Category: “Dead Skunk in The Middle of The Road”

Issues and events that stink to high heaven

Someday, They’ll Be Amazed We Didn’t Impeach Trump Over the Climate Crisis

Esquire

Someday, They’ll Be Amazed We Didn’t Impeach Trump Over the Climate Crisis

Jack Holmes             October 25, 2019
Photo credit: JOSH EDELSON - Getty Images
JOSH EDELSON – Getty Images

 

Right now, out in sunny California, 50,o00 people have been forced to evacuate their homes. That’s just in Los Angeles, where at least four wildfires are currently ravaging the nation’s second-largest city. The largest is the Tick fire, which is burning through the canyons north of town and scything towards heavily residential areas at pace, The New York Times tells us. All schools in the San Fernando Valley have been closed due to “air-quality and safety concerns.” An entirely separate blaze, known as the Kincade fire, has burned 16,000 acres of Sonoma County. 13,000 firefighters are battling it, but it’s so far only 5 percent contained.

The 2019 fire season has actually been a let-off from previous years, particularly the one just past. Only 300 structures have been destroyed so far, compared to 23,000 in 2018. 163,000 acres have burned, compared to 1.6 million (!) last year, though the 2019 season is far from over.

In fact, as David Wallace-Wells detailed this year for New York magazine, the fire season never really ends anymore. Both scientists and firefighters have suggested dropping the “season” term. It is always fire season, and fire season is always getting worse, because it is always getting hotter and drier. About half of the 88 cities in Los Angeles county are classified as “Very High Fire-Hazard Severity Zones,” raising the prospect that in the future, the gleaming jewel of the West—our great American dream factory—will come to resemble a very particular kind of hell. After all, as Wallace-Wells tells us, some of these fires grow an acre a second. Some grow three times faster still. You cannot outrun fire traveling 60 miles per hour on the Santa Ana winds.

Photo credit: JOSH EDELSON - Getty Images
Photo credit: JOSH EDELSON – Getty Images

 

All this, of course, is just one spasm of our almighty planet’s sprawling reaction to the great disturbance we have caused in it. Someday, we will appreciate that if you put the 4 billion-year history of Earth on a 24-hour clock, human history is the equivalent of one second. We are ants crawling about on a particularly fancy rock in a galactic backwater, one that is determined to maintain an equilibrium we have disrupted. If need be, it will sweep us off like the ants we are, with increasingly powerful storms and incredible rain events and oppressive heatwaves and rising seas and epidemic diseases and failing crops and yes, raging wildfires. In the meantime, we will likely tear each other apart to escape the near-term consequences. But like those fires traveling on the Santa Ana winds, there will be no outrunning them in the end.

And all the while, we squabble over taxes and The National Debt and whether the president should be impeached for selling out the national interest in favor of his own when dealing with foreign countries like Ukraine. He should be, of course: he violated his oath of office and abused his power. But someday, assuming we make it that far, future generations will surely wonder why we did not remove him from the world’s most powerful office simply because he denied the existence of a fundamental threat to human civilization as we know it. The president has not just said the climate crisis is a Chinese hoax, or suggested he has some different opinion on whether it’s a problem compared to the scientists—you know, people who have devoted their lives to studying this phenomenon. He has actively rolled back our efforts in pretty much every department, to combat a crisis that will upend not just our children’s lives, but our own.

Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla - Getty Images
Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla – Getty Images

 

Surely, this constitutes a high crime against humanity. His apparatchiks will laugh at the suggestion now, and call it liberal delusion. But soon enough, they won’t be laughing. The people who actually know a goddamn thing about this say we have 12 years to change course in order to avoid this onrushing doom. The president wants to dig more crap out of the ground. He’d like to force New York State to do it, to abandon its commitment to future generations so some energy executives—who perhaps have some sort of relationship with the president—can make a buck.

Donald Trump, for his part, likely figures he’ll be dead and it won’t matter. This is also his view on The National Debt, but at least that’s an overblown problem. His radical solipsism permits him to dismiss small concerns like the future of the human species, not to mention all the other species, which are currently dying off at a prodigious pace in what scientists are calling the sixth mass extinction event. Meanwhile, his rich cronies probably believe they can make enough money to outrun whatever the consequences may be if they’re still around when the time comes. That will require covering an acre a second. Better get your track spikes on.

Secret Trump memo details plans to destroy government workers’ unions

People’s World

Secret Trump memo details plans to destroy government workers’ unions

Mark Gruenberg        October 24, 2019

Secret Trump memo details plans to destroy government workers’ unionsEvan Vucci/AP

WASHINGTON—The Government Employees (AFGE), the nation’s largest union for federal workers, has summarized and is publishing, in five installments, a secret Trump administration memo outlining in detail how President Donald Trump and his ideologues systematically plan to destroy federal worker unions. AFGE adds its own analysis. Part 1 and Part 2 have already appeared, with three more to come.

And private-sector workers and unions are next on Trump’s hit list, the memo promises.

The memo by Trump White House aide James Sherk, a former “fellow” at the hard-right Heritage Foundation, is being posted and analyzed on AFGE’s website. It includes restoring Republican President George W. Bush’s ban on unionization of the nation’s 45,000 airport screeners. And that’s just for starters.

It also would ban unions for the Defense Department’s 200,000 civilian workers, the hundreds of thousands of workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and workers at the Department of Homeland Security and the federal Office of Personnel Management—the government’s human resources agency—itself. Trump also wants to abolish OPM.

Killing OPM and transferring its oversight of federal workers to unaccountable White House aides would bring back the spoils system of the 1880s and before, union leaders say.

“The memo, laced with familiar half-truths and outright lies, is proof AFGE has been right all along in saying the administration’s true goal in making changes to personnel rules is to ‘end collective bargaining’ in the federal sector. It’s right there in their own words,” the union states. It also goes far beyond Trump’s prior executive orders trashing federal worker rights.

Trump’s executive orders don’t plan to obliterate unions outright. His memo does.

“End collective bargaining,” the memo sets as a goal. “Government unions impede the efficiency of federal operations and direct the government to put the interests of government employees first. Curtailing collective bargaining in government serves the public good. The [Civil Service Reform Act] allows the president to exempt agencies from its coverage on the basis of national security concerns.” The New York Times and Politico first disclosed the memo’s existence.

Destruction of federal workers and their unions, including cuts in their pay and benefits—also part of Sherk’s memo—is part of an overall right-wing and corporate-backed drive to destroy unions in the U.S. and thus remove the biggest and most-effective obstacle to their agenda. That larger drive includes the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus decision and anti-worker rulings by the courts and the National Labor Relations Board.

One motive of the larger drive, Tom McCabe, CEO of the conservative Freedom Foundation, admitted to The Guardian in 2016, is to “de-fund the left” and thus destroy opposition.

AFGE revealed Sherk also “discusses ways to make it impossible for workers to unionize” in the private sector. “It details steps to boost corporations’ profits by cutting workers’ overtime pay and redefining workers as ‘independent contractors,’” who legally cannot unionize. “It explains ways to shield mega-corporations from being liable for workers’ poor working conditions in franchises,” AFGE summarizes.

“The administration’s divide-and-conquer strategy with respect to organized labor is as disgusting as it is shameful. But it won’t work.

“Across this country, our members and the members of every other labor union are getting educated, organized, and mobilized. As the largest union representing federal employees, AFGE will continue to resist the president’s mob mentality and disrespect for the federal workforce and the work they do.”

Sherk’s White House anti-union memo outlines further moves beyond Trump’s executive orders, which AFGE, the Treasury Employees, and other federal unions have fought both in court and in Congress.

Those executive orders tossed unions out of their small offices in federal buildings—where shop stewards met with members—yanked their phones, fax machines, and computers, banned federal workers from communicating with lawmakers, and told the stewards they would have to represent workers on their own time and on their own dime, among other restrictions.

Graphic: AFGE

Trump’s biggest order also made it easier to fire federal workers, depriving them of many of their due process rights, including the simple right of having some time to prepare to defend themselves and to argue their cases before unbiased decision-makers.

His “national security” excuse would let Trump abolish unions for the screeners—Bush used the same national security rationale to ban unions for them—defense workers and at VA.

AFGE waged a long campaign to get the Democratic Obama administration to overturn Bush’s anti-union edict for the screeners, formally called Transportation Security Officers. And AFGE has defended VA whistleblowers who revealed bosses’ mismanagement of care for veterans, including mismanagement that led to dead vets.

While the memo hasn’t been formally implemented yet, government-wide, AFGE notes Trump is already taking away some civil service protections for the screeners, whose pay is so low the TSOs have the lowest morale of any group of federal workers. One of every four TSOs quits within 16 months of being hired, AFGE says.

Bush also imposed a National Security Personnel System “merit pay” plan on the DOD workers, to give bosses total sway over workers’ pay and promotions, leaving everything open to favoritism. AFGE and a 31-union alliance battling for the DOD workers fought that scheme in court, too, and won. Congress eventually banned DOD from implementing it.

Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of Press Associates Inc. (PAI), a union news service in Washington, D.C. that he has headed since 1999. Previously, he worked as Washington correspondent for the Ottaway News Service, as Port Jervis bureau chief for the Middletown, NY Times Herald Record, and as a researcher and writer for Congressional Quarterly. Mark obtained his BA in public policy from the University of Chicago and worked as the University of Chicago correspondent for the Chicago Daily News.

Bill Barr’s alternate universe “investigation” has a goal: Right-wing authoritarian rule

Salon

Bill Barr’s alternate universe “investigation” has a goal: Right-wing authoritarian rule

Barr’s “criminal investigation” of the Russia probe is the fruit of a long-running far-right plan to kill democracy

By Heather Digby Parton      October 25, 2019

 

           U.S. Attorney General William Barr (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Students of the modern conservative movement often date the recent supercharged radicalization of the Republican Party to the rise of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution in the early 1990’s. It’s true that the GOP went seriously off the rails during that period and the craziness has been picking up speed ever since. But in reality, the conservative movement has been radical from its beginnings, starting with the anti-communist crusade after World War II all the way through Goldwater to Reagan, Gingrich and now Trump. Now it has finally shed all trappings of a sophisticated political ideology, culminating in this surreal parody of a presidency in 2019. The conservative “three legged stool” of small government, traditional values and global military leadership has completely disintegrated.

But one aspect of that earlier conservative movement has continued to chug along with its long-term project to transform the U.S. into an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian plutocracy. That would be the group of far-right lawyers who started the Federalist Society, with the goal of packing the judiciary with true believers, along with a certain group of Reagan-era legal wunderkinds who came to believe that the GOP could dominate the presidency for decades to come. They developed the theory of the “unitary executive,” originally advanced by Reagan’s odious attorney general Ed Meese ( recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom) which holds that massive, unaccountable power is vested in the president of the United States.

Attorney General William Barr was one of those lawyers, along with White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former appeals court judge Michael Luttig and others who encouraged Barr to take the job, particularly after his famous memo declaring that what any normal person would see as obstruction of justice doesn’t apply to the president. (In a nutshell, Barr agrees with former President Richard Nixon, who said, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”)

Barr is described as supremely confident in his beliefs, which is to say that his overweening arrogance is not an act put on someone who is overcompensating to hide insecurity. He believes in this theory and when it became obvious that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was not long for the  job, Barr and his legal cabal appear to have seen the clueless and corrupt Donald Trump as a perfect instrument to test their theory, and perhaps set legal precedents that would enable future right-wing presidents to use the full power of the presidency to dominate American politics without regard to democratic norms or congressional checks and balances. Indeed, they had been setting the stage for such a man for decades.

It’s also obviously the case that Barr, and perhaps his Reaganite cronies as well, are suffering from the malady known as Fox News Brain Rot, the symptoms of which are an extreme susceptibility to absurd right-wing conspiracy theories and an inability to believe anything that contradicts them. (Barr once said that there was more evidence for the bogus Uranium One charges than the Russian interference in the 2016 election, which confirms the diagnosis.)

That is the toxic combination of views has the Attorney General of the United States running all over the world seeking evidence to back up a ridiculous conspiracy theory in which Ukraine, the “deep state,” the Intelligence agencies of Italy, the U.K. and Australia, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee all conspired to frame Russia and Donald Trump in the 2016 election. They call this an investigation into the “origins” of the Russia investigation, which is also being handled by the Department of Justice’s inspector general and special counsel John Durham, appointed by Barr.

Barr’s personal intervention is outside the boundaries of the normal procedures, but that is yet another example of his “unitary executive” theory: He works for the president and the president has the power to assign him to any task, including being an international man of mystery. So far, Barr appears to be coming up goose eggs with the foreign intelligence services. The Wall Street Journal reported that he is “sparking discord in several foreign capitals, going outside usual channels to seek help from allies in reviewing the origins of a U.S. counterintelligence investigation begun during the 2016 presidential campaign.”

On Thursday night the Times set the political world aflame with a report that Durham has officially opened a criminal investigation into the matter. No one is sure what basis there is for this, but reports over the past week or so suggest Durham’s team is focusing intently on the people Donald Trump often rails against in his public statements, including former FBI agent Peter Strzok and possibly high-level intelligence community personnel such as former CIA chief John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper.

The timing of the story is obviously designed to counter the very bad news coming out of the House impeachment investigation in the House on a daily basis. This isn’t surprising. We’ve been expecting that Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., would hold parallel hearings into the origins of the Russia investigation, as promised. Graham is now balking because the Senate rules would require that he allow Democratic participation. (The fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee has released two substantial reports on the 2016 election, making clear that they came to the same conclusions as the FBI and the intelligence community regarding Russian interference on Trump’s behalf, also complicates matters for him.)

So Graham has been reduced to introducing a meaningless resolution saying that the House is being unfair, obviously hoping to appease Trump and keep his homegrown followers happy.  According to the Daily Beast, it’s not working. In fact, TrumpWorld wants Graham to call House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff to testify before Graham’s Senate committee, which would be a serious violation of congressional norms. He seems reluctant for the moment, but who knows what he’ll be willing to do as time goes on?

So for the moment the task of bringing the Fox News alternate-universe conspiracy theory to the mainstream falls to Barr and Durham. They have both reportedly been to Ukraine in recent weeks, presumably searching for that elusive “DNC server” that Trump constantly babbles about.  Maybe they will manage to delight the Trump base by trying to prosecute some FBI and CIA personnel. Barr seems willing to push the boundaries beyond anything we could have imagined, so that’s not as outrageous as it sounds.

The only remedy for this is for Congress to reassert its own prerogatives and impeach the president and, if necessary, his henchmen. If they fail to hold him accountable for the vast abuse of power and corruption of his office, the precedents will be set and the “unitary executive” will become the working model for all Republican presidents, just as Barr intends. The next one will no doubt be more efficient at using it than Donald Trump.

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

Italy has no use for AG Bill Barr’s conspiracy theory

Attorney General Bill Barr has long been focused on the origins of the Russia scandal, to the point that there is reportedly a criminal investigation underway that could target American law enforcement and intelligence officials who examined Russia’s 2016 attack. That probe was technically assigned to U.S. Attorney John Durham.But that’s not to say Barr is somehow taking a hands-off role in the process. As Rachel noted near the top of last night’s show, the sitting U.S. attorney general, an unabashed Donald Trump loyalist, has apparently been personally involved in traveling the world, meeting with foreign officials, hoping to find evidence to support a conspiracy theory that would disprove the facts surrounding his boss’ Russia scandal.

The theory itself is plainly bonkers, and even many congressional Republicans have no use for it. But Barr keeps racking up frequent-flier miles, including making stops in Italy – where the prime minister was asked by Italian lawmakers to explain what in the world the American attorney general wanted. The New York Times published this striking report yesterday:

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy said his country’s intelligence services had informed the American attorney general, William P. Barr, that they played no role in the events leading to the Russia investigation, taking the air out of an unsubstantiated theory promoted by President Trump and his allies in recent weeks.

“Our intelligence is completely unrelated to the so-called Russiagate and that has been made clear,” Mr. Conte said in a news conference in Rome on Wednesday evening after spending hours describing Italy’s discussions with Mr. Barr to the parliamentary committee on intelligence.

Mr. Conte publicly acknowledged for the first time that Mr. Barr had twice met with the leaders of Italy’s intelligence agencies after asking them to clarify their role in a 2016 meeting between a Maltese professor and a Trump campaign adviser on a small college campus in Rome, Link Campus University.

As bizarre as this may sound, the American attorney general appears to have gone to allied nations, looking for damaging information about American officials, which he thought might help Donald Trump.

Italy, not surprisingly, had no such information, and seemed baffled as to what the United States’ top law-enforcement official was looking for.

The precise details of the conspiracy theory are a bit mind-numbing, and they involve George Papadopoulos, who served as an adviser to the Trump campaign, a London-based Maltese professor named Josef Mifsud, and assorted characters. It’s all quite ridiculous, and for more information along these lines, I’d recommend last night’s A block and this Vox piece from last month.

But stepping back, the big picture is profoundly embarrassing, not just for the administration, but for all of us. The United States – the world’s preeminent superpower, ostensibly the global leader on matters of international affairs – has an attorney general who has gone to foreign countries, hat in hand, looking for dirt on his own country’s officials, begging for help with a ridiculous conspiracy, only to be told by our allies, “We don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Republicans Storm National Statuary Hall

The Onion – News in Brief

Republicans Storm National Statuary Hall, Demand to Be Allowed Into Elijah Cummings’ Casket.

 

WASHINGTON—Staging the protest in response to what they called “a lack of transparency,” House Republicans stormed the National Statuary Hall Thursday, demanding to be allowed inside Elijah Cummings’ casket. “As voting members of Congress, we have an obligation to our constituents to get inside and find out what’s in there—it could be anything,” said Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who explained how a closed-casket viewing went against the very foundations of American democracy while House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Steve King (R-IA) furiously pounded their fists against the coffin. “Right now, it’s an all-Democratic casket. Not even the press are allowed inside. We’ve been knocking all morning and have yet to receive a response, those cowards!” At press time, freaked-out House Republicans were calling for a counter investigation after discovering a body inside the casket.

Trump Admin Begins Official Withdrawal From Paris Agreement

With all the daily nonsense and diversions perpetrated by trump and his republi-con congressional collaborators, America needs to keep their eyes and focus on the damage being done every day to destroy our environment, pillage our national treasures and reward their fossil fuel benefactors. Vote blue in 2020 like yours and your future generations lives depends on it, because it does.   John Hanno

EcoWatch

Trump Admin Begins Official Withdrawal From Paris Agreement

Jordan Davidson       October 24, 2019
Trump visits French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron at the Elysee Presidential Palace in Paris on Nov. 10, 2018. Chesnot / Getty Images

President Trump confirmed Wednesday that his administration will start its official pullout from the 2015 Paris agreement, a long expected move that sacrifices the country’s ability to be a leader in the fight against the global climate crisis.

Trump’s withdrawal, which can officially begin on Nov. 4, is part of his “America First” policy, he argued at a natural gas conference in Pittsburgh, as Reuters reported.

“The Paris accord would have been shutting down American producers with excessive regulatory restrictions like you would not believe, while allowing foreign producers to pollute with impunity,” said Trump, who was flanked on stage by workers in hard hats, as Reuters reported.

“What we won’t do is punish the American people while enriching foreign polluters,” he claimed, adding: “I’m proud to say it, it’s called America First.”

By the rule of law, the U.S. can submit to the UN a written intention to leave on Nov. 4. It can then officially leave, one year later, which will be one day after the 2020 election.

If the U.S. does withdraw, it will leave the U.S. and Syria as the world’s only two countries not in the Paris agreement — the world’s biggest economy and a war-torn nation. The Paris agreement is essentially a voluntary commitment from countries around the world to cut emissions. The Obama administration agreed to cut emissions 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, but the state department under Trump has not turned over any documents showing progress toward that goal, as The New York Times reported.

“I withdrew the United States from the terrible, one-sided Paris Climate accord. It was a total disaster,” claimed Trump in his speech yesterday, as The Hill reported. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”

How a commitment from nearly 200 countries around the world is one-sided was not explained. However, environmentalists, policy makers and scientists quickly criticized the move, noting that leaving damages the ability of the U.S. to lead in the lucrative transition to cleaner energy, as Reuters reported.

“This is really a betrayal of the next generation,” said Malik Russell, a spokesman for The Climate Mobilization, a youth-led environmental advocacy group, who added that the decision was insanity, as the The New York Times reported.

“President Trump’s anti-science stance that climate change is not a serious threat demanding meaningful action puts the profits of fossil fuel polluters above the health and well-being of current and future generations,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a leading expert on the United Nation’s international climate negotiations process, in a statement. “It also impedes the ability of American companies and workers to compete with other countries like China and Germany in the rapidly expanding market for climate-friendly technologies.”

“Fortunately, no other country is following President Trump out the door on Paris,” he added.

The original agreement to cooperate to curtail a mounting crisis was rejected by Nicaragua, a poor central-American nation, because the agreement did not go far enough to slash emissions. Nicaragua subsequently joined in 2017, saying it was the only available instrument that has a unity of intentions to face the climate crisis and natural disasters, as Reuters reported.

“It will take some time to recover from this train wreck of U.S. diplomacy,” said Andrew Light, a former State Department official during the Obama administration and currently a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, as Reuters reported.

The destruction of the middle class is destroying democracies and paving the way for authoritarian rule

Salon

We have to undo the attack on the middle class that started with Reagan if we want democracy back.

The destruction of the middle class is destroying democracies and paving the way for authoritarian rule

Thom Hartmann             October 4, 2019

   Ronald Reagan (AP/J. Scott Applewhite

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
The destruction of the middle class is destroying democracies and paving the way for authoritarian rule.In 2016, Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk published a paper in the Journal of Democracy showing how, in the era since Reagan led America out of classical economic policy and into neoliberalism (aka “trickle-down” and “supply-side” economics), many Americans have ceased to value democracy.

“In the United States,” they write, “among all age cohorts, the share of citizens who believe that it would be better to have a ‘strong leader’ who does not have to ‘bother with parliament and elections’ has also risen over time: In 1995, 24 percent of respondents held this view; by 2011, that figure had increased to 32 percent.” By the time the paper came out in 2016, fully 49 percent of Americans thought elites should make decisions, rather than “government.”

And the growing disillusionment with democracy as a way to protect the interests of average voters doesn’t just push them toward solutions hatched by the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute; increasingly, Americans would even consider a military junta ruling America, something that would shock the founders.

“In the past three decades,” Foa and Mounk write, “the share of U.S. citizens who think that it would be a ‘good’ or ‘very good’ thing for the ‘army to rule’ — a patently undemocratic stance — has steadily risen. In 1995, just one in sixteen respondents agreed with that position; today, one in six agree.”

And it’s not just in the United States; democracies across the world are falling to the power of right-wing strongman leaders. Just in the past few decades we’ve seen this happen in Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, India, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia and, most recently, Brazil. Arguably, it has happened here in the United States with the Electoral College’s selection of Donald Trump as president. Meanwhile, hard-right groups seeking such autocracy are rising fast across Europe, particularly in France, Italy, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

In a recent article for the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria notes this trend, along with Foa and Mounk’s research, and tries to analyze its cause.

“Why is this?” Zakaria writes. “The best I can guess is that we are living in times of great change — economic, technological, demographic, cultural — and in this swirl, people feel insecure and anxious.”

But America and the world have been in the midst of “great change” many times before, including during and after two world wars, but this trend toward authoritarianism has been happening uniquely since the 1980s.

That decade saw the adoption of the radical economic and political ideologies of Thatcherism and Reaganism — neoliberalism — which have since swept the world’s democracies. Even the European Union (with the Maastricht Treaty in 1993) has adopted neoliberal”reforms” that benefitted wealthy elites while forcing austerity on its poorer member nations, inflicting massive pain and inciting right-wing movements in Greece, Spain and Italy, among others.

In the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher led the way in 1978. She rejected government ownership of parts of the commons like railways, busted unions, and later argued that, “There is no such thing as society… [only] individual men and women, and… families.”

Reagan came to power in 1980 with the help of vast amounts of money from corporations and the morbidly rich, made possible by the twin 1976 and 1978 Supreme Court decisions of Buckley v. Valeo and First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, which said that billionaires and corporations owning politicians was “free speech.”

With a nod to his oligarch funders, in his inaugural address, his first day on the job as president, Reagan famously said,  “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

When Reagan flipped our economic system on its head, rejecting two generations of classical Adam Smith economics and replacing it with the Laffer Curve and “supply-side” economics, almost a third of American had union jobs and around 60 percent of American families lived in the economic “middle class.” But starting in 2015, as NPR noted, reporting on a Pew study, “middle-income households have become the minority.”

Since David Koch’s failed 1980 run for VP on the Libertarian ticket, American oligarchs have invested billions of dollars in the message that government is bad and can’t be trusted. The most obvious example was the faux-grassroots Tea Party “movement” funded by Koch front groups, causing thousands of Americans to protest “government-run” health care with slogans like, “Keep your goddamn government hands off my Medicare!”

Koch and his oligarch friends suggested, through their surrogates and think tanks, that instead of a functioning democracy we should have a government both owned and run by them and their billionaire buddies.

And that’s largely what we have now, with the Trump administration. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently tweeted, “A corporate lawyer runs DOL, a pharma exec runs HHS, a coal lobbyist runs EPA, an oil lobbyist runs DOI, a Raytheon lobbyist runs DOD, a steel lobbyist is the US trade rep, and a banking exec runs USDT.” I’d add that a former Verizon lawyer runs the FCC, and midlevel positions across the federal government are now filled with lobbyists and lawyers from industry.

Prior to the Reagan Revolution, Americans usually got what they wanted from the government.

The successes of LBJ’s Great Society programs during the 1960’s are a great example: Medicare, Medicaid, Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act, cutting poverty in half, Head Start, the National Teacher Corps, hundreds of billions in student college aid, PBS and NPR, Air Quality Act, Water Quality Act, Wilderness Act, National Trails System Act, creating the Cabinet-level Department of Housing and Urban Development, Community Action Agencies, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Child Safety Act, mandating warning labels on cigarettes, the Immigration Act that ended race-based immigration quotas, food stamps, and massive investments in public schools and hospitals… among other things.

In the 1970’s, Jimmy Carter followed up by creating the Department of Energy and passing energy programs that would have moved 20 percent of America’s electricity generation to solar by 2000 (it was ended by Reagan), establishing the Department of Education, massively expanding Head Start, passing major laws to regulate coal mining and make it safer, forcing polluters to clean up superfund sites, and doubling our public lands in Alaska. Not to mention winning the Nobel Prize for working out a peace deal between Egypt and Israel that holds to this day.

Before the 1980s, Western Europe and other democracies saw similar expansions of people-based government programs. But nearly all of it came to a screeching halt—and much was even reversed—with the neoliberal Thatcher and Reagan Revolutions.

Today’s standard-bearers for neoliberalism are the Republicans (and a few corporate-owned Democrats), and, as Americans figure out that the probability today of legislation passing that’s supported by the majority of Americans is today equivalent to random chance, they’re revolting.

And the oligarch billionaires have been waiting for just this moment, funding massive voter suppression, right wing media, politicians who tell us that up is down, and efforts to keep their colleague, billionaire Donald Trump, in office. While the outreach to “very fine people” in the neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements is a bit less visible, it’s there, too.

So long as the governments of America and other countries are captives of oligarchs and big corporations, and hang onto anti-worker, anti-middle-class neoliberal policies, citizens will continue to drift toward hard-right “populist” politicians.

Democracies will only begin to revive when we reverse the Reagan Revolution and return to the classical economic and political systems that existed in the Western world before the neoliberal 1980s.

And if that reversal doesn’t happen soon, the trend toward autocratic oligarchy will continue to speed up. As Foa and Mounk note in the conclusion of their research paper, “[W]hat was once unthinkable should no longer be considered outside the realm of possibility.”

THOM HARTMANN

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of “The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America” and more than 25 other books in print.  He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

Pence, Pompeo and Barr deserve to be impeached, too

Washington Post

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Pence, Pompeo and Barr deserve to be impeached, too

By Max Boot, Columnist      October 9, 2019

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with President Trump during a Cabinet meeting at the White House in July. (Bloomberg/Photographer: /Bloomber) (Oliver Contreras/Bloomberg News)
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with President Trump during a Cabinet meeting at the White House in July. (Bloomberg/Photographer: /Bloomber) (Oliver Contreras/Bloomberg News).

 

President Trump has no one but himself to blame for the fact that he is on the verge of being impeached. He recognizes no legal or moral limits on his “absolute right” to do whatever he pleases — including pressuring a foreign country to intervene in U.S. politics on his behalf. But his most senior aides have done him no favors by acting as accelerators rather than brakes on his unconscionable conduct.

Three senior officials, in particular, could have tried to dissuade the president from misusing his office for personal gain, but there is no evidence that they ever attempted to do so. History will record their names along with Trump’s in the annals of ignominy. The president’s principal accomplices in his brazen assault on the rule of law are Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William P. Barr.

Pence has been Trump’s most prominent proxy in his attempts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to cough up dirt on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and to absolve Russia of hacking the 2016 election. Trump told Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration in May so as to turn the screws on the Ukrainian president. When they finally met in Warsaw on Sept. 1, Pence again pressured Zelensky to take action on “corruption,” a code word for investigating Biden and the former vice president’s son Hunter.

Pence has adopted the Sergeant Schultz defense: I know nothing! His protestations of innocence are unconvincing, given that the president’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, publicly proclaimed his desire to get dirt on the Bidens from Ukraine. Moreover, Pence’s national security adviser listened in on the now-infamous July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky that another participant described as “crazy” and “frightening.” Pence himself was given a readout of the call, yet he claims to have seen nothing wrong and is still sticking to the discredited cover story that Trump was pursuing a legitimate investigation of corruption. Pence will be saved from being remembered as the worst vice president in history only because Spiro Agnew had to resign after being charged with tax evasion and bribery.

Pompeo is now officially the worst secretary of state in history — wresting that uncoveted title from his predecessor, Rex Tillerson. As former secretary of state Colin Powell notes, “Our foreign policy is a shambles right now,” and Pompeo bears part of the blame for failing to stand up to Trump. He did not offer his resignation when the president proclaimed himself “in love” with the dictator of North Korea or when he abandoned the United States’ Kurdish allies. Pompeo subordinates the United States’ national interest to his own political interests; he is said to be interested in succeding Trump.

Pompeo was fully aware of how unlawful Trump was acting — he was also on the July 25 call, though he pretended during interviews that he had no idea what had transpired. There is no evidence he did anything to stop Trump. Instead, he has endorsed the crazy conspiracy theory that it was the Ukrainians, not the Russians, who interfered in the 2016 election. Pompeo is now leading Trump’s coverup: He has refused to allow State Department employees to testify to Congress, denouncing Congress’s request as “an attempt to intimidate” and “bully” the career professionals. If anyone is bullying Foreign Service officers, it is Trump; witness the president’s firing of a respected ambassador in Ukraine because she wouldn’t help Giuliani frame Biden. Pompeo stood by as this happened.

No wonder State Department employees are so disgusted and demoralized. “The mood is low and getting lower,” Thomas Pickering, a distinguished former ambassador, told the New York Times.

But wait. If you think that’s bad, Barr says “hold my beer.” The attorney general has already misled the country about the findings of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation by falsely claiming that the president had been absolved of collusion and obstruction of justice. Barr then refused to investigate complaints that a crime had been committed during Trump’s call with Zelensky. Now, he is flying around the world to pressure allies to cooperate with his politically motivated probe designed to show that the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia was actually a “witch hunt” by the so-called deep state — just as Trump claims. Barr’s highly improper requests have stirred a backlash in Italy, Australia and Britain — close allies that have no desire to be thrust into U.S. domestic politics.

By waging war on the dedicated professionals in his own department at the behest of a law-breaking president, Barr is ensuring that he will be remembered as the worst attorney general ever. He has even eclipsed in awfulness his immediate predecessor, acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker, a political hack who was previously a hawker of toilets for “well endowed” men.

Impeaching Pence, Pompeo and Barr would be an unneeded distraction from the necessary impeachment of their boss but, on the merits, all three richly deserve to join Trump in the dock. They have betrayed the country and their oaths of office. They have even failed Trump by not acting to save the worst person ever to occupy the White House from his worst instincts.

WP: Fact-checking Trump’s wild Cabinet session

Fact-checking Trump’s wild Cabinet session

By Glenn Kessler       October 22, 2019

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We originally had planned to offer a deconstruction of one of President Trump’s Four-Pinocchio tweets over the weekend, as an example of how many things the president can get wrong in fewer than 280 characters. But then the president had his wild Cabinet session with reporters, and we shifted course.

 

“I don’t want to leave troops there. It’s very dangerous for — you know, we had 28 troops, as it turned out. People said 50. It was 28. And you had an army on both sides of those troops. Those troops could have been wiped out.”

It was Trump that had said 50 troops. But these tiny numbers belie the fact that Trump ordered the withdrawal of about 1,000 U.S. troops from northeastern Syria from about a dozen bases and outposts scattered across the region, where they worked alongside Syrian Kurdish partners. The hasty withdrawal, prompted by Trump’s decision to let Turkey invade, meant many of these bases had to be quickly abandoned.

“I always thought if you’re going in, keep the oil. Same thing here. Keep the oil. … We’ve secured the oil.”

Trump appears to be talking about a plan to leave a few hundred troops along the Iraqi border area, to prevent the Islamic State from reestablishing its self-described caliphate in the area. That would also help the Kurds keep control of oil fields in the region. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper hinted at such a move when he told reporters over the weekend that all forces would be removed from Syria in the coming weeks “except for — the president has approved the — keeping some forces at Tanf garrison in the south.”

But the plan still has to be put into action. Trump’s language suggests the United States is taking control of the oil. But the U.S. military does not seize foreign oil because it’s against international law “to destroy or seize the enemy’s property.”

“We have a good relationship with the Kurds. But we never agreed to, you know, protect the Kurds. We fought with them for 3½ to four years. We never agreed to protect the Kurds for the rest of their lives.”

Trump misleadingly frames the agreement as the “rest of their lives.” But the United States had certainly made a deal with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which lost 11,000 soldiers in defeating the Islamic State, after being trained and equipped by the United States. (Turkey considers elements of this force to be a terrorist threat.) To prevent a Turkish invasion, the United States persuaded the SDF to pull back up to nine miles from the Turkish border. In August, the SDF destroyed its own military posts after assurances the United States would not let thousands of Turkish troops invade. But then Trump tossed that aside.

For context, here’s how Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke of the Kurds in 2018.

“They’ve been fighting for 300 years that we know of, 300 years.”

Trump frequently and misleadingly frames this as a “hundreds of years” conflict between the Turks and the Kurds. There has been a hundred-year effort to create a Kurdish state in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, with the Kurds frequently manipulated by great powers seeking to flex their muscles against a particular nation, such as Iraq. The United States, for instance, spent $16 million promoting a rebellion in Iraqi Kurdistan in the early 1970’s, only to step aside when the Shah of Iran (then a U.S. ally) decided to cut a border deal in 1975 with Iraq. “There is confusion and dismay among our people and force,” the Kurdish leadership cabled the CIA. “Our people’s fate in unprecedented danger. Complete destruction hanging over our head. No explanation for all of this.”

“The whistleblower gave a false account. Now we have to say, well, do we have to protect somebody that gave a false account?”

Trump says this repeatedly — he’s already earned a Bottomless Pinocchio — but it’s simply not true. Our line-by-line look at the whistleblower complaint, compared to the rough transcript of the July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other information, shows that it was fairly accurate.

“So was there actually an informant? Maybe the informant was Schiff. It could be Shifty Schiff. In my opinion, it’s possibly Schiff. He and his staff, or his staff or a whole group.”

This is ridiculous speculation. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) is not the informant. The whistleblower complaint was investigated by the inspector general for the intelligence community, found to be credible and then submitted to Congress.

“I gave away my salary. It’s, I guess, close to $450,000. I give it away. Nobody ever said, ‘He gives away his salary.’ Now it comes up because of this. But I give away my presidential salary. They say that no other president has done it. … They actually say that George Washington may — may have been the only other president to do — but see whether or not Obama gave up his salary.”

The president’s annual salary is currently $400,000 — and Trump is the third president to give away his salary. Herbert Hoover and John F. Kennedy, both very wealthy at the time, gave their salaries to charity. Barack Obama gave about $1.1 million to charity during the eight years he was president, according to a Forbes analysis. His presidential salary during that period was $3.1 million, though he made millions more from book sales.

“Best location, right next to the airport, Miami International, one of the biggest airports in the world. Some people say it’s the biggest, but one of the biggest airports in the world.”

Trump defended his now-abandoned decision to hold the Group of Seven summit at the Trump National Doral resort, but he needs to get his airport rankings straight. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is No. 1 in the world by passenger volume, with more than 100 million passengers, but Miami does not even rank in the top 20. In 2017, it ranked 40th, according to the Airports Council International.

“Doral was setting records when I bought it, because I owned it for a period of time. Setting records. It was going to — there was nothing like it. It was making a fortune. And then what happened? I announce I’m going to run for office, right? And all of a — and I say we got to build a wall, we got to have borders, we’ve got to have this, we’ve got to have that. All of a sudden, people — some people didn’t like it. They thought the rhetoric was too tough. And it went from doing great to doing fine. It does very nicely now. It’s actually coming back, I understand, very strongly. But Doral was setting records.”

Trump’s Doral resort has been in sharp decline in recent years, according to the Trump Organization’s own records. Its net operating income fell 69 percent from 2015 to 2017; a Trump Organization representative testified last year that the reason was Trump’s damaged brand since he became president. Trump bought it in 2012 and spent several years renovating it, so it’s possible 2015 was the resort’s best year. There is no evidence as yet that it is coming back “very strongly.”

“I don’t know if you know George Washington, he ran his business simultaneously while he was president. … George Washington, they say, had two desks. He had a presidential desk and a business desk.”

We will leave it to readers to decide if the practices at the nation’s founding are relevant today. Washington was one of the nation’s largest landowners when he became president, though they were of dubious value, and he was a shareholder in the Patowmack Co., which aimed to build canals that would have given his land more value. Some historians have been critical — one wrote that Washington “betrayed private trusts in pursuit of private gain” — but our colleague Joel Achenbach, in his 2005 book, “The Grand Idea: George Washington’s Potomac and the Race to the West,” concluded: “There is remarkably little tarnish to be mined in the Washington archive. We can be confident that his reputation as an honest man is not the product of a historical whitewash.”

Achenbach told The Fact Checker: “My thinking is that he did remotely run Mount Vernon as a going concern during his presidency, via letters to his farm manager, but it was a completely different era. Back then he had to borrow cash just to make the trip to get inaugurated.”

“Hey, Obama made a deal for a book. Is that running a business? I’m sure he didn’t even discuss it while he was president, yeah. He has a deal with Netflix. When did they start talking about that? That’s only, you know, a couple of examples.”

In defending the Doral deal, Trump mentions deals that Obama arranged after he left office, speculating without evidence that Obama started negotiating them when he was president.

“I don’t think you people, with this phony emoluments clause — and by the way, I would say that it’s cost me anywhere from $2 billion to $5 billion to be president — and that’s okay — between what I lose and what I could have made.”

The emoluments clause is not phony; it’s right in the Constitution (Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 8): “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Trump’s net worth is valued at $3 billion, so it’s difficult to see how being president could cost him even more than his net worth. Bloomberg News recently estimated that his net worth grew 5 percent in 2018, following two years of declines, bringing it back to the level calculated in 2016. Forbes calculated that as of September, his net worth is $3.1 billion.

“You could end up in a war. President Obama told me that. He said, ‘The biggest problem, I don’t know how to solve it.’ He told me he doesn’t know how to solve it. I said, ‘Did you ever call him?’ ‘No.’ Actually, he tried 11 times, but the man on the other side, the gentleman on the other side, did not take his calls, okay? Lack of respect. But he takes my call.”

We gave this claim Four Pinocchios in July. There is absolutely no evidence that Obama tried to call North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, let alone meet him.

“I see this guy, Congressman Al Green, say, ‘We have to impeach him, otherwise he’s going to win the election.’ What’s that all about? But that’s exactly what they’re saying. ‘We have to impeach him, because otherwise he’s going to win.’ I’m going to win the election.”

One problem with this complaint: Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.) says he never said that. The Texas congressman noted that on Twitter, writing, “It’s no surprise that @realDonaldTrump, who promoted birther conspiracies about President Obama, who claimed there were nice people among the bigots and racists in Charlottesville, and who consistently engages in perfidy, would tweet another untruth. I never said that.”

“They’re interviewing ambassadors who I’d never heard of. I don’t know who these people are. I’ve never heard of them.”

This is false. Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union and a big donor to Trump’s inauguration, testified to Congress on Oct. 17 that Trump in an Oval Office meeting on May 23 directed him, special envoy Kurt Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry to talk to his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani about Ukraine issues.

“We asked the White House to arrange a working phone call from President Trump and a working Oval Office visit,” Sondland said. “However, President Trump was skeptical that Ukraine was serious about reforms and anti-corruption, and he directed those of us present at the meeting to talk to Mr. Giuliani, his personal attorney, about his concerns. It was apparent to all of us that the key to changing the President’s mind on Ukraine was Mr. Giuliani.”

The Worst Day in Earth’s History Contains an Ominous Warning

An artist's depiction of the K-T impact, which wiped out all nonavian dinosaurs.
NASA / REUTERS
The worst day in the history of life on Earth, so far, happened almost exactly 66 million years ago, when an asteroid roughly the size of Manhattan slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula.

You may know the story. The asteroid—which arrived, probably, in June or July—immediately drilled a 20-mile hole into the planet’s surface, vaporizing bedrock and spewing it halfway to the moon. The planet shuddered with magnitude-12 earthquakes, loosing tsunamis across the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the ejected debris condensed in orbit and plunged back to Earth as searing spheres of molten glass, which torched the land and turned forests into firestorms. Other debris remained high in space, where it blocked the sun’s rays and began to chill the surface of the planet.

By the time it was over, about 75 percent of all species on Earth had died, including all nonavian dinosaurs. The event, which ended the Cretaceous Period and began the Tertiary Period, is named the K-T extinction.

Since 1980, when the K-T impact hypothesis was first proposed, the Day the Dinosaurs Died has attained almost mythic significance. But questions remain about the theory. None of the Earth’s other big mass extinctions were caused by an asteroid impact. Why did this one end the 180-million-year reign of the dinosaurs?

A new paper, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers a possible answer: The impact changed the chemical content of the ocean, rendering seawater more acidic and inhospitable to the tiny plankton that form the base of the marine food chain. Combined with the other effects of the asteroid—darkened skies and a snap of global cooling—this ecologic disruption doomed much of life on Earth.The finding may be satisfying for asteroid fans, but it is an ominous one. Ocean acidification, a hallmark of the planet’s previous mass extinctions, is happening again today.

How does an asteroid prompt an extinction? It chooses the right location. The Yucatán Peninsula was an excellent one, says Pincelli Hull, an author of the paper and a geology professor at Yale. The peninsula is essentially an “old buried reef,” she told me, an accumulation of dead coral and other sea life that is now more than a mile thick. When the asteroid hit, untold megatons of that old organic material—rich in nitrogen and sulfur—instantly became dust and shot up into the atmosphere.

Soon it began to fall back down, now as nitric oxide and sulfuric acid. “It was raining brimstone and acid from the sky,” Hull said. The air would have reeked of acrid smog and burnt matches. The acid accumulated in the oceans, wearing away the shells of the small, delicate plankton that serve as the basis of the marine food chain. Within a few centuries of the impact, ocean acidity had jumped by at least 0.3 pH units.

This spike in ocean acidification may have lasted for less than 1,000 years. But even that pulse “was long enough to kill off entire ecosystems for sure,” Hull said. Ocean acidification also likely worsened other sweeping environmental changes wrought by the impact, such as the years-long darkness caused by orbiting debris and ash from the global wildfires.

With this new finding, it now appears that all three of the worst mass extinctions in Earth’s history featured huge spasms of ocean acidification. They include the K-T extinction; the End-Triassic Extinction, when volcanoes in New Jersey killed 75 percent of all species; and the dread End-Permian Event, the worst extinction in the history of the planet, which killed roughly 85 percent of all species and nearly sterilized the oceans. Scientists call that event “the Great Dying.”

And that pattern is worrying, because the oceans are acidifying again today. Carbon dioxide—the same air pollutant that causes global warming—also dissolves in the oceans and increases the acidity of seawater. Since the late 1980s, the planet’s oceans have become about 0.02 pH units more acidic every decade, according to a report last month from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. More than a fifth of all modern carbon pollution has already dissolved into the oceans, the report also found.

The researchers collected more than 7,000 of these tiny fossils—each half the size of a grain of sand—from Geulhemmerberg Cave in the Netherlands, the only place on Earth that contains fossils from the oceans in the decades and centuries after the K-T impact. (Michael J. Henehan / PNAS)

 

Modern acidification is not yet at the same magnitude as the K-T pulse. It’s “moving toward that scale, but it’s not quite there yet,” Hull said. What unites our world and the K-T period, she said, is that a number of environmental catastrophes can overlap with ocean acidification to produce a major upheaval.

“You should think of [ocean acidification] as the straw that broke the camel’s back” during the K-T extinction, she said. “It’s dark, it’s really cold after the impact—and the ocean has acidified.”Chris Lowery, who studies the oceans of the past at the University of Texas at Austin, told me that the paper represents “a big leap” in our understanding of the extinction. “We’ve known for a while that there was some amount of ocean acidification due to the Chicxulub impact, but this is the first time that the acidification has actually been quantified,” he said in an email, referring to the town in the Yucatán Peninsula for which the impact crater is named.

While paleontologists have long hypothesized about how an asteroid impact could produce the K-T extinction, this is some of the first evidence that supports those mechanisms, he added. And while the asteroid struck Mexico, the crucial evidence for this study came from a cave in the Netherlands that preserves fossils from the oceans in the decades or centuries immediately after the impact. Michael Henehan, a scientist who was then a postdoc in Hull’s lab, collected more than 7,000 tiny plankton fossils from the cave—each half the size of a grain of sand—and crushed them to analyze their chemical signatures.

“It was a herculean effort to get these measurements,” Hull said. “There’s just one place in the world where we think these fossil preserved.” (Henehan is now a professor at the German Research Centre for Geosciences.)

Two years ago, another study found the first geological evidence of global cooling, another proposed mechanism, following the impact.

Notably, the study’s findings do not support the idea that enormous eruptions from volcanoes in modern-day India, called the Deccan Traps, prompted the surge in ocean acidification and resulting mass extinction. That hypothesis has a small number of ardent advocates, among them Gerta Keller, a geologist at Princeton who was the subject of a profile in this magazine last year.

But “this study pretty definitively shows that those eruptions had no effect on ocean chemistry,” Lowery said. In an email, Keller disputed the paper’s dating of the impact, arguing the asteroid actually struck Earth “over 100,000 years” prior to the extinction’s start.

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Robinson Meyer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers climate change and technology.