Marty's Blog

By Chris Hedges

It is 6 a.m. in the parking lot outside the La Fiesta supermarket in
Immokalee, Fla. Rodrigo Ortiz, a 26-year-old farmworker, waits forlornly in the
half light for work in the tomato fields. White-painted school buses with logos
such as “P. Cardenas Harvesting” are slowly filling with fieldworkers. Knots of
men and a few women, speaking softly in Spanish and Creole, are clustered on the
asphalt or seated at a few picnic tables waiting for crew leaders to herd them
onto the buses, some of which will travel two hours to fields. Roosters are
crowing as the first light of dawn rises over the cacophony. Men shovel ice into
10-gallon plastic containers from an ice maker next to the supermarket, which
opens at 3:30 a.m. to sell tacos and other food to the workers. The
containers—which they lug to pickup trucks—provide water for the pickers in the
sweltering, humid fields where temperatures soar to 90 degrees and above.

Ortiz, a short man in a tattered baseball cap and soiled black pants that are
too long and spill over the tops of his worn canvas sneakers, is not fortunate
this day. By 7 a.m. the last buses leave without him. He heads back to the
overcrowded trailer he shares with several other men. There are always workers
left behind at these predawn pickup sites where hundreds congregate in the hopes
of getting work. Nearly 90 percent of the workers are young, single immigrant
men, and at least half lack proper documents or authorization to work in the
United States.

Harvesting tomatoes is an endeavor that comes with erratic and unpredictable
hours, weeks with overtime and weeks with little to do and no guarantees about
wages. Once it starts to rain, workers are packed back onto the buses and sent
home, their workday abruptly at an end. Ortiz and the other laborers congregate
at the pickup points every morning never sure if there will be work. And when
they do find daywork they are paid only for what they pick.

“I only had three days of work this week,” Ortiz says mournfully. “I don’t
know how I will pay my rent.”

Ortiz, who along with many others among these migrant workers sends about
$100 home to Mexico every month to support elderly parents, works under
conditions in these fields that replicate medieval serfdom and at times descend
into outright slavery. He lives far below the poverty line. He has no job
security, no workers’ compensation, no disability insurance, no paid time off,
no access to medical care, Social Security, Medicaid or food stamps and no
protection from the abusive conditions in the fields. The agricultural industry
has a death rate nearly six times higher than most other industries, and the
Environmental Protection Agency estimates that of the 2 million farmworkers in
the United States 300,000 suffer pesticide poisoning every year.

But this may change as one of the most important battles in the history of
migrant labor is launched by the Coalition
of Immokalee Workers (CIW). If this battle succeeds it will nearly double
the wages of the farmworkers who labor in the $600 million tomato-growing
industry. A victory over the supermarket chains also would hold out the
possibility of significantly alleviating the draconian conditions that permit
forced labor, crippling poverty and egregious human rights abuses, including
documented cases of slavery, in the nation’s tomato fields. If the CIW
campaign—which is designed to pressure supermarket chains including Publix, Trader
Joe’s, Wal-Mart, Kroger, and Ahold brands Giant and Stop & Shop to sign
the CIW Fair Food Agreement—fails, however, it threatens to roll back the modest
gains made by farmworkers. It depends on us.

“We are standing on the threshold of achieving significant change in the
agricultural industry,” Marc Rodrigues, with the Student/Farmworker Alliance,
tells me later in the day at the CIW office in Immokalee. “But if the
supermarkets do not participate and support it then it will not go any further.
Their lack of participation threatens to undermine what the workers and their
allies have accomplished. They represent a tremendous amount of tomato
purchasing. They wield a lot of influence over conditions in the field. For
those growers not enamored of the concept of workers attaining rights and being
treated with dignity, they will know that there is always a market for their
tomatoes with no questions asked, where nothing is governed by a code of conduct
or transparency. If we succeed, this will help lift farmworkers, who do one of
the most important, dangerous and undervalued jobs in our society, out of
grinding poverty into one where they can have a slightly more decent and normal
life and provide for their families.”

The next major mobilization in
the campaign will take place at noon Oct. 21 outside Trader Joe’s corporate
headquarters in Monrovia, Calif. This will follow a week of local actions to
target supermarkets across the country. To thwart the campaign, the public
relations departments of Trader Joe’s, Publix and other supermarkets are
churning out lies and half truths, as well as engaging in unsettling acts of
intimidation and surveillance. Publix sent out an employee posing
as a documentary filmmaker to record the activities of the organizers.

“Publix has a cabal of labor relations, human relations and public relations
employees who very frequently descend from corporate headquarters in Lakeland,
Fla.—or one of their regional offices—and show up at our demonstrations,” says
Rodrigues. “They watch us with or without cameras. They constantly attempt to
deflect us: If we attempt to speak to consumers or store managers these people
will intercept us and try to guide us away. These people in suits and ties come
up to us and refer to us by our first names—as if they know us—in a sort of
bizarre, naked attempt at intimidation.”

If you live in a community that has a Whole Foods, which is the only major
supermarket chain to sign the agreement, shop there and send a letter to
competing supermarkets telling them that you will not return as a customer until
they too sign the CIW Fair Food Agreement. Details about planned protests around
the country can be found on the CIW
website.

Workers in the fields earn about 50 cents for picking a bucket containing 32
pounds of tomatoes. These workers make only $10,000 to $12,000 a year, much of
which they send home. The $10,000-$12,000 range, because it includes the higher
pay of supervisors, means the real wages of the pickers are usually less than
$10,000 a year. Wages have remained stagnant since 1980. A worker must pick 2.25
tons of tomatoes to make minimum wage during one of the grueling 10-hour
workdays. This is twice what they had to pick 30 years ago for the same amount
of money. Most workers pick about 150 buckets a day. And these workers have been
rendered powerless by law. In Florida, collective bargaining is illegal, one of
the legacies of Jim Crow practices designed to keep blacks poor and
disempowered. Today the ban on collective bargaining serves the same purpose in
thwarting the organizing efforts of the some 30,000 Hispanic, Mayan and Haitian
agricultural laborers who plant and harvest 30,000 acres of tomatoes.

The CIW, which organized a nationwide boycott in 2001 against Taco Bell,
forced several major fast food chains including Yum Brands, McDonald’s, Burger
King, Subway, Whole Foods Market, Compass Group, Bon Appétit Management Co.,
Aramark and Sodexo to sign the agreement, which demands more humane labor
standards from their Florida tomato suppliers and an increase of a penny per
bucket. But if the major supermarkets too do not sign this agreement, growers
who verbally, sexually and physically abuse workers will be able to continue
selling tomatoes to the supermarkets. This could leave at least half of all the
fields without protection, making uniform enforcement of the agreement
throughout the fields difficult if not impossible.

“Supply chains are very opaque and secretive,” says Gerardo Reyes, a
farmworker and CIW staff member. “This is one of the reasons a lot of these
abuses continue. The corporations can always feign that they did not know the
abuses were happening or that they had any responsibility for them as long as
there is no transparency or accountability.”

One of the most celebrated modern cases of fieldworker slavery was uncovered
in November 2007 after three workers escaped from a box truck in which they had
been locked. They and 12 others had been held as slaves for two and a half
years. They had to relieve themselves in a corner of the truck at night and pay
five dollars if they wanted to bathe with a garden hose. They were routinely
beaten. Some were chained to poles at times. During the days they worked on some
of the largest farms in Florida. It was the seventh such documented case of
slavery in a decade.

“As long as the supermarket industry refuses to sign this agreement it gives
the growers an escape,” says Reyes. “We need to bring the pressure of more
buyers who will sign the agreement to protect the workers. We have gotten all of
the major corporations within the fast food industry and food providers to sign
this agreement. Two of the three most important buyers within the industry are
on board. But if these supermarkets continue to hold out they can put all the
mechanisms we have set in place for control at risk. If Wal-Mart, Trader Joe’s
and other supermarkets say the only criteria is buying from those growers who
offer the lowest possible price then we will not be able to curb abuses. If the
agreement is in place and there is another case of slavery then the growers will
be put in a penalty box. If we do not have the ability to impose penalties then
there will always be a way for abusive growers to sell. The agreement calls on
these corporations to stop buying from growers, for example, that use slave
labor. Without the agreement there is no check on these practices.”

“Supermarkets, such as Trader Joe’s, insist they are responsible and fair,”
Reyes goes on. “They use their public relations to present themselves as a good
corporation. They sell this idea of fairness, this disguise. They use this more
sophisticated public relations campaign, one that presents them as a friend of
workers, while at the same time locking workers out of the discussion and
kicking us out of the room. They want business as usual. They do not want people
to question how their profits are created. We have to fight not only them but
this sophisticated public relations tactic. We are on the verge of a systemic
change, but corporations like Trader Joe’s are using all their power to push us
back.”

By Robert Scheer

It’s getting too late to give President Barack Obama a pass on the economy.
Sure, he inherited an enormous mess from George W., who whistled “Dixie” while
the banking system imploded. But it’s time for Democrats to admit that their guy
bears considerable responsibility for not turning things around.

He blindly followed President Bush’s would-be remedy of throwing money at the
banks and getting nothing in return for beleaguered homeowners. Sadly, Obama has
proved to be nothing more than a Bill Clinton clone triangulating with the Wall
Street lobbyists at the expense of ordinary folks.

That fatal arc of betrayal was captured by a headline in Tuesday’s New York
Times: “Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on ‘Lost Decade.’ ” The Census Bureau
reported that there are now 46.2 million Americans living below the official
poverty line—the highest number in the 52 years since that statistic was first
measured—and median household income has fallen back to the 1996 level. As
Harvard economist Lawrence Katz summarized this dreary news: “This is truly a
lost decade. We think of America as a place where every generation is doing
better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape
than it was in the late 1990s.”

The late 1990s, it should be noted, is when President Clinton, working with
Phil Gramm, the Republican head of the Senate Banking Committee, pushed through
two critical pieces of legislation ending effective regulation of the banks. The
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act smashed the wall between high-flying Wall Street
investment firms and the once staid commercial banks entrusted with the deposits
and mortgages of America’s innocent souls. The next year Clinton signed the
Commodity Futures Modernization Act, banning any effective regulation of the
rapidly expanded trade in the collateralized debt obligations and credit default
swaps that have since haunted the world’s economy.

The collapse of those toxic securities led to the housing crisis and resulted
in 15.1 percent of Americans now living in poverty, the same level as when Bill
Clinton took office. But thanks to another one of Clinton’s grand triangulation
strategies, the one he called “welfare reform,” the impoverished are now denied
the safety net that existed before the Clinton presidency. Although 22 percent
of U.S. children are now below the poverty line, the Aid to Families With
Dependent Children program no longer exists.

Some of us who voted for Obama thought he was no Clinton, but he was and is,
as was demonstrated in his first days in office when he appointed two key
veterans of the Clinton Treasury Department, Lawrence Summers and Timothy
Geithner, to head up the Obama economic team. Geithner, as treasury secretary,
is the point man for the administration’s push to pass the so-called American
Jobs Act, which the president hyped in his Sept. 8 speech to Congress and the
nation. It was pure Clinton bull: I feel your pain while I help the superrich
pick your pocket.

Space permits only one example, that of General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt,
whom Obama selected to head his “Jobs Council of leaders from different
industries who are developing a wide range of new ideas to help companies grow
and create jobs.” Was that some cruel joke? GE under Immelt has grown and
created jobs, but they are abroad rather than in our own troubled country. As a
result, by the end of last year, only 134,000 of GE’s workforce of 304,000 were
based in the United States; the remainder—and 82 percent of the company’s
profit—were sheltered abroad.

Ironically, GE’s ability to avoid taxes was restricted by President Ronald
Reagan, who had once been a spokesman for GE but was outraged by the company’s
use of tax loopholes. It remained for President Clinton to offer GE some new tax
breaks. As a result of being able to shelter profit abroad last year, GE had
profits of $14.2 billion but claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion. Immelt was
the elephant in the room when Obama said in his speech last week: “Our tax code
should not give an advantage to companies that can afford the best-connected
lobbyists. It should give an advantage to companies that invest and create jobs
right here in the United States of America.”

It has been a long time since GE was creating jobs here during its “better
light bulb” days, and the last spurt of GE participation in the U.S. economy
came through its unit GE Capital, which specialized in toxic mortgage lending
that once produced more than half of the company’s profits but ultimately led to
a taxpayer bailout.

Someone who knows a great deal about that sort of scam is Elizabeth Warren,
the consumer advocate and Harvard law professor pushed out of Obama’s inner
circle. In launching her campaign for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts this
week, Warren posted a video that clearly defined the enemy:

“Washington is rigged for big corporations. A big company, like GE, pays
nothing in taxes, and we’re asking college students to take on even more debt to
get an education?”

Obama in appointing Immelt last January praised him as a business leader who
“understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy.”
Apparently, what Immelt understands is that what it takes to satisfy corporate
interests instead of national needs is conning a president into looking the
other way while you send jobs abroad.

During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog and others have been conducting on the state of America’s youth.

Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.

It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.

The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, which Smith and company recount in a new book, “Lost in Transition,” you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”

Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”

Many were quick to talk about their moral feelings but hesitant to link these feelings to any broader thinking about a shared moral framework or obligation. As one put it, “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”

Smith and company found an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism — of relativism and nonjudgmentalism. Again, this doesn’t mean that America’s young people are immoral. Far from it. But, Smith and company emphasize, they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America.

Smith and company are stunned, for example, that the interviewees were so completely untroubled by rabid consumerism. (This was the summer of 2008, just before the crash).

Many of these shortcomings will sort themselves out as these youngsters get married, have kids, enter a profession or fit into more clearly defined social roles. Institutions will inculcate certain habits. Broader moral horizons will be forced upon them. But their attitudes at the start of their adult lives do reveal something about American culture. For decades, writers from different perspectives have been warning about the erosion of shared moral frameworks and the rise of an easygoing moral individualism.

Allan Bloom and Gertrude Himmelfarb warned that sturdy virtues are being diluted into shallow values. Alasdair MacIntyre has written about emotivism, the idea that it’s impossible to secure moral agreement in our culture because all judgments are based on how we feel at the moment.

Charles Taylor has argued that morals have become separated from moral sources. People are less likely to feel embedded on a moral landscape that transcends self. James Davison Hunter wrote a book called “The Death of Character.” Smith’s interviewees are living, breathing examples of the trends these writers have described.

In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.

There’s a specter haunting American politics: national decline. Is America on the way down, and, if so, what can be done about it?

The Republicans, and Rick Perry in particular, have a reasonably strong story to tell about decline. America became great, they explain, because its citizens possessed certain vigorous virtues: self-reliance, personal responsibility, industriousness and a passion for freedom.

But, over the years, government has grown and undermined these virtues. Wall Street financiers no longer have to behave prudently because they know government will bail them out. Middle-class families no longer have to practice thrift because they know they can use government to force future generations to pay for their retirements. Dads no longer have to marry the women they impregnate because government will step in and provide support.

Moreover, a growing government sucked resources away from the most productive parts of the economy — innovators, entrepreneurs and workers — and redirected it to the most politically connected parts. The byzantine tax code and regulatory state has clogged the arteries of American dynamism.

The current task, therefore, is, as Rick Perry says, to make the government “inconsequential” in people’s lives — to pare back the state to revive personal responsibility and private initiative.

There’s much truth to this narrative. Stable societies are breeding grounds for interest groups. Over time, these interest groups use government to establish sinecures for themselves, which gradually strangle the economy they are built on — like parasitic vines around a tree.

Yet as great as the need is to streamline, reform and prune the state, that will not be enough to restore America’s vigorous virtues. This is where current Republican orthodoxy is necessary but insufficient. There are certain tasks ahead that cannot be addressed simply by getting government out of the way.

In the first place, there is the need to rebuild America’s human capital. The United States became the wealthiest nation on earth primarily because Americans were the best educated.

That advantage has entirely eroded over the past 30 years. It will take an active government to reverse this stagnation — from prenatal and early childhood education straight up through adult technical training and investments in scientific and other research. If government is “inconsequential” in this sphere, then continued American decline is inevitable.

Then there are the long-term structural problems plaguing the economy. There’s strong evidence to suggest that the rate of technological innovation has been slowing down. In addition, America is producing fewer business start-ups. Job creation was dismal even in the seven years before the recession, when taxes were low and Republicans ran the regulatory agencies. As economist Michael Spence has argued, nearly all of the job growth over the past 20 years has been in sectors where American workers don’t have to compete with workers overseas.

Meanwhile, middle-class wages have been stagnant for a generation. Inequality is rising, and society is stratifying. Americans are less likely to move in search of opportunity. Social mobility has been flat for decades, and American social mobility is no better than European social mobility.

Some of these problems are exacerbated by government regulations and could be eased if government pulled back. But most of them have nothing to do with government and are related to globalization, an aging society, cultural trends and the nature of technological change.

Republicans have done almost nothing to grapple with and address these deeper structural problems. Tackling them means shifting America’s economic model — tilting the playing field away from consumption toward production; away from entitlement spending and more toward investment in infrastructure, skills and technology; mitigating those forces that concentrate wealth and nurturing instead a broad-based opportunity society.

These shifts cannot be done by government alone, but they can’t be done without leadership from government. Just as the Washington and Lincoln administrations actively nurtured an industrial economy, so some future American administration will have to nurture a globalized producer society. Just as F.D.R. created a welfare model for the 20th century, some future administration will have to actively champion a sustainable welfare model for this one.

Finally, there is the problem of the social fabric. Segmented societies do not thrive, nor do ones, like ours, with diminishing social trust. Nanny-state government may have helped undermine personal responsibility and the social fabric, but that doesn’t mean the older habits and arrangements will magically regrow simply by reducing government’s role. For example, there has been a tragic rise in single parenthood, across all ethnic groups, but family structures won’t spontaneously regenerate without some serious activism, from both religious and community groups and government agencies.

In short, the current Republican policy of negativism — cut, cut cut — is not enough. To restore the vigorous virtues, the nanny state will have to be cut back, but the instigator state will have to be built up. That’s the only way to ward off national decline.

The first time I remember hearing the question “is it real?” was when I went
as a young boy to see a traveling show put on by “professional wrestlers” one
summer evening in the gym of the Forks River Elementary School in Elmwood,
Tennessee.

The evidence that it was real was palpable: “They’re really hurting each
other! That’s real blood! Look a’there! They can’t fake that!” On the other
hand, there was clearly a script (or in today’s language, a “narrative”), with
good guys to cheer and bad guys to boo.

But the most unusual and in some ways most interesting character in these
dramas was the referee: Whenever the bad guy committed a gross and obvious
violation of the “rules” — such as they were — like using a metal folding chair
to smack the good guy in the head, the referee always seemed to be preoccupied
with one of the cornermen, or looking the other way. Yet whenever the good guy —
after absorbing more abuse and unfairness than any reasonable person could
tolerate — committed the slightest infraction, the referee was all over him. The
answer to the question “Is it real?” seemed connected to the question of whether
the referee was somehow confused about his role: Was he too an entertainer?

That is pretty much the role now being played by most of the news media in
refereeing the current wrestling match over whether global warming is “real,”
and whether it has any connection to the constant dumping of 90 million tons of
heat-trapping emissions into the Earth’s thin shell of atmosphere every 24
hours.

Admittedly, the contest over global warming is a challenge for the referee
because it’s a tag-team match, a real free-for-all. In one corner of the ring
are Science and Reason. In the other corner: Poisonous Polluters and Right-wing
Ideologues.

The referee — in this analogy, the news media — seems confused about whether
he is in the news business or the entertainment business. Is he responsible for
ensuring a fair match? Or is he part of the show, selling tickets and building
the audience? The referee certainly seems distracted: by Donald Trump, Charlie
Sheen, the latest reality show — the list of serial obsessions is too long to
enumerate here.

But whatever the cause, the referee appears not to notice that the Polluters
and Ideologues are trampling all over the “rules” of democratic discourse. They
are financing pseudoscientists whose job is to manufacture doubt about what is
true and what is false; buying elected officials wholesale with bribes that the
politicians themselves have made “legal” and can now be made in secret; spending
hundreds of millions of dollars each year on misleading advertisements in the
mass media; hiring four anti-climate lobbyists for every member of the U.S.
Senate and House of Representatives. (Question: Would Michael Jordan have been a
star if he was covered by four defensive players every step he took on the
basketball court?)

This script, of course, is not entirely new: A half-century ago, when Science
and Reason established the linkage between cigarettes and lung diseases, the
tobacco industry hired actors, dressed them up as doctors, and paid them to look
into television cameras and tell people that the linkage revealed in the Surgeon
General’s Report was not real at all. The show went on for decades, with more
Americans killed each year by cigarettes than all of the U.S. soldiers killed in
all of World War II.

This time, the scientific consensus is even stronger. It has been endorsed by
every National Academy of science of every major country on the planet, every
major professional scientific society related to the study of global warming and
98 percent of climate scientists throughout the world. In the latest and most
authoritative study by 3,000 of the very best scientific experts in the world,
the evidence was judged “unequivocal.”

But wait! The good guys transgressed the rules of decorum, as evidenced in
their private e-mails that were stolen and put on the Internet. The referee is
all over it: Penalty! Go to your corner! And in their 3,000-page report, the
scientists made some mistakes! Another penalty!

And if more of the audience is left confused about whether the climate crisis
is real? Well, the show must go on. After all, it’s entertainment. There are
tickets to be sold, eyeballs to glue to the screen.

Part of the script for this show was leaked to The New York Times as
early as 1991. In an internal document, a consortium of the largest
global-warming polluters spelled out their principal strategy: “Reposition
global warming as theory, rather than fact.” Ever since, they have been sowing
doubt even more effectively than the tobacco companies before them.

To sell their false narrative, the Polluters and Ideologues have found it
essential to undermine the public’s respect for Science and Reason by attacking
the integrity of the climate scientists. That is why the scientists are
regularly accused of falsifying evidence and exaggerating its implications in a
greedy effort to win more research grants, or secretly pursuing a hidden
political agenda to expand the power of government. Such slanderous insults are
deeply ironic: extremist ideologues — many financed or employed by carbon
polluters — accusing scientists of being greedy extremist ideologues.

After World War II, a philosopher studying the impact of organized propaganda
on the quality of democratic debate wrote, “The conversion of all questions of
truth into questions of power has attacked the very heart of the distinction
between true and false.”

Is the climate crisis real? Yes, of course it is. Pause for a moment to
consider these events of just the past 12 months:

• Heat. According to NASA, 2010 was tied with 2005 as the
hottest year measured since instruments were first used systematically in the
1880s. Nineteen countries set all-time high temperature records. One city in
Pakistan, Mohenjo-Daro, reached 128.3 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest
temperature ever measured in an Asian city. Nine of the 10 hottest years in
history have occurred in the last 13 years. The past decade was the hottest ever
measured, even though half of that decade represented a “solar minimum” — the
low ebb in the natural cycle of solar energy emanating from the sun.

• Floods. Megafloods displaced 20 million people in
Pakistan, further destabilizing a nuclear-armed country; inundated an area of
Australia larger than Germany and France combined; flooded 28 of the 32
districts that make up Colombia, where it has rained almost continuously for the
past year; caused a “thousand-year” flood in my home city of Nashville; and led
to all-time record flood levels in the Mississippi River Valley. Many places
around the world are now experiencing larger and more frequent extreme downpours
and snowstorms; last year’s “Snowmaggedon” in the northeastern United States is
part of the same pattern, notwithstanding the guffaws of deniers.

• Drought. Historic drought and fires in Russia killed an
estimated 56,000 people and caused wheat and other food crops in Russia, Ukraine
and Kazakhstan to be removed from the global market, contributing to a record
spike in food prices. “Practically everything is burning,” Russian president
Dmitry Medvedev declared. “What’s happening with the planet’s climate right now
needs to be a wake-up call to all of us.” The drought level in much of Texas has
been raised from “extreme” to “exceptional,” the highest category. This spring
the majority of the counties in Texas were on fire, and Gov. Rick Perry
requested a major disaster declaration for all but two of the state’s 254
counties. Arizona is now fighting the largest fire in its history. Since 1970,
the fire season throughout the American West has increased by 78 days. Extreme
droughts in central China and northern France are currently drying up reservoirs
and killing crops.

• Melting Ice. An enormous mass of ice, four times larger
than the island of Manhattan, broke off from northern Greenland last year and
slipped into the sea. The acceleration of ice loss in both Greenland and
Antarctica has caused another upward revision of global sea-level rise and the
numbers of refugees expected from low-lying coastal areas. The Arctic ice cap,
which reached a record low volume last year, has lost as much as 40 percent of
its area during summer in just 30 years.

These extreme events are happening in real time. It is not uncommon for the
nightly newscast to resemble a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. Yet
most of the news media completely ignore how such events are connected to the
climate crisis, or dismiss the connection as controversial; after all, there are
scientists on one side of the debate and deniers on the other. A Fox News
executive, in an internal e-mail to the network’s reporters and editors that
later became public, questioned the “veracity of climate change data” and
ordered the journalists to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed
(or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such
theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.”

But in the “real” world, the record droughts, fires, floods and mudslides
continue to increase in severity and frequency. Leading climate scientists like
Jim Hansen and Kevin Trenberth now say that events like these would almost
certainly not be occurring without the influence of man-made global warming. And
that’s a shift in the way they frame these impacts. Scientists used to caution
that we were increasing the probability of such extreme events by “loading the
dice” — pumping more carbon into the atmosphere. Now the scientists go much
further, warning that we are “painting more dots on the dice.”  We are not only
more likely to roll 12s; we are now rolling 13s and 14s. In other words, the
biggest storms are not only becoming more frequent, they are getting bigger,
stronger and more destructive.

“The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes
is climate change,” Munich Re, one of the two largest reinsurance companies in
the world, recently stated. “The view that weather extremes are more frequent
and intense due to global warming coincides with the current state of scientific
knowledge.”

Many of the extreme and destructive events are the result of the rapid
increase in the amount of heat energy from the sun that is trapped in the
atmosphere, which is radically disrupting the planet’s water cycle. More heat
energy evaporates more water into the air, and the warmer air holds a lot more
moisture. This has huge consequences that we now see all around the world.

When a storm unleashes a downpour of rain or snow, the precipitation does not
originate just in the part of the sky directly above where it falls. Storms
reach out — sometimes as far as 2,000 miles — to suck in water vapor from large
areas of the sky, including the skies above oceans, where water vapor has
increased by four percent in just the last 30 years. (Scientists often compare
this phenomenon to what happens in a bathtub when you open the drain; the water
rushing out comes from the whole tub, not just from the part of the tub directly
above the drain. And when the tub is filled with more water, more goes down the
drain. In the same way, when the warmer sky is filled with a lot more water
vapor, there are bigger downpours when a storm cell opens the “drain.”)

In many areas, these bigger downpours also mean longer periods between storms
— at the same time that the extra heat in the air is also drying out the soil.
That is part of the reason so many areas have been experiencing both record
floods and deeper, longer-lasting droughts.

Moreover, the scientists have been warning us for quite some time — in
increasingly urgent tones — that things will get much, much worse if we continue
the reckless dumping of more and more heat-trapping pollution into the
atmosphere. Drought
is projected to spread across significant, highly populated areas of the globe
throughout this century. Look at what the scientists say is in store for the
Mediterranean nations. Should we care about the loss of Spain, France, Italy,
the Balkans, Turkey, Tunisia? Look at what they say is in store for Mexico.
Should we notice? Should we care?

Maybe it’s just easier, psychologically, to swallow the lie that these
scientists who devote their lives to their work are actually greedy deceivers
and left-wing extremists — and that we should instead put our faith in the
pseudoscientists financed by large carbon polluters whose business plans depend
on their continued use of the atmospheric commons as a place to dump their
gaseous, heat-trapping waste without limit or constraint, free of charge.

The truth is this: What we are doing is functionally insane. If we do not
change this pattern, we will condemn our children and all future generations to
struggle with ecological curses for several millennia to come. Twenty percent of
the global-warming pollution we spew into the sky each day will still be there
20,000 years from now!

We do have another choice. Renewable energy sources are coming into their
own. Both solar and wind will soon produce power at costs that are competitive
with fossil fuels; indications are that twice as many solar installations were
erected worldwide last year as compared to 2009. The reductions in cost and the
improvements in efficiency of photovoltaic cells over the past decade appear to
be following an exponential curve that resembles a less dramatic but still
startling version of what happened with computer chips over the past 50
years.

Enhanced geothermal energy is potentially a nearly limitless source of
competitive electricity. Increased energy efficiency is already saving
businesses money and reducing emissions significantly. New generations of
biomass energy — ones that do not rely on food crops, unlike the mistaken
strategy of making ethanol from corn — are extremely promising. Sustainable
forestry and agriculture both make economic as well as environmental sense. And
all of these options would spread even more rapidly if we stopped subsidizing
Big Oil and Coal and put a price on carbon that reflected the true cost of
fossil energy — either through the much-maligned cap-and-trade approach, or
through a revenue-neutral tax swap.

All over the world, the grassroots movement in favor of changing public
policies to confront the climate crisis and build a more prosperous, sustainable
future is growing rapidly. But most governments remain paralyzed, unable to take
action — even after years of volatile gasoline prices, repeated wars in the
Persian Gulf, one energy-related disaster after another, and a seemingly endless
stream of unprecedented and lethal weather disasters.

Continuing on our current course would be suicidal for global civilization.
But the key question is: How do we drive home that fact in a democratic society
when questions of truth have been converted into questions of power? When the
distinction between what is true and what is false is being attacked
relentlessly, and when the referee in the contest between truth and falsehood
has become an entertainer selling tickets to a phony wrestling match?

The “wrestling ring” in this metaphor is the conversation of democracy. It
used to be called the “public square.” In ancient Athens, it was the Agora. In
the Roman Republic, it was the Forum. In the Egypt of the recent Arab Spring,
“Tahrir Square” was both real and metaphorical — encompassing Facebook, Twitter,
Al-Jazeera and texting.

In the America of the late-18th century, the conversation that led to our own
“Spring” took place in printed words: pamphlets, newsprint, books, the “Republic
of Letters.” It represented the fullest flower of the Enlightenment, during
which the oligarchic power of the monarchies, the feudal lords and the Medieval
Church was overthrown and replaced with a new sovereign: the Rule of Reason.

The public square that gave birth to the new consciousness of the
Enlightenment emerged in the dozen generations following the invention of the
printing press — “the Gutenberg Galaxy,” the scholar Marshall McLuhan called it
— a space in which the conversation of democracy was almost equally accessible
to every literate person. Individuals could both find the knowledge that had
previously been restricted to elites and contribute their own ideas.

Ideas that found resonance with others rose in prominence much the way Google
searches do today, finding an ever larger audience and becoming a source of
political power for individuals with neither wealth nor force of arms. Thomas
Paine, to take one example, emigrated from England to Philadelphia with no
wealth, no family connections and no power other than that which came from his
ability to think and write clearly — yet his Common Sense became the
Harry Potter of Revolutionary America. The “public interest” mattered,
was actively discussed and pursued.

But the “public square” that gave birth to America has been transformed
beyond all recognition. The conversation that matters most to the shaping of the
“public mind” now takes place on television. Newspapers and magazines are in
decline. The Internet, still in its early days, will one day support business
models that make true journalism profitable — but up until now, the only
successful news websites aggregate content from struggling print publications.
Web versions of the newspapers themselves are, with few exceptions, not yet
making money. They bring to mind the classic image of Wile E. Coyote running
furiously in midair just beyond the edge of the cliff, before plummeting to the
desert floor far beneath him.

The average American, meanwhile, is watching television an astonishing five
hours a day. In the average household, at least one television set is turned on
more than eight hours a day. Moreover, approximately 75 percent of those using
the Internet frequently watch television at the same time that they are
online.

Unlike access to the “public square” of early America, access to television
requires large amounts of money. Thomas Paine could walk out of his front door
in Philadelphia and find a dozen competing, low-cost print shops within blocks
of his home. Today, if he traveled to the nearest TV station, or to the
headquarters of nearby Comcast — the dominant television provider in America —
and tried to deliver his new ideas to the American people, he would be laughed
off the premises. The public square that used to be a commons has been
refeudalized, and the gatekeepers charge large rents for the privilege of
communicating to the American people over the only medium that really affects
their thinking. “Citizens” are now referred to more commonly as “consumers” or
“the audience.”

That is why up to 80 percent of the campaign budgets for candidates in both
major political parties is devoted to the purchase of 30-second TV ads. Since
the rates charged for these commercials increase each year, the candidates are
forced to raise more and more money in each two-year campaign cycle.

Of course, the only reliable sources from which such large sums can be raised
continuously are business lobbies. Organized labor, a shadow of its former self,

struggles to compete, and individuals are limited by law to making small
contributions. During the 2008 campaign, there was a bubble of hope that
Internet-based fundraising might even the scales, but in the end, Democrats as
well as Republicans relied far more on traditional sources of large
contributions. Moreover, the recent deregulation of unlimited — and secret —
donations by wealthy corporations has made the imbalance even worse.

In the new ecology of political discourse, special-interest contributors of
the large sums of money now required for the privilege of addressing voters on a
wholesale basis are not squeamish about asking for the quo they expect in return
for their quid. Politicians who don’t acquiesce don’t get the money they need to
be elected and re-elected. And the impact is doubled when special interests make
clear — usually bluntly — that the money they are withholding will go instead to
opponents who are more than happy to pledge the desired quo. Politicians have
been racing to the bottom for some time, and are presently tunneling to new
depths. It is now commonplace for congressmen and senators first elected decades
ago — as I was — to comment in private that the whole process has become
unbelievably crass, degrading and horribly destructive to the core values of
American democracy.

Largely as a result, the concerns of the wealthiest individuals and
corporations routinely trump the concerns of average Americans and small
businesses. There are a ridiculously large number of examples: eliminating the
inheritance tax paid by the wealthiest one percent of families is considered a
much higher priority than addressing the suffering of the millions of long-term
unemployed; Wall Street’s interest in legalizing gambling in trillions of
dollars of “derivatives” was considered way more important than protecting the
integrity of the financial system and the interests of middle-income home
buyers. It’s a long list.

Almost every group organized to promote and protect the “public interest” has
been backpedaling and on the defensive. By sharp contrast, when a coalition of
powerful special interests sets out to manipulate U.S. policy, their impact can
be startling — and the damage to the true national interest can be
devastating.

In 2002, for example, the feverish desire to invade Iraq required convincing
the American people that Saddam Hussein was somehow responsible for attacking
the United States on September 11th, 2001, and that he was preparing to attack
us again, perhaps with nuclear weapons. When the evidence — the “facts” — stood
in the way of that effort to shape the public mind, they were ridiculed,
maligned and ignored. Behind the scenes, the intelligence was manipulated and
the public was intentionally deceived. Allies were pressured to adopt the same
approach with their publics. A recent inquiry in the U.K. confirmed this yet
again. “We knew at the time that the purpose of the dossier was precisely to
make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence,” Maj.
Gen. Michael Laurie testified. “To make the best out of sparse and inconclusive
intelligence, the wording was developed with care.” Why? As British intelligence
put it, the overthrow of Saddam was “a prize because it could give new security
to oil supplies.”

That goal — the real goal — could have been debated on its own terms. But as
Bush administration officials have acknowledged, a truly candid presentation
would not have resulted in sufficient public support for the launching of a new
war. They knew that because they had studied it and polled it. So they
manipulated the debate, downplayed the real motive for the invasion, and made a
different case to the public — one based on falsehoods.

And the “referee” — the news media — looked the other way. Some, like Fox
News, were hyperactive cheerleaders. Others were intimidated into going along by
the vitriol heaped on any who asked inconvenient questions. (They know it; many
now acknowledge it, sheepishly and apologetically.)

Senators themselves fell, with a few honorable exceptions, into the same two
camps. A few weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, the late Robert Byrd —
God rest his soul — thundered on the Senate floor about the pitiful quality of
the debate over the choice between war and peace: “Yet, this Chamber is, for the
most part, silent — ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no
discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this
particular war. There is nothing.”

The chamber was silent, in part, because many senators were somewhere else —
attending cocktail parties and receptions, largely with special-interest donors,
raising money to buy TV ads for their next campaigns. Nowadays, in fact, the
scheduling of many special-interest fundraisers mirrors the schedule of votes
pending in the House and Senate.

By the time we invaded Iraq, polls showed, nearly three-quarters of the
American people were convinced that the person responsible for the planes flying
into the World Trade Center Towers was indeed Saddam Hussein. The rest is
history — though, as Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even
past.” Because of that distortion of the truth in the past, we are still in
Iraq; and because the bulk of our troops and intelligence assets were abruptly
diverted from Afghanistan to Iraq, we are also still in Afghanistan.

In the same way, because the banks had their way with Congress when it came
to gambling on unregulated derivatives and recklessly endangering credit markets
with subprime mortgages, we still have almost double-digit unemployment,
historic deficits, Greece and possibly other European countries teetering on the
edge of default, and the threat of a double-dip recession. Even the potential
default of the United States of America is now being treated by many politicians
and too many in the media as yet another phony wrestling match, a political
game. Are the potential economic consequences of a U.S. default “real”? Of
course they are! Have we gone completely nuts?

We haven’t gone nuts — but the “conversation of democracy” has become so
deeply dysfunctional that our ability to make intelligent collective decisions
has been seriously impaired. Throughout American history, we relied on the
vibrancy of our public square — and the quality of our democratic discourse — to
make better decisions than most nations in the history of the world. But we are
now routinely making really bad decisions that completely ignore the best
available evidence of what is true and what is false. When the distinction
between truth and falsehood is systematically attacked without shame or
consequence — when a great nation makes crucially important decisions on the
basis of completely false information that is no longer adequately filtered
through the fact-checking function of a healthy and honest public discussion
— the public interest is severely damaged.

That is exactly what is happening with U.S. decisions regarding the climate
crisis. The best available evidence demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt
that the reckless spewing of global-warming pollution in obscene quantities into
the atmospheric commons is having exactly the consequences long predicted by
scientists who have analyzed the known facts according to the laws of
physics.

The emergence of the climate crisis seems sudden only because of a relatively
recent discontinuity in the relationship between human civilization and the
planet’s ecological system. In the past century, we have quadrupled global
population while relying on the burning of carbon-based fuels — coal, oil and
gas — for 85 percent of the world’s energy. We are also cutting and burning
forests that would otherwise help remove some of the added CO2 from the
atmosphere, and have converted agriculture to an industrial model that also runs
on carbon-based fuels and strip-mines carbon-rich soils.

The cumulative result is a radically new reality — and since human nature
makes us vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable, it
naturally seems difficult to accept. Moreover, since this new reality is painful
to contemplate, and requires big changes in policy and behavior that are at the
outer limit of our ability, it is all too easy to fall into the psychological
state of denial. As with financial issues like subprime mortgages and credit
default swaps, the climate crisis can seem too complex to worry about,
especially when the shills for the polluters constantly claim it’s all a hoax
anyway. And since the early impacts of climatic disruption are distributed
globally, they masquerade as an abstraction that is safe to ignore.

These vulnerabilities, rooted in our human nature, are being manipulated by
the tag-team of Polluters and Ideologues who are trying to deceive us. And the
referee — the news media — is once again distracted. As with the invasion of
Iraq, some are hyperactive cheerleaders for the deception, while others are
intimidated into complicity, timidity and silence by the astonishing vitriol
heaped upon those who dare to present the best evidence in a professional
manner. Just as TV networks who beat the drums of war prior to the Iraq invasion
were rewarded with higher ratings, networks now seem reluctant to present the
truth about the link between carbon pollution and global warming out of fear
that conservative viewers will change the channel — and fear that they will
receive a torrent of flame e-mails from deniers.

Many politicians, unfortunately, also fall into the same two categories:
those who cheerlead for the deniers and those who cower before them. The latter
group now includes several candidates for the Republican presidential nomination
who have felt it necessary to abandon their previous support for action on the
climate crisis; at least one has been apologizing profusely to the deniers and
begging for their forgiveness.

“Intimidation” and “timidity” are connected by more than a shared word root.
The first is designed to produce the second. As Yeats wrote almost a century
ago, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate
intensity.”

Barack Obama’s approach to the climate crisis represents a special case that
requires careful analysis. His election was accompanied by intense hope that
many things in need of change would change. Some things have, but others have
not. Climate policy, unfortunately, is in the second category. Why?

First of all, anyone who honestly examines the incredible challenges
confronting President Obama when he took office has to feel enormous empathy for
him: the Great Recession, with the high unemployment and the enormous public and
private indebtedness it produced; two seemingly interminable wars; an
intractable political opposition whose true leaders — entertainers masquerading
as pundits — openly declared that their objective was to ensure that the new
president failed; a badly broken Senate that is almost completely paralyzed by
the threat of filibuster and is controlled lock, stock and barrel by the oil and
coal industries; a contingent of nominal supporters in Congress who are
indentured servants of the same special interests that control most of the
Republican Party; and a ferocious, well-financed and dishonest campaign poised
to vilify anyone who dares offer leadership for the reduction of global-warming
pollution.

In spite of these obstacles, President Obama included significant
climate-friendly initiatives in the economic stimulus package he presented to
Congress during his first month in office. With the skillful leadership of House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and committee chairmen Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, he
helped secure passage of a cap-and-trade measure in the House a few months
later. He implemented historic improvements in fuel-efficiency standards for
automobiles, and instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward
on the regulation of global-warming pollution under the Clean Air Act. He
appointed many excellent men and women to key positions, and they, in turn, have
made hundreds of changes in environmental and energy policy that have helped
move the country forward slightly on the climate issue. During his first six
months, he clearly articulated the link between environmental security, economic
security and national security — making the case that a national commitment to
renewable energy could simultaneously reduce unemployment, dependence on foreign
oil and vulnerability to the disruption of oil markets dominated by the Persian
Gulf reserves. And more recently, as the issue of long-term debt has forced
discussion of new revenue, he proposed the elimination of unnecessary and
expensive subsidies for oil and gas.

But in spite of these and other achievements, President Obama has thus far
failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate
change. After successfully passing his green stimulus package, he did nothing to
defend it when Congress decimated its funding. After the House passed cap and
trade, he did little to make passage in the Senate a priority. Senate advocates
— including one Republican — felt abandoned when the president made concessions
to oil and coal companies without asking for anything in return. He has also
called for a massive expansion of oil drilling in the United States, apparently
in an effort to defuse criticism from those who argue speciously that “drill,
baby, drill” is the answer to our growing dependence on foreign oil.

The failure to pass legislation to limit global-warming pollution ensured
that the much-anticipated Copenhagen summit on a global treaty in 2009 would
also end in failure. The president showed courage in attending the summit and
securing a rhetorical agreement to prevent a complete collapse of the
international process, but that’s all it was — a rhetorical agreement. During
the final years of the Bush-Cheney administration, the rest of the world was
waiting for a new president who would aggressively tackle the climate crisis —
and when it became clear that there would be no real change from the Bush era,
the agenda at Copenhagen changed from “How do we complete this historic
breakthrough?” to “How can we paper over this embarrassing disappointment?”

Some concluded from the failure in Copenhagen that it was time to give up on
the entire U.N.-sponsored process for seeking an international agreement to
reduce both global-warming pollution and deforestation. Ultimately, however, the
only way to address the climate crisis will be with a global agreement that in
one way or another puts a price on carbon. And whatever approach is eventually
chosen, the U.S. simply must provide leadership by changing our own policy.

Yet without presidential leadership that focuses intensely on making the
public aware of the reality we face, nothing will change. The real power of any
president, as Richard Neustadt wrote, is “the power to persuade.” Yet President
Obama has never presented to the American people the magnitude of the climate
crisis. He has simply not made the case for action. He has not defended the
science against the ongoing, withering and dishonest attacks. Nor has he
provided a presidential venue for the scientific community — including our own
National Academy — to bring the reality of the science before the public.

Here is the core of it: we are destroying the climate balance that is
essential to the survival of our civilization. This is not a distant or abstract
threat; it is happening now. The United States is the only nation that can rally
a global effort to save our future. And the president is the only person who can
rally the United States.

Many political advisers assume that a president has to deal with the world of
politics as he finds it, and that it is unwise to risk political capital on an
effort to actually lead the country toward a new understanding of the real
threats and real opportunities we face. Concentrate on the politics of
re-election, they say. Don’t take chances.

All that might be completely understandable and make perfect sense in a world
where the climate crisis wasn’t “real.” Those of us who support and admire
President Obama understand how difficult the politics of this issue are in the
context of the massive opposition to doing anything at all — or even to
recognizing that there is a crisis. And assuming that the Republicans come to
their senses and avoid nominating a clown, his re-election is likely to involve
a hard-fought battle with high stakes for the country. All of his supporters
understand that it would be self-defeating to weaken Obama and heighten the risk
of another step backward. Even writing an article like this one carries risks;
opponents of the president will excerpt the criticism and strip it of
context.

But in this case, the President has reality on his side. The scientific
consensus is far stronger today than at any time in the past. Here is the truth:
The Earth is round; Saddam Hussein did not attack us on 9/11; Elvis is dead;
Obama was born in the United States; and the climate crisis is real. It is time
to act.

Those who profit from the unconstrained pollution that is the primary cause
of climate change are determined to block our perception of this reality. They
have help from many sides: from the private sector, which is now free to make
unlimited and secret campaign contributions; from politicians who have conflated
their tenures in office with the pursuit of the people’s best interests; and —
tragically — from the press itself, which treats deception and falsehood on the
same plane as scientific fact, and calls it objective reporting of alternative
opinions.

All things are not equally true. It is time to face reality. We ignored
reality in the marketplace and nearly destroyed the world economic system. We
are likewise ignoring reality in the environment, and the consequences could be
several orders of magnitude worse. Determining what is real can be a challenge
in our culture, but in order to make wise choices in the presence of such grave
risks, we must use common sense and the rule of reason in coming to an agreement
on what is true.

So how can we make it happen? How can we as individuals make a difference? In
five basic ways:

First, become a committed advocate for solving the crisis. You can start with
something simple: Speak up whenever the subject of climate arises. When a friend
or acquaintance expresses doubt that the crisis is real, or that it’s some sort
of hoax, don’t let the opportunity pass to put down your personal marker. The
civil rights revolution may have been driven by activists who put their lives on
the line, but it was partly won by average Americans who began to challenge
racist comments in everyday conversations.

Second, deepen your commitment by making consumer choices that reduce energy
use and reduce your impact on the environment. The demand by individuals for
change in the marketplace has already led many businesses to take truly
significant steps to reduce their global-warming pollution. Some of the
corporate changes are more symbolic than real — “green-washing,” as it’s called
— but a surprising amount of real progress is taking place. Walmart, to pick one
example, is moving aggressively to cut its carbon footprint by 20 million metric
tons, in part by pressuring its suppliers to cut down on wasteful packaging and
use lower-carbon transportation alternatives. Reward those companies that are
providing leadership.

Third, join an organization committed to action on this issue. The Alliance
for Climate Protection (climateprotect.org), which I chair, has grassroots
action plans for the summer and fall that spell out lots of ways to fight
effectively for the policy changes we need. We can also enable you to host a
slide show in your community on solutions to the climate crisis — presented by
one of the 4,000 volunteers we have trained. Invite your friends and neighbors
to come and then enlist them to join the cause.

Fourth, contact your local newspapers and television stations when they put
out claptrap on climate — and let them know you’re fed up with their stubborn
and cowardly resistance to reporting the facts of this issue. One of the main
reasons they are so wimpy and irresponsible about global warming is that they’re
frightened of the reaction they get from the deniers when they report the
science objectively. So let them know that deniers are not the only ones in town
with game. Stay on them! Don’t let up! It’s true that some media outlets are
getting instructions from their owners on this issue, and that others are
influenced by big advertisers, but many of them are surprisingly responsive to a
genuine outpouring of opinion from their viewers and readers. It is way past
time for the ref to do his job.

Finally, and above all, don’t give up on the political system. Even though it
is rigged by special interests, it is not so far gone that candidates and
elected officials don’t have to pay attention to persistent, engaged and
committed individuals. President Franklin Roosevelt once told civil rights
leaders who were pressing him for change that he agreed with them about the need
for greater equality for black Americans. Then, as the story goes, he added with
a wry smile, “Now go out and make me do it.”

To make our elected leaders take action to solve the climate crisis, we must
forcefully communicate the following message: “I care a lot about global
warming; I am paying very careful attention to the way you vote and what you say
about it; if you are on the wrong side, I am not only going to vote against you,
I will work hard to defeat you — regardless of party. If you are on the right
side, I will work hard to elect you.”

Why do you think President Obama and Congress changed their game on “don’t
ask, don’t tell?” It happened because enough Americans delivered exactly that
tough message to candidates who wanted their votes. When enough people care
passionately enough to drive that message home on the climate crisis,
politicians will look at their hole cards, and enough of them will change their
game to make all the difference we need.

This is not naive; trust me on this. It may take more individual voters to
beat the Polluters and Ideologues now than it once did — when special-interest
money was less dominant. But when enough people speak this way to candidates,
and convince them that they are dead serious about it, change will happen — both
in Congress and in the White House. As the great abolitionist leader Frederick
Douglass once observed, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did,
and it never will.”

What is now at risk in the climate debate is nothing less than our ability to
communicate with one another according to a protocol that binds all participants
to seek reason and evaluate facts honestly. The ability to perceive reality is a
prerequisite for self-governance. Wishful thinking and denial lead to dead ends.
When it works, the democratic process helps clear the way toward reality, by
exposing false argumentation to the best available evidence. That is why the
Constitution affords such unique protection to freedom of the press and of
speech.

The climate crisis, in reality, is a struggle for the soul of America. It is
about whether or not we are still capable — given the ill health of our
democracy and the current dominance of wealth over reason — of perceiving
important and complex realities clearly enough to promote and protect the
sustainable well-being of the many. What hangs in the balance is the future of
civilization as we know it.

By David Sirota

According to the U.S. government, the list of known bogeymen working to
compromise American national security is long, and getting longer by the day. By
my back-of-the-envelope count, we have shoe bombers, underwear bombers, dirty
bombers and car bombers. Now, we are being told to fear “implant bombers” who
will surgically attach explosives to their innards.

All of these threats are indeed scary. But the fear of individual attacks has
diverted attention from a more systemic threat of terrorists or foreign
governments exploiting our economy’s penchant for job-offshoring. How? By using
our corresponding reliance on imports to stitch security-compromising technology
into our society’s central IT nervous system.

Sounds far-fetched, right? That’s what I thought, until I read a recent
article in Fast Company. Covering a little-noticed congressional hearing, the
magazine reported that a top Department of Homeland Security official “admitted
on the record that electronics sold in the U.S. are being preloaded with
spyware, malware, and security-compromising components.”

The process through which this happens is straightforward—and its connection
to our current trade policies is obvious. First, an American company or
governmental agency orders computer hardware or software from a tech company.
Then, because the “free” trade era has incentivized that company to move its
production facilities to low-wage countries, much of that order is actually
fulfilled at foreign factories where security standards may be lacking.

If this still sounds far-fetched, remember that in the offshoring age, one of
the major high-tech exporters is China. That is, the country which has been
turning computers into stealth weapons of the police state (for proof, Google
the terms “Great Firewall” or “Green Dam”).

Sadly, this threat is about way more than new glitches in Angry Birds. At a
time when missiles are remotely fired via keystrokes, supply-chain
vulnerabilities in high-tech products are a genuine security problem.

What might those vulnerabilities mean in practice? As the U.S.-China Economic
and Security Review Commission reported, they could mean “kill switches”
secretly implanted in Pentagon systems that control our arsenal. Or they could
mean new backdoors that allow Chinese military hackers to again breach Defense
Department computer networks, as they did in 2007.

The possibilities are, unfortunately, endless. And yet this threat has been
largely ignored for two reasons.

First, the threat is invisible, and therefore doesn’t make for good
television. Instead, much of the media promotes stories involving sensational
images of naked-body scanners and ignores less telegenic monsters lurking within
circuits, algorithms and code.

Second, an examination of supply chain vulnerabilities would force us to
question free-trade theologies that powerful interests don’t want challenged.

For decades, trade-related reporting has mostly focused on jobs. Left almost
completely unmentioned are other concerns that free-trade critics have
raised—concerns about the environment, human rights and, yes, national security.

The media and political Establishment avoid discussing these issues not
because they are insignificant, but because the corporations that own the media
and buy the politicians also profit off a regulation- and tariff-free trade
policy that helps companies cut costs by moving production to low-wage
countries. Not surprisingly, then, a discussion of the downsides of those trade
policies has become a victim of a form of self-censorship that presents free
trade as an exclusively economic (and positive) policy.

Appreciating the power of that self-censorship is simply to behold the
reticence surrounding the supply chain problem. In a money-dominated media and
political system that otherwise loves a good scare, the silence suggests that
free-trade orthodoxy trumps all—even major national security threats.