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Officials and advisers fear Xi Jinping is blind to the impact of harsh anti-coronavirus measures

As we continue to watch federal and state governments fail us on issue after issue — from climate change to voting rights to even the most basic of human rights, such as the right to an abortion — a growing movement of change-makers are beginning to look closer to home for ways to exercise political agency and to reshape their world.

This movement has been referred to as the “municipalist moment,” one which puts the city at the heart of the revolutionary struggle. Broadly speaking, municipalism is a bottom-up political system that puts power in the hands of the people working from blocks to neighborhoods to the city. At its heart is the desire to transform society into one that reflects the values of solidarity, democracy, equity, sustainability and pluralism.

On May Day, residents of the Los Angeles area are taking to the streets to begin a two-year project aimed at taking back their city. Anchored by Los Angeles for All, a network of self-organized social movements, the intention of this place-based project is to craft a municipalist platform that reflects the needs of the residents instead of corporations, opens up space for direct democratic reforms, and puts power back in the hands of the people.

Based in the El Sereno neighborhood of northeast Los Angeles, Yvonne Yen Liu is the coordinator of the Los Angeles for All and the Municipalism Learning Series project, as well as the research director of the Solidarity Research Center, a worker self-directed nonprofit that advances solidarity economies. In this interview, Liu discusses what municipalism entails, the importance of intersectionality in democratizing movements and how others can get involved.

Robert Raymond: I want to start with some basic table-setting. The term “municipalism” conjures a few different images in my mind, but I’m wondering if you could start by just unpacking the term. What is municipalism?

Yvonne Yen Liu: At the heart of it, municipalism is about democratizing the local economy and the state — there are three characteristics to it. First, it’s directly democratic, meaning that people are participating in an authentic way, not just electing a representative to make decisions on their behalf. Second, it’s feminist. It’s important to value the labor that is done in terms of caring labor, in terms of housework, in terms of caregiving — whether that’s for children or for elders. But that’s an important piece to consider and also an important group of people to value in terms of participation in politics. And then the third, [municipalism is] anti-capitalist. We’re not trying to control our economy in order to continue the status quo of the economy.

Capitalism is neither natural nor necessary. And I don’t think it needs to be the order of things. Municipalism is about creating different types of social relationships. That could take the form of a solidarity economy, which is an economy based on principles of cooperation, mutuality and inclusion. Or it could be based on a different form of economic organization where workers aren’t exploited for their labor but instead, own the means of production, as Marx famously wrote over 200 years ago. So we could have worker-owned cooperatives, for example, or worker councils, instead.

I love that. And I think that all of those three different points that you mentioned — direct democracy, feminist and anti-capitalist — they intersect in so many ways. Worker cooperatives, for example, are an example of direct democracy, but within the economic realm, right? So it’s also capitalist. And then one could argue that as workers have control over their own livelihoods and the decisions made in their workplaces, a lot of issues could be brought up that are overlooked. For example, how we dealt — or didn’t deal — with issues of care work during the pandemic. Broadly speaking, those issues are feminist issues that typically go unheard or unaddressed in traditional firms.

The intention of this place-based project is to craft a municipalist platform that reflects the needs of the residents instead of corporations, opens up space for direct democratic reforms, and puts power back in the hands of the people.

Absolutely. I think all of this is intersectional. I would say that the general ethic is to make decisions that impact our lives on a daily basis and to make those openly — not just transparently, because what good is transparency when we can see how decisions are being made but we’re still not participating in them? But instead making them actually participatory so that we’re involved and engaged in the decision-making.

Can you tell us about Los Angeles for All?

Los Angeles for All is a project with an expiration date — we will expire in 2024. We have a hypothesis that Los Angeles is ripe for a municipalist platform, and so we’re giving ourselves two years to test this hypothesis. Depending on the results, we will recalibrate our assumptions and make decisions about our next steps.

Our hypothesis is that social conditions are such that the City of Los Angeles is ripe for a municipalist movement. We studied the example of Barcelona and saw that they had a confluence of different social movement forces at around 2015. They had their version of the Occupy movement — the Indignados movement. They also had the anti-eviction movement that was created in the aftermath of the Great Recession. All of those different groups came together and created a platform for the people to take their city back from neoliberalism, from capitalists, from privatization — for the people, not the banks.

We think that it’s the same time here in Los Angeles. LA has a rich history, but also a contemporary scene of different types of social movements working in different sectors — but we’re not necessarily connected together. And so we intend to network the different self-organized social movements that exist in our ridiculously ginormous megalopolis. And then starting from the neighborhood level — a smaller, more manageable unit of geography — we intend to do popular assemblies so that folks can talk about what is it that they want to see in our city, what it is that they need in their lives.

One of the assumptions in our hypothesis is the 3.5 percent rule: Based on research that was done by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, they found that you only need three and a half percent of a population to move into structural change. So, we’re using that calculation to say that in a city of almost 4 million people, that’s about 400 people that we need to activate in each neighborhood — or about 150,000 people.

And you’re planning the launch of this municipalist project on May Day?

Yeah, we’re going to have a social gathering at a community center here in Los Angeles on May Day. And we’re also going to watch the Municipalism Learning Series opening panel together. And then subsequently, we’re hoping to map out those social movements in Los Angeles for the rest of the year. We’re going to be doing that using relational organizing. It’s a little bit like the six degrees to Kevin Bacon thing. I mean, we all have relationships with folks, so I think if we start from who we know and extend outwards, I believe we can actually cover a good chunk of the different parts of our city.

We’re planning to use relational organizing so that folks are thinking about who their networks are and how those networks overlap with other networks. And then we’re launching our neighborhood assemblies starting next year and we’re hoping to go through a process where the neighborhood assemblies formulate their version of their policy needs and demands, and then that gets elevated to a higher geographic level. And finally, we’ll have a platform that represents the needs of the entire city.

And to broaden out, I’m wondering if you have any connections to other cities? I’m thinking about the idea of confederated cities — what social theorist, political philosopher and anarchist Murray Bookchin wrote about, and what’s being embodied by the Cooperation Cities movement, organizations like Cooperation Jackson and Cooperation Richmond. Are you thinking bigger than Los Angeles?

Municipalism is about creating different types of social relationships. That could take the form of a solidarity economy.

We also have gatherings in Humboldt County, California, and also a watch party in New York City. We do think that this is the municipal moment and I think that there’s a lot of folks that are interested in doing this connecting work of what Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson calls “liberated zones,” of different places that have a measure of local democracy in place at the state level and also in the economy.

Confederating municipalities is a way to achieve scale. We can do deep local work in our place, but the way that we can reach larger numbers of people is if we connect with other places that are doing similar experiments. This is also part of why we are doing this learning series. It’s a desire to connect with other places that are doing similar types of municipalist projects, be they people’s platforms, popular assemblies or other associated decision making.

We’re going to actually feature different cases every quarter. So our second panel after our May Day panel is going to be on the 11th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street on September 17, and it’s going to look at municipalist platforms in Barcelona, Bologna and also Zagreb. And subsequently, we’ll have other panels on Indigenous municipalism, the relationship of organized labor with municipalism, “just transition,” etc. It’s our way of learning from other folks, other municipalities, and it’s just been an incredible opportunity to do some of that networking of the nodes.

So, yeah, for so many reasons, so many people who for many years have been doing national level or international level work that hasn’t really been tied to geographic place — I think there’s a real interest in that now. Maybe it’s a reflection of how we’ve had to stay in place during the pandemic, potentially. But people are really rooting into place and situating their projects in a specific place, which I think is really exciting. And I think municipalism speaks to impulse really well at this moment.

For folks who want to get involved or maybe start something in their own city, do you have any words of advice or ways they can plug into the municipalist moment?

Great question! I’d recommend joining the Municipalism Learning Series. Reach out and connect with us. We’re trying to create a peer space, we’re calling it the Resist and Build school (inspired by my mentor Emily Kawano, the cofounder of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, who says that we need to do both: Resist the dominant system while building alternatives, where folks at varying levels can learn from each other. It’s still in the works, and the idea is that folks should have a place-based project, to democratize their local economy and state. Our hope for this school is that it’s a “learn and action” community of practice for municipalism.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

The world is teeming with animals that have never met before. They clamber under dripping green canopies in rainforest, they crouch in the rough recesses of mountain caves, they scamper through your backyard. Usually, they stick to what they know, living in the same ecosystems that have supported their kind for millennia. In normal times, they may never encounter the species that live in the mountain or valley or forest next to theirs.

But these are not normal times.

Covid-19 wasn’t the outlier, a once-in-a-century tragedy. It’s a glimpse of the future to come.

As temperatures spike and rainfall patterns become more erratic, animals are on the move. They’re migrating toward the poles, away from temperate regions, in search of the conditions they need to live in a world that is changing too fast for them to adapt to it. But before they reach their new habitats, they’ll meet each other. And every time a new species meets, there’s a chance to spark a new pandemic. That’s because animals are teeming with pathogens, their own microscopic kingdoms: viruses, bacteria, parasites. Each new interaction is a chance for an animal to get sick in an entirely new way—and to pass it on to other species, including humans.

The science has grown increasingly clear: In a warming, changing world, new viruses will shift between animals and into people with alarming rapidity and frequency.

“What we’re looking at is a total rearrangement of the mammal virome,” Colin Carlson, an assistant research professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security and lead author of a new study published in Nature on Thursday. “And, as species pick up the viruses, we think that there could be some pretty devastating impacts downstream for both human health and conservation.”

Here’s the truly troubling part: These interactions are already happening, the research shows. Even in scenarios where we manage to curb emissions and stop global temperatures from rising, interactions like these are locked in. “We need to think about pandemic preparedness as an escalating problem, no matter what we do upstream at this point,” Carlson, who is a friend of mine, told me. “We cannot put the genie back in the bottle. It is out. It is out today.”

Covid-19 wasn’t the outlier, a once-in-a-century tragedy. It’s a glimpse of the future to come, especially if we don’t take steps now to understand the intricate and inextricable links between the planet’s health and our own. It’s bad now, but it could get way worse.

What scares Carlson the most is how little we know about the global viral picture—and how unpredictable environmental change will affect animals and ecosystems as we move into an increasingly uncertain future.

“It can take years or decades to figure out what’s going on with a single pathogen,” Carlson said. “When we’re talking about the scale of thousands of viruses jumping into new hosts, we really don’t have a sense for what that means.”

We don’t even have a good idea of how many viruses there are in the world, and how good they are at infecting new organisms. The researchers of this new paper estimate that at least 10,000 viruses could jump to humans, and most of them haven’t yet. But we do know that animal-to-human spillover has been responsible for some of the deadliest outbreaks in recent history.

“Every pandemic that’s happened since the twentieth century has been a virus that has moved from an animal to a person, with the exception of cholera,” which isn’t a virus, Aaron Bernstein, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital and the interim director at Harvard’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment, told me. That includes the Covid-19 pandemic as well as influenza, yellow fever, lassa fever, MERS and HIV/AIDS. “And in each of those instances, you can point to deforestation, livestock—some change that humans have made to other life forms that has led to this problem.”

“We’re not thinking about species’ range shifts as biosecurity problems.”

The problem isn’t limited to mammals’ migration. Mosquitoes and ticks are carrying insect-borne diseases—malaria, Zika, chikungunya, West Nile, Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever—farther north and south than ever before. Birds winging over the Arctic and the equator may carry strains of influenza that mutate in dangerous new ways. Winged creatures—bats, bugs, and birds—carry some of the greatest risks as they take flight over different landscapes.

Humans can’t be healthy if the animals and ecosystems around us are not. “Our response to pandemics is a hallmark of this delusion that our welfare is somehow independent of the rest of life,” Bernstein said. “Our pandemic response is all about us. Let’s do vaccines, tests and drugs for us. Forget about the wildlife; don’t protect their habitats, don’t try and figure out what’s going on with their lives. Let’s just focus on us.”

But right now, we’re not even gathering the kind of data we’d need to analyze these threats: We do very little monitoring of viruses in animals, so we don’t even really know what they’re up to. “We’re not thinking about species’ range shifts as biosecurity problems,” Carlson said. “We’re not keeping a really close eye on, how fast are bats moving? We’re not testing them for viruses when they show up in new ecosystems.”

With the levels of warming we’re already experiencing, the researchers estimate that there will be 4,000 opportunities for viruses to transmit to new hosts in the near future. Many of these new animal interactions will be harmless. Most will not result in a deadly pandemic. But even rare events are more worrisome the more chances they are given—when lightning strikes thousands of times, there are greater chances for sparks to turn to wildfires.

The researchers estimate that there will be 4,000 opportunities for viruses to transmit to new hosts in the near future.

“We need to rethink how we’re talking about and addressing emerging infectious disease risks, and that means we have to stop infections before they start,” Bernstein said. “This paper is another clarion call that we cannot afford to address the risk of emerging infections solely through activities that try to contain these diseases after they start, which is almost entirely where all of our leaders have focused. We must take actions that prevent spillover.”

While we can’t stop all viruses before they spill over into humans, stopping some of them could be one of the most cost-effective methods of pandemic prevention. “We just spent something on the order of trillions of dollars for one pathogen, and look how well we did,” Bernstein said. And “even when pathogens don’t become pandemic, they cause immense harm to livelihoods in low- and middle-income countries in particular that have the least resources to deal with them.”

There are two main ways to address the growing risks of animal-borne viruses in a warming world. First, we need to understand how climate is affecting migration patterns, and how quickly animals are moving.

“There’s all of these small natural history notes, where people sort of sound the alarm about something and it’s often very disconnected from the rest of the field,” Carlson said. “It’ll be a little communication that will say something like, ‘Hey, I found a Brazilian free-tailed bat in North Carolina that’s never been there before. Is that something we should know?’” The study Carlson was involved with combed through notes like these to try to understand how quickly animals are moving—but so far, this kind of work has stayed at the margins, he said.

Another key action will be strengthening health care for people, particularly those at the highest risk encountering a novel virus, so that we can identify emerging viruses as quickly as possible—before they spread to other people. “We need to be getting ready to catch outbreaks early. We need to be getting ready to deal with outbreaks if they happen,” Carlson said.

Some of these health systems are already in place, but could use a boost to broaden their focus, Bernstein said. Take malaria, for instance: The global push to eradicate diseases like malaria means that many countries have the capacity to analyze blood samples, or “blood spots,” for infectious disease. “Many of the places where there’s malaria are also high-risk places identified in this paper for emerging infections,” Bernstein said. “Why wouldn’t we use those blood spots to do screens for spillover and then figure out where those people came into contact with a species that is causing spillover?”

Places with the highest levels of risk and the lowest levels of investment are natural areas to target with more resources. But it’s important to remember that viruses can spill over any time animals come in greater contact with people, experts said. “Everyone is at risk, and these hotspots of viral sharing in our backyard exist everywhere,” Carlson said. “We should think about every single grid cell on this map, where there’s people and animals together, as somewhere the next pandemic could start.”

This will require a more complex understanding of climate change than ever before. It’s not just that higher temperatures are causing heat waves; it’s not just that heat is causing droughts, wildfires, and ice melt. It’s that all of those things are driving animals into entirely new territory, weakening their bodies in the process and making them more vulnerable to illness—and then introducing them to unknown dangers and interactions. And humans, similarly uprooted by natural catastrophes, are at greater risk than ever. It is impossible to predict exactly how all of these factors will intertwine. But as a starting point, we need to start tracking them—and we need to start building plans for what happens next.

Despite billions of dollars in federal rental assistance flowing to cities and states, the number of evictions sought by landlords is climbing back to pre-pandemic levels in cities across the country, as wage growth continues to lag behind inflation and millions of people struggle with the rising cost of basic necessities.

An estimated 35 percent of respondents to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest Household Pulse Survey said they are either “very” or “somewhat” likely to leave their home in the next two months due to an eviction. Only about 11 percent said they applied for and received rental assistance through federally funded programs typically administered by states and cities, which are charged with distributing around $46.5 billion in aid to landlords and tenants. A larger Pulse survey found that nearly 25 percent of renter households are “slightly confident” or “not confident at all” in their ability to pay the next month’s rent.

These federal figures are just estimates extrapolated from surveys, but if they are anywhere close to reality, a growing wave of evictions could displace millions of people as the cost of living spikes.

Until recently, employment gains and support from temporary pandemic aid packages shielded the working class from the harms of inflation, according to Shawn Fremstad, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. However, corporations continue to raise prices on consumers, and Congress failed to extend safety net programs such the expanded Child Tax Credit that kept millions of people from going hungry last year.

“But it is now clear that corporate greed is hitting the working class head on,” Fremstad said in a statement this week. “According to the Census Bureau, just over one in three adults (about 34 percent) now report difficulty paying for the usual household expenses, the highest level we’ve seen since early 2021.”

Across the six states and 31 cities tracked by Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, landlords filed for more than 10,247 evictions in the last week alone. In Texas cities — Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth — landlords filed for 37,000 evictions in the first three months of the year, according to a Texas Tribune report based on the same data.

In Dallas, eviction filings plummeted during the height of the pandemic to as few as six per week, but filings skyrocketed after local and federal eviction moratoriums were lifted months ago. More than 1,000 filings were recorded in Dallas during one week this month alone. Similar reports are surfacing in cities across the country as pandemic social aid dries up.

And the housing crisis goes beyond eviction. Thanks in part to a broken social safety net and low wages for workers across multiple top industries, nearly one in three U.S. households can only afford to pay $600 in rent per month or less, resulting in many families grappling with crowded or dangerous housing conditions.

The United States was facing a housing and eviction crisis long before the pandemic forced businesses to shut down and put millions of people out of work. Even before the pandemic, many were charged rent they could not afford, according to housing justice groups. Prior to 2020, more than 3.6 million evictions were filed each year in the U.S.

Falling behind on rent can be a slippery slope toward losing a home, especially in red states with few legal protections for renters. When facing an eviction, only about 3 percent of tenants are represented by an attorney compared to about 81 percent of landlords, according to the National Coalition on the Right to Counsel. However, many evictions are never even challenged in court, according to Greg Pollack, a staff attorney at the Right to Counsel Coalition.

“They just leave. If they try to fight alone, they will lose, and they know it,” Pollock said in an interview. “Half of the people involved don’t even go to court for something that can make them homeless, lose their children, lose their job.”

Even the filing of an eviction, regardless of the outcome in court, can remain on a tenant’s record for years.

The burdens of this crisis are extremely uneven. From 2012 to 2016, Black tenants on average were served eviction notices from landlords at nearly twice the rate of white renters, and low-income Black women were disproportionately targeted, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Fortunately, Pollock said concerns about housing during the pandemic have amplified efforts in multiple cities to guarantee tenants the right to legal representation and set up eviction diversion programs that aim to resolve disputes between tenants and landlords with the goal of preventing an eviction hearing in court. Tenants unions have also organized to collectively challenge landlords and fight evictions across the country.

Washington State, Maryland and Connecticut established “right to counsel” programs that provide legal counsel to tenants facing eviction based on income, and similar programs were recently established in New York City, San Francisco, Newark, Boulder, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Louisville, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Toledo, Seattle, Denver and Cleveland, according to Pollock.

“There are now 16 jurisdictions that have right to counsel. There were zero in 2017,” Pollock said.

Other cities attempted to thwart and eviction crisis by passing new protections for renters, but Pollock said these efforts suffer from “enforcement problems.”

“Often tenants have to file an affidavit of some kind, they don’t know how to do it, and landlords can challenge it,” Pollock said. “In the cities that don’t have a right to counsel, some of the eviction diversion programs and other efforts have helped, but sometimes they are hampered by the fact that there are no lawyers there to make sure that laws are actually followed.”

Even in cities where tenants have a right to counsel, the infrastructure behind many of the new programs is still being built. Pollack said there are shortages of defense attorneys for tenants across the country. A federal moratorium on evictions was thrown out by the Supreme Court last August, and most local moratoriums have expired. Local courts are filling with tenants facing eviction, with in-person hearings replacing the onerous Zoom calls that previously slowed court proceedings and locked out defendants without internet access during pandemic lockdowns.

Still, advocates know a right to counsel can keep many people in their homes. In New York City, 84 percent of tenants with legal representation stay in their homes; in Cleveland, 93 percent of represented tenants avoid an eviction or involuntary move, according to Pollock.

Many tenants are unable to appear in court due to work, family and other obligations during the daytime. In cities without a right to counsel, these tenants are often forced out of their homes without a chance to assert their rights. Legal representation from right to counsel programs instantly fixes that problem, with attorneys appearing in court and filing paperwork on behalf of tenants.

Pollock said advocates are encouraging more law students to become tenant’s attorneys in hopes of building a “pipeline” from graduate law schools to state and local programs that guarantee legal defense for tenants.

“We view this as a cutting-edge civil rights fight, which it is; we view this as part of the fight for the right to housing,” Pollock said.

Climate change is forcing animal migrations at an unprecedented scale, bringing many previously disconnected species into close contact and dramatically raising the likelihood of viruses leaping into new hosts and sparking future pandemics. That’s according to a new study in the journal Nature, which predicts that climate-driven disruptions to Earth’s ecosystems will create thousands of cross-species viral transmissions in the coming decades. We speak with The Atlantic’s Ed Yong, who says this new era can be thought of as the “Pandemicene,” a time defined by the power of viruses over humanity and the wider world. “In a warming world, we’ll get lots of these spillover events in which viruses find new hosts, mostly transferring between animal to animal but increasing the odds that they will eventually then spill over into us,” says Yong.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Global heating is causing such a drastic change to the world’s oceans that it risks a mass extinction event of marine species that rivals anything that’s happened in the Earth’s history over tens of millions of years, new research has warned.

Accelerating climate change is causing a “profound” impact upon ocean ecosystems that is “driving extinction risk higher and marine biological richness lower than has been seen in Earth’s history for the past tens of millions of years,” according to the study.

The world’s seawater is steadily climbing in temperature due to the extra heat produced from the burning of fossil fuels, while oxygen levels in the ocean are plunging and the water is acidifying from the soaking up of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Marine conditions, the researchers said, are reminiscent of the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the Permian period.

This means the oceans are overheated, increasingly gasping for breath—the volume of ocean waters completely depleted of oxygen has quadrupled since the 1960s—and becoming more hostile to life. Aquatic creatures such as clams, mussels and shrimp are unable to properly form shells due to the acidification of seawater.

All of this means the planet could slip into a “mass extinction rivaling those in Earth’s past,” states the new research, published in Science. The pressures of rising heat and loss of oxygen are, researchers said, uncomfortably reminiscent of the mass extinction event that occurred at the end of the Permian period about 250m years ago. This cataclysm, known as the “great dying,” led to the demise of up to 96 percent of the planet’s marine animals.

“Even if the magnitude of species loss is not the same level as this, the mechanism of the species loss would be the same,” said Justin Penn, a climate scientist at Princeton University who co-authored the new research. “The future of life in the oceans rests strongly on what we decide to do with greenhouse gases today. There are two vastly different oceans we could be seeing, one devoid of a lot of life we see today, depending on what we see with CO2 emissions moving forward.”

Truly catastrophic extinction levels may be reached should the world emit planet-heating gases in an unrestrained way, leading to more than 4C of average warming above pre-industrial times by the end of this century, the research found. This would trigger extinctions that would reshape ocean life for several more centuries as temperatures continue to climb.

But even in the better case scenarios, the world is still set to lose a significant chunk of its marine life. At 2C of heating above the pre-industrial norm, which is forecast as likely even under current climate pledges by the world’s governments, around 4 percent of the roughly two million species in the oceans will be wiped out.

Fish and marine mammals that live in polar regions are most vulnerable, according to the study, as they will be unable to migrate to suitably cooler climes, unlike tropical species. “They will just have nowhere to go,” said Penn.

The threat of climate change is amplifying the other major dangers faced by aquatic life, such as over-fishing and pollution. Between 10 percent and 15 percent of marine species are already at risk of extinction because of these various threats, the study found, drawing upon International Union for Conservation of Nature data.

John Bruno, a marine ecologist at the University of North Carolina who was not involved in the study, said the new research appeared “sound” but it differed from previous studies on the topic that suggest species will mainly disperse to new areas rather than be completely snuffed out.

“We’re already losing untold biodiversity and ecosystem functioning with even the relatively modest warming.”

“It’s very different from what most prior work has developed. But that doesn’t mean they are wrong,” Bruno said. “I think this new work is challenging some of our current assumptions about the geographic patterns of looming extinction in the ocean.”

Bruno said that while mass extinctions are likely from extreme heating in the future, the current impacts from climate change and other threats should be concerning enough for policymakers and the public.

“Personally, I’m a lot more worried about the ecosystem degradation we’re already seeing after less than 1C of warming,” he said. “We don’t need to look to a world so warmed over humanity has been wiped out—we’re already losing untold biodiversity and ecosystem functioning with even the relatively modest warming of the last 50 years.”

Currency sell-off sharpens after president pledges ‘all out’ infrastructure spending

John Nichols, The Nation

The post The Democrats’ Losing Strategy appeared first on The Nation.

Since World War I, propaganda has played a crucial role in warfare. Propaganda is used to increase support for the war among citizens of the nation that is waging it. National governments also use targeted propaganda campaigns in an attempt to influence public opinion and behavior in the countries they are at war with, as well as to influence international opinion. Essentially, propaganda, whether circulated through state-controlled or private media, refers to techniques of public opinion manipulation based on incomplete or misleading information, lies and deception. During World War II, both the Nazis and the Allies invested heavily in propaganda operations as part of each side’s overall effort to win the war.

The war in Ukraine is no different. Both Russian and Ukrainian leaders have undertaken a campaign of systematic dissemination of warfare information that can easily be designated as propaganda. Other parties with a stake in the conflict, such as the United States and China, are also engaged in propaganda operations, which work in tandem with their apparent lack of interest in diplomatic undertakings to end the war.

In the interview that follows, leading scholar and dissident Noam Chomsky, who, along with Edward Herman, constructed the concept of the “propaganda model,” looks at the question of who is winning the propaganda war in Ukraine. Additionally, he discusses how social media shape political reality today, analyzes whether the “propaganda model” still works, and dissects the role of the use of “whataboutism.” Lastly, he shares his thoughts on the case of Julian Assange and what his now almost certain extradition to the United States for having committed the “crime” of releasing public information about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq says about U.S. democratic principles.

Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of the most important intellectuals alive. His intellectual stature has been compared to that of Galileo, Newton and Descartes, as his work has had tremendous influence on a variety of areas of scholarly and scientific inquiry, including linguistics, logic and mathematics, computer science, psychology, media studies, philosophy, politics and international affairs. He is the author of some 150 books and the recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), and of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.

C.J. Polychroniou: Wartime propaganda has become in the modern world a powerful weapon in garnering public support for war and providing a moral justification for it, usually by highlighting the “evil” nature of the enemy. It’s also used in order to break down the will of the enemy forces to fight. In the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kremlin propaganda seems so far to be working inside Russia and dominating Chinese social media, but it looks like Ukraine is winning the information war in the global arena, especially in the West. Do you agree with this assessment? Any significant lies or war-myths around the Russia-Ukraine conflict worth pointing out?

Noam Chomsky: Wartime propaganda has been a powerful weapon for a long time, I suspect as far back as we can trace the historical record. And often a weapon with long-term consequences, which merit attention and thought.

“In the more free societies, where means of state violence have been constrained by popular activism, it is of great importance to devise methods of manufacturing consent, and to ensure that they are internalized,” says Noam Chomsky.Uli Deck / picture alliance via Getty Images

Just to keep to modern times, in 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine sank in Havana harbor, probably from an internal explosion. The Hearst press succeeded in arousing a wave of popular hysteria about the evil nature of Spain. That provided the needed background for an invasion of Cuba that is called here “the liberation of Cuba.” Or, as it should be called, the prevention of Cuba’s self-liberation from Spain, turning Cuba into a virtual U.S. colony. So it remained until 1959, when Cuba was indeed liberated, and the U.S., almost at once, undertook a vicious campaign of terror and sanctions to end Cuba’s “successful defiance” of the 150-year-old U.S. policy of dominating the hemisphere, as the State Department explained 50 years ago.

Whipping up war myths can have long-term consequences.

A few years later, in 1916, Woodrow Wilson was elected president with the slogan “Peace without Victory.” That was quickly transmuted to Victory without Peace. A flood of war myths quickly turned a pacifist population to one consumed with hatred for all things German. The propaganda at first emanated from the British Ministry of Information; we know what that means. American intellectuals of the liberal Dewey circle lapped it up enthusiastically, declaring themselves to be the leaders of the campaign to liberate the world. For the first time in history, they soberly explained, war was not initiated by military or political elites, but by the thoughtful intellectuals — them — who had carefully studied the situation and after careful deliberation, rationally determined the right course of action: to enter the war, to bring liberty and freedom to the world, and to end the Hun atrocities concocted by the British Ministry of Information.

One consequence of the very effective Hate Germany campaigns was imposition of a victor’s peace, with harsh treatment of defeated Germany. Some strongly objected, notably John Maynard Keynes. They were ignored. That gave us Hitler.

In a previous interview, we discussed how Ambassador Chas Freeman compared the postwar Hate Germany settlement with a triumph of statesmanship (not by nice people): The Congress of Vienna, 1815. The Congress sought to establish a European order after Napoleon’s attempt to conquer Europe had been overcome. Judiciously, the Congress incorporated defeated France. That led to a century of relative peace in Europe.

There are some lessons.

Not to be outdone by the British, President Wilson established his own propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information (Creel Commission), which performed its own services.

These exercises also had a long-term effect. Among the members of the Commission were Walter Lippmann, who went on to become the leading public intellectual of the 20th century, and Edward Bernays, who became a prime founder of the modern public relations industry, the world’s major propaganda agency, dedicated to undermining markets by creating uninformed consumers making irrational choices — the opposite of what one learns about markets in Econ 101. By stimulating rampant consumerism, the industry is also driving the world to disaster, another topic.

Both Lippmann and Bernays credited the Creel Commission for demonstrating the power of propaganda in “manufacturing consent” (Lippmann) and “engineering of consent” (Bernays). This “new art in the practice of democracy,” Lippmann explained, could be used to keep the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” — the general public — passive and obedient while the self-designated “responsible men” will attend to important matters, free from the “trampling and roar of a bewildered herd.” Bernays expressed similar views. They were not alone.

Lippmann and Bernays were Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberals. The conception of democracy they elaborated was quite in accord with dominant liberal conceptions, then and since.

The ideas extend broadly to the more free societies, where “unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force,” as George Orwell put the matter in his (unpublished) introduction to Animal Farm on “literary censorship” in England.

So it continues. Particularly in the more free societies, where means of state violence have been constrained by popular activism, it is of great importance to devise methods of manufacturing consent, and to ensure that they are internalized, becoming as invisible as the air we breathe, particularly in articulate educated circles. Imposing war-myths is a regular feature of these enterprises.

It often works, quite spectacularly. In today’s Russia, according to reports, a large majority accept the doctrine that in Ukraine, Russia is defending itself against a Nazi onslaught reminiscent of World War II, when Ukraine was, in fact, collaborating in the aggression that came close to destroying Russia while exacting a horrific toll.

The propaganda is as nonsensical as war myths generally, but like others, it relies on shreds of truth, and has, it seems, been effective domestically in manufacturing consent.

We cannot really be sure because of the rigid censorship now in force, a hallmark of U.S. political culture from far back: the “bewildered herd” must be protected from the “wrong ideas.” Accordingly, Americans must be “protected” from propaganda which, we are told, is so ludicrous that only the most fully brainwashed could possibly keep from laughing.

According to this view, to punish Vladimir Putin, all material emanating from Russia must be rigorously barred from American ears. That includes the work of outstanding U.S. journalists and political commentators, like Chris Hedges, whose long record of courageous journalism includes his service as The New York Times Middle East and Balkans bureau chief, and astute and perceptive commentary since. Americans must be protected from his evil influence, because his reports appear on RT. They have now been expunged. Americans are “saved” from reading them.

Take that, Mr. Putin.

As we would expect in a free society, it is possible, with some effort, to learn something about Russia’s official position on the war — or as Russia calls it, “special military operation.” For example, via India, where Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had a long interview with India Today TV on April 19.

We constantly witness instructive effects of this rigid indoctrination. One is that it is de rigueur to refer to Putin’s criminal aggression in Ukraine as his “unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.” A Google search for this phrase finds “About 2,430,000 results” (in 0.42 seconds).

Out of curiosity, we might search for “unprovoked invasion of Iraq.” The search yields “About 11,700 results” (in 0.35 seconds) — apparently from antiwar sources, a brief search suggests.

The traditional victims of brutal violence and repression often see the world rather differently from those who are used to holding the whip.

The example is interesting not only in itself, but because of its sharp reversal of the facts. The Iraq War was totally unprovoked: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had to struggle hard, even to resort to torture, to try to find some particle of evidence to tie Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. The famous disappearing weapons of mass destruction wouldn’t have been a provocation for aggression even if there had been some reason to believe that they existed.

In contrast, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was most definitely provoked — though in today’s climate, it is necessary to add the truism that provocation provides no justification for the invasion.

A host of high-level U.S. diplomats and policy analysts have been warning Washington for 30 years that it was reckless and needlessly provocative to ignore Russia’s security concerns, particularly its red lines: No NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, in Russia’s geostrategic heartland.

In full understanding of what it was doing, since 2014, NATO (meaning basically the U.S.), has “provided significant support [to Ukraine] with equipment, with training, 10s of 1000s of Ukrainian soldiers have been trained, and then when we saw the intelligence indicating a highly likely invasion Allies stepped up last autumn and this winter,” before the invasion, according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

The U.S. commitment to integrate Ukraine within the NATO command was also stepped up in fall 2021 with the official policy statements we have already discussed — kept from the bewildered herd by the “free press,” but surely read carefully by Russian intelligence. Russian intelligence did not have to be informed that “prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States made no effort to address one of Vladimir Putin’s most often stated top security concerns — the possibility of Ukraine’s membership into NATO,” as the State Department conceded, with little notice here.

Without going into any further details, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was clearly provoked while the U.S. invasion of Iraq was clearly unprovoked. That is exactly the opposite of standard commentary and reporting. But it is also exactly the norm of wartime propaganda, not just in the U.S., though it is more instructive to observe the process in free societies.

Many feel that it is wrong to bring up such matters, even a form of pro-Putin propaganda: we should, rather, focus laser-like on Russia’s ongoing crimes. Contrary to their beliefs, that stand does not help Ukrainians. It harms them. If we are barred, by dictate, from learning about ourselves, we will not be able to develop policies that will benefit others, Ukrainians among them. That seems elementary.

Further analysis yields many other instructive examples. We discussed Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe’s praise for President George W. Bush’s decision in 2003 to “aid the Iraqi people” by seizing “Iraqi funds sitting in American banks” — and, incidentally, invading and destroying the country, too unimportant to mention. More fully, the funds were seized “to aid the Iraqi people and to compensate victims of terrorism,” for which the Iraqi people bore no responsibility.

We didn’t go on to ask how the Iraqi people were to be aided. It is a fair guess that it is not compensation for U.S. pre-invasion “genocide” in Iraq.

“Genocide” is not my term. Rather, it is the term used by the distinguished international diplomats who administered the “Oil-for-Food program,” the soft side of President Bill Clinton’s sanctions (technically, via the UN). The first, Denis Halliday, resigned in protest because he regarded the sanctions as “genocidal.” He was replaced by Hans von Sponeck, who not only resigned in protest with the same charge, but also wrote a very important book providing extensive details of the shocking torture of Iraqis by Clinton’s sanctions, A Different Kind of War.

Americans are not entirely protected from such unpleasant revelations. Though von Sponeck’s book was never reviewed, as far as I can determine, it can be purchased from Amazon (for $95) by anyone who has happened to hear about it. And the small publisher that released the English edition was even able to collect two blurbs: from John Pilger and me, suitably remote from the mainstream.

There is, of course, a flood of commentary about “genocide.” By the standards used, the U.S. and its allies are guilty of the charge over and over, but voluntary censorship prevents any acknowledgment of this, just as it protects Americans from international Gallup polls showing that the U.S. is regarded as by far the greatest threat to world peace, or that world public opinion overwhelmingly opposed the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (also “unprovoked,” if we pay attention), and other improper information.

I don’t think there are “significant lies” in war reporting. The U.S. media are generally doing a highly creditable job in reporting Russian crimes in Ukraine. That’s valuable, just as it’s valuable that international investigations are underway in preparation for possible war crimes trials.

On the very rare occasions when U.S. crimes are so blatant that they can’t be dismissed or ignored, they may also be reported, but in such a way as to conceal the far greater crimes to which they are a small footnote.

That pattern is also normal. We are very scrupulous in unearthing details about crimes of others. There are, to be sure, sometimes fabrications, sometimes reaching the level of comedy, matters that the late Edward Herman and I documented in extensive detail. But when enemy crimes can be observed directly, on the ground, journalists typically do a fine job reporting and exposing them. And they are explored further in scholarship and extensive investigations.

As we’ve discussed, on the very rare occasions when U.S. crimes are so blatant that they can’t be dismissed or ignored, they may also be reported, but in such a way as to conceal the far greater crimes to which they are a small footnote. The My Lai massacre, for example.

On Ukraine winning the information war, the qualification “in the West” is accurate. The U.S. has always been enthusiastic and rigorous in exposing crimes of its enemies, and in the current case, Europe is going along. But outside of U.S.-Europe, the picture is more ambiguous. In the Global South, the home of most of the world’s population, the invasion is denounced but the U.S. propaganda framework is not uncritically adopted, a fact that has led to considerable puzzlement here as to why they are “out of step.”

That’s quite normal too. The traditional victims of brutal violence and repression often see the world rather differently from those who are used to holding the whip.

Even in Australia, there’s a measure of insubordination. In the international affairs journal Arena, editor Simon Cooper reviews and deplores the rigid censorship and intolerance of even mild dissent in U.S. liberal media. He concludes, reasonably enough, that, “This means it is almost impossible within mainstream opinion to simultaneously acknowledge Putin’s insupportable actions and forge a path out of the war that does not involve escalation, and the further destruction of Ukraine.”

No help to suffering Ukrainians, of course.

That’s also nothing new. That has been a dominant pattern for a long time, notably during World War I. There were a few who didn’t simply conform to the orthodoxy established after Wilson joined the war. The country’s leading labor leader, Eugene Debs, was jailed for daring to suggest to workers that they should think for themselves. He was so detested by the liberal Wilson administration that he was excluded from Wilson’s postwar amnesty. In the liberal Deweyite intellectual circles, there were also some who were disobedient. The most famous was Randolph Bourne. He was not imprisoned but was barred from liberal journals so that he could not spread his subversive message that “war is the health of the state.”

I should mention that a few years later, much to his credit, Dewey himself sharply reversed his stand.

It is understandable that liberals should be particularly excited when there is an opportunity to condemn enemy crimes. For once, they are on the side of power. The crimes are real, and they can march in the parade that is rightly condemning them and be praised for their (quite proper) conformity. That is very tempting for those who sometimes, even if timidly, condemn crimes for which we share responsibility and are therefore castigated for adherence to elementary moral principles.

Has the spread of social media made it more or less difficult to get an accurate picture of political reality?

Hard to say. Particularly hard for me to say because I avoid social media and only have limited information. My impression is that it is a mixed story.

Social media provide opportunities to hear a variety of perspectives and analyses, and to find information that is often unavailable in the mainstream. On the other hand, it is not clear how well these opportunities are exploited. There has been a good deal of commentary — confirmed by my own limited experience — arguing that many tend to gravitate to self-reinforcing bubbles, hearing little beyond their own beliefs and attitudes, and worse, entrenching these more firmly and in more intense and extreme forms.

That aside, the basic news sources remain pretty much as they were: the mainstream press, which has reporters and bureaus on the ground. The internet offers opportunities to sample a much wider range of such media, but my impression, again, is that these opportunities are little used.

One harmful consequence of the rapid proliferation of social media is the sharp decline of mainstream media. Not long ago, there were many fine local media in the U.S. Mostly gone. Few even have Washington bureaus, let alone elsewhere, as many did not long ago. During Ronald Reagan’s Central America wars, which reached extremes of sadism, some of the finest reporting was done by reporters of the Boston Globe, some close personal friends. That has all virtually disappeared.

The basic reason is advertiser reliance, one of the curses of the capitalist system. The founding fathers had a different vision. They favored a truly independent press and fostered it. The Post Office was largely established for this purpose, providing cheap access to an independent press.

In keeping with the fact that it is to an unusual extent a business-run society, the U.S. is also unusual in that it has virtually no public media: nothing like the BBC, for example. Efforts to develop public service media — first in radio, later in TV — were beaten back by intense business lobbying.

There’s excellent scholarly work on this topic, which extends also to serious activist initiatives to overcome these serious infringements on democracy, particularly by Robert McChesney and Victor Pickard.

Nearly 35 years ago, you and Edward Herman published Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. The book introduced the “propaganda model” of communication which operates through five filters: ownership, advertising, the media elite, flak and the common enemy. Has the digital age changed the “propaganda” model?” Does it still work?

Unfortunately, Edward — the prime author — is no longer with us. Sorely missed. I think he would agree with me that the digital age hasn’t changed much, beyond what I just described. What survives of mainstream media in a largely business-run society still remains the main source of information and is subject to the same kinds of pressures as before.

There have been important changes apart from what I briefly mentioned. Much like other institutions, even including the corporate sector, the media have been influenced by the civilizing effects of the popular movements of the ‘60s and their aftermath. It is quite illuminating to see what passed for appropriate commentary and reporting in earlier years. Many journalists have themselves gone through these liberating experiences.

Naturally, there is a huge backlash, including passionate denunciations of “woke” culture that recognizes that there are human beings with rights apart from white Christian males. Since Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” the GOP leadership has understood that since they cannot possibly win votes on their economic policies of service to great wealth and corporate power, they must try to direct attention to “cultural issues”: the false idea of a “Great Replacement,” or guns, or indeed anything to obscure the fact that we’re working hard to stab you in the back. Donald Trump was a master of this technique, sometimes called the “thief, thief” technique: when you’re caught with your hand in someone’s pocket, shout “thief, thief” and point somewhere else.

Despite these efforts, the media have improved in this regard, reflecting changes in the general society. That’s by no means unimportant.

What do you make of “whataboutism,” which is stirring up quite a controversy these days on account of the ongoing war in Ukraine?

Here again there’s a long history. In the early postwar period [World War II], independent thought could be silenced by charges of comsymp: you’re an apologist for Stalin’s crimes. It’s sometimes condemned as McCarthyism, but that was only the vulgar tip of the iceberg. What is now denounced as “cancel culture” was rampant and remained so.

That technique lost some of its power as the country began to awaken from dogmatic slumber in the ‘60s. In the early ‘80s, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a major Reaganite foreign policy intellectual, devised another technique: moral equivalence. If you reveal and criticize the atrocities that she was supporting in the Reagan administration, you’re guilty of “moral equivalence.” You’re claiming that Reagan is no different than Stalin or Hitler. That served for a time to subdue dissent from the party line.

Whataboutism is a new variant, hardly different from its predecessors.

For the true totalitarian mentality, none of this is enough. GOP leaders are working hard to cleanse the schools of anything that is “divisive” or that causes “discomfort.” That includes virtually all of history apart from patriotic slogans approved by Trump’s 1776 Commission, or whatever will be devised by GOP leaders when they take command and are in a position to impose stricter discipline. We see many signs of it today, and there’s every reason to expect more to come.

It’s important to remember how rigid doctrinal controls have been in the U.S. — perhaps a reflection of the fact that it is a very free society by comparative standards, hence posing problems to the doctrinal managers, who must be ever alert to signs of deviation.

By now, after many years, it’s possible to utter the word “socialist,” meaning moderately social democrat. In that respect, the U.S. has finally broken out of the company of totalitarian dictatorships. Go back 60 years and even the words “capitalism” and “imperialism” were too radical to voice. Students for a Democratic Society President Paul Potter, in 1965, summoned the courage to “name the system” in his presidential address, but couldn’t manage to produce the words.

There were some breakthroughs in the ‘60s, a matter of deep concern to American liberals, who warned of a “crisis of democracy” as too many sectors of the population tried to enter the political arena to defend their rights. They counseled more “moderation in democracy,” a return to passivity and obedience, and they condemned the institutions responsible for “indoctrination of the young” for failing to perform their duties.

The doors have been opened more widely since, which only calls for more urgent measures to impose discipline.

If GOP authoritarians are able to destroy democracy sufficiently to establish permanent rule by a white supremacist Christian nationalist caste subservient to extreme wealth and private power, we are likely to enjoy the antics of such figures as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who banned 40 percent of children’s math texts in Florida because of “references to Critical Race Theory (CRT), inclusions of Common Core, and the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics,” according to the official directive. Under pressure, the State released some terrifying examples, such as an educational objective that, “Students build proficiency with social awareness as they practice with empathizing with classmates.”

If the country as a whole ascends to the heights of GOP aspirations, it will be unnecessary to resort to such devices as “moral equivalence” and “whataboutism” to stifle independent thought.

One final question. A U.K. judge has formally approved Julian Assange’s extradition to the U.S. despite deep concerns that such a move would put him at risk of “serious human rights violations,” as Agnès Callamard, former UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, had warned a couple of years ago. In the event that Assange is indeed extradited to the U.S., which is pretty close to certain now, he faces up to 175 years in prison for releasing public information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can you comment on the case of Julian Assange, the law used to prosecute him, what his persecution says about freedom of speech and the state of U.S. democracy?

Assange has been held for years under conditions that amount to torture. That’s fairly evident to anyone who was able to visit him (I was, once) and was confirmed by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture [and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment] Nils Melzer in May 2019.

A few days later, Assange was indicted by the Trump administration under the Espionage Act of 1917, the same act that President Wilson employed to imprison Eugene Debs (among other state crimes committed using the Act).

Legalistic shenanigans aside, the basic reasons for the torture and indictment of Assange are that he committed a cardinal sin: he released to the public information about U.S. crimes that the government, of course, would prefer to see concealed. That is particularly offensive to authoritarian extremists like Trump and Mike Pompeo, who initiated the proceedings under the Espionage Act.

Their concerns are understandable. They were explained years ago by the Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard, Samuel Huntington. He observed that, “Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.”

That is a crucial principle of statecraft. It extends to private power as well. That is why manufacture/engineering of consent is a prime concern of systems of power, state and private.

This is no novel insight. In one of the first works in what is now called political science, 350 years ago, his “First Principles of Government,” David Hume wrote that,

Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.

Force is indeed on the side of the governed, particularly in the more free societies. And they’d better not realize it, or the structures of illegitimate authority will crumble, state and private.

These ideas have been developed over the years, importantly by Antonio Gramsci. The Mussolini dictatorship understood well the threat he posed. When he was imprisoned, the prosecutor announced that, “We must prevent this brain from functioning for 20 years.”

We have advanced considerably since fascist Italy. The Trump-Pompeo indictment seeks to silence Assange for 175 years, and the U.S. and U.K. governments have already imposed years of torture on the criminal who dared to expose power to the sunlight.

If inflation is all due to an overly generous federal government giving its people too much money, then our inflation problem is about to go away.