I cite

Critical Theory and Climate Change 1

In June 2020, I was supposed to be on the faculty of the Critical Theory Summer School at the Birkbeck Humanities Center in London. Because of the global coronavirus pandemic, this, like everything else, was cancelled. As a way to give myself some structure, I've thought to start posting some of the reading and thinking that I was planning to do for that course. At this point, I don't know whether this will happen with any consistency, but I thought I'd try.

The intuition behind my course is the sense that there are claims regarding the newness of climate change, especially with regard to (1) the challenge climate change presents for critical thought and (2) the ways to address this challenge. In these posts/lectures, I will consider some of these more closely. At the outset, I am skeptical regarding the claim for newness as well as of the response to the perceived newness, as will become clear. Nevertheless, I hope to draw out aspects of these texts that are still helpful (in other words, to engage in sympathetic readings, although, who knows, they are just as likely to be symptomatic readings; what they might be symptoms of I cannot say).

I have three provisional wagers that I hope to explore in these posts/lectures:

1. Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment presents advance versions of some of the arguments most prevalent in climate change writing in the humanities;
2. This resemblance, foreshadowing, or prefiguration is a clue to the assumptions that give climate change writing in the humanities their basic shape, namely assumptions regarding the limits of reason and politics.
3. These assumptions are driven by an anti-communism that prevents them from escaping the confines of capitalism.

Introduction (commentary on xi -xvii of the Introduction to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Continuum Press edition, 1982)

Dialectic of Enlightenment is a critical rejection of the conceits or premises of European modernity. The basic argument regarding the self-destructiveness of Enlightenment, not only Enlightenment's limits --enabling impediments -- but the dangerous effects of these limits/impediments, repeats Rousseau from "The Discourse on the Origins of Inequality" -- the more we know, the less we know. Although Horkheimer and Adorno don't refer to Rousseau directly, they appear to gesture to this text when they write "The fallen nature of modern man cannot be separated from social progress" (xiv). "Discourse on the Origins of Inequality" is a story of the fall into civilization, of how a free being becomes neurotic and enfeebled by its dependence on the opinions of others. For Horkheimer and Adorno, we pay a price for scientific achievements -- more questions, confrontations with the limits of our knowledge, and a decline in other dimensions of understanding -- just as Rousseau's "civilized man" loses the capacities of so-called natural man. The limits of Enlightenment re-embed us in myth, in an irrationality that, the more we try to escape, the more deeply entraps us, again just as Rousseau's civilized man is ultimately fearful and enslaved. Enlightenment's push for freedom produces an all the greater unfreedom.

To illustrate the point regarding how knowledge turns into its opposite we can point to confidence in scientific methods of inquiry. Measurement, data gathering, model generation, predictions, etc have been accompanied by a loss of confidence in (denigration of) other forms of knowledge and theorization:  interpretation/hermeneutics, critique, imagination, "women's ways of knowing," rich description, folk knowledges, etc. In political science we see this in the bizarre positivism that insists on all sorts of "rigorous" methods to prove common sense or tell us that common sense is wrong (as with a claim  that class inequality has a damaging impact on democracy). A more contemporary example might be Big Data and algorithms. In 2008, Chris Anderson argued that theory was dead, over. Big data enables the discovery of correlations -- knowing why things correlate doesn't really matter if we know that things correlate. "With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves." Models, theories, and interpretations are no longer necessary. Understanding is old school, outmoded.

Where Horkheimer and Adorno go further than Rousseau is with their explanation of why Enlightenment turns into its opposite. Their answer concerns the social forms that sustain thought, that enable scientific production. The problem is in the institutions that make thought possible. This element of their argument comes from Hegel. Recall how in The Philosophy of Right Hegel emphasizes the institutions of civil society and the state that are necessary for the idea of freedom to realize itself in the world. Freedom depends on the institutions and practices that transmit and secure it. Horkheimer and Adorno write:

"Just as the Enlightenment expresses the actual movement of civil society as a whole in the aspect of its idea as embodied in individuals and institutions, so truth it not merely the rational consciousness but equally the form that consciousness assumes in actual life" (xiv).

Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the form consciousness assumes is a form of unfreedom -- conformity, fear of deviation. This form is a product of social institutions and the habits and mindset they produce.

"The dutiful child of modern civilization is possessed by a fear of departing from the facts which, in the very act of perception, the dominant conventions of science, commerce, and politics -- cliche-like -- have already molded; his anxiety is none other than the fear of social deviation" (xiv).

Language becomes debased. Any ideas or expressions that don't conform to the dominant mentality are condemned. We see both elements in critiques of theoretical jargon. On the one hand, jargon can be so cliched as to be a prison, absolutely incapable of expressing anything original, complexity and obscuring attempting to mask the fact that actually nothing new is being said. On the other hand, the critique of jargon is anti-intellectual, reinforces a generalized attempt to rule out complex thought, and operates to police and marginalize theoretical work. So here the critique of jargon affirms the dominant mentality and rules out critical thinking. Both hands are true at the same time.

Before too quickly acceding to Horkheimer and Adorno here, it's important to situate their argument in the broader set of criticisms of mass society circulating mid-century. At the same time that the social welfare state, emerging as a result of the post-war labor-capital compromise, was beginning to secure social benefits for ever wider portions of the population, its institutions came under fire for generating conformism and stifling individual creativity. There is something to be said about the critique of commodity culture. After all, rather than promoting individual consumption, post-war economies in the west (particularly the US) could have invested more in the development of social consumption as had been done in the thirties. But Horkheimer and Adorno don't take their argument in this direction. Instead, they level it at the loss of individual freedom and creativity, offering a version of the argument Hannah Arendt would make ten years later in The Human Condition.

"On the one hand the growth of economic productivity furnishes the conditions for a world of greater justice; on the other hand it allows the technical apparatus and the social groups which administer it a disproportionate superiority to the rest of the population. The individual is wholly devalued in relation to the economic powers, which at the same time press the control of society over nature to hitherto unsuspected heights. Even though the individual disappears before the apparatus which we serves, that apparatus provides for him as never before. In an unjust state of life, the impotence and pliability of the masses growth with the quantitative increase in commodities allowed them. The materially respectable and socially deplorable rise in the living standard of of the lower classes is reflected in the simulated extension of the spirit. Its true concern is the negation of reification; it cannot survive where it is fixed as a cultural commodity and doled out to satisfy consumer needs. The flood of detailed information and candy-floss entertainment simultaneously instructs and stultifies mankind" (xiv -xv).

My ungenerous read here is that Horkheimer and Adorno are simply elitists and it makes no sense that they have somehow been viewed as theorists on the left. The victim in their sad story is the individual who disappears because of the rise in the overall standard of living. Notice: they don't make a class argument that says that increases in capitalist productivity immiserate the workers such that immense plenty is accompanied by immense deprivation. They don't present an "unjust state of life" in terms of racism, imperialism, sexism or other kinds of inequality prevalent at mid-century. Neither do they blame private property and the pursuit of profit for functioning as barriers to the greater justice expanded productivity enables. It's hard to know what to make of the idea that the rise in the standard of living of the lower classes is deplorable. This is a critique of technocracy and the administered society, that is, a critique of the possibility of using public institutions for the public good. It is one whose basic categories render it unable to distinguish between capitalist consumerism/mass democracy, soviet socialism, and fascism.

For Horkheimer and Adorno what lurks behind the administered society of mass culture and mass consumption is fascism: "progress becomes regression" (xv). That Germany did not pursue rigorous de-nazification after the war is true, but it's not their point. That the US brought over all sorts of Nazi scientists and assimilated them into US life is also not their point. Their point is more abstract, a point about the entanglement of rationality and social actuality. The rational is manifest in the social practices and institutions that produce it. Enlightenment ultimately means/leads to self-destruction: the destruction of the self, as a free and rational self, in positivism (scientism, technocracy), bureaucratic conformism, and mass culture.

Legitimating Torture: The American Political Science Association Gives Award to Condolezza Rice -- Political Scientists Push Back Letter

The American Political Science Association is providing cover and legitimacy for policies of torture, rendition, and aggressive war. Some of members of the association have drafted a letter opposing the award being given to Condolezza Rice. If you are an APSA member and would like to add your name, please let me know.

By giving the 2018 Hubert H. Humphrey Award to Condeleeza Rice the APSA has honored a person who actively participated in creating a rationale for the illegal invasion of Iraq, participated in and defended the creation of policies of rendition and torture against foreign nationals, supported the creation of a concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, and aided and abetted the deliberate and systematic lies that were told to the American public to encourage their support for the invasion of Iraq, which, from its inception and to this day, has had catastrophic consequences for the world.

The committee members who recommended Rice for the award have responded to our inquiry concerning their reasoning with a statement that argues that while Rice indeed participated in the disastrous foreign policy of the Bush years, her action and that of her fellow members of the administration was taken in the heat of war, with incomplete information, and with urgent responses needed. They also argue that this record is overmatched by her other services to the country, especially noting the reunification of Germany while serving in the first Bush administration and her promotion of policies of development aid under the second. Finally, they point to the person for whom the award is named, and in an act of “what-about-ism” so popular these days, suggest that politics at the highest levels involves inevitable decisions that can, in retrospect, be seen as mistaken.

As political scientists we will long argue about decisions concerning war and peace, power and its limits, and questions concerning the difficult questions of when to act and how. But we are protesting this award because we believe that no one who actively supported and defended policies of deception that led to the death of well over a million people, that created ecological danger still not fully assessed, and that resulted in the torture of other human beings should be given an award.

The committee decided to weigh Rice’s other services against this huge and disastrous failure. But it is not a matter of weight here. Given her record, she should not have been considered for an award. Participation in the governmental administration of torture should be disqualifying. For the APSA to provide cover for officials pursuing such actions violates our professional responsibilities regarding public service.

We urge the APSA to establish an oversight committee that reviews the credentials and records of those who are nominated for public service awards, so as to screen out those who have participated in policies that have had the consequence of the systematic violation of the human rights of others. We also ask that the council rescind this year’s Humphrey Award to Professor Rice, given her record of support for torture and rendition.

Drafted and organized by Thomas L. Dumm (Amherst College) and Jodi Dean (Hobart and William Smith Colleges).

Signed:

 

1. Asma Abbas
2. Tony Affigne
3. Elisabeth Anker
4. Katy Arnold
5. Phillip Ayoub
6. Banu Bargu
7. Alyssa Batistoni
8. Brad Bauerly
9. Jane Bennett
10. Jessica Blatt
11. Peter Bratsis
12. Susan Brewer-Osorio
13. Rachel Brown
14. Wendy Brown
15. Kevin Bruyneel
16. Susan Burgess
17. Sheila Carapico
18. Ajay Singh Chaudhary
19. George Ciccariello-Maher
20. Joan Cocks
21. Elizabeth Cohen
22. Rom Coles
23. William Connolly
24. Barbara Cruikshank
25. Jodi Dean
26. Shirin Deylami
27. Andrew Dilts
28. Lisa Disch
29. Stefan Dolgert
30. Thomas L. Dumm
31. John Ehrenberg
32. Kathy Ferguson
33. Kennan Ferguson
34. Michaele Ferguson
35. John Finn
36. David Forrest
37. Jason Frank
38. Jill Frank
39. Jennifer Gaboury
40. Richard Gilman-Opalsky
41. Jane Anna Gordon
42. Katherine Gordy
43. Alex Gourevitch
44. Judith Grant
45. Laura Grattan
46. Jarius Victor Grove
47. Ayten Gundogdu
48. Nina Hagel
49. Christine Harrington
50. Erin Heidt-Forsythe
51. Harry N. Hirsh
52. Bonnie Honig
53. Juliet Hooker
54. David Howarth
55. Chris Howell
56. Vicki Hsueh
57. Jennifer M. Hudson
58. Jeffrey C. Isaac
59. Jack Jackson
60. Jim Johnson
61. Steven Johnston
62. Rafael Khachaturian
63. Nicholas Kiersey
64. Elisabeth Koechlin
65. Alexander Livingston
66. Brian C. Lovato
67. Joe Lowndes
68. Samantha Majic
69. Mark Major
70. Robyn Marasco
71. Andrew March
72. Elizabeth Markovits
73. Lori Marso
74. James Martel
75. Lida Maxwell
76. Jamie Mayerfield
77. Keally McBride
78. Utz McKnight
79. Jeanne Morefield
80. Cas Mudde
81. Justin Mueller
82. Laurie Naranch
83. Anne Norton
84. Aletta Norval
85. Alix Olson
86. Gary Olson
87. David Ost
88. Sean Parson
89. Paul A. Passavant
90. Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton
91. Ricky Price
92. John Protevi
93. Babak Rahimi
94. Sahar Razavi
95. Thea Riofrancos
96. Will Roberts
97. Corey Robin
98. Melvin Lee Rogers
99. Sayres Rudy
100. Sara Rushing
101. Mildred Elizabeth Sanders
102. Matthew Scherer
103. Jade Schiff
104. Sanford Schram
105. Tyler Schuenemann
106. George Schulman
107. Melissa Schwartzberg
108. Jillian Schwedler
109. Bryant William Sculos
110. John Seery
111. Torrey Shanks
112. Jakeet Singh
113. Laura Sjoberg
114. Claire Snyder-Hall
115. Christian Sorace
116. Joe Soss
117. Lester Spence
118. Jacqueline Stevens
119. Peter Stone
120. Tracy Strong
121. Kirstine Taylor
122. David Temin
123. Lars Toender
124. Jack Turner
125. Camila Vergara
126. Jackie Vimo
127. Kathi Weeks
128. Meredith Weiss
129. Yves Winter
130. Jeffrey Winters
131. Jasmine Yarish
132. Karen Zivi

Civil war and free speech

The US is in a civil war, a civil war that is at its core a class war.

There are different terrains, forms of struggle and violence. Casualties come from different proximate causes -- police attacks, suicide, overdose, slow death from alcohol and despair, toxic environments, crashes and shooters -- but it's one war.

Terrains of struggle include streets and institutions, workplaces and domestic spaces, bodies and bathrooms, science and museums, churches, media, prison, farms, libraries, hospitals, and universities. There is no space external to this war.

The Left needs to defend whatever spaces we can. We have to make the cost of far right speech too high for them to continue it. The Right makes cultural gains by manipulating liberal ideas of tolerance and neutrality -- whether this is in the form of the white supremacism of Charles Murray and Milo or the climate denialist industry funded by the Koch brothers.

Liberal condemnation of the students who push back against these speakers when they comer to their campuses legitimate these speakers' views as worthy of consideration, as matters worth debating because reasonable people may disagree. Not only do most of these condemnations confuse protests against white supremacist speakers with state action (suggesting that there are liberals who can only think from a police perspective), but they proceed as if we were not in a civil war, a class war. They proceed as if society were a seminar or courtroom, not a war zone where people are daily under attack and where their attackers seek the cover of liberal institutions to justify these attacks.

Particularly incoherent is the way that so many liberals decry Trump as a fascist, yet remain unwilling to confront what this entails for so-called liberal practices and institutions, namely, that they are not functioning in a liberal society but are being made to serve fascist ends. This unwillingness suggests that either they don't really believe Trump is a fascist (and so their rhetoric is disingenuous), that they think that liberalism can defeat fascism (which has never happened), that they don't ideas seriously, or that arguments that some groups are genetically inferior are permissible liberal views.

Also galling is the way that resistance, protest, and "standing up and fighting back" is being championed by liberals and Democrats even as they quickly reject actual standing up and fighting back. Protests that remain controlled and symbolic are permitted. Direct action that shuts things down, that pushes back, that has effects is decried as too far. It appears, then, that for some liberals, protests are only early-stage campaign events, precursors to the only political acts they actually accept: writing letters, signing petitions, and the holy-of-holies, voting.

Some liberal arguments address tactics. They say that it’s a tactical mistake to protest far right speakers on college campuses because it gives conservative media fodder for criticism. Of course, right wing media will always attack the Left; they particularly like attacking liberals as leftists. The Left should welcome the attacks as opportunities to show we are fighting back and will continue to fight back. We should be the power the right fears, the power of the people as the rest of us, the oppressed against the oppressors, the many in solidarity against the few.

Liberals might care about being depicted as biased, not neutral. Anyone on the Left should take it as a matter of course that we are in no way neutral. The Right uses whatever opportunities they can get to spread their influence. We have to block them, shut them down, shut them out, refuse the pretense that we are in a rational debate between equally valid positions. We’re not.

It's a war. There are sides.

Facebook and US electoral politics

from the New York Times

Facebook, in the years leading up to this election, hasn’t just become nearly ubiquitous among American internet users; it has centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way. According to the company, its site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook. These are approximate exterior dimensions and can tell us only so much. But we can know, based on these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political conversation in America.

The Facebook product, to users in 2016, is familiar yet subtly expansive. Its algorithms have their pick of text, photos and video produced and posted by established media organizations large and small, local and national, openly partisan or nominally unbiased. But there’s also a new and distinctive sort of operation that has become hard to miss: political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook, uniquely positioned and cleverly engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the context of the news feed. These are news sources that essentially do not exist outside of Facebook, and you’ve probably never heard of them. They have names like Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle; Addicting Info; RightAlerts; Being Liberal; Opposing Views; Fed-Up Americans; American News; and hundreds more. Some of these pages have millions of followers; many have hundreds of thousands.

Using a tool called CrowdTangle, which tracks engagement for Facebook pages across the network, you can see which pages are most shared, liked and commented on, and which pages dominate the conversation around election topics. Using this data, I was able to speak to a wide array of the activists and entrepreneurs, advocates and opportunists, reporters and hobbyists who together make up 2016’s most disruptive, and least understood, force in media.

Individually, these pages have meaningful audiences, but cumulatively, their audience is gigantic: tens of millions of people. On Facebook, they rival the reach of their better-funded counterparts in the political media, whether corporate giants like CNN or The New York Times, or openly ideological web operations like Breitbart or Mic. And unlike traditional media organizations, which have spent years trying to figure out how to lure readers out of the Facebook ecosystem and onto their sites, these new publishers are happy to live inside the world that Facebook has created. Their pages are accommodated but not actively courted by the company and are not a major part of its public messaging about media. But they are, perhaps, the purest expression of Facebook’s design and of the incentives coded into its algorithm — a system that has already reshaped the web and has now inherited, for better or for worse, a great deal of America’s political discourse.

...

This year, political content has become more popular all across the platform: on homegrown Facebook pages, through media companies with a growing Facebook presence and through the sharing habits of users in general. But truly Facebook-native political pages have begun to create and refine a new approach to political news: cherry-picking and reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture. This strange new class of media organization slots seamlessly into the news feed and is especially notable in what it asks, or doesn’t ask, of its readers. The point is not to get them to click on more stories or to engage further with a brand. The point is to get them to share the post that’s right in front of them. Everything else is secondary.

While web publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of Facebook’s audience, these pages have thrived. Unburdened of any allegiance to old forms of news media and the practice, or performance, of any sort of ideological balance, native Facebook page publishers have a freedom that more traditional publishers don’t: to engage with Facebook purely on its terms. These are professional Facebook users straining to build media companies, in other words, not the other way around.

From a user’s point of view, every share, like or comment is both an act of speech and an accretive piece of a public identity. Maybe some people want to be identified among their networks as news junkies, news curators or as some sort of objective and well-informed reader. Many more people simply want to share specific beliefs, to tell people what they think or, just as important, what they don’t. A newspaper-style story or a dry, matter-of-fact headline is adequate for this purpose. But even better is a headline, or meme, that skips straight to an ideological conclusion or rebuts an argument.

...

“It’s like a meme war,” Rivero says, “and politics is being won and lost on social media.”

In retrospect, Facebook’s takeover of online media looks rather like a slow-motion coup. Before social media, web publishers could draw an audience one of two ways: through a dedicated readership visiting its home page or through search engines. By 2009, this had started to change. Facebook had more than 300 million users, primarily accessing the service through desktop browsers, and publishers soon learned that a widely shared link could produce substantial traffic. In 2010, Facebook released widgets that publishers could embed on their sites, reminding readers to share, and these tools were widely deployed. By late 2012, when Facebook passed a billion users, referrals from the social network were sending visitors to publishers’ websites at rates sometimes comparable to Google, the web’s previous de facto distribution hub. Publishers took note of what worked on Facebook and adjusted accordingly.

Continue reading the main story

 

 

This was, for most news organizations, a boon. The flood of visitors aligned with two core goals of most media companies: to reach people and to make money. But as Facebook’s growth continued, its influence was intensified by broader trends in internet use, primarily the use of smartphones, on which Facebook became more deeply enmeshed with users’ daily routines. Soon, it became clear that Facebook wasn’t just a source of readership; it was, increasingly, where readers lived.

Facebook, from a publisher’s perspective, had seized the web’s means of distribution by popular demand. A new reality set in, as a social-media network became an intermediary between publishers and their audiences. For media companies, the ability to reach an audience is fundamentally altered, made greater in some ways and in others more challenging. For a dedicated Facebook user, a vast array of sources, spanning multiple media and industries, is now processed through the same interface and sorting mechanism, alongside updates from friends, family, brands and celebrities.

From the start, some publishers cautiously regarded Facebook as a resource to be used only to the extent that it supported their existing businesses, wary of giving away more than they might get back. Others embraced it more fully, entering into formal partnerships for revenue sharing and video production, as The New York Times has done. Some new-media start-ups, most notably BuzzFeed, have pursued a comprehensively Facebook-centric production-and-distribution strategy. All have eventually run up against the same reality: A company that can claim nearly every internet-using adult as a user is less a partner than a context — a self-contained marketplace to which you have been granted access but which functions according to rules and incentives that you cannot control.

The news feed is designed, in Facebook’s public messaging, to “show people the stories most relevant to them” and ranks stories “so that what’s most important to each person shows up highest in their news feeds.” It is a framework built around personal connections and sharing, where value is both expressed and conferred through the concept of engagement. Of course, engagement, in one form or another, is what media businesses have always sought, and provocation has always sold news. But now the incentives are literalized in buttons and written into software.

Dying white women

from here

White women between 25 and 55 have been dying at accelerating rates over the past decade, a spike in mortality not seen since the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. According to recent studies of death certificates, the trend is worse for women in the center of the United States, worse still in rural areas, and worst of all for those in the lower middle class. Drug and alcohol overdose rates for working-age white women have quadrupled. Suicides are up by as much as 50 percent.

Washington Post series on rising mortality among middle aged white women

from here

White women have been dying prematurely at higher rates since the turn of this century, passing away in their 30s, 40s and 50s in a slow-motion crisis driven by decaying health in small-town America, according to an analysis of national health and mortality statistics by The Washington Post.

Among African Americans, Hispanics and even the oldest white Americans, death rates have continued to fall. But for white women in what should be the prime of their lives, death rates have spiked upward. In one of the hardest-hit groups — rural white women in their late 40s — the death rate has risen by 30 percent.

The Post’s analysis, which builds on academic research published last year, shows a clear divide in the health of urban and rural Americans, with the gap widening most dramatically among whites. The statistics reveal two Americas diverging, neither as healthy as it should be but one much sicker than the other.

In modern times, rising death rates are extremely rare and typically involve countries in upheaval, such as Russia immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In affluent countries, people generally enjoy increasingly long lives, thanks to better cancer treatments; drugs that lower cholesterol and the risk of heart attacks; fewer fatal car accidents; and less violent crime.

But progress for middle-aged white Americans is lagging in many places — and has stopped entirely in smaller cities and towns and the vast open reaches of the country. The things that reduce the risk of death are now being overwhelmed by things that elevate it, including opioid abuse, heavy drinking, smoking and other self-destructive behaviors.

White men are also dying in midlife at unexpectedly high rates. But the most extreme changes in mortality have occurred among white women, who are far more likely than their grandmothers to be smokers, suffer from obesity or drink themselves to death.

White women still outlive white men and African Americans of both sexes. But for the generations of white women who have come of age since the 1960s, that health advantage appears to be evaporating.

This reversal may be fueling anger among white voters: The Post last month found a correlation between places with high white death rates and support for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Public health experts say the rising white death rate reflects a broader health crisis, one that has made the United States the least healthy affluent nation in the world over the past 20 years. The reason these early deaths are so conspicuous among white women, these experts say, is that in the past the members of this comparatively privileged group have been unlikely to die prematurely.

Laudy Aron, a researcher with the Urban Institute, said rising white death rates show that the United States’ slide in overall health is not being driven simply by poor health in historically impoverished communities.

“You can’t explain it away as, ‘It’s those people over there who are pulling us down,’ ” Aron said. “We’re all going down.”

For this article, The Post examined death records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, breaking the information down geographically, county by county, by level of urbanization and by cause of death.

Big cities and their suburbs — metropolitan areas of more than 1 million people — looked strikingly different from the rest of the country. The Post divided these populations into urban and rural categories, with the rural population encompassing smaller cities as well as small towns and the most remote places.

The statistics show decaying health for all white women since 2000. The trend was most dramatic for women in the more rural areas. There, for every 100,000 women in their late 40s, 228 died at the turn of this century. Today, 296 are dying. And in rural areas, the uptick in mortality was noticeable even earlier, as far back as 1990. Since then, death rates for rural white women in midlife have risen by nearly 50 percent.

In the hardest-hit places — 21 counties arrayed across the South and Midwest — the death rate has doubled, or worse, since the turn of the century for white women in midlife.

In Victoria County, Tex., a rural area near the Gulf Coast, deaths among women 45 to 54 have climbed by 169 percent in that time period, the sharpest increase in that age group of any U.S. county. The death rate climbed from 216 per 100,000 people to 583.

Lisa Campbell, medical director for the Victoria County health department, said a third of adults in the county are obese, roughly in line with the national average. Also, 1 in 5 smokes — well above the national average — and people can still light up in restaurants and other public places.

Campbell said she has been struck by how many white women she knows who have some kind of cancer.

“It’s kind of weird, actually,” she said.

...

Researchers circled the dying-whites phenomenon for several years before clearly recognizing what they were seeing. In 2014, the increase in the death rate of relatively young white women was right there in the CDC’s massive annual report on American health, but it drew no comment in the introductory highlights. Readers had to scrutinize Table 23 on Page 109 to spot the trend.

Other reports were more explicit. A 2013 study at the University of Wisconsin looked at the geography of death and discovered that mortality for women of all races had risen in 43 percent of U.S. counties between 1992 and 2006. Men’s mortality had risen in only 3 percent of counties.

Also in 2013, a sweeping study, “Shorter Lives, Poorer Health,” from the National Research Council and the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine showed a broad “health disadvantage” among Americans, compared with people in other affluent countries.

Aron, the Urban Institute researcher who co-authored the study, wrote in January 2014 that “increases in mortality are especially pronounced among white women of reproductive age, not a group we generally think of as being disadvantaged.” Last year, she and two co-authors published a separate article highlighting the perplexing number of white women who are dying prematurely.

Then, in November, Case and her husband, Angus Deaton, another Princeton economics professor, published their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Deaton had recently won the Nobel Prize in economics, an honor that added media gloss to the dying-whites study. Suddenly, it was a national story.

Other researchers weighed in, debating aspects of the Case-Deaton statistical analysis. For example, their study played down differences in gender; Case and Deaton contend that the noticeably higher death rates for women were largely driven by smoking patterns.

Liberals against the Left

Lately we've seen more examples of liberal erasure of the left via the equating of left and right. A couple of years ago, my friend Korinna Patelis wrote a brilliant article on this phenomena in Greece that we published in Theory & Event. In the UK, this erasure manifest in the occlusion of Lexit and subsequent ceding of the terms and terrain of Brexit to the right. In the US, we've seen this most recently in liberal equating of any critique of HRC with a right-wing attack.

The basic move begins with the claim that HRC isn't trusted because she has been attacked from the right for over thirty years. Liberal feminists repeat this trope, adding the point that the basis of right-wing attacks is sexism. HRC herself furthers this narrative as she says she recognizes that people have a hard time trusting her, that she has to earn this trust, and that this is hard because of the decades of attacks from the right.

But the fact that the right attacks her and that some of these attacks are sexist does not mean that all attacks are from the right and that all attacks are sexist. Attacks from the left emphasize her involvement in the coup in Haiti, her militarist adventurism in Libya, her support for war in Iraq, her embrace of Israel, for starters. When liberals ignore these facts of HRC's political position, when they erase the critique, they are implicitly supporting these positions. Coups, regime change, imperialism are reinforced as the bedrock set of liberal positions.

The same holds for big money in politics, the rule of finance capital, and the buttressing of oligarchy. The liberal equation of all attacks on HRC (or the Democrats or Obama) with right wing attacks negates the left, It doesn't consider or engage left arguments, it doesn't tolerate them, it erases them as left, proceeding as if they did not exist at all.

Bernie's international policy

From a Code Pink report:

Sanders’ foreign policy positions are better than those of his Republican and Democratic opponents—though that’s not a terribly high bar, it must be said. He is the least hawkish of the major party candidates. As he has stated repeatedly, he’s proud that he voted against the war in Iraq—in contrast to Hillary Clinton, who has only grudgingly said that her pro-war vote was a mistake[1]—and note that even now she calls it a “mistake,” not a decision that was fundamentally wrong. Like Clinton, Sanders supported recent moves toward normalization of relations with Cuba. He also supported the nuclear deal with Iran; though Clinton too supported the Iran deal, with her trademark “muscular” approach to foreign policy, her tone is quite different from Sanders’: she has emphasized that, if elected, she would back up the U.S.-Iran nuclear agreement with the threat of military reprisal if Iran violated any of its terms.[2] Indeed, she seems coiled and almost looking for a justification to spring into action. Sanders condemns past U.S. interventions in Guatemala, Central America and Iran, and has sharply criticized Clinton’s embrace of Henry Kissinger. (Note by the way that Clinton doesn’t stand alone in Democratic Party establishment circles in her enthusiasm for Kissinger; in May 2016 President Obama’s Defense Secretary Ash Carter presented him with the Department of Defense’s Distinguished Public Service Award.)

Obama, despite his frequent impassioned anti-nuclear rhetoric, has called for a trillion dollar modernization of U.S. nuclear weapons. Sanders strongly opposes the plan. In contrast, Hillary Clinton has been, in the words of Lawrence Wittner, “more ambiguous about her stance. . . . Asked by a peace activist about the trillion dollar nuclear plan, she replied that she would ‘look into that,’ adding: ‘It doesn’t make sense to me.’ Even so, like other issues that the former secretary of state has promised to ‘look into,’ this one remains unresolved. Moreover, the ‘National Security’ section of her campaign website promises that she will maintain the ‘strongest military the world has ever known’ —not a propitious sign for critics of nuclear weapons.”[3] Sanders favors the eventual complete elimination of nuclear weapons and says he would work to get U.S. and Russian weapons down to 1,000 each—a goal which Clinton too says she favors. Sanders calls for cuts in the military budget, but he gives no specifics and makes it sound as if the cuts will all come from eliminating waste and cost overruns—a standard politician’s evasion to avoid discussing policy. Such trimming of the fat in a military budget that stands at close to $600 billion will be too small to provide a real revenue source for Sanders’ social and infrastructure programs. (The likely Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, on the other hand, calls for a 50 percent cut in military spending and indicates how the saved funds will be used. Full disclosure:Stein is the candidate I intend to support.), and too vague to generate a useful conversation about a different sort of U.S. foreign policy, one that doesn’t depend on overwhelming military power.

The Middle East

Sanders has reflected and amplified a growing feeling in the American public— including among younger American Jews—that the United States shouldn’t automatically fall in line to uncritically support the Israeli government no matter how badly it treats the Palestinians. Sanders hasn’t gone far enough: crucially, he hasn’t called for an end to the U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic support that sustains Israeli policy toward Palestinians. However, his sharp words of criticism of Israeli policies during the Democratic presidential debates, even if those criticisms were limited, have helped further a much-needed public debate about the future of the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

Unfortunately, Sanders’ foreign policy positions are too often inconsistent with his democratic and anti-elitist domestic politics. Taken as a whole, his foreign policy approach doesn’t come anywhere near constituting an agenda that addresses the needs of the global 99 percent (or, say, 90 percent) who suffer from today’s wars and the cruel global economic order of neoliberalism and austerity that the United States promotes.

As recently as October of last year Sanders has said that he supports keeping U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan.[4] He voted for NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, which caused one of his staffers, my friend Jeremy Brecher, to resign in protest.[5] And Sanders voted for the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), which has been used to justify U.S. military action in the Middle East (apart from the 2003 Iraq invasion) ever since.

Notwithstanding his criticisms of Hillary Clinton for her inclination to favor U.S. military intervention around the world, Sanders himself has generally supported America’s wars. Rather than putting forward a progressive, non-imperial alternative to ISIS and Al Qaeda that can appeal to ordinary people in the Middle East, Jeremy Scahill reminds us that in the 1990’s Sanders supported the Iraq Liberation Act and the brutal economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and that he supported President Clinton’s bombings in Iraq that were packaged as part of the so-called no-fly zones. And this is not just in the distant past. For example, in October 2015 Sanders said he wouldn’t end Obama’s drone strikes in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen, saying only that strikes must be deployed “selectively and effectively.”[6]

On MSNBC’s April 25, 2016 town hall moderated by Chris Hayes, Sanders repeated his endorsement of drone strikes, and said that he supported a “constitutional, legal” presidential kill list. He agreed with Obama’s action in sending 250 Special Forces operators to the ground in Syria, saying to Hayes, “I think what the President is talking about is having American troops training Muslim troops, helping to supply the military equipment they need, and I do support that effort. We need a broad coalition of Muslim troops on the ground. We have had some success in the last year or so putting ISIS on the defensive, we’ve got to continue that effort.”[7]

The basic problem with Sanders’ approach is that he believes that the solution to the threat of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and their ilk depends on resolute action by reactionary Middle East governments, backed by the United States, Russia, and other powerful countries. But the solution actually lies in the opposite direction. What is needed is an end to intervention by outside powers (including regional heavyweights like Saudi Arabia and Iran) and a thoroughgoing transformation of the Middle East, a transformation that can only be begun by the revival of the grassroots democratic movements of Iran’s Green movement and the Arab Spring that challenged and threatened to replace despotic rulers across the region.

Sanders summed up his anti-ISIS strategy on November 19, 2015, when he said:

While the U.S. and other western nations have the strength of our militaries and political systems, the fight against ISIS is a struggle for the soul of Islam, and countering violent extremism and destroying ISIS must be done primarily by Muslim nations—with the strong support of their global partners. . . . A new and strong coalition of Western powers, Muslim nations, and countries like Russia must come together in a strongly coordinated way to combat ISIS, to seal the borders that fighters are currently flowing across, to share counter-terrorism intelligence, to turn off the spigot of terrorist financing, and to end support for exporting radical ideologies. . . countries in the region like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE—countries of enormous wealth and resources—have contributed far too little in the fight against ISIS. That must change. King Abdallah [of Jordan] is absolutely right when he says that that the Muslim nations must lead the fight against ISIS, and that includes some of the most wealthy and powerful nations in the region, who, up to this point have done far too little.[8]

The governments of these reactionary “Muslim nations” can’t possibly offer the millions of people in the Middle East an attractive alternative to ISIS. Jordan uses a broad and vague counterterrorism law to strictly curtail freedom of expression and outlaws criticism of the king, of the government, and of Islam. Kuwait’s government aggressively cracks down on free speech. Qatar engages in the trafficking of ruthlessly exploited forced labor and provides for penalties of up to five years’ imprisonment for criticizing the emir or vice-emir. UAE courts have invoked repressive laws to prosecute government critics, and a counterterrorism law poses a further threat to government critics and rights activists. And Saudi Arabia’s hideous police state is a byword for blind and bloody repression—against women, religious minorities, and even the most peaceful of government critics[9]—little different from ISIS itself.

These regimes are part of the problem, not part of the solution. But that’s equally true of the “U.S. and other Western nations” that Sanders believes can play a crucial role in the fight against ISIS. The international financial institutions the United States and other Western nations dominate, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, have helped to create the conditions that gave rise to ISIS in the first place. They pressed governments across the region to adopt policies of privatization, cutbacks in state investment, and government subsidies for energy and other day-to-day essentials. These governments—from Tunisia and Egypt to Libya and Syria—acquiesced to Western pressure and implemented such neoliberal policies, using their repressive state apparatuses to squelch popular discontent with the painful consequences. The Arab Spring was a rebellion against both despotism and the economic suffering inflicted by the despots.

Sanders, then, is looking in all the wrong places for a lasting victory against ISIS. Bombings and military intervention by the United States and NATO, with their killing of hundreds of innocent civilians, have only succeeded in creating more terrorists and driving millions of people in the Middle East into passive acquiescence or sometimes actual support for ISIS and other reactionary fundamentalist forces. Likewise, Syria’s murderous Assad regime, with critical assistance from Iran and Russia, has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Assad’s war against his regime’s opponents is not, as Sanders seems to think, the first step toward defeating ISIS. In fact, the effect has been the opposite, and the only way Assad can triumph is by turning Syria into even more of a wasteland than it already is, which will actually serve to encourage groups like ISIS.

Unlike Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders isn’t drawn to dictators. Nor is he a macho warmonger by nature. The problem is that he hasn’t systematically broken with the foreign policy of the 1 percent. What is needed is a new, independent foreign policy of solidarity with grassroots movements for democracy and social justice around the world—an internationalist extension of Sanders’ domestic program. To the extent that Sanders enmeshes himself in the Democratic Party, an institution deeply entwined with corporate and financial interests, he will be unable to champion political or social revolution abroad, or, for that matter, at home. It is to be hoped that the millions of Sanders supporters will come to see that they need to build a new political party not only to reverse America’s militaristic, anti-democratic and imperial foreign policy, but even to achieve many of the more limited goals for which they are fighting today.

Foreign Trade

Sanders opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. So does Clinton, although many pundits consider her position to be totally opportunist, designed for battling Sanders in the primaries, and the president of the Chamber of Commerce has suggested that Clinton will switch to backing the deal if she wins the election.[10] Certainly, Clinton has been an enthusiastic supporter of corporate-oriented free trade deals for her entire career, whereas Sanders has consistently opposed them. Trump opposes the TPP too, but his stance is based in part on his belief that no one can negotiate a deal like he can, and also on his economic nationalism—which also leads him to threaten China with a 45 percent tariff.[11]Given the current U.S. tariff rate of about 3.5 percent,[12] Trump’s policy could not fail to create havoc in the U.S. and world economies.

Sanders emphasizes fair trade over free trade, and insists that workers not corporations should be the beneficiaries. But he has done a poor job of articulating a progressive foreign trade policy that is not narrowly nationalist. It has to be admitted that the left as a whole has failed to outline such a policy, and that’s a challenge that lies before all of us. One thing certain, though, is that the type of global democratic economic planning that would be required to achieve economic security and wellbeing for all will never be adopted by the 1 percent.

Not Me, US

(my essay in the Battle of New York broadsheet distributed in NYC)

"There's a special place in hell for criminals who launch hedge funds"

Holly Wood in the Village Voice -- best millennial writing on Bernie:

There seems to be no shortage of bizarrely sexist assumptions as to why I, a Millennial feminist, am not voting for Hillary Clinton. But speaking as a Millennial feminist, let me assure you: None of them is accurate. Granted, the span of my political biography is only as long as it took Howard Dean to go from human rights crusader to insurance lobbyist. But the reason for my political disaffection is plain: I've spent my entire Millennial life watching the Democratic Party claw its way up the ass of corporate America. There's no persuading me that the Democratic establishment — from where it sits now — has the capacity to represent me, or my values.

And I'm not alone. According to a 2013 poll by Harvard's Kennedy School, three out of five of my peers now believe politicians prioritize private gain over the public good. When young people open opensecrets.org to gauge just how cheaply our futures trade these days, are we being cynical, or just realistic?

If Millennials are coming out in droves to support Bernie Sanders, it's not because we are tripping balls on Geritol. No, Sanders's clever strategy of shouting the exact same thing for 40 years simply strikes a chord among the growing number of us who now agree: Washington is bought. And every time Goldman Sachs buys another million-dollar slice of the next American presidency, we can't help but drop the needle onto Bernie's broken record:

The economy is rigged.

Democracy is corrupted.

The billionaires are on the warpath.

Sanders has split the party with hits like these, a catchy stream of pessimistic populism. Behind this arthritic Pied Piper, the youth rally, brandishing red-lettered signs reading "MONEYLENDERS OUT." If you ask them, they'll tell you there's a special place in Hell for war criminals who launch hedge funds.

...

f anything concerns me at this pivotal moment, it's not the revolutionary tremors of the youth. Given the Great American Trash Fire we have inherited, this rebellion strikes me as exceedingly reasonable. Pick a crisis, America: Child poverty? Inexcusable. Medical debt? Immoral. For-profit prison? Medieval. Climate change? Apocalyptic. The Middle East is our Vietnam. Flint, the canary in our coal mine. Tamir Rice, our martyred saint. This place is a mess. We're due for a hard rain.

If I am alarmed, it is by the profound languor of the comfortable. What fresh hell must we find ourselves in before those who've appointed themselves to lead our thoughts admit that we are in flames? As I see it, to counsel realism when the reality is fucked is to counsel an adherence to fuckery. Under conditions as distressing as these, acquiescence is absurd. When your nation gets classified as a Class D structure fire, I believe the only wise course is to lose your shit.

The reason Wall Street is dropping zillions of quarters into Hillary's Super PAC-Man machine isn't because it wants change — it's because Wall Street sees revenue in her promises of keeping things much the same. Under Hillary, our prisons will continue to punish for profit. Our schools will continue to be sold off to private contractors. And despite 87 percent of Democrats standing behind universal health care, Hillary insists it will "never, ever come to pass." Not from her, I guess, since she's taken over $13 million from the health care industry.

We really can't, America, says Hillary. Nope. Not ever. We are a powerful nation, kids, but one run by the Great Market God. Leave your moral gag reflex at the door. Close that pesky Overton window, won't you? And be a doll and bolt those tables to the floor. You'll love the moneylenders, dear. I do. Hell, my daughter married one!