sen. Joe Manchin weekly and offers him encouragement as the Democratic centrist seeks to whittle down President Joe Biden's sweeping social care and climate change reconciliation bill.

Peltz, in an interview Wednesday on CNBC's Halftime Report, praised the West Virginia senator for "keeping our elected officials somewhere in the middle."

"Joe is the most important guy in DC. Maybe the most important guy in America today," said Peltz, who added that he and Manchin have been friends for 10 years. "I call him every week and say, 'Joe, you're doing great. Stay tough. Stay tough, buddy.' He's phenomenal," said Peltz.

Manchin and fellow Democratic centrist Sen. Krysten Sinema of Arizona have objected to the scale and expense of Biden's proposed domestic spending program.

Biden had originally sought a $3.5 trillion bill, which would be passed using a mechanism called budget reconciliation requiring the support of all 50 Democratic senators.

But Manchin and Sinema's objections mean the bill has been significantly reduced, with a package around $1.5 trillion currently being discussed.

The opposition has enraged progressives, some of whom have accused Manchin of being in the pocket of wealthy donors and lobbyists, including energy industry billionaires who usually donate to Republican candidates.

In a CNN interview in September Manchin denied claims by Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez that he meets weekly with energy industry lobbyists, and said his objections to the larger reconciliation bill were based on concerns about inflation and government debt.

Peltz, the founder of Trian Partners, was formerly a supporter of Donald Trump, hosting a fundraiser for the former president at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, in February 2020, where according to CNN tickets cost half a million dollars per couple.

However he withdrew his support for Trump after the January 6 riot.

According to OpenSecrets.org, Manchin is one of the many Democratic and Republican lawmakers to whom Peltz has donated money.

Billionaire Trump Donor Says He Has Joe Manchin’s Ear: ‘I Call Him Every Week’

Peter Wade

ROLLING STONE 
Thu, October 21, 202

Joe Manchin - Credit: AP

Joe Manchin is one of the two Democratic senators standing in the way of a historic bill that would expand the social safety net and address the climate crisis. Billionaire Trump donor Nelson Peltz says he’s been calling to encourage him every week.

Peltz, founder and CEO of Trian Partners, said Wednesday on CNBC that he calls the West Virginia senator weekly to cheer on the his efforts to slash programs in the proposed legislation. Manchin has said that wants the bill to include a maximum of $1.5 trillion in new spending, which is $2 trillion less than originally proposed. His obstinance has drawn the ire of fellow Democrats.

“I think it’s dead-on fiscally irresponsible for Senator Manchin to refuse to raise revenue,” Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) said last month. “And at the same time out of the other side of his mouth — maybe the side of his mouth that he uses to talk to his corporate donors — complain that we can’t pay for the things that American families desperately need.”

One such prominent donor is Peltz, who has given to Manchin and hosted fundraisers for Trump that cost as much as $580,000 per couple to attend.

“Joe is the most important guy in D.C. Maybe the most important guy in America today,” said Peltz, who has claimed the Jan. 6 insurrection made him regret supporting Trump. “I call him every week and say, ‘Joe, you’re doing great. Stay tough. Stay tough, buddy.’ He’s phenomenal.”

Peltz said he is happy that Manchin, with whom he’s been friends for more than a decade, is “keeping our elected officials somewhere in the middle,” adding, “anywhere from center-right to center-left works for me.” He complained that other lawmakers are “pushing us to the extremes … where it’s uncomfortable.”

“This is still capitalism, this is not socialism,” Peltz said. “This is still a meritocracy, and we better keep it that way.”

Manchin has taken issue with many of the provisions in the social spending bill, including extending the current child tax credit, insisting on means-testing and work requirements so that only those working and making less than $60,000 a year would qualify. According to an analysis by the Niskanen Center, adding only the income restriction could mean that 37.4 million children would lose the federal aid they’re currently receiving. In Manchin’s home state of West Virginia, it would deny benefits to 189,000 children, cutting the number of recipients by 58 percent. That number doesn’t even account for how many would lose government assistance if the bill included a work requirement. Democrats and the Biden administration have argued that giving families an ongoing child tax credit would help pay for child care, basic needs and allow families to be more financially stable.

Manchin has also stood against parts of the bill that would try to address the climate crisis by investing in green energy. It just so happens that Manchin has a significant personal stake in the coal industry. As The Guardian reported in July, Manchin owns as much as $5 million in stock in Enersystems, a private coal brokerage he founded in 1988 that his son now runs. According to financial disclosures, Manchin, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has earned a total of $5,211,154 in dividends from Enersystems, an average of more than half a million dollars per year.

But because Democrats need Manchin’s support to pass the bill through reconciliation, they have reportedly been dropping certain provisions of the legislation, including free community college and, to please Manchin, a clean electricity program that would replace coal- and gas-fired power plants.

We can make the steel of tomorrow without the fossil fuels of yesteryear




Andrew Tarantola
·Senior Editor
Thu, October 21, 2021

The modern world has grown around steel bones — everything from tools and home appliances to skyscrapers and airplanes use the versatile material in their construction. But the process of making steel is a significant contributor to global warming and climate change. In 2018, reportedly every ton of steel produced generated 1.85 tons of carbon dioxide, accounting for about 7 percent of global CO2 emissions that year. This poses not just environmental challenges for our ever increasing world, it could also impact steel producers’ bottom line, which is why the industry is developing a “fossil-free” means of making the alloy, one that relies on renewable-sourced hydrogen rather than carbon coke.

Steel is an alloy composed of iron, which in its pure form is relatively soft, with a small amount of introduced carbon, usually about 2 percent of its total weight. This improves the material’s strength and reduces its propensity for fracturing. The process starts by combining iron ore, before coking coal and limestone (which remove impurities) in a blast furnace to create pig iron.

That molten pig iron is then poured into a furnace and high pressure air is introduced via a water-cooled lance. The oxygen chemically reacts with the molten iron to purge impurities — as well as produce significant amounts of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. The oxygen also forces impurities like silicates and phosphates present in the pig iron to react with limestone flux, trapping them as waste slag. Today, per the World Steel Association, some 1,864 million metric tons of crude steel are produced annually with China producing a vast majority of it.

While the WSA points out that “in the last 50 years, the steel industry has reduced its energy consumption per tonne of steel produced by 60 percent” and notes that steel is infinitely reusable, and that “new” steel typically contain 30percent recycled steel on average the traditional methods of iron and steel production are becoming untenable — at least if we want to mitigate its impacts on climate change. What’s more, the International Energy Agency estimates that global steel production will grow by a third by 2050, which will only compound the industry’s environmental impacts. That’s where fossil-free steel comes in.

Take HYBRIT (Hydrogen Breakthrough Ironmaking Technology), for example. This process has been developed as a joint venture between three Swedish companies: SSAB, which makes steel, energy company Vattenfall, and LKAB, which mines iron ore. Rather than using coking coal and a blast furnace to convert raw iron ore into metallic iron, the HYBRIT method uses hydrogen generated from renewable energy sources and a technique known as direct reduction, which lowers the amount of oxygen contained within the ore without heating it above the metal’s melting point, to create sponge iron.

Blast Furnaces vs HYBRIT

Like pig iron, sponge iron is an intermediary material in the steelmaking process (it’ll get shipped off to SSAB to be turned into steel slabs), but in HYBRIT’s case, its production results in the creation of water vapor rather than carbon dioxide.

“The first fossil-free steel in the world is not only a breakthrough for SSAB, it represents proof that it’s possible to make the transition and significantly reduce the global carbon footprint of the steel industry,” Martin Lindqvist, CEO of SSAB, told reporters in August. “We hope that this will inspire others to also want to speed up the green transition.”

The HYBRIT coalition opened a pilot direct reduction plant in Luleå, Sweden last year and has announced plans to increase production to an industrial scale by 2026. The team claims that eliminating fossil fuels from the steelmaking industry in Sweden could drop the country’s total CO2 emissions by at least 10 percent. However, they are not the only group looking into fossil-free steel production. The H2 Green Steel company has announced its intent to open a large-scale plant in northern Sweden by 2024 and expects to produce 5 million tonnes of the material annually by 2030.

In June, Volvo announced that it would be partnering with SSAB to develop fossil-free steel for use in its products — both passenger cars and industrial machines. Last week, Volvo unveiled the first vehicle to be made with fossil-free steel, an 8-plus ton load carrier designed to operate within mines. Not only is the load carrier powered by a fully electric drivetrain, it can autonomously navigate across a worksite as well. Granted only about 3 of the vehicle’s 8 tons were made from fossil-free steel (the drivetrain’s steel components, for example, were made through traditional smelting means), this marks an important first step towards a carbon-neutral transportation future.

“When we have been talking about ‘fossil free’ in the transport sector, we have been focusing a lot on emissions from the vehicles in use. But it's clear to us and to everyone else that we also need to address the carbon footprint from the production of our vehicles,” Volvo Group’s Chief Technology Officer Lars Stenqvist told Forbes. “That's why it's so important now to team up with everyone in the value chain and collaborate in order to drive out all the fossil fuel also used in the production of components, parts and also running our production facilities.”

Volvo expects the autonomous load carriers to enter real-world operation by next year, though the company concedes that its ability to ramp up production of fossil-free vehicles will depend largely on SSAB’s ability to deliver sufficient quantities of the material.

Exxon board debates dropping several major oil and gas projects - WSJ


FILE PHOTO: Logo of the Exxon Mobil Corp is seen at the Rio Oil and Gas Expo and Conference in Rio de Janeiro

Wed, October 20, 2021,

(Reuters) - Exxon Mobil Corp board is debating whether to continue with several major oil and gas projects amid a global push from investors for fossil fuel companies to be more cost-conscious and green-energy friendly, WSJ reported on Wednesday.

Activist investor Engine No. 1 in May shocked the oil-and-gas industry when three of its four nominees were elected to the board by Exxon shareholders, who were frustrated by weak returns and the company's flagging attention to climate concerns.

The appointment of activist Jeff Ubben in March put a third of the 12-member board in new hands.

The board members expressed concerns about some projects, including a $30 billion liquefied natural gas development in Mozambique and another multibillion-dollar gas project in Vietnam, the WSJ report said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Exxon did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The Mozambique and Vietnam projects have been stalled for long periods over local fights as well as sour gas and high costs. No final investment decisions have been taken on these projects.

The talks on projects are taking place as part of a review of Exxon's five-year spending plan, on which the board is set to vote at the end of this month, WSJ reported.

Exxon is also analyzing the expected carbon emissions from each project and how they would affect its ability to meet pledges to reduce emissions, the report said.

The annual projected emissions from the Mozambique and Vietnam projects were among the highest in Exxon's planned pipeline of oil and gas projects, according to a pre-pandemic internal analysis by Exxon, which was reviewed by WSJ.

Exxon is also planning to declare in coming weeks that it will raise its investment in a low-carbon unit it announced in February by billions of dollars, the Journal added.

Exxon had in February said it would invest $3 billion through 2025 in a new division that would commercialize its carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, biofuels and other technologies.

(Reporting by Arathy S Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur)

Recent Texas catch ‘spooky’ but also fascinating


Pete Thomas
Wed, October 20, 2021,



A fish caught recently off Texas was jokingly described as a “Martian,” in large part because of an invasive parasite that appeared inside its mouth.

“OK, so not really [a Martian], but this is still pretty spooky,” Galveston Island State Park stated on Facebook.

The fish is an Atlantic croaker, whose mouth had been occupied by a tongue-eating louse.

According to the park, the louse enters a fish’s mouth through its gills, severs the tongue and serves as a functioning tongue while feeding on mucous.

“It also happens to be the only known case where a parasite functionally replaces a host’s organ,” the park added.

If these aren’t fun or savory facts, there is good news regarding the tongue-eating louse: “It does not kill the fish or affect humans.”

–Image courtesy of Texas Parks and Wildlife

Supply chain shortage is driving up prices, Farmers are worried it could grow worse.

Phil McCausland

Wed, October 20, 2021, 

Joel Everett said he was astounded when a lightly used 2009 John Deere tractor sold at his last auction in Strawberry Point, Iowa, for tens of thousands of dollars more than it had cost fresh off the production line more than a decade ago.

Bought new for $109,000, the tractor sold for $143,000 at auction, he said. It's not an isolated incident, said Everett, who has run Joel’s Tractor and Auction since 1992. A lot of farm equipment, particularly used tractors, is selling for 30 percent to 50 percent more than it was two years ago at his auction house.

"It's been unreal," Everett said. "Our last sale was the biggest dollar sale we ever had, and we're fixing to have another in three to four weeks that's going to blow that one away."

Quality farm equipment is getting hard to find amid the supply chain shortage, many farmers and experts said, and its scarcity is driving up prices and raising questions about whether farmers' harvests and next year's planting season could be affected.

Some farmers are concerned that the shortage could grow worse after 10,000 John Deere workers went on strike last week. The company had reported record profits this year, and United Auto Workers union members walked off the job at 14 manufacturing plants when it refused to raise wages above 6 percent.

"It's got us worried for sure," said Eric Hopkins, the senior vice president of Hundley Farms, which boasts 20,000 acres of mostly vegetables in central Florida. "They're already low on inventory and parts right now. A strike is only going to exacerbate things, make it worse. If it lasts for a while, not only will they not have new tractors, but when you have a breakdown and there's no parts, your tractor is just going to sit there not being able to harvest or plant a crop."

Image: John Deere Workers Strike Over Contract (Scott Olson / Getty Images)

Feelings among farmers about the John Deere strike are mixed. Many said that they supported the workers' desire for a better deal but that they are worried about the effect of a strike that lasts weeks or months.

A long strike could hamper the country's food supply chain, which has suffered shortages since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which further delayed John Deere's ability to deliver products and parts in a timely manner. Farmers also worry that a delay could affect their increasingly thin margins.

It's uncertain how long the strike could last and to what degree John Deere will be further slowed. It said it had a continuity plan in place, bringing in salaried nonunion workers to maintain some level of production.

Crops can be damaged if they are planted or harvested late, and the insurance provided by the Agriculture Department requires that seeds are put in the ground and produce is pulled by a particular date to be fully insured.

That's one issue highlighted by David Misener, who travels the country from May to November as a custom farmer. He brings farm equipment and harvests other people's crops for them. His timelines are tight, but he's had to wait long periods for repairs and parts multiple times this season — an unusual occurrence.

Most recently, while he was working a field for a South Dakota farm this month, a bearing went out on a combine harvester, destroying one of its shafts. The only place the local dealer could find a replacement part was in Canada, and Misener had to sit on his hands for a week until it arrived.

"It is extremely crucial that we harvest on a timely schedule, because it can decide whether you have something to harvest or nothing," Misener said.

The threat to the bottom line is also scary because prices for equipment are growing, as well as for fertilizer, seed, grain and other common farm production resources.

Matt Ackley, the chief marketing officer of Ritchie Bros, which operates a global marketplace for insights, services and transaction solutions for commercial assets, including the sale of heavy equipment, said interest in and prices for farm equipment are growing considerably.

Image: David Misener works on a combine harvester with his sons. (Courtesy David Misener)

The price index for used tractors at Ritchie Bros. is up by 19 percent since last year, Ackley said. The company's website, where it hosts online auctions, has attracted more than 161 million visitors and 1.3 million bidders in 2021 — that’s up by 15 percent and 19 percent respectively from the same time a year ago.

Ackley shared an auction for a tractor that was struck by lightning this year. It was put up for auction by an insurance company as salvage. The tractor still got 393 bids Monday as prospective buyers fought for the opportunity to break it down for spare parts.

“As you get any type of disruption, especially from an [original equipment manufacturer] standpoint — like this strike — to an already stretched supply chain, you get quite a significant backlog,” said Ackley, whose team has been tracking the shortfalls in the supply chain since the pandemic started. “People are fighting vigorously for what’s left.”

The items that farmers can repair themselves are also becoming more sought-after and harder to find.

It’s an ongoing challenge. Farmers say that as agriculture equipment becomes more technical digitally, companies like John Deere have limited farmers' ability to repair their own tractors, combines and other field equipment.

Tim Riley, an organic farmer in western Kansas, said he and other farmers around him have had to get creative because of the parts shortages and the challenges of fixing their own equipment.

Wheat Rises As Corn Gain May Spur Demand From Livestock Farms (Daniel Acker / Bloomberg via Getty Images file)

"Some of the electronic parts have been really hard lately to get for the guidance systems on some of these tractors," Riley said. "It's really hard to do anything with how highly computer-driven they are anymore, so that's a problem."

When the guidance system broke down on Riley's tractor, he had to call his neighbors to ask whether he could dismantle the GPS systems from their rigs to use on his. The local dealer did the same thing and called customers for help when the GPS on a tractor Riley had rented broke this year.

Riley is also worried because John Deere is already so behind in production that he's unable to buy a new tractor for planting season next year.

"Coming into our spring season, we really need a new tractor, but they told us that we won't be able to get it for a year to a year and a half," he said, adding that he has had to buy a used tractor for his farm for the next few years.

Everett, who operates the auction house in Iowa, said he knows multiple farmers who bought new John Deere combines more than eight months ago who still haven’t gotten them and bought different combines just to get through the season.

At times, he's been able to encourage farmers to buy two of the same tractor and cannibalize one for parts.

"I've been telling the guys who want to buy the new stuff at our auctions if you want one that's newer or really nice, this is all you're going to get," he said. "You used to be able to do that, but now our supply chain is just in shambles."

Russia's Melnikova wins gymnastics world gold in Biles' absence


Issued on: 21/10/2021

Russia's Angelina Melnikova won the women's all-around title at the world gymnastics championships on Thursday 

Charly TRIBALLEAU AFP

Kitakyushu (Japan) (AFP)

Melnikova took gold ahead of American teenagers Leanne Wong and Kayla DiCello, after Biles and a host of other top gymnasts decided not to compete in Kitakyushu in western Japan.

Melnikova, who won all-around bronze at this year's Tokyo Olympics after Biles withdrew over mental health concerns, said she had been determined to compete despite having little time to prepare after the Games.

But she said Biles' absence had made her task easier, and she was "exhausted" after completing the job.

"It's always exciting to compete with Simone because of her strength and power, but I also enjoyed being able to compete for first place," said Melnikova.

"I had only one month to prepare, and I was really surprised that I could do all I did today."

Biles is currently performing in a gymnastics stage show also featuring her Tokyo Olympics team-mates Jordan Chiles, MyKayla Skinner and Grace McCallum.

Olympic all-around champion Sunisa Lee also skipped the world championships to appear in a TV show.

Silver-medallist Rebeca Andrade of Brazil is competing in Japan but dropped out of the all-around event to avoid wear and tear on her body.
"So exhausted"

Melnikova went the extra mile to secure the gold, finishing with 56.632 points to become the first Russian woman since Aliya Mustafina in 2010 to win the world title.

"I'm very happy that I was able to carry on the tradition," said the 21-year-old, who won all-around bronze at the 2019 world championships.

"I did everything that I wanted. I don't know what to say because I'm so happy and I'm so exhausted now."

Eighteen-year-old Wong took silver on 56.340 points in her first world championships appearance.

Leanne Wong of the United States finished second in her first world gymnastics championships

 Charly TRIBALLEAU AFP

Wong was an alternate for the US team at the Tokyo Olympics, but had to spend her entire stay in quarantine after her roommate tested positive for coronavirus.

"Definitely after the first time in Japan, I always had in my mind that I wanted to do the world championships," said Wong.

"During my quarantine, I was trying to keep my body active and do whatever I could in the room so I could prepare myself."

Seventeen-year-old DiCello fell on her uneven bars routine, but dusted herself off to claim third ahead of Russia's Vladislava Urazova on 54.566 points.

"After I fell on bars, I knew that I just had to keep a clean rest of the bar routine so that I could stay where I wanted to stay," she said.

Japan's Hitomi Hatakeda, who qualified for the final in fourth place, was forced to withdraw Wednesday after suffering a serious spinal injury in training.

Hatakeda fell off the uneven bars and was diagnosed with damage to her central spinal cord and bruising of the cervical vertebrae.

A Japan Gymnastics Association official said Thursday that Hatakeda was conscious but had no further update on her condition.

© 2021 AFP

Chile's 'flowering desert' a window on effects of climate change

Issued on: 21/10/2021 
  

Bright purple and yellow flowers blooming in the Atacama desert as part of the irregular "flowering desert" phenomenon in the north of Chile

 MARTIN BERNETTI AFP

Copiapó (Chile) (AFP)

The pata de guanaco and yellow ananuca are among 200 species of flowers that can bloom in an inhospitable environment that averages just 0.01 centimeters of rainfall a year.

Some parts of the desert can go years without seeing rain.

But this natural laboratory around Copiapo, a city 800 kilometers (500 miles) north of Santiago, is providing scientists with a chance to study how such species can adapt to extreme climates.

In this case, it is created by a complex ecosystem in which flower seeds can lie dormant in the soil for decades waiting for enough rainfall to allow them to come to life.

"When there is a certain amount of precipitation, which has been estimated at approximately 15 cubic millimeters, it triggers a large germination event," biologist Andrea Loaiza from La Serena University told AFP.

The surprising blossom is known locally as the "flowering desert."

The bloom is irregular, said Loaiza, and the last significant one happened in 2017. But it may not happen forever.

The ecosystem is "very fragile because it is already on the limit," said Loaiza, adding that "any disruption could break that balance."

There are more than 200 species of flowers in the Atacama desert in Chile's north, and some may not bloom for decades at a time 

MARTIN BERNETTI AFP

And it is important to study these species to understand how they survive in such extreme conditions given that experts say global warming could turn many fertile regions of the planet into deserts like the Atacama.

"To adapt to a climate crisis, we need to understand the natural processes," said geneticist Andres Zurita.

"We want to learn from these plants because these species demonstrate different adaptation mechanisms," Zurita said.

© 2021 AFP

America's foreign critics are unflattering, unfair, and worth hearing


Samuel Goldman, National correspondent
Wed, October 20, 2021


Wang Huning. Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock

Americans like to be praised. When the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the early 19th century, he noted his hosts expected to be admired the way court poets apotheosized European monarchs. Because "the majority lives in perpetual self-adoration," Tocqueville observed, "there are certain truths that only foreigners or experience can bring to American ears."

Tocqueville brought some of those truths to light. Though remembered as an admirer of American democracy, Tocqueville was dismayed by individualist, commercialist, and conformist tendencies. He's still the best-known in a long string of foreign critics of the United States, intellectuals whose judgment of the U.S. can be uniquely instructive, especially when it's unflattering.

Tocqueville's ambivalence was echoed by other "friendly critics" described by Williams College sociologist James L. Nolan, Jr. in his 2016 book What They Saw in America. Looking beyond judicious admirers, however, Nolan considers the harsher assessment of visitors including the Egyptian Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb, who studied in the U.S. in the 1950s. Where Tocqueville thought Americans' virtues outweighed our vices, Qutb depicted Americans as facile barbarians who threatened everything that makes life worth living.

After 9/11, there was a surge of attention to Qutb, who was considered the intellectual mastermind of al Qaeda. That interest has since receded along with the ostensible Islamist threat, but a new chief intellectual challenger to the American way of life has emerged. That challenger is Wang Huning, a secretive Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official whom some scholars have dubbed the "hidden ruler" of modern China.

Like many of his predecessors, Wang's criticisms of American life reflect the disappointment of a young idealist. A full professor at just 30, Wang was invited to visit the United States by the American Political Science Association in 1988. His experiences over six months form the basis of America against America, now a valuable collectors' item.

America against America is more than a travelogue. The title alludes to two tensions at the level of ideas. The first contrasts false images of America prevalent among Chinese intellectuals. The actual United States, Wang insisted, was neither the exploitative tyranny envisioned by older Marxists nor the utopia of freedom envisioned by young liberals. Instead, it was a complicated society where wealth and poverty, high technology and primitive beliefs, hierarchy and equality were constantly juxtaposed.

The title's second meaning addresses those internal contrasts. Borrowing a concept from the political scientist Samuel Huntington, Wang argued that American politics is driven by tension between an ideological creed and actual practice. Unlike societies that enjoy greater balance between self-perception and reality, such as Japan, America was trapped in a "unstoppable undercurrent of crisis."

In his influential essay, "The Structure of China's Changing Political Culture," Wang emphasizes resources and requirements of Chinese culture that might help China escape that undercurrent. That emphasis on cultural autonomy helped launch Wang's career in the CCP, where he has apparently survived many ideological changes of fashion.

But it's a mistake to see Wang as the product of a radically different intellectual tradition: His ideas are as much products of Western modernity as they are criticisms of it. Indeed, Wang's reliance on American self-critique is clear in America against America. In addition to his own observations while visiting in the late 1980s, Wang draws on U.S. political science and political theory of the period. His sources include Allan Bloom, whose diagnosis of nihilism was heavily influenced by the émigré philosopher Leo Strauss.

Published in 1991, Wang's meditation on decline in America against America was untimely. Evading rivalry with Japan, which was then widely anticipated, the United States went on to enjoy several more decades of economic and military hegemony. That reprieve may not have fooled Chinese authorities, whom Wang has counseled to look beyond short-term events, but it did leave American audiences less inclined to heed foreign warnings about domestic decay.

The reception is changing, though. A sympathetic profile in Palladium this month marks Wang's rediscovery as a kind of cult figure in certain quarters of the intellectual right. For these readers, Wang's interest isn't limited to his ostensible influence over the Chinese leadership. Like the chain of foreign observers extending back to Tocqueville and beyond, he's an outsider uniquely positioned to tell us the ugly truth about ourselves.

How accurate is that assessment? One reason it's difficult to say is that Wang apparently refuses to speak to foreigners and no longer publishes or conducts public events even in China. As a result, little of his work is available in English. Like Qutb, whose publications were both linguistically and intellectually inaccessible to all but a tiny number of Western readers, Wang's reputation benefits from a very unAmerican sense of mystery.

What of his work we do have is about 30 years old and partly in amateur translation. Stylistic infelicities aside, Wang's observations are not groundbreaking. A domestic critic with the same insights wouldn't receive the same interest. Wang's close attention to historical observers like Tocqueville and the German sociologist Max Weber, as well as contemporary neoconservatives, give America against America a somewhat derivative quality. He reports that American accept gross urban squalor, are obsessed with psychological wellbeing, and haven't figured out how to reconcile the promise of civic equality with the history of slavery and discrimination. None of this is exactly new.

Still, that's not reason to dismiss him. If people keep telling you that you have a stain on your shirt, you probably do. The great service of foreign observers like Wang has been to puncture Americans' widely recognized tendency to assume that we live in the best of all possible countries.

But there's also reason to be skeptical of the dire conclusions Wang draws. Like the friendly and not-so-friendly critics on whom he draws, Wang is convinced that liberal democracy stands on the precipice of collapse, and that only a powerful infusion of non-liberal values from the distant past can possibly save us from ourselves.

That may indeed be the case. But the fact that versions of the same diagnosis can be found among anti-liberal theorists all the way back to the foundation of the republic gives reason to doubt the situation is quite so dire. In retrospect, many of the developments foreign critics saw as symptoms of profound degeneration seem laughably quaint. Qutb was famously incensed by a church dance in Greeley, Colorado.

There may be a way to combine a more optimistic assessment of American prospects with Wang's analysis, though. Like Tocqueville, Wang wasn't writing about America for the benefits Americans. Instead, he was writing for his countrymen, who were inclined either to be unrealistically positive or unjustifiably negative about the country that has symbolized the modern world for more than two centuries. For them, Wang's message is simply: There's both good and bad in America, and America's good and bad are both very different from China.

That remains a valuable warning against the naive universalism in the idea that history is inexorably marching toward the triumph of U.S.-style democracy. China is not America and must find her own political, cultural, and economic destiny. So must other nations, including those in which the U.S. nation-building efforts have lately gone awry.

Yet Wang's new admirers should also keep the corollary in mind: America is not China, and there is a limit to the lessons we can derive from a great but very different civilization. America's friendly critics have never been impressed by the sophistication of American arts, the quality of American governance, or the power of American social cohesion. Instead, they've seen American greatness in individual freedom, unconstrained possibility, and an optimistic attitude toward the future.

Those characteristics certainly carry risks, including a recurring experience of crisis. But we won't find success in our rivalry with China — or anywhere else — by rejecting them.

America Against America : Wang Huning : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

America Against America by Wang Huning

Publication date 1991Topics communism, marxism-leninism, PRC, china, america, US, united statesCollection opensource

Translated with DeepL software. There are some errors but it is mostly intelligible.

From the uploader at /leftypol/:

"He [Wang] was a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai where he gained the attention of allies of Jiang Zemin in the 1990s. In 2002, he headed the very important Central Policy Research Office and joined the Politburo Standing Committee – the CPC's top decision-making body – in 2017. He is widely regarded by outside observers as one of the most influential theorists in the country, which de facto makes him one of the most influential theorists in the world.

He has written several books, including National Sovereignty (1987), Comparative Political Analysis (1987), An Analysis of Contemporary Western Political Science (1987), Fighting Corruption: China's Experiment (1990), and co-edited books such as Logic of Politics: Marxist Principles of Political Science (1989). His advisor at Fudan University before he became a professor was Chen Qiren, an authority on Marx's works and Das Kapital. Wang's thesis was titled, "From Bodin to Maritain: On Sovereignty Theories Developed by the Western Bourgeoisie." His book National Sovereignty is a historical survey of the concept, tying it in with Marxist-Leninist concepts of national equality and self-determination.

The book covers a wide range of topics regarding the United States ranging from his observations about: Manhattan, Chinatown, "the heights of commodification," the Amish and the Amana colonies and the decline of farming; the American political spirit and the American national character, the space shuttle program, and America's "multileveled social control" system which includes the "invisible hand" and the "money-managed society," the legal culture and taxation system and its scientific administrators. There is a chapter of "interwoven political power" which he called the "rule of donkey and elephant," the party share-spoiling system, lobbyists, radical organizations and the contradiction between pluralism and meritocracy.

He spends a chapter on the 1988 presidential election, and spends another chapter on the "political pyramid" from Congress to the states to county politics. That is followed by a chapters on "soft governance" and "reproducing the system" which covers driver's licenses, workplace principles ("a company is not a democracy"), a visit to the Coca-Cola headquarters, and sections on the education system, MIT, the Kennedy School of Government, the U.S. Naval Academy, etc.

Lastly, there is a chapter on "active intelligence" (think tanks) and "hidden crises." This last chapters covers family values, wandering youths, the criminal underworld, beggars, racism against black people and Native Americans, and whether America is facing a looming "spiritual crisis" of values."

Wang Huning - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Huning

Wang Huning (Chinese: 王沪宁; born October 6, 1955) is a leading political theorist since the 1990s and one of the top leaders of the Communist Party of China, a current member of the party's Politburo Standing Committee (China's top decision-making body) and first-ranked secretary of the party's Secretariat. He served as the head of the Central Policy Research Office from 2002 to 2020 and as a secretary of the Secretariat between 2007 and 2012. He was named director of Central Guidance Commission on Building Spiritual Civilization in November 2017. Widely regarded as Xi Jinping's "Grey Cardinal" or the Mikhail Suslov of China, Wang is believed to be the chief ideologue of the Communist Party and principal architect behind the official political ideologies of three paramount leaders: "Three Represents" by Jiang Zemin, the Scientific Development Concept by Hu Jintao, and the Chinese Dream and Xi Jinping Thought of Xi Jinping. He has held significant influence over policy and decision making over all three paramount leaders and is currently regarded, along with Wang Qishan, as one of the two primary advisors and decision makers for Xi Jinpi

Meet the Jewish Former Southlake Student Who Spoke Out Against Teaching ‘Two Sides’ of the Holocaust


Marisa Kabas
Wed, October 20, 2021

BermanNBC - Credit: NBC News/Youtube

At a school board meeting in Southlake, Texas on Monday night, former student Jake Berman took the mic and uttered these powerful, and unfortunately necessary, words: “The facts are that there are not two sides of the Holocaust. The Nazis systematically killed millions of people.” He went on to describe his experience, which he said nearly drove him to suicide. “I received everything from jokes about my nose to gas chambers, all while studying for my bar mitzvah from a Holocaust survivor as my primary tutor,” Berman, 31, told the Carroll Independent School District Board. “I still struggle with the depression that started at Dawson Middle School in 2003 to this very day.”

Berman was there to share his experiences in light of Texas Senate Bill 3 (SB3), a law that passed this summer to regulate how schools in the state teach social studies — specifically America’s racist history. Last week, his former district found itself in the eye the SB3 storm when leaked audio from a teacher’s meeting caught an administrator instructing teachers to teach “opposing” perspectives on the Holocaust, to stay in accordance with the law. Two decades after his traumatizing experience, Berman knew he had to speak up. And in his first interview after the meeting, he explained why he feels “a moral obligation” to use his voice.

“The antisemitism piece obviously hits home for me because I’m Jewish, but I really tried to parlay it into what this law really is intended to do, which is whitewash the racism that still goes on in the state and in the country today,” Berman tells Rolling Stone the morning after his public comments, which have been viewed more than 65,000 times on Twitter.

“I wouldn’t have gone up there in a public forum and said what I said if I didn’t think it would have some sort of effect or impact,” says the 31-year-old, who now lives in nearby North Richland Hills, says. “The reception I’ve gotten this morning has just been overwhelmingly positive.”

If you’ve heard about any of the fights in schools across the nation over the teaching of Critical Race Theory, it’s in no small part because of Southlake, Texas. What started as a community response to a widely-circulated video of students chanting the n-word in 2019 ballooned last year in response to the country’s racial reckoning. Much of this came to light because of the NBC News podcast Southlake, which debuted in August and chronicled the feud’s origins, plus the contentious school board elections that played out as a proxy for people on both sides of the issue. (The Southlake school board did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

While Southlake gives extensive examples of racism, and bigotry against LGBTQ/non-binary students, antisemitism never came up specifically on the show. But when school administrator Gina Praddy’s Holocaust comments went public, it struck a familiar cord with Berman. “I hold no ill-will towards her,” he says. “I don’t think she’s a Holocaust denier or anything like that. I think she just stepped in a pile of mud.”

Berman described himself as “the ‘Jewish kid’ growing up. “It wasn’t an issue until I got to middle school,” he said. “But when it got bad, it got pretty bad.”

The bullying started slowly, he says, with off-hand jokes about bagels, but eventually turned much darker, culminating in him opening his locker one day to a flurry of small sheets of papers covered in hand-drawn swastikas. While he’s quick to note that “middle school students don’t have the wherewithal to understand the gravitas that a Nazi swastika has,” the incident stays with him to this day.

At the time, he wasn’t aware of the district taking any action against the bullies or to implement systemic change, but he says they did their best to protect him. And his parents focused on him. “Their number one priority wasn’t solving any antisemitism issue or bullying issue within the school — it was the safety of their son.”

He transferred to a private school the following year, though his family remained in the town. Now, two decades later, problems of race and religion persist.

He hopes that, much like schools that defied the Texas governor’s mask mandates ban, one school — whether it’s Southlake or not — will defy the ahistorical law. “I think the mic cut off right before I got to say it, but I sort of implied that you’re at a crossroads, and you have the opportunity to be a leader as a school district — which you’ve long seen yourself as…If I were the superintendent, I would say ‘We’re not going to take part in this law.’”

He also hopes this incident will help others around the country will see how we’ve gone astray in trying to reinterpret history, but he says he’s not entirely convinced it can happen. “Unfortunately with the state of politics in the whole country, it seems like when you point out facts and logic and reason, for some reason the people on the other side of facts and logic and reason dig in deeper.”

Asked point blank if he thinks Southlake has a racism problem, Berman said, “I don’t know, because I don’t live there [anymore]. I would say from the outside looking in, it certainly appears that way.”

How ideas from ancient Greek philosophy may have driven civilization toward climate change

THEY COULD HAVE HAD STEAM ENGINES EXCEPT THEY HAD A SLAVE ECONOMY

Michael Paul Nelson, Professor of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, Oregon State University 

 Kathleen Dean Moore, Distinguished Professor Emerita, Oregon State University
Wed, October 20, 2021

Firefighters and residents battle a blaze in hot, dry conditions in Athens, Greece, in August 2021. AP Photo/Petros Karadjias

Wildfires driven by increasing winds and unprecedented heat surrounded Athens, Greece, this past summer, blanketing its ancient marble monuments and olive groves with ash and acrid smoke. These are the same places where philosophers gathered almost 2,500 years ago to debate questions about the nature of matter and morality.

The ideas formulated then echo through Western civilization – for better or for worse. At its best, classical Greek philosophy imagined humans as capable of great honor and achievement, guided by reasoned discussion. At their worst, some of their ideas have licensed an exploitative, expansionist way of life that has helped fuel global warming and pushed civilization toward the brink of self-destruction.

The centuries since classical Greek philosophers took stock of the world constitute an experiment on a global scale, testing which philosophies invite planetary thriving and which invite ruin.

Aspects of the worldview formulated by classical Greek philosophers – coupled, compounded and refined by others over centuries – helped set the stage for the climate changes that now fuel destructive fires and extreme weather around the world.
The Atomists’ perilous path

The early Greek philosophers were primarily interested in two kinds of questions. The first kind was metaphysical: What is the world? The second kind was ethical: What is a good person? The two sorts of questions were intertwined, as the physical description of the world shaped humanity’s place in it.

So where did the early Greeks take a perilous path? A group of philosophers now known as The Atomists – among them, Leucippus and Democritus – argued that matter is composed of atoms that, for them, are tiny solid particles that vary only by their shape, size and speed. A fire atom, for example, was sharp, small and fast; whereas an olive oil atom was round, large and slow. The tiny particles are independent of one another, interacting only when they collide.

If the world is only matter, it has no purpose or intentionality, no divine design or intervention, no spirit or sanctity. It’s just stuff moving around or not, crashing or not. The particles operate according to mechanistic laws, as expressed by the principles of geometry. Consequently, the world has no emergent qualities – soul, mind, consciousness – that cannot be expressed in numbers.

In that view, the world is profane, a word that comes from “profanum,” meaning “outside the temple.” There is nothing special about it, nothing inspiring respect or veneration.
An open door to exploitation and waste

Before the Atomists, early Greeks generally did not draw a sharp distinction between the material and the spiritual worlds. In their view, everything – river, mountain, child, tree – is enlivened by a life force.

But the mechanistic, reductionist, matter-in-motion worldview stripped the spirit from the natural world. In doing so, it also stripped the world’s inherent value. The world became unremarkable, reducible, explainable, ownable, for sale. And so, the mechanistic worldview opened the door to exploitation, waste and abuse.

Over time, this worldview became deeply embedded in Western thought. And so human enterprise, following this view, could damage and destroy the matter of the world and offend no god, value or sacred place.

A thick, intact rainforest stands on one side with the clear line where it was cut away, leaving an open field.

Of course, the Greek philosophers did not anticipate or intend this result. But over time, their ideas both fostered and sanctioned the ever-increasing human ability to exploit the planet, a process that began in the Renaissance and developed throughout the Industrial Revolution.

Civilizations’ social license to create an existential environmental disaster coincided with their power to do exactly that. At the same time, the power of their ideas – and the way in which those ideas served the interests of the powerful – demeaned, disempowered and in many cases destroyed Indigenous and other competing worldviews. In American Indian residential schools, for example, the federal government, often with the assistance of religious institutions, forced Native children to give up their cultural and religious traditions.
A call for a new worldview

With a new worldview, or one inspired by ancient Indigenous cultures, we believe it may be possible for Western civilization to free itself from the old materialism and restore life, spirit, purpose, value – and thus, some measure of protection – to the substance of the planet. Consider alternative answers to the two great questions:

Reconsider: What is the world?

Today, in a great convergence, ecological science, evolutionary theory, quantum theory, Indigenous wisdom and the religions of the world are all telling us that the story told by the mechanistic worldview is too small. On this expanded view, there is complexity in the cosmos, in rivers, plants, animals that can’t be explained by matter in motion.

The converging worldviews emphasize that new properties and entities evolve or emerge from the interdependencies and interactions of natural systems, not from their matter alone. Orchids or consciousness or beauty, for example, aren’t snapped together from particles of matter like Legos. Rather, they emerge over long expanses of time from the evolving organization of particular systems. As systems become more complex and interactive, they organize themselves into new patterns, new life forms, new realities.

And what of the second ancient question: What is a good person?

Ethics begins by recognizing that entities of this Earth are both material and animate. In this re-imagined worldview, humans are members of the community of beings. We share the urgency of life, shaped by our cultural, ecological and physical relationships. We will share a common fate.

There is no hierarchy of value in such a world; the value assigned to human beings is generously distributed throughout the world. If all beings are worthy, then all count in the calculation of what is morally permissible – and what is not.
Stopping the fires of planetary ruin

As strong winds drove wildfires through Greek forests this past summer, authorities organized boats for evacuations, and fire crews used helicopters, bombers and hoses to slow the fires’ advance. Firefighters from other countries urged the Greek crews to set backfires, pouring flames from torches in advance of the line of the firestorm; the strategy was to burn the ground clear of the heavy buildup of fuel, and so slow the advance of the fire.

As global catastrophe unfolds, it is unlikely that there will be boats for a planetary evacuation to a safe place. But we can adopt the strategy of the backfire to slow the conflagration. We can burn away the old mechanistic ways of thinking that are fueling the fires of planetary ruin and create space for a world where people live in respectful relation among other beings.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Michael Paul Nelson, Oregon State University and Kathleen Dean Moore, Oregon State University.