Robert Reich documentary 'Inequality for All' is a compelling class lecture on the U.S. economy
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Opinion
Climate change? Try catastrophic climate breakdown
The message from the IPCC report is familiar and shattering: it's as bad as we thought it was
Already, a thousand blogs and columns insist the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's new report is a rabid concoction of scare stories whose purpose is to destroy the global economy. But it is, in reality, highly conservative.
Reaching agreement among hundreds of authors and reviewers ensures that only the statements which are hardest to dispute are allowed to pass. Even when the scientists have agreed, the report must be tempered in another forge, as politicians question anything they find disagreeable: the new report received 1,855 comments from 32 governments, and the arguments raged through the night before launch.
In other words, it's perhaps the biggest and most rigorous process of peer review conducted in any scientific field, at any point in human history.
There are no radical departures in this report from the previous assessment, published in 2007; just more evidence demonstrating the extent of global temperature rises, the melting of ice sheets and sea ice, the retreat of the glaciers, the rising and acidification of the oceans and the changes in weather patterns. The message is familiar and shattering: "It's as bad as we thought it was."
What the report describes, in its dry, meticulous language, is the collapse of the benign climate in which humans evolved and have prospered, and the loss of the conditions upon which many other lifeforms depend. Climate change and global warming are inadequate terms for what it reveals. The story it tells is of climate breakdown.
This is a catastrophe we are capable of foreseeing but incapable of imagining. It's a catastrophe we are singularly ill-equipped to prevent.
The IPCC's reports attract denial in all its forms: from a quiet turning away – the response of most people – to shrill disavowal. Despite – or perhaps because of – their rigours, the IPCC's reports attract a magnificent collection of conspiracy theories: the panel is trying to tax us back to the stone age or establish a Nazi/communist dictatorship in which we are herded into camps and forced to crochet our own bicycles. (And they call the scientists scaremongers …)
In the Mail, the Telegraph and the dusty basements of the internet, yesterday's report (or a draft leaked a few weeks ago) has been trawled for any uncertainties that could be used to discredit. The panel reports that on every continent except Antarctica, man-made warming is likely to have made a substantial contribution to the surface temperature. So those who feel threatened by the evidence ignore the other continents and concentrate on Antarctica, as proof that climate change caused by fossil fuels can't be happening.
They make great play of the IPCC's acknowledgement that there has been a "reduction in surface warming trend over the period 1998–2012", but somehow ignore the fact that the past decade is still the warmest in the instrumental record.
They manage to overlook the panel's conclusion that this slowing of the trend is likely to have been caused by volcanic eruptions, fluctuations in solar radiation and natural variability in the planetary cycle.
Were it not for man-made global warming, these factors could have made the world significantly cooler over this period. That there has been a slight increase in temperature shows the power of the human contribution.
But denial is only part of the problem. More significant is the behaviour of powerful people who claim to accept the evidence. This week the former Irish president Mary Robinson added her voice to a call that some of us have been making for years: the only effective means of preventing climate breakdown is to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Press any minister on this matter in private and, in one way or another, they will concede the point. Yet no government will act on it.
As if to mark the publication of the new report, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has now plastered a giant poster across its ground-floor windows: "UK oil and gas: Energising Britain. £13.5bn is being invested in recovering UK oil and gas this year, more than any other industrial sector."
The message couldn't have been clearer if it had said "up yours". It is an example of the way in which all governments collaborate in the disaster they publicly bemoan. They sagely agree with the need to do something to avert the catastrophe the panel foresees, while promoting the industries that cause it.
It doesn't matter how many windmills or solar panels or nuclear plants you build if you are not simultaneously retiring fossil fuel production. We need a global programme whose purpose is to leave most coal and oil and gas reserves in the ground, while developing new sources of power and reducing the amazing amount of energy we waste.
But, far from doing so, governments everywhere are still seeking to squeeze every drop out of their own reserves, while trying to secure access to other people's. As more accessible reservoirs are emptied, energy companies exploit the remotest parts of the planet, bribing and bullying governments to allow them to break open unexploited places: from the deep ocean to the melting Arctic.
And the governments who let them do it weep sticky black tears over the state of the planet.
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Ted Cruz: The GOP's self-made monster
Over the past couple of days, as I've watched Ted Cruz capture the political world's attention and drive the GOP's self-defeating strategy on the budget and the debt limit, I've tried to think about what is the best metaphor to describe his extraordinary political rise – from freshman Texas senator to ideological lodestar of the Republican party.
Is he a modern-day version of George Wallace (in Gary Younge's analogy)? Is he Elmer Gantry? Is he Frankenstein?
No, he's the Republican's Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
For those not familiar with the reference, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man is "the form of the destructor" in the 1983 film, Ghostbusters. He seems harmless. After all, it's a giant marshmallow with a jaunty sailor's cap. But in reality, he is a 60ft anthropomorphized destroyer, who is chosen (inadvertently) to wage the movie's final showdown between the forces of good (the ghostbusters) and the forces of bad (Gozer).
Now, in the end of the movie everything works out for the best and everyone lives happily ever after (except, unfortunately, for those who paid to see Ghostbusters II). Things, however, are unlikely to work out so well for the Republican party.
For Cruz, on the other hand, capitalizing on the GOP's descent into madness is a deft political move that positions him well to be a clear frontrunner to win the party's presidential nod in 2016.
Over the past several decades, Republicans have cultivated the party's most reactionary, uncompromising and extremist base of supporters. They have portrayed government as a deeply nefarious and destructive force; they have fetishized ideological rigidity; they have derided and demonized compromise of any sort; they have destroyed the party's moderate wing and even drove conservatives out of the party for not being conservative enough.
Things are so bad that Liz Cheney is taking on incumbent Mike Enzi for the Senate seat in Wyoming. The reason for the primary challenge: he's not obstructionist enough and has committed the sin of actually talking with Democrats in the US Senate. That such a challenge would come after a period in which Congress entered a new stratosphere of dysfunction and uselessness is practically unimaginable. But alas, here we are.
Of course, when it comes to Obama, the GOP's rhetoric has been turned up to "11". Republicans have played on the fears of those who believe Obama is a socialist, Muslim, or a proud native son of Kenya. They have decried his war on political freedom; his war on gun rights; his war on business; his war on the middle class; his war on the nation's future generations; and his surrender to foreign tyrants. And they have portrayed his policies as a fast train to America's destruction – none more so than his signature legislation, Obamacare.
Since 2009, Republicans have practically fallen over themselves to describe a plan to provide health insurance coverage for 30 million people and lower healthcare costs as "the worst thing ever to happen to America".
According to Republicans, Obamacare represents a government takeover of the healthcare system (it's not); it was passed in violation of the will of the American people (it wasn't); it covers illegal immigrants (it doesn't, but it should); it will put government bureaucrats in charge of your healthcare decision (it won't); it is already causing widespread job losses (it's not) and will destroy the economy (it won't).
Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, calls it the "single worst piece of legislation passed in the last 50 years". Congressman John Fleming – a Louisiana Republican – went even further, describing Obamacare as "the most dangerous piece of legislation ever passed in Congress", and "the most existential threat" to the US economy "since the Great Depression". The House of Representatives has now voted more than 40 times to repeal the bill and is actively working to sabotage the law.
Conservatives are even running a creepy series of ads encouraging young people to eschew Obamacare and subsidized healthcare coverage, which, it must be said, is one of the more morally depraved activities that this country has seen from a major political group in some time. But in the GOP jihad against Obamacare, this sort of action is par for the course.
Indeed, opposition to Obamacare and the demand by Republicans – largely instigated by Cruz – that any budget or debt limit extension be tied to the defunding or delay of Obamacare has led to a possible government shutdown next week. It's an act both destructive and unworkable. Obama is not going to sign a bill undercutting his signature legislation, and they'll take the blame, which will be politically damaging.
So, why pursue this suicidal, self-defeating course? Enter Ted Cruz – the destructor.
Though many Republicans are wary, conservatives like Cruz have demanded this strategy – and have challenged the conservative bona fides of any who fail to get in line. A month ago, speaker of the House John Boehner was powerless to resist the crazies and finally relented, introducing legislation that tied the federal budget to a defunding of Obamacare.
This move led numerous Republicans to violate Ronald Reagan's so-called "11th commandment" – "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican" – as the two most senior GOP members have attacked Cruz. But none of this should be a surprise to them. Republicans have spent so much time describing Obamacare in the most dire terms imaginable, isn't it completely consistent for some Republicans to take this rhetoric to its logical conclusion?
To be sure, Republicans will find their way out of this current mess, most likely by conceding defeat and passing a clean continuing resolution and debt limit extension. But that will only begin the intra-party bloodletting.
For conservatives like Cruz, who, in just nine months in office, has become a hero to the party's base, it's precisely this retreat that he is counting on. It will only strengthen his political message that the problem for Republicans is the cadre of sellouts like McConnell, Boehner et al who refuse to follow through on their conservative principles. For a politician like Cruz, who clearly has his eyes set on national office, defeat for the GOP on Obamacare will be his ultimate victory.
Indeed, we've seen repeatedly over the past two election cycles that the more radical a Republican is, the more likely he or she is to defeat a slightly less radical Republican in a Senate or House primary. This is actually how Cruz became a senator.
In the end, Republicans have no one to blame but themselves for their current crisis. Ted Cruz was created by Republicans who persistently ramped up the extremism of their attacks on government and on Obama. That reached a point where Cruz's brand of crazy, heartless, morally wanton, uncompromising conservatism is now the default position of the party.
Unfortunately for Republicans, unlike the Ghostbusters, there is no escape from the monster they created.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
[Image via Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons-licensed]
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Seven things you should know about the wackiest 'fiscal crisis' yet
Sometime in the next week, Congress will either get it together to pass a new budget resolution or the government will shut down (all but essential services). Two weeks after that, the federal government will reach its debt limit. If it is not raised…
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Tea partying: When protest movements defend the interests of the ultra-rich
Four years ago, the modern tea party seemed to emerge from nowhere, leaving journalists bewildered and the public with few reference points to understand seemingly spontaneous rallies by middle…
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Choice, for women, is not about biology. It's about basic equality
The battle over abortion rights is simply a flashpoint in women's pervasive experience of being deprived of control of our destinies
One of the most frustrating things about being "pro-choice" is the assumption that the only choice we care about has to do with our bodies. Really, the choices we're talking about have to do with preserving, or expanding, all of the choices available to women. The choices we make about our bodies, yes, but also choices about our time, our minds, our emotions, our money, our thoughts, our votes and our voices.
There is not a woman reading this right now that hasn't experienced a reminder, probably quite recently, maybe even today, that her choices are more limited than a man's. This week, I asked the Twitter universe for examples of this – examples of how women don't have the options that men do in all kinds of situations. Some of the answers were funny, a lot were serious, all of them meant something. A few favorites:
@anamariecox not always on hairstyles, try wearing hardhat w/ponytail, but don't have to worry about shaving for respirator fit (beards bad)
— Geeky Girl Engineer (@gkygirlengineer) September 18, 2013
@soonergrunt @anamariecox I would have been a flight medic, would have made a sniper both closed at time. Men aren't thrilled with 11bravo.
— JessicaRRG (@Mumaroo1) September 18, 2013
@lechatsavant @anamariecox not diagnosed with adhd until my 40's because everybody knows only boys have adhd
— Knuck (@knck1es) September 18, 2013
@anamariecox when you see a woman executive, chances are she's in HR because, you know, vagina means soft skills, right?
— Lois Lipstick Long (@LipstickLong) September 18, 2013
And a last one, kind of meta and very sad:
@anamariecox Not wanting to share incidents here to avoid dealing with potential backlash when colleagues/professional contacts see it
— Teresa Genaro (@BklynBckstretch) September 18, 2013
(You can find almost the entire thread here.)
My own first clear memory of realizing that my future would be different than a boy with the same dreams was in high school. I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and, like most 15 year-olds who read On the Road, I immediately wanted to take off across the country myself. That Kerouac was sexist I don't think I realized or maybe chose to ignore. But what I knew in my gut was that I probably would never be able to make that trip, certainly not by myself.
Since then, there have been other reminders. As I said, almost daily ones. But my own experience is less important than the fact that I even something that specific didn't just happen to me.
When I asked the Twitterverse for those examples, in fact, one of the very first responses was from another journalist, who shared her frustration over not being able to safely take the same assignments as male colleagues – which is the adult, professional version of my own frustrated Kerouacian dream, and one I share today. I have male colleagues who have reported from war zones, profiled Somali pirates, gone undercover in secret societies, and they've written amazing pieces – stories that I will never get the chance to add to myself.
It's true that you or I could do any one of those stories. What's different for me, for us is the effort, the support needed, and the danger involved.
In the implicit closing down of options, in the subtle way power is exerted over our choices, in the diffuse and invisible discouragement, the lack of any one person to blame … that narrowing of choices in the assignments I can take or in the places you can go or the sports our daughters can play – all of these are minor analogues to the more intensely personal and dramatically physical shutting-down of women's choices about their bodies.
Yes, there are villains in the story of needless access restrictions and "safety" regulations; yes, there are specific lawmakers and activists. There are people we can rally against. But what makes the battle for reproductive choice so tricky is that while it's easy to defeat or expose the obvious assholes (Todd Akin), the rhetoric and tactics of our opposition draw on the existing and pervasive forms of institutionalized sexism that don't have an obvious connections to pregnancy or contraception. Some examples of what I mean:
• Laws that require practioners to have hospital privileges or that bar the use of telemedicine in reproductive health, but allow it for non-gendered procedures, draw on the idea that women's bodies are inherently more mysterious and delicate, and that they must be protected against imaginary threats.
• Laws that mandate ultrasounds (pdf) or counseling (pdf), or both, draw on the idea that women don't know their own bodies, or don't realize the consequences of their decisions. This despite the fact that today most women seeking abortions – up to 72% – are already mothers. They know what's happening to them, the connection between what's happening to them and the potential for a child.
• Barring abortion in all cases except for when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest relates to the belief that in any other situation, a woman's unwanted pregnancy is "her fault", that a woman who decides of her own free will to have sex is tacitly agreeing to become pregnant – because the only real reason for a woman to have sex is, of course, to get pregnant.
• Waiting periods, and multiple clinic visits, hinge on the underlying belief that women are prone to hasty, "emotional" decisions, that they must be protected from their own hysterical behavior. This despite surveys that show almost 90% of women who seek abortions are "highly confident" about their decision before they contact a provider.
This assumption of flightiness, that women who want to end their pregnancies haven't made a rational decision, underlies almost all the justifications for limiting women's access to providers of reproductive healthcare. The decision to end a pregnancy involves emotions, it generates emotions, but it's not an emotional decision. People who are anti-choice disparage the abortion decision as one made to "get out of" being pregnant, as one made out of selfishness or hedonism. But any woman who's faced an unwanted pregnancy knows that the decision to end it carries its own negative consequences. I'm not talking about pseudo-scientific warnings about "post-abortion syndrome" or any permanent mental or spiritual or physical impairment, but just a weight of knowledge that inevitably follows the decision to refuse what we know to be a gift, in exchange for a different kind of gift.
Any real choice also has consequences; any freedom worth having has a cost. When we argue for choice, choice of any kind, we are not arguing that we want something for nothing. We are arguing for the right to pay the cost that men pay, and get the same benefit in return. To do the same work that men do, and get the same pay. To achieve what they've achieved and not have it taken away.
When I opened up that conversation on Twitter, I knew that there would be pushback.
A lot of the pushback took the form of "men suffer too!" I have some sympathy for this argument. Gender roles constrain men, though they usually constrain men only when they want to exercise a behavior that's considered feminine. Men don't suffer when they act like men; they experience bias when they want to do something that women do. What's more, the gender bias is rarely (not never, but rarely) enshrined in law. Imagine if there was a waiting period for Viagra.
Also, I would gladly trade some of the so-called "advantages" women have for, say, equal representation in politics. You can have my Jimmy Choos. Give me Governor Wendy Davis.
Most of the negative commentary on Twitter was just sarcasm and mockery – laughing at the idea that having to pay more for alterations was part of the "war on women". Two things on that: first, any time women are reminded that they don't have the same freedoms and benefits that men have matters; and second, invalidating the discussion as trivial kind of proves the point that we need to have it.
That mockery and pushback are also a hint at the most powerful tool we have in claiming the choices we've been denied: to speak out about them. To call out the sexism we experience as sexism. This can be exhausting, I admit. I think most of us choose to not do it all the time; it could turn into a full-time job. (That's mine!)
Everyone can choose their own limits about these things, pick her own battles. It helps to have a sense of humor. But we do have to talk about it.
Not talking about institutionalized, invisible and everyday, "trivial" sexism allows it not just to persist, but persist in ways that other women (and men!) don't even recognize. I give credit to a lot of the men who watched that Twitter discussion unfold and wrote that they "didn't realize" what we faced. Didn't realize that, yes, we notice when there aren't women's teams on television, or women's names on the ballot, or that our pants don't fit, or that garage mechanics overcharge us.
I worry that some women might not realize that those forms of sexism are pervasive but not permanent. Things can change. Things do change. But we have to talk about them first.
• This column is a version of a speech the author gave at NARAL-Pro-Choice Minnesota's "The Power of Choice" event on 19 September
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
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If Paul Ryan really listened to Pope Francis he would oppose cruel cuts to food stamps
As Congress considers cruel and barbaric attacks against the poor embodied by efforts to impose massive cuts in the food stamp program — cuts that would make the poor more poor, the hungry more hungry, the needy more needy and the ill more ill —…
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America's gun disease is a national security issue
The spate of shootings in the US and the lack of political will to tackle gun control shows the country as a basket case, not a model state
If this isn't a matter of national security, what is? When 13 people end up dead at a US military base, that surely crosses the threshold – putting America's problem with guns into the category reserved for threats to the mortal safety of the nation. At its narrowest, Monday's massacre at the Washington navy yard is a national security issue because it involved hostile entry into what was meant to be a secure military facility. Plenty will now focus on how a man twice arrested in gun-related incidents was able to gain such easy access to the nerve centre of the US navy. There will be inquiries into the entry-pass system, use of contractors and the like.
But that would be to miss the wider point. America's gun sickness – which has turned massacres of this kind into a fairly regular, rather than exceptionally rare occurrence – endangers the US not solely because it can lead military personnel to lose their lives, nor even because it can lead to the murder of schoolchildren, as it did at Sandy Hook elementary school last year, or the death of young movie-goers, as it did in Aurora, Colorado, also last year – dreadful though those losses are.
The foreign policy experts who gather in the thinktanks and congressional offices not far from the navy yard often define national security to encompass anything that touches on America's standing in the world. That ranges from its ability to project military force across the globe to its attractiveness, its "soft power". For decades, this latter quality has been seen as one of the US's primary assets, central to its ability to lead and persuade other nations.
But America's gun disease diminishes its soft power. It makes the country seem less like a model and more like a basket case, afflicted by a pathology other nations strive to avoid. When similar gun massacres have struck elsewhere – including in Britain – lawmakers have acted swiftly to tighten controls, watching as the gun crime statistics then fell. In the decade after the rules were toughened in Australia in 1996, for example, firearm-related homicides fell by 59%, while suicides involving guns fell by 65%.
But the US stays stubbornly where it is, refusing to act. When President Obama last tried, following the deaths of 20 children and six staff at Sandy Hook at the end of 2012, his bill fell at the first senate hurdle. He had not proposed banning a single weapon or bullet – merely expanding the background checks required of someone wanting to buy a gun. But even that was too much. The national security pundits who worry how a US president is perceived when he is incapable of protecting the lives of innocent Syrians abroad should think how it looks when he is incapable of protecting the lives of innocent Americans at home.
On guns, the US – so often the world leader in innovation and endeavour – is the laggard, stuck at the bottom of the global class. Bill Clinton perfectly distilled the essence of soft power when he said in 2008, "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power." He was right. But every time a disturbed or angry individual is able to vent his rage with an assault weapon, killing innocents with ease, the power of America's example fades a little more.
@Freedland
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
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