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News / 3rd August 2023

The campaign to fight U.S. inflation by upping interest rates has been going on for a year and a half — and its impacts are being felt around the world. On July 26, 2023, the Federal Reserve announced another quarter-point hike. That means U.S. rates have now gone up 5.25 percentage points over the past 18 months. While inflation is now coming down in the U.S., the aggressive monetary policy may…

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Jacob Chansley.

Brent Stirton/Getty Images

• The “QAnon Shaman” Capitol riot defendant has come to the defense of former President Donald Trump. 
• Trump was federally indicted on Tuesday in connection to the January 6 Capitol riot.
• The “shaman” slammed the indictment, telling Newsweek that Trump had “no role” in the insurrection. 

The infamous Capitol riot defendant known as the “QAnon Shaman” — whose ex-lawyer previously said felt “betrayed” by Donald Trump and was open to testifying against him — has now come to the defense of the former president over Trump’s indictment related to the deadly insurrection. 

The “shaman,” whose real name is Jacob Chansley, ripped the new federal indictment against Trump in an interview with Newsweek, saying that Trump played “no role whatsoever” when a mob of his supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. 

“I feel the notion of a Trump indictment related to the events of January 6th is further evidence that federal agencies have been corrupt and weaponized for decades by the DC Uniparty,” Chansley told Newsweek. 

Chansley called it “not fair at all” for Trump to be charged in the case and added that his “sympathies go out to Trump for everything he has endured for the American people due to the corruption in DC.”

Trump, who has now been indicted three times, was charged with four counts on Tuesday as part of the Justice Department’s criminal probe into 2020 election interference and the Capitol riot. 

Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith said after the indictment was released that the insurrection was “fueled by lies” from Trump.

But Chansley told Scripps News the former president “doesn’t deserve to be indicted whatsoever.”

Chansley, who has apologized for his role in the Capitol riot, was handed down one of the harshest sentences in connection with the insurrection. He was released from prison early after serving about 27 months of his 41-month sentence but recently said he regrets his guilty plea. 

Chansley told the BBC last month that statements his former lawyer made in an attempt to get him a lesser sentence were not true. 

“I never said I was duped by Trump,” Chansley told the news outlet.

An attorney for Chansley did not immediately respond to requests for comment by Insider on Tuesday. 

Elie Mystal

The post For Trump, the Stakes of the 2024 Election Just Became: Win—or Go to Jail appeared first on The Nation.

The world is now experiencing some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded, thanks to profiteering fossil fuel corporations. They owe us hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations for the havoc they’ve unleashed.

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A wildfire rages in Rhodes, Greece, on July 27, 2023. (Halil Kahraman/ dia images via Getty Images)

We have entered uncharted territory when it comes to climate breakdown, after climate agencies declared the first week of July as the hottest week ever recorded. The hottest week on record comes in the wake of the hottest June on record. And all of the warmest eight years ever recorded have come since 2015, with 2016 being the warmest ever, followed by 2019 and 2020.

Skeptics might argue that these records have only been kept for a small portion of human history — global temperature records only date back to the 1850s. But the UN confirmed that over the course of July, fourteen days have recorded global surface air temperatures higher than 17 degrees Celsius — an increase that has not been seen over the course of the last 125,000 years.

Heatwaves brought astonishing temperatures to southern Europe, with Almeria, Spain, experiencing a temperature of 44 degrees Celsius. Rome experienced its hottest day ever, with temperatures reaching 41.8 degrees Celsius, and temperatures of 45.3 degrees Celsius in Catalonia also broke records. Wildfires spread through Portugal and Greece as a result of extreme heat, and fires raged in Italy, Croatia, and Turkey.

This comes on the back of the astonishing scenes in North America, where Canadian wildfires blanketed the region in smoke. And a heat wave that swept across the southern United States brought record-breaking temperatures to parts of Arizona, Texas, and California, with temperatures in Phoenix peaking at 118 degrees Fahrenheit, or 47.8 degrees Celsius.

Toward the start of this year, parts of South Asia recorded temperatures of up to 45 degrees Celsius, though they often felt higher due to humidity. Climate change made the heat wave at least two degrees hotter than it otherwise would have been.

Ocean temperatures have risen sharply too. In Florida, ocean temperatures reached a shocking 38.4 degrees Celsius — at least six degrees above what should be expected, in what could be a record-breaking rise in ocean temperatures. NASA recently observed that the oceans are changing color as a result of this phenomenon. Unsurprisingly, record-high ocean temperatures have led to record-low sea ice coverage in Antarctica.

Rising temperatures are already killing thousands of people. The scientific journal Nature recently released a study showing that up to sixty-one thousand people died last year as a direct result of heat waves across Europe. In the United States, extreme heat is already the top annual weather-related killer — and 104 million people were placed under heat alerts last week as a result of rising temperatures.

These deaths due to extreme heat are just part of the picture. Already, air pollution causes 6.7 million premature deaths each year. And extreme weather events, like floods, wildfires, and droughts, are becoming more likely — weather-related disasters have increased fivefold over the last fifty years, leading to two million deaths and $4.3 trillion worth of economic damage.

More than 90 percent of these deaths occurred in the Global South. Those forced to bear the consequences of global warming largely caused by the Global North are those least able to bear the economic and health consequences. As Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, passionately attested in Glasgow in 2021, the rich world has been astonishingly slow to provide aid to those places on the front line of the fight against climate breakdown.

And things are only going to get worse. Scientists are now extremely concerned that temperatures will breach the limit of 1.5 degrees above preindustrial temperatures set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change earlier than expected. The break could come as early as next year.

A leading climate scientist told the BBC last week that it was likely the scientific community had severely underestimated the rapidity and severity of climate breakdown. If current trends continue, the earth’s temperature is likely to reach 3 degrees above preindustrial levels over the next century, which would bring catastrophic damage to the ecological systems upon which human life on Earth depends.

The greatest obstacle to our ability to tackle climate breakdown is, of course, a capitalist economic system that views the earth’s natural wealth as a “free gift” to be exploited for private gain. We have known for some time that one hundred companies are responsible for around 70 percent of global carbon emissions.

In fact, scientists at firms like ExxonMobil were aware of the damage that would be caused from burning fossil fuels as far back as the 1970s. But rather than bringing this information to the public’s attention, studies were buried, research budgets cut, and billions poured into lobbying and climate denialism. The company is now facing court cases across the United States as a result of the cover-up.

One study has demonstrated the direct consequences of the emissions released by the biggest fossil fuel companies, showing that BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Total, Aramco, and Chevron are collectively responsible for $5.3 trillion worth of damage likely to emerge from climate breakdown between 2025 and 2050. The companies owe the world — and particularly the poorest nations — $209 billion in annual climate reparations as a result.

So, what is stopping us from taking on the power of the big fossil fuel companies?

Clearly, these firms and the coterie of lobbyists, lawyers, and politicians that support them are very well-organized. But the forces opposing them are not. Rather than banding together to demand that the big fossil fuel companies pay for the damage that they have caused, most people seem to believe that the only way to fix climate breakdown is to stop using plastic straws, take the bus, or go vegan.

This individualistic understanding of the problem, and the potential solutions, is by far the greatest challenge that the climate movement faces. Yet leading climate campaigners can often be found playing up to this dynamic by blaming working people for their “carbon footprint” —a concept that was developed by BP to shift the blame for climate breakdown onto individuals.

No one person caused climate breakdown. While the wealthy are disproportionately responsible, no one group caused climate breakdown. Climate breakdown is the direct result of an utterly unsustainable economic and social system that gives most people no choice other than to pollute in order to survive.

The only way to change this is to transform the very foundations of our society — from the infrastructure we use to travel, live, and work, to the ideologies that allow us to make sense of the world. Alongside capital, individualism is perhaps our greatest enemy in this fight.

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Jeffrey Clark, a top Justice Department official under then-President Donald Trump, suggested using military power to keep Trump in power despite his loss in the 2020 election.

Trump’s third indictment on Tuesday cites a January 3, 2021, exchange between Clark, who is referred to as “Co-Conspirator 4,” and White House deputy counsel Patrick Philbin. A month earlier, Philbin had warned Trump that “there is no world, there is no option in which you do not leave the White House on January 20th.”

Philbin also warned Clark that there was no fraud in the 2020 election, and if Trump tried to remain in office anyway, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.”

To that, Clark simply responded: “Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

The Insurrection Act, which has been used only a handful of times in the last century, authorizes the U.S. president to deploy the military domestically to quell a rebellion or uprising.

The law has been criticized as being “dangerously vague” and “ripe for abuse.” (You may recall a New York Times op-ed in 2020 from Senator Tom Cotton, encouraging Trump to use the Insurrection Act to stop the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the country.) Because of the way the law is written, Americans basically have to trust that the president will not abuse the powers of the Insurrection Act.

As we can see in Trump’s third indictment, he could not be trusted in that regard. His advisers were planning to stage a coup, and also preparing to use the military to quash protests if that coup failed.

Congress votes to fund Ukraine probe while punishing PA for petitioning court.

Even after all these years of Donald Trump’s extremist attacks on American democracy and decency itself, the four-count criminal indictment handed down by a federal grand jury on Tuesday that accused the former president of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results still is a shocking development. It would be quite the capstone to the Trump era. Yet despite these criminal charges, the Trump era is not yet over. There are motions and presumably trials (in this case and others) to come, as well as the entire 2024 election. Trump has not left the building. And whatever happens in the various courtrooms, a key question remains: Will this latest—and most serious—indictment of Trump do anything to break his hold on the paranoid and irrational imagination of tens of millions of Americans?

Of all the Trump indictments—which also cover his payment of hush money to a porn star to cover up an alleged extramarital affair and his alleged theft of classified documents—this new set of charges addresses the most fundamental threat he has posed on American democracy. He falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him. He schemed to overturn legitimate vote counts. And he riled up his followers to such an extent that thousands stormed the Capitol and violently tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power—a bedrock principle of American society.

But this alleged crime was not Trump’s doing alone. He had millions of accomplices: all those Americans who bought his bogus claims about the election.

Trump was only able to promote the biggest con of his career because there was an audience of Republican voters who believed his bunk. The GOP establishment did not oppose Trump’s disinformation operation—his assertions that he had actually won the election and his many unsubstantiated allegations of fraud—because it feared the party’s base. After the 2020 election, as Trump poisoned the national discourse with his conspiracy theories, Republican leaders did not counter his lies out of fear of alienating Trump’s voters. This afforded Trump the political space to mount assorted and overlapping plots to retain power. With this indictment, special counsel Jack Smith alleges these actions were crimes. And when those allegedly illegal schemes failed, Trump’s cultish loyalists provided the shock troops for the January 6 insurrectionist riot that nearly prevented the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. 

This historic indictment is a healthy sign that conspiracies to overturn elections or mount coups will not be tolerated. Better late than never, these charges deliver a powerful message: the man in charge of safeguarding the Constitution criminally tried to sabotage it. There perhaps is no better summation of Trump’s presidency. Yet, ultimately, Trump is not the main danger. He may be brought to justice via this prosecution. But that act alone won’t protect the constitutional order. 

Trump will turn this indictment, as he has done so with his previous indictments, into yet more proof that he is the target of a corrupt and nefarious cabal aiming to destroy the country. The Deep State, Democrats, the media, antifa, communists, Black radicals, and pedophiles—they are, in his BS narrative, arrayed against him and against real Americans. In Trump’s telling, the only way to thwart these evildoers was to declare the election rigged and foment the paranoia and outrage that led to the seditious January 6 attack on the US Capitol. 

Trump had no evidence of this diabolical election-stealing plot; he had no rational argument. His claims were debunked again and again. (His own consigliere, Rudy Giuliani, has admitted to making false allegations of election theft.) Nevertheless, millions of Americans accepted this false reality—and still do. They have been under a Trump trance, transfixed by his lies and false statements and impervious to actual facts. This latest indictment will confirm their irrational beliefs. 

A recent poll found that zero percent—yes, zero percent—of MAGA Republicans think that Trump has committed serious federal crimes. Only 2 percent of his loyalists concede that he did “something wrong” regarding the handling of classified documents. More than 9 out of 10 of these people said Republicans must stand behind Trump in the face of the investigations. And three quarters of all likely Republicans voters said Trump, following the 2020 elections, was legitimately contesting the results. (That number went up to 83 percent for Republicans who are heavy viewers of Fox News.)  

One survey after another shows that Republicans and conservatives are trapped in the muck of Trump conspiracism. Half of Republicans say that Trump did not keep classified documents at Mar-a-Lago—a sign of willful blindness. Eighteen million Americans believe the use of force to restore Trump to the White House would be justified—an uptick of about 50 percent over the past few months. About 90 percent of Trump’s most radical supporters see the federal government as run by a supposed Deep State full of immoral schemers. Twelve percent of Americans agreed with this statement: “A secret group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is ruling the US government.” (A survey conducted last year found that half of Republicans and more than half of Trump 2020 voters believed prominent Democrats were involved in secret pedophilia rings.) A separate poll notes that two-thirds of Republicans still believe Trump’s bogus and debunked claim that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election by fraud.

Trump has encouraged and exploited all this crap. He would be nowhere if there was not a market for his outrageous and baseless lies. Millions of Americans who are mired in this lunacy aided and abetted Trump’s assault on the republic. When Richard Nixon was exposed as a crook—and named an unindicted co-conspirator—his support among Republican voters and officeholders sharply eroded. Those Americans eventually accepted the investigations of Nixon’s criminality and the prosecutions of his henchmen as legitimate enterprises and turned (somewhat gradually) against him. 

Not this time. As news of the latest indictment hit, Trump’s campaign released a statement declaring the “persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes.” It added, “These un-American witch hunts will fail and President Trump will be re-elected to the White House so he can save our Country from the abuse, incompetence, and corruption that is running through the veins of our Country at levels never seen before.” His people will absorb and embrace this hyperbolic, hate-mongering, demagogic junk. These Americans are threats to the American project. 

Once upon a time, criminal indictments would stop a political campaign dead in its tracks. Not anymore. The Trump crusade is chugging ahead, as this narcissistic, grievance-stirring wannabe-autocrat strives to return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and implement his out-in-the-open plan to transform the federal government into an authoritarian regime. And millions will cheer him on, perhaps even more loudly after he has become the first former president (and current presidential candidate) to be criminally charged as a domestic enemy of the US Constitution. The Trump spell will not be broken. The wheels of justice, which grind exceedingly slow but exceedingly fine, are (finally!) addressing Trump’s alleged crimes. But it will take more than justice to defeat Trumpism. 

“He is in a better position to win the general election than at any point” in 2016 or 2020, warns CNN’s Harry Enten

VA columnist Reinaldo Iturriza looks back at the history of communes and how they are supposed to be more than “appendages” of state institutions.