RSN: Garrison Keillor | Never Been Such Times as These Before, I Swear
09 September 22
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The sorting of material, separating articles of clothing from top-secret documents into their own piles, seems to be a problem for DJT, according to the FBI. Surely the man’s valet puts the socks in the sock drawer and not with the golf balls and cheeseburgers, but in his official dealings DJT seems prone to chaos.
Orderliness is no requirement for holding high office. There’s no reason candidates should offer their closets for inspection. I doubt that Ron DeSantis stores piles of Florida state secrets along with admiring articles and a golf cap given him by the emir of Qatar. It would be good to know, however, if he has ever been in charge of four or more children under the age of five for a three-day weekend, unassisted, I’d be impressed more than by his strutting around rewriting Florida’s school curriculum.
Do our elected leaders not realize that we can see through them? They are frosted glass. Their attempts at nobility do not impress: it’s like watching a man throw horseshoes at a pine tree. There is no ding, just a crunch.
This should be high season for political ridicule. (Where are you, Bill Maher?) John Fetterman will win Pennsylvania by his wicked mockery of the hapless Oz, who said he grew up south of Philly by which he meant New Jersey. The man is lost in the fog of his own celebrity. Tony Evers looks good in Wisconsin thanks to his use of a photo of Ron Johnson with his mouth open wide enough to swallow a softball. And Herschel Walker in the Senate? The man does not bear close inspection.
A master of insult was Winston Churchill, a struggling politician, an inspiring wartime leader, and then a magnificent author, who in his early years said of his fellow conservative: “I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been much better if he had never lived.” Brilliant, how the polite “no ill” perfectly sets up the throat chop.
The Former, who has been trying for years to master the Churchillian scowl, is seriously humor-impaired. There are unemployed joke writers around but he never thought to hire one. He was a name-caller on a fourth-grade level (Lyin’ Ted, Crooked Hillary) or he slapped a LOSER sticker on someone’s back and let it go at that. So much venom and no fangs to make it work for him.
The Brits do insult so much better. So we should steal from them. “A shiver looking for a spine to run up” could be applied to Mitch McConnell just as well as to Edward Heath, the original target. “A sheep in sheep’s clothing” fits any number of people. “He eats used toilet tissue in the hope that he will someday get used to the taste” fits Kevin McCarthy perfectly. And “He is the only man I know who immatures as he ages” is the Former in twelve words. It’s a poke in the snoot that disarms even as it raises a welt.
There is some precedent for insult in American politics. Lincoln and Douglas dusted each other up. In 1932 Democrats called Hoover a “timid capon” and Hoover came back and called Roosevelt “a chameleon on plaid.” The problem today is the amiable Biden. He was in the Senate too long and, coming from a safe blue state, he believed in bipartisanship. His Philly speech about MAGA was devoid of insult. Not a funny line in it.
MAGA has portrayed Joe as senile, a mumbling geriatric, and his civility only plays into their hands. The way for Joe to gain broad public respect is to say, “I wish Donald Trump no ill. It would be unfortunate were he to be hit in the head by a golf ball. But it would be a catastrophe for the country if someone gave him CPR.” No need to trot up the steps to Air Force One, you just kick the hippo where it hurts.
Ukraine’s military also said it launched new attacks on Russian pontoon bridges used to bring supplies across the Dnieper River to Kherson, one of the largest Russian-occupied cities, and the adjacent region. Ukrainian artillery and rocket strikes have left all the fixed bridges across the river unusable, the military’s southern command said.
Anxiety increased about Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which was operating in emergency mode Friday for the fifth straight day due to the war. That prompted the head of the U.N. atomic watchdog to call for the establishment of an immediate safety zone around the plant to prevent a nuclear accident.
The six-reactor Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant came under the control of Russian forces early in the war but is being operated by Ukrainian staff. The plant and surrounding areas have been repeatedly hit by shelling that Russia and Ukraine blame on each other. The last power line connecting the plant to the Ukrainian electricity grid was cut Monday, leaving the plant without an outside source of electricity. It is receiving power for its own safety systems from the only reactor — out of six total — that remains operational.
The Ukrainian military said it took control of the village of Volokhiv Yar in the Kharkiv region and aimed to advance toward strategically valuable town of Kupiansk, which would cut off Russian forces from key supply routes.
Pro-Russian authorities in the Kupiansk district announced that civilians were being evacuated toward the Russian-held region of Luhansk.
“The initial signs are positive and we see Ukraine making real, demonstrable progress in a deliberate way,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Brussels, a day after visiting Kyiv.
“But this is likely to go on for some significant period of time,” he said. “There are a huge number of Russian forces in Ukraine and unfortunately, tragically, horrifically, President (Vladimir) Putin has demonstrated that he will throw a lot of people into this at huge cost to Russia.”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who met with Blinken, said the war is “entering a critical phase.”
The gains “are modest and only the first successes of the counteroffensive of the Ukrainian army, but they are important both in terms of seizing the military initiative and raising the spirit of Ukrainian soldiers,” Mykola Sungurovsky, a military analyst at the Razumkov Center in Kyiv, told The Associated Press.
Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear operator, said Friday that repairs to outside electric lines at the Zaporizhzhia plant are impossible because of the shelling and that operating the plant in what is called an “island” status carries “the risk of violating radiation and fire safety standards.”
“Only the withdrawal of the Russians from the plant and the creation of a security zone around it can normalize the situation at the Zaporizhzhia NPP. Only then will the world be able to exhale,” Petro Kotin, the head of Energoatom, told Ukrainian TV.
Earlier, Kotin told The Associated Press that the plant’s only operating reactor “can be stopped completely” at any moment and as a consequence, the only power source would be a diesel generator.
There are 20 generators on site and enough diesel fuel for 10 days. After that, about 200 tons of diesel fuel would be needed daily for the generators, which he said is “impossible” while the plant is occupied by Russian forces.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Friday that there was little likelihood of reestablishing reliable offsite power lines to the plant.
“This is an unsustainable situation and is becoming increasingly precarious,” Grossi said, calling for an “immediate cessation of all shelling in the entire area” and the establishment of a nuclear safety and security protection zone.
“This is the only way to ensure that we do not face a nuclear accident,” he said.
Fighting continued Friday elsewhere in Ukraine.
Russian planes bombed the hospital in the town of Velika Pysarivka, on the border with Russia, said Dmytro Zhyvytskyi, governor of the Sumy region. he said the building was destroyed and there were an unknown number of casualties.
In the Donetsk region in the east — one of two that Russia declared to be sovereign states at the outset of the war — eight people were killed in the city of Bakhmut over the past day and the city is without water and electricity for the fourth straight day, said governor Pavlo Kyrylenko.
Four people were killed in shelling in the Kharkiv region, two of them in the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest, according to governor Oleh Syniehubov. The shelling of the city continued Friday afternoon, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said, wounding 10 people, including three children.
Ukraine this week claimed to have regained control of more than 20 settlements in the Kharkiv region, including the small city of Balakliya. Social media posts showed weeping, smiling Balakliya residents embracing Ukrainian soldiers.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Friday refused to comment on the alleged retaking of Balakliya, redirecting all such questions to the Russian Defense Ministry.
But Vitaly Ganchev, the Russian-installed official in the Kharkiv region, confirmed Friday that “Balakliya, in effect, is not under our control.” Ganchev said “tough battles” were continuing in the city and that Russian forces were attempting to expel the Ukrainian troops.
Helicopters and fighter jets streaked over the rolling plains of the eastern Donetsk region, with the jets heading in the direction of Izium, near where Ukrainian forces have been carrying out a counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region. The jets fired flares while black smoke billowed in the distance.
The Justice Department files an extraordinarily savvy response to the Trump judge’s “special master” order.
Today, the Justice Department made its first attempt to regain control over the classified documents.
In a motion asking Cannon to stay parts of her order, the Justice Department warns that the order risks “irreparable harm to our national security and intelligence interests” by sabotaging the intelligence community’s efforts to determine whether any of the sensitive information contained in the seized records has leaked beyond Trump. To understand why, you have to understand a bit about what makes Cannon’s order odd.
In her Monday order, Cannon ruled that she would appoint an official known as a “special master” to comb through the several boxes of documents the FBI seized from Trump’s Florida residence, and determine if any of those documents might be protected by attorney-client privilege or executive privilege. The FBI says it seized these documents from Mar-a-Lago as part of a criminal investigation into potential violations of several statutes prohibiting unauthorized retention of national security documents, including the Espionage Act. (Trump denies any wrongdoing.)
But that investigation hit a huge roadblock Monday, because Cannon also prohibited the Justice Department “from further review and use of any of the materials seized from Plaintiff’s residence ... for criminal investigative purposes” until the special master’s review is complete.
The DOJ’s motion seeks a partial stay of this order. It seeks permission to continue using the classified documents in its criminal investigation, as well as a ruling that the special master will not review the classified documents themselves.
Under the process that typically governs stays of a federal district court’s decisions, the DOJ must first ask Cannon to suspend parts of her order before it may ask a higher court for a stay. The DOJ indicated in its motion that it will seek such a stay from an appeals court “if the Court does not grant a stay by Thursday, September 15.” The government also formally announced on Thursday that it will appeal Cannon’s order.
The FBI says Cannon’s order undermines US national security
The FBI took several boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida residence, 103 of which had classified markings. According to the Washington Post, these papers include “a document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities.”
According to the Justice Department’s motion, assessing the “potential damage to our national security and intelligence interests” of having these documents remain insecure for so long is of “vital importance.”
Technically, Cannon’s order permitted the intelligence community to continue its investigation into whether Trump’s alleged theft of these classified documents harmed national security. But, as the Justice Department explains in its Thursday motion, “the ongoing Intelligence Community (‘IC’) classification review and assessment are closely interconnected with—and cannot be readily separated from—areas of inquiry of DOJ’s and the FBI’s ongoing criminal investigation.”
The FBI is both a law enforcement body and “part of the Intelligence Community,” the DOJ explains. Indeed, the FBI is the intelligence agency with primary responsibility for conducting intelligence investigations within the United States. For this reason, “the same personnel from the FBI involved in the criminal investigation were coordinating appropriately with the IC in its review and assessment.” And the FBI often relies on criminal investigative tools, such as grand jury subpoenas or search warrants, to conduct intelligence investigations.
Thus, the DOJ argues, preventing the FBI from conducting a criminal investigation into the classified documents also frustrates its intelligence investigation. As the DOJ explains, “any FBI agent or analyst who investigated whether the classified records were improperly accessed, for instance, would by definition be gathering information highly relevant to —and thus in furtherance of — ‘criminal investigative purposes.’”
The DOJ makes several very savvy concessions in its motion
In her Monday decision, Cannon gave several reasons why she believed that Trump should be able to seek the return of some of the seized documents, and then referred to these reasons as justification for appointing a special master. Cannon claimed, for example, that “at least a portion” of the seized records include “medical documents, correspondence related to taxes,” “accounting information,” and “material potentially subject to attorney-client privilege” that Trump may need for his personal business.
The Justice Department’s motion announces that it will make several concessions to Trump, in an apparent effort to take some of Cannon’s objections off the table. Specifically, the DOJ reveals that it “plans to make available to [Trump] copies of all unclassified documents recovered during the search — both personal records and government records — and that the government will return [Trump]’s personal items that were not commingled with classified records and thus are of likely diminished evidentiary value.”
Thus, Cannon will no longer be able to argue that the FBI has deprived Trump of access to his personal documents. And, by returning at least some of the non-classified documents, the DOJ will also reduce the number of records that a special master could review.
Cannon’s Monday order was highly unusual and rested on extraordinarily dubious legal reasoning. Among other things, Cannon argued that Trump is entitled to special protections that are not ordinarily afforded to other criminal suspects because he used to be president. So it remains to be seen whether any concessions by the DOJ — or any warnings that Cannon is endangering national security — could move this judge to reconsider her earlier approach.
If Cannon does not reconsider, the next move will be to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, where Trump appointees hold six of the court’s 11 active judgeships.
Starbucks is doing everything it can to stifle, delay, and repress the new union Starbucks Workers United — despite an order by a federal judge to cease and desist its myriad and repeated violations of labor law.
Last weekend, five workers were fired in Anderson, South Carolina. Three of them — Aneil Tripathi, Jon Hudson, and Rhi Greer — had taken part in a “march on the boss,” in which workers collectively present a set of demands to their manager, on August 1. The manager deemed the action “kidnapping” and “assault,” and pressed charges against the workers. They and eight others were suspended indefinitely when Tripathi, Hudson, and Greer were fired. “They’ve gone full throttle,” says Hudson, the former barista.
The workers were told by management that they were fired for being in the store after hours over a month ago. Tripathi, Hudson, Greer, and others had been getting the story ready for business the next shift after their second strike. “We were literally showing responsibility and helping the store,” says former shift supervisor Tripathi.
Two other baristas who had not been suspended were fired as well, for a total of five at the store — more than a quarter of its workforce. Workers at the Anderson store unanimously voted to unionize in late May and have since held two strikes in addition to a march on the boss.
In Westford, Massachusetts, two Starbucks workers at a recently unionized store lost their jobs because management decided to enforce a rule that workers need to be available during the academic year even if they are away. Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) Massachusetts said in a release, “Management has committed in the past to allowing students to remain on the payroll while away at school and enabling them to return to work during summer and winter breaks.”
The union argues that the move, as well as other steps like understaffing and “severe hour cuts” are retaliation for the store having unionized. In addition to cutting income, hours cuts can eliminate access to Starbucks’s health insurance. “I’ve been at this store for over a year and during that time many things have changed — unfortunately for the worst. We’ve lost many good partners and customers due to these changes,” said barista Vicky Coyne in the release. As a result, the Westford store’s workers went on strike over Labor Day weekend.
In Ithaca, an entire unionized store was shut down, ostensibly for safety reasons, and three workers were fired in August. SBWU has pointed out that union stores have been shut down at a disproportionate rate in recent months. One of the former Ithaca workers, Gwendolyn McKeon, was also fired for not expanding her availability. This happened even though, according to Evan Sunshine of Ithaca SBWU, Starbucks’s new availability policy is not enforceable at union stores. The remaining two Ithaca stores went on strike in late August for nearly a week to protest all three firings.
Two additional workers were fired in Buffalo last month: Sam Amato and Allegra Anastasi. Between the two, they had twenty years of work experience at Starbucks. SBWU says they were fired for union activity. In response, the union and its allies held an informational picket at the twenty Starbucks stores across the Buffalo region Tuesday.
There are now over two hundred company-run Starbucks stores unionized in the United States, but the rate at which new stores are unionizing has slowed in recent months from the pace of early 2022. This may be related to Starbucks’s union-busting.
For example, at the end of last year, the company sent about a hundred additional managers to the Buffalo market to assist in captive audience meetings, one-on-ones, and other tactics to sway baristas away from supporting the union. After that maneuver did not prevent the union from expanding nationally, Starbucks brought back anti-union CEO Howard Schultz for another tour of duty. Schultz had stepped away as CEO but helmed Starbucks when it originally pushed its workers to disband their existing unions decades ago.
Starbucks has also brought in union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson, established new policies or reinforced old ones that make selectively firing union supporters easier, set higher benefits and wages at nonunion and non-organizing stores, and attacked the National Labor Relations Board for allegedly siding with the union.
The latest firings show no shifts in Starbucks practices to stifle, delay, and repress the emergence of Starbucks Workers United, despite an order by a federal judge to cease and desist from violations of labor law.
But although the union’s growth has slowed, it’s winning victories and organizing more militant actions. The federal judge who issued the cease and desist to Starbucks also ordered reinstated the “Memphis 7,” seven workers who were fired for organizing in Tennessee. And in Boston, a store has been on open-ended strike for about seven weeks, by far the longest strike in Starbucks Workers United’s brief life.
The union is still winning elections at a strong clip even though the rate of filings has slowed. SBWU has won 85 percent of the elections that have been certified so far. Despite the company’s best efforts, Starbucks has not squeezed the life out of this union drive yet.
The Department of Homeland Security on Thursday said a new regulation for the “public charge” rule would go into effect in late December, although the Biden administration had already stopped applying the previous version last year.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement that the shift “ensures fair and humane treatment.”
“Consistent with America’s bedrock values, we will not penalize individuals for choosing to access the health benefits and other supplemental government services available to them,” he said.
The public charge regulation bars people from getting green cards if they would be burdens to the United States. For years prior to the Trump administration, that was interpreted as being primarily dependent on cash assistance, income maintenance or government support for long-term institutionalization.
But the Trump administration expanded the benefits to include non-cash assistance including food stamps and Medicaid. There were numerous legal challenges, but it was allowed to be implemented in 2020. Legal challenges went on, and in 2021, the Biden administration said it would not continue defending the rule.
Thursday's announcement was welcomed by immigrant advocates, who said the Trump administration’s expanded rule had created a hard atmosphere for those seeking legal residency.
“The public charge regulation caused such fear among immigrants who sought to legally apply for a green card that many chose to forego health care and vital economic support,” American Immigration Lawyers Association President Jeremy McKinney said in a statement.
“These changes to simplify and de-mystify the rule will truly change lives across our nation.”
The majority of Chileans voted against the proposed new constitution. How can we interpret the “no” vote’s significant victory?
How did a process that began with a historic level of support end up so truncated? What happened to the support for the constitutional process?
This constitutional process began on November 15, 2019. As a result of a massive social uprising in October that year, Chilean political parties across the political spectrum reached an agreement, setting a timeline for drafting a new constitution. The first milestone in this timeline was a plebiscite in which the overwhelming majority—more than 78 percent—of Chileans voted to replace the existing constitution and elect a Convention responsible for the rewriting. These results were truly impressive, not just for the high percentage but also for the geographic distribution of votes. Just five of the country’s 346 comunas (municipalities) voted against the constitutional process. These five municipalities included the three iconic Santiago comunas where the national economic elite reside. Many rushed to point out how the results indicated that the country was not polarized between the right and the left but that the real division was between the pueblo (people) and the elite. This image of a homogeneous pueblo clashing with the elite crystallized in references to “the three comunas,” which became part of the common lexicon in political discussions.
Agreements in Congress guaranteed that the Constitutional Convention would be made up of an equal number of men and women, with quotas for Indigenous peoples, and, in keeping with the fierce anti-party sentiments of the October 2019 protests, with opportunities for independent candidates. Specifically, candidates with no party affiliation were allowed to form independent slates, like candidates of traditional parties.
The election of the Convention members was a blow to those who hoped for a return to pre-uprising politics. The two traditionally powerful political coalitions had meager results. The right received a paltry 20 percent of votes, leaving it far from reaching the third of Convention members required for potential veto power. The center-left coalition saw its center and more moderate forces collapse. Perhaps the most well-known example of this crisis was the Democracia Cristiana, which only managed to elect one member—the party president—to the Convention. But by far, the greatest accomplishment of these elections was the resounding success of the independents associated with the 2019 protest movement. Of the 155 members of the Constitutional Convention, 103 had no traditional political affiliation. Thus, the final composition of the Convention had a clear majority representation from progessive sectors, especially new political forces that had emerged from the social uprising raising the banners of feminism, Indigenous rights, and a strong anti-elite discourse.
Public excitement at the beginning of the process ran very high: when describing what they felt about the process, 52 percent named “hope” as the primary emotion, followed by “happiness” with 46 percent. So what happened to this 78 percent support and the hope and happiness regarding the process? Progressive and leftist forces will likely spend the next few years trying to answer that question.
Preliminary Reasons for the Defeat
As more data becomes available and the debate advances, a closer analysis of what happened will develop. For now, there are three reasons that stand out as explanations for the September 4 outcome: 1) The rejection of the politics of performance in the Convention; 2) The association of the Convention with traditional politics; 3) The reaction of traditional identities to the power that marginalized identities held in the process.
One of the issues that dominated the debate was the politics of “performance” in the Convention. Before long, the Constitutional Convention began to lose support, especially among right-wing voters who were wary of it as a kind of caucus of activists for progressive causes. If for activists stopping mobilizations, even from within the halls of power, was a betrayal, then for some voters, especially those who value order, unending mobilization was a nightmare.
Several Convention members achieved fame and social legitimacy for their street performances, which included costumes and provocative declarations about aspects of traditional identities. These street protests often denounced the authorities with shouts and chants. However, the same attitudes that were perceived in the streets as defiance, were seen within the Convention and from the seats of power in another light. In addition, the ethos of social mobilization that persisted in the Convention tainted many of its actions with a testimonial sentiment. For some members, it was important to present maximalist, bold, and symbolic proposals, even though they did not have the votes to be approved. For example, one member proposed dissolving all the powers of the state and replacing them with assembly-style bodies. The media amplified these performative acts and unreasonable proposals, which were also highlighted by disinformation campaigns on social media. Videos of these declarations also frequently appeared in the Rechazo campaign and TV programming. What in the beginning appeared bold and beautiful ended up creating uneasiness.
The association of Convention politics with traditional politics occurred in the context of a strong push for radical and anti-establishment politics. According to the Center for Public Studies, the percentage of the population that identified with a specific party fell from 53 percent in 2006 to 19 percent in 2019. Moreover, some studies have indicated that a significant portion—12.9 percent—of the population has taken on a position against the “traditional” parties as their primary identity. The strength of the Convention was that, in the beginning, it was seen as distinct from traditional politics.
It is possible that, ironically, the Convention’s performance politics and testimonial squabbles actually resembled Congress and traditional politics, where these practices also abound. In any case, the use and abuse of these practices did not help Convention members appear any more effective than traditional politicians at reaching agreements and carrying out citizen demands . Meanwhile, amid the constitutional process, there was a presidential election and a change in government. The new administration, particularly former congressional representative Gabriel Boric, was closely associated with the genesis of the constitutional process. Thus, opposing the constitutional process became a form of opposing the new government, and part of the energy against political institutions shifted to the Rechazo side.
The reaction of traditional identities especially pertains to the first article of the draft constitution, which enshrined Chile as a “social and democratic state with rule of law,” which is also “plurinational, intercultural, and ecological.” Together with the definition of Chile as plurinational, the article recognized collective rights for Indigenous peoples and would have installed an Indigenous justice system.
The most cited reason for rejecting the draft constitution was the negative view of Convention members, followed by the issue of plurinationality. After the draft constitution was presented, the plurinational state and the creation of an Indigenous justice system were the proposals with the most disapproval, according to a poll by independent think tank Espacio Público-IPSOS. In this way, the Rechazo sector managed to consolidate support around traditional Chilean identities that felt threatened by the notion of plurinationality. This was reinforced by some Convention members’ actions and performances, including disparaging actions and comments concerning the national anthem, the flag, and other patriotic symbols. Although these positions were not expressed in the draft constitution, they served as munitions for the Rechazo campaign.
The Second Plebiscite
The alignment of Chile’s political forces for the September 4 exit plebiscite came as no surprise. All the parties from the Democracia Cristiana to the left sided with Apruebo, although some leaders rebelled against the official position. All right-wing parties supported Rechazo. Within both camps, however, there was variation.
Early on, differences emerged between those who supported rejecting the draft to maintain the existing constitution with a few minor reforms and those who preferred an entirely new process to create another draft. As the campaign advanced, the latter became the leading voices of the Rechazo campaign.
On the Apruebo side, there was disagreement about what would have occurred during the implementation of the draft constitution, if the country voted to approve it. However, as Apruebo trailed Rechazo in the polls, the official parties that supported Apruebo became open to the idea of making changes to the draft. They accepted that revisions were necessary to mitigate public concerns, like the resentment about implementing plurinationality. This view was reinforced by a series of surveys showing that Apruebo remained far behind Rechazo and that the majority of Apruebo supporters believed the draft constitution would require modifications after being approved. Well into the campaign and with different levels of enthusiasm, these parties signed an agreement to carry out these proposals after the plebiscite.
Ultimately, the plebiscite that had only two options on the ballot ended up being about four choices: approve, approve to reform, reject, and reject to restart. In one of the final polls carried out by Cadem, 17 percent of those surveyed were in favor of simply rejecting, 35 percent of rejecting to restart, 32 percent of approving to reform, and only 12 percent of approving and implementing the original draft constitution.
The “no” vote in the September 4 plebiscite was very different from the initial plebiscite on whether to rewrite the constitution. This wasn’t only because the rejection was larger, but also because it permeated more sectors of society than just the “three comunas.” According to polls, Rechazo was leading without significant differences across socioeconomic levels, and the September 4 vote confirmed this trend. In the Santiago metropolitan region’s poor and working class comunas, Apruebo should have swept the vote but only managed victories by small margins.
There was a difference, however, in the ideological profile of voters, with Apruebo winning comfortably among those who identify with the left. Rechazo was for the most part those who identify with the right and center, and people who do not identify with either the left or right. There was also a significant difference in votes by age; Apruebo was victorious among youth between 18 and 30, while Rechazo won among all other age ranges. Thus, unlike in the initial plebiscite, the Rechazo campaign managed to create a more diverse social and political alliance than Apruebo.
Why Did Rechazo Win?
At this point there are two interpretations—which, incidentally, are not mutually exclusive—for the decrease in support for Apruebo and increase for Rechazo: the first emphasizes the “average voter,” which assumes an abrupt break from the ethos of the 2019 uprising; the other points to the reaction of traditional identities that united against the draft constitution and presumably recognizes that the uprising was clearly anti-elite but not necessarily “leftist.”
In the first interpretation, the initial plebiscite and the vote for Convention members were marked by the dispute between the people and the elite. This configuration of political power mostly erased the distinctions between the left and right and between the diverse interests and visions of the public. However, according to this interpretation, the dispute between “above” and “below” has ended, and, in its place, the classic conflicts between the left and right have returned. According to some polls, the Rechazo campaign was associated with combating drug trafficking and economic growth, while Apruebo was correlated with the redistribution of wealth through social rights, positions typically associated with the right and left, respectively.
What this perspective implies is that the current constitution is to the right of the average voter, while the failed draft constitution is to the left. This would explain the success of the options “reject to restart” and “approve to reform.” Ultimately, according to this interpretation, the plebiscite was won in the center of the political spectrum. This theory also supposes that the main shortcoming of the constitutional process was the lack of agreement with the Convention’s right on key topics, like the political system. In keeping with this idea, 77 percent of people surveyed said they preferred that Convention members reach agreements, even if it meant yielding in certain areas. Meanwhile, 61 percent thought that Convention members had not budged in their positions.
The second interpretation assumes that the ethos of conflict between “above” and “below” persisted, but that, over the course of the process, the anti-elite position shifted to the right. The events that occurred during the past two years allowed the right to contest the left’s long standing monopoly on popular defiance, and, even more significantly, indignation. Instead of strengthening the moderate center, what occurred was a reinforcement and politicization of traditional social identities.
From this perspective, the success of the non-polar positions—“approve to reform” and “reject to restart”—indicates that many citizens have complex social identities that don’t clearly map onto the current political conflict. As Government and Politics professor Lilliana Mason explains, when the supporters of a political stance are clearly socially homogenous, affective polarization tends to result. On the other hand, the existence of complex identities fosters depolarization. In other words, it is possible that, for many people, their partisan identities of class, religion, age, ethnicity, or place of residence were tugged in opposite directions for this plebiscite, pushing people towards center positions in the debate.
According to this view, the main failure of the constitutional process was the inability to incorporate these traditional identities into the symbolic process of creating a new magna carta. In particular, they needed to find a way to present plurinationalism within the framework of inclusive patriotic sentiment. This is certainly conspicuous in the most intemperate declarations by Convention members and in performances that, when executed from a place of power instead of opposition, seemed derogatory towards people with traditional national identities. There are also concrete constitutional norms that could have been written to more clearly explain equality within the context of diversity. For example, the limits of the justice system and autonomy for Indigenous peoples could have been more explicit.
The Third is Defeated
There appears to be a relatively broad consensus that a constitutional stalemate is not a viable option. Moreover, there seems to be some agreement that a new constitutional process must include citizen participation. This will likely also involve the creation of a new Convention and another plebiscite to ratify a new draft constitution. It is thus highly probable that Chile will face a third constitutional plebiscite in a few months.
The exact form that this process will take remains to be seen, and, beyond the interests at play, it will depend on which of the described analyses ultimately rings true. If the Rechazo win is seen as a product of the demand for greater center-moderate presence and more dialogue between the left and right, then the tension will be around the options for independent candidates. One aspect that defies this assessment is the anti-party sentiment that has existed for the last two years. According to a Criteria survey, 82 percent of those polled prefer that members of a new Convention not belong to any party, with no significant statistical difference compared to October 2020. However, the same poll shows that the preference for “experts” has grown from 63 percent to 80 percent. In contrast, support for “ordinary people'' dropped from 37 percent to 20 percent. This complicates the interpretation of conflict between “above” and “below” and could reinforce the idea of seeking a Convention more inclined to agreement.
If, on the other hand, the analysis emphasizes the identity conflict, it will call into question how many seats should be reserved for Indigenous groups in the process. It is also likely that a new process will be marked by greater care for patriotic symbols. A clear shift in this regard can be seen near the end of the original constitutional process: it was not for nothing that the Chilean flag was selected as the symbol of the draft constitution.
The challenge facing Chilean politics is to reach a new agreement that will finally allow for the creation of a new draft constitution with broad and cross-cutting popular support. In doing so, it will be important to remember how quickly the hope and support for a process can plummet if expectations are betrayed.
BP, ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, and TotalEnergies are pouring billions into unfounded, positive climate spin, a new report finds.
The analysis from InfluenceMap, a UK-based climate think-tank, found that an average of 60% of 2021 public communications from the five companies contained at least one “green” claim. For instance, that the company is moving away from polluting fuels toward a renewable future. Or that that company is supporting reduced emissions. In contrast, less than a quarter of communication materials promoted oil and gas directly.
The report estimates that, combined, these companies are spending about $750 million annually on their climate messaging. Further, the authors point out that “this should be viewed as a conservative estimate of the total resources allocated to climate-related PR and marketing, as it does not include the use of any external agencies for PR, marketing, and advertising.”
Yet notably, while hyping up a supposed climate-friendly shift, oil company investments remained firmly in the realm of fossil fuels. Just 12%, on average, of the corporations’ projected 2022 capital expenditures are forecast to go toward “low carbon” activities, according to InfluenceMap. Note: Low carbon investment basically means money spent on developing energy sources other than oil and gas, and can still include greenhouse-gas emitting fuels, like blue hydrogen.
In other words, five of the largest fossil fuel producers are staying committed to the energy strategy that’s given us climate change in the first place, while outwardly projecting a façade of environmental good. And all at a time where the necessity of combatting climate change and ceasing fossil fuel reliance has never been more apparent.
Not to mention, this has been a banner year for Exxon and Chevron’s profits, as they benefit from global discord and the resulting inflated fuel and energy prices.
Communications spending is part of a “systematic campaign to portray themselves as pro-climate to the public,” Faye Holder, InfluenceMap program manager, told CNN. “In the meantime, what we see is continued investment into this unsustainable energy system — predominantly for fossil fuels.”
To come to their conclusions, the report authors looked at 3,421 items of public communications material from 2021, including marketing, public relations, and policy engagement actions. They further analyzed company staffing data to come up with estimates on the cost of all of that communication.
Separately, the think-tank assessed the amount of money each company is reportedly expected to spend on green investments this year. And the resulting disconnect is striking, albeit not particularly surprising.
Oil companies like Exxon have a long history of greenwashing and deceptive advertising, meant to obscure their actual, worldwide environmental harms. These corporations spent decades on coordinated campaigns to combat climate science and spread disinformation, and they still are. Recently, Chevron has even gone as far as to start its own “newsroom,” spreading local news and propaganda in Texas.
These companies are “misrepresenting their primary business operations by overemphasizing energy transition technologies,” says the report. The authors further add that their “findings raise serious and persistent questions for regulators and the companies’ shareholders, as well as PR and advertising agencies, the media, and social media platforms that work with the companies.”
Of the companies examined, Shell had the largest discrepancy between “saying” and “doing”—spending only 10% of its capital expenditures on “low carbon” work, while making “green claims” in 70% of its public communications. ExxonMobil wasn’t far behind, spending only 8% on its self-proclaimed green investments, while putting dubious climate declarations in 65% of its communications.
Of all five corporations, the French-owned TotalEnergies was projected to spend the most on its energy transition, with a quarter of its 2022 capital expenditures slated for “low carbon” investment.
Aside from TotalEnergies, all four companies were found by InfluenceMap to be lobbying for the development of new fossil fuel infrastructure and extraction.
Gizmodo reached out for comment to each of the five fossil fuel companies and did not immediately receive a response. However the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. trade group which BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell are all members, directed Gizmodo to its “Climate Action Framework.”
Megan Bloomgren, an API communications exec, also told Gizmodo the following in an emailed statement:
API member companies continue to make investments towards innovation, research, and best practices to further reduce GHG emissions and tackle the climate challenge. In reality, the International Energy Agency estimates that natural gas and oil will account for nearly half of the global energy mix by 2040 even if all 193 parties meet their Paris-based climate commitments. Our industry has contributed to the significant progress the U.S. has made in reducing America’s CO2 emissions to near generational lows with the increased use of natural gas.
Important to state: natural gas is still a deeply polluting fossil fuel. The Paris Agreement benchmarks are not nearly enough to stave off catastrophic global warming. And counter to what API says, we can’t keep extracting coal, oil, and gas, even from already developed mines and wells, if we want to avoid the worst-case scenarios.
One 2022 report from Oil Change International estimated that about half of all fossil fuels that could be pulled out of the ground with current infrastructure need to stay there, if we’re going to have any chance of avoiding temperature rise over 2 degrees Celsius.
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