Pressed by Climate Activists, Senate Democrats to ‘Go on Offense’ - The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Facing a showdown vote as early as this month over the embattled “Green New Deal,” Senate Democrats are preparing a counteroffensive to make combating climate change a central issue of their 2020 campaigns — a striking shift on an issue they have shied away from for the past decade.



Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, outlined the new strategy in an interview last week, casting it as a way to mobilize millennial voters, a key part of the Democratic constituency that the party will need to turn out to win in swing states.



With progressives pushing Democrats to embrace the Green New Deal — and Republicans ridiculing the idea as socialism — Mr. Schumer is effectively trying to turn a weakness into a strength. He is planning daily floor speeches attacking Republicans for inaction and a proposal for a special Senate committee focused on the issue, which he intends to announce this week.



And while there is virtually no chance of passing climate change legislation in a Republican-controlled Senate with President Trump in office, Mr. Schumer said he wanted legislation to run on next year — and bring to a vote in early 2021, should his party win the White House and the Senate.



“This is the first time Democrats have decided to go on offense on climate change,” Mr. Schumer said in an interview in his office. Asked about a bill, though, he conceded that “it’s going to take us a little while to come up with a consensus that works.”



But even one of the most ardent evangelists for climate action, former Vice President Al Gore, conceded that it could be difficult for the party to come together around actual legislation. “This is a heavy lift politically,” he said.



Despite that, Democrats see fighting climate change as a winning issue on the campaign trail — a way to mobilize not only young voters but also progressives, who are increasingly talking about the environment in terms of economic and social justice, given the outsize effect pollution has on minority communities.





Protesters for the Sunrise Movement, which encourages young people to combat climate change, outside Representative Steny Hoyer’s office last year.

Photo by: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock

Climate change has for the first time emerged as a front-and-center issue in national political campaigns. On Friday, Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, announced that he would campaign for president on the signature issue of fighting climate change. Other Democratic presidential candidates regularly make campaign speeches about the subject, and most initially rushed to back the Green New Deal, the liberal social policy proposal made famous by its author, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Students around the world are “striking” from school this spring to demand action.



But the rise of climate change as a rallying cry has come with huge downsides for Democrats. The ambitions of its youthful advocates have clashed with the caution of Democratic veterans, memorably caught in a viral video of middle and high schoolers confronting Senator Dianne Feinstein of California.



And in a speech to conservative activists on Saturday, President Trump appeared to salivate at the chance to confront Democrats on the issue. “I encourage it,” he mockingly said of the Green New Deal. “I think it’s really something that they should promote.”



Republicans see a political advantage in tying Democrats to the most contentious Democratic proposals, like linking climate change policy to universal employment.



Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, plans to put the Green New Deal to a vote, without a single hearing or legislative language, as a way of daring Senate Democrats, especially those running for president, to go on record in favor of it.



“Whether or not they agree with everything in the Green New Deal, they are going to be lumped into what that proposal was,” said Antonia Ferrier, a Republican strategist and former top aide to Mr. McConnell. “To be charitable to them, they care about this issue and think it’s important. But they also do run a risk of alienating a lot of independent-minded voters in some of those states that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016.”



Democrats have been skittish about embracing the “green activist” label at least since 2000, when Mr. Gore lost his bid for the White House. Their unease worsened in 2010, when President Barack Obama’s effort to push a climate change bill through Congress crashed in the Democratic Senate and helped sink the careers of some Democrats who voted for it.





Flooded homes and roads in Elizabeth City, N.C. after Hurricane Florence last year.

Photo by: Hilary Swift for The New York Times

“Climate change, to our frustration, was never an issue that rung a bell with voters, particularly in the throes of coming out of an economic crisis,” said David Axelrod, the former chief political strategist to Mr. Obama. “But now we’re a decade down the road, and the road is surrounded by floods and fires in a way that is becoming more and more visible.”



Polls show that millennial voters, the largest voting demographic, consistently rank climate change as an issue of top concern — something older generations never did. A 2018 poll by the Pew Research Center found that millennials are the only generation in which a strong majority — 65 percent — says both that there is solid evidence of global warming and that this is attributable primarily to human activity.



Mr. Schumer said that he believed voters now saw climate change as an issue that affected them in their daily lives, as scientific reports link climate change to damaging extreme weather, such as stronger storms, flooding and drought.



He pointed to “the energy of the young people” on the issue and added, “We want to take that energy and channel it into something more constructive.”



Celinda Lake, a Democratic strategist, said that if Democrats talked about the issue correctly — using phrases like “transitioning to green energy,” rather than the more polarizing “climate change” — they could win over Trump voters, who associate words like “transition” and “energy” with jobs.



“Trump’s weakest issue is the environment,” Ms. Lake said. “As a Democrat, you’re mobilizing our side, you’re cross-pressuring his voters and you’re talking about the economy and the environment at the same time.”



But Democrats are likely to run into trouble when it comes time to propose serious policy solutions. Already, supporters of the Green New Deal have been met with criticism that the proposal is chiefly a set of broad-strokes outlines, rather than concrete legislative language.





Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, introducing the Green New Deal last month.

Photo by: Pete Marovich for The New York Times

The Green New Deal immediately won the embrace of multiple Democratic presidential candidates, including Senators Kamala Harris of California, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont.



But it was also hit by a backlash, as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s website mistakenly published a draft summary of the document that included contentious provisions not endorsed by those candidates, like language that called for economic security “for all who are unable or unwilling to work.”



Other Democrats shied away, including Ms. Feinstein, who told the group of student protesters, “there’s no way to pay for it,” and “it wouldn’t pass the Senate.”



Mr. Schumer called the episode “a little hiccup, nothing more.”



Republicans saw an opportunity.



“Do our Democratic colleagues really support this fantasy novel masquerading as public policy?” Mr. McConnell asked last week on the Senate floor, discussing his plan for the coming vote. “Do they really want to completely upend Americans’ lives to enact some grand socialist vision?”



Mr. Schumer’s plan to protect Democrats from going on the record in support of the Green New Deal is to have all members of his caucus simply vote “present” when Mr. McConnell brings the proposal to the Senate floor.



Mr. Schumer said he would then counter with a more detailed policy solution, but that may prove just as risky. Such a solution to climate change is the same as it was in 2010, when Mr. Obama failed to pass a bill that required polluters to pay for their carbon emissions.



Policy experts say the solution to climate change is still to put a price — ideally, a tax — on carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, essentially creating an energy tax that would raise the price of gasoline and electricity generated from fossil fuels. That idea is likely to remain a tough sell with many voters, even as it energizes the liberal left wing of the Democratic Party.



Veterans of the 2010 debacle say the political risk will not be as great as it was then.



“There has been a lot of change since then,” said Rick Boucher, a former Democratic congressman from a coal-rich quarter of southwest Virginia, whose constituents voted him out of office for backing the Obama-era climate change bill."



Pressed by Climate Activists, Senate Democrats to ‘Go on Offense’ - The New York Times

Opinion | Why White People Need Blackface - The New York Times

"By George Yancy, www.nytimes.comView OriginalMarch 4th, 2019



To understand this degrading practice, we must examine the white face that refuses to see itself in its own monstrous creations.



Mr. Yancy is a philosophy professor and author.



In his memoir “Black Boy,” Richard Wright expresses his dismay that white America would continue to fail to understand what it means to be black in America because it “will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known.” I, along with many others, share Wright’s dismay. We have not seen much evidence of that bigger and tougher America when it comes to seriously and collectively interrogating white racism in this country.



The recent scandals over prominent whites donning blackface provided a reminder of this failure. Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia apologized for appearing in a photo in his 1984 medical school yearbook of two students, one in blackface and one wearing Ku Klux Klan “regalia,” and admitted to darkening his face to look like Michael Jackson when he went to a dance party. Similarly, Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini, while a sophomore in high school, donned blackface, replete with a do-rag, gold chains, sunglasses and a New York Yankees cap. As of this writing, both Sabatini and Northam have refused to resign from their political offices.



After these incidents became public, I saw and heard white pundits and commentators condemn these individual cases and persons. This is certainly reasonable. There isn’t much dispute over the racist history and nature of blackface. Condemnation is a sign of greater awareness about this hurtful, racist practice, but it is also a way of distancing: By attributing blackface to a few “bad apples,” they fail to treat this as a teachable moment about the deeply ingrained nature of white American racism. They also ignore the degree to which blackface is actually little more than a perverse expression of whiteness.



To face blackface, as it were, head-on, we must address the structure of whiteness that drives it. Blackface is a performance historically grounded in white supremacy and as such, an act of epistemological and ontological terror. In other words, blackface is a form of “white knowing” (in reality, of white unknowing), of white projection, and of stipulating through performance of what it means to be black by way of lies about what it means to be white. Hence, to understand blackface, we must return to the white face that refuses to see itself in its own monstrous creations.



Blackface is a product of a long history of whiteness and its attempt to make sense of itself through both the consumption and the negation of black humanity. It speaks to the parasitic nature of whiteness and its need to “feed.” After all, whiteness, in its colonial expression, must consume and yet exclude that which is other, that which is black.



Understanding blackface in this way can be an important step toward starving whiteness of its need for the “other,” its need to be what it is not, its need to masquerade, its need to project — or in its root meaning, to “throw forth” — its lies onto the black body and to pretend as if the black body has always been the site of those projections.



Blackface also echoes the pain and suffering felt by black people whose bodies and identities underwent transmogrification, where they were rendered grotesque and bizarre, defined by ugly white myths. White American blackface was a grotesque extension of minstrelsy from the Middle Ages, where servant-performers, as Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates state, “entertained their patrons by playing music, singing, telling stories, juggling, or performing comic antics and buffoonery.”



Within the white American antebellum context and after, anti-blackness was at the very heart of white blackface minstrelsy. The black body functioned as the repulsive and revolting object of white disgust, with whites “throwing forth” their hatred and lies onto what they themselves had created. White American blackface performers engaged in exaggerated and distorted gestures, warped dialect and racist clowning, all creations of the white American imaginary. As white performers blackened their faces with burnt cork, re-presented the black body in caricatured, silly, ersatz, inferior, horrible, and damnable ways, they were able to mark black bodies publicly as appallingly stupid and subhuman.



Within this racist construction, though, white bodies remained “normative,” “intelligent,” “civil,” “nonthreatening,” engaging in “mere entertainment” and they implicitly and explicitly reinforced deeply problematic and false “racial differences” between black and white bodies. As the scholar Ronald L. Jackson argues, “The darkened face, created from the moistened debris of burnt and crushed champagne corks, insolently signified that Whites did not want to see Blacks for who they really were culturally, but, instead, … an iconographic image, a scripted racial body inscribed with meanings and messages Whites enjoyed seeing, ones that were self-affirming and insular.”



On this score, American whiteness embodied and embodies an epistemological and ontological divide that it takes as “normative,” as “common sense.” And it tells a self-redeeming and self-congratulatory history that is itself indicative of white power and privilege.



As the feminist and white anti-racist activist Peggy McIntosh writes, “When I am told about national heritage or about ‘civilization,’ I am shown that people of my [white] race made it what it is.” At the base of this narrative history are lies and distortions; indeed, more broadly, there is an entire underside of white modernity that consists of enslaved and dehumanized black bodies and often forgotten indigenous bodies across the Americas that were brutally slaughtered and decimated. To use the poet and theorist Vincent Woodard’s terms, blackface in particular can be described as an expression of “consumption rituals” and “consumption practices.” In short, the black body and bodies of color are the subject of white consumption.



To conjure the performance of blackface, whites had to engage in a magical trick that involved profound self-deception. White theatrical spaces of blackface performance were forged to confirm the “truth” that white gazes beheld. White people gathered within such spaces to have their worldview proven beyond a doubt. White audiences, through their attendance and their laughter, helped to “validate” the white racist distortions as true. They laughed at those who were deemed fundamentally different from themselves, and that laugher helped to sustain the illusions they had projected, their creations, their myths, authored by an arrogant white race who dared to assume they knew black people better than black people knew themselves.



Imagine whites in blackface on the stage: The actor “throws forth” all of the lies and distortions onto the black body. Here is where the combined performance displays a kind of consumptive process. The whites in the audience embrace and internalize the projections. They accept the putrid lies — the happy “darky,” the black “idiot,” the inferior “nigger”— that fill them with self-certainty about their “superior” status. They deny that they have created these lies and that denial sustains their white “purity” and “innocence.”



Black people are not the horrible and derogatory racist myths that so many white people have depicted, whether through blackface or other white American pastimes. I know who I am. Blackface tells me absolutely nothing about myself, but it does tell me about whiteness, and its grotesque projections. But what if blackface reveals something far too weighty and threatening for white America, something that would require a bigger and tougher America to confront? What if blackface is clear evidence of the emptiness of whiteness, the hollowness of its being as an identity marker?



Blackface is not a black problem. It is a white one, and fixing it is the job of white America. In her book “Dismantling Privilege: An Ethics of Accountability,” the religion scholar Mary Elizabeth Hobgood writes, “For whites to construct an identity outside the racist construct, we would need to give up our socially constructed white selves and embrace the rejected parts of our humanity that requires scapegoats.”



I couldn’t agree more. Blackface is the white man’s burden, not ours.



George Yancy is professor of philosophy at Emory University. His latest book is “Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America.”



Opinion | Why White People Need Blackface - The New York Times

Opinion | How Giuliani Might Take Down Trump - The New York Times

"The parallels between the Mafia and the Trump Organization are striking, and Giuliani perfected the template for prosecuting organized crime.



Mr. Graff is the author of “The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s F.B.I. and the War on Global Terror.”



Any onetime Mafia investigator who listened to the Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen testify Wednesday would have immediately recognized the congressional hearing’s historical analogue — what America witnessed on Capitol Hill wasn’t so much John Dean turning on President Richard Nixon, circa 1973; it was the mobster Joseph Valachi turning on the Cosa Nostra, circa 1963.



The Valachi hearings, led by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, opened the country’s eyes for the first time to the Mafia, as the witness broke “omertà” — the code of silence — to speak in public about “this thing of ours,” Cosa Nostra. He explained just how “organized” organized crime actually was — with soldiers, capos, godfathers and even the “Commission,” the governing body of the various Mafia families.



Fighting the Mafia posed a uniquely hard challenge for investigators. Mafia families were involved in numerous distinct crimes and schemes, over yearslong periods, all for the clear benefit of its leadership, but those very leaders were tough to prosecute because they were rarely involved in the day-to-day crime. They spoke in their own code, rarely directly ordering a lieutenant to do something illegal, but instead offering oblique instructions or expressing general wishes that their lieutenants simply knew how to translate into action.



Those explosive — and arresting — hearings led to the 1970 passage of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, a law designed to allow prosecutors to go after enterprises that engaged in extended, organized criminality. RICO laid out certain “predicate” crimes — those that prosecutors could use to stitch together evidence of a corrupt organization and then go after everyone involved in the organization as part of an organized conspiracy. While the headline-grabbing RICO “predicates” were violent crimes like murder, kidnapping, arson and robbery, the statute also focused on crimes like fraud, obstruction of justice, money laundering and even aiding or abetting illegal immigration.



It took prosecutors a while to figure out how to use RICO effectively, but by the mid-1980s, federal investigators in the Southern District of New York were hitting their stride under none other than the crusading United States attorney Rudy Giuliani, who as the head of the Southern District brought charges in 1985 against the heads of the city’s five dominant Mafia families.



Ever since, S.D.N.Y. prosecutors and F.B.I. agents have been the nation’s gold standard in RICO prosecutions — a fact that makes clear precisely why, after Mr. Cohen’s testimony, President Trump’s greatest legal jeopardy may not be in the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller.



What lawmakers heard Wednesday sounded a lot like a racketeering enterprise: an organization with a few key players and numerous overlapping crimes — not just one conspiracy, but many. Even leaving aside any questions about the Mueller investigation and the 2016 campaign, Mr. Cohen leveled allegations that sounded like bank fraud, charity fraud and tax fraud, as well as hints of insurance fraud, obstruction of justice and suborning perjury.



The parallels between the Mafia and the Trump Organization are more than we might like to admit: After all, Mr. Cohen was labeled a “rat” by President Trump last year for agreeing to cooperate with investigators; interestingly, in the language of crime, “rats” generally aren’t seen as liars. They’re “rats” precisely because they turn state’s evidence and tell the truth, spilling the secrets of a criminal organization.



Mr. Cohen was clear about the rot at the center of his former employer: “Everybody’s job at the Trump Organization is to protect Mr. Trump. Every day most of us knew we were coming and we were going to lie for him about something. That became the norm.”



RICO was precisely designed to catch the godfathers and bosses at the top of these crime syndicates — people a step or two removed from the actual crimes committed, those whose will is made real, even without a direct order.



Exactly, it appears, as Mr. Trump did at the top of his family business: “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates,” Mr. Cohen said. Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen said, “doesn’t give orders. He speaks in code. And I understand that code.”



What’s notable about Mr. Cohen’s comments is how they paint a consistent (and credible) pattern of Mr. Trump’s behavior: The former F.B.I. director James Comey, in testimony nearly two years ago in the wake of his firing, made almost exactly the same point and used almost exactly the same language. Mr. Trump never directly ordered him to drop the Flynn investigation, Mr. Comey said, but he made it all too clear what he wanted — the president isolated Mr. Comey, with no other ears around, and then said he hoped Mr. Comey “can let this go.” As Mr. Comey said, “I took it as, this is what he wants me to do.” He cited in his testimony then the famous example of King Henry II’s saying, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?,” a question that resulted in the murder of that very meddlesome priest, Thomas Becket.



The sheer number and breadth of the investigations into Mr. Trump’s orbit these days indicates how vulnerable the president’s family business would be to just this type of prosecution. In December, I counted 17, and since then, investigators have started an inquiry into undocumented workers at Mr. Trump’s New Jersey golf course, another crime that could be a RICO predicate; Mr. Cohen’s public testimony itself, where he certainly laid out enough evidence and bread crumbs for prosecutors to verify his allegations, mentioned enough criminal activity to build a racketeering case. Moreover, RICO allows prosecutors to wrap 10 years of racketeering activity into a single set of charges, which is to say, almost precisely the length of time — a decade — that Michael Cohen would have unparalleled insight into Mr. Trump’s operations. Similarly, many Mafia cases end up being built on wiretaps — just like, for instance, the perhaps 100 recordings Mr. Cohen says he made of people during his tenure working for Mr. Trump, recordings that federal investigators are surely poring over as part of the 290,000 documents and files they seized in their April raid last year.



Indicting the whole Trump Organization as a “corrupt enterprise” could also help prosecutors address the thorny question of whether the president can be indicted in office; they could lay out a whole pattern of criminal activity, indict numerous players — including perhaps Trump family members — and leave the president himself as a named, unindicted co-conspirator. Such an action would allow investigators to make public all the known activity for Congress and the public to consider as part of impeachment hearings or re-election. It would also activate powerful forfeiture tools for prosecutors that could allow them to seize the Trump Organization’s assets and cut off its income streams.



The irony will be that if federal prosecutors decide to move against President Trump’s empire and family together, he’ll have one man’s model to thank: his own TV lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who perfected the template to tackle precisely that type of criminal enterprise."



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An excellent analysis of the importance of teaching historical narratives..