Deny Climate Change

When Congressmen Deny Climate Change and Evolution

BILL MOYERS: The battle never ends. And the choices we make in democracy often pit religious or partisan beliefs against scientific evidence that contradicts them. And beliefs can be stubborn, hard to give up. They even determine which facts we choose to accept. Partisans, especially – and who among us is not sometimes a partisan – will twist the facts to fit their preconceived notions. So, when people do stupid things, journalists and politicians included, cherished beliefs are often driving them, sometimes right over the cliff. As people in recovery say, denial is not just the name of a river in Egypt. And that’s what makes it dangerous.

Right now, two powerful belief systems have converged to counter facts staring us right in the face. Just as the number of Americans who question the science of evolution has gone up, so too has the number who deny that global warming is happening, and that human activity is causing it. This, at a time when the global scientific community is more certain than ever that you and I, and everyone else, are helping to turn up the heat and seal our fate. And here’s the scary political reality: on both fronts, evolution and climate change, radical right Republicans have made denial a litmus test. You can see it embodied in this man, Paul Broun, Republican congressman from Georgia, and a physician with strong religious beliefs:

PAUL BROUN: I've come to understand that all that stuff I was taught about evolution, and embryology, and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see there are a lot of scientific data that I found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young earth. I don’t believe that the earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.

BILL MOYERS: And when he took on the science of global warming, his fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives enthusiastically applauded:

PAUL BROUN on CSPAN: Now we hear all the time about global warming. Well, actually we’ve had a flat line temperatures globally for the last eight years. Scientists all over this world say that the idea of human-induced global climate change is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated out of the scientific community. It is a hoax.

BILL MOYERS: Not true, simply not true. Up to a point, we might agree that Representative Broun’s personal beliefs are his own business, even when he is telling the extremist John Birch Society that this entire concept of man-made global warming is a conspiracy to, and I’m quoting, “destroy America.” But remember, this man is chairman of oversight and investigations for the Science, Space, and Technology Committee of the United States House of Representatives, passing judgment on public policy and science. God help us.

Tacit Consensus

Andrew Bacevich on Washington’s Tacit Consensus

What words best describe present-day Washington politics? The commonplace answer, endlessly repeated by politicians themselves and media observers alike, is this: dysfunction, gridlock, partisanship and incivility. Yet here’s a far more accurate term: tacit consensus. Where Republicans and Democrats disagree, however loudly, matters less than where their views align. Differences entertain. Yet like-mindedness, even if unacknowledged, determines both action and inaction.

In the ‘Bill-W.-Obama’ era, a neoliberal consensus defines American politics. In his classic text, The American Political Tradition, the historian Richard Hofstadter identified the parameters of that consensus. It emphasizes, he wrote, “the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, [and] the value of competition.” It assumes “the natural evolution of self-interest and self-assertion … into a beneficent social order.” Grab and get ultimately works for the larger benefit of all. That, at least, is the idea.

Of course, when Hofstadter published these observations way back in 1948, his subject was not the neoliberalism of our day but an earlier variant — the progressivism that had shaped the American political agenda during the first decades of the 20th century. During the era bookended by the two Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin, progressives had sought — successfully — to preserve corporate capitalism by curbing its excesses. Attacked by their critics as radicals, TR and FDR were in fact anything but.

By 1948, Hofstadter was worried that progressivism had become a spent force, leaving Americans “bereft of a coherent and plausible body of beliefs.” In fact, a revised, more assertive brand of liberalism was already gathering strength. While this new Cold War liberalism differed from pre-World War II progressivism in some respects, protecting the “free enterprise” system remained a top priority. With perceived threats to that system now coming primarily from abroad, exercising global leadership, backed by ample military muscle, now became one of liberalism’s abiding signatures. This modified consensus, superseding progressivism, dominated the American political scene for several decades during the latter half of the 20th century.

Although the Cold War has long since ended, this emphasis on an expansive, militarized foreign policy persists. If there’s a fresh element in today’s neoliberal consensus, it’s found in the realm of culture. As neoliberals see it, received norms related to family, gender and sexuality ought to be optional. What Hofstadter in his time described as a “democracy in cupidity rather than a democracy of fraternity” has become in our day a democracy combining cupidity with individual autonomy at the expense of fraternity and self-restraint, all backed by the world’s most powerful, widely deployed and busily employed military establishment.

Are the troops in Afghanistan fighting for our freedom? If so, the package of things they fight for includes the prerogative of dispatching US forces to wherever it pleases Washington to send them, along with no-fault divorce, abortion on demand, gay marriage, and an economic system that manifestly privileges the interests of the affluent at the expense of those hard-pressed to make ends meet. To pretend otherwise, indulging in some sanitized or cliché-laced definition of freedom, is to engage in willful self-deception.

To imply that all Americans subscribe to this neoliberal consensus would be misleading, of course. A loosely-organized antiwar movement objects, however ineffectually, to Washington’s penchant for military adventurism. Moral traditionalists protest against the casting off of social conventions, again without discernible impact on policy. Risking the charge of engaging in class warfare, groups such as the Occupy Wall Street movement raise a ruckus about the yawning gap between the rich and everyone else. Again, the effects of their efforts appear negligible.

As far as their practical impact is concerned, these dissenters might as well be locked in a soundproof booth. They shout, but are not heard. Hofstadter had anticipated their predicament. “The range of ideas … which practical politicians can conveniently believe in,” he observed, “is normally limited by the climate of opinion that sustains their culture.”
Here we come to the heart of the matter: the climate of opinion. Only politicians who possess an aptitude for interpreting the prevailing climate will succeed in gaining and holding high office. In the political sphere, ideas at variance with that climate are by definition inconvenient. Expedience dictates that they should be ignored.

Whether the precepts informing basic US policy today actually work as advertised – whether the neoliberal consensus keeps us safe, liberates us from archaic and repressive attitudes, and creates conditions conducive to broad prosperity or whether they foster needless wars, moral confusion, and social injustice is an interesting question. That the question deserves more attention than it presently receives is undoubtedly the case. What cannot be argued, however, is that those precepts depart in any significant way from what the prevailing climate of opinion demands.

Neoliberal Revolution

Henry Giroux on Resisting the Neoliberal Revolution

The notion of the “Deep State” as outlined by Mike Lofgren may be useful in pointing to a new configuration of power in the US in which corporate sovereignty replaces political sovereignty, but it is not enough to simply expose the hidden institutions and structures of power.

What we have in the US today is fundamentally a new mode of politics, one wedded to a notion of “power unaccompanied by accountability of any kind,” and this poses a deep and dire threat to democracy itself, because such power is difficult to understand, analyze and counter.

I would suggest that what needs to be addressed is some sense of how this unique authoritarian conjuncture of power and politics came into place. More specifically, there is no mention by Lofgren of the collapse of the social state that began in the 1970s with the rise of neoliberal capitalism, a far more dangerous form of market fundamentalism than we had seen in the first Gilded Age. Nor is there a sustained analysis of what is new about this ideology.

How, for instance, are the wars abroad related increasingly to the diverse forms of domestic terrorism that have emerged at home? What is new and distinctive about a society marked by militaristic violence, exemplified by its war on youth, women, gays, public values, public education and any viable exhibition of dissent? Why at this particular moment in history is an aggressive war being waged on not only whistle blowers, but also journalists, students, artists, intellectuals and the institutions that support them?

What’s missing in Lofgren’s essay is any reference to the rise of the punishing state with its massive racially inflected incarceration system, which amounts to a war on poor minorities, especially black youth. Nor is anything said about the culture of fear that now rules American life and how it functions to redefine the notion of security, diverting it away from social considerations to narrow matters of personal safety.

Moreover, Lofgren needs to say more about a growing culture of cruelty brought about by the death of concessions in politics — a politics now governed by the ultra-rich and mega corporations that has no allegiance to local politics and produces a culture infused with a self-righteous coldness that takes delight in the suffering of others. Power is now separated from politics and floats, unchecked and uncaring.

Neoliberalism is a new form of hybrid global financial authoritarianism. It is connected to the Deep State and marked by its savage willingness in the name of accumulation, privatization, deregulation, dispossession and power to make disposable a wide range of groups extending from low income youth and poor minorities to elements of the middle class that have lost jobs, social protections and hope.


Then, there is the central question, how does the Deep State function to encourage particular types of individualistic, competitive, acquisitive and entrepreneurial behavior in its citizens?

The biggest problem facing the US may not be its repressive institutions, modes of governance and the militarization of everyday life, but the interiority of neoliberal nihilism, the hatred of democratic relations and the embrace of a culture of cruelty. The role of culture as an educative force, a new and powerful force in politics is central here and is vastly underplayed in the essay (which of course cannot include everything). For instance, in what ways does the Deep State use the major cultural apparatuses to convince people that there is no alternative to existing relations of power, that consumerism is the ultimate mark of citizenship and that making money is the essence of individual and social responsibility?

In other words, there is no theory of cultural domination here, no understanding of how identities, subjectivities and values are shaped in the narrow and selfish image of commerce, how exchange values are the only values. In my estimation, the Deep State is symptomatic of something more ominous, the rise of a new form of authoritarianism, a counter-revolution in which society is being restructured and advanced under what might be called the neoliberal revolution. This is a revolution in which the welfare state is being liquidated, along with the collective provisions that supported it. It is a revolution in which economics drives politics.

Regarding the question of resistance, I think this is the weakest part of the essay. I don’t believe the system is broken. I think it works well, but in the interest of very privileged and powerful elite economic and political interests that are aggressively waging a war on democracy itself. If there is to be any challenge to this system, it cannot be made within the discourse of liberal reform, which has largely served to maintain the system. Occupy and many other social movements recognize this. These groups have refused to be defined by the dominant media, the dictates of the security state, the financialization of everyday life and forms of representations that are utterly corrupt.

Hope and resistance will only come when the call for reform and working within the system gives way to imagining a very different understanding of what democracy means. The new authoritarianism with its diverse tentacles is the antithesis of democracy, and if we are going to change what Lofgren calls the Deep State, it is necessary to think in terms of an alternative that does not mimic its ideologies, institutions, governing structures and power relations.

Two things are essential for challenging the new authoritarianism. First, there needs to be a change in collective consciousness about what democracy really means and what it might look like. This is a pedagogical task whose aim is to create the formative culture that produces the agents necessary for challenging neoliberal rule. Secondly, there is a need for a massive social movement with distinct strategies, organizations and the will to address the roots of the problem and imagine a very different kind of society, one that requires genuine democratic socialism as its aim. Democracy is on life support in the US and working within the system to change it is a dead end, except for gaining short-term reforms. The struggle for a substantive democracy needs more, and the American people expect more.

Ordinary

Where are Ordinary Black Youth in Pop Culture?

By Reniqua Allen

Being young and black in America today must be hard. The experiences of black youth are so often left out of the national discourse, it probably seems like no one really understands their plight. On the few occasions that stories about them appear in pop culture, particularly television and film, they’re often shown in one of two ways — the overachiever, the kid that “makes it” despite the odds, like Jay-Z, or the lazy underachiever, the thugs and welfare moms that so many on the right often allude to.

The voices of these at-risk youth need to be heard and their stories need to be told, but there’s another perspective that we also need to hear — that of positive, average black kids. In their own way they’re invisible — kids that are more like The Beaver and Wally than gangster Frank Lucas, and are neither marginalized or at the proverbial mountaintop. Their stories seem to be regarded as unrelatable to a mainstream America that still values blonde hair and white picket fences.

It’s easy to understand why this happens. In the more than four decades since the Civil Rights Movement, black youth are still lagging behind. Many of the statistics and stories that we hear about young African Americans, much like the ones Bryan Stevenson shared on recent Moyers & Company shows, are abysmal. Add in the other “isms” that all too many black youth are familiar with, like classism and sexism, and you can see why there’s an anxiety about the state of young black America.

One of the stories that did receive a lot of media attention in the recent past is the Trayvon Martin case. He was the teen killed last year in Florida by a man who allegedly thought he was threatening his life. Putting the politics of the case aside, Trayvon, a young middle-class black kid, with two involved (if not together parents), who liked hoodies, his girlfriend, Twitter and Skittles, is probably a good example of your average black kid. But how much does America really know about the Trayvons of the world except when violence intervenes? When do their stories get told? When do we understand that most black kids aren’t all that different from white kids?

I know a bit about this because growing up I was that Trayvon. I wasn’t what many would classify as a “burden” to society, but I wasn’t the next Barack either. I lived in a single parent household that was loving and instilled the values of hard work and sacrifice. And I was far from an anomaly. I was surrounded by other black families like mine, some with more money, some with less, some with fathers and mothers together, some with only fathers, but many were happy, working and middle-class Americans.

In the eighties and nineties, mainstream network television and film was better about showing middle-class black families. Girls like Moesha, Rudy Huxtable and Laura Winslow looked like me. Today however, with a decreasing number of black family shows — and an explosion of celebrity culture — storylines about average black youth are even rarer. While it’s a great testament to our nation’s progress to have stories about Will Smith’s talented kids and Obama’s smart girls, we need to make “ordinary” black kids a commonplace as well.

I’m lucky that the lives of black youth aren’t hidden to me. I am surrounded by a number of young black men and women that are doing well, that are smart and talented and talk endlessly about annoying parents, relationships, and even politics. But popular culture is a powerful tool. It shapes and defines many of our beliefs about our larger society. And while it is important to voice the stories of those that need it the most — those that have been left behind, discriminated against and crippled by injustice in an all too often unequal society — we must also hear more about ordinary black kids, who are more the norm than the exception.

Greenhouse Gas Challenge

Will the Chamber of Commerce’s SCOTUS Winning Streak Continue with Key Greenhouse Gas Challenge?

By Joshua Holland

The Supreme Court is hearing two major challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Last week, Thomas Donnelly, counsel to the Constitutional Accountability Center, wrote a post titled, “Six Reasons the Greenhouse Gas Cases Are Worth Watching,” which detailed the background of the cases and outlined the political landscape that brought them before the court.

The first case was argued in December. EPA v. EME Homer was a challenge to the EPA’s ability to regulate pollution that drifts across state lines. Arguments in the second case, Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, began yesterday.

BillMoyers.com asked Donnelly to bring us up to speed on these potentially significant cases. Below is a transcript of our conversation that’s been lightly edited for clarity.

Joshua Holland: Let’s begin with the basics. Can you give us a little bit of the background of this week’s case?

Thomas Donnelly: Absolutely. Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA is a follow-up case to one of the landmarks of the last decade in the Roberts court, called Massachusetts v. EPA. And that green-lighted EPA’s efforts to regulate climate change. It said that under the Clean Air Act, greenhouse gases are covered and that EPA must go forward and figure out whether or not there’s a genuine threat there, and if there is, must address it by valid regulations.

This case now is a follow-up to that, weighing whether or not EPA can now extend regulations to what are called stationary sources. These are power plants, large emitters of greenhouse gas emissions. And industry challengers, along with some states, like Texas, have come into court and said, “EPA, you cannot do this. You’re overstepping your bounds.” And EPA’s coming back and saying, “Well, the court said seven years ago, in a very important decision, that we have the authority to address greenhouse gases and the threat of climate change, and so we’re doing it here, and we’re doing it in a way that is consistent with the last five presidential administrations in terms of how they’ve interpreted this important provision of the Clean Air Act.”

Holland: It seemed like this had been somewhat settled law. Were you surprised that the Supreme Court took these challenges up?

Donnelly: Well, just backing up slightly, one of the most important things about this case is what the Court decided not to take. It doesn’t surprise me that the US Chamber of Commerce, other industry groups and states with conservative attorneys general would come to court and try to stifle anything EPA wants to do to address climate change.

In their petitions to the Court here, they took a very aggressive stance, asking the Court to reconsider Massachusetts v. EPA, challenging other greenhouse gas regulations and finally challenging this other move that EPA made to address stationary sources.

And the Court effectively threw out the petitions as to those broader questions and really fixed on this particular program. So the decision by this Court to not grant those other petitions confirms the Obama administration and future administrations’ power to deal with climate change under the Clean Air Act. So in an important sense, that law really is settled and there’s no going back.

They are challenging an important program, but if the Court sticks to the issues it actually granted in this case, then even if EPA loses, it will still have other tools to address climate change.

Holland: Do the Court’s evidentiary rules preclude having any arguments over the science of climate change itself?

Donnelly: What EPA did after Massachusetts v. EPA was go and review the science, and it determined that greenhouse gases do endanger the public health of Americans. That was through an extensive regulatory process, where there were thousands upon thousands of comments, and they reviewed all the evidence and said, “Yes, there’s a threat. Now we have to address it.”

The industry groups here did ask the Court to review that determination, but the Court decided not to review that particular question. So while the Court certainly could’ve done that, it chose not to, and so if the Court sticks to the issues it actually granted, we will not be jostling over those sorts of questions on Monday.

Holland: In the piece, you write that Washington’s highly polarized environment is one of the reasons that this question ended up before the Court. Can you explain that?

Donnelly: The Clean Air Act is a decades-old law. It used to be the case that bipartisan majorities would come together every few years and amend the act in important ways. But because of polarization in Congress, the Clean Air Act has not been amended since 1990. And what ends up happening is you have a very broadly worded statute that gives EPA a great deal of authority. It was actually constructed in that way to ensure that EPA can continue acting even if there is congressional gridlock. If there’s a new environmental threat, and science confirms it, then EPA can go out and address it without further congressional action.

But over time, as we do not update these laws, the president continues to act under that old authority to address new problems, and that opens up at least an opportunity for conservative groups — industry groups, in the case of climate change — to come in and say, “No, no, the president is addressing a problem that Congress didn’t think about in 1990. No matter what the text of the statute says, Congress didn’t really intend that.”

And so you end up having ongoing litigation addressing what the administration’s doing, and it ultimately ends up before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court as it exists now — the Roberts Court — is a very conservative Supreme Court, and they end up getting to decide these questions.

Holland: Barack Obama is on pace to issue the fewest executive orders since Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s. But that hasn’t prevented conservatives from adopting this narrative that he’s some kind of tyrant operating above the law, issuing executive orders left and right. How is that playing out in these cases?

Donnelly: Both the industry challengers, and a lot of the groups filing “friend of the court” briefs on their behalf — important people like Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul filed amicus briefs in this case in support of the industry groups — are making exactly that claim, which is that EPA is exceeding its authority and essentially rewriting the law.

What this ends up ignoring is that, again, the Clean Air Act was written quite broadly with the idea that EPA would be able to address new threats over time without having to go back to Congress. Furthermore, what the Obama Administration is doing here is following a reading of the statute that’s over three decades old. It’s not as though they just took this statutory provision and said, “Oh, we really want to do something on climate change and we’re going to invent a new interpretation to allow us to do that.” They’re following the same interpretation of previous administrations, Republicans and Democrats alike, except this time it actually leads to actions on climate change.

So there’s certainly an attempt from the other side to make this sound like it’s an absolutely radical, crazy move by the Obama Administration, but in fact, it’s very much in line with past executive practice.

Holland: You mentioned that the Chamber of Commerce is one of a bunch of parties suing the EPA in this case. Tell us about the Chamber’s role.

Donnelly: On behalf of their own membership, they often go into the DC circuit, which is an appeals court that’s very important when it comes to environmental regulations and challenge regulations like this. What makes this notable is the overall success of the US Chamber of Commerce before the Roberts Court, where it’s wining over 70 percent of its cases; since the beginning of October term 2011, it’s won about 90 percent of its cases.

Holland: In the piece you write, “The petitioners don’t agree on what the statute actually requires, or how far the Court should go to check the ‘lawless Obama Administration.’” Can you unpack that for us?

Donnelly: Absolutely. This case consolidates six different challenges. That’s not unusual when it comes to regulatory cases like this, but at the beginning of the briefing in a case like this, it’s common for petitioners to come together around one argument, or maybe even two arguments, and file a consolidated brief. But in this case, we had seven different briefs by the petitioners, giving the Court a variety of options how to rule, some quite broad, some narrow. But in the end, all that they could agree upon was that they really didn’t like what the EPA did and thought that it was wrong. They weren’t able to come around to one particular position.

Holland: So here the Court has a Chinese menu of possible resolutions.
It’s a sign of how far to the right the Court has drifted that Anthony Kennedy, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, is the so-called moderate swing vote. What can we expect from him in these cases?

Donnelly: It’s always tough to predict. The one thing to understand about his role, particularly when it comes to climate change, is that we think of Justice Kennedy in terms of his opinion last term on marriage equality in Windsor, or gay rights in Lawrence v. Texas a few terms ago, and his push for equality when it comes to sexual orientation is an important part of his legacy. But if we want to understand the fullness of his legacy, one of the most important things that Justice Kennedy did was join with the four progressive justices in Massachusetts v. EPA seven years ago. It was that particular decision, in the face of foot-dragging by the Bush administration, that really cleared the way for the actions that you see the Obama administration taking on climate change, including their moves in the case that’s being challenged this week. All eyes will be on Justice Kennedy, and it’s certainly the case that he has played a very constructive role when it comes to the authority of EPA to address climate change.

Holland: Tom, when can we expect a ruling in these cases?

Donnelly: Given how late it is in the term, we’re not going to see a decision until near the end of the term, so in late June.

Workers?

Are We Facing a Future of Invisible Workers?

By George Packer

At The New Yorker, George Packer considers one significant way in which this Gilded Age differs from the last one. Packer writes:

A hundred years ago, the popular image of the worker was a sweaty toiler, his face smudged with coal dust or scorched by the blast furnace, oppressed by the industrial machine but not its total victim. He was coiled with potential energy that was frightening to some and inspiring to others—he had the country’s future in his muscular hands. By the time Studs Terkel published his oral history “Working,” forty years ago next month, that image had blurred. The Chicago steelworker at the start of the book was a working stiff, bored and trapped by his job but still able to take its existence for granted. And he now had company—among others, a hospital aide, a supermarket cashier, a pair of hair stylists. These were the last days of secure blue-collar work, and the beginning of wage stagnation in the service economy. 

In the decades after 1974, the archetypal worker became a store greeter at Walmart—part time, nonunion, making near-poverty wages. The animating spirit of her working life was no longer the dignity of labor, the drama of factory strife, or the slackness of union bureaucracy—it was required cheerfulness barely concealing an unhappiness that she was too afraid to show. She was isolated, anxious, and, basically, powerless, under the constant threat of having no job at all. 

As the bottom fell out of the working class, this attitude spread to other kinds of work, including the once formidable assembly line: employees at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, who recently voted against joining the United Auto Workers, cited the fate of their counterparts in Detroit. Solidarity had become too risky—they were lucky just to be making nineteen dollars an hour. 

When I wrote about Amazon—which is as emblematic of the American corporation in 2014 as U.S. Steel was in 1914 and Walmart in 1994—for a story in The New Yorker, earlier this month, I began to wonder what a company worker looked like. I found it hard to come up with an image. Amazon’s workforce is made up mainly of computer engineers and warehouse workers, but when you think of Amazon you don’t picture either one (and there aren’t many photographs to help your imagination). What you see, instead, is a Web site with a button that says “ADD TO CART” and a cardboard box with a smile printed on the side. Between clicking “BUY” and answering the door when U.P.S. arrives lies a mystery—a chain of events that only comes to mind if you make a conscious effort. The work is done by people you don’t see and don’t have to think about, which is partly what makes Amazon’s unmatched efficiency seem nearly miraculous. 

The invisibility of work and workers in the digital age is as consequential as the rise of the assembly line and, later, the service economy. Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought. The guy stocking shelves and the girl scanning purchases at Target never occupied much of a place in the public mind, and certainly never a romantic one (no one composed a “Ballad of the Floor Associate”), but at least you had to look at them whenever you ventured out to stimulate the economy. They reminded you that low-priced Chinese-made goods were a mixed blessing—that many of the jobs being created in post-industrial America were crappy ones. 

With work increasingly invisible, it’s much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy. For example, a century ago there was a great debate over the trusts—enormous concentrations of economic power in oil, railroads, banking, steel. The trusts produced a historic backlash called Progressivism. Reformers were divided into two camps: the New Nationalists, led by Theodore Roosevelt and guided by the New Republic editor Herbert Croly, believed that monopoly was an inevitable and highly efficient feature of the industrial economy. The New Nationalists wanted not to break up monopolies but to regulate them in the public interest, necessitating a central government that was the equal of the big corporations. “Every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it,” Roosevelt said in Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1910, in a speech that inspired President Obama to talk about inequality a century later in the same place. 

In the election of 1912, Roosevelt’s New Nationalism was opposed by the New Freedom of Woodrow Wilson, under the intellectual guidance of Louis Brandeis, the goal of which was to liberate individual enterprise and to eliminate monopoly power and its corrupting influence. Wilson embraced “that vision which sees that no society is renewed from the top but that every society is renewed from the bottom.” In practice, the difference between these two schools of thought was not as wide as the rhetoric of their proponents. “Whether the objective was to regulate monopoly or competition,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., later wrote, “the method was to meet the power of business by expanding the power of government.” Elements of both the New Nationalism and the New Freedom informed Progressive thought and its crowning achievement, the New Deal. 

Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P. Morgan and Company, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. (Earlier this month, Google briefly passed Exxon Mobil as the second most valuable American company, after Apple, with a market capitalization of nearly four hundred billion dollars.) Among tech companies, dependent on rapid growth with huge network effects for revenue, competition for market share has become so routinely intense that Facebook’s purchase, last week, of the mobile-messaging company WhatsApp for nineteen billion dollars was reported as yet another tale of sudden, outlandish wealth creation, not as a dangerous consolidation of the messaging business in one company’s hands, which is taken as a given and probably a beneficial thing. Comcast’s proposed forty-five-billion-dollar takeover of Time Warner Cable raised a few eyebrows, but most observers expect it to go through. In banking, the Dodd-Frank reform law has provisions to minimize the kind of risky behavior that led to the financial crisis, but, in the name of global competitiveness, the too-big-to-fail banks just keep getting bigger.  

The whole trend of antitrust policy for the past thirty years, continuing with the Obama Administration, has been to disregard monopoly in the interest of low consumer prices and greater “efficiency.” As Paul Krugman wrote, in the Times, of the Comcast deal, “There used to be a bipartisan consensus in favor of tough antitrust enforcement. During the Reagan years, however, antitrust policy went into eclipse, and ever since measures of monopoly power, like the extent to which sales in any given industry are concentrated in the hands of a few big companies, have been rising fast.”

Where is the great debate over bigness in our time? What public limits should be placed on the power of private companies to disrupt older industries, which usually involves destroying more jobs than can be created? What are the ideas for regulating monopoly or competition on the Internet? Who are the leaders and thinkers of the New New Nationalism and the New New Freedom? There are thoughtful, though fairly marginal, critics, such as Jaron Lanier, whose recent book “Who Owns the Future?” argues for giving users a share of the wealth in an Internet economy that requires their participation. Lanier stands in the philosophical tradition of Louis Brandeis, who regarded bigness as a result of financial manipulation more than the drive for efficiency. 

But the sheer size of the tech giants, and the economic and political power that comes with this, generates much less skepticism than Rockefeller and Morgan ever inspired.
One reason, I think, has to do with the sense in which these companies are everywhere and nowhere, ubiquitous in our lives but with no physical presence or human face. 

They are regarded by many users as public resources, not private corporations—there for us—and their own rhetoric furthers this misperception: Facebook’s quest for a “more open and connected world”; Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil,” and its stated mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”; Amazon’s ambition to become “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” 

Because these endeavors seem to involve no human beings, no workers, other than ourselves—the supposed recipients of all the benefits—it takes an effort to realize that the tech economy is man-made, and that, as with the economies that preceded it, human beings have the capacity to shape and reform it for the public good. It would be easier to remember this if every time you clicked “BUY,” searched for an article, or texted a friend your screen flashed the face of a worker who once held a job that made way for your seamless online experience.

Orion spacecraft boosters

Two of the boosters that will help send NASA’s Orion spacecraft into space for the first time are on their way to Florida.


Orion will launch on top of a Delta IV rocket this fall, and two of the rocket’s three boosters were rolled out of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) facility in Decatur, Ala., and loaded onto a Mariner cargo barge Feb 21.

ULA is constructing the Delta IV for the flight test of Orion, called Exploration Flight Test-1, or EFT-1. From ULA, the boosters will arrive at Cape Canaveral, Fla., in early March for final processing prior to the launch. A third booster is still in fabrication at the Decatur facility.

"This is a very exciting time for NASA," said Bill Hill, NASA assistant deputy associate administrator for exploration systems. "EFT-1 is a big milestone for us, and is the start of venturing further into space than we ever have before. Seeing these rocket boosters roll out headed for the Cape is a testament of the hard work taking place to help further NASA’s space exploration goals.”

During the flight test, Orion will travel 3,600 miles into space -- farther than a spacecraft built for humans has been in more than 40 years -- and orbit the Earth twice. The capsule will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at speeds approaching 20,000 mph, generating temperatures as high as 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

The uncrewed flight will provide engineers with important data about Orion's heat shield and other elements, including the spacecraft adapter’s performance. The spacecraft adapter will connect Orion to the Delta IV and also will connect Orion to NASA’s new rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), on its first mission in 2017. The adapter was completed earlier this month at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and will be delivered to ULA in mid-March. SLS, NASA's new rocket, will be capable of taking humans to deep space missions, including Mars.


“NASA and our partners have worked very hard to get Orion ready for EFT-1,” said Paul Marshall, NASA’s Orion assistant program manager. “It truly is a team effort, and that has been showcased here today. We really can’t wait to see Orion fly this fall on the Delta IV, and use that data to get us ready for the first SLS flight in 2017.”

California drought conditions

NASA is partnering with the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) to develop and apply new technology and products to better manage and monitor the state's water resources and respond to its ongoing drought.

NASA scientists, DWR water managers, university researchers and other state resource management agencies will collaborate to apply advanced remote sensing and improved forecast modeling to better assess water resources, monitor drought conditions and water supplies, plan for drought response and mitigation, and measure drought impacts.

"Over the past two decades, NASA has developed capabilities to measure and provide useful information for all components of Earth's freshwater resources worldwide," said Michael Freilich, director of NASA's Earth Science Division in Washington. "Working with partners like DWR, we are leveraging NASA's unique Earth monitoring tools and science expertise to help managers address the state's water management challenges."

In January, Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. declared a drought state of emergency and directed state officials to take all necessary actions to prepare for water shortages as 2014 shapes up to be one of the driest years on record in California.

NASA and DWR began exploring opportunities to apply remote sensing data and research to the process of water resource management through a partnership established with funding from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Ongoing collaborations include monitoring California delta levees; mapping fallowed agricultural lands; and improving estimates of precipitation, water stored in winter snowpack, and changes in groundwater resources. The agencies also are working to combine data from NASA satellites and DWR's network of agricultural weather stations to improve estimates of crop water requirements for California farmers seeking to better manage irrigation.

"We value the partnership with NASA and the ability of their remote sensing resources to integrate data over large spatial scales, which is useful for assessing drought impacts," said Jeanine Jones, Interstate Water Resources Manager, DWR, Sacramento, Calif. "Early detection of land subsidence hot spots, for example, can help forestall long-term damage to water supply and flood control infrastructure."

In April, NASA and DWR will resume flights of NASA's Airborne Snow Observatory to map the snowpack of the Tuolumne River Basin in the Sierra Nevada and the Uncompahgre watershed in the Upper Colorado River Basin. The Tuolumne watershed is the primary water supply for 2.6 million San Francisco Bay Area residents.

The airborne observatory measures how much water is in the snowpack and how much sunlight the snow absorbs, which affects how fast the snow melts. These data enable accurate estimates of how much water will flow out of a basin when the snow melts. Last year, observatory data helped water managers optimize reservoir filling and more efficiently allocate water between power generation, water supplies and ecological uses.

Another pilot project is demonstrating the feasibility of using satellite imagery to track the extent of fallowed land -- cultivated land intentionally allowed to lie idle during growing season -- in California's Central Valley. NASA is working with DWR, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and California State University at Monterey Bay to establish an operational fallowed land monitoring service as part of a California drought early warning information system. New methods using time-series of crop data from NASA and USGS satellites can provide information on land fallowing and reductions in planted acreage early in the year. The team is preparing to produce data and maps of fallowed acreage in the Central Valley beginning this April to help monitor the impacts of the ongoing drought.

Faced with an inability to fully irrigate their crops due to drought, Central Valley farmers often must prioritize use of limited available water supplies to sustain perennial crops. Taking land out of production reduces farm income and agricultural sales and increases unemployment. Timely and accurate knowledge of the extent of fallowing can give decision makers vital insights into the severity of drought impacts and provide a basis for sound drought response decisions.

Another NASA project mapped areas of subsidence, or ground sinking, in the San Joaquin Valley from 2007 to 2011 caused by decreased groundwater levels. Groundwater is increasingly important in water resource management, yet knowledge of groundwater levels is not uniformly available. Satellite-based and airborne interferometric synthetic aperture radar can monitor groundwater levels by measuring surface deformation due to the withdrawal and recharge of aquifers.

Satellite radar maps produced to date reveal significant areas of subsidence. NASA produced regional maps of the rate and total amount of subsidence, along with animations and detailed histories of individual locations that can help researchers deduce year-to-year changes in groundwater storage. Researchers hope to extend the data to the present day to give state water managers updates on how subsidence has progressed during the drought and detect possible new areas of concern. The data can be used to focus on problem areas where too much water is being pumped. The maps also help managers of infrastructure that can be affected by subsidence, such as aqueducts, flood-control channels and the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

NASA is teaming with DWR, University of California at San Diego and others to conduct airborne campaigns, satellite studies and analyses of weather and climate models to enhance understanding and improve forecasts of atmospheric rivers. These narrow, low-altitude, elongated corridors of water vapor account for most major flooding events, provide about 40 percent of California's freshwater, and often are "drought busters." They help scientists understand and predict the global water cycle and its regional extremes.

NASA satellite data and modeling studies have contributed to a better description and understanding of the Madden-Julian Oscillation, a recurring pattern of tropical weather and climate that impacts weather in Earth's mid-latitudes, including California. Weather forecast models now demonstrate the ability to forecast this pattern as much as four weeks in advance, potentially providing new, long-lead precipitation forecast information for California. The NASA team is working with the global weather and climate forecast communities to enable and improve routine forecasts of this phenomenon.

Three of the five new Earth science missions NASA is scheduled to launch this year will contribute to water cycle research and water-related national policy decisions.

The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory, a joint satellite project with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency scheduled for launch Thursday, Feb. 27, will inaugurate an unprecedented international satellite constellation that will produce the first nearly global observations of rainfall and snowfall. The new information will help answer questions about our planet's life-sustaining water cycle, and improve water resource management and weather forecasting.

ISS-RapidScat, scheduled to launch to the International Space Station (ISS) in June, will extend the data record of ocean winds around the globe. The data are a key factor in climate research, weather and marine forecasting and tracking of storms and hurricanes.

The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), launching in November, will inform water resource management decisions on water availability. SMAP data also will aid in predictions of plant growth and agricultural productivity, improve short-term weather forecasts and long-term climate change projections, and advance our ability to monitor droughts and predict floods and mitigate their related impacts on people's lives.

NASA also plans to launch four additional water-related satellites in the next seven years: The Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2); Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) Follow-on; Surface Water Ocean Topography mission; and the NASA-Indian Space Research Organisation Synthetic Aperture Radar mission. These satellite missions join more than a dozen NASA airborne sensors focused on regional-scale issues, understanding detailed Earth science processes and calibrating and validating NASA satellites.


NASA monitors Earth's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.

2006 DP14

Doesn't look like much, but....

A collage of radar images of near-Earth asteroid 2006 DP14 was generated by NASA scientists using the 230-foot (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, Calif., on the night of Feb. 11, 2014.

Delay-Doppler radar imaging revealed that the asteroid is about 1,300 feet (400 meters) long, 660 feet (200 meters) wide, and shaped somewhat like a big peanut. The asteroid's period of rotation is about six hours.

The asteroid is of a type known as a "contact binary" because it has two large lobes on either end that appear to be in contact. Previous radar data from Goldstone and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has shown that at least 10 percent of near-Earth asteroids larger than about 650 feet (200 meters) have contact binary shapes like that of 2006 DP14. The data were obtained over an interval of 2.5 hours as the asteroid completed about half a revolution. The resolution is about 60 feet (19 meters) per pixel.

The data were obtained on Feb. 11 between 9:03 a.m. and 11:27 p.m. PST (12:03 a.m. to 2:27 a.m. EST on Feb. 12). At the time of the observations, the asteroid's distance was about 2.6 million miles (4.2 million kilometers) from Earth. That is about 11 times the average distance between Earth and its moon. The asteroid's closest approach to Earth occurred on Feb. 10, at a distance of about 1.5 million miles (2.4 million kilometers).

Radar is a powerful technique for studying an asteroid's size, shape, rotation state, surface features and surface roughness, and for improving the calculation of asteroid orbits. Radar measurements of asteroid distances and velocities often enable computation of asteroid orbits much further into the future than if radar observations weren't available.

NASA places a high priority on tracking asteroids and protecting our home planet from them. In fact, the United States has the most robust and productive survey and detection program for discovering near-Earth objects. To date, U.S. assets have discovered more than 98 percent of the known near-Earth objects.

In addition to the resources NASA puts into understanding asteroids, it also partners with other U.S. government agencies, university-based astronomers, and space science institutes across the country that are working to track and understand these objects better, often with grants, interagency transfers and other contracts from NASA.


NASA's Near-Earth Object Program at NASA Headquarters, Washington, manages and funds the search, study and monitoring of asteroids and comets whose orbits periodically bring them close to Earth. JPL manages the Near-Earth Object Program Office for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

VO65

Volvo Ocean Race

It should come as no surprise that a number of the Dongfeng Race Team have been around the world before with Groupama. No Franck Camma perhaps – he is too busy ducking and diving (literally) on the eXtreme 40 Circuit – but that’s another story.

Team Director Bruno Dubois from France has been involved with this edition of the Volvo Ocean Race right from the start with the design of the wardrobe and the sails themselves that will power all the VO65s round the world so it is no small wonder that he looked first at those who had done the race before and who he had worked with on the Groupama campaign. Not a bad gene pool to select from either as the French boat proved to be the class act once they got going enhancing the opinion that there is no substitute for having the T-shirt.

The Team was today officially launched to the world in Sanya, China where the team are training, getting used to the boat, and one another. They also currently have a ‘Morning Light’ style boot camp working through the selection process for the sailors who will make up the Chinese element of the team. These young men, 12 at the moment, Olympians amongst them, are being put through the mill to arrive at those who will make up around half the crew on the Chinese entry that starts in Alicante in October.

There are naysayers, just as there were with the Roy Disney backed campaign. Those were however silenced, just as I am sure will happen again with Dongfeng Race Team.

By the time they reach the start line of the Alicante In Port Race they will no longer be ocean sailing rookies . The boat may have got to China in the hold of a container ship but she returns, with the crew, to Europe on her own bottom via Auckland and the Southern Ocean. In other words the young Chinese sailors will have effectively done the second half of the race before they hit the start line in 7 months time.

The fireworks, speechifying and so on aside the important part of the christening and naming ceremony was of course the naming of the boat, the skipper and the already selected crew and as the title of this piece suggests, while there may be no Gene Hackman, there are some tough experienced ocean racers on the team.

The named skipper is a Groupama alumni. Charles Caudrelier, part of the winning team from the last edition of the Volvo Ocean Race and while the move to skipper may seem a big step he is in fact no stranger to making those important race winning decisions having won the Solitaire De Figaro in 2004 and the Transat Jaque Vabre (TJV) with Marc Guillemot in 2009 and these are just a small part of his impressive sailing resume.

Team Director Bruno Dubois (Belgian actually, not French) is on record as stating “there is no place for second…. …..I want to win and the sponsor wants to win” and with the team that is being assembled in Sanya that somehow doesn’t feel like an idle boast.


I doubt if many of the teams on the start line in Alicante later this year will have an entire crew of fully paid up ‘Cape Horners’. Now that’s t-shirt worth having! – Alistair Skinner.