Saudi Arabia actively blocked sinking island nations and other small countries facing climate catastrophe from foregrounding their problems at the Bonn climate summit that just wrapped up.

Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists has been attending the summit and wrote,

"During the negotiations, Saudi Arabia blocked substantive discussions called for by a large number of vulnerable developing countries on the implications of the Intergovernmental Panel on the Climate Change Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees Celsius released last October. But while they may have succeeded in short-circuiting formal discussion of the report, the Saudis can't prevent scientific fact from continuing to drive the heightened awareness amongst governments"

Climate change denialism, in other words, is trying to take over the very international vehicle for addressing our climate emergency.

Most of the governments meeting at Bonn sought implementation of the Paris climate accord and made preparations for the COP 25 climate conference this coming December in Santiago, Chile. Saudi Arabia was there only as a spoiler, since it is the world's top petroleum exporter and is single-handedly responsible for 11% of the global emissions from the transportation sector. That is, this one country is helping wreck our planet with its poisoned product, and it wouldn't even let the island nations it is sending to Davy Jones' locker so much as complain about it.

Meyer notes that Trump's breach of the Paris Agreement meant that he pulled $2 billion in funding for climate initiatives, and that he left the US delegation ineffective. It is state governors, some businesses, and civil society who now carry on work on the Paris Accord, not the US federal government, which is pushing dirty, destructive coal.

If any of this makes you angry, there are ways to fight back against Saudi Arabia. The next time you buy a car, if you can afford it, make it electric. Or switch to public transport. Saudi Arabia's oil is actually worthless because it is toxic to our planet, but the markets bestow on it a value because people are still driving gasoline cars. We need to get off gasoline if we are to pull the plug on the sinister forces, whether domestic like the Koch brothers, or international like Saudi Arabia, which are putting the only earth we have into a pressure cooker and turning up the flames.

(c) 2019 Juan R.I. Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf and South Asia and has given numerous media interviews on the war on terrorism and the Iraq War. He lived in various parts of the Muslim world for nearly 10 years and continues to travel widely there. He speaks Arabic, Farsi and Urdu.

Investors are pondering where to put their money this week after the sudden decline in the assessed value of presidential candidate Joe Biden.

On Wall Street and in other corporate quarters where financiers were heavily invested in Biden, hopes have eroded in recent days amid reduced investor confidence. Some prominent donors began to openly question the wisdom of devoting more capital to the national marketing campaign for the former vice president.

After the leading blue chip closed sharply lower at the end of last week, even declaring "my time is up," many top investors felt overexposed and looked for shelter. Gathering new topline data and considering several prospectuses that had been previously submitted, investors are now reassessing assets and liabilities as well as potential growth in market share during the next quarter and beyond.

Venture capitalists, hedge fund managers, powerful CEOs and other wealthy individuals-sensing a political emergency that may require swift and decisive action-are moving to widen financing spigots for Kamala Harris. With contingency planning, there is elevated interest in Pete Buttigieg. One previously hot startup, Beto O'Rourke, is now considered to be too underperforming to warrant reinvestment.

The overarching goals are to quickly shore up capitalization of aligned political products and to implement sustained brand enhancement. While great appreciation remains for Biden's nearly five decades of massive financial benefits to investors, some have concluded that he is now unreliable in view of current political turbulence.

Yet Biden is hardly in penny-stock territory. Many rich investors remain bullish on the former vice president. Politico reported Sunday that "sources say Biden walked away with a $1 million haul after two fund-raisers in San Francisco alone this weekend." One of those gatherings drew about 200 wealthy guests to the backyard of a former Twitter vice president for global media, Katie Jacobs Stanton.

But an erstwhile Biden fundraiser, Tom McInerney, didn't show up at the Stanton poolside event, even though he was listed on the invitation. McInerney, who was a member of Biden's national finance committee, said he notified the Biden campaign on June 20 that he would no longer fundraise for it, citing the candidate's recent fond comments about segregationist senators. (Actually, Biden had been on the record for many years with such warm reminiscences. And in a report first published on April 11, CNN had exposed Biden's letters to racist senators in 1977 and 1978, seeking support for his legislation against school busing for desegregation.)

Quoting McInerney as saying that "I would imagine I'm not alone," CNBC reported on the day after Biden's debate pratfall: "While McInerney is the first financier to publicly withdraw his support after Biden's controversial round of comments, the loss is significant because it could be a harbinger of further defections."

Overall, market conditions have abruptly changed, in the midst of fierce competition for big-investor dollars.

The New York Times did some candid reporting in mid-June under the headline "Wall Street Donors Are Swooning for Mayor Pete. (And They Like Biden and Harris, Too.)" The story explained that "the behind-the-scenes competition for Wall Street money in the 2020 presidential race is reaching a fevered peak . . . as no less than nine Democrats are holding New York fund-raisers in a span of nine day." And, "with millions of dollars on the line, top New York donors are already beginning to pick favorites, and three candidates are generating most of the buzz"-Biden, Harris and Buttigieg.

The Times reported: "Interviews with two dozen top contributors, fund-raisers and political advisers on Wall Street and beyond revealed that while many are still hedging their bets, those who care most about picking a winner are gravitating toward Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, while donors are swooning over Mr. Buttigieg enough to open their wallets and bundling networks for him."

At the same time, the newspaper noted, "Not everyone is chasing Wall Street cash: Two candidates in the top tier of polls, [Bernie] Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have railed against the financial industry and opted against the kind of fancy fund-raisers with catering and $2,800 admission prices that lubricate the donor industry."

The antipathy is mutual: Wall Streeters understand that Sanders and Warren would be bad investments anyway.

In sharp contrast, the Times summarized a bit of the investment frenzy: "Hamilton E. James, the executive vice chairman of Blackstone and a top fund-raiser, hosted Mr. Buttigieg at his home on Thursday. The short-selling hedge fund manager James Chanos will hold an event for Mr. Biden on Monday. And on Tuesday, Marc Lasry, the hedge fund manager and co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, is gathering checks for Ms. Harris. Co-hosts of that event include Blair W. Effron, an investment bank co-founder and an influential Democratic financier, and Ray McGuire, vice chairman of Citigroup."

Deep-pocket investors are lined up from coast to coast. The night before she gave a speech at the California Democratic Party convention a month ago, Kamala Harris held a campaign fund-raiser at the San Francisco home of oil billionaires Ann and Gordon Getty, with the price of admission reportedly up to $28,000. While Harris was attending that fund-raiser, the San Francisco Chronicle observed, "Sanders was stopping by the Latino and labor caucuses at the convention."

For his part, Biden skipped the California state party convention entirely. But the same weekend, he sent top aides to the same city to meet with "more than two dozen bundlers-people who raise money from high-dollar donors-at the San Francisco home of Sandy Robertson, co-founder of private equity firm Francisco Partners," CNBC reported. "Other financiers at the private huddle included Richard Blum, an investment banker and husband of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein; veteran trial lawyer Joseph Cotchett; Steve Westly, founder of tech investment firm the Westly Group; Denise Bauer, former U.S. ambassador to Belgium; and Wade Randlett, the president of Dashboard Technology."

Eager for lucrative stability in the electoral marketplace, corporate Democratic investors are keen to block threats to their dominance from the Sanders and Warren campaigns. Now that Joe Biden is looking shaky-with a damaged brand and a faltering business plan-prudence requires a new set of calculations. Biden may have outlived his usefulness. If "politics ain't beanbag," neither is political investment.

The following essay was prepared for the 30th annual convention of NCOBRA, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, held June 20 - 23 in Detroit.

2017 is the year that reparations definitively became a "mainstream" issue - meaning, serious candidates for president have been compelled to discuss the need to repair the historical and ongoing damage inflicted on Black people with the complicity of the United States government. Solid majorities of African Americans support reparations in principle: 64 percent, according to a Business Insider poll taken in March of this year, a statistically significant increase over Black pro-reparations sentiment measured in 2014 (59 percent, according to a YouGov survey), 2015 (52 percent, CNN) and 2016 (58 percent, Marist Poll). The Business Insider poll shows that 25 percent of whites, 37 percent of Asian Americans and 42 percent of Hispanics favor reparations - not enough to sway a national referendum on reparations, but almost certainly constituting a majority of the Democratic Party base, 25 percent of which is Black.

These numbers are extremely encouraging, in that they give national political legitimacy to the principle of reparations, which political scientist Michael Dawson writes "has been a central theme of Black political life," and now seems destined to become a staple of the Democratic half of the U.S. electoral duopoly. With a companion bill in the Senate, introduced by New Jersey's Cory Booker in April of this year, the H.R. 40 reparations study measure is now a "real" piece of legislation that can be lobbied in both chambers of Congress. In addition to Booker, presidential candidates Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi Gabbard and Julian Castro claim to favor reparations, although none of their proposals measure up to even a narrow semantic definition of the word. It is enough, for now, that these politicians acknowledge that a debt is owed to Black people. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has a real chance of becoming president, says he will sign a reparations study bill if it comes across his desk. But he resists endorsing reparations, asking CNN's Wolf Blitzer: "What does that mean? What do they mean? I don't think anyone's been very clear."

It's an honest and sincere question - and one that can only be answered by Black people in the process of a Great Black Reparations Debate. Only Black people can put meat on the bare bones principle of reparations in America. As Frederick Douglass said, "the man who has suffered the wrong is the man to demand redress-the man STRUCK is the man to CRY OUT."

Reparations - repair - must mean measures that are transformative, that lift Black people up from the bottom of the socio-economic-political barrel that the United States government and white society have methodically placed us in through centuries of criminal acts. The runaway slave who joined the Union Army and was part of the unit that captured his former master's plantation was clear on what reparations meant to him. "Bottom rail on top this time, Massah."

The United States was built on the foundation of Black people as the bottom rail -- and keeping them there. In an endemically racist society, we are the institutional definition of the bottom. The mission of genuine reparations must be to eliminate the "bottom" altogether - otherwise, a hostile white society will push Black people back into our "place," once again.

Resources are important, and any reparations scheme that does not have a price tag in the many trillions is an insult to the living and the dead. According to one estimate, the Federal Reserve bank bailout amounted to $29 trillion - to save the criminals that caused the economic collapse! Redressing crimes against the Black people whose unpaid labor created America's wealth is at least as large a project. But reparations is more than material resources; it is the power to use those resources for the betterment of one's people, and to be secure in not being victimized again by the historical oppressor. It means Black self-determination, without which "democracy" is a sham and a farce.

The Great Black Reparations Debate must reach into every nook and cranny of Black America, examining every aspect of Black life in this country -- as well as debating Black Americans' relationship with the rest of the African Diaspora and the world. It is up to Black people - the one's who have been struck! - to propose the programs and structures that not only emancipate us from the bottom, but that effectively abolish such substrata.

Folks need to be instructed to stop asking white or Black politicians to come up with a reparations plan - that's a task reserved collectively for African Americans, after long and exhaustive debate. The United States was built on stolen land and stolen labor. Those are the crimes that must be redressed. Any reparations proposal that leaves current U.S. social, economic and political structures intact only perpetuates the crime and guarantees a relapse into the abyss. The Great Black Reparations Debate must begin before passage of H.R. 40. Ideally, the Black debate should inform those delegated by Congress to study the reparations question. More likely, a Black community that is energized and aroused by the debate will wind up rebuking the politicians, including most of the Black ones, for treating the reparations issue as a chance to declare a symbolic victory for Black people, like the Dr. King holiday. But that's the most African Americans can expect if we fail to organize a Black-wide debate that involves, literally, millions of our people. We're already late.

Black opponents of reparations like political scientist Adolph Reed argue that reparations may be appealing, but isn't worth investing lots of political capital because the non-Black majority of the U.S. will never support truly transformative repair. That's certainly true, if we assume that today's pitiful level of independent Black political mobilization is permanent. Forty million Black people can't change a damn thing unless they argue collectively about what is to be done, and then organize to do it. The Great Black Reparations Debate can be the extended, independent forum for Black people to re-imagine themselves and their place in the nation and the world, and to act collectively to build a new society - one that is fit for our people's habitation. Once such a mobilization is underway, it really doesn't much matter what the corporate servants on Capitol Hill think reparations should look like - because Black people will have our own vision and plan.

In his book Black Visions, Dr. Michael Dawson analyzes the results of an exhaustive political survey of African Americans that he oversaw in 1994. The survey showed that a majority of Black people, while not in favor of politically separating from the United States, nevertheless see Black America as a "nation within a nation." A Great Black Reparations Debate -- actually, a mass discussion of our collective future - is a chance for Black America to start acting like that "nation within a nation."

As Attorney General William Barr releases Robert Mueller's long-anticipated report into Russian interference in the 2016 election, we speak with world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky about what he sees as the political perils of "Russiagate."

AMY GOODMAN: Can you share your analysis of President Trump? You have lived through so many presidents. Explain President Trump to us and assess the massive response to him.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, Trump is-you know, I think there are a number of illusions about Trump. If you take a look at the Trump phenomenon, it's not very surprising. Think back for the last 10 or 15 years over Republican Party primaries, and remember what happened during the primaries. Each primary, when some candidate rose from the base, they were so outlandish that the Republican establishment tried to crush them and succeeded in doing it-Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum. Anyone who was coming out of the base was totally unacceptable to the establishment. The change in 2016 is they couldn't crush him.

But the interesting question is: Why was this happening? Why, in election after election, was the voting base producing a candidate utterly intolerable to the establishment? And the answer to that is-if you think about that, the answer is not very hard to discover. During the-since the 1970s, during this neoliberal period, both of the political parties have shifted to the right. The Democrats, by the 1970s, had pretty much abandoned the working class. I mean, the last gasp of more or less progressive Democratic Party legislative proposals was the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978, which Carter watered down so that it had no teeth, just became voluntary. But the Democrats had pretty much abandoned the working class. They became pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans. Meanwhile, the Republicans shifted so far to the right that they went completely off the spectrum. Two of the leading political analysts of the American Enterprise Institute, Thomas Mann, Norman Ornstein, about five or 10 years ago, described the Republican Party as what they called a "radical insurgency" that has abandoned parliamentary politics.

Well, why did that happen? It happened because the Republicans face a difficult problem. They have a primary constituency, a real constituency: extreme wealth and corporate power. That's who they have to serve. That's their constituency. You can't get votes that way, so you have to do something else to get votes. What do you do to get votes? This was begun by Richard Nixon with the Southern strategy: try to pick up racists in the South. The mid-1970s, Paul Weyrich, one of the Republican strategists, hit on a brilliant idea. Northern Catholics voted Democratic, tended to vote Democratic, a lot of them working-class. The Republicans could pick up that vote by pretending-crucially, "pretending"-to be opposed to abortion. By the same pretense, they could pick up the evangelical vote. Those are big votes-evangelicals, northern Catholics. Notice the word "pretense." It's crucial. You go back to the 1960s, every leading Republican figure was strongly, what we call now, pro-choice. The Republican Party position was-that's Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, all the leadership-their position was: Abortion is not the government's business; it's private business-government has nothing to say about it. They turned almost on a dime in order to try to pick up a voting base on what are called cultural issues. Same with gun rights. Gun rights become a matter of holy writ because you can pick up part of the population that way. In fact, what they've done is put together a coalition of voters based on issues that are basically, you know, tolerable to the establishment, but they don't like it. OK? And they've got to hold that, those two constituencies, together. The real constituency of wealth and corporate power, they're taken care of by the actual legislation.

So, if you look at the legislation under Trump, it's just lavish gifts to the wealth and the corporate sector-the tax bill, the deregulation, you know, every case in point. That's kind of the job of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, those guys. They serve the real constituency. Meanwhile, Trump has to maintain the voting constituency, with one outrageous position after another that appeals to some sector of the voting base. And he's doing it very skillfully. As just as a political manipulation, it's skillful. Work for the rich and the powerful, shaft everybody else, but get their votes-that's not an easy trick. And he's carrying it off.

And, I should say, the Democrats are helping him. They are. Take the focus on Russiagate. What's that all about? I mean, it was pretty obvious at the beginning that you're not going to find anything very serious about Russian interference in elections. I mean, for one thing, it's undetectable. I mean, in the 2016 election, the Senate and the House went the same way as the executive, but nobody claims there was Russian interference there. In fact, you know, Russian interference in the election, if it existed, was very slight, much less, say, than interference by, say, Israel. Israel, the prime minister, Netanyahu, goes to Congress and talks to a joint session of Congress, without even informing the White House, to attack Obama's policies. I mean, that's dramatic interference with elections. Whatever the Russians tried, it's not going to be anything like that. And, in fact, there's no interference in elections that begins to compare with campaign funding. Remember that campaign funding alone gives you a very high prediction of electoral outcome. It's, again, Tom Ferguson's major work which has shown this very persuasively. That's massive interference in elections. Anything the Russians might have done is going to be, you know, peanuts in comparison. As far as Trump collusion with the Russians, that was never going to amount to anything more than minor corruption, maybe building a Trump hotel in Red Square or something like that, but nothing of any significance.

The Democrats invested everything in this issue. Well, turned out there was nothing much there. They gave Trump a huge gift. In fact, they may have handed him the next election. That's just a-that's a matter of being so unwilling to deal with fundamental issues, that they're looking for something on the side that will somehow give political success. The real issues are different things. They're things like climate change, like global warming, like the Nuclear Posture Review, deregulation. These are real issues. But the Democrats aren't going after those. They're looking for something else-the Democratic establishment. I'm not talking about the young cohort that's coming in, which is quite different. Just all of that has to be shifted significantly, if there's going to be a legitimate political opposition to the right-wing drift that's taking place. And it can happen, can definitely happen, but it's going to take work.

AMY GOODMAN: The world-renowned linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky, speaking at the Old South Church in Boston last Thursday night.