CLIMATE CHANGE

This dissonance on climate issues seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Major cable news networks mentioned climate change a whopping two times during their coverage of the historically deadly 2017 hurricane season, and frequently devoted more airtime to pressing issues like Roseanne Barr’s tweets. MSNBC host Chris Hayes once noted that climate change is a “palpable ratings killer.” This may or may not be true, but if outlets actually took their duty of public accountability seriously, they would empower journalists and television producers to incorporate climate change into stories that warrant it.

GENEVIEVE LEIGH—What the whole operation confirms is that the DSA and Ocasio-Cortez have no fundamental differences with Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership. Pelosi has been the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives for 16 years. She has overseen all the crimes of the Democratic Party for a decade and a half, including the draconian immigration policies of the Obama administration, which resulted in the deportation of more immigrants than any president in history. She was driven out of her own press conference last year by pro-immigrant activists chanting “Democrats are deporters!”

It is the outcome of the thorough-going degeneration, under the impact of economic crisis and boiling social tensions, of the bourgeois democratic order established 30 years ago this month with the adoption of the 1988 constitution. The process of transition from military dictatorship to civilian rule was touted by its stewards as “slow, gradual and secure.” It assured a blanket amnesty to the assassins and torturers of the Brazilian military and a defense of the property and profits of the capitalists who had supported the dictatorship.

ERIC SCHECHTER—As I’ve already mentioned, people aren’t basically greedy and selfish. But our current culture certainly trains those traits into us. They’re built into the so-called “American dream”: You keep your stuff in your house, I keep my stuff in my house, and we’re taught that we don’t need to care about each other. Shootings in schools and shopping malls have become commonplace.

GEORGE MONBIOT—Tony Jones asked Plimer to respond. His answer ranged from the correspondence we had had, to my absence of qualifications, to Roman warming, medieval warming, to the Met Office saying the UK would have a barbeque summer this year, to the temperature 4,000 years ago – in fact any temperature series except the one he was asked about. Whenever I pressed him to answer the question, Plimer said it was “the height of bad manners” to interrupt him. When Jones pushed him again, he started talking about wheat farming in Greenland and grapes in Roman Britain. In my quarter century as a journalist I have never seen anyone go to such lengths to avoid answering a simple point.