Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Decolonizing Queerness in the Philippines

“Bakla” is often used as a slur – But the word has its roots in indigenous language and culture, and a time when Queer identities were revered.

Made in NYC… and TX: An Interview with The Casualties new frontman, David Tejas

B & W Photos courtesy of Adan Cedillo / Flier by Kaia Bellanca Beggs David Tejas is the new lead singer of The Casualties now for two years running. He’s been on tour alongside the The Casualties for fifteen years with his other band Krum Bums, and his newer project Starving Wolves. Read that story […]

The post Made in NYC… and TX: An Interview with The Casualties new frontman, David Tejas appeared first on Dying Scene.

Transparency and accountability in DNA collection, especially from vulnerable populations, is long overdue. That's why we're filing suit against the Department of Homeland Security. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evjwje/privacy-rights-group-sues-dhs-over-coercive-dna-tests-at-the-border

This is why movement politics is so important - noone was excited enough about Al Gore to hit the streets in protest of the political coup that stole the 2000 election, but in Bolivia MAS is fighting back.
@politics @OCRbot

The history of USENET and the alt. hierarchy shows what we lost when the Internet stopped being about protocols and started being about products—a catastrophe adversarial interoperability staved off for decades, until we blocked it with terrible tech laws. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/altinteroperabilityadversarial

MSNBC Is the Most Influential Network Among Liberals—And It’s Ignoring Bernie Sanders

Once known as the lone, forthright voice of liberalism on cable news, MSNBC began a lurch to the center in 2015 with its new chairman, Andrew Lack, going on a conservative pundit hiring spree and shedding the network’s “Lean Forward” branding.

Even so, MSNBC is positioned to have an outsized influence on the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. According to the Norman Lear Center, liberals watch MSNBC at (respectively) three and 10 times the rate of more moderate and conservative viewers. After Fox News, MSNBC is the most-watched cable news network, beating out CNN. What’s more, the median age of MSNBC’s audience is 65—and older voters turn out in high numbers in primary contests.

To understand how MSNBC may be shaping the 2020 election, In These Times analyzed the network’s August and September coverage of the Democratic presidential contest’s leading candidates—Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren. We focused on the network’s flagship primetime shows: The 11th Hour with Brian Williams, All In with Chris Hayes, The Beat with Ari Melber, Hardball with Chris Matthews, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell and The Rachel Maddow Show.

In These Times tallied how often the three candidates were discussed and logged whether the coverage was positive, negative or neutral. For example, while poll results by themselves (whether favorable or unfavorable to a candidate) were simply logged as neutral, commentary about a candidate “surging” was logged as positive and “stagnant” as negative. Clips and previews for upcoming segments were not included.

The coverage quickly revealed a pattern. Over the two months, these six programs focused on Biden, often to the exclusion of Warren and Sanders. Sanders received not only the least total coverage (less than one-third of Biden’s), but the most negative. As to the substance, MSNBC’s reporting revolved around poll results and so-called electability.

After the 2016 presidential election, in which the press was criticized for disproportionately giving Donald Trump $2 billion of free media, MSNBC may be repeating history. While pundits get paid to have opinions, MSNBC’s seem to dwell in an alternate reality: As momentum mounts for longstanding liberal goals like single-payer health care and bold climate action, MSNBC’s coverage seems devoted, instead, to narrowing the liberal imagination. 

NOT AVERAGE JOE

In its August and September coverage, by total mentions, MSNBC talked about Biden twice as often as Warren and three times as often as Sanders. By number of episodes, 64% of the 240 episodes discussed Biden, 43% discussed Warren and 36% discussed Sanders. A quarter of the episodes only discussed Biden, compared to 5% and 1% that mentioned only Warren or Sanders, respectively.

Biden was also the only one of the three candidates to see his on-air mentions increase, rather than decline, in September, even as his polling numbers steadily went south. Part of the reason was the Ukraine scandal that erupted in September: News broke that President Trump had conditioned the release of aid to Ukraine upon an investigation of Biden’s son, who had accepted a well compensated position with a Ukrainian oil company in 2014. MSNBC gave the story wall-to-wall coverage, pushing up Biden’s mentions. Almost all of this coverage was neutral—stating that Trump was trying to dig up dirt on Biden—but was occasionally positive, as when Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson speculated that the “impeachment dynamic sort of confirm[s] Biden’s aura of electability because he’s the one Trump is most afraid of, so maybe he’s one we ought to go with.” 

In August, however—before the Ukraine scandal took off—Biden still received around 2.5 times as much coverage as Sanders and about 1.7 times as much as Warren.

This coverage was not all positive. In total, 11.6% of Biden’s mentions were negative. Generally, this negative coverage focused on Biden’s gaffes and lackluster debate performances, and how they might affect his electability—the quality upon which Biden is staking his candidacy. The shows hosted by Chris Hayes and Ari Melber featured proportionally the most negative coverage of Biden.

The handful of more substantive criticisms of Biden included Chris Matthews and Jason Johnson, politics editor at The Root, questioning how sincere Biden was when he accused Trump of being a white supremacist, as well as primary candidate Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) criticizing Biden’s tough-on-crime record and vote for the Iraq War.

By and large, however, such critiques of Biden were subsumed by positive coverage, presenting him as the safest, strongest choice to take on Trump—or, as Matthews put it, the Democrats’ “designated driver.”

“What happens if you get Joe Biden and a rocky stock market? That’s a bad combination for President Trump,” MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle said on Brian Williams’ show, contrasting Biden with an unnamed “socialist” whom she implied Trump would successfully redbait.

One common line, deployed in six different episodes by both hosts and guests, was that the contest between Biden (on one side) and Warren or Sanders (on the other) was a battle between the “head” and the “heart” of the Democratic Party—implying Biden was the smart choice.

Guests across all six shows played down Biden’s widely panned debate performances. In a Last Word appearance, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. waved away criticism in other media (including on Melber’s show) of Biden’s infamous “record player” comment. Biden had responded to a question about the legacy of slavery by suggesting social workers be deployed in the homes of African Americans to help parents “deal with how to raise their children” by, for example, making sure they have a “record player on at night.” Dionne joked, “[Biden] had that appeal to hipsters by talking about record players. Aren’t they into vinyl these days?” He added, “People aren’t giving him credit for how he— what he had in mind there.”

The most Biden-friendly shows were those hosted by Lawrence O’Donnell, Matthews and Williams. On August 8, O’Donnell effusively praised a speech of Biden’s that cast Trump as a racist aberration in a long line of good, tolerant presidents, saying Biden had “told the hard truths of American history.” Five days later, O’Donnell lauded a Biden tweet calling for the United States to lead the world in rallying support for protesters in Hong Kong. “That’s the way presidents in this country used to sound,” O’Donnell gushed.

On Williams’ show, the most-watched cable news show in its 11 p.m. slot for five straight quarters, NBC News correspondent Mike Memoli played down Biden’s bizarre statement to an Iowa crowd that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” Memoli said that, to the Iowans in the audience, the comment “may not have even registered.”

MSNBC’s most pro-Biden host was Chris Matthews, who in 2017 called for Biden to run. Matthews’ guests waved away Biden’s gaffes and talked him up as the all-but-certain winner of the general election.

“Today, I saw a splash of sunlight in what’s been a grim Democratic tussle for president,” Matthews began August 1, before launching into a soliloquy about a Biden press conference in Detroit, where the candidate, “his face toward the sun,” reminded Matthews that “hope” still existed. Matthews lamented that criticism of Biden’s record would only lead to “even more destruction of our national unity.”

When Sirius XM host Danielle Moodie-Mills cautioned that she didn’t think Biden “conjures that kind of action that are going to get people into the streets,” Matthews responded, “Okay, well, that’s your opinion,” and cut to a Biden campaign ad.

Only a few of the 240 episodes discussed Biden’s reliance on big-dollar donations, and none singled out his fundraising from industries such as healthcare and banking that have a strong interest in current policy debates. Melber noted that Biden was struggling among grassroots small donors compared to Sanders and Warren. The other times Biden’s big-dollar fundraising came up, it was in the context of airing criticisms of Warren for having engaged in it herself before swearing it off for this year’s primary.

In terms of policy coverage of the candidates—arguably the most important role played by the fourth estate when reporting on candidates—Biden barely registered.

On healthcare, the biggest campaign issue for a majority of voters, Biden’s “plan to protect and build on the Affordable Care Act”—which his website admits would leave 3% of Americans uninsured—was only occasionally discussed, while being praised for giving Americans “choice” by guests such as ousted centrist Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).

Meanwhile, Sanders’ “Medicare for life thing”—as Matthews calls it—was criticized as “throwing 149 million people off their healthcare” (Sen. Amy Klobuchar [D-Minn.]) and taking away “choice.” Biden’s deputy campaign manager told Matthews that Sanders’ plan would “mean a tax increase on middle tax [sic] families,” ignoring the fact that independent studies have determined Medicare for All would lower overall healthcare costs. Warren’s refusal to say taxes would go up to fund Medicare for All was characterized alternately as evasive, or a shrewd tactic to “help her sustain” her rise in polling.

This is a far cry from the polls that show the majority of Democratic voters are favorable toward the policy.

While the broader progressive media landscape was chock-full of stories about Biden’s fundraising from powerful interests, his lack of grassroots enthusiasm, his incoherent public statements and his unfair attacks on Medicare for All, MSNBC viewers mostly saw the Biden that his campaign presented: a decent, beloved, steady hand who is the country’s safest bet.

BERNIE & LIZ

Sanders, meanwhile, received less coverage on MSNBC than Biden or Warren. Of the three candidates, Sanders was least likely to be mentioned positively (13% of his mentions) and most likely to be mentioned negatively (21%). The remaining two-thirds of his mentions were neutral.

Sanders received no negative mentions on Maddow’s show (which had the least primary coverage of the six programs analyzed), and only a handful on O’Donnell’s, Melber’s and Hayes’ shows. Rather, 87% of negative mentions came from just two programs: Matthews’ Hardball and Williams’ 11th Hour.

Sanders was especially criticized on 11th Hour after he suggested the negative campaign coverage coming from the Washington Post—owned by billionaire Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos—was related to Sanders’ criticism of Amazon’s labor practices. Williams and a guest both took the opportunity to liken Sanders to Trump, who frequently complains about his media coverage. Williams then quoted a tweet from an anonymous online anti-Sanders troll—sent before the Bezos controversy had even begun—accusing Sanders of not working to defeat Trump in 2016. (In fact, Sanders stumped at 17 pro-Hillary Clinton events in 11 states in November 2016.)

Although Warren was almost as under-covered as Sanders relative to her polling numbers, her treatment was very different. Warren had the lowest proportion of negative coverage of all three candidates (just 8% of all her mentions) and the highest proportion of position mentions (30%).

Criticisms of Sanders and Warren were often paired. Nevada Independent editor Jon Ralston suggested to Williams on August 20 that Warren and Sanders had endangered their chances of winning a general election by backing “things that [the] majority of Americans may not like,” such as Medicare for All.

By that same day, however, Matthews had pioneered a new tone toward Warren. Mere moments after saying voter support for the two was “unchanged since June” and “too close to call,” Matthews declared Warren was “making big strides in her efforts to take over the party’s left lane from Sanders” and “eating his lunch every day.” In a later episode, Matthews and The Root’s Johnson claimed African American women were “leaving Bernie” and “breaking for Warren,” even though a Pew Research Center poll that week showed Sanders’ base to be the least white (49%) of the leading four candidates (including Sen. Kamala Harris), Warren’s was whitest (71%), and all four had about 50% women supporters. (Matthews specified that he meant “African American women who tend to be influencers.”)

Williams highlighted what he described as an “excitement deficit” between Warren and the other candidates, ignoring that Sanders continued to draw large crowds and was the first to reach the benchmark of 1 million individual donations.

Zerlina Maxwell, a Clinton campaign alum and frequent guest, told Matthews that Warren and Sanders shared a “bold vision,” but Warren coupled it with “specific policy proposals” that tell you “how we’re going to get there”—implying that Sanders did not.

Commentators framed the September debate as a showdown between Warren and Biden, often leaving Sanders out. “Any sort of discussion between those two candidates will be one that could help a lot of voters decide who they’re supporting,” said the Wall Street Journal’s Tarini Parti.

After that debate, commentators singled out Warren’s performance with praise. Matthews’ and Williams’ shows saw a pronounced uptick in positive coverage of Warren, with commentators calling her “ingenious” and “the strongest natural talent,” and plotting out future scenarios where she ran away with the Democratic nomination.

As pundits warmed to Warren, they increasingly singled out Sanders for criticism. He “shouted his way through that last debate and came off as a bit of a scold,” said Williams. He was “out of step on the biggest sort of cultural issue in the country right now,” said Deadline: White House host Nicole Wallace, in reference to guns. He was helping Trump’s re-election chances, said former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele on Hardball. Appearing on The 11th Hour, Republican strategist Rick Wilson called Sanders the “communist Ron Paul” and “a recipe for electoral disaster.” 

FUTURE PLANS

Overall, MSNBC's primary coverage was devoid of policy discussion. Viewers were told often that Warren “has a plan for everything”—but not what those plans might contain.

Sanders and Warren released, respectively, eight and 10 detailed policy plans over this two-month period, covering topics from investing in rural America, empowering indigenous people, getting to 100% renewable energy and muzzling corporate lobbyists (Warren) to workplace democracy, a Green New Deal, housing for all and a wealth tax (Sanders). Most of these 18 plans were ignored by MSNBC, and only two were discussed in any depth: Hayes interviewed Sanders about his August 22 Green New Deal plan and Maddow interviewed Warren about her September 16 anti-corruption plan. (Biden, for his part, introduced zero plans.)

Instead, MSNBC’s coverage builds around incoming poll results, which may be cause for concern. Social scientists have long been critical of the way polls can shape news coverage, as poll coverage risks calcifying what might otherwise be fleeting shifts in popular opinion. The hosts In These Times analyzed occasionally acknowledged that polls are not always reliable, but relied on them anyway. Only Melber explicitly dismissed polls, saying “they don’t matter right now,” reporting instead on online donation numbers. He was alone in mentioning Sanders’ historic surge in small-dollar donations.

Political commentator Walter Lippmann, patron saint of patrician liberalism, argued in 1922 that, because “the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely,” they “can be managed only by a specialized class”—in other words, the misguided masses can’t recognize their own interests without guidance from the best and brightest. Lippmann would likely have put MSNBC anchors in this special class, interpreting and shaping reality for the liberal public to, as Lippmann put it, “create consent.” Of course, the anchors on MSNBC’s flagships are part of a larger corporate media system, and the parameters of the consent they create is modulated by the terms of acceptable public discourse. When political actors cross those parameters—including climate crisis activists like the Sunrise Movement, antiwar Catholic Worker protestors like the Ploughshares Seven, prison abolitionists like Critical Resistance and democratic socialist members of Congress like Sanders—the Fourth Estate buttresses the status quo to protect the establishment from any such incursions. So when the Democratic establishment was besieged by small-d democrats in search of a political revolution in 2016, rather than investigate, the mainstream press simply performed as expected—by emphatically promoting a candidacy that turned out to be fatally flawed.

MSNBC has close ties to a Democratic establishment that finds the politics of Biden (and even Warren) more palatable than Sanders’ “political revolution.” In the leadup to the 2016 primary, MSNBC frequently drew hosts and guests from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. According to the New York Times and other outlets, in the lead-up to the race for the Democratic nomination, this same establishment— including former Clinton staffers and donors—has held secret meetings to strategize how to stop Sanders.

Once the primaries are over, the election will be decided by the turnout and preferences of voters who pay little or no attention to MSNBC, or cable news in general. But at the moment, as the Iowa caucuses near, MSNBC has a powerful bullhorn. In 2016, the Democratic establishment backed the “safest,” most “electable” candidate in Hillary Clinton, with disastrous results. It bears asking if they’re repeating the same mistake.

Juan Caicedo, Isabel Carter, Will Kang, Indigo Olivier and Hannah Steinkopf-Frank contributed research and fact-checking.

RT @livkittykat@twitter.com

In the past 48 hours,
Israelis killed: 0
Palestinians killed: 32
Democrats: https://twitter.com/joebiden/status/1194367262284828678

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/livkittykat/status/1194815816400658433

RT @LeeCamp@twitter.com

The #1 immediate problem facing humanity is climate change.

The IMF just came out with a report showing that governments subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of $5 TRILLION a year.

If we switched those subsidies to clean energy, we would be done with fossil fuels in weeks.

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/LeeCamp/status/1194832578131316736

Naomi Klein's endorsement speech for @Bernie2020 felt like an historic moment. Plus, if you look closely, you can see me losing my shit with excitement the entire time
https://youtu.be/XcVF2HOcVBI?t=785
#Bernie2020

National Nurses union has endorsed Bernie.

They know Bernie is the candidate who we can count on to fight for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

Nurses values are human values.

https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/national-nurses-united-endorse-bernie-sanders

#feelthebern #nursesforbernie #bernie2020 #BernieisBetter @BernieOrVest

The establishment and the corporate media are going to look dumber than usual when Bernie wins Iowa.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/09/ocasio-cortez-and-sanders-draw-largest-iowa-crowd-democratic-primary-so-far-call

#feelthebern #bernie2020 #WhenWeWin #alwaysbernie

Knowing your neighbors may shape US household yard care practices

Neighbor peer pressure may be linked to increases in yard fertilization and irrigation across several distinct climate regions of the US, according to a new study.

A Witness To History

One man, four impeachments.

The Life Cycle of a Meme

It’s faster than ever.

"The crux of the plan is for the voice assistant to move from passive to proactive interactions. Rather than wait for and respond to requests, #Alexa will anticipate what the user might want. The idea is to turn Alexa into an omnipresent companion that actively shapes and orchestrates your life. This will require Alexa to get to know you better than ever before."

https://qrius.com/amazons-roadmap-for-alexa-just-may-be-the-scariest-thing-big-tech-is-doing

The ultimate goal of #SurveillanceCapitalism is manipulation of human behavior to profitable ends.

Linus Torvalds: Git is a distributed version control system, which means even if you lose a remote, you still have your local copy, so your code is safe, unlike centralized VCSes.

Developer Community: wut?

Microsoft: Hmm. How about you use our Visual Studio Online and push it to GitHub, both hosted on our computers, so that you don't have a local copy?

Developer Community: Yaay! Such innovation! Very cloud! Much wow! 🎉

Trump: Thou shall not use US services.

Developers: Where's my code? 😭

It’s too late for a carbon tax—it’s time for a world war against climate change https://www.fastcompany.com/90423806/its-too-late-for-a-carbon-tax-its-time-for-a-world-war-against-climate-change

Uber CEO Forgives Saudi Arabia for a Brutal Murder, But Punishes Drivers for Small Errors

In an Axios interview that aired on HBO last Sunday, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi made a troubling analogy. Discussing Uber’s ties to Saudi Arabia—whose sovereign fund is one of Uber's largest shareholders—Khosrowshahi described the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi as a “mistake” comparable to the company's own “mistakes” in reckless automation. This “mistake” was brushed off casually, with no mention of its place in the context of other Saudi “mistakes,” including an ongoing violent war against Yemen and a long history of brutally silencing domestic critics.

I mentioned the other day that health care data is one area where people who "have nothing to hide" still care about #privacy.

Personal finances is the other area and it looks like Google's going there too.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/13/google-eyes-banking-it-widens-its-reach/

Naomi Klein on Climate Chaos: “I Don’t Think Baby Boomers Did This. I Think Capitalism Did.”

Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa helped lead a resistance movement against the “ecological genocide” carried out to facilitate Shell’s expansion into the Niger Delta during the 1990s. The Nigerian government, eager for oil profits, assisted Shell in removing the only thing in their way: the Ogani people who were peacefully resisting encroachment on their native lands. The state’s military was accused of behaving like a “private police force” for the oil giant, killing and torturing thousands. On May 10, 1994, Saro-Wiwa predicted, "They are going to arrest us all and execute us. All for Shell." Twelve days later he and eight other indigenous Ogoni activists were arrested by the Nigerian military; they were murdered the following year, 24 years ago this month. 

Saro-Wiwa has appeared in three of Naomi Klein’s books: First in No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (1999), about the rise of corporate globalization, Saro-Wiwa’s story was told as an example of anti-corporate activism. Then, in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014), Klein showed how Saro-Wiwa’s anti-corporate activism was also climate activism.  

In her newest book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (2019), she uses the case of Saro-Wiwa to demonstrate how “fossil fuel sacrifice zones” span the globe—and makes the case that a Green New Deal is our best chance to build a world without sacrificing people and places and change course from reckless fossil fuel expansion towards an ecologically just economy, one that doesn’t pit jobs against the environment, or the Global North against the Global South. 

Klein, an iconic journalist and intellectual, has always advocated for a world where Saro-Wiwa wouldn’t have been murdered and his peoples’ lands not destroyed by a multinational fossil fuel company. Her books pay close attention to how capitalism operates on a global scale—one critic called The Shock Doctrine (2007), which details how the Right exploit disasters to advance deregulation and privatization, a “master narrative of our time.” I spoke with Klein via telephone about her new book, which is the latest installment in this larger story.  Our conversation followed the rise of climate barbarism and eco-fascism, as well as the narrow path forward for the Left to win global justice and a Green New Deal.

In many ways the Green New Deal is a course corrective both economically and environmentally to the status quo of the last 40 years. How so? 

When I was writing The Shock Doctrine, I was in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and watching the way our current economic system actually responds to the shock of the kind we are going to see more of in a warming world. What I was writing about then was the infrastructure of disaster capitalism descending onto this still-flooded city—the privatization of the school system, of the hospitals, of public housing, and realizing that there wasn’t a counter response really. 

During that time, I researched why [economist] Milton Friedman and others were so obsessed with the need to have a strategy for different kinds of crisis, what became clear was that they believed that everything had gone wrong during the New Deal. That the great crash of 1929 had been used to push this radical agenda. They actually understood that when capitalism produces these crises, it’s much more organic for societies to move to the left than it is for them to move to the right. You have to work really hard to get them to move to the right. So it’s fitting in a way that we’re talking about a Green New Deal because it brings this full circle. 

I sometimes quote my friend Saket Soni, a labor organizer, who said: “They have disaster capitalism, we need disaster collectivism.” In other words, what is our plan for how we want to transform society in the context of the system failures that are being produced? You know, I see the sort of intersectional vision in a Green New Deal as that kind of counter shock. I’ve been involved in other projects like it, like the Leap Manifesto in Canada [which articulates a movement-backed transformation of society], and this has been a gradual process on the Left of realizing that we really need to have a vision for whatever the crisis is. We needed it in Greece, we needed it after the 2008 meltdown, and we needed it in Egypt. Too often there have been these system crises and really regressive forces have their “shock doctrine” plan and the Left doesn’t have a democratic counterpart. And I think the significance of the Green New Deal is that for the first time the Left does have a plan. 

As you mention in the book’s introduction, capitalism is adapting to the climate emergency. Instead of a Green New Deal, what is actually being offered is ecofascism and climate barbarism. What’s the difference between these two terms? 

What I’m calling climate barbarism is de facto what is happening at the borders. Politicians know [climate change is] real whether or not they deny it. Just recently we have new evidence that the Trump administration has known very well that the mass migration that’s happening from Central America is intimately linked to drought-related climate disruption. 

And their response was to cut hundreds of millions of dollars of aid to Central America , and expand the infrastructure of incarceration, family separation and the militarization of the border. [Eds. note: After this interview took place, Trump restored some “law enforcement and security” aid to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. In return, the countries agreed to help deter migrants from seeking asylum in the United States.] They have used the specter of the invading “other” as a unifying force for their political project. This is a form of climate change adaptation that we’re seeing with these barbaric practices, such as the construction of concentration camps, whether they’re in Texas, in Libya, or off the shore of Australia in places like Nauru or Manus; this has been the story of the decade. 

Ecofascism is more of an articulated ideology that we’re starting to hear. A sector of the far Right is no longer denying climate change and is using the reality that we are entering a period where more and more people are going to be on the move as a rationale for extreme violence. We saw that in Christchurch, New Zealand, the person who killed more than 50 people at those two mosques specifically calling himself an “ethno-nationalist, eco-fascist” and saying that in the context of ecological breakdown you can’t have migration to predominantly white countries. 

So what can the Left demand in response to climate barbarism and ecofascism? Open borders? Global reparations? 

Even under that best case scenario, there’s going to be many millions of people on the move. There’s a core justice question here about what the big historical emitters like the United States, Canada, the European Union and Australia—[the question of] what we owe, what are our debts? Some of our debts are financial. And here, Bernie Sanders is the only candidate taking this seriously. Even if he isn’t using the language of debt, he is using the language of justice and he’s talking about putting $200 billion into the UN climate fund which is really a transformative amount. The Obama administration committed 3 billion and I don’t think they ever paid it up [Eds. note: Obama fulfilled $1 billion of this pledge, and the remaining $2 billion was cancelled by Trump], so its a huge shift. And it’s money without strings attached, which is very significant because part of what we hear from some of the other candidates is, “We’re gonna help other countries green their economies by selling them cheap made-in-America solar panels.” That’s actually economic imperialism that locks in relationships of dependency, which doesn’t offer real economic opportunity, and it’s more of the same, in terms of unequal economic relationships. So, I think part of what we owe is financial which means no strings attached financing for communities—and I say communities because in some cases it does need to bypass national governments—to leapfrog directly to clean energy, to keep carbon in the ground and leave forests intact. 

But we also owe asylum. People are gonna be displaced through no fault of their own, and they have a right to move, they have a right to safety, and most people do not want to move from their homelands if they have a choice. There is no such thing as a climate refugee under international law, and that needs to change. 

A lot has changed since you’ve been following the Left. Today, the Left seems to have both social movement savvy and also electoral ambition. What’s your assessment of what you’ve learned since your days in the Global Justice movement of the 1990s? 

I think the biggest shift is just generationally, people are not afraid to get their hands dirty with electoral politics. But they simultaneously continue to understand the importance of independent social movements. I think there’s just more people involved, so there’s more capacity to do a few things at once: build independent social movements, have an electoral strategy, have a direct confrontational strategy with elected officials and develop policy alternatives, which is what the Green New Deal is. And to me, that last part is the most important because I think this is the first time where I think if there was a breakthrough political moment, like an Occupy moment, or an Arab Spring moment, or like a movement of the Squares in Europe, that we would be very clear about what the alternative policies are that we want to fight for. 

I think the climate movement needs to do more on migrant rights, needs to do more on mass incarceration, more on militarism and war and connecting these struggles. But I think we’re in as good a place as we’ve ever been in terms of having the potential to weave together a truly holistic agenda of the next economy built on different values. We also have a kind of ideological infrastructure through the Democratic Socialists of America and others, where the whole sort of issue-based silo approach is being rejected and people are not afraid to talk about an ideological project, which is another huge shift. So, if there is that kind of an opening, which I believe there will be very soon, we won’t find ourselves in that really quite tragic situation of having opened up political space and not knowing what to fill it with. Which then leaves us open to opportunists on the Right to come in and fill that vacuum. 

Looking toward 2020, do the Democratic candidates go far enough on climate and the Green New Deal?

I think there’s a range. And I think that I still feel a little bit like it’s not integrated enough into anyone’s stump speech to be honest. I think that Bernie’s Green New Deal plan is the best plan mainly because of what I said around the international scope of it. I feel really passionately that there’s no such thing as a national Green New Deal. This is an international, global crisis, right?

And there’s really strong elements to Warren’s plan. She took a lot from Jay Inslee, which was a great plan, but I really object to the nationalism of it [Warren calls her approach “economic patriotism”]. I agree with Yanis Varoufakis, we’re not going to beat the Right on the terrain of nationalism. They have it cornered and I also think it’s morally reprehensible in the context of an international crisis that the United States is historically the biggest contributor to. So that’s why I back Bernie’s plan. 

I think we’re still a little bit trapped in this sort of a checklist approach instead of a coherent, holistic vision. I think that it has really helped that a couple of the networks have given the candidates prolonged space to talk about their climate platforms and that is starting to improve. I think all of the candidates could do a better job getting that the GND is a frame, it’s not one item on the checklist.

Teenagers are rising up and many are acting from a place of, "The grown-ups won’t act, so we will." Still, being a teenager is hard, kids pick on each other and there’s a lot of pressure; it isn’t easy to organize. Many of them carry the twin burdens of being a teenager and saving the world. What advice do you have for that generation?

[laughs] I think they know that it’s an unfair burden. And I think the main thing is just that they try to take care of each other and be kind, and organize in a way that leaves room and space for the emotional spectrum of this work. I think they have to leave room for their own grief and for their own feelings of hopelessness. They don’t have to be driving all the time. Nobody can be in that state all the time. I find it so inspiring when we see these little moments where these young activists are standing up for each other and protecting each other. I think that’s why that adorable viral video of a young boy protecting Greta [Thunberg] and friends from the cameras was so sweet. 

I think it’s important also to build an intergenerational movement. Young people are leading the strike movement, but I worry a little bit about the framing of this as generational warfare because I think it’s very depoliticizing. I don’t think Baby Boomers did this. I think capitalism did, and there’s something both depoliticizing and isolating about the generational frame. There are people in every generation who tried so hard to stop this from happening, who raised the alarm, and people who died in the struggle. I think movements that are just of young people tend to be short lived. On the other hand, indigenous movements, and many other movements that have been fighting for hundreds of years, have a role for every generation to play, and that’s part of how we protect these young people with so much courage.