Op-Ed

Former U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden (R) and incumbent U.S. Vice President Mike Pence (L) share a moment during a mock swearing-in ceremony for U.S. Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) at the Old Senate Chamber of the U.S. Capitol January 3, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

When Joe Biden told an audience that Mike Pence "is a decent guy," Pence had already been vice president for more than two years. After the comment drew fierce criticism, Biden responded that he'd said it "in a foreign policy context"—an odd effort at damage control, given that Pence has publicly backed every one of President Trump's countless abhorrent policies, whether foreign or domestic.

It has been satisfying to note the significant response to two recent climate campaigns: the actions, including the recent Global Climate Strike, initiated by school students inspired by Greta Thunberg and the climate actions organized by Extinction Rebellion.

While delighted that these campaigns have finally managed to mobilize significant numbers of people around the existential threat the climate catastrophe poses to life on Earth, I would like to briefly raise some issues for consideration by each of those involved in the climate movement as well as those considering involvement.

I do this because history provides clearcut and compelling lessons on how to make such movements have the impact we need and, so far, the climate movement is not doing several vital things if we are to indeed be successful. And I would like to be successful.

So here are five key issues that I would address as soon as possible.

1. Analyze the climate catastrophe within the context of the ongoing and broader environmental disaster that is currently taking place.

During many years of writing about or describing the terrible damage that the “special relationship” with Israel has done to the United States the question occasionally comes up “Given the enormous power of the Zionist lobby, what can we do to bring about change?”

It is a simple question, though one that begs for multiple answers, but it also requires some thinking about how the Establishment, better known as the Deep State, operates in America. The American Deep State, which has as one of its dearest principles eternal nurturing of Israel’s interests, is actually a bundle of individual enterprises that together operate to sustain policies that are mutually beneficial. Its epicenters include financial services and faux news media in New York and the political hub in Washington, but it also is served by Hollywood’s entertainment plus propaganda machine.

The irony of this old New Yorker cartoon by Eric Lewis is so precise I haven’t been able to get it out of my head for two years. The speaker is the planet Saturn, clad in doctor’s garb — a stethoscope circling his forehead — giving the bad news to a sick and miserable-looking Earth:

“I’m afraid you have humans.”

The Nixon tapes are still in the news! My God, they’re still spewing bile, still making America’s eyeballs roll.

They’re as relevant as ever.

Donald Trump, it turns out, is merely the inner Richard Nixon, live and uncensored. He’s also the inner Ronald Reagan — the inner voice, suddenly made public, of every white male racist who has ever occupied the Oval Office (which is probably most of the occupants).

I spoke with Senator Mike Gravel on Thursday and asked him whether it seemed fair to him to be excluded from Democratic Party Presidential Primary debates on the basis of his performance in polls that did not include his name among those whom people could say they supported.

Of course, he said that it did not. But he also raised some additional questions, and told me what he would say if included in a debate.

Gravel said that 70,000 supporters had donated to his campaign. That means he has qualified for the debates by the factor that he couldn’t be prevented from competing in, namely number of donors. In this regard he differs from some of the candidates being included in the debates; they have not achieved the required number of donors, but are being included on the sole basis of their performance in polls in which they had the distinct advantage of their names being included.

“The easy movement of high ranking military officers into jobs with major defense contractors and the reverse movement of top executives in major defense contractors into high Pentagon jobs is solid evidence of the military industrial-complex in operation.”

I was utterly stunned when I read these words of former Wisconsin senator William Proxmire, quoted in an essay by William Hartung, not because of the point he was making — like, what else is new? — but because he said them in . . . 1969.

Oh my God, fifty years ago!

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You’d think a publisher with this many names could check for glaring errors in its books: “Currency, Crown Publishing Group, Penguin Random House LLC.” And you’d be right. So this isn’t an error. It’s a lie accepted as a desirable myth:

“Today it’s widely accepted that meritocracy and aristocracy have become one and the same. The lords of the universe are not sitting on trust funds. . . . [M]ost of the new lords achieved perfect or near-perfect scores on their SATs at age sixteen or seventeen. . . . We now live in a world where the highest-IQ people earn the greatest financial rewards.”

The author is Rich Karlgaard. The book is an otherwise perfectly reasonable one called Late Bloomers. Its topic is the United States, so the word “world” quoted above should not be taken literally. The book is chock full of criticism of how SATs are used. But the statements quoted above are not satirical. They are meant quite straightforwardly, and they are false. They are presented without any footnotes or citations. So, here are some: