Category: green new deal

March 14, 2021

Capitalist Economies Overproduce Food — But People Can’t Afford to Buy It

The unprecedented pandemic, and the recession it has caused, has led to a sharp increase in food insecurity in the United States. The problem isn’t that there isn’t enough food to go around, but that more and more people are unable to afford to purchase it. Last year the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) recently released a report predicting that the number of people facing extreme hunger could soar to 270 million by the end of 2020 — effectively doubling.

What’s leading to these extreme statistics isn’t a lack of availability — it’s that many people simply can’t afford to purchase food. Like with many commodities, capitalist markets are fairly good at producing food, but they are not so efficient at distributing it equitably. When you combine this with a lack of bold intervention from policymakers, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing an uptick in hunger during the pandemic.

Hunger is not the only food-related problem intensifying under capitalism. COVID-19 has simply magnified many of the already existing problems in our food system, such as labor exploitation, unsustainable farming practices, lack of regulation… the list goes on.

In his book, A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism: Understanding the Political Economy of What We Eat, Eric Holt-Gimenez gives a broad overview of how we got to our current predicament when it comes to how we produce, distribute and consume food in the United States. The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Robert R. Raymond: I wanted to start by situating our conversation within our current major crisis. Can you explain how the pandemic has impacted our food system?

Eric Holt-Giménez: I think one of the most remarkable things about what COVID has done to the food system is that it has helped to perpetuate it as it is. I mean, I don’t think that COVID has significantly changed our food system at all other than to exacerbate some of the inequities and externalities. And what I mean by that is, when the lockdowns first hit, there was tremendous disruption to the food supply chain globally, especially in the United States. Restaurants were closing, food wasn’t being sold to restaurants, and food wasn’t being distributed to schools and other institutions. It was backing up all the way down the supply chain.

We also began to see that food and farmworkers were some of the first to get seriously ill, in large part because our processing plants, especially meat processing plants, were refusing to shut down and to socially distance — basically calculating that there were enough poor immigrant workers that they could draw from. They could simply sacrifice the workers that they had because there’s always someone to take their place. So, tremendous disruptions in the food supply chain, but it adjusted itself very quickly, actually. We don’t see scarcities now — there was some panic-buying at first, but once that was over with we didn’t really see scarcities in the United States or on a global scale. There’s plenty of food to go around.

But what we do see is the people who work within the food system are sick, dying, out of work and food insecure. Now, this was true before COVID, but it’s worse now. We also see a tremendous concentration going on in the industry as before but worse. Huge conglomerates like Walmart and Amazon have actually, and unsurprisingly, made a killing with COVID. People are ordering food; people are stocking up. So, I would say that it hasn’t significantly changed our food system at all — it’s made parts of it worse for a lot of people along with the economy. But basically, it’s more of the same.

Zooming out, I think it would be helpful to take a historical look at our food system to understand how we got to where we are now. One of the earlier examples of how we’ve come to commodify food is based around the potato famine. Can you explain what happened during that crisis?

The Irish potato famine, also known as the Great Hunger of 1845, has some very interesting and horrifying explanations which fly in the face of the Malthusian understandings, which are still peddled around the world today in terms of hunger and famine. In other words, Thomas Malthus, an English economist, came up with a theory that people go hungry because there’s not enough food. This has almost never been the case, and a good example is the Irish potato famine.

What happened was that the Spanish brought back potatoes from Latin America, and from the 1,200 or so varieties of potatoes from the Andes, they brought back just a couple. The potato made its way around Europe because it was so much more efficient in terms of producing the calories that people needed. But what happened in Ireland was there was only one variety of potato, and it became infested with a strain of fungus that spread very quickly throughout country. And in the course of seven years, I believe, it destroyed three-quarters of the potato crop.

This was devastating because most Irish people ate mostly potatoes. Now, why did most Irish people eat mostly potatoes? Because they had been colonized by the British, and British landowners controlled most of the land in Ireland. Most of the Irish were sharecroppers — they didn’t own their land and subsisted on potatoes. So, what at one point was the bulwark of the Indian civilization becomes, in fact, food for exploited peoples who are very vulnerable and on the brink of disaster anyway…. What’s interesting is that, the potato fungus alone would not have led to the famine. But because the people were too poor to buy food, food was actually being exported out of Ireland during the height of the famine. That’s why so many people starved. So, you can see right there that food had become a commodity, it followed the logic of the market, and the Great Hunger is an example that really helps explain what’s still wrong with the capitalist food system today.

One of the main problems with our food system isn’t that there’s not enough food to go around — it’s how that food is distributed. Can you talk about the problems with the Green Revolution of the 1970s and how the ideas it was premised on still permeate the food system today?

The driving force behind the “Green Revolution” was not hunger at all — it was the need for agro-industry to find new markets for their products. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, which posited that the world population was exploding, that we need to double production over the next generation, and we will need to limit population growth. And so the Green Revolution was introduced, and what it did was basically to take the fertilizers and pesticides that the United States had been using after World War II and export them around the world, to get other countries and farmers to buy them and increase production.

So that’s why we supposedly need genetically modified organisms; that’s why we supposedly need precision farming, satellite agriculture, all these things — because supposedly the population is growing so fast that we need to produce more food. Well, it doesn’t appear as though anybody is groveling before the facts on this, because the rate of population growth has plummeted. The world population is crashing, and it doesn’t look like we’re even going to reach the 12 billion which was projected just a couple of years ago. Now it looks like 8 or 9 billion is going to be the leveling off for the population. So, you can’t argue that we need to double production because we already produce too much to begin with. And yet, this is what we hear over and over again. So, this is really sort of how capital politicizes the discourse around hunger in order to colonize new markets.

You alluded to this earlier, but can you talk a bit about the problem of overproduction?

We produce too much food. And when we produce too much food, we do so because we don’t have to pay for what it’s worth. We don’t have to pay for the destruction that it causes in the environment — at least the agricultural sector doesn’t have to. And what happens in agriculture is that farmers have to invest a tremendous amount of resources and money in time upfront before they see any returns. And then you have to wait and pray for months for a crop and favorable market conditions and favorable weather conditions and whatnot. And then you pay back your loans and hopefully you make a profit. Well, most years you don’t, but you’re counting on those years that you do.

But if the price goes down, what are you going to do? Farmers produce more, because they have a lot of fixed costs, upfront costs. So, they produce more than next year to recover their losses. Well, if you produce more, that just creates more overproduction and the price goes lower again. And we basically had overproduction for the last hundred years. If you look at the food price index, it’s been dropping ever since before World War II. And what that means is there’s always been too much food, and that’s still the case today.

Can you talk about the various forms of labor exploitation that take place in the capitalist food system today, particularly in the agricultural sector?

Well, one of the biggest ways in which the agricultural sector avoids labor laws, regulation, and scrutiny is by hiring people who are undocumented and who fall outside of the system. They hire people who are vulnerable and are not able to easily challenge abuses on the farm — who are technically not even able to form unions. Our food system would fall apart tomorrow without immigrant and undocumented labor. We wouldn’t get the products out of the fields, we wouldn’t get anything processed in the plants. And to a large degree, we wouldn’t get our food served or cooked.

So the biggest challenge for labor in agriculture today is immigration. And, ironically, it was President Ronald Reagan who gave the last amnesty. And the minute folks got amnesty, they got the hell out of agriculture — they just didn’t want to be farmworkers anymore. And, so, the point is that on one hand, we need to regularize immigration status for workers, and then we have to begin applying fair, equitable labor regulation to agriculture and have them begin paying farmworkers a fair wage — not just a living wage but a fair wage.

You’ve spoken about how it’s time for “foodies” to embrace a Green New Deal for the food system. Can you talk about what you mean by this?

The food system is still pivotal in terms of our entire political economic system. And I say that recognizing that we can’t change the food system without changing the system of capitalism — it’s going to be impossible to change one without changing the other — they’re interlinked. But the food system has tremendous leverage in the types of social and economic transformations which we need in this country and in the world.

We can’t change the food system without changing the system of capitalism.

We need to go back to the lessons from the original New Deal and update them to include provisions around labor, around race, reparations and around the environment. So, in some ways, it’s very simple. You say to the farmer, ok, we will buy X tons of wheat or corn, whatever it is at this price, which is a fair price, but we won’t buy one bushel more. And that’s basically a quota. And so, you get to produce this much, and we can figure it out with the parity price index — this is how much you need to make a good living. But you cannot contaminate your groundwater, you can’t poison your workers, you have to pay them fairly. In other words, a set of social and environmental conditions for a guaranteed price at a level of production which we can actually absorb. That way, the price won’t drop too much and we can put some in reserve.

If we start there, you would find a number of things happening. You will find that these large industrial farms will not be able to compete. A Green New Deal with a green and fair-parity index will favor family farms, and the wealth from those farms will circulate locally and help to rebuild our rural communities that are suffering so much. There are studies that show that that type of wealth circulates up to seven times more within the community if it’s not siphoned off by agribusiness and by some of these huge monopolies.

So that means that the food movement, per se, particularly the farm justice movement and food justice movement, have to build alliances, broad alliances. That also means building alliances and taking action outside of just the food system. There are a whole host of issues which impact the food system, particularly around climate and environment and labor, with whom we need to build alliances in order to create the political will to introduce the type of transformative legislation and policies which we desperately need.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
March 13, 2021

Biden’s Trade Policy With India Could Accelerate Global Climate Catastrophe

The new Biden administration’s centering of the climate crisis — including through the cabinet appointment of Indigenous leader Deb Haaland, the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline and the creation of a nation-wide climate policy task force — is a significant victory for the environmental movement.

At the same time, there are also aspects of Biden’s climate plan, his international agenda in particular, which are far from progressive. This has been reflected in the administration’s approach to India, the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter.

The developing country, which is rapidly expanding its investment in coal, is expected to double its energy consumption by 2040 — making it thus an essential partner in international climate change mitigation.

While the partnership between Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to spur India’s “Green Transition” is likely to prioritize “green finance” and “knowledge transfers,” no clear effort has been made to address the well-documented ways in which the Indian state has exploited the “green energy” label to recklessly expand ecologically hazardous projects, to the detriment of marginalized people.

Moreover, the Biden administration’s recent expression of support for the three contentious agricultural laws passed by the Modi government, which have been met by a three-month-long protest involving hundreds of millions of farmers and workers, is anathema to a serious vision of global climate justice. These laws, in short, are expected to have the effect of deepening India’s dependence on a fossil fuel-intensive agricultural regime, putting a downward pressure on agricultural prices through market deregulation, and diminishing other food security initiatives which are key to the survival of 67 percent of the country. The reforms come at a time when the country is emerging from its worst economic recession in a century.

The White House has also been passive about the farmers’ struggle and the ruthless repression the Modi-led government has wielded against it. In fact, just days after Biden met with the Indian prime minister, Delhi police arrested and illegally detained 22-year-old climate activist Disha Ravi, along with 30-year-old Nikita Jacob and 31-year-old Shantanu Muluk, invoking a colonial-era sedition law for helping create and share a toolkit which suggested ideas to support the farmers’ protests, originally tweeted by Greta Thunberg. Aside from Ravi, Jacob and Muluk, all of whom are members of the Extinction Rebellion chapter in India (XR India), the Modi regime has targeted dozens of the farmers’ supporters over the preceding months. Many of them have been severely deprived of their rights and, as in the cases of youth labor union leaders 24-year-old Shiv Kumar and 23-year-old Naudeep Kaur, brutally tortured at the hands of the police. The Biden administration has not said a word about these transgressions.

Contemporary India is, thus, a prime example of why an internationalist approach to climate justice is more crucial now than ever. The alarming growth of far right proto-fascist politics in India (as in much of the world) adds urgency to this task, as the ecological crisis both feeds into and is intensified by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) agenda. A robust vision of climate justice for the U.S.-India partnership must therefore include an explicit rejection of ethnonationalist politics and focus on building policies that strengthen rather than marginalize communities that are most vulnerable to the changing climate.

India’s Farm Laws Are Disaster Capitalism

The fundamental contradiction that lies therein is the incompatibility of climate justice with the profit motives of capital and the trade agenda of the U.S. government. From the perspective of the U.S., India is an “emerging market,” ripe for foreign direct investment. And while India is already the U.S.’s 13th-largest agricultural export market, the U.S. has a history of retaliating against the developing country for its “excessively high tariffs” and investment barriers; for example, in 2019 President Trump terminated India’s special developing country status in the World Trade Organization after alleging that India failed to offer the US equitable and reasonable access to its markets in numerous sectors including dairy and agricultural products.

India is expected to double its energy consumption by 2040 — making it thus an essential partner in international climate change mitigation.

India’s domestic agribusiness investors like Adani and Reliance — owned by two of India’s richest and most politically influential men — also have much to gain from the removal of “inefficient” government price supports to farmers, which will drive down prices of agricultural produce and facilitate greater corporate control over markets. The Biden administration’s congratulatory tone thus reflected the interests of large capital rather than the scores of environmental and farmers organizations, lawyers and labor unions in the U.S. and globally who have called on the administration to take decisive measures to protect Indian farmers.

The protesting farmers who have vowed to remain put at the border of Delhi for “six months or six years” — however long it takes to repeal the three agricultural laws — have in essence created a microcosm of democracy within a country which has grown increasingly authoritarian since Modi’s rise to power in 2014. Crafting their own newspaper to counter the jingoistic, pro-corporate mainstream media, erecting shelters and communal kitchens through small donations, and at times engaging in a kind of mass therapy to heal divisions between religious communities that were stoked by the BJP government. These acts — while mostly concentrated in India’s wheat-growing states of Punjab and Haryana — have been received with enormous solidarity from all corners of the country and the world. As a full-page advertisement in The New York Times, signed by 75 international nonprofit organizations, reads: “To Indian farmers: You have ignited one of the largest protests in human history. From the fields of Punjab, to the villages of Kerala, to the streets of New Delhi, your voices echo around the world. Now we raise our voices in solidarity.”

Still perhaps one of the most remarkable achievements of this movement is the way it has brought a degree of unity to sections of civil society and political economy which are usually highly fragmented. Owing to the sweeping nature of the laws — which threaten the livelihoods of not only large grain farmers but also agricultural laborers and small farmers, who consume more of their yield than they sell — the movement has attracted people from a variety of class positions. Samyukt Kisan Moorcha (SKU), the leadership body which formed in the aftermath of the BJP government’s passage of the three farm laws, consists of over 40 farmers unions that range ideologically from Gandhian to Communist, and is equally diverse. The emerging solidarities between agriculturalists and climate justice warriors are also an important development of this struggle.

While the organizing links are nascent, the material basis of such a unity is strong. At the most basic level, in order to grow crops, there must be predictable climatic conditions. But as the globe warms, India’s extreme weather events have soared; from 1950 to 2015 these events have tripled, costing India’s economy $3 billion USD per year, according to a study in the journal Nature.

These losses have been ruinous for India’s small farmers (85 percent of all farmers) whose crops are dependent on the vagaries of the weather, especially precipitation. At the same time, erratic climatic conditions have perhaps exacted a more extreme toll on the medium-size farmers who adopted mechanized and input-intensive agriculture during the Green Revolution of the 1960s. Yields initially were impressive, bringing new levels of wealth to the largely upper-caste beneficiaries who could afford the onerous costs of chemical inputs and high yielding variety crops (HYVs). Eventually, however, these practices depleted nutrient density in the soil and a sinking water table soured the fortunes of many. Declining yields have prompted farmers to seek out higher loans to invest in more toxic fertilizers and pesticides.

In this context, even a minor change in weather fluctuations has the ability to drive a family farm into an extreme crisis of overindebtedness. The APMC system (Agricultural Produce Market Committee) — in which the government procures and provides a remunerative price on select crops, namely wheat and rice at public market yards — has been one of the only reliable lifelines for grain farmers of Punjab and Haryana. In places where the Minimum Support Prices (MSPs) are non-existent or poorly enforced, such as the cotton farming belt of Maharashtra, the situation is even more dire — as seen by the farmer suicide crisis (more than a third of the 300,000+ deaths since 1995 are concentrated in Maharashtra).

This socially and ecologically hazardous agricultural regime adopted by India and many developing countries across the world in the 1960s under the influence of the U.S. government cannot persist in its current form. But the transformation cannot be achieved through brute force or the market-driven decimation of farmers’ livelihoods — and certainly not through the current laws which are more likely to expand capital intensive agriculture.

This is why the US must support the farmers’ demands for a more ambitious scheme of government support, one where not only grains, but all crops, are covered under the MSP. And while not officially endorsed by the SKU, the movement has also brought forth demands that could benefit the largely Dalit (ex-untouchable caste) landless laborers — a class that rarely finds common cause with farmers’ movements in India. For example, organizations like the Punjab Khet Mazdoor Union (PKMU) and Mazdoor Adhikar Sangh (MAS) have pushed for the enforcement of minimum wages and aid to families of laborers who have commit suicide (currently only landed farmers are counted in farmer suicide databases — and thus compensated — by the government).

Without such measures, coupled with investments in a more ecologically-appropriate rural economy — including incentives for farmers such as the expansion of stable non-farm employment — a just transition will not be possible.

Kicking Away the Ladder to Food Security

The argument being made by the U.S. and crony capitalist class in India that opening India’s agricultural markets further to market forces, and doing away with price subsidies would “help” the majority of small farmers (who comprise 85 percent of India’s agrarians) does not hold water. In fact, it is contrary to the development record of virtually every wealthy nation in this world. The U.S. and other nations heavily subsidized their infant industries and agriculturalists. In 2020 an estimated 39% of net farm income came from the federal government. Now that poorer nations seek to do the same, the advanced nations are attempting to “kick away the ladder,” to borrow the words of the economist Ha-Joon Chang.

Moreover, in India, where there are 189.2 million undernourished people (that’s more than half the population of the United States) and nearly 70 percent of the Indian population depends on the agricultural sector either directly or indirectly for their livelihoods, deregulating agricultural markets would be playing with fire. On top of the human toll, subjecting farmers to market forces only has potential to improve the economy when a base level of development has already been attained. Moreover, according to Chang, “for countries that have not reached this level, a fall in food import capacity even for a year or two may have serious irreversible negative consequences for long-term productivity of many people due to irreversible falls in the provision of nutrition and, for children, education.”

It appears that the current regime has little regard for “hierarchy of human needs — where food is the most basic of consumption goods.” This has been illustrated through not only the farm laws, but also draconian measures such as the lockdown in March 2020, which left millions of migrant workers stranded in far-flung places without work or food rations; and the botched demonetization drive of 2016, which cost the country 1.5 million jobs and dealt a crushing blow to small businesses that operate in the informal sector.

Modi’s Fossil Fuel Fascism

Finally, growing outrage by the various oppressed communities that have been further subordinated by the ruling BJP’s majoritarian political program since Modi’s rise to power in 2014 is also helping to fuel to the current movement.

The BJP and the larger “family” of organizations to which it belongs, known as the Sangh Parivar, espouse an ideology known as “Hindutva,” which professes that India is a nation belonging exclusively to Hindus. The hundreds of millions of religious minorities (Muslims, Christians and Dalits), environmentalists, human rights advocates, secularists, communists and anti-caste activists are all “enemies” of the nation to be destroyed.

The founders of the “parent” organization of the Sangh, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), were explicitly inspired by the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini. The man who fired three bullets into Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, Nathuram Godse, was a proud member of the RSS, and is celebrated by Hindu nationalists as a “patriot.”

What makes this movement particularly dangerous is not simply the ideology but the way it has so thoroughly embedded itself in civil society. The Sangh Parivar comprises a network of dozens of institutions, including schools, women’s clubs, publishing houses, “IT cells,” health centers, and many more. The RSS claims to have 5-6 million members and 50,000 centers (shakhas) across the country. These centers act as sites of ideological indoctrination, but also weapons-training grounds. One could say it is the largest network of fascist organizations by membership in the world.

Aside from possessing many of the classical features of fascism, what should be particularly of interest to the Biden administration’s climate team is the Sangh’s politics of “fossil fuel fascism.”

Climate Justice Project Director at the Institute for Policy Studies Basav Sen has studied the obsession of fascist movements across the world with fossil fuels (in the U.S., Brazil and India). In part it has do with “notions of conquest, and the notions of control of resources,” he told Truthout. “In America, we have the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous populations. White supremacists lay claim to the Indigenous lands and the resources in it which includes fossil fuels. Similarly, in India, the caste Hindu power structure and the elite see the resources of Adivasis’ [Indigenous] land as something they have an inherent right to. If Adivasis are in the way, drive them out.”

The anti-farmer and anti-climate trade policies currently being pursued by the Biden-Modi partnership both strengthen the hand of fascism and threaten progress on global climate justice.

Conversely, as has been documented in places across the world, the impacts of climate change fuel extremist politics. In India we see this in the Hindutva’s response to increasing undocumented immigration from neighboring Bangladesh. “Outside of island chains in the Pacific, Bangladesh is probably the country most vulnerable to sea level rise in the world,” Sen said. “Two-thirds of country is a river delta, and a lot will be inundated with seas rising and the Himalayas melting. It’s not the only factor driving people to migrate, but it certainly is a factor.”

Rather than providing refuge to these vulnerable populations, India’s response has been to militarize the border. The BJP in particular has used the rhetoric of the “invasion” of “illegal” Muslims as a way to win popularity. It has been a big part of the BJP’s electoral messaging in West Bengal, where politicians have increasingly used Facebook to demonize and provoke supporters to commit acts of violence against religious minorities. Mythologies of Muslim invasion and demographic takeover were also central to the BJP’s national mobilization in support of the controversial Citizens Amendment Act passed in 2020, which creates a pathway to citizenship for all major religious minorities from bordering states except for Muslims.

No Internationalism, No Green New Deal

Climate diplomacy and cooperation is impossible in the context of fascist dictatorship — the U.S. government should thus be very concerned with the road India is traveling.

In 2014, while even conservative media outlets like The Economist had made the editorial decision to oppose the candidacy of Narendra Modi due to his ethnonationalist politics and violent past, President Obama diligently worked to “rehabilitate” Modi. Previously, under a 1998 U.S. law which bars entry to foreigners who have committed “particularly severe violations of religious freedom,” the Hindu supremacist was banned from the U.S. It is widely held that as chief minister of Gujarat, Modi was responsible for the 2002 pogroms which saw 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, perish.

While it may seem farfetched to get the U.S. administration to care about the farmers of the Global South and to take steps to reverse the spread of ecofascism, the degree to which progressives have moved them so far brings hope.

Donald Trump’s affinity for so-called “strongmen” only deepened U.S. ties to Modi’s agenda. In February 2020, Trump infamously traveled to Delhi just as the Sangh Parivar was painting the streets of Delhi red with the blood of Muslims, and mentioned nothing about the carnage. And while the Biden administration likely won’t be replicating Trump’s expressions of bonhomie such as the 2019 “Howdy Modi” event in Houston, the anti-farmer and anti-climate trade policies currently being pursued by the Biden-Modi partnership both strengthen the hand of fascism and threaten progress on global climate justice.

The contemporary youth-led climate movement in the U.S. and abroad has demonstrated why militant and aggressive organizing to pressure the Biden administration must be an integral part of the climate justice strategy in the years ahead. There is no question that activists have already pushed Biden’s climate policy to a far more ambitious place than it would have otherwise been. And while it may seem farfetched to get the U.S. administration to care about the farmers of the Global South and to take steps to reverse the spread of ecofascism, the degree to which progressives have moved them so far brings hope.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
March 12, 2021

Meet the “New Koch Brothers”

Wealthy predators are playing stock market games with companies needed to develop and produce clean technology Continue reading

The post Meet the “New Koch Brothers” appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
March 12, 2021

The Public Sector We Need

To have any chance of implementing popular left-wing ideas, we need to restore the capacity of democratic government to serve working people.

This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
March 11, 2021

To Win a Green New Deal, Pass the PRO Act

The PRO Act would establish a baseline for ensuring that working people can fight for and win transformative climate policies that benefit everyone.

This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
March 9, 2021

Rethinking Employment in the Biden-Harris Era

And my own looming job crisis. Continue reading

The post Rethinking Employment in the Biden-Harris Era appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
March 8, 2021

Longing for Genuine Global Solidarity

You know that Green New Deal by Ed Markey and AOC,
it needs to be a Global GND.
Just read the document from the IPCC,
it’s gloomy as hell, but that’s the painful reality.
Our plan must be global, with reparations for the tragedy of ecological damage and colonial atrocity.

Millions of people want to live freely,
with justice for all, peace, and prosperity.
They want dignity and hope, not your charity.
Clean water, clean air, clean soil, that’s not a fantasy.

No more hunger and bread riots, we’ll have food sovereignty.
No more darkness nor smog, we’ll have clean energy sovereignty.
We’ll use the sun, the wind, the tides, and even some volcanic energy.
We’ll end the pain, we’ll end the suffering, we’ll build a truly circular economy.
We’ll change the metric to guide every public policy.
We’ll use GPI, laser-focused on quality of life, not some useless GDP.

It won’t be easy, cheap, or enemy-free.
The naysayers will scream, ‘the deficit, the debt, OMG it’s inflationary!‘
Little do they know, we have plenty of productive capacity.
We’ll build even more with our industrial strategy.
We’ll go after price-setters, cartels, and every monopoly.
We’ll setup Pecora-style hearings in every congressional committee.

We’ll fight corruption and greed, and end the oligarchy.
We will have a Brand New Congress in Washington DC.
535 lawmakers, and a true participatory democracy,
a government of the people, by the people, for the people, like it was supposed to be.

We’ll tax polluters, speculators, and the oligarchs; you see,
not because we need their money, or their permission to have an equitable society,
but because we need to decarbonize the system and fight inequality.

It’s the only way forward. I can’t compromise and settle for insanity.
Don’t try to distract my people with your conspiracy theories.
Qanon, Rothschilds, gold bugs, or a new kind of cryptocurrency.

Let’s stick to the facts, history, logic, and a simple accounting identity.
It’s all brought into shape focus under the lens of Modern Monetary Theory.
I know it’s a little silly but I like it, I made this poem rhyme with MMT.

It’s a paradigm shift, it’s undeniable, don’t you agree?
It changes the narrative, and it destroys the foundations of austerity.
A whole new world is possible, without artificial scarcity.
We’ll fight unemployment and poverty with a Job Guarantee,
with decent wages, full benefits, and every need covered if necessary.

We’ll make those jobs green, community-driven, and focus on the care economy.
We’ll look after the planet, the children, and the elderly.
Every living thing, every drop of water, every inch of soil, is our responsibility.
Every source of life is so precious; a gift in our custody, not some kind of private property.

I’m taking this global Climate Action plan very seriously,
because I don’t want to end up a Climate Refugee.

Call your Reps and tell them about Ayanna Pressley.
She wrote the Job Guarantee resolution, to complete the civil rights legacy.
Urge them to endorse it promptly.
Be sure to warn them: ignore us, and you will see,
your term in office will expire in January 2023.
Hit the streets and chant with me:
“By the ballot, or by decree, we demand a Job Guarantee!”

Humanity is longing for genuine global solidarity.
So join me in this struggle, it’s my final plea.
I’ll die trying if I have to, for this better future is within reach, and it’s yearning to be set free.

This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
February 24, 2021

Texas Power Grid Deregulation Cost Texans $28 Billion Over Two Decades

Republican Texas lawmakers often tout their state leadership’s contempt and recalcitrance toward the federal government as a point of pride. But a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has found that the deregulation and monopolization of the Texas energy market cost Texas residents $28 billion more than they would have paid under a traditional utility.

When Texas changed from fully regulated power generation to the largely deregulated system that’s in place today, it began requiring almost 60 percent of residents to buy from retail utilities rather than a public local utility, says WSJ. Retail providers buy energy and then sell it at a fixed rate and essentially acting as a middleman.

Texas isn’t the only state that allows its residents to choose between energy providers, but the model of energy system that led to last week’s power crisis is built upon a shaky framework. Ironically, the deregulatory effort was supposed to make power cheaper for consumers while avoiding federal oversight.

When a Republican state senator who helped lead the charge for deregulation of Texas’s grid in the 1990s alongside lobbyists and businesses like Enron unveiled the deregulation bill in 1999, WSJ noted that he said: “If all consumers don’t benefit from this, we will have wasted our time and failed our constituency.”

“Competition in the electric industry will benefit Texans by reducing monthly rates,” said then-Gov. George W. Bush, per WSJ.

Deregulation, according to these lawmakers’ stated intentions, didn’t work as planned. From 2004 to 2019, WSJ found, while the average rate paid by Texas residents getting their electricity from traditional utilities was 8 percent lower than the average across the U.S., the average rate among retail providers was 13 percent higher than the nationwide rate.

As Bush noted, deregulation was also supposed to allow for more competition, but various mergers have left the state with only two main retail electricity providers.

A 2014 report by the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power (TCAP) had similar findings to WSJ. At the time, the organization found that residents in deregulated areas paid $22 billion more than people in regulated areas of Texas. A follow-up report in 2019 by TCAP found that the gap had since narrowed, but that the system “ha[s] a long way to go,” said TCAP’s executive director.

WSJ’s findings are in light of some conservatives doubling down on defending the deregulated energy system in Texas after the crisis began. Last week, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry said that Texans would rather face the energy crisis that ballooned into what some called a Hurricane Katrina-scale disaster than face regulation from the federal government.

Gov. Greg Abbott, meanwhile, went on Fox to blame the energy crisis on renewable energy, even though the crisis was largely due to natural gas generation failures, and attacked the Green New Deal. However, in the wake of the disaster, climate experts have pointed out that the Green New Deal could actually be instrumental in helping to prevent future disasters like this one.

The winter storm that knocked out the grid in Texas has been attributed to the climate crisis, since climate change causes unusual and often disastrous weather conditions. Though climate scientists have warned of such changes for many years, many energy regulators continue to largely ignore the effects of the climate crisis — including Texas’s grid operator. In an interview with Texas Monthly, the president of the state’s grid operator said “We don’t have any climate specialists on staff.”

It remains to be seen how much consumers will end up paying out of pocket for the past week of energy price spikes in the state, but experts are saying that they will likely be paying more. Some residents who chose to get their energy from wholesale providers were hit with bills of up to $16,000 last week for just a few days’ worth of energy use; others may see a rise in their rates eventually.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 22, 2021

A Green New Deal Would Solve Texas Energy Deregulation, Says Naomi Klein

Millions of Texans are still suffering after severe winter weather devastated the state’s energy and water systems. About 8 million Texans remain under orders to boil water, and 30,000 homes still have no power. Around 70 deaths have now been linked to the winter storms, including at least 12 people who died inside their homes after losing heat. Republican lawmakers in Texas are facing increasing criticism for their handling of the crisis, their decades-long push to deregulate the state’s energy system, and their unfounded attacks on renewable energy and the Green New Deal. Naomi Klein, senior correspondent at The Intercept and a professor at Rutgers University, says Republicans’ reaction is “because of panic” over their own culpability. “The Green New Deal is a plan that could solve so many of Texas’s problems and the problems across the country, and Republicans have absolutely nothing to offer except for more deregulation, more privatization, more austerity.” Klein also discusses the Biden administration’s early policies on the climate crisis, the dangers of continued fossil fuel development, and her new book, How to Change Everything.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Today, we’ll start in Texas, where millions are still suffering after severe winter weather devastated the state’s energy and water systems. About 8 million Texans remain under orders to boil water. About 30,000 homes still have no power. President Biden has declared a major disaster in 77 counties. Around 70 deaths have now been linked to the winter storms, mostly in Texas, including at least 12 people who died inside their homes after losing heat, including an 11-year-old boy named Cristian Pavón, who froze to death in his bed in his family’s mobile home in Conroe, Texas. In Sugar Land, Texas, three children and their grandmother died in a fire while trying to stay warm during the blackout.

Republican lawmakers in Texas are facing increasing criticism for their handling of the crisis, as well as their decades-long push to deregulate the state’s energy system. Last week, Texas Senator Ted Cruz faced outcry for flying to Cancún, Mexico, to stay at the Ritz-Carlton while millions of Texans were suffering. Cruz initially blamed the trip on his 10- and 12-year-old daughters. On Sunday, protesters brought a mariachi band to play outside his home in Houston.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has used the crisis as a way to attack the Green New Deal by falsely claiming the state’s partial reliance on renewable energy was to blame for the blackouts.

GOV. GREG ABBOTT: This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America. Texas is blessed with multiple sources of energy, such as natural gas and oil and nuclear, as well as solar and wind. But you saw, from what Trace said, and that is, our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10% of our power grid. And that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power in a statewide basis.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to Governor Abbott’s claim by writing, quote, “The real ‘deadly deal’ is his failed leadership.” Over the weekend, Ocasio-Cortez traveled to Texas to help relief efforts. On Saturday, she volunteered at a food bank in Houston. So far, she’s helped raised over $5 million for Texans impacted by the storms.

To talk more about the crisis in Texas, we’re joined by Naomi Klein, senior correspondent at The Intercept, professor at Rutgers University, along with Juan González. She has just written a piece in The New York Times headlined “Why Texas Republicans Fear the Green New Deal.” And she is author of several books. Her most recent is the one that’s coming out tomorrow, How to Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other. Her previous books include The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and This Changes Everything.

Naomi, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about the Republican leadership of Texas blaming this catastrophe on what hasn’t even happened yet, and that is the Green New Deal.

Naomi, I think we are having trouble right now hearing you. We’re going to go to a break, and then we’re going to come back to you. We’re just having trouble making the connection to you. Naomi Klein, senior correspondent at The Intercept, writing an op-ed piece in The New York Times. Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Texas Sun,” Khruangbin and Leon Bridges. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we turn now to Naomi Klein on the catastrophe that has taken place in Texas with the winter storm, about 70 deaths, it’s believed, people suffering major devastation. Thirty thousand homes still have no power. There are still 8 million Texans under orders to boil their water. Naomi wrote a piece in The New York Times, “Why Texas Republicans Fear the Green New Deal.” Naomi, why?

NAOMI KLEIN: Hi, Amy. Hi, Juan. It’s good to be with you today.

Yeah, it’s just been a symphony of voices from the Republican Party pointing the finger at something that doesn’t actually exist anywhere really but on paper, certainly doesn’t exist in Texas. Texas is about as far from a Green New Deal as you can possibly get, seeing as a Green New Deal is a plan to bring together the need to get off fossil fuels in the next decade to radically decarbonize our energy system, and, as we know, fossil fuels are still king in Texas. It’s a plan to marry that huge infrastructure investment in the next green economy with a plan to battle poverty, to create huge numbers of good, union, green jobs, to take care of people. It’s a plan to have universal public healthcare and child care and a jobs guarantee. So it’s all the things that are not happening in Texas, because there isn’t just this extreme weather, which many scientists believe is linked to our warming planet — you know, you can’t link one storm with climate change, but the patterns are very clear, and this should be a wake-up call — but Texas is also suffering a pandemic of poverty, of exclusion, of racial injustice. It certainly doesn’t have a Green New Deal.

And we’ve heard this messaging, I think, because of panic, frankly, because the Green New Deal is a plan that could solve so many of Texas’s problems and the problems across the country, and Republicans have absolutely nothing to offer except for more deregulation, more privatization, more austerity. And so they have been frantically seeking to deflect from the real causes of this crisis, which is an intersection of extreme weather, of the kind that we are seeing more of because of climate change, intersecting with a deregulated, fossil fuel-based energy system. And that is the truly catastrophic intersection. And layered on that, you have all of the injustices and inequalities that mean that this doesn’t impact everybody equally by any means. It’s an extremely racially unjust catastrophe, as every catastrophe in the United States is.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Naomi, could you talk a little bit about the — it’s basically a right-wing extremism when it comes to energy policy that’s been practiced in Texas — the origins of the deregulation movement that Texas pioneered? And also, the other wrinkle in this —

NAOMI KLEIN: Sure.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — is this notorious independence streak, that Texas not only wants the United States to be energy independent, the state of Texas wants to be independent from the rest of the U.S. electrical grid, so that other states couldn’t come to its support in this time of crisis.

NAOMI KLEIN: Sure. You know, in headlines, I heard you playing a clip of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s trip to Texas and the fact that she raised — helped raise, I believe, $5 million, to this point. And, you know, she’s been very clear that she doesn’t believe that charity is the solution to these systemic failures. And, of course, she is probably the person who’s most closely associated with the calls for a Green New Deal in government. But I think that what she is trying to show with this action is that government should be there to take care of people, that we should have each other’s backs, particularly in a crisis.

The ideology that has governed Texas now for at least four decades is an ideology, I think, best encapsulated by Ronald Reagan’s famous phrase, “The nine most dangerous words in the English are ‘I am from government, and I’m here to help.’” And, you know, I think it is worth pausing over that, because that sort of glib slogan, that people should be afraid of a government that’s there to help, when you have a catastrophe like the one that is unfolding in Texas, but, more broadly, the pandemic everywhere, it’s really quite chilling, because people need a government that is there to help. And so, in Texas, they just took this to the extreme.

And so, it goes back further than the 1990s, but a series of fateful decisions were made in the late 1990s, when Enron — blast from the past, and now defunct, but this scandal-plagued energy company headed by the late Ken Lay — led this successful push, under then-Governor George W. Bush, to radically deregulate Texas’s electricity sector. And they won, is the bottom line. And as a result, decisions about the generation and distribution of power were stripped from regulators in Texas and handed over to private energy companies, on the basis of this logic that what’s good for industry will be good for everyone else, prices will be lower, there will be maximum competition. So you have all of these private players competing with each other, and, as you said, Juan, they are, quote-unquote, “independent” from the rest of the grid.

You know, I see some really interesting parallels with what has happened with COVID, because when you hand over essential functions of the state to private companies, whether they’re healthcare companies or whether they’re energy companies, what they seek to do is make maximum profits, and you do that through, quote-unquote, “efficiency.” Now, what does “efficiency” mean in practice? It means you take out all the slack in the system, because you’re wringing out profits, maximum profits, at every turn. So, when it comes to something like healthcare or elder care, that means you don’t want to have a single empty hospital bed or a single empty bed in an elder care facility, because that’s an inefficiency. But then, if you have a shock, like a pandemic, you have no slack in the system to absorb that shock, and you have disaster, right?

What we’ve seen in Texas is something very similar with energy, right? There’s no slack in the system. There’s no built-in redundancies, because if you’re plugged into the national grid, if you have a shock in your state or in one location, then energy from somewhere else that is not having a shock is able to come in and cover for you. In Texas, they took out all of those redundancies, and so then you have a weather shock that puts stress on the system, knocks out capacity, and also there’s a surge in demand because it’s freezing and everybody wants more energy, and it just blows the whole system out, in the same way that the pandemic blew out any capacity in the healthcare system, if that makes sense.

So, unsurprisingly, these private companies prioritized short-term profit over costly investments in maintaining the grid, in winterizing the grid for an extreme event. They took out all the built-in redundancies. And today, Texans are at the mercy of regulation-allergic politicians who failed to require that energy companies plan for shocks, like the one they’re experiencing right now and like the ones, frankly, we are going to see more and more of because of our destabilized climate.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Naomi, as you’ve often documented, every crisis brings an opportunity for other capitalists to profit. Who will benefit from this crisis? Can you talk about the shale gas company, for instance, Comstock Resources?

NAOMI KLEIN: Right, yeah. Look, energy companies are — it’s a windfall, as they are proudly telling their investors. Comstock Resources is a shale gas company. And on an earnings call last Wednesday, their chief financial officer said, “This week is like hitting the jackpot with some of these incredible prices,” because, once again, there are no protections for consumers.

So, all of this was sold to Texans based on this idea that it was going to lower their energy costs. But there’s no protections from costs going up when you have a huge surge in demand like they’re experiencing right now. So, people who were fortunate enough not to lose their power — and I know you’re going to be talking about this more later on in the show, but people who had their power stay on are now being hit with these absolutely exorbitant electricity bills. Once again, no protections for them, because it’s a market free-for-all, which was the vision from the start. And so you have politicians like Ted Cruz now banging their hands on the table, saying, “This is wrong! What is it? What are these huge bills?” It’s entirely legal. This is the result of the energy system that they built.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Naomi, you have the former governor, Rick Perry, who was also the secretary of energy of the United States, retweeting an article, saying, quote, “If we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters, we are going to have to keep burning natural gas — and lots of it — for decades to come.”

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: He also went on to say, “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” I don’t know if that’s why Senator Cruz fled to Mexico, to keep the federal government out of Texas. But this moment, where you have this older, white, wealthy Republican leadership of Texas — deregulation going back to the ’30s, right? I mean, for people to understand, you’ve got the Eastern grid, the Western grid and Texas. That’s what you have, the electric grids in the United States. And El Paso is not a part of the Texas independent grid, and so they did so much better.

NAOMI KLEIN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: But what this means for that leadership and the young leadership, that has been fighting for a Green New Deal, that has been recognizing COVID as a scientific reality, that Texas was disastrous in dealing with?

NAOMI KLEIN: Sure. I mean, there’s a very strong youth-led movement in Texas that has been calling for a Green New Deal for a while. And I think that they’re going to be calling for that with greater confidence and greater volume and greater determination in the weeks and months to come, which is why, in The New York Times piece that you mentioned, I described all of this deflection as a form of panic, because we know that — they know, and we know, that they have no solutions for the problems that they have created. All they have to offer Texans is more deregulation, more privatization, more austerity, more disaster capitalism. As usual, we’re seeing waves of criminalizing people who protest against fossil fuel companies. You know, they don’t have solutions to real problems, which is why they’re just making things up. And we’re seeing that on absolutely every level.

But, you know, I want to come back to what you were saying about this rift between the leadership, who really don’t have to worry about their power, are taking vacations in the middle of this, are clearly not worried, are making these glib statements, like, “Oh, yeah, we’ll live without power for much longer, if necessary.” They’re not the ones without power, right? There’s so much inequality, as I said earlier, whenever there is any kind of disaster in the United States, it follows racial fault lines, economic fault lines.

And I think that we should think about Ted Cruz’s ill-fated trip to Mexico not as a, quote-unquote, “mistake,” as he now describes it, but, in a way, as a metaphor, Amy, a metaphor for how these politicians actually think about the climate crisis. They don’t think it’s a hoax. They just say that publicly. They know it is real. You know, these are people with deep ties to the oil and gas industry, and the oil and gas industry is, in lots of ways, benefiting from the climate crisis, because there’s melting in the Arctic. It’s opening up trade routes because of that. They’re having to adapt all kinds of their own infrastructure to deal with the reality of climate change. They don’t really genuinely believe that it isn’t real. They’re on the frontlines of it in lots of ways. What they believe — and I think we’ve talked about this before on the show — is that this is somebody else’s problem. They believe that their wealth, their power and their privilege will protect them from the worst of its effects. And if we want to know what that looks like, it looks like Ted Cruz boarding a flight to Mexico in the middle of a disaster to go to the Ritz-Carlton in Cancún.

And that is something that I’ve tracked over the years in this privatized response to crisis, right? So, it isn’t just the systematic neglect and deregulation of the private sphere, of the infrastructure that regular people, everyday people, have to depend on in a crisis. It’s that they’re simultaneously building their privatized kind of rescue bubbles. You know, there was a short-lived airline that I wrote about in The Shock Doctrine many years ago, short-lived because it was ahead of its time. It was called HelpJet. It was launched in Florida. It was a private jet airline that would send a notice to people in Florida when their beachfront homes were at risk from a hurricane. And their slogan was something like “Turn a disaster into a luxury vacation.” This company would send a limousine to come pick you up, take you to the airport and jet you out on a private jet, make your reservations at a luxury resort. And that was their idea of how to deal with a disaster. Now in California when there are wildfires, there are private firefighters that come to protect the mansions and the wineries.

So they don’t see themselves as part of the public infrastructure that they’re systematically allowing to degrade. They believe they’ll be fine. What does that look like? It looks like Ted Cruz flying off to Mexico. Now, he got caught. He’s calling it a mistake. It’s actually a metaphor for the fact that they don’t believe they have to deal with the effects of the disasters that they themselves are creating.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Naomi, if we could, the Biden administration. I’m wondering if you could give us a brief take on how it’s been responding to this crisis and also the initial — in its initial weeks in terms of its climate policy.

NAOMI KLEIN: You know, I think that there are obviously some good signs when it comes to climate policy — the canceling of the Keystone XL pipeline. You know, I think, most significantly, we are seeing much more coordination between different arms of the government, and this has been something that’s really been lacking in previous administrations, where climate has just been treated as a narrow pollution issue that should be dealt with by the EPA and the Energy Department. And I think one of the most significant things is this sort of commitment to having individuals whose job it is to make sure that all the different arms of the government, all the different departments and agencies, are talking to each other.

But, you know, Keystone needs to be more than just one pipeline canceled. It needs to be a principle. And the principle is, we cannot be building new fossil fuel infrastructure. I know you’ve covered the intense battles against Line 3, against the Dakota Access pipeline. All of this new fossil fuel infrastructure needs to be canceled. We cannot be locking in new fossil fuel infrastructure when we need to be winding down, if we’re going to get off fossil fuels in a decade, which is what scientists have told us we need to do. So, there are good signs, but, unfortunately, like, we’re still at the level of symbolism. We are not at the level of actually doing what is necessary to prevent the kind of catastrophic warming that we can’t survive. We’re already in the era of climate shock, of climate disasters. But if we don’t get off the road we are on, if we don’t swerve, then we are going to be dealing with shocks that we can’t adapt to.

You know, I don’t think that the — I think we need to be talking about whether energy belongs in private hands at all, whether this is just too much of an essential service and also whether we just need too much change too quickly to have the private sector involved in energy in the first place. And these are the sorts of policy discussions that the Biden administration, because of its ties to the private sector, is really not willing to engage in yet. But they’re going to be under huge pressure, I think, particularly after this, by the progressive wing of the party, by outside climate justice movements. And we’ll see what happens, because they’ve already moved a lot more than they wanted to move. Biden is doing more than his campaign was promising, certainly, in the early days. So, we’ll see. They are under pressure. They have moved, and they’re going to need to move further.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Naomi, we only have 30 seconds, but, of course, the youngest are also such extreme victims of this catastrophe. We learned about 11-year-old Cristian, who went outside, saw snow for the first time, to play in the snow, came inside and froze to death. We hear these stories as part of the 70 people who have died as a result of the storm. You have a book that’s coming out tomorrow. Tonight, you’ll be doing a big virtual event with Sunrise Movement at the Brooklyn Public Library. Your book, How to Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other. Your final thoughts, on why you wrote this book?

NAOMI KLEIN: Thank you, Amy. Yeah, at this event tonight, we’ll also be joined by Tokata Iron Eyes, who is a young woman who is from Standing Rock and was one of the young people who helped start that incredible movement in Standing Rock against the Dakota Access pipeline, and is just one example of the fact that young people now — and by “young people,” I’m not just talking about university students, I’m talking about middle school students and high school students — are truly the heart and soul of the climate movement right now.

And that’s why I wrote the book. I wrote the book for this incredible generation, who have been leading climate strikes, who have been pushing politicians, speaking truth in incredible ways, like Greta, who you’ve talked about so much on the show, but is part of this amazing generation of millions of young people around the world. And there aren’t a lot of books that take them seriously, that treat them with the dignity to believe and understand that they’re ready for the truth because they’re living it and they need some tools, some intellectual tools, some facts, some figures, to fight for the future that they deserve. So that’s why I wrote the book. And I’m so excited to have these opportunities to interview young people about why they have built this amazing movement. And that’s what we’re going to be doing tonight and over the next few weeks.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, senior correspondent at The Intercept, professor at Rutgers University. We’ll link to your New York Times op-ed piece headlined “Why Texas Republicans Fear the Green New Deal.” Her latest book is coming out tomorrow. It’s titled How to Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 17, 2021

Dangerous Deep Freeze in Texas

With climate change expected to intensify extremes of weather, the crisis in Texas indicates that our infrastructure will need to be reinforced to meet conditions it was not designed for. Continue reading

The post Dangerous Deep Freeze in Texas appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
February 11, 2021

New Lancet Report: 40 Percent of US COVID Deaths Could Have Been Avoided

If the United States had death rates on par with other wealthy nations such as Canada and Japan, there would have been 40 percent fewer deaths attributed to COVID-19 last year. In 2018 alone, an estimated 461,000 fewer people would have died if the U.S. was as healthy as France or Germany.

The failure to contain COVID in the U.S. confirmed that our approach to health care and public health is broken, and former President Donald Trump made a bad situation worse. That’s the message from a multidisciplinary commission of experts assembled to study the Trump administration by The Lancet, a longstanding medical journal that has publicly tussled with Trump over the course of the pandemic.

Since 2017, the international team of 33 leading experts in clinical medicine, public health, epidemiology, community medicine, economics, nutrition, law, and politics has analyzed how the Trump administration’s policies impact our health. The result is a scathing and detailed new report that is an indictment of both Trump and a health care system that values profit over human life.

The life expectancy in the U.S. began falling behind peers such as the United Kingdom, Germany and France when Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, according to Kevin Grumbach, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Fransisco and co-author of the report.

“That is the turning point where health started falling in the United States compared to the other G7 nations,” Grumbach said in an interview. “We totally shifted to conservative and neoliberal policies, and that corresponds with the deteriorating health in the country relative to other nations.”

Reagan instated policies that reduced the government’s role in health care and education and accelerated the concentration of wealth among the upper classes. Since then, life expectancy has dropped 3.4 years behind other wealthy countries and remains even lower among Black people and Native Americans. The report found that, before the pandemic, rates of midlife mortality among Black people and Native Americans were 42 and 59 percent higher, respectively, than for white people. People of color are more likely to die from COVID than white people, and the mortality gap between Black and white people has grown by 50 percent during the pandemic.

“The disastrous, bungled response to the pandemic made clear how existing, longstanding racial inequities simply have not been addressed,” said Mary T. Bassett, director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University and a member of the commission, in a statement.

Reagan’s neoliberal political philosophy stuck around under both Democratic and Republican administrations and created conditions for the rise of Trump. The report links health to trade liberalization that led to the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, weakened unions and left many parts of the country to struggle economically. According to the report, Trump exploited anger among white voters over their “deteriorating life prospects,” and stoked racism and nativism to win the 2016 election.

“That’s the epidemic that we’ve been struggling through, not just through four years of Trump, but 40 years of failing to create the conditions that make for a healthy society,” Grumbach said.

As soon as he took office, Trump and Republicans in Congress moved to destroy the Affordable Care Act, which expanded health insurance for millions of people. The GOP’s signature achievement, a massive tax cut for the wealthy, opened holes in the federal budget that conservatives used to justify spending cuts on health and food assistance.

While attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed spectacularly in Congress, the Trump administration used its executive powers to undermine the law. During the first three years of Trump tenure, the number of people with health coverage dropped by 2.3 million largely due Trump’s attacks on Medicaid, the program that provides health coverage to low-income people. About 760,000 kids and teens lost health coverage.

Before the pandemic hit, the Trump administration proposed $920 billion in Medicaid cuts and was poised to require burdensome eligibility checks that would have pushed more people out of the program, according to the report.

The Trump administration consistently favored corporate interests over public health when it came to climate and the environment and openly worked on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. The administration rolled back dozens of environmental regulations, allowing companies to spew more dangerous pollution into the air. Between 2016 and 2019, the number of deaths related to environmental and occupation hazards spiked to 22,000 after years of steady decline, according to the report. The administration also repeatedly attempted to suppress data showing the effects that pollution has on human health.

The list goes on, but the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic stands out. Grumbach said Trump had already cut staff at public health agencies by the time the pandemic hit, severely weakening the nation’s response. Meanwhile, Trump consistently spread disinformation about COVID, providing a preview of his efforts to overturn the election he lost to President Joe Biden. Attempting to deflect blame for a botched COVID response, Trump attacked China and World Health Organization (WHO), even citing The Lancet in a blistering letter to the WHO. The Lancet’s editor stepped in and confirmed that Trump was lying.

By October 2020, the U.S. had the highest death rate among 18 other high-income countries, both from COVID and other health problems.

However, Grumbach said the problems exposed by COVID are bigger than Trump. Behind Trump’s bluster and weakness in the face of the virus is a neoliberal ideology that shapes our health care system and sets the U.S. apart from other nations, he said. It’s an ideology that values corporate profits over the lives of the vulnerable and sees health care as a commodity to be bought and sold rather than a human right. In such an environment, public health measures such as masking in public and providing health care to immigrants are subject to polarizing debate, even though they benefit everyone.

The Lancet’s commission concludes that simply returning to pre-Trump era policies will not be enough to protect health. Grumbach said the entire system needs an “overhaul.” For starters, the U.S. should transition to a single-payer health care system like those set up in nations such as Canada that have better life expectancy. Polling shows that 56 percent of likely voters in the U.S. support Medicare for All, the single-payer proposal championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and other progressives. Support for a public option that would compete with private insurance is even higher, although many people support both.

The commission recommendations go far beyond the health care system. A massive mobilization of resources — a Green New Deal — is needed to confront climate change, which poses myriad threats to public health. The U.S. spends 3.4 percent of its GDP on the military, but G7 countries with lower mortality rates only spend an average of 1.4 percent of GDP on defense. If the U.S. reduced foreign intervention and military spending to 1.4 percent of GDP, a massive amount of resources could be redirected to urgent social needs. Additionally, the war on drugs must come to an end, and new investments should be made in communities of color harmed by the criminal legal system and mass incarceration, according to the commission.

“While the wealthy have thrived, most Americans have lost ground, both economically and medically,” said Steffie Woolhandler, who co-chairs The Lancet’s commission and lectures at Hunter College and Harvard. “The Biden administration must reboot democracy and implement the progressive social and health policies needed to put the country on the road to better health.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.