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One week, its that old Malthusian David Attenborough telling us the moment of crisis has come. The next its that young Malthusian Greta Thunberg telling us our house is still on fire and inaction is fuelling the flames.

Both express the key elements of todays environmentalist script. The shrill tone. The end-is-nigh urgency. The act-now-or-else command. And underwriting this script, as ever, is the core idea of contemporary environmentalism namely, the climate emergency. This is the idea that so imminent and existential is the threat of climate change that world leaders need to act as if they are at war. They need to declare a state of emergency. Theres no time for deliberation or debate anymore, because, well, our house is on fire. In this state of emergency, all civil liberties and democratic freedoms can be suspended. All dissent and debate silenced. Only then will the authorities, using all force necessary, be able to do what needs to be done to protect us from the enemy. It just so happens that this enemy happens to be us, and our all-consuming passions.

This wartime analogy has long lurked on the deep-ecological fringes of the environmentalist movement. It crops up, for instance, in James Lovelocks 2009 broadside, The Vanishing Face of Gaia. He writes that surviving climate change may require, as in war, the suspension of democratic government for the duration of the survival emergency.

But only now has it entered the mainstream. So, in May last year, the Guardian revised its style guide, stating that instead of climate change, the preferred terms are climate emergency, crisis or breakdown. That same month, the UK became the first nation state to declare a climate emergency, days after similar declarations from Scotland and Wales. In June, New York City became the worlds largest city to declare a climate emergency. And then, in November, the European Parliament, with new Commission president Ursula von der Leyen leading the charge, did likewise, for the EU. Little wonder Oxford Dictionaries made climate emergency its word of the year.

Not everyone has been quite as keen to embrace the emergency rhetoric. In November, a few MEPs from the European Parliaments largest bloc, the European Peoples Party, struck a note of caution amid the EUs clamour for a declaration of climate emergency. They were worried that the language was just a little too redolent of Nazi-era Germany.

Which is understandable. The Emergency Decree for the Protection of the German People, issued on 28 February 1933, permitted the suspension of the democratic aspects of the soon-to-disappear Weimar Republic, and legally sanctioned the Nazis suppression and persecution of political opponents. That, after all, is what states of emergency tend to entail: a clampdown on civil and democratic freedom in the interests of preserving the state against a perceived existential threat. And that is what the climate emergency entails, too.

It raises a few questions. Given the unpleasant, brown-shirted whiff steaming off the idea of a climate emergency, why are political and cultural elites in the EU, the UK and the US so willing to embrace it? And, more pertinently, why now?

It cannot be fully explained by reference to the state of the environment, no matter how devastating the Australian bushfires, or destructive the floods in northern England. For there is always more to environmentalism than environmental challenges. And the more in this case is the seismic shift in the post-2016 political landscape. It is a landscape in which Western elites find themselves mortally threatened, not so much by climate change, but by those they can blame for it the people. And this is precisely why climate change has resurged as an issue over the past few years, and why the profoundly anti-democratic idea of a climate emergency lies at its heart. Because it is being mobilised against the populist threat.

The shift in tone of the climate-change issue is marked. When environmentalism last enjoyed its moment in the blazing Sun, in the mid-2000s, it was still of course a catastrophist narrative. It could hardly have been otherwise, given its anti-Enlightenment, Malthusian origins. But the approach was condescendingly scientistic rather than shrill and panic-stricken. The truth was inconvenient, rather than compelling. An IPCC report would offer a very likely range of future scenarios, rather than offer a singularly scary warning. But then environmentalism preached to estranged, often understandably bored electorates, rather than recalcitrant, restive ones.

This patronising, scientistic tone reflected environmentalisms political, ideological function, as a legitimising gloss painted on to Western political elites administration of things. It was the handmaiden of technocracy and managerialism. It allowed post-Cold War elites to disavow modernity, justify long-term economic stagnation, and provide their Third Way governance with a semblance of purpose.

The financial crash and subsequent economic crisis was to sideline environmentalism. From 2008 onwards, justifying economic stagnation no longer needed a green dressing. It could become, as austerity, a policy and ideology in its own right. Hence, from the UK to the crisis-ridden eurozone, politicians of all stripes now talked of fiscal responsibility, of cutting back and consuming less.

2016 changed everything. The populist challenge to the political classes of Europe and the US, which had been stirring for a while, erupted in the form of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as US president. And environmentalism resurged in response. It had always served as a way of managing the public, of justifying the political classs mode of governance. Now it could serve as a way of quelling the populist challenge. Of diminishing peoples democratic aspirations. Of suppressing the rejection of technocracy and managerialism. After all, what is politics or taxes or Brexit beside the climate emergency?

Climate activists, a uniformly bourgeois bunch as opposed to Brexit as they are to Trump voters, have rallied. Rising Up!, the group that was to launch Extinction Rebellion in 2018, staged its first action in November 2016. And the teachers pets of the Climate Strike movement began theirs in the summer of 2018.

Sometimes they have positioned themselves explicitly against Brexit, or Trump. But often they dont need to. Their climate-emergency message does the job implicitly, functioning, as it does, as an all-purpose means to diminish and even suppress the democratic ambitions of the revolting masses.

Little wonder, then, that environmentalism is so central to the preservation of the status quo today. The climate emergency is the elites response to the populist challenge. It represents the suspension of peoples democratic aspirations. The suspension of politics. But, as has been demonstrated ever since 2016, the populist challenge resists suspension.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.

Picture by: Getty.

To enquire about republishing spikeds content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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The climate emergency is a threat to democracy - Spiked

SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras. (Photo by Eurokiniossi/ Stelios Missinas)

ATHENS Speaking to Saturdays edition of Efimerida Ton Syntakton, main opposition SYRIZA party leader Alexis Tsipras expressed his view that the government of New Democracy will not see the end of its four-year term, and how he also believes that it is quite possible to see a political power shift to social democracy in Greece, along the lines of the Spanish governmental alliance between the socialists and the Podemos party.

The collapse of Mitsotakis government has begun, while New Democracy officials and the prime minister himself are exploring the idea of snap elections to prevent the loss of political equilibrium, said Tsipras and that their policy and the reactions it causes, are forcing them to draft an early elections plan.

The ruling New Democracy on Friday voted the re-enforced proportional system of distributing seats after national elections, but because the draft did not collect the minimum 200 votes required by the constitution to go into effect on the next national elections (which will be held on the current system of simple proportionality, introduced by the SYRIZA government), the new system will go into effect on the next but one elections. The issue relates to the number of bonus seats awarded to the winning party, which was abolished under the current electoral law.

Criticizing the re-introduction of the system Syriza abolished when once in government, Tsipras said that they (New Democracy) underestimate the fact that whenever next elections are held-will be held on the current system of simple proportionality, and now they mention double elections, so what are they thinking of doing? Go to the polls claiming votes by telling voters that the first ballot is of no value-so wait for the next one? They are risking a big surprise, he noted.

In any case we will be ready to claim a victory in the elections, whenever they may be held, as the popular support for SYRIZA and a government of democratic and progressive co-operation, will not include New Democracy as part of the solution, concluded Syrizas leader.

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Tsipras: "New Democracy Will Not See the End of Its Four-Year Term" - The National Herald

Lets say you owned a house and needed extra cash to make ends meet, so you decided to rent two of your bedrooms. Would you agree to lease those rooms to two people, but under the condition that you could only meet and run a credit check on one of them? Would you allow a anonymous rando move into your second room, no questions asked, not even their name?

Its an absurd question. No one would do that. Yet thats exactly what the parties ask millions of voters to do in American presidential primaries.

Thanks to debates and news reports weve gotten to know Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and the other presidential contenders pretty well. Democratic voters have the information they need to vote for their party standardbearer. But they have no idea who will represent their party for vice president.

We dont even know what kind of veep the candidates would pick. Would Biden balance his centrism with a progressive, or someone younger like Pete Buttigieg? Would Sanders double down on progressivism by pairing up with Warren, or vice versa?

Since four out of ten vice presidents have become president, this is not an academic question. (I include those who ran for the presidency using the formidable springboard of incumbency and the name reconciliation it bestows.)

You might think no big deal, my choice for president will select a running mate with a similar temperament and ideological leanings. History shows that balance, i.e. contrast, is a common strategy. Bush, an affable moderate Republican, went with maniacal hardliner Dick Cheneyand by many accounts he was the one in charge. The US (and Iraq!) lost a lot when Bush prevailed over Al Gore; whereas Gore was a staunch environmentalist and a thoughtful liberal, his running mate Joe Lieberman was a charmless Republican in sheeps clothing. Whatever you thought of John McCain (in my case, not much) it would have been a tragic day for America had he croaked and been succeeded by the shallow imbecile Sarah Palin.

It is strangenay, it is insanethat a self-declared democracy allows, effectively, 40% of its future leaders to be elected not by the voters but by one person, the presidential nominee of one party or, at most, by a half-dozen of his or her confidants.

Sometimes it works out. The assassination of William McKinley gave us Teddy Roosevelt, who set the standard for the contempt with which a president ought to treat big business. How long would we have awaited the Civil Rights Act had LBJ not been prematurely promoted? Still, this is not democracy.

It is time for the United States to require that candidates for president announce their veep picks at the same time they announce their intent to run. Its truth in advertising.

Candidates terms dont expire with them. If a president succumbs to an assassins bullet, a foreign drone or an aneurism prior to the end of their four-year term, votersprimary votersought to have the right to know who would finish it out. Toward that end, they also ought to pre-announce their cabinet picks. Many cabinet positions are in the line of succession. And they can make a big difference. I would not have voted for Barack Obama if I had known he would appoint Goldman Sachs Timothy Geithner to run the Treasury Department.

Announcing veeps early enough for voters to take them into consideration before casting their primary ballots would deprive political conventions of their last remaining bit of drama, but lower TV ratings are a small price to pay compared to what is to be gained: transparency and choice.

Its not like revealing the number-two spot ahead of time is a crazy idea no one has tried before.

Nowadays, once a candidate has locked up the presidential nomination, we expect them to choose their running mate by whatever process they choose to employ, introduce him (or, in two recent cases, her) to the public a few days before the convention, and we all understand that the convention will rubber-stamp that choice, and the veep nominee will make a televised speech, which will occur on Wednesday night, the third day of the four-day TV show that conventions have become, Eric Black wrote for the Minnesota Post. In the earliest days of the Republicand this was the way the Framers of the Constitution intended itwhoever finished second in the Electoral College voting would become vice president. Thats how John Adams, the first vice president got the job. Even as the two-party system (which is not mandated by the Constitution) developed, that remained the case, which is how Adams (when he succeeded George Washington in 1796) ended up with his chief rival in the presidential race (Thomas Jefferson) as his vice president.

The parties usurped the voters role in the choosing of the vice president in 1832.

Were a weird country. Few electoral democracies elect a president the way we do and even fewer deal with succession the same way. Most nations replace their departed presidents with a temporary fix, typically an acting president who is a parliamentary official analogous to the Speaker of the House pending a special presidential election, or a quickie election to find a replacement. Were pretty much on our own when it comes to figuring out a better construction.

Whats clear is that nothing would be gained and much would be gained by requiring presidential candidates to declare their running mates, and their cabinets, up front.

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If This is a Democracy, Why Don't We Vote for the Vice President Too? - CounterPunch

Recently Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters for The Washington Post Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig published their assessment of Donald Trumps presidency to date, seeking to step out of the news cycle and assess the reverberations of his administration throughout the nation. Titled A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trumps Testing of America, the book layers scene after scene of Trumps ineptitude, prioritization of self-interest over care for the nations well-being, and general lack of any moral compass or intellectual rigor.

As Dwight Garner, in his review for The New York Times characterized the tale Rucker and Leonnig weave, It reads like a horror story, an almost comic immorality tale. Its as if the president, as patient zero, had bitten an aide and slowly, bite by bite, an entire nation had lost its wits and its compass.

The story is a compelling one, and one seemingly validated for Americans by what we have witnessed in the impeachment hearings played out in the House of Representatives and now in the ongoing trial in U.S. Senate.

The wealthy businessman Trump, corrupt to the core, is dismantling democracy and putting the nations well-being and security at risk for his own private gain and ego interests.

And yet we shouldnt let the high drama of the very necessary impeachment process distract us from the more mundane threats to American democracy that seem to have become largely accepted in American life but which are no less deleterious to the American people and our supposed political ideals than Trumps presidency is.

As an example of what Im talking about, take billionaire Jeff Bezos and his Amazon empire, which includes, by the way, The Washington Post.

The admonitory slogan of The Washington Post is, of course, Democracy Dies in Darkness.

The sentiment is a warm and fuzzy one for sure, even articulating a noble mission and role for the free press in sustaining our democracy.

And Jeff Bezos dollars nobly enable that mission.

But what he gives with one hand (it is a business after all), he taketh with the other, underscoring the severely limited application of democratic principles throughout American society.

And can we call a form of government that limits democratic rights in practice a democracy at all?

Bezos Amazon, for example, recently threatened to fire its employees who spoke out publicly against the companys environmental policies.

As Annie Palmer reported for CNBC earlier this month, employees reported that Amazons policy on workers external communications was updated last September and now requires employees to seek prior approval to speak about Amazon in any public forum while identified as an employee.

The Amazon Employees for Climate Justice tweeted in response to the suppression of employee free speech:

How will the world remember Jeff Bezos in the era of climate emergency? Will he use his immense economic power to help, or not?Please tell @Amazon and @JeffBezos: Our world is on fire & desperately needs climate leadership. Stop silencing employees who are sounding the alarm.

It needs to be stressed, of course, that Amazons suppression of its workers speech is not illegal and certainly not unique.

In other words, Americans do not enjoy democratic rights in the workplace. U.S. law allows for the denial of First Amendment rights when you are at work, as Ive written about previously for PoliticusUsa.

So, as conceived currently in our nations legal codes, the most sacred tenets of democracy are only applicable in American life on a part-time basis. Ask Colin Kaepernick.

When you are at work for 40 to 60 hours per week, please know that democracy is on hold. Please leave your rights in your locker before you punch your time card.

Sometimes its even worse.

Remember Juli Briskman, a marketing executive at Akima, a government contracting firm, who was fired for flipping off President Trumps motorcade while riding her bike? She wasnt even at work. Because she had been photographed and the photograph had been published with great popularity, she identified herself to her company and was promptly called into a room and fired for violating code-of-conduct policies. Clearly, she did not have the right to express herself as she chooses, even outside of the workplace, without consequences for her employment.

Democracy dies in the workplace, and certainly at Amazon, where, similar to many companies, workers efforts to unionize are vigorously resisted. Like Target and Walmart, among others, Amazon has produced its own anti-union video that is part of employee training.

And the union structure, which collectively organizes workers and negotiates their rights and remuneration, is the main and really only means for workers to have a voice in their workplace, where they spend a good deal of their lives contributing to the world in which we all live.

Bezos and Trump have a long adversarial history, as they spar over the size of their . . . bank accounts.

Trump basically foiled a Pentagon contract that seemed destined for Amazon but was eventually awarded to Microsoft.

Trump regularly attacks The Washington Postas Bezos lobbying group (even though, admittedly, he does reporting critical of Amazon).

In the end, though, Trump and Bezos, along with much of corporate America, stand together against democracy and in favor of American oligarchy.

Dont let people speak. Let money and private ownership have the biggest voice in decision-making.

Perhaps the impeachment hearings and trial will enliven the democratic sensibilities in the American people to understand not just Trumps horror show but also these wider efforts at work in our culture and society aimed at preventing and dismantling democracy.

Tim Libretti is a professor of U.S. literature and culture at a state university in Chicago. A long-time progressive voice, he has published many academic and journalistic articles on culture, class, race, gender, and politics, for which he has received awards from the Working Class Studies Association, the International Labor Communications Association, the National Federation of Press Women, and the Illinois Womans Press Association.

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Opinion: Democracy Dies at Amazon, Are Trump and Bezos Really Such Strange Bedfellows? - PoliticusUSA

Here in Manhattan, actor Annabella Sciorra told a packed courtroom Thursday that disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein forced his way into her New York City apartment one night in the early 1990s, where he held her down and raped her. The experience, Sciorra testified, left her so scarred that she fell into a deep depression, started cutting herself and began drinking heavily. It was the first time one of Weinsteins accusers has confronted him directly in court since his arrest in May of 2018 on charges of rape and criminal sexual acts.

Five more of Weinsteins accusers are expected to testify during the trial, though the statute of limitations has expired for all but two of their claims. Weinstein faces life in prison on the New York charges and up to 28 years in a separate criminal case in Los Angeles County. Over 100 women have accused Weinstein of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment and professional retaliation.

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Annabella Sciorra Testifies That Harvey Weinstein Raped Her in 1990s - Democracy Now!