31 October 21
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A new court filing reveals Trump wants to hide his daily presidential diaries, schedules, activity and call logs, draft speeches and files from top White House staffers related to the Capitol insurrection
“These records all relate to the events on or about Jan. 6, and may assist the Select Committee’s investigation into that day, including what was occurring at the White House immediately before, during and after the Jan. 6 attack,” Justice Department lawyers wrote in the court filing submitted late Friday night on behalf of the National Archives.
Trump has been trying to block the committee from obtaining 750 pages of documents out of almost 1,600 that have been identified as relevant to the investigation. The documents that Trump wants to keep hidden include:
- Thirty pages of “daily presidential diaries, schedules, appointment information showing visitors to the White House, activity logs, call logs and switchboard shift-change checklists showing calls to the president and vice-president, all specifically for or encompassing [Jan. 6]”
- Thirteen pages of “drafts of speeches, remarks, and correspondence concerning the events of [Jan. 6]”
- “Three handwritten notes concerning the events of [Jan. 6] from [former White House chief of staff Mark] Meadows’ files … listing potential or scheduled briefings and telephone calls concerning the [Jan. 6] certification and other election issues”
- Binders of talking points from former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany “principally relating to allegations of voter fraud, election security, and other topics concerning the 2020 election”
- “Draft text of a presidential speech for the [Jan. 6] Save America March”
- “A handwritten list of potential or scheduled briefings and telephone calls concerning election issues”
- “A draft Executive Order concerning election integrity”
- “A draft proclamation honoring deceased Capitol Police officers Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood”
- “Associated e-mails from the Office of the Executive Clerk, which relate to the select committee’s interest in the White House’s response to the Capitol attack”
The filing states that the National Archives searched first for relevant documents in paper records because it wasn’t until August that they received electronic records from the Trump White House. There are another outstanding “several hundred thousand potentially responsive records” that may also be relevant to the investigation that they are still working their way through.
Trump has sued to block the release of these documents by claiming executive privilege, and this court filing is in response to that suit. Biden officially rejected Trump’s executive privilege request to keep the documents secret earlier this month.
Even more news in the Jan. 6 saga broke Friday night when it was revealed that during the attack on the Capitol, Trump’s lawyer, John Eastman, emailed an aide to former Vice President Mike Pence to blame Pence for the violence that was unfolding, The Washington Post reported.
“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this [election challenge] to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” Eastman wrote to Pence aide, Greg Jacob, who quoted the Trump attorney’s email in an unpublished op-ed obtained by The Post.
Eastman also emailed Jacob after Congress reconvened following the riot to tell him that Pence should not certify the election results because he violated a technicality in the Electoral College Act related to how much time lawmakers could use for speeches. Pence had cited the act as justification for not sending electors back to their states.
“My point was they had already violated the electoral count act by allowing debate to extend past the allotted two hours, and by not reconvening ‘immediately’ in joint session after the vote in the objection,” Eastman told The Post. “It seemed that had already set the precedent that it was not an impediment.”
According to a separate report from The Post this past Tuesday, the select committee is planning to subpoena Eastman unless he voluntarily cooperates with their investigation.
Zephyr Teachout speaks to supporters outside Brooklyn Borough Hall in New York on August 7. (photo: Peter Morgan/AP)
When violations of the law are hard to punish, authorities will usually give them a pass.
Anticompetitive behavior is rampant—and not just in the tech industry. Punishing it should be easy.
The law hasn’t always been so lax. From the early 1800s until the 1980s, large companies’ abuse of economic power to crowd out rivals—far from being excused as merely the way the free market works—was broadly seen as illegal. For most of the 19th century, that understanding was embedded in corporate law, common law, and other rules against various restraints of trade. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and subsequent federal laws formalized the notion that certain types of competition were fundamentally unfair, and some states enshrined similar ideas in their constitutions. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled against the bicycle manufacturer Schwinn after it set up what antitrust lawyers call “vertical restraints”—limitations on what other entities in a distribution system can do. Schwinn required its distributors to sell its bikes within designated geographical areas and only to designated franchisees. Essentially, it was limiting competition within those regions. It was found guilty of an illegal trade restraint in violation of the Sherman Act. The Supreme Court said the distributor contracts were “so obviously destructive of competition that their mere existence is enough” to show that the law had been broken. To find Schwinn guilty of anticompetitive acts, the government had to prove only that it had been intentional in its contracts.
Today, the same case would lose, because starting in 1977, a wave of federal court cases radically reinterpreted antitrust laws—which are typically written in broad language—to specifically require a weighing of the competitive pros and cons of every business decision, including those that were previously illegal. If the Schwinn case were brought today, the government would need proof not just that anticompetitive behavior occurred, but also that it caused economic harms, including higher costs for consumers, that exceeded any possible benefits of the behavior. The government would have to hire consultants to prove that Schwinn was flexing its economic muscle within the bicycle market, and to prove that the terms of its distributor contracts were not justified by any offsetting consumer benefits. The company would likely hire its own high-priced consultants to make the opposite claim.
Or maybe, seeing the complexity and likely cost of the case, the government simply wouldn’t intervene against behavior that was anticompetitive on its face.
The judges who essentially rewrote our laws—without congressional approval—got it wrong. If Americans want to protect the economy from Goliaths that trample all over workers and small businesses, Congress and the states are going to have to pass new laws that make it easier to bring, and win, antitrust cases.
Under the current regime, judges are given an untenable task: Modern antitrust law treats behavior as legal or illegal depending on whether it can be justified by other positive results. While in our private moral lives these kinds of judgments make sense (philosophers love to debate whether lying might be the morally correct thing to do in some circumstances), public law should be clear and transparent, and not depend on case-by-case balancing.
A basic principle of the rule of law is that laws should be clear, well publicized, stable, and fair, which means we typically do not ask judges to make consequentialist decisions about whether a particular action is “worth it”; we ask them to enforce the decided-upon rules. Imagine if criminal prosecutors had to prove that an embezzler’s victim had a more economically valuable use for the money than the embezzler, or if the defense team in a bribery case could prove that the bribe increased economic efficiency. Imagine if judges not only had to decide whether a restaurant violated health codes, but also had to evaluate reports from economic consultants claiming that the violation actually increased the safety of the restaurant.
Judges are poorly equipped to make those decisions and tend to defer to economists, and any would-be monopolist can typically find at least one analyst who can justify its behavior as pro-competitive. Even though Congress never voted to subject antitrust cases to today’s prevailing standard—which reflects an economic ideology that treats economies as self-healing—judges have mostly stopped blocking mergers or punishing abuses. The more complex and drawn-out the fight, the greater the advantage to monopolists who can afford to spend a lot more than the government. And as big companies get bigger, the even-bigger companies engage in ever more outrageous behavior.
Here’s what a good antitrust fix would look like: Instead of asking judges to apply impossible standards, the law should spell out and prohibit a specific set of abusive business practices—just as it does with bribery, fraud, and employment discrimination. Each of those practices is illegal on its own terms, and we don’t ask whether it was “worth it” to society. Likewise, dominant firms should be explicitly banned from predatory pricing, coercive dealing, and exclusive dealing, for example. Agencies should overtly ban bad mergers, instead of engaging—as they now do—in negotiations for minor concessions that will allow mergers to proceed.
Congress should also recognize that the largest companies exercise far more power in the market than small competitors do—and should therefore be subject to tougher rules. Lawmakers can create transparent standards to determine whether a company is powerful enough to warrant that additional oversight. Congress should also remove any requirement that judges engage in assessing competitive impacts or efficiency. Finally, Congress should be clear that antitrust law is important for protecting consumers from price gouging, but also for protecting workers, small-business owners, and democracy itself. The myopic view that antitrust law exists only to protect consumer welfare has played a singularly destructive role, allowing abusive behavior to flourish. Fortunately, the consumer-welfare standard hasn’t prevented the emergence of a new movement for more vigorous antitrust enforcement—nor has it kept the FTC from trying to make amends for being too lax in the past. The agency has filed suit to undo Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram. Yet although the FTC has a strong chance to win, the case is a nail-biter when it should be a no-brainer.
By simply outlawing abusive, monopolistic corporate behavior, the public would also understand antitrust law better. It would also be easier for businesses and workers to spot anticompetitive behavior when it occurs. Good antitrust laws are like good anti-corruption laws: Strong, simple, clear rules that prohibit misbehavior before it happens are far more effective than trying to clean up the mess afterward.
The gurney in the execution chamber at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Okla. (photo: Sue Ogrocki/AP)
But as editor of the Huntsville Item, he is guaranteed one of five media witness spots reserved for executions at the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, just a couple of miles from his newsroom. So he has dutifully witnessed 19 of them since he took his job four years ago.
“It’s the same reason a reporter covers a town council meeting: just to be a watchdog,” he said. “Because if the government can go and execute someone and no one but government-employed people get to view it, Lord knows what can happen.”
Brown is one of a handful of reporters who regularly witness executions — a macabre assignment that often requires journalists to “leave your emotions at the door,” as he put it — in order to provide an objective account of what happens when the state puts someone to death.
The importance of media witnesses was underscored Thursday during the Oklahoma execution of John Marion Grant, a 60-year-old man convicted of the 1998 killing of a prison cafeteria worker. The Associated Press’s Sean Murphy and four other media witnesses recounted what they saw — how Grant convulsed and vomited during the execution — during a news conference for other journalists covering the death.
It was a striking detail given the state’s recent history of botched executions and use of the wrong drugs — and it was a detail conspicuously missing from the state’s first official summary, which said that Grant’s execution “was carried out in accordance with Oklahoma Department of Corrections’ protocols and without complication.”
The department’s chief, Scott Crow, attempted to reconcile that statement with Murphy’s startling account during a news conference Friday afternoon, saying that “there were no instances of unusual behavior” other than “regurgitation,” which is “not uncommon when someone is undergoing the process of sedation.”
Representatives for the Department of Corrections and the state’s attorney general’s office did not reply Friday to questions from The Washington Post.
Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a D.C.-based nonpartisan research organization, said many states have become increasingly secretive in how they carry out executions, so “the need for neutral eye witnesses is at its height.”
That is especially important in Oklahoma, said Kathryn E. Gardner of Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. A grand jury determined that Oklahoma committed grave errors in the way it administered executions by injection in 2014 and 2015, the last of which prompted then-Gov. Mary Fallin (R) to declare a temporary moratorium on executions and inmates to demand more information about the lethal drug used. Grant, who had been serving a 130-year prison sentence for armed robberies when he killed Gay Carter, is the first execution since then.
“The government has an obligation to adhere to the constitutional mandate against cruel and unusual punishment when carrying out executions,” Gardner said in an email. Reporters ensure “the government cannot hide from public scrutiny when things go wrong.”
Media eyewitnesses have been a feature of state and federal executions for decades, and almost every death penalty state has some kind of law or regulation about allowing media witnesses, Dunham said. In Georgia, five journalists can be present and the policy specifically states one of them should be a representative from the Associated Press — a common practice in many other states, including Tennessee, which allows up to seven members of the media, selected by drawing. In Florida, the Florida Association of Broadcasters and the Florida Press Association each select five members as witnesses, in addition to one AP reporter.
Although most states have the death penalty, most have abolished or paused executions in recent years. Texas has carried out more executions than any other state, which may be one reason that they “are not very well covered by the media,” Brown said — they happen too often to be considered big news.
The pandemic has also made things somewhat complicated for journalists covering executions; Alabama this month said it would only allow one media witness, citing covid-19 concerns.
But Brown, of the Huntsville Item, also cited the financial strains within the news industry, where shrinking newsrooms have left reporters stretched too thin in what they can cover. Many of the executions that he has attended have only been witnessed by only one other reporter, Michael Graczyk, a former Associated Press journalist who is now a freelance writer and has witnessed more than 400 executions in Texas.
Because of that record, Graczyk has become a national expert on executions; he told the AP’s Murphy that he could only remember one other time that someone vomited while being executed.
At one Texas execution, there were no media witnesses; the state forgot to escort Graczyk and Brown into the chambers to see 41-year-old Quintin Jones’s death by lethal injection in May, blaming a miscommunication error.
It was something that “never should have happened,” Brown said, noting that policies have been changed to make sure they aren’t forgotten again.
“An execution is the greatest punishment that the justice system can levy,” Brown said. It shouldn’t simply be that “people go into a black box and die,” he said.
Elon Musk at the construction site of the new Tesla Gigafactory near Berlin, Germany, last September. (photo: Maja Hitij/Getty Images)
It is time for billionaires like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk to "step forward now, just once," and offer a minimum percentage of their wealth to address the problem of global hunger, said David Beasly, executive director of the United Nations World Food Program.
An example of the concentration of wealth is that 2% of Musk's wealth would be enough to overcome the current food shortage, Beasly told the Connect the World program on the U.S. network, and reiterated that it is "6 billion dollars to help 42 million people who are literally going to die if we don't help them. It's not complicated. As reported by the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Musk has a net worth of almost $289 billion.
Already in April, the UN Secretary General, the Portuguese António Guterres, had said that, in the last year, the wealth of the richest people in Latin America had increased by five billion dollars, and recommended for the region a "solidarity tax" for those who benefited during the coronavirus pandemic; he also called for a minimum emergency income for those who were left in the most vulnerable situations, a measure that some countries in the region adopted. This would prevent a long-term crisis, Guterres said at the time.
During the pandemic, extreme poverty in Latin America increased to 12.5% according to UN data, while the number of billionaires grew 31% in the region. On its web page, the international organization compares in size the increase in wealth of these people with the volume of Ecuador's economy. Meanwhile, since the pandemic began in the United States, the wealth of billionaires has practically doubled.
We are in "a perfect storm" in which several crises are converging at the same time, Beasley explained. One is the pandemic and another is climate change, he added. Added to this are specific regional situations, such as Afghanistan, where half the population is at food risk, Yemen, where the civil war is generating the biggest humanitarian crisis in humanity at the moment, and Ethiopia.
In this African country, 5.2 million people are in this desperate situation, particularly in the area where there is fighting between the Tigray People's Liberation Front and the central government, said CNN and Deutsche Welle, citing a recent report by the World Food Program itself, an entity that in 2020 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts in the fight against hunger.
In the interview, Beasley said of the institution he heads, "We've run out of fuel. We've run out of cash, in terms of paying our people, we're running out of money and we can't get our trucks in."
"I'm not asking them to do this every day, every week or every year. We have a unique crisis," Beasley insisted, adding, "All I'm asking for is 0.36% of your net worth. I'm all for people making money, but God knows I'm also all for helping people who are in great need right now."
The UN program head said that "one person is dying every four seconds from hunger-related causes," and asked, addressing the 400 wealthiest people in the United States, "What if it was your family or your daughter who was starving?"
Beasley invited all the tycoons he asked for the contribution to travel with him and see with their own eyes this global reality of lack of access to food.
Jonathan Cortez in front of a bodega. (photo: ackie Nguyen/Guardian UK)
Six weeks after the killing, the family of the aspiring food truck owner demands answers: ‘What are they hiding?’
Seconds later, the officer opened fire, fatally shooting the 31-year-old.
The shooting on 13 September, a rare killing by an FBI agent, has left Cortez’s shattered family with many unanswered questions.
Federal authorities said Cortez was killed as officers were serving warrants for his arrest, and local officials have claimed Cortez was armed. But, Cortez’s relatives say, it remains unclear how a trip to the store for snacks turned deadly in an instant. Why were federal agents involved in serving local warrants? Why did the officer run in with his gun drawn? And what exactly happened in those few seconds?
Cortez’s friends and relatives have demanded that the agent involved be named, fired and arrested, and that police release the security footage they seized from the store during the investigation. They’ve decried the response of local and federal police, which the family says has included harassment, during the investigation.
Meanwhile, community activists have warned the shooting highlights the dangers of federal officers operating in Oakland’s communities of color.
“How can this happen?” said Jackie Nguyen, Cortez’s 33-year-old girlfriend, who has known him since childhood and lives above the store. “He spent seven dollars and he lost his life.”
‘Always dancing and laughing’
Cortez’s relatives said they want him to be remembered for how he lived, not how he died.
Michael Jonathan Cortez, who went by Jonathan, grew up in the Fillmore district, the historic San Francisco neighborhood known as the “Harlem of the west”. He was born in 1990 and was one of nine siblings, raised in a close-knit family. His mother worked in retail, and his father as a chef.
“We were popular kids, we knew everybody, and everybody knew our family,” Iris, one of his older sisters, told the Guardian. Jonathan was “a wild child”, Iris recalls. “He was always active, always funny, always dancing, always wanting to go outside and ride bikes or play baseball, kickball or any sport.”
Jonathan was considered the baby in the family, and his older cousins and siblings were protective of him, said Mila Cortez, one of his cousins. They were often worried about him, she said, and tried to keep him close.
Even when he was young, police and neighborhood members sometimes wrongly assumed he was a gang member, she said, recounting one instance when a group of guys harassed him when he was 11 or 12 because his hat had a San Francisco logo printed in red, a color associated with a local gang.
“Police would come at him all the time, and they would have their guns drawn, for a traffic stop or anything … It was ridiculous, because he was a small guy, always pleasant and smiling and laughing,” Mila recounts.
Junior, another cousin, recalled how Cortez was an expert in San Francisco geography at a young age, and loved riding the cable cars with Junior’s father, who worked as a driver, and chatting with tourists: “He was such a people’s person.”
The ‘uncle’ of the block
Cortez couldn’t escape violence in the neighborhood though, Mila said, and at one point was incarcerated after defending himself during an attack. His criminal record haunted him throughout his 20s, she added.
But Cortez, his family said, had a big heart. Mila recalled that he went out of his way to help someone behind bars who had lost contact with his family, making sure the man had money in his account for basic necessities, and was connected to a re-entry program. There was also the man he found overdosing on the street. Cortez got him into a hospital, she said, and later helped him get into a rehab program.
Cortez was working hard to turn his life around, family and friends said. “He was ready to come out and be a better man,” said Rudy Corpuz Jr, a family friend who visited him in jail and is the founder of United Playaz, a youth development organization.
He had three children – ages five, seven and 14 – and nieces and nephews who adored him. Cortez loved cooking seafood, and had ambitions to open a food truck that would hire formerly incarcerated people. “We had so many things planned. He wanted to eat at every restaurant,” Nguyen said.
Cortez had been spending a lot of time in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, where Nguyen lived. On the block where he was killed, children and teens called him “uncle”, she said, and he would teach them how to fix cars and motorcycles and buy them food.
Killed in seconds
Surveillance video recorded from across the street on the day Cortez was killed shows an officer drive up in what appears to be an unmarked car to the Upstairs Underground Smoke Shop, the corner store on Fruitvale Avenue below Nguyen’s apartment.
The grainy footage, which was shared with the Guardian, shows the officer running in with his gun drawn. More cars with officers pull up.
An FBI spokesperson later said the officer shot Cortez eight seconds after entering the store.
Faisal Aldahmi, the store’s operator, told the Guardian his son was behind the counter, talking to a friend, when he saw a man who appeared to be in plainclothes approaching with a gun, and thought the shop was being robbed. Aldahmi’s son and his friend ran to the back, the store operator said. “They thought somebody was going to come in and shoot. They were scared.”
The FBI told reporters that the officer wore a law enforcement bulletproof vest, announced he was an officer and that Cortez tried to flee and brandished a gun.
The Oakland police department, which is investigating the killing and has footage from inside the shop, refuses to release it. The department declined the Guardian’s request for comment.
Details on the operation remain scant. The FBI has said it wasn’t running the effort, and its agent was deputized to work for the US marshals service and was a regular member of its regional “fugitive taskforce” that was targeting Cortez.
The marshals service said it was executing warrants for Cortez’s arrest for local domestic violence and police evasion charges, and said he had a federal charge of mail theft, but declined to elaborate.
The local charges originated in Hayward, a city near Oakland. A Hayward police spokesperson alleged that Cortez had fled when police tried to arrest him for domestic violence allegations. The spokesperson told the Guardian that although the department had shared information with the federal force, it was not involved in the operation: “There was no specific request from us to have them pick him up.” The Marshals spokesperson declined to say why it targeted the store that day.
Cortez’s family says the charges are unfounded.
‘They are harassing our family’
Since the shooting, various members of Cortez’s family have alleged both state and federal law enforcement agencies have mistreated them.
When Nguyen returned from the hospital where Cortez had died, she found authorities trying to enter her home.
An officer pressured her to let him in, she alleged, saying: “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way.” She refused: “We have nothing to hide, but we know our rights.” The officer returned with a warrant hours later and ransacked her apartment, she said, flipping her bed and emptying cabinets and drawers. (She thought it was a marshals officer, though the warrant was drawn up by Oakland police.)
“I went from being worried and scared to being so angry. I really felt like they wanted to raid my home to find something to justify Jonathan’s killing,” she said, adding that the officers took paperwork with Cortez’s name, but nothing else.
Two weeks later, the same US marshals taskforce that shot Cortez showed up at his funeral reception and arrested one of Cortez’s friends, who had been a pallbearer at the service that day. Cellphone footage shows family members, wearing shirts with Cortez’s face, protesting as officers took the man into custody, saying: “Don’t shoot him!” and “This is our family function, we just buried our cousin.”
A marshals spokesperson said the man had warrants for his arrest and that the task force located his vehicle in the parking lot.
“This is harassment. This is terrorizing our family,” said Mila. “We can’t even mourn.”
While police agencies have said little about the ongoing investigations, they have continued to speak about Cortez’s alleged criminal cases: “Instead of accountability and transparency about what really happened, they are just presenting him as a bad guy, and speaking down about his character,” said Nguyen.
“What are they hiding?” added Iris, Cortez’s sister. “You can’t just go into a store and kill somebody while they’re shopping and give no explanation.”
‘You can’t hold them accountable’
As the Cortez family waits for answers, the shooting has sparked fresh debates about Oakland’s plans to invite outside law enforcement agencies to help patrol its streets.
In August, Oakland requested that California Highway Patrol (CHP) deploy officers in the city, arguing that personnel were needed to deal with a spike in crime. The request followed a wave of reports about attacks against elderly Asian residents in the city’s Chinatown neighborhood.
Activists protested that adding state officers to patrol communities of color could lead to more police violence, and that Oakland has a checkered history of deploying outside officers in times of tension. The city had previously brought in the FBI and other federal law enforcement amid protests around the death of Oscar Grant, who was killed by police at the Fruitvale train stop.
Pointing at Cortez’s shooting, they argued that it’s easier for federal agents to act with impunity, and that some of the local laws meant to prevent police violence didn’t apply to federal officers. “You can’t hold them accountable. They basically come here playing wild, wild west, and then bounce,” said Cat Brooks of the Anti Police-Terror Project.
An FBI spokesperson for the San Francisco division, which includes Oakland, said it was extremely rare for an agent to fire a gun on the job, saying he only knew of three incidents in the region in the last six years.
On Fruitvale avenue, Nguyen is left to pick up the pieces. Her 16-year-old son was fatally shot in San Francisco two weeks before the FBI shot Cortez, who had been supporting her. She was still processing the trauma from her son’s killing when she got the call about Cortez.
People in Nguyen’s life have encouraged her to move away from her apartment and the block where Cortez was killed. She often looks out her window and sees the youth who called him uncle still in mourning, wearing shirts with her boyfriend’s face.
That community support keeps her going, she said, and has strengthened her resolve to stay on the block.
Portrait of singer, songwriter, poet Josh Ritter. (photo: Laura Wilson)
Lyrics, Josh Ritter Harrisburg
From the 2002 album, Golden Age of Radio
Romero got married on the fifth of July
In our Lady of Immaculate Dawn
Could have got married in the revival man's tent
But there ain't no reviving what's gone
Slipped like a shadow from the family he made
In a little white house by the woods
Dropped the kids at the mission, with a rose for the virgin
She knew he was gone for good
It's a long way to Heaven, it's closer to Harrisburg
And that's still a long way from the place where we are
And if evil exists, it's a pair of train tracks
And the devil is a railroad car
Could have stayed somewhere but the train tracks kept going
And it seems like they always left soon
And the wolves that he ran with moaned low and painful
Sang sad miseries to the moon
It's a long way to Heaven, it's closer to Harrisburg
And that's still a long way from the place where we are
And if evil exists, it's a pair of train tracks
And the devil is a railroad car
Rose at the altar withered and wilted
Romero sank into a dream
He didn't make Heaven, he didn't make Harrisburg
He died in a hole in between
Some say that man is the root of all evil
Others say God's a drunkard for pain
Me I believe that the Garden of Eden
Was burned to make way for a train
Toxic vapor pours from a chimney at a power plant in Belchatow, Poland. (photo: Piotr Malecki/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Instead of focusing on ‘micro consumerist bollocks’ like ditching our plastic coffee cups, we must challenge the pursuit of wealth and level down, not up
When faced with an impending or chronic threat, such as climate or ecological breakdown, we seem to go out of our way to compromise our survival. We convince ourselves that it’s not so serious, or even that it isn’t happening. We double down on destruction, swapping our ordinary cars for SUVs, jetting to Oblivia on a long-haul flight, burning it all up in a final frenzy. In the back of our minds, there’s a voice whispering, “If it were really so serious, someone would stop us.” If we attend to these issues at all, we do so in ways that are petty, tokenistic, comically ill-matched to the scale of our predicament. It is impossible to discern, in our response to what we know, the primacy of our survival instinct.
Here is what we know. We know that our lives are entirely dependent on complex natural systems: the atmosphere, ocean currents, the soil, the planet’s webs of life. People who study complex systems have discovered that they behave in consistent ways. It doesn’t matter whether the system is a banking network, a nation state, a rainforest or an Antarctic ice shelf; its behaviour follows certain mathematical rules. In normal conditions, the system regulates itself, maintaining a state of equilibrium. It can absorb stress up to a certain point. But then it suddenly flips. It passes a tipping point, then falls into a new state of equilibrium, which is often impossible to reverse.
Human civilisation relies on current equilibrium states. But, all over the world, crucial systems appear to be approaching their tipping points. If one system crashes, it is likely to drag others down, triggering a cascade of chaos known as systemic environmental collapse. This is what happened during previous mass extinctions.
Here’s one of the many ways in which it could occur. A belt of savannah, known as the Cerrado, covers central Brazil. Its vegetation depends on dew forming, which depends in turn on deep-rooted trees drawing up groundwater, then releasing it into the air through their leaves. But over the past few years, vast tracts of the Cerrado have been cleared to plant crops – mostly soya to feed the world’s chickens and pigs. As the trees are felled, the air becomes drier. This means smaller plants die, ensuring that even less water is circulated. In combination with global heating, some scientists warn, this vicious cycle could – soon and suddenly – flip the entire system into desert.
The Cerrado is the source of some of South America’s great rivers, including those flowing north into the Amazon basin. As less water feeds the rivers, this could exacerbate the stress afflicting the rainforests. They are being hammered by a deadly combination of clearing, burning and heating, and are already threatened with possible systemic collapse. The Cerrado and the rainforest both create “rivers in the sky” – streams of wet air – that distribute rainfall around the world and help to drive global circulation: the movement of air and ocean currents.
Global circulation is already looking vulnerable. For example, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which delivers heat from the tropics towards the poles, is being disrupted by the melting of Arctic ice, and has begun to weaken. Without it, the UK would have a climate similar to Siberia’s.
AMOC has two equilibrium states: on and off. It has been on for almost 12,000 years, following a devastating, thousand-year off state called the Younger Dryas (12,900 to 11,700 years ago), which caused a global spiral of environmental change. Everything we know and love depends on AMOC remaining in the on state.
Regardless of which complex system is being studied, there’s a way of telling whether it is approaching a tipping point. Its outputs begin to flicker. The closer to its critical threshold it comes, the wilder the fluctuations. What we’ve seen this year is a great global flickering, as Earth systems begin to break down. The heat domes over the western seaboard of North America; the massive fires there, in Siberia and around the Mediterranean; the lethal floods in Germany, Belgium, China, Sierra Leone – these are the signals that, in climatic morse code, spell “mayday”.
You might expect an intelligent species to respond to these signals swiftly and conclusively, by radically altering its relationship with the living world. But this is not how we function. Our great intelligence, our highly evolved consciousness that once took us so far, now works against us.
An analysis by the media sustainability group Albert found that “cake” was mentioned 10 times as often as “climate change” on UK TV programmes in 2020. “Scotch egg” received double the mentions of “biodiversity”. “Banana bread” beat “wind power” and “solar power” put together.
I recognise that the media are not society, and that television stations have an interest in promoting banana bread and circuses. We could argue about the extent to which the media are either reflecting or generating an appetite for cake over climate. But I suspect that, of all the ways in which we might measure our progress on preventing systemic environmental collapse, the cake-to-climate ratio is the decisive index.
The current ratio reflects a determined commitment to irrelevance in the face of global catastrophe. Tune in to almost any radio station, at any time, and you can hear the frenetic distraction at work. While around the world wildfires rage, floods sweep cars from the streets and crops shrivel, you will hear a debate about whether to sit down or stand up while pulling on your socks, or a discussion about charcuterie boards for dogs. I’m not making up these examples: I stumbled across them while flicking between channels on days of climate disaster. If an asteroid were heading towards Earth, and we turned on the radio, we’d probably hear: “So the hot topic today is – what’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to you while eating a kebab?” This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with banter.
Faced with crises on an unprecedented scale, our heads are filled with insistent babble. The trivialisation of public life creates a loop: it becomes socially impossible to talk about anything else. I’m not suggesting that we should discuss only the impending catastrophe. I’m not against bants. What I’m against is nothing but bants.
It’s not just on the music and entertainment channels that this deadly flippancy prevails. Most political news is nothing but court gossip: who’s in, who’s out, who said what to whom. It studiously avoids what lies beneath: the dark money, the corruption, the shift of power away from the democratic sphere, the gathering environmental collapse that makes a nonsense of its obsessions.
I’m sure it’s not deliberate. I don’t think anyone, faced with the prospect of systemic environmental collapse, is telling themselves: “Quick, let’s change the subject to charcuterie boards for dogs.” It works at a deeper level than this. It’s a subconscious reflex that tells us more about ourselves than our conscious actions do. The chatter on the radio sounds like the distant signals from a dying star.
There are some species of caddisfly whose survival depends on breaking the surface film of the water in a river. The female pushes through it – no mean feat for such a small and delicate creature – then swims down the water column to lay her eggs on the riverbed. If she cannot puncture the surface, she cannot close the circle of life, and her progeny die with her.
This is also the human story. If we cannot pierce the glassy surface of distraction, and engage with what lies beneath, we will not secure the survival of our children or, perhaps, our species. But we seem unable or unwilling to break the surface film. I think of this strange state as our “surface tension”. It’s the tension between what we know about the crisis we face, and the frivolity with which we distance ourselves from it.
Surface tension dominates even when we claim to be addressing the destruction of our life-support systems. We focus on what I call micro-consumerist bollocks (MCB): tiny issues such as plastic straws and coffee cups, rather than the huge structural forces driving us towards catastrophe. We are obsessed with plastic bags. We believe we’re doing the world a favour by buying tote bags instead, though, on one estimate, the environmental impact of producing an organic cotton tote bag is equivalent to that of 20,000 plastic ones.
We are rightly horrified by the image of a seahorse with its tail wrapped around a cotton bud, but apparently unconcerned about the elimination of entire marine ecosystems by the fishing industry. We tut and shake our heads, and keep eating our way through the life of the sea.
A company called Soletair Power receives wide media coverage for its claim to be “fighting climate change” by catching the carbon dioxide exhaled by office workers. But its carbon-sucking unit – an environmentally costly tower of steel and electronics – extracts just 1kg of carbon dioxide every eight hours. Humanity produces, mostly by burning fossil fuels, roughly 32bn kg of CO2 in the same period.
I don’t believe our focus on microscopic solutions is accidental, even if it is unconscious. All of us are expert at using the good things we do to blot out the bad things. Rich people can persuade themselves they’ve gone green because they recycle, while forgetting that they have a second home (arguably the most extravagant of all their assaults on the living world, as another house has to be built to accommodate the family they’ve displaced). And I suspect that, in some deep, unlit recess of the mind, we assure ourselves that if our solutions are so small, the problem can’t be so big.
I’m not saying the small things don’t matter. I’m saying they should not matter to the exclusion of things that matter more. Every little counts. But not for very much.
Our focus on MCB aligns with the corporate agenda. The deliberate effort to stop us seeing the bigger picture began in 1953 with a campaign called Keep America Beautiful. It was founded by packaging manufacturers, motivated by the profits they could make by replacing reusable containers with disposable plastic. Above all, they wanted to sink state laws insisting that glass bottles were returned and reused. Keep America Beautiful shifted the blame for the tsunami of plastic trash the manufacturers caused on to “litter bugs”, a term it invented.
The “Love Where You Live” campaign, launched in the UK in 2011 by Keep Britain Tidy, Imperial Tobacco, McDonald’s and the sweet manufacturer Wrigley, seemed to me to play a similar role. It had the added bonus – as it featured strongly in classrooms – of granting Imperial Tobacco exposure to schoolchildren.
The corporate focus on litter, amplified by the media, distorts our view of all environmental issues. For example, a recent survey of public beliefs about river pollution found that “litter and plastic” was by far the biggest cause people named. In reality, the biggest source of water pollution is farming, followed by sewage. Litter is way down the list. It’s not that plastic is unimportant. The problem is that it’s almost the only story we know.
In 2004, the advertising company Ogilvy & Mather, working for the oil giant BP, took this blame-shifting a step further by inventing the personal carbon footprint. It was a useful innovation, but it also had the effect of diverting political pressure from the producers of fossil fuels to consumers. The oil companies didn’t stop there. The most extreme example I’ve seen was a 2019 speech by the chief executive of the oil company Shell, Ben van Beurden. He instructed us to “eat seasonally and recycle more”, and publicly berated his chauffeur for buying a punnet of strawberries in January.
The great political transition of the past 50 years, driven by corporate marketing, has been a shift from addressing our problems collectively to addressing them individually. In other words, it has turned us from citizens into consumers. It’s not hard to see why we have been herded down this path. As citizens, joining together to demand political change, we are powerful. As consumers, we are almost powerless.
In his book Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman notes that, when Stalin and Hitler were in power, “one of the most astonishing human traits that came to light at this time was obedience”. The instinct to obey, he observed, was stronger than the instinct to survive. Acting alone, seeing ourselves as consumers, fixating on MCB and mind-numbing trivia, even as systemic environmental collapse looms: these are forms of obedience. We would rather face civilisational death than the social embarrassment caused by raising awkward subjects, and the political trouble involved in resisting powerful forces. The obedience reflex is our greatest flaw, the kink in the human brain that threatens our lives.
What do we see if we break the surface tension? The first thing we encounter, looming out of the depths, should scare us almost out of our wits. It’s called growth. Economic growth is universally hailed as a good thing. Governments measure their success on their ability to deliver it. But think for a moment about what it means. Say we achieve the modest aim, promoted by bodies like the IMF and the World Bank, of 3% global growth a year. This means that all the economic activity you see today – and most of the environmental impacts it causes – doubles in 24 years; in other words, by 2045. Then it doubles again by 2069. Then again by 2093. It’s like the Gemino curse in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which multiplies the treasure in the Lestrange vault until it threatens to crush Harry and his friends to death. All the crises we seek to avert today become twice as hard to address as global economic activity doubles, then twice again, then twice again.
Have we reached the bottom yet? By no means. The Gemino curse is just one outcome of a thing we scarcely dare mention. Just as it was once blasphemous to use the name of God, even the word appears, in polite society, to be taboo: capitalism.
Most people struggle to define the system that dominates our lives. But if you press them, they’re likely to mumble something about hard work and enterprise, buying and selling. This is how the beneficiaries of the system want it to be understood. In reality, the great fortunes amassed under capitalism are not obtained this way, but through looting, monopoly and rent grabbing, followed by inheritance.
One estimate suggests that, over the course of 200 years, the British extracted from India, at current prices, $45tn. They used this money to fund industrialisation at home and the colonisation of other nations, whose wealth was then looted in turn.
The looting takes place not just across geography, but also across time. The apparent health of our economies today depends on seizing natural wealth from future generations. This is what the oil companies, seeking to distract us with MCB and carbon footprints, are doing. Such theft from the future is the motor of economic growth. Capitalism, which sounds so reasonable when explained by a mainstream economist, is in ecological terms nothing but a pyramid scheme.
Is this the riverbed? No. Capitalism is just a means by which something even bigger is pursued. Wealth.
It scarcely matters how green you think you are. The main cause of your environmental impact isn’t your attitude. It isn’t your mode of consumption. It isn’t the choices you make. It’s your money. If you have surplus money, you spend it. While you might persuade yourself that you are a green mega-consumer, in reality you are just a mega-consumer. This is why the environmental impacts of the very rich, however right-on they may be, are massively greater than those of everyone else.
Preventing more than 1.5C of global heating means that our average emissions should be no greater than two tonnes of carbon dioxide per person per year. But the richest 1% of the world’s people produce an average of more than 70 tonnes. Bill Gates, according to one estimate, emits almost 7,500 tonnes of CO2, mostly from flying in his private jets. Roman Abramovich, the same figures suggest, produces almost 34,000 tonnes, largely by running his gigantic yacht.
The multiple homes that ultra-rich people own might be fitted with solar panels, their supercars might be electric, their private planes might run on biokerosene, but these tweaks make little difference to the overall impact of their consumption. In some cases, they increase it. The switch to biofuels favoured by Bill Gates is now among the greatest causes of habitat destruction, as forests are felled to produce wood pellets and liquid fuels, and soils are trashed to make biomethane.
But more important than the direct impacts of the ultra-wealthy is the political and cultural power with which they block effective change. Their cultural power relies on a hypnotising fairytale. Capitalism persuades us that we are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires. This is why we tolerate it. In reality, some people are extremely rich because others are extremely poor: massive wealth depends on exploitation. And if we did all become millionaires, we would cook the planet in no time at all. But the fairytale of universal wealth, one day, secures our obedience.
The difficult truth is that, to prevent climate and ecological catastrophe, we need to level down. We need to pursue what the Belgian philosopher Ingrid Robeyns calls limitarianism. Just as there is a poverty line below which no one should fall, there is a wealth line above which no one should rise. What we need are not carbon taxes, but wealth taxes. It shouldn’t surprise us that ExxonMobil favours a carbon tax. It’s a form of MCB. It addresses only one aspect of the many-headed environmental crisis, while transferring responsibility from the major culprits to everyone. It can be highly regressive, which means that the poor pay more than the rich.
But wealth taxes strike at the heart of the issue. They should be high enough to break the spiral of accumulation and redistribute the riches accumulated by a few. They could be used to put us on an entirely different track, one that I call “private sufficiency, public luxury”. While there is not enough ecological or even physical space on Earth for everyone to enjoy private luxury, there is enough to provide everyone with public luxury: magnificent parks, hospitals, swimming pools, art galleries, tennis courts and transport systems, playgrounds and community centres. We should each have our own small domains – private sufficiency – but when we want to spread our wings, we could do so without seizing resources from other people.
In consenting to the continued destruction of our life-support systems, we accommodate the desires of the ultra-rich and the powerful corporations they control. By remaining trapped in the surface film, absorbed in frivolity and MCB, we grant them a social licence to operate.
We will endure only if we cease to consent. The 19th-century democracy campaigners knew this, the suffragettes knew it, Gandhi knew it, Martin Luther King knew it. The environmental protesters who demand systemic change have also grasped this fundamental truth. In Fridays for Future, Green New Deal Rising, Extinction Rebellion and the other global uprisings against systemic environmental collapse, we see people, mostly young people, refusing to consent. What they understand is history’s most important lesson. Our survival depends on disobedience.
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