Is Trump right to doubt that Islam is a Religion?

By Juan Cole | Mar. 2, 2017 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka again declined to say on Wednesday in an NPR interview whether President Trump believes Islam is “a religion.” He also doubled down on calling Muslim radicalism “radical Islamic extremism.” In the end he clarified that the US is not at war with Islam, saying that Islam is itself divided into pro- and anti-American factions and that he wants the pro-American version to win.

I have explained many times that the word “Islamic” is like “Judaic.” It refers to the ideals and the beautiful things about the Muslim religion. You can have Islamic art and Islamic ethics. You can’t have Islamic terrorism because Islam forbids terrorism. Likewise, university Centers for Judaic Studies focuses on Judaic religious thought and Judaic history, but wouldn’t typically teach about Jewish gangsters like Bugsy Siegel.

For the United States government to call al-Qaeda and ISIL “Islamic” extremism is to aid and abet them in their quest to be accepted by other Muslims as legitimate. They are terrorists, not Islamic. And just has you can have Jewish gangsters but not Judaic ones, you can have terrorists who happen to be Muslim but you can’t have Islamic ones.

Also of course, a phrase such as “radical Islamic extremists” is ludicrous and no right-thinking person should be guilty of its fallacies. It is redundant, since it implies that there are Islamic extremists who are not radical or that there are Islamic radicals who are not extremists. So it is just an asinine piece of propagandistic over-reach by the American (and apparently Hungarian) right wing, which undermines the fight against extremism and radicalism by raising the white flag of surrender on whether it is genuinely Islamic and whether Muslims should view it as legitimate.

Moreover, extremism is not always pejorative. An American conservative once said that extremism in the service of liberty is no vice. Some Muslims would agree. So you aren’t even succeeding, by using this phrase, in stigmatizing Muslims who commit terrorism, which was apparently the whole point.

The United States indirectly created al-Qaeda to fight the Soviet Union, so the idea that there is a civil war in Islam over anti-Americanism is ahistorical. The US rampaged around the Middle East undermining Arab secularism all through the Cold War. Political Islam was bolstered to some important extent by Washington, just as Hamas was initially supported by Israel to offset the secular PLO. Eisenhower and Dulles tried to build up the Saudi, Wahhabi king as leader of the Middle East. I was handed a biblical scorecard in the 1980s by which I was supposed to judge my congressman, put out by the American religious Right. It asked if he supported the jihadis in Afghanistan (among whom were al-Qaeda). That is, thirty years ago people like Gorka were insisting that we have to support the people he now sees as so threatening. Or else were were betraying Judeo-Christian values and surrendering to godless Communism.

While Muslim radicals are a problem, you’re much more likely to be struck by lightning than to encounter one, and I wouldn’t spend trillions of dollars on all this. White supremacists in the US are a much bigger issue.

So, on to the first point, or non-point, is Islam a religion? I would argue that not only is Islam a religion, but for all practical purposes it invented the idea of multiple co-existing religions.

St. Augustine complains in The City of God that there wasn’t a really good word for religion in his day. Religio meant the ties that bind and could refer to family or state as well as a religious community. Threskaia, the Greek for worship, just addressed one aspect of religion. Eusebeia or awe and reverence for the divine was used in Greek, but again was limited to describing an attitude.

Most early Christians, and many thinkers into our own day, rejected the idea that Christianity is a religion among the religions. Many saw four categories– the True Christian doctrine, paganism, heresy and the incomplete and stunted Judaism. They thought everyone but Christians were going straight to hell. Seeing Islam as a heresy and not a religion is an old theological move of Christian supremacists.

As Cantwell Smith argued, Islam in contrast took over the Persian idea of daena or den or din, which evolved to mean “religion.” Zoroastrianism was called in Sasanian times “weh din,” the good religion. The Qur’an thus calls late Greco-Roman-Arab paganism a religion (din). It calls Judaism a religion/din. Likewise Christianity and Zoroastrianism. And it calls the community of the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632) a religion (din). Not until the eighteenth century Enlightenment did the West achieve a similar understanding of religion as a global category and of each religion as in the same category as all the others. The Qur’an says that members of all the monotheistic religions, who do good works and have faith, are saved, something almost no Christian would have said until the nineteenth century, and even then it has remained a minority view.

16th Cent. Mughal Emperor Akbar welcomes Jesuits to his court

In the US system, the Supreme Court decides what a religion is (though ironically the Internal Revenue Service can play an important role, since religions are tax-exempt and so the IRS has to decide if a group claiming that exemption really is a religion.)

But of course the Constitution is where we have to begin.

The First Amendment says

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

The word “establishment” is a technical term in 18th century practice, meaning to “make something official state policy.” The amendment is saying that the US government can’t have a favored, state religion. The Supreme Court later interpreted the 14th amendment to hold that individual states also can’t have state religions, since that would be discriminatory. (Madison originally had tried to restrict the states from having official religions but the senate voted him down at that time).

The obvious other side of this coin is that the government cannot actively discriminate against a particular religion, either. The Founding generation set up the US government to be neutral with regard to the religions.

The idea of religious liberty enshrined in the First Amendment was based on an act passed in 1786 by the Virginia state legislature that had been authored by Thomas Jefferson, and which said in part:

“Be it enacted by the General Assembly, that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”

Gee, seems to me like Jefferson wouldn’t have wanted a Muslim ban. In fact, one of the arguments raised against this act in the Virginia legislature was precisely that it would allow the free practice of Islam in the Commonwealth. Jefferson’s opponents tried to limit religious freedom to Christianity. Jefferson battled back and won.

James E. Hutson explains:

“Campaigning for religious freedom in Virginia, Jefferson followed Locke, his idol, in demanding recognition of the religious rights of the “Mahamdan,” the Jew and the “pagan.” Supporting Jefferson was his old ally, Richard Henry Lee, who had made a motion in Congress on June 7, 1776, that the American colonies declare independence. “True freedom,” Lee asserted, “embraces the Mahomitan and the Gentoo (Hindu) as well as the Christian religion.”

In his autobiography, Jefferson recounted with satisfaction that in the struggle to pass his landmark Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786), the Virginia legislature “rejected by a great majority” an effort to limit the bill’s scope “in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan.””

Jefferson was ambassador in Paris in 1787 when the Constitution was being drafted, but he corresponded with Madison and strongly urged him to draft a bill of rights that would address religious liberty. Madison was influenced by the 1786 Virginia statute.

That is, the legislative history of the First Amendment demonstrates conclusively that it is rooted in Enlightenment conceptions of religion that saw Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism as all constituting “religions,” belief in which is a matter of conscience over which civil magistrates should have no control. So I would say that the Constitution implicitly recognizes Islam as a religion, even for an originalist who reads it through eighteenth-century eyes.

Of course, through the twentieth century the Supreme Court has further refined what it considers to be a religion.

The Newseum Institute explains:

“In the 1960s, the Court expanded its view of religion. In its 1961 decision Torcaso v. Watkins, the Court stated that the establishment clause prevents government from aiding “those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs.” In a footnote, the Court clarified that this principle extended to “religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God … Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others.”

Most recently, the late Antonin Scalia authored an 8 to 1 decision that Abercrombie & Fitch could not discriminate against a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf even if she did not explicitly ask for a religious accommodation. Scalia and his colleagues had no doubt whatsoever that Islam is a religion.

That is, there simply isn’t any question a) that the American legal tradition sees Islam as a religion and that b) its free practice on American soil, without fear of discrimination, is guaranteed by our most precious constitutional instruments, as demonstrated by their legislative history.

So the next reporter should please ask the recently naturalized Mr. Gorka to explain why he has not stood up to Mr. Trump on this issue, and why he characterizes the controversy as “theological” when in fact it is a matter of our civil constitutional law.

Posted in Bill of Rights,Donald Trump,Featured,Islam,Islam-hatred,Muslim-Americans | No Responses | Print |

Afghanistan: We Lost a long Time Ago, and are Still at War

By Juan Cole | Mar. 2, 2017 |

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William J. Astore | ( Tomdispatch.com ) | – –

America’s war in Afghanistan is now in its 16th year, the longest foreign war in our history. The phrase “no end in sight” barely covers the situation. Prospects of victory — if victory is defined as eliminating that country as a haven for Islamist terrorists while creating a representative government in Kabul — are arguably more tenuous today than at any point since the U.S. military invaded in 2001 and routed the Taliban. Such “progress” has, over the years, invariably proven “fragile” and “reversible,” to use the weasel words of General David Petraeus who oversaw the Afghan “surge” of 2010-2011 under President Obama. To cite just one recent data point: the Taliban now controls 15% more territory than it did in 2015.

That statistic came up in recent Senate testimony by the U.S. commanding general in Afghanistan, John “Mick” Nicholson Jr., who is (to give no-end-in-sight further context) the 12th U.S. commander since the war began. Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he called for several thousand more U.S. troops to break what he optimistically described as a “stalemate.” Those troops would, he added, serve mainly as advisers and trainers to Afghan forces, facilitating what he labeled “hold-fight-disrupt” operations.

As to how long they would be needed, the general was vague indeed. He spoke of the necessity of sustaining “an enduring counter-terrorism (CT) platform” in Afghanistan to bottle up terrorist forces, so they wouldn’t, as he put it, hit us in the “homeland.” Indeed, the U.S. military considers what it has begun to speak of as a “generational” war in that country “successful” because no major attacks on the United States have had their roots in Afghanistan since September 11, 2001. And that certainly qualifies as one of the stranger definitions of success in a perpetual war that lacks a sound strategy.

Of Stalemates and Petri Dishes

You know America is losing a war when its officials resort to bad metaphors to describe its progress and prospects. A classic case was the infamous “light at the end of the tunnel” metaphor from the Vietnam War years. It implied that, although prospects might appear dark — that “tunnel” of war — progress was indeed being made and, in the distance, victory (that “light”) could be glimpsed. Contrast this with World War II, when progress was measured not by empty words (or misleading metrics like body counts or truck counts) but by land masses invaded and cities and islands wrested from the enemy. Normandy and Berlin, Iwo Jima and Okinawa are place names that still resonate with Allied heroism and sacrifice. That kind of progress could be seen on a map and was felt in the gut; metaphors were superfluous.

Afghanistan, U.S. military theorists claim, is a different kind of war, a fourth-generation war fought in a “gray zone”; a mish-mash, that is, of low-intensity and asymmetric conflicts, involving non-state actors, worsened by the meddling of foreign powers like Pakistan, Iran, and Russia — all mentioned in General Nicholson’s testimony. (It goes without saying that the U.S. doesn’t see its military presence there as foreign.) A skeptic might be excused for concluding that, to the U.S. military, fourth-generation warfare really means a conflict that will last four generations.

Long and losing wars seem to encourage face-saving analogies and butt-covering metaphors. For General Nicholson, Afghanistan is actually a “petri dish” that, as in a laboratory of terror, has cultivated no fewer than 20 “DNA strands” of terrorist bad guys joined by three violent extremist organizations — VEOs in military-speak. To prevent a “convergence” of all these strands and outfits and so, assumedly, the creation of a super terror bug of some sort, Nicholson suggested, America and its 39-member coalition in Afghanistan must stand tall and send in yet more troops.

As it turns out, our 12th commanding general there isn’t the first to resort to biology and a “petri dish” to explain a war that just won’t end. In 2010, during the Afghan surge, General Stanley McChrystal referred to the community of Nawa in southern Afghanistan as his “number one petri dish.” As the Washington Post reported at the time, McChrystal “had hoped the antibodies generated there [during its pacification] could be harnessed and replicated [elsewhere in Afghanistan]. But that hasn’t yet happened.” Nor has it happened in the intervening seven years. McChrystal’s petri dish experiment failed, yet his metaphor lives on, even if now used in a somewhat different way, with the entire country (including parts of Pakistan) serving as that “dish” and terrorists, not American troops and friendly Afghans, multiplying in it.

It may not be the most appetizing metaphor, but you can at least understand why American leaders might prefer it to the classic one applied to foreign attempts to pacify Afghanistan back in the ancient days of European colonial experiments: “graveyard of empires.”

To summarize Nicholson mixed-metaphorically: Afghanistan is a “petri dish” in which terrorist “strands” are “converging” to create a “stalemate” that is weakening America’s “enduring CT platform,” which could lead to terrorist attacks on the “homeland.” Now, let’s take that one apart, piece by piece. Is the Afghan War truly a stalemate, as in a game of chess? That hardly seems to fit a situation in which the end game is — as the Pentagon with its generational thinking and Nicholson with his request for more troops suggest — hardly in sight. In fact, at a time when the Afghan government may control less than 60% of its territory and its security forces are taking staggering, possibly unsustainable casualties, other players, not the U.S.-led coalition, seem to have the momentum.

What about that “enduring CT platform” — the presence, that is, of those U.S. and NATO troops (together with private military contractors), all showing “resolute support” for the Afghan people so as to keep us safe at home? What if, in fact, their presence is perpetuating the very war they say they are seeking to end? Can Afghanistan of the present moment truly be described as an experiment in terrorist biology, and if so are U.S.-led “kinetic” efforts to kill those strands of terror working instead to create an even nastier virus?

Above all, are such metaphors just a way of avoiding the absurdity of suggesting that a few thousand (or even a surge-worthy 30,000) more U.S. troops could possibly turn a never-ending, losing war into a victorious one almost 16 years later?

Grim Honesty Among the Ground-Pounders

For grim honesty, skip those metaphor-wielding commanding generals so deeply invested in a war that they can neither admit to losing nor contemplate leaving. Look instead to the ground-pounders, the plain-speaking corporals and captains who have met that war face to face, up close and personal. Consider, for instance, a 2010 HBO documentary, The Battle for Marjah. Seven years ago, in a much larger military effort than the one presently being contemplated, U.S. troops joined with Afghan forces to secure the town of Marjah in Helmand Province in the opium-growing heart of the country.

The documentary followed a U.S. Marine unit, which fought valiantly to clear that town of the Taliban in accordance with the counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine then experiencing a revival under Petraeus and McChrystal. The goal was to rebuild its institutions and infrastructure so U.S. troops could ultimately leave. As usual, the Marines kicked ass: they cleared the town. But the price of holding it proved dear, while efforts to build a local Afghan government to replace them failed. Today, as much as 80% of Helmand Province is under Taliban control.

The documentary’s harshest lessons come almost as visual asides. While Taliban insurgents fought with spirit, Afghan government forces, then as now, fought reluctantly. U.S. troops had to force them to enter and clear buildings. In one case, a Marine takes a rifle away from an Afghan soldier because the latter keeps pointing the muzzle at “friendly” forces. We witness Afghan troops holding a half-hearted ceremony to salute their government’s flag after Marjah is “liberated.” Meanwhile, the faces of ordinary Afghans alternate between beleaguered stoicism and thinly veiled hostility. Few appear to welcome their foreign liberators, whether U.S. or Afghan. (The Afghan government units, hailing from the north, were ethnically different and spoke another language.) An Afghan shown working with the Marines was assassinated soon after the U.S. withdrawal.

A tired Marine corporal put it all in perspective: for him, the Afghan War was a “mind-fuck.” At least he rotated out sooner or later. The Afghan people have had no such luck. To mix metaphors and wars, they were stuck in the big muddy of their “petri dish.”

Let’s turn to another ground-pounding Marine of more recent vintage, Captain Joshua Waddell. A decorated combat veteran of the war, he penned an article for this month’s Marine Corps Gazette in which he lambastes the U.S. military for its “self-delusion.” He writes:

“It is time that we, as professional military officers, accept the fact that we lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Objective analysis of the U.S. military’s effectiveness in these wars can only conclude that we were unable to translate tactical victory into operational and strategic success.”

Supporting Waddell’s “lost war” conclusion is General Nicholson’s own testimony, which cited the same old problems in the Afghan military: too many “ghost” (fake) soldiers — others, often commanders, pocket their salaries — indicating widespread and endemic corruption; unmotivated leadership, made worse by crippling shortages of skilled junior officers and noncommissioned officers; and too many unmanned Afghan checkpoints. (Those “ghost” soldiers, so good at funneling money to their creators, turn out to be bad indeed at securing checkpoints.)

Seeing Only What We Want to See

Given such a grim assessment, what difference, you might wonder, would just a few thousand more American troops make, when it comes to tipping the Afghan “stalemate” in Washington’s favor? In fact, General Nicholson’s humble request is undoubtedly only an opening wedge in the Trumpian door through which future, far higher troop requests are then likely to enter.

Asked by Senator Lindsey Graham whether he could do the job in Afghanistan with 50,000 troops, which would quadruple coalition forces there, Nicholson answered with a “yes”; when asked about 30,000 U.S. and other NATO troops, he was less sure. With that 50,000 number now out there in Washington, does anyone doubt that Nicholson or his successor(s) will sooner or later press the president to launch the next Afghan surge? How else to counter all those terrorist strands in that petri dish? (This, of course, represents déjà vu all over again, given the Obama surge that added 30,000 troops to 70,000 already in Afghanistan and yet failed to yield sustainable results.)

That a few thousand troops could somehow reverse the present situation and ensure progress toward victory is obviously a fantasy of the first order, one that barely papers over the reality of these last years: that Washington has been losing the war in Afghanistan and will continue to do so, no matter how it fiddles with troop levels.

Whether Soviet or American, whether touting communism or democracy, outside troops to Afghan eyes are certainly just that: outsiders, foreigners. They represent an invasive presence. For many Afghans, the “terrorist strands” in the petri dish are not only the Taliban or other Islamist sects; they are us. We are among those who must be avoided or placated in the struggle to stay alive — along with government forces, seen by some Afghans as collaborators to the occupiers (that’s us again). In short, we and our putative Afghan allies are in that same petri dish, thrashing about and causing harm, driving the very convergence of terrorist forces we say we are seeking to avoid.

All the metaphors and images do, however, suggest one thing — that Afghanistan isn’t real to American leaders, much as Vietnam wasn’t to an earlier generation of them. It’s not grasped as a sophisticated culture with a long and rich history. Those in charge see it and its people only through the reductive and distorting lens of their never-ending war and then reduce what little they see to terms that play well to politicians and the public back home. Stalemate? We can break it. Platform? We can firm it up and launch attacks from it. Petri dish? We can contain it, then control it, and finally eradicate it with our lethal medicines. What they refuse to do, however, is widen that lens, deepen their vision, and see the Afghan people as a richly complex society that Washington will never (and should never try to) dominate and reshape into our image of a country.

The question now is what President Donald (we’re going to win!) Trump will do. If past is prologue, he will end up approving Nicholson’s request, in part because his leading generals, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, are so psychically and professionally linked to the Afghan War. (Mattis oversaw that war while serving as head of U.S. Central Command, McMaster held a command post in Kabul, and Kelly’s son was killed there while on patrol.)

Yet if Trump gives Nicholson the troops he wants — and then more of the same — he will merely be echoing the failed policies of his predecessors, while prolonging a war that will prove endless as long as foreign forces continue to meddle in Afghan affairs. His will then be a fate foretold in a war in which Washington’s greatest foe has always been self-deception.

A retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, Astore is a TomDispatch regular. His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, as well as Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2017 William J. Astore

Via Tomdispatch.com

Posted in Afghanistan,Pentagon,Taliban,US Foreign Policy | No Responses | Print |

Sorry, Trump, China’s cut-back on Coal Dooms Industry

By Juan Cole | Mar. 1, 2017 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Donald Trump has said many foolish things, but his pledge to bring back coal takes the cake.

Coal is the dirtiest source of energy. Not only does it produce enormous amounts of carbon dioxide when burned, but releases other toxins as well, including mercury. Mercury is a nerve poison that can cause paralysis and insanity if the exposure is sufficiently robust. Recent studies suggest that the epidemic of Alzheimers is related to breathing polluted air, and no air is more polluted than that near coal plants. The long term harm of the CO2, however, is the big problem– continuing to burn coal at our present rate will likely put up the average global temperature by 10 degrees F., which will melt all surface ice, cause the loss (over a long period of time) of one-third of the earth’s dry land, and produce highly destructive mega-storms.

So wanting to bring back coal is a little bit like wanting to bring back the Black Plague, only much, much worse.

Make no mistake. Trump’s policies favoring fossil fuels will do enormous damage to our world. But he won’t be able to wreak as much pure havoc as he would like. And bringing back coal in a big way is probably impossible.

Look at China, the world’s biggest carbon polluter. The Chinese government, unlike Trump, believes in science and is sufficiently sensitive to public opinion that it wants to cut way back on coal. And it is doing so. Even though China’s over-all energy use rose about 1.5% in 2016, it cut coal consumption by nearly 5%! And this is the third year in a row that coal use has dropped. What’s more, production of coal fell 9%. In 2015, renewables had accounted for 18% of China’s energy, but that rose to 19.7% just about a fifth, in 2016. That is, likely a significant portion of reduced coal use was made up for by increased solar and wind.

If China cuts way back on coal, it will have a negative effect on the world market for the commodity, one that Trump’s mere bloviating cannot overcome.

It isn’t just China. By 2024, only 7 years from now, India expects never again to put in a new coal plant. Thereafter, all new power plants will be fueled by renewables. And by 2050 India could be coal free.

Coal is in a death spiral, and the faster it is actually dead, the better. In the US, the number of jobs in the coal electric generation sector fell by 24%. That sector now employs only 86,000 or so people, including 57,000 or so miners. In contrast, there were 370,000 people working in solar electricity generation in 2016, a 25% increase over the previous year. There are another 100,000 or so jobs in wind energy, and that sector is expected to double in jobs by 2024. I’m not unsympathetic to coal workers, but with what we now know, they are like asbestos workers. You wouldn’t want that stuff in your house just so the industry could employ a few thousand workers. And by the way, there were 60,000 people employed in video stores in 2006 and all those jobs are gone because of streaming over the internet, and no one even mentions it. Coal workers deserve retraining for other jobs, but don’t let the coal companies fetishize coal jobs, with their black lung and continent-sinking.

The biggest coal power plant in the American West is closing early, purely for economic reasons.

And, no, carbon capture and storage is a very bad idea. Carbon can escape, as it has from natural underground pockets, and kill large numbers of people by smothering them.

——

Posted in Climate Change,Coal,Denialism,Energy,Environment,Featured,Pollution | 8 Responses | Print |

Top 5 Ways Obama is Behind Leaks, Protests against Trump

By Juan Cole | Feb. 28, 2017 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Trump did an interview with “Fox and Friends” for this morning in which he alleged that former president Barack Obama is behind the leaks that have bedeviled Trump’s White House.

The Fox agent provocateur asked Trump a leading question as to whether Obama is also behind the angry crowds of constituents who have attended some Republican town halls on issues like repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

Trump replied, “No, I think he is behind it. I also think it’s just politics. That’s just the way it is. You never know what’s exactly happening behind the scenes … I think that President Obama’s behind it because his people are certainly behind it.”

Last we saw President Obama, he was hang gliding in the Caribbean with obvious delight at getting his personal freedom back after eight thankless years in office, during which white people prevented him from doing virtually any of the good deeds for them that he had intended. Trump’s paranoid remarks would raise further questions about his sanity if a) they weren’t obviously planted by Rupert Murdoch’s mind control techniques and b) if any further questions about his sanity were necessary.

But here are the actual ways that Obama is, in a way, behind Trump’s troubles:

1. Obama is famously calm, collected, rational and deliberative. The unhinged and frenetic people who replaced him have freaked out the White House staffers who stayed on into the new administration, and impelled them to let the country know what is going on. Trump’s Rasputin and alt-NeoNazi Steve Bannon has so much of a temper on him that he’s been accused of repeated domestic abuse, and even he admits he “runs a little hot” (is he an old boiler or something?). So no one can be sure of its validity, but a White House leak feed tweeted this on Monday:

Bannon is the scariest person here. He's broken so much White House stuff by throwing it in anger. Plates, phones, chairs, etc.

— White House staffer (@AngryWHStaffer) February 27, 2017

Clearly it was the unrealistic expectations raised by Obama’s character that have caused this panic and the spate of leaks.

2. People at the town halls are afraid of losing their health insurance. Obama had minded that when she was ill, his mother’s disability insurance denied her claim because, the company said, her cancer was a pre-existing condition. So the Affordable Care Act forced insurance companies to provide coverage even for preexisting conditions. Republican legislators in the back pocket of the 1% want to abolish that provision, and therefore their town halls are full of angry Republicans who have decided that they rather like the ACA. This outrage is obviously Obama’s fault for having coddled the sick in the first place.

3. Obama was extremely careful about deploying military personnel in battlefront warfare. His critics complain about the drone strikes and bombing runs he launched. Whether they are right or not, the point for Obama was that these tactics were a means to avoid putting US soldiers in harm’s way. Two weeks into his presidency, Trump appears casually to have launched a commando raid on a facility of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in southern Yemen. Some 30 civilians were killed in the raid, including 9 children, as well as a US Navy Seal. The Seal’s father is not satisfied that the raid was properly planned (Obama had ordered a study of the possibility but likely would not have signed off on such an operation). He refused to meet Trump and wants an investigation to see if the sacrifice of his son’s life was warranted. So that Obama did not typically shoot from the hip on military operations has also spoiled things for his successor.

4. There is no evidence that Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice ever once called the Russian Embassy to reassure Moscow’s diplomats that sanctions placed on Russian officials over the unilateral annexation of Crimea from the Ukraine would be lifted. Nor did Rice take $40,000 to speak in Moscow at a commemoration of a Russian-government-backed television channel. So Rice’s absence of sketchy relations with the Russian Federation, in contrast to those of disgraced former Trump National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, clearly set a standard of behavior that impressed US security personnel and caused some of them to leak Flynn’s improper actions.

5. There are all kinds of people on staff at the White House, and some of them are disturbed at the white supremacist tone set by Trump, Bannon, Miller and others. One young Muslim-American woman says she only lasted 8 days in a newly hostile work environment. By treating people of all races and creeds decently, Obama without a doubt sowed dissension in the ranks of government employees who, after Trump’s election, discovered that he wanted to fire and/or deport them.

So yes, Donald, it is Obama’s fault. Just not in the way your warped mind imagines.

——

Posted in Barack Obama,Civil Rights,Constitution,Democratic Party,Donald Trump,Far Right,Featured,Steve Bannon | 12 Responses | Print |

Would Trump let Oscar Winner Mahershala Ali back into the Country?

By Juan Cole | Feb. 27, 2017 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Mahershala Ali, 43, last night won an Oscar for best supporting actor, in Moonlight . The film treats themes of sexual repression, gayness, and the plague of drug dealing and addiction. Moonlight, of course, also won Best Picture, after a historic error in which the winner was initially incorrectly announced as Lalaland.

Ali has been an important figure in American popular culture, having most recently played “Cottonmouth” Stokes in “Luke Cage” (part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, streaming on Netflix) and having appeared as Boggs in “The Hunger Games” films and as Remy Danton in “House of Cards.”

Ali was born Eric Gilmore in Oakland, CA. His mother, Willicia, who raised him in Cleveland, OH, at some point became an ordained Christian minister. He gained another name, Mahershalalhashbaz, from Isaiah 8:3. This is the symbolic name that God ordained that the prophet Isaiah give to his second son, meaning “quickly seize the spoils, quickly seize the spoils.” God was thereby warning that within months of the child’s birth, the Neo-Assyrian Empire would take Damascus and Samaria. This is the single longest name in the Bible and around 2010 he shortened it. Ironically, many Americans will assume that it is an Arabic Muslim name because it is exotic-sounding, but it is not. It is biblical and Hebrew.

In 2000, when he was in his mid-twenties, Gilmore converted to the Ahmadiyya branch of Islam and took the last name Ali (a reference to the first cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad). The late jazz legend Yusef Lateef was also an Ahmadi, a group that began in India and Pakistan and which many Sunni and Shiite Muslims do not recognize as Muslims. But since Ahmadis see themselves as Muslims, that is the way I shall speak of them.

Ali is the first Muslim to win an Oscar since the Academy Awards began in 1929.

Ali had earlier won a Screen Actors Guild Award as best supporting actor for his role of Juan in “Moonlight.” In his acceptance speech, he subtly referred to the pressure the Trump administration is putting on American Muslims:

“I think what I have learned from working on Moonlight, you see what happens in persecution. What I was so grateful about and having the opportunity was playing a gentleman who saw a young man folding into himself as a result of the persecution of his community, and taking that opportunity to uplift him and tell him he mattered, that he was OK. And accept him. I hope that we do a better job of that.

““We kind of get caught up in the minutiae and the details that make us all different. I think there’s two ways of seeing that. There’s an opportunity to see the texture of that person, the characteristics that make them unique, and then there’s the opportunity to go to war about it. And to say that that person is different than me and I don’t like you, so let’s battle.

“My mother is an ordained minister. I’m a Muslim. She didn’t do backflips when I called her to tell her I converted 17 years ago. You put things to the side, and I’m able to see her and she’s able to see me. We love each other. The love has grown. And that stuff is minutiae. It’s not that important.”

SAG Awards: “Mahershala Ali Acceptance Speech | 23rd SAG Awards”

In this speech, interestingly enough, Ali used the stigma still all too often associated with gayness as a proxy for the stigma attached in the US to being Muslim in the era of Trump, and pointed to his own multi-religious family as a model for multi-religious America.

As for the question I ask in the title of this essay, you will object that Trump’s Muslim ban only affects non-US citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries.

But as it was implemented by apparently fanatical ICE agents, the ban also had an impact on US citizens, as President Bannon almost certainly intended that it should.

Muhammad Ali Jr., the son of the late renowned boxer, was allegedly illegally detained at the Ft. Lauderdale airport by ICE agents for several hours after he spoke in Jamaica for Black History Month.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Chris Mancini, Muhammad Ali Jr.’s attorney, asserted that his client was kept at the airport for almost two hours and that agents asked him over and over again, “Where did you get your name from?” and “Are you Muslim?”

After he affirmed that he is a Muslim, the officials continued to interrogate him about his religion and his place of birth (Philadelphia). He is a US citizen by birth and holds an American passport.

If white people in America didn’t want African-American Muslims here, they shouldn’t have kidnapped millions of Africans, some 20% of them Muslims, and brought them here as slaves.

So the answer is that Muslim-ness is being othered by the Trump cronies, and American Muslims are being coded as somehow foreign– even though persons of Muslim heritage have been in North America for hundreds of years (long before the Drumpfs got here in the 1880s). And, yes, it is entirely possible that Mahershala Ali could be treated as Muhammad Ali, Jr., was.

Although Mahershala Ali is the first Muslim actor actually to win an academy award, prominent Muslims have long associated with Hollywood and have won Golden Globes and other awards. Omar Sharif, an Egyptian of Christian Syrian heritage who converted to Islam, was nominated for an Academy Award as supporting actor in David Lean’s 1962 “Lawrence of Arabia.” He was also celebrated for his roles in “Dr. Zhivago” and “Funny Girl.” I pointed out that he was never forced to play a terrorist. IMDB has a listing of younger Muslim talent in Hollywood, who are already making their mark.

The five directors nominated for best foreign film, one of them an Iranian, issued a joint statement in protest of the Trump Muslim ban, saying, “We believe there is no best country, best gender, best religion or best color. . .”

And, as noted, Mahershala Ali spoke of the great opportunity of playing an individual “who saw a young man folding into himself as a result of the persecution of his community, and taking that opportunity to uplift him and tell him he mattered, that he was OK. And accept him.”

He said, “I hope that we do a better job of that.” Me too.

Posted in African-Americans,Culture,Donald Trump,Featured,film,Islam-hatred,Muslim-Americans | 5 Responses | Print |

Spurned Reporters should dump Trump Briefings, turn to Investigative Journalism

By Juan Cole | Feb. 26, 2017 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Donald Trump was unhappy Saturday that the major media had neglected to report a point made by Herman Cain in an interview on Fox. Cain alleged that in Barack Obama’s first month, the Federal budget deficit rose $200 bn., but in Trump’s first month it fell to only $12 bn. Obviously, Obama had nothing to do with the deficit in his first month– that was a result of the 2008 collapse, which had something to do with Republican policies of deregulating the banks and other mortgage lenders and declining to exercise any oversight over sketchy practices. And Trump had nothing to do with the deficit during his first month in office. That was a result of Obama’s 8 years of pulling the economy back out of the toilet to which the Republican Party had consigned it.

Trump’s petty attacks on journalists as enemies of America, as the worst people, and as irrationally denying him the credit for his 4 weeks of economic turnaround, are deeply worrisome to many Americans sensitive to the danger of a spiral down into authoritarian rule. William H. McRaven, the retired four-star admiral and former Navy Seal who led the raid against Usama Bin Laden, called Trump’s remark on the press as an enemy of the people “the greatest threat to democracy” he has ever seen.

Trump’s immature sidelining of reporters on his enemy’s list kept rolling on this weekend. White House spokesman Sean Spicer was set to do an on-camera press briefing on Friday, and then Donald Trump spoke at the conservative gathering CPAC. It is a custom that the spokesman doesn’t do an on-camera event the same day the president gives a substantial address. So Spicer switched to doing what is called a “gaggle,” a smaller briefing in his office attended only be a few reporters in a pool who then would convey his remarks to others.

Spicer pared down the invitee list to the bare bones. He excluded the BBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed, the Daily Mail and Politico, among others. He allowed ABC, Fox News, Breitbart News, Reuters and the Washington Times. Breitbart is not a news outlet, but a propaganda arm of elements of the Ku Klux Klan who wear suits rather than white robes.

The exclusions were so egregious and petty that the Associated Press, USA Today and Time magazine declined to be present. The Washington Post and McClatchy did not know about the disinvitees, and said that if they had been aware of what was going on, they would not have attended, either.

Since Spicer often conveys fake news (the Atlanta Attack) or pro-Trump propaganda at his briefings, it isn’t clear that the excluded media were exactly missing anything.

Then Trump announced that he would be the first president since Tricky Dick Nixon voluntarily to skip the annual dinner of the White House correspondents, where in recent decades the president and the press engaged in some good-natured ribbing. Trump appears to have felt humiliated at one of these events by remarks of then President Barack Obama, pushing back against Trump’s outrageous lies about Obama’s birthplace.

But Spicer’s and Trump’s attempts to exclude so many journalists from a briefing may be all to the good.

Something is broken in American journalism. Maybe it is the “inverted pyramid” whereby US reporters put the “most important thing” first in the article. It has been pointed out that this way of organizing the article gives an unfair advantage to a duplicitous administration, since anything the president says goes first in the article. Bush and his people used this principle to game the press all the time. (When the scandal about US personnel torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq broke on a Thursday evening, Bush quickly came out and condemned the practice. The Friday headlines were “President condemns torture at Abu Ghraib.”)

Or maybe it is access journalism, whereby an administration adopts a few favored writers and feeds them scoops that it suits the administration to go on the front page.

Or maybe it is the news conference. Why privilege an administration’s narrative about itself by doing articles based on nothing more than hot air coming from the general direction of the West Wing?

Most major newspapers in the US, when there were major print newspapers, used to have an investigative journalism team. With the decline of ad revenue and the hard times on which journalism has fallen, investigative journalism has often been abandoned. Administrations and the Washington bureaucracy don’t like a young journalist nosing around. ProPublica, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and some other independent organizations (often with limited resources) have been left to try to fill the gap left when big media cut back on investigative reporting.

But we need that back, big time, in this administration. Everywhere you dig in Trump’s cabinet, you find bodies. So instead of sitting in a room being fed falsehoods by Spicer or Trump, best for the journalists to be working contacts in the White House or at NSC or the Pentagon to get the real story. Enough people in Washington are appalled by the Trump-Bannon attempt to fascize America that they seem willing to leak damaging information all on their own. How much better if a trained journalist got those stories through initiative.

So here’s to Trump excluding virtually all the newspapers and cable channels. Let him. Go get the scoops he doesn’t want you to have.

Someone (probably not George Orwell) once said, ““News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising.” Whoever said it, truer words were never spoken.

We need less advertising (or “public relations” in some versions), and a helluva lot more journalism these days.

——-

Posted in Authoritarianism,Donald Trump,Featured,journalism | 25 Responses | Print |

Top 5 Hypocrisies of Trump Friday

By Juan Cole | Feb. 25, 2017 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

On Friday, Trump was making news again, after having appeared to be subdued (or muzzled?) by his staff midweek. But he addressed the conservative equivalent of that bar scene in Star Wars, CPAC. As usual, the sum total of his wacky pronouncements added up to a minus number. Here are a few of the more striking contradictions:

1. At CPAC Trump complained that the US deficit has soared to $20 trillion.

Then he said,

“We’re also put nothing a massive budget request for our beloved military. And we will be substantially upgrading all of our military, all of our military, offensive, defensive, everything, bigger and better and stronger than ever before. And hopefully, we’ll never have to use it, but nobody’s gonna mess with us, folks, nobody.

The annual US military budget is $773.5 billion. The US spends as much on the military as the next 14 countries, and this massive spending on war-related institutions drives the country into repeated wars (war spending creates constituents and lobbies). The federal government plans to collect $3.2 trillion in taxes and fees in fiscal 2017 and to spend $3.6 trillion– i.e. is spending $400 bn more than it has. The military budget is a quarter of the federal budget. War spending cannot be expanded without vastly increasing the deficit, as Trump himself seemed to admit when he talked about the wastefulness of the Bush wars.

2. At CPAC he said, “So I’m not against the media, I’m not against the press. I don’t mind bad stories if I deserve them.” And he said, “And I love the First Amendment; nobody loves it better than me. Nobody.”

Then he disinvited CNN, NYT, LAT, Politico and Buzzfeed from the Friday press briefing. Trump is attempting to make Breitbart and other alt-NeoNazi outlets into the mainstream media and to destroy even the center-right corporate media which he and Steve Bannon see as insufficiently worshipful of the privilege of the white and wealthy, and insufficiently worshipful of Trump.

3. Trump is always going on about how he will make the US more secure.

Then he basically called for a new nuclear arms race and ratcheting up of the planet’s most deadly arsenal.

4. Trump said, “And by the way, I want regulation. I want to protect our environment, I want regulations for safety, I want all of the regulations that we need and I want them to be so strong and so tough…”

But Trump is now again allowing corporations to dump their coal ash into our rivers and thus our drinking water. He also intends to reverse many of President Obama’s other clean water regulations.

5. Trump says he wants the intelligence community to report on the danger to the US emanating from the 7 countries whose citizens he wishes to place on a travel ban.

But when on Friday The Department of Homeland Security issued a report questioning the premises of Trump’s 7-country visa ban, Trump immediately and totally dismissed it.

—-

Posted in Denialism,Donald Trump,Featured,Militarization,Pentagon,Republican Party | 18 Responses | Print |

“Get out of my Country!” White Terrorist Shoots Asian-American Engineers in Wake of Trump Visa Ban

By Juan Cole | Feb. 24, 2017 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

It is alleged that Adam W. Purinton, a regular at a bar and grill, went up to two Indian-American patrons on Wednesday night in Olathe, Kansas and screamed racial slurs at them. He was asked to leave by the bartender, but 15 minutes later came back, shouted “get out of my country!” and shot them. One victim, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, died of his injuries in a Kansas City hospital. He is said to have left behind a wife who is five months pregnant.

The other intended victim, 32-year-old Alok Madasani of Overland Park, is wounded and in hospital.

It is speculated that Purinton, who had served in the Navy and worked in internet technology, thought that the men were Middle Eastern Muslims rather than Indian Hindus.

Also shot and wounded in the hand, chest and neck is 24-year-old Ian Grillot, who just happened to be at the bar and grill, and who tried to stop Purinton as he fled. Grillot, from his hospital bed, told the story of how he was under a table and counted out nine shots then pursued the alleged assailant. But apparently he miscounted, and the gunman still had a shot to get off.

Grillot said: “It’s not about where he [victim] was from or his ethnicity. We’re all humans, so I just did what was right to do.”

Grillot’s injury is a badge of honor and courage, and he should be saluted by all right-thinking people. But it is a dark parable. White terrorism against people the white supremacists code as non-white or foreign will also victimize white people.

Purinton was picked up at another bar 80 miles away from the scene of the crime, where he allegedly confessed to having shot two “Middle Eastern” men. That kind of stupidity is an active danger to the survival of our species.

Remember, the shooter had been told by Trump-Bannon that Muslims hate America and should be excluded from the US.

Kuchibhotla was a star software engineer originally from Hyderabad, India (his wife is also from there). He had degrees from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in Hyderabad and from the University of Texas. His co-workers say he was the nicest person. His bereaved wife and his family are trying to raise money to send his body back to India for his funeral.

He and Madasani worked at Garmin International.

The White House sets a tone in a country. Trump’s assertion that “Islam hates us” and his project of a Muslim ban sent a signal permitting hate crimes to the millions of unbalanced people in the US into whose hands the National Rifle Association has insisted on putting firearms.

But ironically, Trump would approve of Kuchibhotla.

As Willa Frej tells the story, then Steve Bannon had a radio show on Sirius XM in 2015, he had Donald Trump on as a guest and complained about all the foreigners in the US. Trump pushed back, saying that a lot of bright people come to America and get Ivy League degrees, and we should try to keep them.

Bannon told Trump, “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think… A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

Needless to say, Bannon’s “facts” are fake. Asian-Americans actually account for 14 percent of CEOs in Silicon Valley. And, as we social scientists use the phrase “civil society” (non-governmental public organizations), there is no reason to exclude Asian-Americans. That is, there is no analytical reason, assuming you’re not, like, a racist bigot.

Bannon speaks of a “civilizational war” with Muslims and through the executive orders he crafter for Tump he has laid the ground work for blood in the streets.

Bannon is not fit to shine the shoes of any of the three victims here, who actually contribute positively to our country rather than trying to Nazify it.

Two of my uncles fought the Nazis. I mind anyone trying to import racist thuggery into this country. There’s no difference between publishing a rag like Breitbart and going out to Arlington cemetery and spitting on the graves every day.

——-

Posted in Donald Trump,Far Right,Featured,Islam-hatred,Muslim-Americans,Steve Bannon,Xenophobia | 37 Responses | Print |

Buyers’ Remorse: Americans think Trump is bad at almost Everything

By Juan Cole | Feb. 23, 2017 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

The vast majority of Americans in a new Quinnipiac opinion poll do not believe that Donald J. Trump is level-headed or shares their values. Of course, this is only one poll, and likely the plus or minus swing is 3 or 4 percent. But actually the findings are so decisive in most cases that that wouldn’t matter. Qunnipiac showed Trump beating Clinton last summer, so you can’t accuse them of being biased against him.

And only 38% think he is doing a good job in his first month, versus 55% who say no. In contrast, a strong majority trust the courts to do the right thing.

This finding has to be underlined. Only 33 percent of Americans (as projected from this poll) think Trump is level-headed.

National poll – #PresidentDonaldTrump strengths and weaknesses pic.twitter.com/aueBUBaGbg

— Quinnipiac Poll (@QuinnipiacPoll) February 22, 2017

So this is the guy with the nuclear codes. The guy with the power, as things evolved through the 20th century, unilaterally to declare war. The guy who presides over a trillion-dollar a year security and military complex. Who has several hundred thousand people spying on us all. The guy who issues executive orders, which now make up about 1/3 of all of our national legislation, and who does so by fiat.

And 63 percent of you think he isn’t level-headed? And, like, this wasn’t apparent to you all the way through 2016?

I mean, is this a joke? You put a flake (isn’t that what you mean by “not level-headed”?) in the most powerful office in the world? What, did you think it would be entertaining, sort of like one of those asteroid movies where in the end there is no way to stop it from destroying most of the earth? Did your mother drop you on your head?

And get this, only 37 percent think Trump shares their values. It would be scary, of course, if they really even believed what they told the pollsters. Do 118 million Americans really think it is all right to just start grabbing the person next to them in inappropriate ways? Or do they only talk like that in the locker room? Do 118 million Americans really think the 10% of the country that is first-generation immigrants are all criminals?

So my guess is that on mature reflection even the 37 percent might have some doubts.

But again, if 60 percent of you think this guy’s values are alien to you, why would you put him in the presidency? Just for a change of pace?

It goes down the line. You don’t think he is honest (55%). You don’t think he has good leadership skills (55%). You don’t even think he cares about the average Joe (55%). So you thought it might be a good idea to have a lying, incompetent elitist rat bastard as president?

The only positives for Trump here are that you think he is intelligent and a strong leader.

First of all, you have confused slyness with intelligence.

Second of all, you have confused mouthing off with being a strong leader. (I will remind you that you just said he has poor leadership skills; then how do you think he’s a strong leader?)

Then let’s take the issues, according to the Quinnipiac findings:

National poll – Approval of the way #PresidentDonaldTrump is handling #Economy #Terrorism #Immigration #ForeignPolicy pic.twitter.com/mWVXF0oGuC

— Quinnipiac Poll (@QuinnipiacPoll) February 22, 2017

You think he is bad at handling foreign policy (56%). You think he’s bad on immigration (58%). You even think he is bad at counter-terrorism (49%). The only thing you think he is good at is running the economy (47% positive on that). And boy, do you have another think coming. Wait till he gets rid of Dodd Frank and deregulates even further the big banks and investment firms. The 2008 crash will look like a kindergarten field trip. And the environment is part of the economy. This is the guy who thinks it was much better when coal companies could release their toxic ash into our streams and rivers and when dirty oil pipelines could spill their poisonous sludge into our drinking water and fields. (So they can, again).

The vast majority of you think Trump’s Muslim ban went too far, and you are really against banning Syrian refugees, and you think in general the Federal government has taken this counter-terrorism thing way too far, chipping away at our civil liberties.

I saw on social media someone quoting a Trump supporter that they want us to give them a way to say they were wrong and made a mistake, without our telling these voters that they were bad people.

OK, you’re not bad people. You just made a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes.

But there are things you have to do to make up for the mistake. You have to give Trump a Democratic Senate and even House in 2018 if you want those bad instincts you just identified to be restrained. The GOP is obviously going to let Trump exercise his bad judgment all he likes. Even so-called mavericks like Sen. John McCain have not voted against Trump even once.

And, you have in your own life to counter-act Trump. Help with or give some support to refugees already here. Join a Muslim-American civil rights organization like MPAC or an Arab-American one like the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination committee. And where you can afford it and it is practical, cut down on your carbon footprint. Use public transportation or drive an electric vehicle. Pressure your utility to give you more green energy. If you can, put up solar panels.

You made a mistake. Fix it.

——–

Posted in Donald Trump,Featured,US politics | 38 Responses | Print |

Red state rural America is acting on climate change – without calling it climate change

By Juan Cole | Feb. 23, 2017 |

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By Rebecca J. Romsdahl | (The Conversation) | – –

President Donald Trump has the environmental community understandably concerned. He and members of his Cabinet have questioned the established science of climate change, and his choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has sued the EPA many times and regularly sided with the fossil fuel industry.

Even if the Trump administration withdraws from all international climate negotiations and reduces the EPA to bare bones, the effects of climate change are happening and will continue to build.

In response to real threats and public demand, cities across the United States and around the world are taking action to address climate change. We might think this is happening only in large, coastal cities that are threatened by sea-level rise or hurricanes, like Amsterdam or New York.

Research shows, however, that even in the fly-over red states of the U.S. Great Plains, local leaders in small- to medium-size communities are already grappling with the issue. Although their actions are not always couched in terms of addressing climate change, their strategies can provide insights into how to make progress on climate policy under a Trump administration.

‘Deliberate framing’

My colleagues and I did a survey of over 200 local governments in 11 states of the Great Plains region to learn about steps they’re taking to mitigate the effects of climate change and to adapt to them. We found local officials in red states responsible for public health, soil conservation, parks and natural resources management, as well as county commissioners and mayors, are concerned about climate change, and many feel a responsibility to take action in the absence of national policy.

In terms of framing, using wind energy is a way to improve local air quality and save money on energy, while also reducing emissions from fossil fuels.
paytonc/flickr, CC BY-SA

But because it is such a complex and polarizing topic, they often face public uncertainty or outrage toward the issue. So while these local officials have been addressing climate change in their communities over the past decade, many of these policy activities are specifically not framed that way. As one respondent to our survey said:

“It is my personal and professional opinion that the conservation community is on track with addressing the issue of climate change but is way off track in assigning a cause. The public understands the value of clean water and clean air. If the need to improve our water quality and air quality was emphasized, most would agree. Who is going to say dirty water and dirty air is not a problem? By making the argument ‘climate change and humans are the cause’ significant energy is wasted trying to prove this. It is also something the public has a hard time sinking their teeth into.”

In order to address the vulnerabilities facing their communities, many local officials are reframing climate change to fit within existing priorities and budget items. In a survey of mayors, we asked: “In your city’s policy and planning activities (for energy, conservation, natural resources management, land use, or emergency planning, etc.) how is climate change framed?” The following quotes give a sense of their strategies.

“In terms of economic benefit & resource protection. This framing was deliberate to garner support from residents who did not agree with climate change.”

“We frame the initiative as: energy savings (=$ savings), as smart growth/good planning, and as common sense natural resource management. Climate change is only explicitly referenced in our Climate Protection Plan adopted in 2009. Most initiatives fall under the “sustainability” umbrella term.“

“We mask it with sustainability, we call it P3 (People, Planet, Prosperity)”

“The initial interest in climate change came about as a result of concern about the potential for poor air quality affecting economic development in the City. Air quality and climate change were framed as being extremely related issues.”

“Climate change is framed as one of several benefits of conservation measures. Other benefits of conservation, recycling, walking, etc. include it’s ‘good for the earth’ (regardless of climate change), healthful, economical, etc.”

The results show that energy, economic benefits, common sense and sustainability are frames that are providing opportunities for local leaders to address climate change without getting stuck in the political quagmire. This strategy is being used across the Great Plains states, which include some of the most climate-skeptical areas of the country.

Local needs and values

Every region of the U.S. will need to address practical questions of how states and local communities can reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts. Under the Trump administration, it is likely any progress on U.S. climate policy will continue at these subnational levels. That’s why a variety of experts argue that we should encourage the types of pragmatic strategies now being employed by local leaders in red states.

In the Great Plains in particular, local officials are facing severe impacts from higher temperatures, which will place greater demands on water and energy.

Capturing methane gases from landfill can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and be a local source of fuel for power.
Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, CC BY-NC

In our research we found local leaders focus on regional and local issues such as drought, energy and flooding. These are problems that are tied to climate change, but are already a priority on the local level. And the sought-for improvements, such as energy savings, health benefit and flood management, fit well with local needs and values.

For example, Fargo, North Dakota mitigates some of its greenhouse gas emissions and created a new source of city revenue by capturing the methane from its landfill facility and selling that gas to the electricity company. The city trash is now providing renewable energy for local residents and an industrial facility.

Perhaps the question facing us is: Should we reframe climate change and other environmental problems to fit the Trump administration’s priorities with a strong focus on practical solution ideas? For example, Trump has stated that infrastructure projects will be a high priority. That could easily translate into fixing the drinking water crisis experienced by Flint, Michigan and many other cities where it is likely to happen; Trump has also highlighted mass transit, which could help reduce air pollution and carbon emissions.

With an administration eager to expand fossil fuel development and consumption, the outlook for federal action on reducing climate-altering greenhouse gases is dire. Given that, reframing climate change to address cobenefit issues seems a logical strategy, and we can look for local government leaders in red states to show the way.

Rebecca J. Romsdahl, Professor of Environmental Science & Policy, University of North Dakota

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Posted in Climate Change,Desertification,Environment,Environmentalists | 1 Response | Print |