LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

The high stakes of the US-Russia confrontation over Ukraine

The U.S. must step back from the brink of a U.S.-Russia war, and then from the larger Cold War with China and Russia that they have so blindly and foolishly stumbled into.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

November 22, 2021

SOURCENationofChange

A report in Covert Action Magazine from the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic in Eastern Ukraine describes grave fears of a new offensive by Ukrainian government forces, after increased shelling, a drone strike by a Turkish-built drone and an attack on Staromaryevka, a village inside the buffer zone established by the 2014-15 Minsk Accords.

The People’s Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR), which declared independence in response to the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, have once again become flashpoints in the intensifying Cold War between the United States and Russia. The U.S. and NATO appear to be fully supporting a new government offensive against these Russian-backed enclaves, which could quickly escalate into a full-blown international military conflict.

The last time this area became an international tinderbox was in April, when the anti-Russian government of Ukraine threatened an offensive against Donetsk and Luhansk, and Russia assembled thousands of troops along Ukraine’s eastern border.

On that occasion, Ukraine and NATO blinked and called off the offensive. This time around, Russia has again assembled an estimated 90,000 troops near its border with Ukraine. Will Russia once more deter an escalation of the war, or are Ukraine, the United States and NATO seriously preparing to press ahead at the risk of war with Russia?

Since April, the U.S. and its allies have been stepping up their military support for Ukraine. After a March announcement of $125 million in military aid, including armed coastal patrol boats and radar equipment, the U.S. then gave Ukraine another $150 million package in June. This included radar, communications and electronic warfare equipment for the Ukrainian Air Force, bringing total military aid to Ukraine since the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 to $2.5 billion. This latest package appears to include deploying U.S. training personnel to Ukrainian air bases.

Turkey is supplying Ukraine with the same drones it provided to Azerbaijan for its war with Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020. That war killed at least 6,000 people and has recently flared up again, one year after a Russian-brokered ceasefire. Turkish drones wreaked havoc on Armenian troops and civilians alike in Nagorno-Karabakh, and their use in Ukraine would be a horrific escalation of violence against the people of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The ratcheting up of U.S. and NATO support for government forces in Ukraine’s civil war is having ever-worsening diplomatic consequences. At the beginning of October, NATO expelled eight Russian liaison officers from NATO Headquarters in Brussels, accusing them of spying. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the manager of the 2014 coup in Ukraine, was dispatched to Moscow in October, ostensibly to calm tensions. Nuland failed so spectacularly that, only a week later, Russia ended 30 years of engagement with NATO, and ordered NATO’s office in Moscow closed.

Nuland reportedly tried to reassure Moscow that the United States and NATO were still committed to the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Accords on Ukraine, which include a ban on offensive military operations and a promise of greater autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk within Ukraine. But her assurances were belied by Defense Secretary Austin when he met with Ukraine’s President Zelensky in Kiev on October 18, reiterating U.S. support for Ukraine’s future membership in NATO, promising further military support and blaming Russia for “perpetuating the war in Eastern Ukraine.”

More extraordinary, but hopefully more successful, was CIA Director William Burns’s visit to Moscow on November 2nd and 3rd, during which he met with senior Russian military and intelligence officials and spoke by phone with President Putin.

A mission like this is not usually part of the CIA Director’s duties. But after Biden promised a new era of American diplomacy, his foreign policy team is now widely acknowledged to have instead brought U.S. relations with Russia and China to all-time lows.

Judging from the March meeting of Secretary of State Blinken and National Security Advisor Sullivan with Chinese officials in Alaska, Biden’s meeting with Putin in Vienna in June, and Under Secretary Nuland’s recent visit to Moscow, U.S. officials have reduced their encounters with Russian and Chinese officials to mutual recriminations designed for domestic consumption instead of seriously trying to resolve policy differences. In Nuland’s case, she also misled the Russians about the U.S. commitment, or lack of it, to the Minsk Accords. So who could Biden send to Moscow for a serious diplomatic dialogue with the Russians about Ukraine?

In 2002, as Under Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, William Burns wrote a prescient but unheeded 10-page memo to Secretary of State Powell, warning him of the many ways that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could “unravel” and create a “perfect storm” for American interests. Burns is a career diplomat and a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, and may be the only member of this administration with the diplomatic skills and experience to actually listen to the Russians and engage seriously with them.

The Russians presumably told Burns what they have said in public: that U.S. policy is in danger of crossing “red lines” that would trigger decisive and irrevocable Russian responses. Russia has long warned that one red line would be NATO membership for Ukraine and/or Georgia.

But there are clearly other red lines in the creeping U.S. and NATO military presence in and around Ukraine and in the increasing U.S. military support for the Ukrainian government forces assaulting Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin has warned against the build-up of NATO’s military infrastructure in Ukraine and has accused both Ukraine and NATO of destabilizing actions, including in the Black Sea.

With Russian troops amassed at Ukraine’s border for a second time this year, a new Ukrainian offensive that threatens the existence of the DPR and LPR would surely cross another red line, while increasing U.S. and NATO military support for Ukraine may be dangerously close to crossing yet another one.

So did Burns come back from Moscow with a clearer picture of exactly what Russia’s red lines are? We had better hope so. Even U.S. military websites acknowledge that U.S. policy in Ukraine is “backfiring.”
Russia expert Andrew Weiss, who worked under William Burns at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, acknowledged to Michael Crowley of TheNew York Times that Russia has “escalation dominance” in Ukraine and that, if push comes to shove, Ukraine is simply more important to Russia than to the United States. It therefore makes no sense for the United States to risk triggering World War III over Ukraine, unless it actually wants to trigger World War III. During the Cold War, both sides developed clear understandings of each other’s “red lines.” Along with a large helping of dumb luck, we can thank those understandings for our continued existence. What makes today’s world even more dangerous than the world of the 1950s or the 1980s is that recent U.S. leaders have cavalierly jettisoned the bilateral nuclear treaties and vital diplomatic relationships that their grandparents forged to stop the Cold War from turning into a hot one.

Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, with the help of Under Secretary of State Averell Harriman and others, conducted negotiations that spanned two administrations, between 1958 and 1963, to achieve a partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that was the first of a series of bilateral arms control treaties. By contrast, the only continuity between Trump, Biden and Under Secretary Victoria Nuland seems to be a startling lack of imagination that blinds them to any possible future beyond a zero-sum, non-negotiable, and yet still unattainable “U.S. Uber Alles” global hegemony.

But Americans should beware of romanticizing the “old” Cold War as a time of peace, simply because we somehow managed to dodge a world-ending nuclear holocaust. U.S. Korean and Vietnam War veterans know better, as do the people in countries across the global South that became bloody battlefields in the ideological struggle between the United States and the U.S.S.R.

Three decades after declaring victory in the Cold War, and after the self-inflicted chaos of the U.S. “Global War on Terror,” U.S. military planners have settled on a new Cold War as the most persuasive pretext to perpetuate their trillion dollar war machine and their unattainable ambition to dominate the entire planet. Instead of asking the U.S. military to adapt to more new challenges it is clearly not up for, U.S. leaders decided to revert to their old conflict with Russia and China to justify the existence and ridiculous expense of their ineffective but profitable war machine.

But the very nature of a Cold War is that it involves the threat and use of force, overt and covert, to contest the political allegiances and economic structures of countries across the world. In our relief at the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which both Trump and Biden have used to symbolize the “end of endless war,” we should have no illusions that either of them is offering us a new age of peace.

Quite the contrary. What we are watching in Ukraine, Syria, Taiwan and the South China Sea are the opening salvos of an age of more ideological wars that may well be just as futile, deadly and self-defeating as the “war on terror,” and much more dangerous to the United States.

A war with Russia or China would risk escalating into World War III. As Andrew Weiss told the Times on Ukraine, Russia and China would have conventional “escalation dominance,” as well as simply more at stake in wars on their own borders than the United States does.
So what would the United States do if it were losing a major war with Russia or China? U.S. nuclear weapons policy has always kept a “first strike” option open in case of precisely this scenario.

The current U.S. $1.7 trillion plan for a whole range of new nuclear weapons therefore seems to be a response to the reality that the United States cannot expect to defeat Russia and China in conventional wars on their own borders.

But the paradox of nuclear weapons is that the most powerful weapons ever created have no practical value as actual weapons of war, since there can be no winner in a war that kills everybody. Any use of nuclear weapons would quickly trigger a massive use of them by one side or the other, and the war would soon be over for all of us. The only winners would be a few species of radiation-resistant insects and other very small creatures.

Neither Obama, Trump nor Biden has dared to present their reasons for risking World War III over Ukraine or Taiwan to the American public, because there is no good reason. Risking a nuclear holocaust to appease the military-industrial complex is as insane as destroying the climate and the natural world to appease the fossil fuel industry.

So we had better hope that CIA Director Burns not only came back from Moscow with a clear picture of Russia’s “red lines,” but that President Biden and his colleagues understand what Burns told them and what is at stake in Ukraine. They must step back from the brink of a U.S.-Russia war, and then from the larger Cold War with China and Russia that they have so blindly and foolishly stumbled into.

Personal interview: Lee Camp What are the Prospects for Peace?

Lee Camp directly address the role of the U.S. in the escalating tensions and its capacity to reduce them.

John Rachel

November 22, 2021

SOURCENationofChange

Events are unfolding at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we are looking to our most respected and renowned thought leaders for an honest assessment of both U.S. foreign and military policy to offer their most current thoughts and insights. We know they have some ideas for improving the prospects for peace.

Lee Camp is the head writer and host of the national TV show Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp on RT America. He’s a former contributor to The Onion, former staff humor writer for the Huffington Post, and co-host of the podcast “Government Secrets.” He’s toured the country and the world with his fierce brand of standup comedy and hard-hitting political commentary. His book, Bullet Points & Punch Lines has earned enormous praise. RadMediaNews is his most recent project, an alternative to the propaganda of mainstream media and a vehicle to deal with large-scale suppression of the truth. His responses below are exactly as he provided.

The questions here are not philosophical or abstract. They focus on the realities of the international power struggle unfolding in real time. They directly address the role of the U.S. in the escalating tensions and its capacity to reduce them. We also probe the role of everyday citizens in affecting the relationship the U.S. now has and will have with the rest of the world community.

Here is what Lee Camp had to say.

Q. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has recently put the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds before midnight. Midnight means all out war, probably nuclear holocaust. This is the closest it has ever been. Do you agree with this dire assessment?

A. I mean, in general midnight is usually when the party gets started – so we should be excited, no? Oh, wait, they’re saying midnight is bad. I get it now. I do think things are quite dire. One of the core problems with our system almost never gets discussed. Capitalism is a system in which true sociopaths inevitably end up running the show. The estimates are that 1 out of every 100 humans is a sociopath—and sociopaths are uniquely suited to succeed at a profit-over-all-else system. So the gravity of capitalism will always pull the most irrational humans to run the systems. This is how we ended up with a political system that vomited up the likes of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama. Obama’s Pentagon dropped 26,000 bombs his final year in office. Trump’s Pentagon dropped 40,000 his first year in office. I’m sure the Biden numbers aren’t far off. These are war criminals, and yet the mainstream media dances around happily celebrating these villains as if it’s Mardi Gras (Fox News for Trump, the other networks for Biden & Obama).

Q. The U.S. always portrays itself as the greatest force on the planet for peace, justice, human rights, racial equality, etc. Polls tell us that most other nations actually regard the U.S. as the greatest threat to stability. What in your view is the truth here?

A. We are absolutely the greatest force for justice and racial equality. During the hundreds of years we spent kidnapping black people and owning them as property, we always treated each slave as equal to every other slave. So, that’s a great deal of equality right there. Also, our Declaration of Independence said “All men are created equal” and at that time, they were referring to white, land-owning males, who were six percent of the population. So what it really meant was “All six percent of us are created equal.” And my gosh, those white land-owning males were treated SO VERY equal. No one can deny that. . . . Is my sarcasm coming through in writing or not so much? . . . Anyway, what was the question again? Oh yes, is the United States a threat to stability? Absolutely. Not just because we’re literally always at war but also because we are the largest cause of catastrophic climate change, which will cause immense suffering, death, instability, and large scale extinction — all things I’m not a fan of.

Q. Here’s a chicken-or-egg question: The U.S. accuses both Russia and China of rapidly expanding their military capabilities, claiming its own posturing and increase in weaponry is a response to its hostile adversaries, Russia and China. Both Russia and China claim they are merely responding to intimidation and military threats posed by the U.S. What’s your view? Do Russia and China have imperial ambitions or are they just trying to defend themselves against what they see as an increasingly aggressive U.S. military?

A. Rather than give an opinion, I’ll just give people some facts. The U.S. has roughly 900 military bases around the world. China has a grand total of one outside of China. Russia has around 18, I think, and they’re mostly in the former Soviet bloc. The U.S. spends roughly $1 trillion a year on military (when we include the black budgets), which is the same amount as 144 countries COMBINED. The Pentagon has been found to have roughly $21 trillion in unaccounted-for financial adjustments on their books over the past two decades. To put that in perspective, if you earn $40,000 a year, in order to make $21 trillion, it would take you 525 million years. The Pentagon was finally audited for the first time a few years ago. It took over 1,000 auditors and lasted for over a year. At the end of it, the Pentagon simply said, “We failed our audit.” And that was basically the end of the information given to the public. . . . So yeah, I guess the U.S. is just defending itself from the dastardly Chinese and Russians.

Q. The U.S. always denies that it has imperial ambitions. Most unbiased experts say that by any objective standards, the U.S. is an empire — indeed the most powerful, sprawling empire in history. Does the U.S. have to be an empire to be successful in the world and effectively protect and serve its citizenry?

A. Well, if you want to decide if the U.S. is an empire, please see previous facts. In terms of “being a success,” the U.S. is not a success. We here in the U.S. face immense inequality (a higher Gini coefficient than Ancient Rome just before its collapse), don’t have universal healthcare, don’t have free college education, face a crippling opioid epidemic, have a political system filled with corruption, and the world’s largest prison state (both total number and per capita). On top of that, late-stage capitalism is killing the environment in the U.S. and around the world. We’ve lost 50% of all wildlife over the past 40 years, the oceans are filling with plastic, 2000 cities in the US have elevated lead in the water, and the insect world is facing a genocide. Under no interpretation of the word, could the U.S. be considered a “success.” A success would be a sustainable society that provides a comfortable and fulfilling future for our grandchildren and their grandchildren. We seem to have the opposite.

Q. The highest ranking commanders of the U.S. military recently sounded the alarm. They have concluded that the U.S. — widely regarded as the most formidable military power in history — can’t defeat either Russia or China in a war. These military commanders are saying we need to dramatically increase our military capabilities. What do you make of this claim and the resulting demand for more DOD spending?

A. (Please see earlier numbers about the amount spent on the military.) Toxic nationalism along with capitalism is destroying the globe. We’re told to hate enemies like Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, etc. Can anyone explain to me why a baby born in Iran is evil and a baby born in the U.S. is wonderful and moral and pure? I haven’t heard a good answer for that, but they want us to believe it.

Q. In 2009, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton announced a reset with Russia, heralding greater cooperation and understanding. By 2014, Obama had made a sharp reversal. A sweeping regime of sanctions has since been imposed on Russia to cripple its economy. Hillary Clinton and the Democrats now relentlessly demonize Russia and Putin, blaming them for every imaginable ill. Both in the media and from official pronouncements by government officials, Russia has become the favorite whipping boy for both the U.S. and its “special friend”, Great Britain. Why? What happened?

A. The U.S. is a waning empire in the turbulence of late-stage capitalism. America doesn’t treat our own citizens well (just look at our insane healthcare system), and therefore the only way to get citizens to ignore their true enemies (the ruling elite), is to convince them the great “other” is out to get them. Hence the War on Terror, the new cold war against Russia and China—each of these propaganda tools helps keep average American citizens in line and willing to give up all of their rights and liberties. The oligarchs are basically saying, “We’re not the ones exploiting you. We’re not the source of your troubles. It’s the Russians. It’s the Chinese. It’s the Syrians.” This is not the only reason for the new cold wars that have been instituted, but it’s definitely one of the important ones.

Q. The U.S. against the clear objections of the government in Syria is occupying valuable land, stealing the country’s oil, and preventing access to the most agriculturally productive region, effectively starving the population. The world sees this for what it is, a cruel game sacrificing innocent people for some perceived geopolitical advantage. Is this the kind of reputation the U.S. wants? Or does it simply no longer care what the rest of the world community thinks?

A. The U.S. really only has one playbook. So even though the standard propaganda — The U.S. wants to give you freedom and democracy — has broken down and no longer holds up, the US government keeps pushing it. Meanwhile they have and endless array of economic sanctions on countries (economic war), they’re bombing multiple countries, and they spend billions on CIA cutouts trying to create coups in various nations. They’ve invaded, destroyed, or “coup’ed” numerous countries — most commonly those who are outside our central banking system and/or are socialist. Yet, when a U.S. official walks up to that podium, they still say, “We need to bring democracy to ___[fill in country]__.”

Q. In a democracy, at least in theory citizens have a say in all matters of public policy. Yet, in the end none of the recent military campaigns and undeclared wars seem to achieve much popular favor or support. What is and what should be the role of everyday citizens in determining the foreign policy and military priorities of the country? Or are such matters better left to the “experts”?

A. I’ll do you one better. For much of what our Pentagon’s actions — not even elected officials have a say. Congress rarely intervenes in military matters. They no longer declare wars, even though they’re supposed to. Even the president doesn’t oversee most military intelligence actions. He may have some say in whether we start bombing a country, but 99% of the Pentagon’s behavior is not scrutinized by the President or Congress. On top of that, no one seems to know where the money goes. As I said earlier, trillions of dollars are floating around and thousands of auditors can’t even get to the bottom of it. Whistleblowers have said that when they were serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, they would be given bundles of millions of dollars to hand out and no one kept track of where it went. In Afghanistan we were paying the Taliban and fighting the Taliban. We were paying the opium growers and fighting the opium growers. The only book that does this insanity justice is Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22.

Q. Now there’s pervasive spying on U.S. citizens right here at home. What place does any of this have in “the land of the free”? Does this mean government of the people, by the people, for the people is just a sham?

A. Yes, it’s a sham. The government can’t truly represent the people unless the people know what the government is up to. But we’re not told most of what the government does. And when a whistleblower reveals what our government is up to — or a journalist like Julian Assange — they’re horribly persecuted and imprisoned. Furthermore, even if you wanted to claim we have a free democracy in the U.S., the two corporate parties agree on 90% of the core issues of our country. They agree on capitalism, on militarism, on Wall Street, on environmental destruction, on unlimited surveillance, on a massive prison state, on dystopian policing — they agree on just about everything. So if our choice is between those two parties, then it’s no choice at all. None of our elections are legit in this regard.

Q. Recently we’ve seen some token but precedent-setting direct payments to citizens in the form of Covid relief. There is also the ongoing discussion about reparations to descendants of slaves. If it could be unequivocally established that the government has abused DOD funding, misused and squandered vast sums of money to promote unjustified wars, purchase unneeded equipment, unnecessarily expand U.S. military presence across the globe, and regularly lied to the American public to manufacture consent for these misadventures and fraudulent activities, practical and political considerations aside, do you see any constitutional or other legal barriers to the public identifying, expecting, or even demanding proper compensation? A cash refund or citizen reparations for massive, authenticated abuse of power?

A. I’ll go beyond that. I believe Universal Basic Income is both doable right now and would save millions of lives. It would instantly end homelessness, extreme poverty, hunger, and a large percentage of health problems. Ending those things would also greatly decrease crime. Furthermore, UBI already exists in Alaska and other smaller examples. However, this is not to say it would solve all the problems with capitalism. It would not. Having an economic system that pushes everyone to seek profit over all else will ultimately destroy everything eventually. Capitalism requires infinite growth on a finite planet. By definition, it cannot sustain, and we’re already seeing signs of environmental collapse. We need a mental revolution, an evolution of what is possible. And we need it now.

We are grateful to Lee Camp for his thought-provoking views. The interview was arranged by John Rachel, Director of the Peace Dividend Project. This effort embraces a powerful, unprecedented, end-to-end strategy for challenging the tyranny of neocon warmongers in Washington DC, ending the endless wars, and reversing the self-destructive foreign policy and military paradigm which now poisons U.S. relations with the rest of the world. Lee has also agreed to be interviewed for the full-length Peace Dividend documentary film, a devastating indictment of the corruption and fraud built into our excessive military budgets and imperial overreach. This movie will inform, unite and empower everyday citizens to have a voice in determining the future they want for themselves and their children.

Welcome to the Martians!

Or will we truly find ourselves living in Trumptopia?

Tom Engelhardt

November 24, 2021

SOURCETomDispatch

Who knew that Martians, inside monstrous tripodal machines taller than many buildings, actually ululated, that they made eerily haunting “ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla” sounds? Well, let me tell you that they do — or rather did when they were devastating London.

I know that because I recently reread H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel War of the Worlds, while revisiting an early moment in my own life. Admittedly, I wasn’t in London when those Martian machines, hooting away, stalked boldly into that city, hungry in the most literal fashion imaginable for human blood. No surprise there, since that was almost a century and a quarter ago. Still, at 77, thanks to that book, I was at least able to revisit a moment that had been mine long enough ago to seem almost like fiction.

Yes, all those years back I had been reading that very same novel for the very first time under the covers by flashlight. I still remember being gripped, thrilled, and scared, at a time when my parents thought I was asleep. And believe me, if you do that at perhaps age 12 or 13, you really do feel as if you’ve been plunged into a futuristic world from hell, ululations and all.

But of course, scary as it might have been, alone in the dark, to secretly live through the Martian desolation of parts of England and the slaughter of countless human beings at their hands (actually, more like the tentacles of octopi), as if they were no more than irritating bugs, I was always aware of another reality as well. After all, there was still the morning (guaranteed to come), my breakfast, my dog Jeff, my bus trip to school with my friend Jim, my anything-but-exciting ordinary life, and my sense, in the ascendant Cold War America of the 1950s, of a future extending to the distant horizon that looked boring as hell, without even a stray Martian in sight. (How wrong I would turn out to be from the Vietnam War years on!)

I felt that I needed some Martians then. I needed something, anything, to shake up that life of mine, but the sad truth is that I don’t need them now, nor do the rest of us. Yet, in so many ways, in an America anything but ascendant, on a planet that looks like it’s in a distinctly War-of-the-Worlds-style version of danger, the reality is that they’re already here.

And sadly enough, we Americans and humanity in general seem little more effective against the various Martian stand-ins of today than the human beings Wells wrote about were then. Remember that his Martians finally went down, but not at the hands of humanity. They were taken out, “after all man’s devices had failed,” as the novelist expressed it then, “by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.” The conquerors of those otherwise triumphant Martians were, he reported, “the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared.”

If only we were so lucky in our own Wellsian, or do I mean Trumptopian (as in dystopian, not utopian) world?

Living in a science-fiction (or science-fact) novel?

In the 1950s, I went on to read, among other books, John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (about giant killer plants taking humanity apart), Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy which sent me into distant galaxies. And that was before, in 1966, I boarded the USS Enterprise with Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock to head for deep space in person — at least via my TV screen in that pre-Meta era.

Today, space is evidently something left to billionaires, but in the 1950s and 1960s the terror of invading aliens or plants with a taste for human flesh (even if they had perhaps been bioengineered in the all-too-Earthbound Soviet Union) had a certain strange appeal for the bored boy I was then. The future, it seemed, needed a Martian or two or a Triffid or two. Had I known, it wouldn’t have mattered in the least to me then that Wells had evidently created those Martians, in part, to give his British readers some sense of what it must have felt like for the Tasmanians, living on an island off the coast of Australia, to be conquered and essentially eradicated by British colonists early in the nineteenth century.

So, yes, I was indeed then fascinated by often horrific futures, by what was coming to be known as science fiction. But honestly, if you had told me that, as a grownup, I would find myself living in a science-fiction (or do I mean science-fact?) novel called perhaps Trumptopia, or The Day of the Heat Dome, or something similar, I would have laughed you out of the room. Truly, I never expected to find myself in such a world without either those covers or that flashlight as protection.

As president, Donald Trump would prove to be both a Martian and a Triffid. He would, in fact, be the self-appointed and elected stand-in for what turned out to be little short of madness personified. When a pandemic struck humanity, he would, as in that fictional England of 1898, take on the very role of a Martian, an alien ready to murder on a mass scale. Though few like to think of it that way, we spent almost two years after the Covid-19 pandemic began here being governed (to use a word that now sounds far too polite) by a man who, like his supporters and like various Republican governors today, was ready to slaughter Americans in staggering numbers.

As Trump’s former White House Covid-19 response coordinator Deborah Birx recently testified, by rejecting everything from masking to social distancing in the early months of the pandemic (not to speak of personally hosting mass superspreader events at the White House and elsewhere), he would prove an all-too-literal murderer — though Birx was far too polite to use such a word. In the midst of a pandemic that has, by now, killed an estimated 17 million people globally and perhaps more than a million Americans, he would, she believed, be responsible for at least 130,000 of those early deaths. That’s already slaughter on a monumental scale. (Keep in mind that, in the Trumpian tradition, from Florida’s Ron DeSantis to Texas’s Greg Abbott, Republican governors have continued in that distinctly murderous tradition to this very moment.)

And when it came to slaughter, the Trumpian/Republican response to Covid-19 will likely prove to be the milder kind of destruction they represented. As a climate denialist (it was a Chinese hoax!) and a major supporter of the fossil-fuel industry (no wonder the Saudis adored him!), The Donald would prove all too ready to all-too-literally boost the means to destroy this planet.

And wouldn’t you say that the various Trump supporters who now make up what’s still, for reasons unknown, called the Republican Party are ululating all too often these days, as they hover over dead and dying Americans, or at least those they would be perfectly willing to see wiped off this planet?

Lights off, flashlights on?

Sadly enough, however, you can’t just blame Donald Trump and the Republicans for our increasingly endangered planet. After all, who needs giant Martians or monstrous human-destroying plants when carbon dioxide and methane will, in the long run, do the trick? Who needs aliens like Martians and Triffids, given the global fossil-fuel industry?

Keep in mind that more representatives of that crew were accredited as delegates at the recent Glasgow climate-change talks than of any country on the planet. That industry’s CEOs have long been all too cognizant of climate change and how it could ravage this world of ours. They have also been all too willing to ignore it or even to put significant funds into climate-denial outfits. If, in 2200, there are still historians left to write about this world of ours, I have little doubt that they’ll view those CEOs as the greatest criminals in what has been a sordid tale of human history.

Nor, sadly enough, when it comes to this country, can you leave the Democrats out of the picture of global destruction either. Consider this, for instance: after the recent talks in Glasgow, President Biden returned home reasonably triumphant, swearing he would “lead by example” when it came to climate-change innovation. He was, of course, leaving behind in Scotland visions of a future world where, according to recent calculations, the temperature later in this century could hit 2.4 to 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.32 to 4.86 degrees Fahrenheit) above that of the pre-industrial age. That, of course, would be a formula for destruction on a devastating scale.

Just to consider the first leading “example” around, four days after Glasgow ended, the Biden administration began auctioning off to oil and gas companies leases for drilling rights to 80 million acres of public waters in the Gulf of Mexico. And that, after all, is an administration headed by a president who actually seems committed to doing something about climate change, as in his ever-shrinking Build Back Better bill. But that bill is, of course, being Manchinized right now by a senator who made almost half a million dollars last year off a coal brokerage firm he founded (and that his son now runs). In fact, it may never pass the Senate with its climate-change elements faintly intact. Keep in mind as well that Manchin is hardly alone. One in four senators reportedly still have fossil-fuel investments and the households of at least 28 of them from both parties “hold a combined minimum of $3.7 million and as much as $12.6 million in fossil-fuel investments.”

Take one small story, if you want to grasp where this country seems headed right now. As you may remember, the Trump administration worked assiduously to infringe upon national parks and indigenous lands to produce yet more fossil fuels. Recently, President Biden announced that his administration, having already approved a much-protested $9 billion pipeline to carry significant amounts of oil through tribal lands in Minnesota, would take one small but meaningful remedial step. As the New York Times described it, the administration would move “to block new federal oil and gas leasing within a 10-mile radius around Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, one of the nation’s oldest and most culturally significant Native American sites.”

I know you won’t be shocked by what followed, sadly enough. The response was predictable. As the Times put it, that modest move “generated significant pushback from Republicans and from New Mexico’s oil and gas industry.” Natch! And that, of course, is but the smallest of stories at a time when we have a White House at least officially committed to dealing in some reasonable fashion with the overheating of this planet.

Now, imagine that the Republicans win the House and Senate in the 2022 elections and Donald Trump (or some younger version of the same) takes the 2024 presidential election in a country in which Republican state legislators have already rejiggered so many voting laws and gerrymandered so many voting districts that the results could be devastating. You would then, of course, have a party controlling the White House and Congress that’s filled with climate-change denialists and fossil-fuel enthusiasts of the first order. (Who cares that this country is already being battered by fire, flood, and heat in a devastating fashion?) To grasp what that would mean, all you have to do is expand the ten-mile radius of that New Mexican story to the country as a whole — and then the planet.

And at that point, in all honesty, you could turn off the lights, flick on that old flashlight of mine, and be guaranteed that you, your children, and your grandchildren will experience something in your everyday lives that should have been left under the covers. As almost happened in The War of the Worlds, it’s possible that we could, in essence, kiss this planet goodbye and if that’s not science fiction transformed into fact of the first order, what is?

The Martians have arrived

You know, H.G. Wells wasn’t such a dope when it came to the future. After all, his tripodal Martian machines had a “kind of arm [that] carried a complicated metallic case, about which green flashes scintillated, and out of the funnel of this there smoked the Heat-Ray.” In 1898, he was already thinking about how heat of a certain sort could potentially destroy humanity. Today, the “Martians” stepping out of those space capsules happen to be human beings and they, too, are emerging with devastating heat rays.

Just ask my friend journalist Jane Braxton Little, whose town, Greenville, largely burned down in California’s record-breaking Dixie Fire this fall, a climate-change-influenced inferno so vast and fierce that it proved capable of creating its own weather. Imagine that for our future.

Of course, in another sense, you could say that we’ve been living in a science-fiction novel since August 6, 1945, when that first American nuclear bomb devastated Hiroshima. Until then, we humans could do many terrible things, but of one thing we were incapable: the destruction of this world. In the nearly eight decades that followed, however, the Martians have indeed arrived and we human beings have taken over a role once left to the gods: the ability to create Armageddon.

Still, the truth is that we don’t know how our own sci-fi tale will end. As in War of the Worlds, will some equivalent of those bacteria that took down the Martians arrive on the scene, perhaps some scientific discovery about how to deal so much better with the greenhouse gases eternally heading into our atmosphere? Will humanity, Greta Thunberg-style, come together in some new, more powerful way to stop this world from destroying itself? Will some brilliant invention, some remarkable development in alternative energy use, make all the difference in the world? Will the United States, China, and other key fossil-fuel burners finally come together in a way now hardly imaginable?

Or will we truly find ourselves living in Trumptopia?

Stay tuned.

Deadly pesticide still legal in US can harm bee populations for generations, study finds

The latest research offers another argument that U.S. regulators should follow the EU and ban neonicotinoids.

Olivia Rosane

November 24, 2021

SOURCEEcoWatch

A new study shows just how dangerous pesticides can be for bees.

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America this month, found that bee populations can take a hit for generations if a bee is exposed just once to a common pesticide during its first year of life.

“Especially in agricultural areas, pesticides are often used multiple times a year and multiple years in a row,” study lead author and University of California in Davis ecology Ph.D. candidate Clara Stuligross told The Guardian. “So this really shows us what that can actually mean for bee populations.”

Stuligross and her team studied a type of bee called the blue orchard bee. These bees are about the size of a honeybee, but they live alone and have a blue, metallic color, National Geographic explained. They are also important pollinators for native U.S. wildflowers and crops like apples, cherries, almonds and peaches.

The researchers exposed the bees to a neonicotinoid called imidacloprid, which is the most commonly used neonicotinoid in the U.S. and one of the most used in California specifically, according to The Independent.

Neonicotinoids are well known to be harmful to bees and other insects because they bind to their nerve cells and prevent the insect from transmitting electrical signals, National Geographic explained. However, this study is unique in showing how exposure can continue to impact bee populations for generations, something known as the “carryover effect.”

The scientists exposed the bees to the pesticide at different life stages and got the following results, The Guardian explained:

Bees exposed only in their first year of life saw 20 percent fewer offspring.
Bees exposed once as adults had 30 percent fewer offspring.
Bees exposed once as both larvae and adults had 44 percent fewer offspring.

The research therefore adds to the evidence the neonicotinoids are harming bee and insect populations, which have both taken a dive in recent decades.

“These findings support what many of us beekeepers and solitary beekeepers suspect is happening in agricultural fields,” researcher and beekeeper Steve Peterson, who was not involved with the research, told National Geographic. “We are seeing massive declines in all kinds of insects over the past several decades and much of it may be due to pesticide residues in the environment.”

A quarter of bee species have not been sighted since the 1990s, and insects that live on land have seen their populations fall by around 25 percent in the last 30 years and 50 percent in the last 75. Pesticides are considered a major threat to insect populations, along with other stressors like habitat loss, pollution and the climate crisis.

The latest research offers another argument that U.S. regulators should follow the EU and ban neonicotinoids.

“I hope that the EPA will review studies like this and carefully consider these kinds of effects in their risk assessment,” Peterson told National Geographic. “I do think that multigenerational and non-direct contact

Dollar Tree CEO—Who Made Over $10 Million Last Year—Blames Inflation for Price Hike to $1.25

"Dollar Tree made $1,230,000,000 in profits this year, gave its CEO $10,767,883, and pays workers as little as $8.32 an hour."

A person walks past a Dollar Tree store on November 23, 2021 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

JAKE JOHNSON

November 24, 2021

Dollar Tree CEO Michael Witynski—who raked in around $11 million in total compensation last year—announced Tuesday that his company is raising prices to $1.25 at stores across the United States, pointing to the current "inflationary environment."

"Corporations are using the excuse of inflation to raise prices and make fatter profits."

But observers weren't buying Witynski's explanation for the imminent price hike, which was publicized as Dollar Tree reported $216.8 million in net profits for the third quarter of 2021. The 25% price increase is expected to take effect at Dollar Tree stores nationwide in early 2022.

"Dollar Tree made $1,230,000,000 in profits this year, gave its CEO $10,767,883, and pays workers as little as $8.32 an hour. Over 7,400 Dollar Tree employees are forced to rely on food stamps and Medicaid subsidized by U.S. taxpayers," Warren Gunnels, majority staff director for Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), pointed out on Twitter.

"Unfettered greed is corporate America closing U.S. factories where workers made $30/hour, opening sweatshops abroad where workers make 30 cents/hour, hiring U.S. workers to sell the sweatshop goods for $8/hour and blaming inflation for a 25% price increase at Dollar Tree," Gunnels wrote.

Dollar Tree's decision to push higher costs onto consumers follows a growing trend of companies citing inflationary pressures in the economy to justify price hikes—even as they bring in record profits and lavishly reward their executives and shareholders. In 2020, according to a recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, CEOs made 351 times as much as a typical worker, and CEO pay has soared by 1,322% since 1978.

The Institute for Policy Studies noted in a May study that Witynski—who took over as Dollar Tree's CEO in July of 2020—received $11.3 million in total compensation last year.

"That's 715 times as much as the pay for the company's median worker, a part-time U.S. store employee who earned $15,816," IPS observed.

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Corporate Greed the 'Real Culprit Behind Rising Prices,' Researchers Say
Kenny Stancil

A report released earlier this month by the watchdog group Accountable.US found that at least a dozen major U.S. corporations have "reported nearly $11 billion in profits the same quarter they announced price increases, along with over $34 billion in stock buybacks and dividends this year."

"As millions of Americans are already struggling against a worsening hunger crisis, eight of these companies, including Proctor & Gamble, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola, have jacked up food prices, or announced their intent to do so, despite recent healthy financial reports," the group said.

While acknowledging that many factors—including major supply chain disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic—are contributing to rising U.S. inflation, progressive economists and lawmakers have argued that consolidated corporate power is a key driver of recent price increases.

"Corporations are using the excuse of inflation to raise prices and make fatter profits. The result is a transfer of wealth from consumers to corporate executives and major investors," former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote in a blog post earlier this month. "This has nothing to do with inflation, folks. It has everything to do with the concentration of market power in a relatively few hands."

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that as the coronavirus continues to wreak havoc worldwide, executives of U.S. companies "are seizing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to raise prices to match and in some cases outpace their own higher expenses."

"Nearly two out of three of the biggest U.S. publicly traded companies have reported fatter profit margins so far this year than they did over the same stretch of 2019, before the Covid-19 outbreak," the Journal noted. "Nearly 100 of these giants have booked 2021 profit margins—the share of each dollar of sales a company can pocket—that are at least 50% above 2019 levels."

"We're having to pay more because corporate America made a choice to raise prices on us."

On Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called on the Justice Department to investigate "major poultry companies' anticompetitive practices that have lined the pockets of executives and shareholders while raising prices for families at the grocery store ahead of Thanksgiving."

"Lack of competition in the poultry industry is allowing these massive companies to squeeze both American consumers and farmers to fuel record corporate profits and payouts to shareholders," Warren said in a statement. "When companies have monopoly power as massive suppliers, they can jack up prices of the goods they sell."

"And when those same companies have complete or substantial market power as large employers or buyers of inputs, also known as monopsony power, they can suppress their own costs for those inputs, including workers' wages," she added. "This is the worst of all worlds, where wages are held back while prices are jacked up."

Faiz Shakir, founder of the advocacy journalism organization More Perfect Union, wrote in the New Republic earlier this week that "corporate America has seized on the fears of inflation to jack up prices on you and make a ton more money."

"For months, they have, with one hand, fueled talk of inflation as a way to make obscene profits off the backs of consumers. That’s bad enough," Shakir noted. "But with the other hand, they have been manipulating the talk of inflation to engage in a full-frontal assault on President Biden’s efforts to pass a Build Back Better bill for working families."

"As we head into Thanksgiving and Christmas, and we all look forward to large enjoyable feasts with friends and family, we should rightly harbor anger about inflation," Shakir continued. "Not just that they made us pay more for turkey, cranberries, and pie crusts. We're having to pay more because corporate America made a choice to raise prices on us, and then on top of that, it tried to manipulate your fear about those prices to keep you from getting paid leave, home care, childcare, and climate change action. Corporate America made you pay more while trying to make sure it didn't have to."

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