Houthi rebels overturned the chessboard

The Yemeni Shiite group’s spectacular attack on Abqaiq raises the distinct possibility of a push to drive the House of Saud from power

PEPE ESCOBAR

https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/09/article/how-the-houthis-overturned-the-chessboard/

We are the Houthis and we’re coming to town. With the spectacular attack on Abqaiq, Yemen’s Houthis have overturned the geopolitical chessboard in Southwest Asia – going as far as introducing a whole new dimension: the distinct possibility of investing in a push to drive the House of Saud out of power.

Blowback is a bitch. Houthis – Zaidi Shiites from northern Yemen – and Wahhabis have been at each other’s throats for ages. This book is absolutely essential to understand the mind-boggling complexity of Houthi tribes; as a bonus, it places the turmoil in southern Arabian lands way beyond a mere Iran-Saudi proxy war.

Still, it’s always important to consider that Arab Shiites in the Eastern province – working in Saudi oil installations – have got to be natural allies of the Houthis fighting against Riyadh.

Houthi striking capability – from drone swarms to ballistic missile attacks – has been improving remarkably for the past year or so. It’s not by accident that the UAE saw which way the geopolitical and geoeconomic winds were blowing: Abu Dhabi withdrew from Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s vicious war against Yemen and now is engaged in what it describes as a  “peace-first” strategy.

Even before Abqaiq, the Houthis had already engineered quite a few attacks against Saudi oil installations as well as Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports. In early July, Yemen’s Operations Command Center staged an exhibition in full regalia in Sana’a featuring their whole range of ballistic and winged missiles and drones.

The situation has now reached a point where there’s plenty of chatter across the Persian Gulf about a spectacular scenario: the Houthis investing in a mad dash across the Arabian desert to capture Mecca and Medina in conjunction with a mass Shiite uprising in the Eastern oil belt. That’s not far-fetched anymore. Stranger things have happened in the Middle East. After all, the Saudis can’t even win a bar brawl – that’s why they rely on mercenaries.

Orientalism strikes again

The US intel refrain that the Houthis are incapable of such a sophisticated attack betrays the worst strands of orientalism and white man’s burden/superiority complex.

The only missile parts shown by the Saudis so far come from a Yemeni Quds 1 cruise missile. According to Brigadier General Yahya Saree, spokesman for the Sana’a-based Yemeni Armed Forces, “the Quds system proved its great ability to hit its targets and to bypass enemy interceptor systems.”

Houthi armed forces duly claimed responsibility for Abqaiq: “This operation is one of the largest operations carried out by our forces in the depth of Saudi Arabia, and came after an accurate intelligence operation and advance monitoring and cooperation of honorable and free men within the Kingdom.”

Notice the key concept: “cooperation” from inside Saudi Arabia – which could include the whole spectrum from Yemenis to that Eastern province Shiites.

Even more relevant is the fact that massive American hardware deployed in Saudi Arabia inside out and outside in – satellites, AWACS, Patriot missiles, drones, battleships, jet fighters – didn’t see a thing, or certainly not in time. The sighting of three “loitering” drones by a Kuwaiti bird hunter arguably heading towards Saudi Arabia is being invoked as “evidence”. Cue to the embarrassing picture of a drone swarm – wherever it came from – flying undisturbed for hours over Saudi territory.

UN officials openly admit that now everything that matters is within the 1,500 km range of the Houthis’ new UAV-X drone: oil fields in Saudi Arabia, a still-under-construction nuclear power plant in the Emirates and Dubai’s mega-airport.

My conversations with sources in Tehran over the past two years have ascertained that the Houthis’ new drones and missiles are essentially copies of Iranian designs assembled in Yemen itself with crucial help from Hezbollah engineers.

US intel insists that 17 drones and cruise missiles were launched in combination from southern Iran. In theory, Patriot radar would have picked that up and knocked the drones/missiles from the sky. So far, absolutely no record of this trajectory has been revealed. Military experts generally agree that the radar on the Patriot missile is good, but its success rate is “disputed” – to say the least. What’s important, once again, is that the Houthis do have advanced offensive missiles. And their pinpoint accuracy at Abqaiq was uncanny.

For now, it appears that the winner of the US/UK-supported House of One Saudi war on the civilian Yemeni population, which started in March 2015 and generated a humanitarian crisis the UN regards as having been of biblical proportions, is certainly not the crown prince, widely known as MBS.

Listen to the general

Crude oil stabilization towers – several of them – at Abqaiq were specifically targeted, along with natural gas storage tanks. Persian Gulf energy sources have been telling me repairs and/or rebuilding could last months. Even Riyadh  admitted as much.

Blindly blaming Iran, with no evidence, does not cut it. Tehran can count on swarms of top strategic thinkers. They do not need or want to blow up Southwest Asia, which is something they could do, by the way: Revolutionary Guards generals have already said many times on the record that they are ready for war.

Professor Mohammad Marandi from the University of Tehran, who has very close relations with the Foreign Ministry, is adamant: “It didn’t come from Iran. If it did, it would be very embarrassing for the Americans, showing they are unable to detect a large number of Iranian drones and missiles. That doesn’t make sense.”

Marandi additionally stresses, “Saudi air defenses are not equipped to defend the country from Yemen but from Iran. The Yemenis have been striking against the Saudis, they are getting better and better, developing drone and missile technology for four and a half years, and this was a very soft target.”

A soft – and unprotected – target: the US PAC-2 and PAC-3 systems in place are all oriented towards the east, in the direction of Iran. Neither Washington nor Riyadh knows for sure where the drone swarm/missiles really came from.

Readers should pay close attention to this groundbreaking interview with General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force. The interview, in Farsi (with English subtitles), was conducted by US-sanctioned Iranian intellectual Nader Talebzadeh and includes questions forwarded by my US analyst friends Phil Giraldi and Michael Maloof and myself.

Explaining Iranian self-sufficiency in its defense capabilities, Hajizadeh sounds like a very rational actor. The bottom line: “Our view is that neither American politicians nor our officials want a war. If an incident like the one with the drone [the RQ-4N shot down by Iran in June] happens or a misunderstanding happens, and that develops into a larger war, that’s a different matter. Therefore we are always ready for a big war.”

In response to one of my questions, on what message the Revolutionary Guards want to convey, especially to the US, Hajizadeh does not mince his words: “In addition to the US bases in various regions like Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Emirates and Qatar, we have targeted all naval vessels up to a distance of 2,000 kilometers and we are constantly monitoring them. They think that if they go to a distance of 400 km, they are out of our firing range. Wherever they are, it only takes one spark, we hit their vessels, their airbases, their troops.”

Get your S-400s or else

On the energy front, Tehran has been playing a very precise game under pressure – selling loads of oil by turning off the transponders of their tankers as they leave Iran and transferring the oil at sea, tanker to tanker, at night, and relabeling their cargo as originating at other producers for a price. I have been checking this for weeks with my trusted Persian Gulf traders – and they all confirm it. Iran could go on doing it forever.

Of course, the Trump administration knows it. But the fact is they are looking the other way. To state it as concisely as possible: they are caught in a trap by the absolute folly of ditching the JCPOA, and they are looking for a face-saving way out. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned the administration in so many words: the US should return to the agreement it reneged on before it’s too late.

And now for the really hair-raising part.

The strike at Abqaiq shows that the entire Middle East production of over 18 million barrels of oil a day – including Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia – can be easily knocked out. There is zero adequate defense against these drones and missiles.

Well, there’s always Russia.

Here’s what happened at the press conference after the Ankara summit this week on Syria, uniting Presidents Putin, Rouhani and Erdogan.

Question: Will Russia provide Saudi Arabia with any help or support in restoring its infrastructure?

President Putin: As for assisting Saudi Arabia, it is also written in the Quran that violence of any kind is illegitimate except when protecting one’s people. In order to protect them and the country, we are ready to provide the necessary assistance to Saudi Arabia. All the political leaders of Saudi Arabia have to do is take a wise decision, as Iran did by buying the S-300 missile system, and as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did when he bought Russia’s latest S-400 Triumph anti-aircraft system. They would offer reliable protection for any Saudi infrastructure facilities.

President Hassan Rouhani: So do they need to buy the S-300 or the S-400?

President Vladimir Putin: It is up to them to decide [laughs].

In The Transformation of War, Martin van Creveld actually predicted that the whole industrial-military-security complex would come crumbling down when it was exposed that most of its weapons are useless against fourth-generation asymmetrical opponents. There’s no question the whole Global South is watching – and will have gotten the message.

Hybrid war, reloaded

Now we are entering a whole new dimension in asymmetric hybrid war.

In the – horrendous – event that Washington would decide to attack Iran, egged on by the usual neocon suspects, the Pentagon could never hope to hit and disable all the Iranian and/or Yemeni drones. The US could expect, for sure, all-out war. And then no ships would sail through the Strait of Hormuz. We all know the consequences of that.

Which brings us to The Big Surprise. The real reason there would be no ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz is that there would be no oil in the Gulf left to pump. The oil fields, having been bombed, would be burning.

So we’re back to the realistic bottom line, which has been stressed by not only Moscow and Beijing but also Paris and Berlin: US President Donald Trump gambled big time, and he lost. Now he must find a face-saving way out. If the War Party allows it.

Ending Temp Work Is at Center of Auto Workers Strike

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7fRvCLfRoA

How Decades of Neoliberalism Led to the Era of Right-Wing Populism

DANIEL ZAMORA 

NIKLAS OLSEN

Review of Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism (Columbia University Press, 2019).

Right-wing neoliberalism’s assault on the very idea of society laid the groundwork for today’s right-wing nationalist backlash. But the Left’s hands aren’t entirely clean either.

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/09/in-the-ruins-of-neoliberalism-wendy-brown

In the heated year of 1968, the Chicago economist and Nobel Prize winner George J. Stigler jotted down some thoughts on how to introduce the “price system” into the process of democracy. Stigler had been one of Milton Friedman’s closest friends and part of his neoliberal “thought collective” since its inception. Both men participated in the first meeting of the Mont Pèlerin society in 1947, one of the founding events of the neoliberal movement. In the following decades, the two Chicago economists made vital contributions to what, according to Wendy Brown, became the overriding objective of the worldwide neoliberal agenda: “the economization of all features of life,” a project that sought to substitute the price system for more political forms of collective decision-making.

Stigler proposed a particular mode for this “economization.” He had already previously provided cost/benefit models to, for example, probe the “optimal” rate of car accidents or to ask if it would be more optimal to bomb Japan “continuously” or “discontinuously” in war time. From that point of view, shouldn’t we also view democracy itself as having a “cost” and needing to be run in the most efficient way? The cost of periodic elections, Stigler thought, was generally too high and “distracting” with all its “unnecessary campaigns.” Unlike in a private company, the terms of employment for elected officials were limited in time. “The costs of ‘rehiring’ elected officeholders,” he argued, were excessive and superfluous as long as voters were satisfied with their elected officials. Perhaps surprisingly, the “abandonment of periodic elections” became for Stigler a more rational way of organizing political representation, bringing it into closer alignment with “orderly economic life.” It was always “costly to discover, examine, and train a new worker, and the worker finds it costly to discover, explore, and move to a new job,” he followed. Why not, as in the private sector, “adopt the rule of indefinite tenure?” With a presidential term understood as a simple employment contract, a president could then stay in power as long as his employers — read, citizens — want him there. Voters, Stigler proposed, could call an election by means of a petition requiring one-tenth of the electorate to sign on. In today’s demographic terms, this would represent more than 20 million voters.

Furthermore, to avoid an excess of elections (“excessive” democracy could easily degenerate into totalitarianism), Stigler added that “the petitioners for a new election would pay its costs to the state.” This “introduction of the price system” into the democratic process would allow for it to “become responsive to the desires of the electorate and the costs of elections.” Implementing such a system would, of course, imply a very strict containment of politics and democracy, making even elections difficult to organize; considering the “cost” of an election, only the wealthy or corporations would then have the resources to contest elected officials. “Politics” in the classical sense would thus be, to take Hayek’s expression, “dethroned,” making the vast majority of citizens unable to shape the social order collectively.

Following on her earlier study of neoliberalism (Undoing the Demos, 2015) political theorist Wendy Brown’s newest book, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, focuses on this neoliberal effort to dismantle the political and the social and how that project has laid the groundwork for the rise of antidemocratic politics in the West.

Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein

Alot has happened in between those two volumes, however. History, as Marx once wrote, never follows a linear evolution, but is always made of downturns and accelerations. For a political theorist, the four years that separate these two studies look more like a century. Trump and Brexit alone constitute two of the most remarkable evolutions in contemporary politics since neoliberalism’s political triumph. In the light of these developments, Brown tries to understand how what she calls “neoliberal rationality” prepared the ground for these “antidemocratic forces” to rise. Going “beyond” and even “revising” some of her earlier arguments, she takes a closer look at how the “neoliberal mode of reason” generated something that is indeed “radically different from the neoliberal utopia of an inegalitarian liberal order in which individual and families would be politically pacified by markets.” Brown tries to explain how, while central proponents of neoliberalism themselves probably did not envision or aim at our political and economic present, their ideas and reforms worked as an excellent “fertilizer” to nurture it. Trump, whose rule appeals to nihilism, fatalism, and resentment, and relies on an antidemocratic alliance between “business and moral-religious traditionalists,” is thus not to be understood as neoliberalism’s intended creation but its “Frankenstein.”

Relying partly on Melinda Cooper’s brilliant study of the neoliberal-social conservative alliance, Family Values, Brown shows how in Hayek’s work, morals, and markets constitute, together, the foundations for freedom, both being “organized spontaneously and transmitted through tradition, rather than political power.” The decentralized and impersonal signals of the market replace collective political deliberation, and traditional morals constitute an appropriate substitute for “society” conceived as organized common pursuit. Both are “spontaneous orders” rather than “designed” purposes that would put us on the slippery slope of “unlimited democracy.” In neoliberalism, morals function as a useful alternative to the social and the political by deflecting challenges to traditional inequalities and hierarchies that could distort the proper functioning of markets.

Brown admits that her initial focus on the drive to economization failed to address how neoliberalism’s violent charge against the very notion of “society” or “politics” has reshaped our societies. “Dismantling society” and “dethroning politics” constitute in this framework the two central components of the “moral-political” project that opened the path to what Brown calls the “return of the repressed.” By using markets and morals to erase the very notions of popular sovereignty, the social, and social justice, neoliberalism provoked the rise of an “enraged” form of majority rule, characterized by far-right nationalism and religious fundamentalism, freed from any form of civil norms, and fueled by resentment. Trump is thus not caused by neoliberalism, but was produced in the “ruins” of it. Out of its remains erupted these ferocious “social and political forces that the neoliberals once opposed, underestimated, and deformed with their de-democratizing project.”

Brown’s stimulating account nevertheless suffers from her focus on the conservative bent neoliberalism took in the eighties, underestimating the Left’s contribution to the acceptance, development, and spread of neoliberalism. While she occasionally seems to acknowledge that the notion of “the social” and a certain conception of political deliberation vanished from the Left as well during that period, this theme plays a marginal role in her story. And yet we know from Daniel Rodgers’s intellectual history of the late twentieth century how the Left contributed to a shift in American thought in which traditional ideas of collective concerns and institutions were unhinged and replaced by a more fractured and individualized way of thinking about society that emphasized choice, agency, and performance, and came to rely on the metaphor of the market. Nancy Fraser has likewise pointed to the disappearance of New Deal–style social democracy and its replacement by a “progressive neoliberalism” that specifically “hollowed out working-class and middle-class living standards” while promoting, at the same time, the “mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights) on the one side, and high-end ‘symbolic’ and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other.” This convergence between left and right unfolded on a number of terrains of political thought and practice that are all ignored in In the Ruins of Neoliberalism.

The Consumer Trumps the Citizen

Part of the problem in Brown’s account is her restrictive understanding of how neoliberalism understood its relation to “popular sovereignty.” In her account it seems essentially a conservative project. But she fails to recognize that it encompassed an alternative vision of the good society that could easily be appropriated into a progressive outlook. Most importantly, the neoliberal attempt to curtail traditional notions of democracy went hand in hand with the invention of a new, positively framed, and supposedly superior notion of “market democracy” that drew on the idea of consumer sovereignty. By drawing a direct parallel between choice in the marketplace and at the ballot box, neoliberals portrayed sovereign consumers’ daily “voting” on the marketplace as a superior solution to securing the representation and participation in sociopolitical processes for the individual citizen. This is a solution that supposedly allows for individual choice unbound by the will of the majority and seeks to limit and ultimately replace traditional institutions of political democracy with those promoting the dynamics of market capitalism. In the words of Milton Friedman:

When you vote daily in the supermarket, you get precisely what you voted for, and so does everyone else. The ballot box produces conformity without unanimity; the marketplace, unanimity without conformity. That is why it is desirable to use the ballot box, so far as possible, only for those decisions where conformity is essential.

Alongside other notions appealing to personal freedom (think the “entrepreneur of the self”), consumer sovereignty provided neoliberalism with popular appeal and legitimacy. Central here was of course the idea that the good society is to be created through market mechanisms rather than through the traditional institutions and mechanisms of the welfare state.

Today, this idea is arguably widespread on the Left, too — not only because the Left failed to develop an alternative to neoliberalism, but also because it actively embraced and helped disseminate neoliberalism’s “progressive ideas,” such as applying consumer sovereignty to various societal contexts.

In the discipline of economics in the postwar era, leftist and centrist scholars such as Kenneth Arrow and Anthony Downs contributed just as much as Milton Friedman and George Stigler to the new trends of elevating consumer sovereignty into the only norm according to which societal well-being can be measured, reworking the ideal of traditional political democracy by interpreting it through market metaphors, and challenging the role of the state as a collective decision-maker and social planner.

In politics, center-left parties in the 1990s not only followed in the footsteps of their neoliberal predecessors by privatizing state-owned companies to further individual choice, but went a step further by reforming the public sector itself, modeling it after the market in portraying the citizen as its “customer,” thus recasting political democracy as a mechanism of choosing between available products or goods.

In the realm of cultural critique, it was intellectuals from across the political spectrum including Tom Wolfe, Marshall McLuhan, Jürgen Habermas, and Roland Barthes who in the 1960s broke with a long tradition of worrying about the deleterious effects of mass consumption and began to view the dynamics of the market in a more positive light, emphasizing the elements of pleasure, play, and symbolic exchange as the essence of a vibrant and potentially liberating and individualizing consumer culture.

Marketizing Equality

Another result of the Left’s embrace of market thinking has been a notable marketization of equality. Indeed, the sanctity of the price mechanism for neoliberals was not, as Brown suggests, anti-egalitarian per se; indeed, it would gradually find many proponents within the Left. Against a vision in which social institutions and political deliberation would be placed at the core of the idea of equality, through the socialization of wealth and generous public services or social security, a new perspective arose, centered on ways to redistribute wealth while preserving the price system as the central tool for allocating resources in society. By the mid-fifties, as historian Peter Sloman has argued for the British context, something that could be called “redistributive market liberalism” slowly displaced approaches to social justice focused on “wage bargaining, contributory insurance, and social services” in favor of a vision in which “poverty and inequality are best alleviated through income transfers rather than through direct intervention in labour and product markets.” A new generation of economists, including people like Anthony Atkinson, who basically created the field of inequality in economics, would come to see public-service based social policies as less efficient ways to tackle poverty than direct transfer payments.

Contrary to what Brown suggests, Friedman himself wasn’t at first hostile to equality. His main criticism until the late fifties did not concern the fact of redistribution per se, but the tools used to reach it. He admitted to having “strong egalitarian leanings,” but thought that “the major fault of the collectivist philosophy” “is not in its objectives” but rather “in the means.” “Failures to recognize the difficulty of the economic problem of efficiency” he continued, “led to readiness to discard the price system without an adequate substitute and to a belief that it would be easy to do much better by a central plan.”

This displacement was not just a technical matter, however. The shift from one vision to the other entailed not only a change in the understanding of equality but also in the importance attached to politics in shaping the social order. While social institutions and public services are submitted to public deliberation and represent a way for society to collectively shape its own destiny, reducing social policy to cash transfers “hollows out” equality from any kind of collective deliberation. It preserves equality as a moral horizon but restricts it as a political space. This shift was obviously part of the Third Way’s program of “progressive neoliberalism” in the 1990s. Blairites were to a certain extent concerned with redistribution — though generally limited to poverty-reduction rather than a broader attack on inequality — while at the same time promoting the expansion of markets at the global level and introducing New Public Management–inspired public sector reform in a domestic setting. Both were enacted in the name of consumer sovereignty, alongside promises of individual freedom and autonomy.

As Brown correctly remarks, part of this success is probably due to how neoliberalism was able to radically limit our conception of normativity and coercion. In the postwar period, economists were extremely effective in popularizing the idea (first invented in the 1930s by neoliberal economist Lionel Robbins) of economics as a “value-free” science that should only inform us on the choices we have rather than “normatively” deciding for us. Economics had to distance itself from any notion of the “good life” or moral philosophy, any shared Aristotelian telos. Coercion and normativity in this setup is then essentially a problem of any policy that tries to define collective norms or institutions aiming at implementing things such as “social rights.” The role of economics would then essentially be, as Friedman put it, maximizing the “effective freedom” — understand “choice” — “of individuals.” While this redefinition became an excellent opportunity for the conservative right to, as Brown suggests, “[cast] principles (and law based on them) of equality and inclusion as tyrannical political correctness”, it had also its effect on the Left — whether in the Third Way’s embrace of “equal opportunity” against “equality of conditions” or, in the realm of social and political theory, visible in the anti-statist turn taken by the New Left in the late 1960s.

The Anti-Statist Left

In Hayek’s “dethronement of politics,” scholars like Michel Foucault, Pierre Clastres, Antonio Negri or, more recently, James C. Scott seemed to have found a way to “cut off the head of the king.” Highly critical of the “old left,” of the “labor centered” defense of full employment, social security “biopolitics,” or the state-centered conception of social change, this intellectual left would find elective affinities with the decentralized and impersonal signals of the market as an alternative way to think about power and resistance. In the search for alternative ways of conceptualizing social change outside the sovereign model — meaning outside majority rule and the conquest of state power — they sometimes saw, along with neoliberals, the state as the primary, or worst, kind of coercion.

If in the early twenties, the lawyer and economist Robert Lee Hale had legitimated the New Deal by arguing that coercion was a constitutive part of economic life under capitalism, not limited to purposeful, deliberate action by an institution, by the seventies several social theorists within the Left would be unable to provide a theory of coercion that also addressed the workings of the market. We can find an illuminating portrait of how social security institutions shape our relation to ourselves in Foucault, and of how “seeing like a state” leads to mass standardization in Scott. But none of these authors were able to make us think substantively about how coercion and normalization are not just the products of centralized institutions and do not simply disappear when those institutions do. In fact, they implicitly shaped an intellectual framework in which the market appears less as a way in which norms are imposed than as a more effective space for subverting them.

Hadn’t Friedman himself famously depicted the market as a genuine “system of proportional representation” protecting the preferences of minorities through its “absence of coercion”? In the market, “each man can vote” he argued, “for the color of tie he wants and get it; he does not have to see what color the majority wants and then, if he is in the minority, submit.” Producing conformity without unanimity, the marketplace could potentially also be a less coercive space for experiments in alternative lifestyles. This often took the form of alternative modes of consumption, offering ways to enact “social change” through individual and ethical choices.

Implicitly and explicitly, part of the Left participated in spreading this false dichotomy. The postwar welfare state was heavily normative and aimed to shape family structure around the male breadwinner and the Fordist factory worker. But by definition, and this is perhaps one of the key intellectual tasks for us today, all policies — whether statist or neoliberal — are normative. If we decide to grant everyone a basic income instead of free health care, we substitute a certain normativity (which defines certain subjects through certain “social rights”) by another (who makes “individual choices” in the market the priority). The market did not lead to a less normative society, but just one where the grip of normativity was even more unequally distributed.

The Left’s abandonment of the project of imagining and building collective institutions devoted to creating the good society is a crucial component of our present situation. It’s in the void left by “progressive neoliberalism” that the Trumps of the world prosper. In other words: If Brown is right to point to neoliberalism’s failure in getting rid of the political and the social, she captures only half of the picture.

Message from RepresentUs

https://represent.us/

The story is taking off on social media – and if all of us share it right now we can make it go viral, drawing attention to our demands to fix our broken political system.

The arrest happened at the end of Renaldo Pearson's 700-mile walk from Atlanta to D.C. to demand an end to political corruption. Volunteers from across the country joined in for Renaldo's final mile from the Washington Monument to the Capitol steps, where we sat in protest.

Moments like this have the power to change the dialogue in our country – but only if we amplify them. Share the story of this historic action with your friends and family to inspire people everywhere to join our call to fix America's broken political system.

For more updates from today's final mile and events at the Capitol, including live footage, follow RepresentUs on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Thank you for your support,

Jen Johnson Movement Director RepresentUs

US and Canada have lost more than 1 in 4 birds in the past 50 years

September 19, 2019

Cornell University

Data show that since 1970, the US and Canada have lost nearly 3 billion birds, a massive reduction in abundance involving hundreds of species, from beloved backyard songbirds to long-distance migrants.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190919142331.htm

A study published today in the journal Science reveals that since 1970, bird populations in the United States and Canada have declined by 29 percent, or almost 3 billion birds, signaling a widespread ecological crisis. The results show tremendous losses across diverse groups of birds and habitats -- from iconic songsters such as meadowlarks to long-distance migrants such as swallows and backyard birds including sparrows.

"Multiple, independent lines of evidence show a massive reduction in the abundance of birds," said Ken Rosenberg, the study's lead author and a senior scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and American Bird Conservancy. "We expected to see continuing declines of threatened species. But for the first time, the results also showed pervasive losses among common birds across all habitats, including backyard birds."

The study notes that birds are indicators of environmental health, signaling that natural systems across the U.S. and Canada are now being so severely impacted by human activities that they no longer support the same robust wildlife populations.

The findings showed that of nearly 3 billion birds lost, 90 percent belong to 12 bird families, including sparrows, warblers, finches, and swallows -- common, widespread species that play influential roles in food webs and ecosystem functioning, from seed dispersal to pest control.

Among the steep declines noted:

Grassland birds are especially hard hit, with a 53 percent reduction in population -- more than 720 million birds -- since 1970.

Shorebirds, most of which frequent sensitive coastal habitats, were already at dangerously low numbers and have lost more than one-third of their population.

The volume of spring migration, measured by radar in the night skies, has dropped by 14 percent in just the past decade.

"These data are consistent with what we're seeing elsewhere with other taxa showing massive declines, including insects and amphibians," said coauthor Peter Marra, senior scientist emeritus and former head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and now director of the Georgetown Environment Initiative at Georgetown University. "It's imperative to address immediate and ongoing threats, both because the domino effects can lead to the decay of ecosystems that humans depend on for our own health and livelihoods -- and because people all over the world cherish birds in their own right. Can you imagine a world without birdsong?"

Evidence for the declines emerged from detection of migratory birds in the air from 143 NEXRAD weather radar stations across the continent in a period spanning over 10 years, as well as from nearly 50 years of data collected through multiple monitoring efforts on the ground.

"Citizen-science participants contributed critical scientific data to show the international scale of losses of birds," said coauthor John Sauer of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). "Our results also provide insights into actions we can take to reverse the declines." The analysis included citizen-science data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey coordinated by the USGS and the Canadian Wildlife Service -- the main sources of long-term, large-scale population data for North American birds -- the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, and Manomet's International Shorebird Survey.

Although the study did not analyze the causes of declines, it noted that the steep drop in North American birds parallels the losses of birds elsewhere in the world, suggesting multiple interacting causes that reduce breeding success and increase mortality. It noted that the largest factor driving these declines is likely the widespread loss and degradation of habitat, especially due to agricultural intensification and urbanization.

Other studies have documented mortality from predation by free-roaming domestic cats; collisions with glass, buildings, and other structures; and pervasive use of pesticides associated with widespread declines in insects, an essential food source for birds. Climate change is expected to compound these challenges by altering habitats and threatening plant communities that birds need to survive. More research is needed to pinpoint primary causes for declines in individual species.

"The story is not over," said coauthor Michael Parr, president of American Bird Conservancy. "There are so many ways to help save birds. Some require policy decisions such as strengthening the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. We can also work to ban harmful pesticides and properly fund effective bird conservation programs. Each of us can make a difference with everyday actions that together can save the lives of millions of birds -- actions like making windows safer for birds, keeping cats indoors, and protecting habitat."

The study also documents a few promising rebounds resulting from galvanized human efforts. Waterfowl (ducks, geese, and swans) have made a remarkable recovery over the past 50 years, made possible by investments in conservation by hunters and billions of dollars of government funding for wetland protection and restoration. Raptors such as the Bald Eagle have also made spectacular comebacks since the 1970s, after the harmful pesticide DDT was banned and recovery efforts through endangered species legislation in the U.S. and Canada provided critical protection.

"It's a wake-up call that we've lost more than a quarter of our birds in the U.S. and Canada," said coauthor Adam Smith from Environment and Climate Change Canada. "But the crisis reaches far beyond our individual borders. Many of the birds that breed in Canadian backyards migrate through or spend the winter in the U.S. and places farther south -- from Mexico and the Caribbean to Central and South America. What our birds need now is an historic, hemispheric effort that unites people and organizations with one common goal: bringing our birds back."

Organizations Behind the Study

American Bird Conservancy (ABC) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to conserving birds and their habitats throughout the Americas. With an emphasis on achieving results and working in partnership, we take on the greatest problems facing birds today, innovating and building on rapid advancements in science to halt extinctions, protect habitats, eliminate threats, and build capacity for bird conservation.

Bird Conservancy of the Rockies (Bird Conservancy) is a Colorado-based nonprofit that works to conserve birds and their habitats through an integrated approach of science, education, and land stewardship. Our work extends from the Rockies to the Great Plains, Mexico, and beyond. Together, we are improving native bird populations, the land, and the lives of people. Bird Conservancy's vision is a future where birds are forever abundant, contributing to healthy landscapes and inspiring human curiosity and love of nature.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is a nonprofit member-supported organization dedicated to interpreting and conserving the earth's biological diversity through research, education, and citizen science focused on birds.

Environment and Climate Change Canada is Canada's lead federal department for a wide range of environmental issues. It informs Canadians about protecting and conserving our natural heritage, and ensuring a clean, safe, and sustainable environment for present and future generations.

Advancing Georgetown's commitment to the environment, sustainability, and equitability, the Georgetown Environment Initiative brings together students, faculty, and staff from across disciplines -- from the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, public policy, law, medicine, and business -- to contribute to global efforts to deepen understanding of our world and to transform the Earth's stewardship.

The Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC) is dedicated to understanding, conserving, and championing the grand phenomenon of bird migration. Founded in 1991, and part of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, SMBC scientists work to conserve migratory species through research and public education that foster a better understanding of migratory birds and the need to protect diverse habitats across the Western Hemisphere.

Greta Thunberg Leads Climate Strikes in 150 Countries (Photos)

PHOTO ESSAY






https://www.truthdig.com/articles/greta-thunberg-leads-climate-strikes-in-150-countries-live-blog/?essay_photo=1

Our Revolution as a transformative force in American political life

Our Revolution

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Sep 20 · 2 min read

by Sen. Bernie Sanders

https://medium.com/@our_revolution/our-revolution-as-a-transformative-force-in-american-political-life-7bf9e998d015

Over the last three years what Our Revolution has done, what grassroots politics has done is transform the political life of this country. Do not minimize, do not take for granted the enormous progress we have already made.

Issue after issue that we have focused on, the majority of the American people now support us and we’re seeing concrete action to implement those policies. Needless to say, we have a very, very, very long way to go and what Our Revolution knows is that, at the end of the day, if we’re going to bring about the kind of transformative change this country needs, we have got take on Wall Street and their greed and corruption.

We’ve got to take on the pharmaceutical industry, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, the fossil fuel industry. These people have unlimited amounts of money.

They have incredible power over our political and economic systems. But what I believe, and I know all of you believe is that while the 1% have incredible power today. At the end of the day, they are just 1%.

And what Our Revolution is about is organizing the other 99%, getting people, working people, young people, involved in the political process. Getting people to run for school board, city council, US Congress, whatever the position may be. Making people understand that they should not be intimidated away from running for office. They should go out and educate and organize.

Brothers and sisters, the future of our country is at stake. The future of the planet is at stake. Let’s get out — let’s educate. Let’s organize. Let’s transform this country.