Friday, June 5, 2020
Our fellow citizens are not the enemy, and must never become so, says former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I Cannot Remain Silent
Mike Mullen
https://portside.org/2020-06-03/i-cannot-remain-silent
It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president's visit outside St. John's Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump's leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent.
Whatever Trump's goal in conducting his visit, he laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest in this country, gave succor to the leaders of other countries who take comfort in our domestic strife, and risked further politicizing the men and women of our armed forces.
There was little good in the stunt.
While no one should ever condone the violence, vandalism, and looting that has exploded across our city streets, neither should anyone lose sight of the larger and deeper concerns about institutional racism that have ignited this rage.
As a white man, I cannot claim perfect understanding of the fear and anger that African Americans feel today. But as someone who has been around for a while, I know enough—and I’ve seen enough—to understand that those feelings are real and that they are all too painfully founded.
We must, as citizens, address head-on the issue of police brutality and sustained injustices against the African American community. We must, as citizens, support and defend the right—indeed, the solemn obligation—to peacefully assemble and to be heard. These are not mutually exclusive pursuits.
And neither of these pursuits will be made easier or safer by an overly aggressive use of our military, active duty or National Guard. The United States has a long and, to be fair, sometimes troubled history of using the armed forces to enforce domestic laws. The issue for us today is not whether this authority exists, but whether it will be wisely administered.
I remain confident in the professionalism of our men and women in uniform. They will serve with skill and with compassion. They will obey lawful orders. But I am less confident in the soundness of the orders they will be given by this commander in chief, and I am not convinced that the conditions on our streets, as bad as they are, have risen to the level that justifies a heavy reliance on military troops. Certainly, we have not crossed the threshold that would make it appropriate to invoke the provisions of the Insurrection Act.
Furthermore, I am deeply worried that as they execute their orders, the members of our military will be co-opted for political purposes.
Even in the midst of the carnage we are witnessing, we must endeavor to see American cities and towns as our homes and our neighborhoods. They are not “battle spaces” to be dominated, and must never become so.
We must ensure that African Americans—indeed, all Americans—are given the same rights under the Constitution, the same justice under the law, and the same consideration we give to members of our own family. Our fellow citizens are not the enemy, and must never become so.
Too many foreign and domestic policy choices have become militarized; too many military missions have become politicized.
This is not the time for stunts. This is the time for leadership.
MIKE MULLEN is a retired admiral from the U.S. Navy and was the 17th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Renewables Surpass Coal in US Energy Generation for First Time in 130 Years
‘We are seeing the end of coal,’ says analyst as energy source with biggest impact on climate crisis falls for sixth year in a row
Oliver Milman
https://portside.org/2020-06-03/renewables-surpass-coal-us-energy-generation-first-time-130-years
Solar, wind and other renewable sources have toppled coal in energy generation in the United States for the first time in over 130 years, with the coronavirus pandemic accelerating a decline in coal that has profound implications for the climate crisis.
Not since wood was the main source of American energy in the 19th century has a renewable resource been used more heavily than coal, but 2019 saw a historic reversal, according to US government figures.
Coal consumption fell by 15%, down for the sixth year in a row, while renewables edged up by 1%. This meant renewables surpassed coal for the first time since at least 1885, a year when Mark Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and America’s first skyscraper was erected in Chicago.
Electricity generation from coal fell to its lowest level in 42 years in 2019, with the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasting that renewables will eclipse coal as an electricity source this year. On 21 May, the year hit its 100th day in which renewables have been used more heavily than coal.
“Coal is on the way out, we are seeing the end of coal,” said Dennis Wamsted, analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “We aren’t going to see a big resurgence in coal generation, the trend is pretty clear.”
The ongoing collapse of coal would have been nearly unthinkable a decade ago, when the fuel source accounted for nearly half of America’s generated electricity. That proportion may fall to under 20% this year, with analysts predicting a further halving within the coming decade.
A rapid slump since then has not been reversed despite the efforts of the Trump administration, which has dismantled a key Barack Obama-era climate rule to reduce emissions from coal plants and eased requirements that prevent coal operations discharging mercury into the atmosphere and waste into streams.
Coal releases more planet-warming carbon dioxide than any other energy source, with scientists warning its use must be rapidly phased out to achieve net-zero emissions globally by 2050 and avoid the worst ravages of the climate crisis.
Countries including the UK and Germany are in the process of winding down their coal sectors, although in the US the industry still enjoys strong political support from Trump.
“It’s a big moment for the market to see renewables overtake coal,” said Ben Nelson, lead coal analyst at Moody’s. “The magnitude of intervention to aid coal has not been sufficient to fundamentally change its trajectory, which is sharply downwards.”
Nelson said he expects coal production to plummet by a quarter this year but stressed that declaring the demise of the industry is “a very tough statement to make” due to ongoing exports of coal and its use in steel-making. There are also rural communities with power purchase agreements with coal plants, meaning these contracts would have to end before coal use was halted.
The coal sector has been beset by a barrage of problems, predominantly from cheap, abundant gas that has displaced it as a go-to energy source. The Covid-19 outbreak has exacerbated this trend. With plunging electricity demand following the shutting of factories, offices and retailers, utilities have plenty of spare energy to choose from and coal is routinely the last to be picked because it is more expensive to run than gas, solar, wind or nuclear.
Many US coal plants are ageing and costly to operate, forcing hundreds of closures over the past decade. Just this year, power companies have announced plans to shutter 13 coal plants, including the large Edgewater facility outside Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the Coal Creek Station plant in North Dakota and the Four Corners generating station in New Mexico – one of America’s largest emitters of carbon dioxide.
The last coal facility left in New York state closed earlier this year.
The additional pressure of the pandemic “will likely shutter the US coal industry for good”, said Yuan-Sheng Yu, senior analyst at Lux Research. “It is becoming clear that Covid-19 will lead to a shake-up of the energy landscape and catalyze the energy transition, with investors eyeing new energy sector plays as we emerge from the pandemic.”
Climate campaigners have cheered the decline of coal but in the US the fuel is largely being replaced by gas, which burns more cleanly than coal but still emits a sizable amount of carbon dioxide and methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in its production.
Renewables accounted for 11% of total US energy consumption last year – a share that will have to radically expand if dangerous climate change is to be avoided. Petroleum made up 37% of the total, followed by gas at 32%. Renewables marginally edged out coal, while nuclear stood at 8%.
“Getting past coal is a big first hurdle but the next round will be the gas industry,” said Wamsted. “There are emissions from gas plants and they are significant. It’s certainly not over.”
New York Police Are Attacking Protesters - They Know They Won't Face Consequences
The abuse has been enabled by laws that shield officers from accountability and by barriers to police oversight — as well as by city leaders who have long allowed police to operate with impunity.
Alice Speri, Ryan Devereaux, Sam Biddle
https://portside.org/2020-06-03/new-york-police-are-attacking-protesters-they-know-they-wont-face-consequences
AS THOUSANDS OF PROTESTERS converged in Brooklyn on Monday evening, NYPD scanners picked up a bit of radio chatter that stood out even in the atmosphere of boiled-over police violence. After a police dispatcher noted protester movement near the 77th Precinct, a voice on the same channel replies clearly: “Shoot those motherfuckers.” Just as clear was the immediate response: “Don’t put that over the air.”
The exchange, at 6:20 p.m., was captured via Broadcastify, one of many publicly accessible websites that allow users to listen in on police and other emergency radio channels nationwide. These sites have “skyrocketed to the top of the App Store” in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by police in Minneapolis, Vice reported this week. An NYPD spokesperson confirmed the radio exchange and told The Intercept that it is under internal review.
After days of increasingly violent repression of protests across the country, and after President Donald Trump called for protesters looting stores to be shot and Defense Secretary Mark Esper called U.S. cities a “battlespace” — the radio message was yet another indicator that police see protesters as enemies to combat rather than the citizens they are sworn to protect. But the chatter was also a sign of how emboldened police have become in calling for violence, and how little they seem to fear repercussions for violent attacks on civilians.
In New York City, as across the country, officers have responded to protests prompted by anger at police violence and lack of accountability with yet more violence and, mostly, no consequence. Over the last several days, NYPD officers have beaten protesters with nightsticks, ripped off masks to pepper-spray them at close range, driven their vehicles into crowds, and in at least one occasion pointed a gun at a group of demonstrators. These incidents, police critics say, represent a significant escalation while also being consistent with a long pattern of violence and lack of accountability by the country’s largest police department. The abuse has been enabled by laws that shield officers from accountability and by barriers to police oversight — as well as by city leaders who have long allowed police to operate with impunity.
“The disturbing videos and reports of the violent attacks by NYPD on protestors and the media, while traumatizing to watch, are all too familiar to us,” a group of New York City public defenders wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “They mirror the stories we hear every day of police acting with impunity, targeting, attacking, beating, lying, abusing, and disrespecting Black and brown people in the communities we serve in all five boroughs.”
In response to the police crackdown, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea expressed his pride as he congratulated his officers for their actions — days after condemning the officers who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, calling their actions “deeply disturbing” and “not acceptable ANYWHERE.” Mayor Bill de Blasio, for his part, who also condemned Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, continued his long-held practice of defending police misconduct in the face of indisputable evidence and attempted to shift the blame to protesters.
“I’ve seen that video and I’ve obviously heard about a number of other instances. It’s inappropriate for protesters to surround a police vehicle and threaten police officers,” de Blasio said earlier this week, in reference to one of those incidents. “If a police officer is in that situation, they have to get out of that situation.”
The Civilian Complaint Review Board, New York’s independent office for investigating police abuses, has received 467 complaints since Friday, when the protests started, “and is committed to fully investigating them,” a board spokesperson told The Intercept. But the police department is investigating only six, according to Shea. The NYPD spokesperson did not answer questions about several instances of police violence and misconduct that were caught on video. A spokesperson for the Attorney General’s office told The Intercept they are aware of the NYPD radio exchange, but declined to comment further or provide detail on any other ongoing investigation into police actions.
Despite the videos, advocates and victims of police violence fear that the officers involved in these incidents will escape accountability, as a number of officers assigned to protests have begun covering the badge numbers necessary to identify them. The NYPD did not comment on officers covering their badges.
Covering one’s badge number is in direct violation of the NYPD’s patrol guide, which allows officers to wear “mourning bands” covering the seal of the city upon the death of an officer but mandates that the seal number and rank remain visible. In April, Shea wrote on Twitter that some officers would be wearing mourning bands in commemoration of NYPD officers who died of Covid-19.
But covering one’s badge number also violates New York’s Right to Know Act, which mandates officers identify themselves by name, rank, and shield number when they interact with people. The act, which went into effect in 2018, also requires officers to inform those they stop that they have a right to refuse consent for a search, and to document those requests.
“It’s basically protecting NYPD officers from being held accountable in these mass protests, where they’re not actually following the law themselves,” said Jennvine Wong, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project, in reference to growing reports of cops covering their badges. “Not only are they not following the law when it comes to the way that they’re interacting with individuals, but they’re also not providing the information that they should be providing when they’re interacting with the public.”
Officers had ignored their obligations under the Right to Know Act long before this week’s protest, Wong noted. She called it a “long-standing pattern with the NYPD.”
“It’s really problematic, because it makes it very difficult for advocates for individuals who are the victims of police brutality to hold these officers accountable if we’re not able to identify them,” she added. “And so not only are they acting with impunity, but they are actively trying to hide their identities from people who would hold them accountable. … They’re attacking protesters, and they’re covering their badge numbers. And so, even if we captured them on camera, how are we supposed to hold them accountable?”
For the most part, New York law protects officers from meaningful accountability. For years, before this week’s protests, advocates have lobbied legislators to repeal a decades-old state law known as “50-a,” which makes the personnel records of law enforcement officers “confidential and not subject to inspection or review.” As The Intercept has reported, officials have responded to pressure for greater police transparency with even stricter interpretations of 50-a, making everything from complaints of misconduct to the findings of internal reviews, to body camera footage largely inaccessible to the public. Efforts to repeal 50-a in court have failed, but the legislation was back in the spotlight this week after Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. Derek Chauvin, the officer accused of killing Floyd, had 18 previous complaints of misconduct filed against him.
In New York, which has one of the strictest laws in the country protecting the privacy of law enforcement officers, Gov. Andrew Cuomo surprised advocates this week when he expressed support for repealing 50-a, despite the fact that the legislation has been hotly debated during the nine years he has been in office. “I would sign a bill today that reforms 50-a,” Cuomo said. “I would sign it today.” De Blasio has defended 50-a, and under his administration the city has stopped making the outcomes of internal disciplinary reviews available to the public.
A spokesperson for Gov. Cuomo told The Intercept that “the Governor supports reforming 50-A, and has said he will sign a bill that does that,” adding that Cuomo “has asked the Attorney General to review all actions and procedures used during the protests.”
But advocates were skeptical of the governor’s promise — and insisted that the legislation should be repealed rather than simply amended. “He’s been silent on it previously,” said Wong, of Legal Aid. “This is a movement that advocates have been working on for years and years and years — they’ve been pushing for a repeal of 50-a forever.”
“New Yorkers have been demanding change for years,” Council Member Antonio Reynoso echoed in a statement condemning the NYPD and the mayor’s handling of the protests. “The NYPD needs to immediately release the disciplinary records of all officers, and where patterns of misconduct by individual officers are discovered, those officers must be terminated immediately and prosecuted where appropriate.”
Even before the recent wave of protests, the coronavirus emergency had offered police a new opportunity to escape scrutiny. A city official, speaking to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, said that the CCRB was already in a tough position before the protests began. With New York City the epicenter of Covid-19, CCRB investigators, like other city employees, have been working remotely for weeks. Although investigations into police misconduct can be done remotely, the official said — much of it involves pushing through cases that came in long before the pandemic — the novel coronavirus has presented unique problems.
First, the official said, the CCRB frequently fields complaints from populations for whom physical visits to the board’s office is a necessity: individuals who lack access to phones or the internet and, in particular, New York City’s unhoused. “The other side of it is the PBA,” the official said — the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the hard-right union representing New York City’s cops. “There have been no officer interviews since the beginning of Covid,” the official said, adding that without cooperation from the PBA, oversight investigators can only go so far. All of this, of course, comes after weeks of controversy surrounding the NYPD’s hard-line enforcement of local social distancing guidelines — and, now, its hammer-fist approach to policing protests. The PBA could not be reached for comment prior to publication.
While few expect the police department itself to conduct fair investigations of officer abuse during the protests, advocates warned that the questionable arrests and excessive force displayed in recent days would likely lead to scores of civil lawsuits against the city. Last year, the city paid $69 million to settle lawsuits over police misconduct, an increase of nearly $30 million over the previous year. And litigating misconduct lawsuits cost the city some $230 million in 2018 and $335.5 million in 2017.
Massive taxpayer-funded payouts over police misconduct are likely to come under increased scrutiny this year, since the economic impact of the Covid-19 crisis is forcing the city to slash its budget for next year by $6 billion. But, as The Intercept has reported, there is one city agency that has been largely spared the across-the-board cuts: the NYPD.
Our History is Our Future
JOHN DAVIS
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/04/our-history-is-our-future/
We can be sure that the public grandiloquence of Barack Obama grated mightily on at least half of the country during his eight years in the Oval Office. Now, we Libtards find every Trump tweet excruciatingly inane – or horrifyingly inflammatory. As ever, it is the style, not the content, of American political leadership that is in question. For Its neoliberal ideology has been unwavering for four decades and is but the contemporary version of an implicitly racist dedication to the well-being of the wealthy that was fundamental to the founding of the Republic. Committed to the economization of all facets of public and private life, we citizens are remade as human capital: mini entrepreneurs whose only civic duty is towards pumping up the GDP. This is what our government demands of us, and we would be foolish to expect more from it than further destruction of the public realm and further trivialization of the democratic process. Having relinquished our individual roles as a necessary part of the Republic’s sovereignty, our vote is rendered superfluous at a time of a viral pandemic, unprecedented unemployment and expectations of further economic dislocation likely to eclipse the melt-down of 2008.
On a weekend when the nation’s streets exploded in violent protest against racialized police brutality, the President and the Vice President chose to attend a manned rocket launch contracted by SpaceX, a private corporation. Politics have been dethroned, the public realm abandoned and the public good forsaken. Trump is ascendant, his sun-bronzed, narcissistic gaze reflected in the ruddy glow of burning streets. His military, on high alert, awaits its orders.
Our smoldering streets may no longer be safe for Trump’s ‘warriors’ attempting, around the country, to fully re-open the American economy. Many will doubtless now enlist as his Law and Order ‘vigilantes’. Neoliberalism demands the appearance of vibrant, life-sustaining markets. Trump has seen the financial
indices decline as the epidemic curve has arced skyward, but his focus has always been on economic rather than public health. He, and his ‘warriors’, are quite prepared to sacrifice ‘flattening the curve’ for the sake of a rising Dow but his calculus must now include appeasing his newly enrolled ‘vigilantes’ while not entirely disaffecting African Americans.
Neoliberalism, as the SARS-CoV-2 viral pandemic and the uprising demonstrate, is this country’s comorbidity – a precondition making it extremely susceptible to both viral disease and to the recapitulation of long-ago racial injustice. In, The Road to Serfdom, 1944, Friedrich Hayek, the Anglo-Austrian economist, explicitly equates the freedom of the individual with the unfettered workings of the market. By way of contrast, he identifies the centralized economic planning evidenced in National Socialism, Communism and Social Democracies as inevitably trending towards totalitarianism. He suggests that governments restrict all attempts to establish social objectives and by extension, any encouragement of the citizen’s role in shaping these objectives. In other words, he recommends abandoning both the social and the political realm in favor of the invisible hand of the market, a goal that continues to inform neoliberalism as it is practiced across Europe and the Americas, and is the ruling ideology that has shaped the United States since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Hayek’s ideas, developed out of his deeply felt reaction to German and Soviet totalitarianism, have had disastrous consequences in the United States where the gross injustices of its past continue to haunt its present, and where its best moments have been enshrined in exactly the kind of social objectives, such as FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, that Hayek spurns.
In the 1830’s, the two signature, home-grown horrors that have shaped American history, the genocidal eradication of indigenous peoples and slavery, coalesced in President Andrew Jackson’s ‘Indian Removals’ which aimed to deport a number of surviving Indian tribes to west of the Mississippi to make way for the establishment of further industrial cotton plantations. This expansion of slavery was partly funded by securitized bonds, sold in New York, London, Paris, and other finance capitals, in a process that involved the financialization of human flesh. The violence necessary to convert slaves into a fungible commodity had existed for over two centuries, practiced in their initial capture in Africa, in their transportation, and in their work. The stain of slavery was then embedded in the capital generated by the cotton crop which went on to be invested in the Industrial Revolution and formed the basis for this country’s extravagant wealth. It is a wealth that has not been shared by most of its citizens.
The highly visible murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, performed on the street and reprised endlessly as viral videos on social media, go to the heart of this country’s racialized hierarchies established in 1492 and then compounded in 1619, with the arrival of the first shipment of African slaves introduced to this country as stolen human capital. Neoliberalism has made human capital of us all, but has vastly accentuated the wealth divide because, as Piketty has shown, it is from investment and inherited wealth that the rich are made – not from an honest day’s work. The majority of the U.S. population, and certainly most African Americans, rely not on wealth from inheritance or investments, but on the mythology of the equitable rule of law and equal economic opportunity. As the looting component of the uprising suggests, egregious racialized murder exposes an awareness of this country’s endemic economic injustice.
Nick Estes writes in, Our History is the Future, 2019, “Indigenous elimination, in all its orientations, is the organizing principle of settler society.” In documenting the Lakota tribes’ struggles to prevent the Dakota Access Pipeline passing under, and across sacred indigenous lands, Estes lauds the ongoing struggles of native peoples to resist a colonizing civilization that possesses an overbearing commercial ethic which leaves little room for the recognition of other, non-material values. Across the continent, indigenous peoples regarded the native soil, along with its flora and fauna, as co-creators of their lives, and the concept of its individual ownership was unthinkable. Genocide after genocide has still not entirely eliminated their awareness of belonging to the land – ever in conflict with those who so clearly prize the value of individual ownership, property rights and, of course, the strange notion that the land belongs to them.
It is in this country’s varied civilizational currents that the supreme value of the almighty dollar emerged. As a nation, we have bought and sold people, bought and sold the land’s natural beneficences, and now we have sold our sovereign right to vote to corporations that exist only to give succor to their owners and shareholders. The neoliberalism that was created out of a fear of totalitarianism has now made societies beholden to a totalized economy in which all is subsumed. Its values are those of the market, entirely blind to the human concerns of a richly diverse population many of whom it makes vulnerable to an ever increasing precarity in their livelihood, housing and health care. The current pandemic, natural disasters, debt crises, and recessions expose the venal character of this prevailing ideology, while emergency relief and bailouts are leveraged by the wealthy to expand capital in readiness for the next ‘recovery’ – widening the corrosive gulf between the rich and everybody else.
As a Native American academic, Estes celebrates his peoples’ ongoing resistance to the dominant culture, established shortly after 1492. By declaring that “Our History is Our Future”, he is committing to a continuance of this struggle. White members of the dominant culture can find no such guidance in their past. We see our history reenacted in violence and racial injustice entirely too often to wish it to be our future. We suppress our past and fear our future for good reason.
Neoliberalism has obliterated the conditions for democracy by concentrating wealth, eschewing the public good and causing civility to be drowned out by over-amplified, profit-seeking media. The democracy that now struggles to exist in this country, does so only as a fully financialized product fertilized by corporate money featuring a roster of politicians pitifully beholden to the special interests that support their reelection campaigns. Estes is right to reaffirm his peoples’ history. Our salvation might be in confronting ours.
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