Sunday Long Read: The Flames Of Bhalswa

As record high temperatures blaze through the US and Europe, the Indian subcontinent is also burning, and the over one billion there have even fewer methods to deal with literally unbearable heat, as the New Yorker's Dhruv Khullar notes in this week's Sunday Long Read.

 

The Bhalswa landfill, on the outskirts of Delhi, is an apocalyptic place. A gray mountain of dense, decaying trash rises seventeen stories, stretching over some fifty acres. Broken glass and plastic containers stand in for grass and stones, and plastic bags dangle from spindly trees that grow in the filth. Fifteen miles from the seat of the Indian government, cows rummage for fruit peels and pigs wallow in stagnant water. Thousands of people who live in slums near the mountain’s base work as waste pickers, collecting, sorting, and selling the garbage created by around half of Delhi’s residents.

This March was the hottest on record in India. The same was true for April. On the afternoon of April 26th, Bhalswa caught fire. Dark, toxic fumes spewed into the air, and people living nearby struggled to breathe. By the time firefighters arrived, flames had engulfed much of the landfill. In the past, similar fires had been extinguished within hours or days, but Bhalswa burned for weeks. “The weather poses a big challenge for us,” Atul Garg, the chief of the Delhi Fire Service, said, nine days after the fire began. “Firefighters find it difficult to wear masks and protective gear because of the heat.” A nearby school, blanketed by hazardous smoke, was forced to close. In the end, it took two weeks to extinguish the blaze. The charred bodies of cows and dogs were found in the debris.

I have family in Delhi, and have visited regularly over the decades. Each year has always felt hotter than the last. But this spring’s heat wave, which continued into the summer, has been unprecedented in its severity, duration, and geographic expanse. Across much of northern India, where more than a billion people live, temperatures have regularly soared past a hundred and ten degrees, and slightly lower temperatures have often combined with very high humidity—a dangerous combination. “The heat is rising rapidly and much earlier than usual,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, in April. “Fire has broken out in many forests, historical monuments, and hospitals.” Indians who work outside—about half the population—have sometimes had to stop in the afternoons, relinquishing their wages; schools and businesses have had to adjust their hours or shut entirely; and farmers have seen their crop yields drop by a third or more. On a particularly hot day in May, the high in Delhi hit a hundred and twenty-one, and overheated birds fell from the sky.

According to the official count, the heat wave has killed around a hundred people. But the true toll is certainly higher: in the summer of 2003, a less severe event killed seventy thousand across Europe. Only eight per cent of Indians have air-conditioning, and many lack reliable electricity, a situation that limits their use of fans and other cooling devices. In 2010, during a heat wave in Ahmedabad, the financial center of the state of Gujarat, officials counted seventy-six heatstroke deaths during the hottest week—but a later analysis of death certificates revealed that there had been at least eight hundred more deaths than usual during that time, some two hundred of them on a single day. Research has shown that, each day the temperature rises above ninety-five degrees in India, the annual mortality rate increases by three-quarters of a per cent. (In the United States, the rate increases by only .03 per cent.)

The dusty road leading to Bhalswa is lined with ramshackle shops and gutters full of stagnant water. When I visited, in May, some sections of the landfill were still releasing angry coils of smoke. In the car, I consulted my phone, which told me that it was a hundred and three degrees outside, with thirty-two-per-cent humidity. Still, when I opened the door, I was stunned by the three-dimensionality of the heat. The sun fried my skin but also somehow roasted me from within. I felt as if I’d swallowed a space heater.

A dirt path wound between tents and shacks. Tattered sheets, hung from wires attached to wooden poles, provided only a little shade. Fat plastic bags full of trash for resale leaned against crumbling brick walls; alongside them were broken chairs, metal buckets, plastic bottles, cracked pots, torn trousers, errant shoes, and a dirty diaper. Two women cooked over an open fire while an elderly man pushed a wooden cart, a young child lugging a sack behind him.

In a small brick hut, a man sat cross-legged amid a thick knot of flies, braiding human hair that he’d collected from the landfill. Half a dozen women in brightly colored clothing, their heads covered in scarves, sat on the floor.

“It didn’t use to be this hot,” Saira, the woman in charge of the group, said. “Before, it felt like it was possible for humans to work the landfill.” Now, because of the heat, they tried to stay out of the sun. “If you see five hundred people working there right now, you’ll see at least two thousand people up there at night,” she said.

“We eat up there, sleep up there sometimes,” another worker added.

Hema, a thin woman in a purple sari, sat on the stairs. “When the sun hits, it feels like your body is on fire,” she said. “I drape a shirt over my head—that makes it feel even hotter. When we come back home, our heads feel like they will explode. We take water with us, but it’s boiling by the time we can drink it.”

The women described headaches, exhaustion, dizziness, rashes, fever. The stench of the landfill—an acrid mixture of excrement and rotting trash—was sickening, they said, but the heat made it hard to tolerate masks. Outside the hut, children kicked a ragged soccer ball. A scrawny dog panted on a mound of refuse. Flies swarmed a heap of dung.

“We are living,” Saira said. “But we are also dying.”

 

As the earth's population approaches the eight billion mark later this year, it's important to note that we're now deep into the triage phase of global warming. The time to do something about this was 30 years ago. It's too late now, all we can do is try to regulate the damage.

 

Failure to do that will lead to unconscionable, uncountable deaths for years to come.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine stalls out in its fourth week, the damage to world food markets and supplies from Putin's attack on the "breadbasket of Europe" are becoming readily apparent.

The war in Ukraine has delivered a shock to global energy markets. Now the planet is facing a deeper crisis: a shortage of food.

A crucial portion of the world’s wheat, corn and barley is trapped in Russia and Ukraine because of the war, while an even larger portion of the world’s fertilizers is stuck in Russia and Belarus. The result is that global food and fertilizer prices are soaring. Since the invasion last month, wheat prices have increased by 21 percent, barley by 33 percent and some fertilizers by 40 percent.

The upheaval is compounded by major challenges that were already increasing prices and squeezing supplies, including the pandemic, shipping constraints, high energy costs and recent droughts, floods and fires.

Now economists, aid organizations and government officials are warning of the repercussions: an increase in world hunger.

The looming disaster is laying bare the consequences of a major war in the modern era of globalization. Prices for food, fertilizer, oil, gas and even metals like aluminum, nickel and palladium are all rising fast — and experts expect worse as the effects cascade.

“Ukraine has only compounded a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe,” said David M. Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Program, the United Nations agency that feeds 125 million people a day. “There is no precedent even close to this since World War II.”

Ukrainian farms are about to miss critical planting and harvesting seasons. European fertilizer plants are significantly cutting production because of high energy prices. Farmers from Brazil to Texas are cutting back on fertilizer, threatening the size of the next harvests.

China, facing its worst wheat crop in decades after severe flooding, is planning to buy much more of the world’s dwindling supply. And India, which ordinarily exports a small amount of wheat, has already seen foreign demand more than triple compared with last year.

Around the world, the result will be even higher grocery bills. In February, U.S. grocery prices were already up 8.6 percent over a year prior, the largest increase in 40 years, according to government data. Economists expect the war to further inflate those prices.

For those living on the brink of food insecurity, the latest surge in prices could push many over the edge. After remaining mostly flat for five years, hunger rose by about 18 percent during the pandemic to between 720 million and 811 million people. Earlier this month, the United Nations said that the war’s impact on the global food market alone could cause an additional 7.6 million to 13.1 million people to go hungry.

The World Food Program’s costs have already increased by $71 million a month, enough to cut daily rations for 3.8 million people. “We’ll be taking food from the hungry to give to the starving,” Mr. Beasley said.

Significant long-term food shortages are all we need as the world reels from climate change, an ongoing pandemic and potential for World War III.

It's going to be another very bad summer, folks. There's little chance that things are going to get better soon, either, and we could be in for even worse times ahead.

The Worst-Case COVID Scenario

India has now reached the cascade failure stage of "reopening too early" as daily new cases of COVID-19 have gone from 15k to 400k in the matter of weeks.

India recorded more than 400,000 new COVID-19 cases for the first time on Saturday as it battles a devastating second wave, and the country's massive new vaccination drive was hampered in some areas by shortages of the shots.

Authorities reported 401,993 new cases in the previous 24 hours, after 10 consecutive days of more than 300,000 daily cases. Deaths jumped by 3,523, taking the country's total toll to 211,853, according to the federal health ministry.

The surge in infections has overwhelmed hospitals, morgues and crematoriums and left families scrambling for scarce medicines and oxygen. And while India is the world's biggest producer of COVID-19 vaccines, shortages of the shots in some states hindered the opening of vaccinations for all adults.

West Bengal state was unable to start a drive aimed at adults aged between 18 and 45 due to a shortage of shots and urged the federal government to provide more supplies, a senior state health official said, declining to be named as he was not authorised to speak with media.

Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of the hard-hit state of Delhi on Friday urged people not to queue at vaccination centres, promising more vaccines would arrive "tomorrow or the day after".

Eastern Odisha state said on Friday it had received a consignment of 150,000 shots but would only allow a few people to get shots due to lockdown restrictions preventing movement.

In Ahmedabad, the main commercial city in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home state of Gujarat, hundreds of people lined up for their shots.

"I took my first dose and I am appealing to all students to take the vaccine and be safe," said Raj Shah, a 27-year-old student in the city.

India has received 150,000 Sputnik-V vaccine doses from Russia and millions more doses will follow, an Indian foreign ministry spokesman said on Saturday.

 

When I said we were in for the long haul against COVID, I meant it. The Biden Administration is getting supplies to India, but the reality is this is now a runaway train. Lockdowns until the fire is out may stop the spread, but it also prevents people from getting vaccinated. This is the worst-case scenario that would have happened here under a second Trump term, and it's happening in a country with four times our population.

 

The curve has gone exponential.

What's happening in India now is prima facie evidence of what this virus can do to a susceptible population when there is premature breakdown of social distancing and universal masks. (Rise of variants doesn't help this cause either). Vaccinate first. Relax next. pic.twitter.com/9j6dniriMg

— Vincent Rajkumar (@VincentRK) April 30, 2021

 

Unless President Modi can contain this disaster, we could see a million daily new cases at this rate. The death toll could be catastrophic. We lost 500,000 plus people in this country and the death toll isn't done here. India in 2021 could dwarf that number.

Get vaccinated, is all I'm saying.

Sunday Long Read: Cooking With Vlad

This week's Sunday Long Read comes from ProPublica's Abrahm Lustgarten, who correctly points out that in a rapidly warming world, no country stands to gain more valuable, arable land in a warming climate than Russia, and if that doesn't explain the last four years of Russian politics, I don't know what does.

IT WAS ONLY November, but the chill already cut to the bone in the small village of Dimitrovo, which sits just 35 miles north of the Chinese border in a remote part of eastern Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region. Behind a row of sagging cabins and decades-old farm equipment, flat fields ran into the brambly branches of a leafless forest before fading into the oblivion of a dreary squall. Several villagers walked the single-lane dirt road, their shoulders rounded against the cold, their ghostly footprints marking the dry white snow.

A few miles down the road, a rusting old John Deere combine growled on through the flurries, its blade churning through dead-brown stalks of soybeans. The tractor lurched to a halt, and a good-humored man named Dima climbed down from the cockpit. Dima, an entrepreneur who farms nearly 6,500 acres of these fields, was born in the Liaoning Province of northeastern China — his birth name is Xin Jie — one of a wave of Chinese to migrate north in pursuit of opportunity in recent years. After Dima’s mostly Chinese laborers returned home this year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, he has been forced to do much of the work himself. Bundled against the wind in a camouflage parka, he bent to pick a handful of slender pods from the ground, opening one to reveal a glimpse at Russia’s future.

A great transformation is underway in the eastern half of Russia. For centuries the vast majority of the land has been impossible to farm; only the southernmost stretches along the Chinese and Mongolian borders, including around Dimitrovo, have been temperate enough to offer workable soil. But as the climate has begun to warm, the land — and the prospect for cultivating it — has begun to improve. Twenty years ago, Dima says, the spring thaw came in May, but now the ground is bare by April; rainstorms now come stronger and wetter. Across Eastern Russia, wild forests, swamps and grasslands are slowly being transformed into orderly grids of soybeans, corn and wheat. It’s a process that is likely to accelerate: Russia hopes to seize on the warming temperatures and longer growing seasons brought by climate change to refashion itself as one of the planet’s largest producers of food.

Around the world, climate change is becoming an epochal crisis, a nightmare of drought, desertification, flooding and unbearable heat, threatening to make vast regions less habitable and drive the greatest migration of refugees in history. But for a few nations, climate change will present an unparalleled opportunity, as the planet’s coldest regions become more temperate. There is plenty of reason to think that those places will also receive an extraordinary influx of people displaced from the hottest parts of the world as the climate warms. Human migration, historically, has been driven by the pursuit of prosperity even more so than it has by environmental strife. With climate change, prosperity and habitability — haven and economic opportunity — will soon become one and the same.

And no country may be better positioned to capitalize on climate change than Russia. Russia has the largest land mass by far of any northern nation. It is positioned farther north than all of its South Asian neighbors, which collectively are home to the largest global population fending off displacement from rising seas, drought and an overheating climate. Like Canada, Russia is rich in resources and land, with room to grow. Its crop production is expected to be boosted by warming temperatures over the coming decades even as farm yields in the United States, Europe and India are all forecast to decrease. And whether by accident or cunning strategy or, most likely, some combination of the two, the steps its leaders have steadily taken — planting flags in the Arctic and propping up domestic grain production among them — have increasingly positioned Russia to regain its superpower mantle in a warmer world.

 

And no country has worked harder to accelerate global climate change than Russia. There's a reason behind it, and a method to the madness. The hints are there now, where India, China, and the US are all suffering, Russia becomes the new land superpower, dominating both Europe and Asia.

Sure explains Russia, Trump, the EU, and everything, right?

Holidaze: Destruction Modi Engaged

The Atlantic's Yascha Mounk argues that if you want to see the horrific autocratic fascism of a second Trump term, take a look at where India's Narendra Modi is now with his violent hypernationalism.

When I spent a month on a research trip to India in December 2014, half a year after Narendra Modi swept to power, the writers, academics, and intellectuals I met were engrossed in a debate that may now feel oddly familiar to Americans. They all disliked Modi, an ardent Hindu nationalist, because of his disdain for India’s secular constitution. But they were divided on the impact that his rule was likely to have on the basic freedoms they enjoyed.

Some people feared that Modi would quickly move to quash dissent; one even worried that he might soon land in prison for criticizing the government. Others waved such fears away as hyperbolic.

In his first five years in office, Modi did considerable damage, both to the freedoms his critics enjoyed and to the security of the country’s religious minorities. Social-media mobs intimidated anybody who dared to criticize his government. Media outlets allied with Modi stoked fears about Muslim men waging “love jihad” by marrying Hindu women. Mainstream newspapers that were once highly critical of Modi started to praise him with surprising regularity, and to criticize him with notable rarity. And in episodes of what Indians euphemistically call “communal violence,” Muslims were lynched by angry mobs.

The worst, however, was yet to come. After Modi won reelection with an even larger majority in the spring of this year, his government began to take radical action to unwind the secularism of India’s constitution, arguably doing more damage in the first months of its second term than it had in the previous five years. Some of the concerns about Modi that seemed exaggerated at the conclusion of his first term in office are now starting to look prescient.

During his reelection campaign, Modi vowed to introduce a national register of citizens, which would allow the government to keep better records and to expel unauthorized immigrants. This plan raised fears both among Hindu immigrants who came to the country decades ago after being expelled from neighboring countries such as Bangladesh and among Muslims who lack the necessary documentation to prove that they are in fact citizens. Once reelected, Modi proposed to help the former group by granting unauthorized immigrants from Muslim-majority countries—including Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—an express path to naturalization if they belonged to a persecuted religious minority in their country of origin. In other words, Hindus who have no legal right to be in India would likely be able to stay, while many Muslims who have been in India for generations would face the threat of deportation—bringing India one step closer to the Hindu nation that Modi desires.

Over the past weeks, a large protest movement has formed to oppose these radical changes. In cities and universities across the country, citizens of every faith have rallied to defend the country’s secular constitution. The government’s response has been brutal: In some states, it has invoked colonial-era statutes to ban the assembly of more than five people. In other states, it has shut down the internet. Harrowing videos that quickly went viral show policemen roughing up Muslim students whom they suspect of having protested the government.

As Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the country’s preeminent political scientist, told me, in his first term, Modi focused on economic initiatives without ever distancing himself from Hindu nationalism. “In the second term, he has taken a more aggressive stand to enshrine Hindu majoritarianism in law and polarize public discourse,” Mehta said. “Even more worryingly, the use of the state apparatus to quell dissent and protest has increased markedly. In states like Uttar Pradesh, the police is cracking down on protesters from the minority community with unprecedented ferocity.”

Many observers of India have been surprised that Modi has grown so much more extreme in his second term in office. But a comparison of populist governments around the world suggests that India is following a predictable pattern of what would-be authoritarians do when they win reelection.

As we’ve seen in countries including Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, populist leaders are at first hamstrung in their ability to concentrate power in their own hands. Many key institutions, including courts and electoral commissions, are still dominated by independent-minded professionals who do not owe their appointment to the new regime. Media outlets are still able and willing to report on scandals, forcing the government to tread somewhat carefully.

Once these governments win reelection, these constraints begin to fall away. As the independent-minded judges and civil servants depart, populist leaders feel emboldened to pursue their illiberal dreams.

Replace "Hindu" with "Christian" and you already have the Trump regime's deportation plan under Stephen Miller.  Give them a second term with Mitch still in charge of the Senate and god help us the House, and another Supreme Court pick or two, and all bets are off as to whether the Civil rights era survives into 2024.


Or free and fair elections, for that matter.

Last Call For A War On The Board

Meanwhile, events in Kashmir have gotten so tense that India and Pakistan are all but in an open shooting war.

Tensions between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan escalated sharply on Wednesday, following conflicting claims by both of having shot down each other’s fighter aircraft in aerial ‘dogfights’ in the disputed Kashmir region.

A day after Indian Air Force (IAF) fighters attacked an alleged terrorist camp deep inside Pakistan, Islamabad said it had captured one Indian pilot after his aircraft was shot down in the first air-to-air engagement between the two forces since their last major war in 1971.

Pakistan military spokesman Maj Gen Asif Ghafoor said the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) had shot down two Indian fighters after they strayed into Pakistani air space and captured one pilot.

He told reporters in Islamabad that one of the IAF aircraft crashed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir while the second was hit and “limped” back to its base on the Indian side of the disputed principality.

He also displayed the seized pilot’s identity documents, in addition to publicising video clips of the trussed-up and bloodied pilot on social media outlets, in which he identifies himself and reveals only his service serial number.

India has called on Islamabad to treat the officer humanely and in accordance with the Geneva Convention. In a demarche to a senior Pakistani diplomat from its embassy in Delhi, India’s foreign ministry has demanded the pilot’s swift return.

An Indian foreign ministry official provided a different account of the events that led to the pilot’s capture. Raveesh Kumar claimed that Pakistan had responded to Tuesday’s attack by the IAF on a terrorist camp deep inside its territory by launching a retaliatory strike early the following morning against Indian military installations in Kashmir.

There's every indication that this is only going to get worse, and may I remind everyone, India and Pakistan are both nuclear powers.  Commercial flights to Pakistan have been suspended and Indian PM Modi has effective slipped the leash on India's military.

It's going to get bad most likely, and quickly.

Last Call For It's Too Early For This Nonsense

The rodent coitus is starting early for 2020, and I want nothing to do with the looming disaster that is Tulsi Gabbard.

Tulsi Gabbard is known — insofar as she is known — for bucking her party. She criticized President Barack Obama’s handling of ISIS. She was widely criticizedfor meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has been accused by the US government of using chemical weapons against his own people, when she traveled to Syria for a fact-finding visit in 2017. She rebuked the way the Democratic National Committee handled the 2016 presidential primary, and then publicly resigned as vice chair to endorse Bernie Sanders.

Now, nearly three years later, the Democratic member of Congress from Hawaii is poised to try to convince Democratic primary voters that they should turn the page not just on status quo politics, but on the Vermont senator whom she championed.

Gabbard has acknowledged that she is “seriously considering” a presidential bid. Her team is actively seeking to staff senior roles on a potential presidential campaign, according to a person briefed on the outreach, and has indicated that an announcement could come as soon as this week.

She’s in discussions with the Des Moines–based Asian and Latino Coalition about organizing an event with them sometime in the first two weeks of January. She did several events in New Hampshire earlier this month, on the heels of trips there before the 2018 election. She also made a trip to Nevada the week before the election to connect with “progressive” candidates and causes, and was set to hit early state bingo with a trip to South Carolina, but that trip was scotched due to plane trouble.

Even in a barely formed presidential field, Gabbard would enter the race as an underdog. She did not rate a mention in a Des Moines Register/CNN poll of the Democratic presidential field last week. House members have an inherently difficult time running for national office, as they are often little known outside their district. The last one to successfully do it was James Garfield — in 1880. In a field that could number more than two dozen candidates, Gabbard stands out as the only one to have met with Donald Trump, then the president-elect, to discuss her foreign policy views at a moment when she was reportedly being considered for a cabinet post in his administration. And for all her Sanders campaign bona fides, she has a much more conservative political history, and she would hardly be the only one to claim the progressive mantle — with Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Jeff Merkley, and Sanders himself considering bids.

But conventional political wisdom proved to be a poor guide in the last crowded presidential primary, when Trump upended the field of favorites to win the whole thing.

“The more progressives, the better,” said former Ohio state senator Nina Turner, a stalwart Sanders supporter who spent time on the 2016 campaign trail with Sanders and Gabbard, adding: “Hopefully then that means that we will get a real progressive elected to president.”

Let's get this out of the way right now.

Tulsi Gabbard is not a progressive in any way, shape, or form.

I didn't trust her in early 2016, and my hunch was correct.

So the same time this article drops,  Rep. Gabbard resigns from the DNC to back Bernie over Hillary's hawk positions, both dropping the day after Bernie gets cremated in SC by 45 points.

That's not a coincidence, considering Super Tuesday is in less than 72 hours.  Taken collectively, that bothers me.

It only got worse in 2017.

Democrats were silent on Thursday as Tulsi Gabbard, one of the party’s sitting lawmakers in Congress, announced that she had met with Bashar al-Assad during a trip to war-torn Syria and dismissed his entire opposition as “terrorists”.

Gabbard, a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, disclosed her meeting with the Syrian president on Wednesday, during what her office called a “fact-finding” mission in the region.

“Initially I hadn’t planned on meeting him,” Gabbard told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so, because I felt it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we could achieve peace. And that’s exactly what we talked about.”

Democratic leaders were mum on the decision by one of their sitting lawmakers to meet with a dictator whom the US government has dubbed a war criminal for his use of chemical weapons against civilians.

Gabbard’s trip raised alarms over a potential violation of the Logan Act, a federal statute barring unauthorized individuals from conferring with a foreign government involved in a dispute with the US. The US currently has no diplomatic relations with Syria.

It got even worse in 2018.

But a steady drumbeat of criticism from progressives claims that Gabbard also has sympathies with Steve Bannon–style nationalists on the hard right, whose foreign-policy view is also fundamentally anti-interventionist. Her detractors argue that her policy overlap with the hard right is consistent and substantive enough that it ought to undermine her credibility as someone who could represent consensus progressive values in the White House.

If “Gabbardism” is a foreign-policy school of thought, it is perhaps best captured by her own words. “In short, when it comes to the war against terrorists, I’m a hawk,” Gabbard told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald in 2016. “When it comes to counterproductive wars of regime change, I’m a dove.” It’s a sentiment that wouldn’t be out of place in Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign — or in Pat Buchanan’s in 1992.

In Gabbard’s own telling, her non-interventionist views are the result of her seeing the cost paid by American soldiers while deployed in Iraq — the cost paid by the Iraqis themselves goes unmentioned. And according to her critics, Islamophobia underlies her hawkishness. Gabbard’s idiosyncratic foreign policy is an uneasy fit next to her orthodox economic populism, and suggests a deeper question: what are progressives’ foreign-policy priorities in the first place? America is still fighting the borderless and interminable War on Terror, launching surgical strikes and drone attacks in countries around the world with impunity — in such an environment, is it enough to be just against wars of regime change?

I don't trust her, I especially don't trust her relationship with India's Narendra Modi, particularly when it comes to Pakistan.  She's shown bad judgment when it comes to Syria as well.  She's way too close to the Ron Paul/Steve Bannon school of foreign policy, and that's bad news all around.

Selling The President's Brand™

Don Jr. is in India this week selling Trump stuff to the locals as the Trump Regime International Grift Tour continues.

Donald Trump Jr. arrived in India on Tuesday for a week-long visit, and his trip has already revealed a couple of things. 

First, it’s clear that the Trump administration is still embroiled in huge conflicts of interest. And second, it’s evident that the Trump brand, though toxic at home, commands surprising power in the world’s second most populous country. 

President Trump’s eldest son will be spending his time in India promoting Trump-branded luxury apartments across the country. He’ll be meeting with real estate brokers and potential buyers throughout the week in his family business’s biggest market outside the US. 

He’s also offering a special reward to Indians who buy property from him: He’ll join them for an intimate meal. 

Indian newspapers have been running advertisements that promise homebuyers willing to pay a roughly $38,000 booking fee an opportunity to “join Mr. Donald Trump Jr. for a conversation and dinner.” 

Government ethics experts in the US are appalled by that prospect, and say that the arrangement encourages Indians — especially those with ties to India’s government — to use purchases of Trump-branded property as a way to gain favor with the Trump administration. 

“For many people wanting to impact American policy in the region, the cost of a condo is a small price to pay to lobby one of the people closest to the president, far away from watchful eyes,” Jordan Libowitz, the communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told the Washington Post. 

Trump Jr.’s India visit also highlights something else: While Trump’s polarizing presidency has put a dent in his domestic businesses, it doesn’t seem to have damaged his reputation in India. In fact, the Trump brand seems to be chugging along quite nicely there.

I'm trying to imagine the near-relativistic speeds at which Republicans would demand Congressional hearings, introduce legislation, and probably deliver articles of impeachment if Chelsea Clinton went to India to promote the Clinton Foundation while her mother was in the Oval Office.

But that's the new normal now, Trump Jr. is allowed to take money on trips abroad to sell the Trump brand wherever he goes, and people are expected to pay up if they want America to keep playing nice.

Sure we should be appalled at this, but nothing will change as long as Republicans remain in power.  This is how American diplomacy works now, you buy the Trump brand or else we pick up our $18 trillion a year economy and take it somewhere else.

The Big Blue Eff You

Facebook founder (and burgeoning philanthropist) Mark Zuckerberg wants to give India free internet., which in a country like India which primarily accesses the internet via mobile phone is a massive deal. However, India's telecom industry just told him to go jump in the Ganges and take his free internet with him and it looks like the country's internet regulatory commission is following suit.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has released their long-anticipated ruling on net neutrality in India. The regulators have ruled against differential and discriminatory pricing of mobile data on the basis of content.

This ruling will affect Free Basics — Facebook’s controversial plan to offer free, but limited Internet access — in India. Mark Zuckerberg has been campaigning to bring increased digital connectivity to the developing world. Free Basics, which claims to have 15 million users in more than 35 countries around the globe, is part of Facebook’s quasi-philanthropic efforts. India is the second largest market for Facebook users after the United States and considered vital to its continued growth.

Today’s much-anticipated ruling by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) was not about Free Basics per se. Rather, regulators were reviewing pricing schemes like “zero-rating,” where mobile operators offer access to some websites and services for free, while charging for others. Advocates for digital equality arguethat zero-rating gives an unfair advantage to subsidized content, distorts the market for smaller players, and squashes innovation. Supporters of Free Basics, on the other hand, counter that urban elites who already have Internet access should not deny access to the poor, even if more equitable methods exist.

It seems the last thing India's government wants is Americans coming in and giving people just enough "free" internet to access Facebook all day and have to pay for everything else.

Free Basics was ostensibly targeted at Indians who had never experienced the Internet or could not pay for data plans. However, Facebook recently struggled to provide a reporter with the name of a single Free Basics user in India who had never been online before. Free Basics allows users free access to limited resources including Wikipedia, Bing search, and the weather, as well as a lightweight version of Facebook. Yet normal data charges apply for outside websites, like Google search results, for example. 

Facebook’s promotion of Free Basics has been orchestrated like a political campaign. In December, Zuckerberg published an op-ed in the Times of Indiadefending Free Basics. In it, he repeated Facebook’s claim that half of the people who go online through Free Basics end up paying for access to “the full Internet” within 30 days, but offered no further details about the study. “Who could possibly be against this?” Zuckerberg asked. “Surprisingly, over the last year there’s been a big debate about this in India.” Other countries have prohibited Free Basics. It is not offered in Chile, for example, because the government banned zero-rating in 2014.

If you want to know why I think Zuckerberg and his philanthropy are full of absolutely self-serving crap, this Free Basics scam is exactly why. This is precisely the kind of metered access that net neutraility laws in the US are supposed to prevent, and why Republicans are very eager to shut them down.

Imagine that Facebook gave you "free" mobile internet data -- only for accessing Facebook and search engines -- but the second you clicked on a web site, you had to pay as you go with the kind of data rates that would make AT&T and Verizon actually blush.

Given no net neutrality rules in India until now, that's the game Facebook decided it was going to play. That should be a big alarm bell to everyone about the necessity of net neutrality here in the US and indeed everywhere, but you can guarantee those rules go away the moment we get a GOP president again.

America already has the most expensive internet in the developed world.  The answer is not "free internet" with strings attached,

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

You know you're a winger when your reaction to stories like this...

Northern India's power grid crashed Monday, halting trains, forcing hospitals and airports onto backup power and providing a dark reminder of the nation's inability to feed a growing hunger for energy as it strives to become an economic power.

While the midsummer outage was unique in its reach - it hit 370 million people, more than the population of the United States and Canada combined - its impact was softened by Indians' familiarity with almost daily blackouts of varying duration. Hospitals and major businesses have backup generators that seamlessly kick in during power cuts, and upscale homes are hooked to backup systems powered by truck batteries.

...is banal crap like this, from Daily Pundit's Bill Quick.  

That’s more than the entire population of the U.S.

The article seems to indicate that the grid was quickly restored. I’m not so sure that would be the case if the U.S. grid ever went down this hard.

Yeah Bill, Flying Spaghetti Monster forbid we improve the nation's power grid there.  I know, tax cuts will surely cure any infrastructure issues we have along these lines, if you'll excuse the pun.  The invisible hand will get around to burying our major power lines any time now.

The Road To Mumbai

The newest location with a nouveau riche boomlet is India, where the kids prefer Italian sportscars in the "world's largest democracy".

From farmers who swapped fields for cash to 20-something CEOs that inherited the family business, hot new money is flooding India's luxury car market as roaring sportscar engines announce the country's growing wealth on its roads.

No senior Indian executive feels complete without his sleek German-made saloon, while Italian sportscars are the new calling cards for the country's rich young things at exclusive nightclubs that screen guests at the main gate, not at the door.

"There is a rush to luxury," says Mohan Mariwala, managing director of Auto Hangar, surrounded by gleaming Mercedes Benz sportscars in one of his four Mumbai showrooms for luxury cars.

"Farmers, tiny industrial families, the younger generation with different value systems...You can't imagine the kind of people who invest in extremely exotic cars today."

Headline growth in Asia's third-largest economy may be stuttering, but decades of growth has spawned a new upper class with global tastes and aspirations that is driving a $1 billion luxury car market expanding at 40 percent annually, say industry analysts and research firms.

With India's population reaching 1.2 billion, and half the population living on the US equivalent of about a dollar a day, it's no wonder that the "one percent" there is looking to flash some cash.  Income inequality may be awful in the US, but there are countries where it is far worse and it remains so.

It's Going To Get Hot In Here

There's good news and bad news on projections of global energy use in the next 25 years.  The good news is that while energy consumption is expected to rise 53 percent by 2035, carbon emissions will be less than that.  The bad news is by "less than that" I still mean carbon emissions will rise by 43 percent by 2035.

The world is going to burn through 53 percent more energy by 2035, and despite all the hype surrounding renewable energy, much of that will still come from fossil fuels, according to a new annual report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The EIA projects with its new report that total world energy use will rise to a mind-boggling 770 quadrillion Btu in 2035, up from 505 quadrillion Btu in 2008.

"In 2008, China and India combined accounted for 21 percent of total world energy consumption," according to a press statement that came out with the key findings of the International Energy Outlook 2011 on Monday.

"With strong economic growth in both countries over the projection period, their combined energy use more than doubles by 2035, when they account for 31 percent of world energy use in the IEO2011 Reference case. In 2035, China's energy demand is 68 percent higher than the U.S. energy demand."

And the bad news is this chart here:



In other words, by 2035 we're going to be using enough coal and natural gas globally to generate the same amount of electricity as we need now in total from all sources. That's not good. And something tells me 25 years from now will be far too late to do much of anything about saving the planet.

Meanwhile In Baghdad...

Oh yes, ladies and gentlemen, the protests in Egypt have not gone unnoticed in Iraq.

Hundreds of Iraqis took part in scattered demonstrations on Sunday, calling for an improvement in basic services and the resignation of local government officials as unrest sweeps much of the Arab world.


In Baghdad, around 250 people gathered in the impoverished district of Bab al-Sham to protest against a lack of services. "It is a tragedy. Even during the Middle Ages, people were not living in this situation," said engineer Furat al-Janabi.

Some carried a coffin with the word "services" written across it, while others called for the resignation of all members of the local council in their area.

Almost eight years after the U.S.-led invasion, Iraq's infrastructure remains severely damaged. The country suffers a chronic water shortage, electricity supply is intermittent and sewage collects in the streets.

While public frustration is a challenge to the government as Iraq emerges from the sectarian war after the invasion, the country has already been freed from the autocratic rule that protesters in other countries such as Egypt are seeking to end.

In the oil city of Basra, 420 km south of Baghdad, around 100 protesters demanded the resignation of the governor and members of the city council, saying they were corrupt.

The demonstrators carried yellow cards symbolising the warning card a referee carries in a soccer match.

"I and my children depend totally on food rations, without it we will die. I find work for one day, and then nothing for 10 days after that," said 43-year-old Nuri Ghadhban, a day labourer in the construction industry and father of six.

"I have been looking for kerosene for a month and I cannot find it. We have had enough. What do they want? For us to burn ourselves until they think about us?"

As bad as things are, these protests have the potential to pretty much undo what little gains we have made in the region and delivering the country back into near civil war.  If ordinary Iraqis are starving on top of having no power, no jobs, and no hope of getting us out of their country, things are going to get ugly, fast.  But that's not the biggest problem.

The protests are moving eastward from Egypt to the Middle East.   If they continue on this trajectory, the next countries in line east of Iraq are Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, and now we start getting into some serious international problems if those countries start protesting food prices, corruption, and despotism.  Pakistan's government is already fragile as hell.  Iraq and Afghanistan's governments are cardboard at best.  And if nuclear Pakistan goes into Egyptian-style turmoil, India isn't going to just sit around.

I mentioned last week that Saudi Arabia was the big domino at the end of this destabilization chain.  That's certainly true in the Middle East, but globally there are many worse places that could see chaos, and Pakistan has to be tops on that list.

How The Game Works

Over at Balloon Juice, Mistermix nails the Right Wing Noise Machine.

Here’s a great illustration of the cycle and danger of the nontroversy. Last week, Mike Huckabee was one of the morons who insisted that Obama’s trip to India was a waste of money because it cost $200 million per day. After serious consideration, the sage and thoughtful Huckabee changed his position yesterday:

Still, the former governor acknowledged that bagging the trip altogether — as some conservatives have suggested — would have been “very insulting” to India, an increasingly important ally to the United States, given its proximity to Pakistan. “They’ve been a good friend of the United States, not only in terms of diplomatic friendship, but they’ve also been a good trade partner,” Huckabee told Van Susteren. “For him to abruptly cancel the trip would have been a snub of epic proportions and would have had long-lasting implications and created damage that, frankly, we don’t need right now in the international community. We need all the friends we can get, and India is one of them we need to keep.”

This is typical of the nontroversy cycle. The same jackasses who tell us lies to get the cycle started are able to come back again and again to comment on it, without repercussion. This would be harmless except that that subjects of these nontroversies are important institutions that are de-legitimatized every time that lies about them are mainstreamed.

And Mike Huckabee, possible Republican candidate for President, will be able to go on his FOX News show and pretend he never bought or propagated the "India is a $200 million a day trip" lie.  Meanwhile the next time the President goes on a trip, that lie will be repeated.

Six months from now another FOX host will say "this is just like the time President Obama went to India after the midterm elections and that cost what $200 million a day?"  It won't be challenged.  It will be repeated.  And it will continue again and again because there will be plenty of opportunities to parade the lie unchallenged.

And soon it will become accepted truth, because that's how the game is played.

Oh You Mean THESE Nuclear Weapons...

Why, I have no idea what you are talking about, sir.

Israel's secretive nuclear activities may undergo unprecedented scrutiny next month, with a key meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency tentatively set to focus on the topic for the first time, according to documents shared Friday with The Associated Press.

 A copy of the restricted provisional agenda of the IAEA's June 7 board meeting lists Israeli nuclear capabilities as the eighth item - the first time that that the agency's decision-making body is being asked to deal with the issue in its 52 years of existence.

The agenda can still undergo changes in the month before the start of the meeting and a senior diplomat from a board member nation said the item, included on Arab request, could be struck if the U.S. and other Israeli allies mount strong opposition. He asked for anonymity for discussing a confidential matter.

Even if dropped from the final agenda, however, its inclusion in the May 7 draft made available to The AP is significant, reflecting the success of Islamic nations in giving concerns about Israel's unacknowledged nuclear arsenal increased prominence. 

Despite Israel's nuclear capabilities being the worst kept secret in the Middle East, expect to see howling and screaming from the usual suspects (and open calls of the AP being anti-Semitic, along with Obama, Hillary, the UN, the IAEA, and everyone else who might have anything to do with being interested in reading the report.)  Discussion of Israel's nukes means Israel actually has nukes and is a country with nukes that has not signed on to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and admitting that means Israel is a "rogue nuclear state" by several definitions (along with India and Pakistan.)

Most importantly it means Israel is a nuclear power, and that changes the calculus of power in the entire theater.  Israel has had plausible deniability on this for a while now (despite this being a terribly badly secret.)  Admitting they have nukes means Israel is subject to the same inspection game that they've helped to force on to other countries, like Iraq and Iran, and that's going to make things real interesting.

Then again, if you wanted to force Israel's military hand and by proxy America's military hand, this is the prime way to do it.  Cui bono is the question to ask here, who benefits the most from something like this?

Watch the response on this carefully.  If the talk quickly turns to "Well now Israel has no choice but to attack Iran while it has the advantage" then you'll know.

Star Power Drain

Howard Fineman argues that Bush/Cheney did so much damage to America's rep that not even Obama's presence can fix the perception.

Obama’s role as the elegant, path-breaking, intercultural celebrity is not enough to reverse a steady erosion of our global dominance — especially not if he’s seen merely as a new hood ornament on an economic clunker.

My concern is merely anecdotal. But I have been collecting anecdotal evidence for decades. It’s what I do for a living.

I was in London and Paris last week while Obama was making his first trip to Asia. I kept paging through the local papers for stories about the trip. They were only few — almost none. He was all but invisible, except when bowing deeply to the emperor of Japan. There weren’t many stories about the United States, either.

Wait, so we've gone from the complaint that Obama's too much of a rock star to now saying that Obama just doesn't have the international star power to raise America's ruined profile?  Will the Village press make up its mind, please?  Six months ago it was "Obama is a celebrity".  Now the complaint is he's not a celebrity enough.

What's unsaid by Fineman of course is who does qualify as celebrity enough.  Perhaps he means Moose Lady.  But he does go on to say that the damage that Bush/Cheney did to our economy has proven to be too much for Obama to merely fix in one year and that the world's investors are looking to other places than Wall Street to invest these days.

How unfortunate the President has failed to fix America in his first ten months in office.

So When Will Conservatives Invade India?

After all, they're foreign, they outnumber us, and they're all brainwashed into working for Barack Obama.

Clearly I expect Generals Beck and Limbaugh to lead the first charge.

Last Call

The Telegraph's Jeremy Warner mourns the death of the dollar.

The challenge for a developing nation such as China is a rather different one. In China, the propensity to export and save is driven by an absence of any meaningful social security net, in combination with the legacy of its oppressive one child policy, which has deprived great swathes of the population of children to fall back on for support in old age.

What's more, most Chinese don't earn enough to buy the products they are producing, so in what has become the customary path for developing nations, they export the surplus and save the proceeds.

Yet even in China the establishment of a newly affluent, free-spending middle class may now have gained an unstoppable momentum. In any case, the country can no longer rely on American consumers to provide jobs and growth. It needs a new growth model, which means ultimately adopting the Henry Ford principle that if you want a sustainable market for your products, you have to pay your workers enough to buy them.

These trends – all of which pre-date the crisis but which, out of necessity, are being greatly accelerated by it – will eventually drive a move away from the dollar as the world's reserve currency of choice. As China takes control of its economic destiny, spends more and saves less, there will be less willingness both to hold dollar assets and to submit to the domestic priorities of US monetary policy.

None of this will happen overnight. Depressed it might be, but US consumption is still substantially bigger than that of all the surplus nations put together. All the same, that the dollar's reign as the world's dominant currency is drawing to a close is no longer in doubt.

And he's right. Sometime within the next decade, the dollar will cease to be the world's reserve currency. America will no longer be running the show, but the BRIC nations: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Of those four, China's renminbi will end up being the strongest currency. With almost four times our population, China will eventually start outspending us worldwide, it's only a question of when the dollar collapses.

But it will collapse. It will be replaced, either by the renminbi or whatever passes for a UN global currency down the road. Either way, the US will lose its place atop the economic superpower mountain and our standard of living will be dictated not by us, but by other countries.

We may get our turn again. But I doubt it will happen in our lifetimes. China and India especially are just too big for us to compete with, and Russia and Brazil's resources will make them the major suppliers for China and India's workforces.

The economic engine of Earth will no longer be powered by America. It's already happening. The only question is how much of the end game of our decline we'll be able to choose. And with our current economy, the world has seen that depending on the American consumer is no longer a viable economic model. New markets and new consumers are coming. They will decide who lives and dies in the new marketplace, not us.

The hands of the clock are turning, folks. My generation will see our standard of living continue to drop, year after year. The American middle class that our parents were born into and our grandparents worked so hard to create will not be passed on to our children. We're already experiencing the new economic reality.

Get used to it.

Growing Pains

Meeting with India's Environment Minister, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has run into a bit of a snag in trying to convince India to accept carbon production limits.

India will resist pressure from the Obama administration to accept legally binding caps on its carbon emissions, the South Asian nation’s environment minister told visiting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have been among the lowest emissions per capita, face to actually reduce emissions,” Jairam Ramesh said at a meeting today with Clinton in Gurgaon near New Delhi, according to a statement he issued to reporters. “And as if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours.”

Clinton is on a state visit to India meant to showcase trade and security ties and seek common ground on climate change and arms control. India has said it will reject any new treaty to limit global warming that makes it reduce emissions because that will undermine the country’s energy consumption, transportation and food security.

The climate-change bill that passed the U.S. House on June 26 calls for carbon-based tariffs if countries like China and India don’t adopt their own greenhouse gas controls by 2020. The U.S. said its push for higher environmental standards is not aimed at limiting the economic progress of nations, including India.

“No one wants to in any way stall or undermine the economic growth that is necessary to lift millions of more people out of poverty,” Clinton said at a joint news conference with Ramesh in Gurgaon. “But we also believe that there is a way to eradicate poverty and develop sustainably that will lower significantly the carbon footprint of the energy that is produced and consumed to fuel that growth.”

Which is polite diplo-speak for "Screw you guys." India is basically calling out the Obama administration on Waxman-Markey bill, saying that they not only believe that that there's no way the US will ever put carbon tariffs on India, but that they don't believe climate change legislation will ever pass here. The international language is business, and there's no way America is going to threaten that.

“Legally binding” emissions targets won’t be acceptable for India, Ramesh said. “It’s going to be impossible to sell in our democratic system.”

Clinton said she is confident that the U.S. and India can devise a plan that changes the way energy is produced, consumed and conserved, helping to create additional investments and jobs. The two countries must also expand the use of renewable energy in India, especially for rural electrification.

“There is no question that developed countries like mine must lead on this issue and for our part, under President Obama, we are not only acknowledging our contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, we are taking steps to reverse its ill effects,” Clinton said. “It is essential for major developing countries like India to also lead because over 80 percent of the growth in future emissions will be from developing countries.”

Obama's point of view is that India and China having a third of the world's population means that those two countries will have a massive effect on the carbon footprint of the world in the future. India's point is that America has a massive effect on the world's carbon footprint NOW, and by having that growth over the last sixty years has put America where is is today.

However, India's major point is that since Kyoto, the United States has zero credibility on carbon limits. None. Zero. Zilch. We certainly don't have the credibility to pull the paternalistic big brother colonialist crap on them, not when we told the rest of the world to kiss off at Kyoto. 183 other countries ratified Kyoto. We never did. Even China and India ratified it. Why should India bow to U.S. pressure when our word on climate change agreements is literally worthless?

Until the U.S. gets serious and passes cap and trade legislation, the rest of the world will simply smile and nod at our desires for what the planet needs to do, and go on without us. Should Waxman-Markey become law, then we can ask other countries to go along.

We're all in this together.