After Pluto was discovered, in 1930, astronomers wondered whether the solar system stopped there. For decades, they peered through their best telescopes, searching for hints of more objects in the darkness. In the early 1990s, when telescope technology became powerful enough, they found one. The object was thousands of times fainter than Pluto, but it was there. A few months later, they found another. And then another. And another. With each new discovery, the edges of the solar system expanded.
More than 3,100 similar objects have been found in this cold, dark region, known as the Kuiper Belt, named for an astronomer who predicted their existence. On New Year’s Eve, for the first time, one of these objects received a visitor.
At exactly 12:33 a.m. Eastern time, as people on the East Coast drained their champagne glasses, a NASA spacecraft about the size of a grand piano approached a Kuiper Belt object about the size of a city. The object was 2014 MU69, which NASA has nicknamed Ultima Thule, an ancient phrase meaning “beyond the known world.” Ultima Thule orbits about 4 billion miles from Earth, making this the most distant encounter with another celestial object in the history of space exploration.
Like New Year’s revelers back on Earth, the spacecraft, known as New Horizons, snapped many photographs to capture the experience. And it had to do it fast. This mission was a flyby, not a visit, and Ultima Thule, measuring just 20 miles long and 10 miles wide, was a difficult mark to hit. New Horizons came within 2,200 miles of Ultima Thule’s surface. Then, traveling at a brisk pace of 32,000 miles an hour, the spacecraft left as quickly as it arrived, continuing on to the very ends of the solar system.
At a distance of 4 billion miles, it takes some time for data from New Horizons to reach Earth. The spacecraft called home for the first time since the flyby on Tuesday morning. Engineers reported that systems were working properly and packed with tantalizing new data. Scientists plan to unveil the first close-up images of Ultima Thule on Wednesday.
For now, the best view they have of Ultima Thule is this fuzzy, elongated blob, which resembles a snowman (or a peanut, or a bowling pin), taken on New Year’s Eve:
NASA / JHUAPL / SwRITen hours earlier, on Monday night, hundreds gathered at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, in Maryland, where New Horizons was built, to celebrate the flyby. The mood was festive. There was cheese and crackers, glittery party hats and kazoos. String lights draped across the walls gave the room a soft glow.
It felt like any other New Year’s Eve soiree, except it was clearly obvious that no one actually cared about New Year’s Eve. Brian May—the curly-haired lead guitarist for Queen who became a professional astrophysicist about a decade ago—debuted a recording of a song he wrote specifically for New Horizons. Guests cheered with more enthusiasm for the flyby than they did for the arrival of 2019.
All night, scientists buzzed about what sights New Horizons may reveal. From Earth, these objects look like tiny pinpricks of light. The faint glint can be used to calculate the objects’ orbits, but little else. Scientists think that Ultima Thule, like most Kuiper Belt objects, is icy. They suspect it will likely be reddish in color, thanks to billions of years of exposure to the radiation that permeates space. They don’t even know whether it’s one object or two; Ultima Thule could be two objects orbiting in close contact as one, or two objects orbiting each other.
The flyby data will provide answers to this and other questions. New Horizons’s science instruments were instructed to collect data about Ultima Thule’s composition, determine whether it has an atmosphere, and search for moons or rings. (Yes, even very tiny, icy worlds in the farthest reaches of the solar system, well beyond the glare of the sun, can have the kinds of features we associate with giant planets.)
“I’m hoping to see something I’ve never seen before,” said Kelsi Singer, a planetary scientist on the New Horizons team who planned some of the spacecraft’s observations. “I’m hoping that there’ll be features that we’ve never seen anywhere else in the solar system.”
It’s happened before. New Horizons left Earth in 2006, eight years before Ultima Thule was even discovered. In 2015, the spacecraft swept past Pluto. The encounter produced unprecedented observations of the dwarf planet, which lost its status as a full-fledged planet in 2006, a demotion its fans fulminate against to this day. The images revealed, in tremendous detail, 11,000-foot mountain ranges made of ice and smooth plains of frozen nitrogen. Some land features suggested that Pluto may even be geologically active.
“There were things on Pluto that we never would have guessed were there, because they’re literally only on Pluto,” Singer said.
Scientists hope their observations of Ultima Thule will provide new information about the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. Objects in the Kuiper Belt are cosmic leftovers, remnants of a tumultuous process that swept some debris into planets and scattered the rest. Thanks to their distance from the sun, the objects orbit in an extremely cold environment that has left them virtually unchanged for billions of years. This means they contain the same materials that formed the planets. For planetary scientists, Ultima Thule is a cosmic time capsule in pristine shape.
For now, the arrival is thrilling enough. The New Horizons team has waited three and a half years for the spacecraft to approach Ultima Thule. Scientists have had plenty of time to daydream about the object’s landforms and make their predictions. And they’re well aware that they may be wrong.
“I always feel like we ought to call it exploration and discovery, because the whole point of exploring is to go places no one’s ever been before, to see things no one’s ever seen, and to find out what’s there,” said Andrew Chaikin, a space historian. “Every time we’ve gone someplace that we’ve never been before, we’ve been surprised.”
It hasn’t received much attention, what with Donald Trump suddenly declaring victory against ISIS, ordering U.S. troops out of Syria, and provoking James Mattis to resign in protest.
But the man who is now the president’s principal adviser on the nation’s defense, tasked with leading the largest employer in the world and managing the fallout from Trump’s military retrenchment, has less experience in government (a year and a half) or the military (none) than any defense secretary since an oil magnate served as the acting head of the Pentagon for several weeks during Watergate 45 years ago.
The man’s name is Patrick Shanahan. He’s a relative enigma in American politics. And while he’s only temporarily assuming the top posting at the Defense Department for now, he may be sticking around for a while.
Focus solely on the policy positions Shanahan has staked out, and you’ll hear echoes of his outgoing boss. They’re a reminder of the difficulty Trump will have in finding a new Pentagon chief from any corner of the political-military-industrial complex whose views, as Mattis put it in his resignation letter, “are better aligned” with the president’s. In his disdain for traditional American allies, disregard for the authoritarian threat from Russia and China, and dismissal of the U.S.-led international system as a boondoggle, the commander in chief of the United States’s military largely stands alone.
[Read: James Mattis’s final protest against the president]
As deputy secretary of defense, Shanahan spoke of renewed “great-power competition” with China and Russia, the central theme of the new, Mattis-crafted National Defense Strategy. In Senate testimony during his confirmation hearing in the summer of 2017, the longtime executive at the aerospace company Boeing supported sending additional coalition troops to Afghanistan, “buttressing” NATO in part by deploying American military personnel to the Baltics and Poland to counter Russia, and reassuring U.S. allies in Asia of Washington’s commitment to maintaining the “security architecture of the Pacific Rim.”
Shanahan, in fact, made the very argument that many critics of Trump’s Syria pullout are expressing at the moment: that the lasting defeat of ISIS and its imitators depends not just on wiping out the terrorist organization on the ground, but also on working with partners to achieve a “political” resolution to the conflict that curbs Iranian and Russian influence in the country and produces a “legitimate” Syrian government. Reflecting on the “disastrous” lessons from the Obama administration’s military withdrawal from Iraq and Libya, he noted that the United States “must stay engaged in the fight and not walk away, because, as hard as it is, the alternative is worse.”
“Much of Pat’s view of the world has been formed by his relationship with Jim Mattis,” says Jim Albaugh, a retired Boeing executive who was Shanahan’s boss in the company’s defense division and, later, on the commercial side. Albaugh has stayed close with Shanahan and also knows Mattis personally.
Yet what’s most striking is that even those close to Shanahan weren’t sure how to answer when I asked what his firm foreign-policy views are, beyond pointing to his efforts to ensure that the U.S. military has a competitive edge and is ready for combat. “He’s pretty apolitical,” Albaugh told me, an assessment echoed by others I interviewed who know Shanahan. (While at Boeing, Shanahan donated to both Democratic and Republican political candidates.)
“As secretary of defense, even as acting, he’s going to have to show those cards,” says Rick Larsen, a Democratic representative from Washington State whose district includes a major Boeing production facility where Shanahan worked. “If it takes three months to get a new secretary in, even if it’s him, we don’t have three months to put a pause on the national-security strategy of the United States. We don’t have three months to wait to see how we’re gonna proceed on military-to-military relations with China.”
At the Pentagon—where he has focused on internal matters such as crafting annual budget requests and launching a process for migrating the department’s IT systems to the cloud, racking up only provisional achievements at best—Shanahan has described his role as the “chief operating officer.” He has, in other words, managed the internal execution of the vision articulated by Mattis, a legendary four-star general and “master strategist,” as Shanahan admiringly put it during his Senate confirmation hearing.
The 56-year-old Shanahan is an MIT-trained engineer and 31-year veteran of Boeing, most recently as a senior vice president for supply chain and operations, who acquired the nickname Mr. Fix-It for turning around beleaguered programs such as the development of the 787 Dreamliner passenger jet. Shanahan, who was reportedly not Mattis’s first choice for the deputy job, is a technocratic program manager through and through.
[Read: James Mattis’s letter of resignation]
Mattis seasons his remarks with quotes from statesmen and strategists such as Winston Churchill and George Shultz. Shanahan, by contrast, refers to a Pentagon office as the “obeya room” in homage to the Japanese corporate problem-solving technique, and cites Kodak as a cautionary tale for the consequences of failing to innovate. Whereas Mattis cast the National Defense Strategy as a means of bequeathing the free world as we know it to the next generation, Shanahan noted how “a risk-balanced, opportunity-driven approach will spark innovation and help protect our hard-earned culture of excellence from the unintended distortion of budgetary instability.”
While visiting U.S. soldiers in Iraq over Christmas, Trump praised Shanahan as a “good buyer” of military equipment, not some master strategist. “I’m in no rush” to replace him, the president declared. (Shanahan is only the third defense secretary to serve on an interim basis since the position was created in 1947.)
Shanahan has embraced some of the president’s pet projects. He’s championed increased sales of U.S.-made military goods and services to other countries, for example, and led Pentagon efforts to establish a new Space Force (an initiative Mattis at first resisted).
Riki Ellison, a friend of Shanahan’s and the chairman of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, a nonpartisan organization that aims to build public support for missile-defense systems, told me that Shanahan’s competitive nature is useful at a time when the U.S. military is jockeying with China and Russia in domains ranging from space to the processes by which each power acquires its military capabilities. (Such acquisitions are what Shanahan “does best,” he said.)
But Shanahan can come across as less enthused about Trump’s ideas themselves than making the ideas work—of ingeniously solving the president’s problems, like a good engineer. “It’s pretty exciting,” he has said of the Space Force. “Over a very short period of time, it’s been thrust upon us to create and grow a new organization.”
“He’s not gonna dictate. He’s gonna follow what the president’s intent is,” Ellison said. Shanahan, who is succeeding a man Trump reportedly resented for slow-walking his directives, is “an efficient doer of things,” he told me.
As the aviation journalist Jon Ostrower, who spent years covering Shanahan at Boeing, recently wrote, Mr. Fix-It enjoyed “exemplary” relationships with his superiors at the company because he made sure “the leadership delivered what it promised.” Some observers, including the late Senator John McCain, have voiced concern that, beyond the president hitting it off with a fellow businessman at the Defense Department, a suspiciously cozy relationship is developing between the Trump administration and Boeing, one of the nation’s leading defense contractors. Ethics rules require Shanahan to recuse himself from Boeing-related matters at the Pentagon.
With Mattis’s departure, the last full-throated advocate of the principles that have guided U.S. foreign policy for decades has now left Trump’s inner circle, following in the footsteps of figures such as H. R. McMaster and Nikki Haley. Taking their place are disruptors (such as the president’s sovereigntist national-security adviser John Bolton) and doers (be it pragmatic implementers of Trumpism like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or loyal foot soldiers like the UN ambassador nominee Heather Nauert).
Shanahan’s approach seems closest to that of Pompeo, who served in Congress but previously made a career in business as well. As something of an unknown quantity, Shanahan now appears to be auditioning before Trump, during a period when many of the president’s top aides—from his new chief of staff to his attorney general—are similarly in limbo as “acting” advisers.
Ellison didn’t pick a side when asked whether Shanahan’s view of the world is ultimately closer to Mattis’s or Trump’s. He acknowledged, however, that Shanahan doesn’t have Mattis’s foreign-policy pedigree or relationships around the world, and that “the Pentagon is so much more challenging than anything he’s ever done in his life” in terms of its massive budget and bureaucracy.
[Read: The Woodward book comes for James Mattis]
Hence why Trump’s decision to speed up Mattis’s exit and install Shanahan by the first of January 2019 has alarmed Adam Smith, a Washington State Democrat and the incoming chair of the House Armed Services Committee. Shanahan “does not have the comprehensive understanding of global national security threats that Secretary Mattis does,” Smith said in a statement. “Throwing him into the role of acting secretary with no notice in this way unnecessarily places the United States in a riskier position.”
Shanahan has certainly “earned the Mr. Fix-It” nickname, says Larsen, who from his perch on the House Armed Services Committee has also interacted with Shanahan since his arrival at the Defense Department. But now “the questions I’m going to have won’t be along the lines of, ‘How is the cloud-computing contracting problem going?’” he told me. “It will be focused on, ‘What’s your opinion of the Syria withdrawal? What’s your opinion of NATO? Will you be able to say no to the president or at least push back on the president and offer him advice that might be different than what he wants to do?’”
Over the past year and a half, Larsen reflected, Shanahan has struck him as “the Sergeant Friday of the Pentagon,” a reference to the fictional Dragnet detective who famously followed the facts wherever they led. The problem, Larsen told me, is that “the president maybe doesn’t like the facts.”
President Donald Trump has good reason to denounce China’s tolerance of intellectual-property theft and various other trade abuses, as even his harshest critics will acknowledge. And there are tentative signs that U.S. negotiators are securing concessions from Beijing on market access for U.S. firms and the protection of their intellectual property. But a face-saving deal along these lines won’t really change China’s behavior. To do that, Trump ought to play against type by championing the interests of ordinary Chinese workers. That would pressure the Chinese party-state right where it is most vulnerable—and drive home the point that our quarrel is not with the Chinese people, but with the Chinese party-state.
Having witnessed the Arab Spring, and the speed with which the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor sparked a massive wave of protests, the Chinese Communist Party’s elite chose to strengthen its strict censorship regime and to elevate Xi Jinping, who had long argued that the party-state could reap the benefits of a growing digital economy while tightening the grip of its digital police state, to the role of paramount leader.
The keystone of these efforts is China’s Great Firewall. It is, from one vantage point, an extraordinary triumph. At the very same time Chinese entrepreneurs have come to dominate global e-commerce and mobile payments, and as the number of billion-dollar tech start-ups in China approaches the number in the United States, the Chinese party-state has managed to stringently limit the discussion of politically sensitive ideas and events in digital media. In doing so, it has limited the spread of terrorist attacks and peaceful political dissent, both of which have a viral quality.
But now, as China experiences a growth slowdown—one that is already causing serious ructions among middle-class investors, many of whom have been devastated by the collapse of its lightly regulated peer-to-peer lending platforms, and low-skilled migrant workers, who’ve been hit by the offshoring of low-wage manufacturing employment to lower-cost locales elsewhere in Asia—the Firewall, and the party-state it shields from criticism, face a test.
China’s social-media censors must anticipate which stories might fuel opposition, which could come from workers organizing wildcat strikes, the Marxist Maoists of the campus left, or the increasingly vocal nationalist right. Or perhaps it could come from salaried professionals in big cities bristling at the prospect of finally having to pay income taxes. Sooner or later, even the most sophisticated censorship regime will buckle. The only question is when. And that is why American policy makers ought to adopt a new approach to China.
Consider that the party-state has been particularly keen to police conversations about Donald Trump’s trade war and its own agonized response. For the most part, this has been reported as a reflection of Beijing’s desire to preserve its room for maneuver. If public anger over U.S. tariffs were to boil over, it would become much harder for the party-state to offer concessions to the Americans.
There is another possibility, however, which is that at least some Chinese citizens are cheering on Trump’s hard-line approach, as the pro-democracy activist Chen Guangcheng recently suggested in The Washington Post: “It might seem counterintuitive to many Americans that people in China would call for more tariffs, as though welcoming economic damage at home. But most ordinary Chinese people don’t see it that way. They commonly believe tariffs will hurt the Communist Party far more than regular people, since it’s the party that manipulates trade to line its pockets and prop up the economy.”
Yet it is striking that Trump has done virtually nothing to encourage this line of thinking, despite the fact that doing so would surely redound to his, and more importantly, the world’s, benefit. To Trump, all that seems to matter is narrowing the bilateral trade deficit between the U.S. and China. In this regard, he is sure to be disappointed. Even if the bilateral trade deficit between the two countries were to shrink, overall trade balances are driven by how people in different countries choose to save and spend.
One of the central facts about the Chinese economy, as Matthew C. Klein of Barron’s has observed, is that Chinese workers receive only a small fraction of what they produce, thanks to a tax system that leaves the urban rich untouched while soaking the poor, a rigged financial system, and labor-market rules that strip workers of bargaining power. The result, according to Klein, is that “China may be the workshop of the world, but the Chinese people cannot afford to buy what they produce. Instead, foreigners buy Chinese goods with money stolen from Chinese households by the Chinese government.”
Workers in the United States and other market democracies also bear the consequences, as artificially inexpensive Chinese imports “come at the price of lost jobs and rising debt.” The surest way to ease tensions between China and the United States over the long run is therefore to allow low- and middle-income Chinese workers to keep more of what they earn. Though this wouldn’t guarantee a lower bilateral trade deficit, boosting Chinese household consumption would almost certainly boost China’s consumption of imports, including U.S. imports. The interests of Chinese workers and U.S. workers aren’t at odds. They are perfectly aligned. It is the Chinese party-state that profits from the suppression of household consumption, and that channels vast resources to party members and politically connected industrialists, not the Chinese people.
That is the vulnerability that Trump can now exploit. Imagine if the president gave one major public address to that effect, ideally on Chinese soil. And if this all sounds too out of character for a man who has shown little appetite for such moralistic crusading, substitute one of the many Democrats looking to make a mark in the race for the party’s presidential nomination. The social-media censors would find themselves awfully busy.
For two years, they formed a community of experts, about 1,000 in all, including 300 leading climate scientists inside and outside 13 federal agencies. For two years, they volunteered their time and expertise to produce the Fourth National Climate Assessment.
There is no parallel process to tackle the questions I study; there is no ongoing national racial assessment mandated by a law summarizing the impact of racism on the United States, now and in the future. Still, I can relate to these climate scientists.
From U.S. national assessments to the global assessments of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate scientists have been pumping out warnings for decades. Each warning about what will happen if there is not “substantial and sustained reductions in global greenhouse-gas emissions” has been more dreadful than the last. I can relate to their continuous stand on scientific certainty, their continuous travel toward scientific discovery, and their quest to cultivate and defend humanity from humanity. “I’m for humans,” the climate scientist Andrea Dutton recently tweeted.
The first volume of their Fourth National Climate Assessment, released last year, concluded that there is “no convincing alternative explanation” for global warming other than “human activities, especially emissions of greenhouses gases.” This year’s second volume, released into the mad dash of Black Friday sales and family reunions, stated, “More frequent and intense extreme weather and climate-related events, as well as changes in average climate conditions, are expected to continue to damage infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems that provide essential benefits to communities.”
“I don’t believe it,” President Donald Trump said in response. “No. No. I don’t believe it.”
I have heard this before. I can relate.
“No. No. I’m not racist,” Trump has said repeatedly. Evidence be damned.
I feel how climate scientists probably feel when they hear Trump and others disbelieve what their scientific community says is beyond disbelief. Scholars of racism watch as individuals dismiss our scientific consensus as casually as they form a consensus of disbelief. Climate and racial scientists watch as the denials of climate change and racism combine for the denial that “marginalized” communities of color “are expected to experience greater impacts,” as foretold in the Fourth National Climate Assessment.
The disbelievers do not believe that either climate change or racism is real. Or they do not believe they are caused by emissions of greenhouse gases or racist policies. Or they do not believe that regulating them would be better for society.
All this disbelief rests on the same foundation: the transformation of science into belief. It is a foundation built from the economic, political, and ideological blocks that stand the most to lose from the aggressive reduction of carbon-dioxide emissions and racial inequities.
These defensive voices engage in the same oratorical process, attack the credibility of scientists, disregarding their consensus and reducing their findings to personal beliefs.
The effect: Science becomes belief. Belief becomes science. Everything becomes nothing. Nothing becomes everything. All can believe and disbelieve all. We all can know everything and know nothing. Everyone lives as an expert on every subject. No experts live on any subject. Years of intense and specialized training and research and reflection are abandoned, like poor Latino immigrants, like the poor body of our planet.
Instead of trained racial researchers, individuals decide whether they are racist, whether their ideas are racist, whether their policies are racist, whether their institutions are racist. Instead of trained climate researchers, individuals decide whether that worst-ever natural disaster, whether that record temperature, whether that rising sea level is caused by climate change. The great confrontations of our time are not between scientists, but between individual beliefs and scientific knowledge.
How many Americans, as they strive to be balanced and objective and bipartisan, to bring people together, think they can subscribe to both individual disbelief and scientific knowledge? How many Americans believe there are very fine ideas on both sides of these questions? How many Americans ask, “Do you think racism is still a problem?” or “Do you believe the globe is warming?” as if society should value ignorance in the face of scientific certainty.
I am relatively ignorant about climate science, and about every subject matter outside my own expertise of racism and anti-racism. The ridiculousness of climate-change denial is matched by the ridiculous of asking people like me whether we believe in climate change. The ridiculousness of denials of racism is matched by the ridiculousness of asking whether people believe in the persistence of racism.
And in their ridiculous answers to ridiculous questions, denialists evince more than disbelief. They explain their disbelief using examples in their direct line of sight. They do not trust the far-flung hindsight, foresight, and bird’s-eye view of the scientist. They do not believe the distant averages, likelihoods, disparities, and sweeping histories that show the ravages of racism and climate change on society. If it is not happening within their narrow field of vision, then it is not happening. They disbelieve. They call “believing” scientific findings stupid. They call their disbelief high intelligence.
“A lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers,” Trump said of climate change. “You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean.”
In disbelieving the present observable realities, they certainly disbelieve future projections. If they disregard the fact that white-nationalist violence has worsened and U.S. law enforcement does not know how to stop it, will they believe that it will get even worse? If they ignore the enormous racial disparities in wealth, will they accept the projection of the Institute for Policy Studies that the median wealth of black households will redline at $0 by 2053 and that Latino wealth will redline two decades later? If they cannot see the changing climate today, will they buy the assessment of the Fourth National Climate Assessment that “with continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century—more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states”?
Instead of science, they hunt for signs.
“Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS—Whatever happened to Global Warming?” Trump tweeted weeks ago.
“US dominates Olympics,” tweeted Bill O’Reilly after the 2016 Rio Olympics. “How can this be if we are a terrible country that persecutes minorities? Press is deceiving world about the US.”
“Who could not be moved at the sight of a major political party naming Barack Obama, an African American, as its presidential candidate?” Dinesh D’Souza asked weeks before Obama’s election. “To me, there could not be a better sign that America has left behind its racist past.”
Signs reign in the realm of belief. Belief reigns in the realm of what we cannot or do not know. Let me say it differently. I know because of science. When I do not know, I believe or disbelieve. As such, the end game of the transformation of science to belief is the execution of knowing. And the end of knowing is the end of human advancement.
Do not get me wrong. We should not follow all scientific pronouncements blindly. I am not saying every scientist and scientific consensus is indisputable. For decades before the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, the scientific consensus of polygenesis found that the races were separate species with separate origins. At the turn of the 20th century, the scientific consensus of social Darwinism found the white race had been naturally selected for the highest evolution. After World War II, the scientific consensus of black cultural pathology urged African Americans to assimilate into white America.
But scientific anti-racists on the margins did not respond to mainstream scientific racists by saying they didn’t believe their findings, by spinning out easily disprovable alternative facts, by walking away.
It is one thing to disbelieve scientific findings. It is yet another thing to dispute scientific findings. We dispute on the basis of training and expertise; by conducting and finding and presenting evidence; and by challenging assumptions, flawed study designs, and analyses of findings. Unlike disbelieving, disputing produces an intellectual exchange among open-minded scientists. Only the disbelievers, some of whom pose as scientists, are closed-minded and unwilling to change their mind in response to new evidence.
In order to reinforce the scientific certainty that human action and inaction are disastrously warming the globe and racist action and inaction are disastrously causing racial inequities, environmentalists and anti-racists must separate belief from science. Instead of caring about belief, environmentalists and anti-racists should care about knowledge, especially our own. Instead of asking, “Are you a racist?” we should be asking, “What is a racist?” Instead of asking, “Do you believe in climate change?” we should be asking, “What does climate change look like?”
To disconnect science from belief, environmentalists and anti-racists must disconnect the disbelievers from the power to make racial and climate policy. When disbelievers take power, they will always believe in the business of reproducing disbelief. Environmentalists and anti-racists must be in the business of reproducing humanity.
By some estimates, there are more than 100 “uncontacted tribes” in Brazil, mostly in the western reaches of the Amazon rainforest. These are indigenous peoples who live beyond the direct control, and sometimes knowledge, of the Brazilian state. Their groups vary in size but are, in many cases, quite small. Researchers from FUNAI—the Brazilian government agency that upholds indigenous rights—released footage in July of a single man who continues to live on his 8,000 hectare territory by himself. Dubbed “the Man of the Hole” for his practice of digging deep pits, he is the sole survivor of a tiny tribe attacked by ranchers in the 1990s. Little is known about the man himself: not his name, or the name of his vanished people, or the language he speaks. He avoids contact with outsiders, insisting on leading his solitary life in the forest in which he plants vegetables, forages, hunts, and manages to survive.
That he can live in this way is a measure both of his fortitude and of the effect of Brazilian laws that protect his territory from economic development. Approximately 13 percent of Brazil’s land area is reserved for indigenous peoples, including huge swaths of the Amazon rainforest. Without those regulations, farmers, ranchers, loggers, and miners would gobble up the land. FUNAI sent a team to film the Man of the Hole not out of curiosity, but out of necessity; the agency needed proof that he was alive and healthy to renew the protections around his territory.
The documentary Piripkura, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, follows a similar FUNAI mission, in search of the Piripkura people, a tribe that consists of only two men, Pakyî and Tamandua. The uncle and nephew maintain a nomadic existence in the rainforest of the western state of Mato Grosso, hemmed in by ranches and farms. They boast “ninja” survival skills, according to the expedition leader, Jair Candor.
Media coverage of uncontacted tribes often delights in painting indigenous groups as people out of time, hunter-gatherers in the age of Seamless. In November, an American missionary was killed trying to reach North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal, home to a remote tribe thought to number about 100 people. Grainy images shot from a helicopter in 2004 of naked islanders brandishing spears flooded the internet. But when they first appear in Piripkura, Pakyî and Tamandua offer a different kind of spectacle. What is striking about them is not their timelessness, but rather their very modern resolve to persist against the odds, to be free from the outside world.
That independence is likely to come further under threat from the incoming far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has pledged not to reserve any more land for indigenous peoples. In previous years, Bolsonaro has said he would arm ranchers in their conflicts with native groups and has lamented that the Brazilian army was not as efficient as the American cavalry in exterminating indigenous tribes. When trying to put a more benign gloss on these statements, Bolsonaro has claimed that government protections unfairly exclude indigenous people from the benefits of 21st-century life. “The natives want doctors, dentists, television, internet,” he said recently. “We will give them the means to be like us.”
And yet many natives like Pakyî and Tamandua do not share that aspiration. They rarely live in oblivious remove from modern comforts; indeed, their lives have been shaped by the wider world around them. The Piripkura were slaughtered decades ago in an attack typical of the often-brutal frontier between indigenous peoples and an expanding, pioneer Brazilian society. That Pakyî and Tamandua chose a life in the forest is in keeping with a long history of indigenous peoples resisting forced incorporation into states. Researchers believe, for instance, that the nomadic Awá people were once settled agriculturalists but changed their ways to survive incursions. Many uncontacted tribes in the Amazon sought refuge deeper in the rainforest after the rubber boom of the 1870s. What seem like unchanged, primordial modes of being are actually lifestyles produced by shifting circumstance.
One virtue of the film’s somewhat rough style (which marries tremendous moral complexity to the cinematographic sophistication of The Blair Witch Project) is the transparency with which it sees the two men. After failing to find them, the FUNAI workers have a huge stroke of luck. The Piripkura come to them. Pakyî and Tamandua emerge from the forest only because they must, after the palm-bark torch they had kept burning for 18 years went out. They are short, wiry, and unclothed, moving in front of the cameras and in the presence of strangers with furtive half steps. Despite the solicitousness of the FUNAI workers, the two men keep a guarded distance. They lie together in a hammock, illuminated by the glow of the television news (broadcasting the latest from Brazil’s rolling impeachment and corruption scandals of 2016). They laugh as a friendly FUNAI worker dances to entertain them, and they patiently undergo the pokes and prods of a nurse.
Zeza Filmes / Courtesy of Cinema Libre StudioBut all the while they are itching to leave, a fact that Candor, the bearded, lugubrious expedition leader, repeats grudgingly. When Candor finally rekindles their torch in a cooking fire, they disappear back into the forest, waving goodbye with the only Portuguese word they seem to know: “Ciao!” “Let’s wait another 20 years for their fire to go out and see if they come back again,” Candor says.
In the middle of what is at times a slow, halting journey of a film, that astonishing sequence provides a moment of wonder. The rhetoric used to describe threatened indigenous peoples often directs attention to their culture, to their knowledge of the forest, to their lore and language—as if they can only have value to broader society as repositories of ancient wisdom and know-how. But the Piripkura now consist of two men who have lived alone in the forest since at least 1989, when Candor first met them. In the FUNAI camp, Pakyî and Tamandua huddle close together and you can’t help but imagine their intimacy, the loneliness of their existence and the enormity of their bond.
Candor explains that their names have not always been Pakyî and Tamandua, but have changed over the years. This molting of names is not elaborated on further, but it suggests a kind of wistful proliferation in the Piripkura world, the peopling of the forest with past selves. Tamandua, the nephew, has grown up entirely under the eaves of his uncle, not within a larger community. When together in the jungle, do they tell each other jokes? Do they talk about their dreams? Do they speak of worlds beyond their own? The full shape of their lives together cannot be known, but it certainly shouldn’t have to bear the weight of an immutable cultural inheritance.
Piripkura shows great humility in seeing indigenous people not as curious relics of some long-ago time, but simply as people who want to live freely, to live apart. Though viewers are taken on a search for the Piripkura, the film accepts that some chasms can’t be bridged. The two men are allowed to remain inscrutable, different, even unknowable. None of the FUNAI workers can speak their language. In one extended shot, Candor and a colleague sit in silence next to Pakyî and Tamandua; these four men from different worlds can say little to one another, and simply scratch at the mosquitos that bite them indiscriminately.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fala com ativistas do movimento Sunrise Movement que protestam nos escritórios da líder da minoria da Câmara, Nancy Pelosi, em Washington D.C., em 13 de novembro.
Foto: Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times via Redux
Como muitos outros, fiquei empolgada com a ousada liderança moral vinda de membros recém-eleitos do Congresso como Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib e Ayanna Pressley diante da crise climática em espiral e dos chocantes ataques a migrantes desarmados na fronteira. Isso me fez pensar na diferença crucial entre uma liderança que atua e uma liderança que fala sobre atuação.
Vou chegar ao New Deal Verde e por que precisamos nos agarrar a essa corda salva-vidas com todas as forças. Mas, antes disso, me acompanhe em uma visita à grandiosa política climática do passado.
Era março de 2009, e as capas dos heróis ainda estavam esvoaçando em clima de comemoração na Casa Branca depois da histórica vitória eleitoral de Barack Obama. Todd Stern, o recém-nomeado emissário do clima, contou a um grupo no Capitólio que ele e seus colegas negociadores precisavam abraçar seus super-heróis internos, salvando o planeta do perigo existencial em cima da hora.
A mudança climática, disse ele, pedia por “aquela velha sensibilidade das histórias em quadrinhos de se unir diante de um perigo comum ameaçando a Terra. Porque é isso que temos aqui. Não é um meteoro ou um invasor espacial, mas os danos ao nosso planeta, à nossa comunidade, aos nossos filhos e aos filhos deles serão igualmente grandes. Não temos a perder.”
Oito meses depois, na decisiva cúpula climática das Nações Unidas em Copenhague, na Dinamarca, toda a pretensão de super-heroísmo do governo Obama havia sido abandonada sem cerimônia. Stern percorreu os corredores do centro de convenções como a Morte, passando a foice em todas as propostas que resultariam em um acordo transformador. Os EUA insistiram em uma meta que permitiria o aumento da temperatura em 2 graus Celsius, apesar das objeções de muitos delegados africanos e ilhéus do Pacífico que diziam que essa meta equivalia a um “genocídio” e levaria milhões a morrerem em terra ou em barcos afundando. Foram derrubadas todas as tentativas de tornar o acordo juridicamente vinculativo, optando por metas voluntárias inexequíveis (como faria em Paris cinco anos depois).
Stern rejeitou categoricamente o argumento de que os países ricos e desenvolvidos devem compensar os pobres por conscientemente bombear o carbono que está aquecendo a Terra para a atmosfera, usando, em vez disso, fundos tão necessários para a proteção da mudança climática para forçar esses países a se alinharem.
Como escrevi na época, o acordo de Copenhague – preparado a portas fechadas com os países mais vulneráveis deixados de fora – equivalia a um “pacto sujo entre os maiores emissores do mundo: eu finjo que vocês estão fazendo alguma coisa em relação à mudança climática se vocês também fingirem que eu estou. Combinado? Combinado.”
O enviado principal do clima dos EUA, Todd Stern, fala durante uma entrevista coletiva na Cúpula do Clima da ONU em Copenhague, em 9 de dezembro de 2009.
Foto: Claus Bjoern Larsen/POLFOTO via AP
Quase exatamente nove anos depois, as emissões globais continuam a subir, junto com as temperaturas médias, com grandes áreas do planeta atingidas por tempestades recordes e causticadas por incêndios sem precedentes. Os cientistas reunidos no Painel Intergovernamental sobre Mudança Climática confirmaram exatamente o que os estados africanos e insulares de baixa altitude alertam há muito tempo: que permitir que as temperaturas subam 2 graus é uma sentença de morte, e que apenas uma meta de 1,5 grau nos dá uma chance de lutar. De fato, pelo menos oito ilhas do Pacífico já desapareceram sob os mares em elevação.
Os países ricos não apenas deixaram de lado a tecnologia limpa e negaram ajuda significativa às nações mais pobres para que se protegessem dos extremos climáticos. Na verdade, a Europa, a Austrália e os Estados Unidos reagiram ao aumento da migração em massa – se não causada diretamente, intensificada por estresses climáticos – com força brutal, variando da política “deixe-os afogar” da Itália à guerra cada vez mais real de Trump contra uma caravana desarmada da América Central. Que ninguém se engane: essa barbárie é a maneira como o mundo rico planeja se adaptar à mudança climática.
Hoje em dia, a única coisa que se parece com uma capa de super-herói na Casa Branca são todos aqueles casacos que Melania joga sobre os ombros, misteriosamente recusando-se a usar os orifícios das mangas para o seu propósito planejado. Enquanto isso, o marido dela está ocupado em abraçar seu papel de supervilão climático, aprovando alegremente novos projetos de combustíveis fósseis, estraçalhando o acordo de Paris (afinal, não é legalmente obrigatório, então, por que não?), e pronunciando que uma onda de frio no Dia de Ação de Graças é uma prova positiva de que o planeta não está aquecendo, afinal.
Em suma, o meteoro metafórico que Stern evocou em 2009 não está apenas se aproximando de nosso frágil planeta, ele está passando raspando pelas copas das árvores.
E, no entanto, aqui está o que é realmente estranho: eu me sinto hoje mais otimista em relação às nossas chances coletivas de evitar o colapso climático do que anos atrás. Pela primeira vez, vejo um caminho político claro e crível que poderia nos levar à segurança, a um lugar no qual os piores resultados climáticos são evitados e um novo pacto social é forjado, o que é radicalmente mais humano do que qualquer coisa atualmente em oferta.
Ainda não estamos nesse caminho – muito longe disso. Mas, ao contrário de um mês atrás, o caminho é claro. Começa com o impulso galopante conclamando o Partido Democrata a usar sua maioria na Câmara para criar uma comissão para um New Deal Verde, um plano promovido por Ocasio-Cortez e agora apoiado por mais de 14 deputados.
O texto preliminar pede que a comissão, que seria totalmente financiada e autorizada a elaborar a legislação, passe o próximo ano consultando uma série de especialistas – de cientistas a legisladores locais, passando por sindicatos trabalhistas e líderes empresariais – para mapear um “detalhado plano nacional de mobilização industrial e econômica” capaz de tornar a economia dos EUA “neutra em carbono”, ao mesmo tempo em que promove “justiça econômica e ambiental e igualdade”. Até janeiro de 2020, esse plano seria lançado e, dois meses depois, viria um projeto de lei para transformá-lo em realidade.
Esse prazo inicial de 2020 é importante – significa que os contornos do New Deal Verde estarão concluídos até o próximo ciclo eleitoral dos EUA, e qualquer político que queira ser levado a sério como progressista precisará adotá-lo como peça central de sua plataforma. Se isso acontecer, e o partido no comando do New Deal Verde retomar a Casa Branca e o Senado em novembro de 2020, haveria de fato tempo sobrando no relógio climático para cumprir as duras metas estabelecidas no recente relatório do IPCC, que nos disse que temos apenas 12 anos para reduzir as emissões de combustíveis fósseis em 45%.
Isso, afirma o resumo do relatório em sua primeira frase, não é possível apenas com políticas como impostos sobre a emissão de carbono. Em vez disso, são necessárias “mudanças rápidas, de longo alcance e sem precedentes em todos os aspectos da sociedade”. Ao dar à comissão um mandato que conecta energia, transporte, moradia e construção, bem como assistência médica, salários dignos, garantia de empregos e o imperativo urgente de combater a injustiça racial e de gênero, o plano New Deal Verde estaria mapeando precisamente esse tipo de mudança de longo alcance. Não se trata de uma abordagem fragmentada que aponta uma pistola de água contra um fogo ardente, mas um plano abrangente e holístico para efetivamente apagar o fogo.
Se a maior economia do mundo parecer preparada para demonstrar esse tipo de liderança visionária, outros grandes emissores – como a União Europeia, a China e a Índia – quase que certamente se veriam sob intensa pressão de suas próprias populações para fazerem o mesmo.
AGORA, NADA A RESPEITO do caminho que acabei de descrever é certo ou mesmo provável: A base do Partido Democrata sob Nancy Pelosi provavelmente esmagará a proposta do New Deal Verde, assim como o partido arrasou com as esperanças de acordos climáticos mais ambiciosos sob Obama. Os investidores apostariam no partido fazer pouco mais do que ressuscitar o comitê climático que ajudou a produzir a legislação sobre limitação e comércio no primeiro mandato de Obama, um esquema de mercado mal sucedido e confuso que teria tratado os gases de efeito estufa como abstrações de capitalismo tardio a ser negociado, empacotado e especulado como moeda ou dívida subprime (o motivo pelo qual Ocasio-Cortez está insistindo que os legisladores que aceitam dinheiro de combustível fóssil não devem estar na comissão seleta do New Deal Verde).
E, claro, mesmo que a pressão sobre os legisladores continue aumentando e que os membros da comissão saiam vitoriosos, não há garantia de que o partido reconquistará o Senado e a Casa Branca em 2020.
E, no entanto, apesar de todas essas ressalvas, agora temos algo que estava faltando: um plano concreto sobre a mesa, completo com um cronograma baseado na ciência, que não apenas é proveniente de movimentos sociais de fora do governo, mas que também tem um considerável (e crescente) bloco de defensores comprometidos dentro da Câmara.
Daqui a décadas, se tivermos a sorte de contar uma história emocionante sobre como a humanidade se uniu no momento certo para interceptar o meteoro metafórico, o capítulo central não será o momento cinematográfico altamente produzido de quando Barack Obama ganhou a primária e democrata e disse a uma multidão de adeptos que aquele seria “o momento em que a ascensão dos oceanos começou a desacelerar, e nosso planeta começou a se curar”. Não, será o momento muito menos roteirizado e marcadamente mais sem graça em que um grupo de jovens cansados Sunrise Movement ocupou os escritórios de Pelosi após as eleições de meio de mandato, pedindo que ela apoiasse o plano para um New Deal Verde – com Ocasio-Cortez passando pela ocupação para animá-los.
Ativistas do Sunrise Movement do lado de fora do escritório de Nancy Pelosi em Washington D.C., em 13 de novembro.
Foto: Briahna Gray/The Intercept
Sei que pode parecer excessivamente otimista investir tanto em uma comissão parlamentar, mas não é a comissão em si a minha principal fonte de esperança. É a vasta infra-estrutura de especialização científica, técnica, política e de movimento pronta para entrar em ação, se dermos os primeiros passos nesse caminho. É uma rede de grupos e indivíduos extraordinários que se mantiveram atentos ao foco e aos compromissos climáticos, mesmo quando nenhuma mídia queria cobrir a crise e nenhum grande partido político queria fazer algo além de fingir preocupação.
É uma rede que vem esperando há muito tempo por finalmente haver uma massa crítica de políticos no poder que entendesse não apenas a urgência existencial da crise climática, mas também a oportunidade única no século que representa, como afirma o projeto de resolução: “eliminar virtualmente a pobreza nos Estados Unidos e tornar a prosperidade, a riqueza e a segurança econômica disponíveis para todos os que participam da transformação”.
O terreno para este momento vem sendo preparado há décadas, com modelos de energia renovável de propriedade da comunidade e controlada pela comunidade; com transições baseadas na justiça que garantem que nenhum trabalhador seja deixado para trás; com uma análise aprofundada das interseções entre racismo sistêmico, conflito armado e perturbações climáticas; com tecnologia verde aprimorada e avanços em transporte público limpo; com o próspero movimento de desinvestimento em combustíveis fósseis; com a legislação modelo impulsionada pelo movimento de justiça climática que mostra como os impostos sobre carbono podem combater a exclusão racial e de gênero e muito mais.
O que está faltando é apenas o poder político de alto nível lançar o melhor desses modelos de uma só vez, com o foco e a velocidade que tanto a ciência quanto a justiça exigem. Essa é a grande promessa de um New Deal Verde abrangente na maior economia do planeta. E ao aumentar a pressão sobre os legisladores que ainda não assinaram o plano, o Sunrise Movement todo o nosso apoio.
É claro que não faltam especialistas em Beltway prontos para rejeitar tudo isso como algo irremediavelmente ingênuo e inviável, o trabalho de neófitos políticos que não entendem a arte do possível ou dos pontos mais sutis da política. O que esses especialistas estão deixando de levar em consideração é o fato de que, ao contrário das tentativas anteriores de introduzir a legislação climática, o New Deal Verde tem a capacidade de mobilizar um movimento de massa verdadeiramente intersecional – não apesar de sua ambição radical, mas precisamente por disso.
Essa é a mudança radical de ter no Congresso representantes enraizados em lutas da classe trabalhadora por empregos com salários dignos e por ar e água não tóxicos – mulheres como Tlaib, que ajudou a lutar uma batalha bem-sucedida contra a tóxica montanha de coque de petróleo da Koch Industries em Detroit.
Quando se faz parte da classe vencedora da economia e é financiado por vencedores ainda maiores, como muitos políticos são, suas tentativas de criar uma legislação sobre o clima provavelmente serão guiadas pela ideia de que a mudança deve ser mínima e o menos desafiadoras possível ao status quo. Afinal, o status quo está funcionando bem para você e seus doadores. Líderes com raízes em comunidades que estão sendo notoriamente reprovados pelo sistema atual, por outro lado, estão liberados para adotar uma abordagem muito diferente. Suas políticas climáticas podem abranger mudanças profundas e sistêmicas – incluindo a necessidade de investimentos massivos em transporte público, moradia acessível e assistência médica –, porque é justamente desse tipo de mudança que suas bases precisam para prosperar.
Como as organizações de justiça climática vêm discutindo há muitos anos, quando as pessoas com mais a ganhar lideram o movimento, elas lutam para vencer.
Outro aspecto revolucionário de um New Deal Verde é que ele é baseado no mais famoso estímulo econômico de todos os tempos, o que o torna à prova de recessão. Quando a economia global entrar em outra recessão, o que certamente irá acontecer, o apoio a esse modelo de ação climática não cairá, como ocorreu com todas as outras grandes iniciativas verdes durante recessões passadas. Em vez disso, o apoio aumentará, uma vez que um estímulo em larga escala se tornará a maior esperança de reviver a economia.
Ter uma boa ideia não é garantia de sucesso, é claro. Mas, pense comigo: se a pressão por uma comissão em tordo de um New Deal Verde for derrotada, os legisladores que quiserem que isso aconteça podem considerar trabalhar com a sociedade civil para estabelecer algum tipo de corpo semelhante a uma assembleia constituinte para elaborar o plano de qualquer maneira, a tempo dele roubar a cena em 2020. Porque essa possibilidade é simplesmente muito importante, e o tempo, curto demais, para permitir que ela seja fechada pelas forças habituais da inércia política.
Conforme os eventos surpreendentes das últimas semanas se desenrolaram, com jovens ativistas reescrevendo as regras do possível dia após dia, eu me vi pensando em outro momento no qual os jovens encontraram sua voz na arena da mudança climática. Foi em 2011, na cúpula anual do clima das Nações Unidas, dessa vez realizada em Durban, na África do Sul. Uma estudante universitária canadense de 21 anos chamada Anjali Appadurai foi escolhida para falar aos presentes em nome (absurdamente) de todos os jovens do mundo.
Ela fez uma fala impressionante e implacável (a que vale a pena assistir na íntegra) que cobriu de vergonha os negociadores reunidos por décadas de inação. “Você vêm negociando a minha vida inteira”, disse ela. “Nesse período, deixaram de cumprir compromissos, não atingiram metas e quebraram promessas. … A maior traição da responsabilidade de geração de vocês em relação à nossa é que vocês chamam isso de “ambição”. Onde está a coragem nessas salas? Agora não é hora de ação incremental. No longo prazo, estes serão vistos como os momentos decisivos de uma era em que o interesse próprio estreito prevaleceu sobre a ciência, a razão e a compaixão comum.”
A parte mais dolorosa do discurso é que nem um único grande governo estava disposto a receber sua mensagem; ela estava gritando no vazio.
Sete anos depois, quando outros jovens estão localizando sua voz e sua raiva climáticas, finalmente há alguém para receber sua mensagem, com um plano real para transformá-la em política. E isso simplesmente pode mudar tudo.
Tradução: Cássia Zanon
The post A promessa de um New Deal ambientalista para mudar os EUA appeared first on The Intercept.
O poder precisa de inimigos. Não há, na história, governantes sem seus vilões, sejam eles reais ou imaginários. Jair Bolsonaro, que toma posse hoje, já escolheu um inimigo imaginário (o comunismo) e um real, a imprensa. Ele tem razões objetivas para atacar os jornalistas.
Bolsonaro e sua família estão no baixo-clero da política há 30 anos praticamente sem serem notados. Antes de mostrarem interesse real em vencer eleições majoritárias, os Bolsonaro só viravam notícia quando diziam frases absurdas ou quando desmaiavam em debates. Eram da turma dos Severinos Cavalcanti, a faixa de políticos que se situa entre o Tiririca e um vereador reacionário de uma cidade do interior do país. Serviam para a sociedade do espetáculo e seus programas humorísticos, ora para rirmos deles, ora para nos causar repulsa e ódio. A nota evidente é que agora esse personagem grotesco vai governar um país doente. Nós elegemos um meme.
A essa altura, vocês já sabem: Jair Bolsonaro bloqueou toda a redação do Intercept (inclusive nossa conta oficial) no Twitter – a rede social que, segundo ele, “qualquer informação além [de fora do Twitter] é mera especulação maldosa e sem credibilidade.” O que teme Bolsonaro?
Será que ele teria dificuldades em explicar seu plano econômico que só faz sentido para o mercado financeiro? Ou que sua candidatura agiu ativamente para censurar a liberdade de imprensa que ele diz defender enquanto fabricava boatos e tentava chupar dados de celulares para sua máquina de propaganda? Conseguiria ele defender o partido de seu vice, Mourão, que financiou a maior rede de fake news do Brasil, derrubada pelo Facebook? Ou a condenação do general Heleno? As tramóias do caricato Marcos Pontes?
Bolsonaro teme a imprensa porque foi ela que descobriu a Wal do Açaí, o Queiroz, o cofre milionário que sumiu de uma agência do Banco do Brasil. Foi ela que identificou os 15 milhões de reais em imóveis da Família B, com salários incompatíveis.
Bolsonaro odeia e tenta deslegitimá-la porque sabe que ela não vai desaparecer. “A imprensa acabou” é só um bordão ruim e velho repetido por todos os governantes desde que a imprensa existe. Os governantes sumiram, a imprensa segue por aqui.
A retórica atual é mais violenta, mas se assemelha muito a de outros governos, inclusive ao do PT. À época, jornalistas eram chamados de “Partido da Imprensa Golpista”. Hoje, são taxados de “Partidos da Extrema Imprensa”. As semelhanças entre os radicais bolsonaristas e os radicais petistas são maiores do que parecem. Orange is the new red.
Na esteira do escândalo Queiroz, seus fãs mais ardorosos perguntaram publicamente: “onde estava a imprensa nos últimos tempos?”, como se elas tivessem descoberto o mensalão lendo borra de café ou nuvens no céu. A Lava Jato – o grande cavalo de batalha da “luta contra a corrupção” que elegeu Bolsonaro – não sobreviveria seis meses sem a imprensa.
É evidente que há por aí mau jornalismo, aos montes. E que a confiança entre a população e o jornalismo se quebrou. Mas até nisso o bolsonarismo quer falsear a história: o acordo entre o público e a imprensa foi quebrado há muitos anos. Bolsonaro está surfando nessa onda e querendo tomar para ele a vitória de ter feito com que a população desacreditasse o que vê no noticiário. É mais uma de suas mil mentiras, porque obviamente não foram eles que fizeram isso. A imprensa já estava desgastada há muito tempo: apenas 10% dos jovens confiam muito nela. Eles precisam ser reconquistados.
Bolsonaro já escolheu seus assessores travestidos de jornalistas, entre grandes redes de TV e sites produtores de lixo disfarçado de informação. Alguns deles estão se orgulhando por terem sido convidados para a posse, como se estivéssemos de volta à Corte de Dom João. Vocês podem dar a isso o nome que quiserem.
Se Bolsonaro é inimigo da imprensa, a imprensa não é inimiga de Bolsonaro. A imprensa seguirá cumprindo seu papel e não vai tirar os olhos do novo governo. A Presidência da República é do povo, por mais que Jair Bolsonaro pense que seja dele e de sua turma.
ps. Estou muito feliz porque nós batemos (e já superamos!) a meta de nosso crowdfunding. E já decidimos o que vamos fazer com esse dinheiro: contratar um editor em Brasília e investir ainda mais em reportagens na capital federal, bancando viagens, buscando documentos, descobrindo novas fontes. Isso tudo custa muito caro, mas é um preço barato a se pagar para ajudar a proteger nossa frágil democracia. Por isso, nós queremos ir além. A campanha seguirá aberta de modo contínuo. Avise seus amigos, seja parte disso. O TIB precisa de vocês.
The post O Inimigo Número 1 de Bolsonaro (segundo ele próprio) appeared first on The Intercept.
The stock market has experienced its worst performance in December since the early 1930s. Despite brisk holiday shopping, the usual Santa Claus rally was canceled, in part thanks to a grinch named Steve Mnuchin.
The treasury secretary’s inexplicable maneuver on Christmas Eve eve, announcing that he convened meetings — by phone, from Cabo — with the six largest banks and was reassured that America faced no liquidity problems, when nobody was particularly concerned that we did, sent markets into a volatile tailspin. It was as if the contractor you hired to fix a sticky door told you that your roof was probably in no immediate danger of collapse; that wasn’t your preoccupation before, but it is now.
The stock market is not the economy, as long as jobs and paychecks continue to be strong. This was an unforced error that temporarily snagged the 10 percent of America that own 84 percent of all stocks. But Mnuchin’s boneheaded actions reflected his dominant characteristics. He is a sycophant willing to debase himself, no matter how strongly, at the altar of Donald Trump. The president has convinced himself that the Federal Reserve is ruining his economy (and, like a stopped clock, he’s not totally wrong), and Mnuchin’s pronouncement of financial stability made no sense outside of a vain need to show his boss that everything was actually fine — or, at least, that Mnuchin was doing things.
But the sycophancy in this case mashed up with Mnuchin’s other main trait: He’s a rather dim gentleman. Anyone who doesn’t recognize the implications of springing on the public an announcement that banks most certainly have ample liquidity isn’t operating with a shed full of all the tools needed to do this job. And, sadly for the country, this is part of a pattern.
This is a man who tried to block the University of California, Los Angeles from releasing video of an embarrassing public event where he was heckled by students over shepherding through tax cuts for the rich. Of course, this had the opposite effect, ensuring that the otherwise low-profile incident remained in the news cycle for weeks. After several news organizations filed public records requests, the university posted the video nearly three weeks later, saying that it had received Mnuchin’s consent. The massive, unforced error seems to have been caused only by the treasury secretary’s vanity.
Another low point came during the debate over the tax bill, when Mnuchin recited with religious conviction the claim that the $1.5 trillion overhaul would pay for itself through increased economic growth. Asked to provide any evidence of this, he repeatedly claimed that more than 100 employees were “working around the clock on running scenarios for us.”
Time and again, reporters and policymakers asked for this Treasury Department analysis of the deficit impact of tax reform. In late November, as a vote on the bill approached, an anonymous economist at the Office of Tax Policy confirmed what most of us expected by that point: There was no such analysis. The details of what was actually going on, gleaned by the New York Times’s Alan Rappeport, would almost be funny if they hadn’t heralded utter disaster:
Those inside Treasury’s Office of Tax Policy, which Mr. Mnuchin has credited with running the models, say they have been largely shut out of the process and are not working on the type of detailed analysis that he has mentioned.
An economist at the Office of Tax Analysis, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his job, said Treasury had not released a “dynamic” analysis showing that the tax plan would be paid for with economic growth because one did not exist.
Instead of conducting full analyses of tax proposals, staff members have been running numbers on individual provisions or policy ideas, like lowering the tax rate on so-called pass-through businesses and figuring out how many family farms would benefit from the repeal of the estate tax.
In fact, it’s already estimated that just 20 farms a year are subject to any inheritance tax at all — not exactly tough math. But even after it was exposed that Mnuchin’s corps of number-crunchers were basically just chilling and counting gold coins, he persisted with the fiction by releasing a one-page, 500-word document and passing it off as the thing we’d all been waiting for. The so-called analysis could have been simplified further by just writing, “Trust us.”
The document was “embarrassing to all of us,” an unnamed senior official told Politico.
Of course, it didn’t matter in the end: Republicans in Congress passed a tax bill and parroted Mnuchin’s shaky claim that the deficit impact would be nonexistent. But after collecting sharply lower tax revenues in 2018, the deficit — get this — went up. Worse things can certainly happen in this world, but Mnuchin’s hard-to-watch failure to “prove” that the tax cuts would pay for themselves slamming into reality further indicates the lack of gravitas behind the Coke-bottle glasses and Bond-villain smile.
It’s worth noting who actually did the intellectual heavy lifting on tax reform. In the weeks before the administration released its tax outline in April 2017, Mnuchin met with Apple CEO Tim Cook and the executives of a host of other tax-dodging corporations that are getting deep tax cuts and a reprieve in the form of a one-time, 15.5 percent tax on profits stashed overseas. The next month, when the Treasury released its recommendations for further tax regulatory changes, they were almost entirely copied from a U.S. Chamber of Commerce memo on the same subject. And when it came to figuring out withholdings under the new tax bill, Mnuchin announced that the IRS would set up an online calculator for workers to check that the right amount of money was being withheld from their paycheck, shifting responsibility from the government to taxpayers.
Even Mnuchin’s fellow political travelers frequently underscore that he is not the sharpest knife in the Cabinet. For example, in a March FOX News interview he urged Congress to give Trump the power to veto line items on future spending bills. The Supreme Court has previously ruled this unconstitutional, forcing the host to explain sheepishly to Mnuchin that Congress cannot just ignore the court’s ruling, because that’s not how the whole “checks and balances” thing that we learn about in eighth grade works. A Yahoo Business profile claims that Mnuchin’s former Goldman Sachs colleagues consider him “if not especially book smart, then street-savvy,” but let’s be honest: It’s exceptionally difficult to imagine him being either.
Luckily for Mnuchin, intelligence is no obstacle when you have massive, unearned privilege on your side. Mnuchin got his start out of college at Goldman Sachs. His father, Robert Mnuchin, was a legendary Goldman Sachs partner who headed up the firm’s trading division in the 1970s. His brother, Alan Mnuchin, was also a 12-year Goldman veteran, arriving at the firm a few years ahead of the younger Steven. Even going back another generation doesn’t do much to dial up the rags-to-riches factor: Mnuchin’s grandpa was an attorney who co-founded a yacht club in the Hamptons, New York.
While Mnuchin rose steadily through the ranks at Goldman, some of his colleagues suspected that this had little to do with his own merits. His promotion to partner in 1996 came at the expense of Kevin Ingram, a black trader from a working-class background who had gotten an engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before landing at Goldman. Ingram “was livid,” a former colleague tells author William D. Cohan in his 2011 book “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World.” “He was much smarter than Steven, had accomplished a lot more, but his dad wasn’t Robert Mnuchin.”
Perhaps the peak Mnuchin moment to dominate the news cycle thus far involved a familiar activity for the uberrich Trump cabinet: using their lofty positions to feed at the public trough.
In August 2017, the secretary’s actress wife, Louise Linton, posted an Instagram photo of the couple deplaning from a government jet. The caption doubled as an advertisement for the designers she was wearing: “Great #daytrip to #Kentucky! #nicest #people #beautiful #countryside #rolandmouret pants #tomford sunnies, #hermesscarf #valentinorockstudheels #valentino #usa.”
The tacky factor jumped when Linton berated an Instagram user who criticized her in the comments. And the incident turned into a full-fledged scandal when it turned out that Mnuchin may have chartered a government plane simply to take his wife to see the solar eclipse. (It would end up being one of a series of allegations of Mnuchin’s taxpayer-funded jet-setting: He reportedly requested a $25,000-per-hour military escort for his honeymoon, and cost the government nearly $1 million on plane travel in 2017 alone.)
The treasury secretary responded to the eclipse dust-up in characteristically dickish fashion. “People in Kentucky took this stuff very seriously,” Mnuchin told the Washington Post. “Being a New Yorker, I don’t have any interest in watching the eclipse.”
A recently obtained photo of Mnuchin and Linton gazing up at the heavens says otherwise. ThinkProgress, which got it hands on this smoking gun through a public records request, learned that the U.S. Mint had even procured their eclipse glasses for them.
A request for comment from the Treasury Department on whether or not Steve Mnuchin is a dunce was not returned.
Correction: January 1, 2019
This article originally made reference to “the 16 percent of America that actually own stocks,” but it is more accurate to say that 10 percent of Americans own 84 percent of all stocks.
This has been an adapted excerpt from the new book “Fat Cat: The Steve Mnuchin Story” by Rebecca Burns and David Dayen, available for purchase from IndieBound.
The post Steve Mnuchin Is a Dunce appeared first on The Intercept.
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