I have lived nearly all my life in California, and my love for this place and its people runs deep and true. There have been many times in the past few years when I’ve called myself a California nationalist: Sure, America seemed to be going crazy, but at least I lived in the Golden State, where things were still pretty chill.
But lately my affinity for my home state has soured. Maybe it’s the smoke and the blackouts, but a very un-Californian nihilism has been creeping into my thinking. I’m starting to suspect we’re over. It’s the end of California as we know it. I don’t feel fine.
It isn’t just the fires — although, my God, the fires. Is this what life in America’s most populous, most prosperous state is going to be like from now on? Every year, hundreds of thousands evacuating, millions losing power, hundreds losing property and lives? Last year, the air near where I live in Northern California — within driving distance of some of the largest and most powerful and advanced corporations in the history of the world — was more hazardous than the air in Beijing and New Delhi. There’s a good chance that will happen again this month, and that it will keep happening every year from now on. Is this really the best America can do?
Probably, because it’s only going to get worse. The fires and the blackouts aren’t like the earthquakes, a natural threat we’ve all chosen to ignore. They are more like California’s other problems, like housing affordability and homelessness and traffic — human-made catastrophes we’ve all chosen to ignore, connected to the larger dysfunction at the heart of our state’s rot: a failure to live sustainably.
Ben Ehrenreich at The Nation writes—California Is Burning—Nationalize PG&E. California’s utility, PG&E, has put profits over public safety for too long:
For decades now, PG&E has been making a convincing case for public ownership of utilities—so convincing, in fact, that in 2010 the company thought it wise to throw $46 million at a ballot initiative designed to thwart local efforts at municipal control of energy. (It lost.) Those efforts have been taking off in recent years, as have grassroots campaigns to democratize the grid—that is, decentralize energy production and distribution so that communities can take control over their own energy. (Large public utilities, after all, are in some cases only nominally more accountable than the corporate kind.) After last year’s disastrous fire season, Bay Area and northern California chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America teamed up with local environmental justice groups to launch a campaign—Let’s Own PG&E, they called it—for climate justice and democratic accountability, calling for a public takeover of the utility’s infrastructure, a transition to clean energy with worker and community ownership. “We knew more disasters would be coming,” organizer Keith Brower Brown told me. “We didn’t know how soon or how bad.”
On October 27, the campaign’s efforts got an implicit endorsement from Bernie Sanders, whose Green New Deal plan is the only one that calls for making energy infrastructure public. (Silicon Valley Congressman Ro Khanna and San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo have since both come out for customer-ownership of PG&E.) “It is time,” Sanders tweeted, “to begin thinking about public ownership of major utilities.” That time actually came and went decades ago. Right now, PG&E’s shareholders are fending off a takeover bid by the carrion-feeding hedge funds that have bought up the company’s bonds—and the insurance claims of its wildfire victims. While the jackals scrap with the hyenas, the best California Governor Gavin Newsom could do was hope for the arrival of a more benevolent predator. On Saturday, Newsom put out a desperate plea for Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway to make a bid for the failing utility. But Berkshire Hathaway is heavily invested in coal and shale oil. Buffett is gambling, in other words, on the success of the very industries that are fueling the fires. And Newsom is gambling on him.
Jill Filipovic at The Guardian writes—Adoption of separated migrant kids shows 'pro-life' groups' disrespect for maternity. Children who have been removed from their undocumented parents at the border are being claimed by foster families supported by conservative Christian groups:
An Associated Press investigation earlier this month found that children across the country are being stripped from their parents and handed over to new families, who are able to petition for custody of them – and that state court judges can grant that custody without notifying the children’s parents. Thanks to a hastily implemented family separation policy, there are hundreds of migrant children in foster care or detention centers whose parents undoubtedly want them. But if their parents have been deported, reunification is more difficult – especially if more-powerful American foster parents decide they want to keep the child they are supposed to be temporarily caring for.
According to the AP, “more than 300 parents were deported to Central America without their children this summer.” Many of those parents likely had legitimate asylum claims but did not get fair hearings (or any hearings at all). Their children are at risk of being permanently and legally given over to wealthier American families who seem to think they deserve the children of the poor and the vulnerable.
For this, you can thank the pro-life movement.
George Goehl at The New York Times writes—If Progressives Don’t Try to Win Over Rural Areas, Guess Who Will. I’ve been out there organizing for 20 years. I have never seen this level of public activity by white supremacist groups:
This weekend, I’ll head back home to southern Indiana, where members of the 3 Percenters, a far-right militia, showed up with guns and knives at the Bloomington Farmers Market earlier this year. The leader of the white supremacist organization American Identity Movement even paid a visit. I’ve been organizing for 20 years in rural communities and have never seen this level of public activity by white supremacist groups. [...]
I run People’s Action, a coalition of 40-some grass-roots organizations across the country that bring poor and working-class people together to win economic and racial justice. We are rare in that we work in both urban and rural areas; many of our peer organizations are largely urban.
As part of this work, our organizers had over 10,000 conversations with people in small towns across the country over the past year. We spoke with neighbors in Amish country, visited family farms in Iowa and sat on front porches in Appalachia — communities that have experienced hard economic times and went solidly for Donald Trump in 2016.
Although these communities may be fertile ground for the Trump administration and other white nationalist organizations, they are also places where people can come together across race and class to solve the big problems facing everyday people. That starts by recognizing one another’s humanity — and with honest conversations. [...]
For those who have given up on rural communities: Please reconsider. So many of these places need organizing to win improved conditions. Despite the stereotypes, rural people are not static in their political views or in the way they vote. Single white rural women and young rural white people represent two of the greatest leftward swings in the 2018 midterms, moving 17 and 16 points respectively toward Democrats. They played a key role in Democratic wins across the Midwest.
Yome Adgoke at The Guardian writes—The treatment of Meghan is racist. We should feel able to say so:
The silence surrounding the Duchess of Sussex’s treatment by the press has become a roar. More than 70 female MPs signed a letter this week in “solidarity” with Meghan after she spoke about her treatment by sections of the media. The letter outlined attempts “to cast aspersions” on her character. It also attempted to address the nature of these attacks: “We are calling out what can only be described as outdated, colonial undertones to some of these stories,” it read.
However, this treatment can be described as only one thing: racist. Not saying so explicitly is part of a growing trend – the word “racist” is now dodged with more fervour than racial slurs themselves.
At one point, there was concern that “racist” was being used willy-nilly; now, it feels as if those in power are thumbing through a thesaurus with kid gloves, searching hastily for synonyms. The phrasing has become almost comically creative: take “racially charged,” “racially loaded,” “racially divisive” and “racially tinged”, as if bigotry is administered in doses with a pipette. “Homophobically tinged” and “sexistly charged” sound equally ludicrous, but I am yet to see them used in lieu of the real terms. [...]
Many journalists are grappling with editorial guidelines that are making their jobs more difficult. Look at the censuring of the BBC presenter Naga Munchetty, after she said, in relation to Trump’s comment, that every time she had been told to “go back to where [she] came from, that was embedded in racism”. Attempts at impartiality lead to inaccuracy – when the Republican congressman Steve King asked why the terms “white supremacist” and “white nationalist” were offensive, NBC News originally told its staff to “be careful to avoid characterising [King’s] remarks as racist.”
Catherine Timber at The Baffler writes—Land Without Bread:
The loosely defined proposal for a Green New Deal hits the panic button, American-style, but it does not exactly lay a cornerstone. Which is to say that it avoids prickly issues of land use—generally reserved for states and localities that regularly do battle with sacrosanct private property rights. Yet the choices we make about our land are foundational to any future we construct, low-carbon or otherwise. It has always been so. Just ask the pre-Columbian indigenous peoples, the slaveholders and their human property, the “settlers,” the railroad barons, and the policy architects of postwar suburbanization and urban disinvestment. And consider the fact that sprawling suburban development devoured nearly 31 million acres of agricultural land—cropland, woodlands, pasture, and range land—between 1992 and 2012 alone, according to a 2018 report by American Farmland Trust (AFT). That is an area almost as large as New York State. More than a third of that conversion, 11 million acres, took place on prime farmland blessed with the world’s richest soil. That is an area roughly the size of California’s Central Valley. Protecting such land, and doing so in an equitable manner, is critical not only to our future food supply but also to mitigating and adapting to climate change.
A few others have pointed out the land-use blind spot in the Green New Deal, but they have focused almost entirely on urban land use, practices promoted by the New Urbanist and Smart Growth movements in the 1990s that aim for greater urban density, compact mixed-use, transit-oriented development, and walkability as antidotes to greenhouse-gas-pluming, car-centered suburban expansion. These urbanist measures are important in offering up an alternative to sprawl, of course, and are very much au courant in view of our newfound love affair with cities. But somehow, the inverse—protecting agricultural lands from development—has receded from public discourse in recent years, a casualty, perhaps, of the growing urban-rural divide that birthed the 2016 presidential election results. So has use of the word sprawl itself, that thing going on out there past the decrepit, empty shopping malls, far from the thrum of the metropolis.
Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer writes—A revolution in Chile sparked by U.S.-style economics. Our billionaires should be very worried:
In 2019, as an autumn of popular uprisings erupts around the globe, the most dramatic revolution of the moment is taking place in the shadows of the towering mountains of Chile, where as many as a million people flood the streets of capital city Santiago by day, and harrowing street battles have erupted at night. What set off this political conflagration? A subway fare hike that -- converted to U.S. money -- amounts to less than 5 cents.
But to massive numbers of Chileans, those 30 extra pesos were literally the last straw, and not just because transit fares in the South American nation had doubled in 12 years to take a toll on lower-income families. The fare hike touched off much deeper anxieties about income inequality in a nation often held up as an economic success story because of its rapidly rising gross domestic product (GDP), yet has seen much of that wealth flow to a narrow sliver at the top. That’s in addition to social unease over fewer opportunities for Chile’s browner-skinned indigenous and mixed-race people, often packed into outskirts barrios. [...]
Americans should be paying a lot closer attention to all of this -- and not just because 50-plus years of U.S. meddling in a capital some 5,000 miles south of Washington have played a key role in getting things to this point. After taking the advice of America’s conservative economics professors for decades, Chile now has -- according to one survey -- the world’s highest level of income inequality. No. 2 on that list? The United States. No wonder this nation’s billionaire oligarchs are so worried about the 2020 elections. They ought to be terrified.
I imagine that the tortured (in too many cases, literally) history of U.S.-Chile relations is not well known to many younger voters. In 1970, the people of Chile chose a more socialist path and democratically elected a left-wing president, Salvador Allende. But Allende and his populist reforms weren’t popular with one group: U.S. corporations like ITT, Pepsi and Anaconda Copper, and they leaned heavily on a friend in the White House, Richard Nixon, and his chief foreign policy architect Henry Kissinger, to do something.
And since the 1973 coup, conventional “wisdom” from rightist U.S. economists have praised the supposed “miracle” of the Chilean economy. The pre-coup economy was one that President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger wanted to “make scream” in order to turn Chileans against Allende and his elected government. Kissinger still lies through his teeth about his role in spurring the coup that killed thousands, tortured tens of thousands, and exiled at least 200,000 Chileans.
Even though the CIA had been mucking around in Chile’s elections since 1964 to keep leftists out of power as a favor to U.S. multinational corporations operating there, somehow U.S. officials found it impossible to do anything helpful to Chileans being murdered and oppressed after General Augusto Pinochet started dropping opponents of the coup into the Pacific Ocean from helicopters, a technique the Argentine generals would soon use.
There was significant improvement after Pinochet left office and, eventually, even one of those he ordered to be tortured became president. But neither she nor subsequent leaders did anything substantial to deal with the grotesque income inequality and rotten education system.
Sarah Jones at New York magazine writes—Democrats Lost the States. A New Book Says Activists Are Fighting Back:
Though Democrats made up some ground in 2018, Republicans still control most state governments. It’s not a minor problem. Republicans have cannily used state governments as laboratories for radical policies. When state Democratic Parties are weak, they can’t block assaults on abortion rights, or voting rights, or collective bargaining rights. They can’t serve as talent incubators for future members of Congress, and that, in turn, weakens the national party. How did we get here? Journalist Meaghan Winter poses the question early in her new book, All Politics Is Local. The answer, she suggests, is multipronged. Statehouses are missing progressive and even centrist lawmakers, she writes, “because of choices not made, money not spent, organizations not sustained, would-be leaders never elected.”
Winter’s reporting took her to Missouri, Florida, and Colorado, where activists are trying to claw back territory at the local level. Their foes are many. Winter compellingly argues that progress isn’t just a casualty of the Republican Party and its powerful allies. It’s endangered by the decisions of Democratic consultants and fickle donors, and restricted by archaic campaign-finance laws. Winter spoke to me by phone to discuss her reporting, and to tell me why she hasn’t quite given up hope that politics as we know it will change.