This past week, I released the name of every one of these Georgia voters Kemp flushed from voter rolls in 2017. If you're a Georgia resident, check the list. If your name is on it, re-register right now. You only have through tomorrow (October 9).

It's no coincidence that Georgia's Purge'n General is also running for Governor: The Republican candidate is fighting a dead-even race against Stacey Abrams, Democratic House Minority Leader. Abrams, if she wins, would become the first Black woman governor in US history.

Suspiciously, Kemp sent no notice to these citizens after he took away their voting rights. If they show up to vote on November 6, they're out of luck - and so is Georgia's democracy.

I brought in one of the nation's top mailing database experts, Mark Swedlund, and his team to go through the list, name by name. Among the voters purged are thousands who supposedly left the state but remain in Georgia. Thousands more are people who moved from one end of town to another and lost their vote - and we even found one who simply moved from one apartment to another in the same building.

These registration cancellations are therefore dead wrong and, say voting law experts, coldly break the law.

That is why Gerald Griggs, counsel for the Atlanta NAACP, and voting rights attorney Nse Ufot, executive director of the New Georgia Project (a nonpartisan voter registration initiative), are joining in my suit against Kemp.

We'll be hauling Kemp into federal court to force him to open the records to which the public is entitled under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 - provisions meant to prevent just this type of voter roll shenanigan. In particular, we're forcing him to disclose the complete detailed process that led to each voter's removal.

I don't file federal suits on a whim. Kemp has continually turned down legitimate Open Records Act requests over my five years of investigation for Al Jazeera and Rolling Stone.

Griggs and Ufot made their announcement about the suit at a press conference October 2 in Atlanta at the national headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the civil rights group that traces its origins to the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

The location was meant to make a point. The racial stench from the computerized torching of the Georgia voter files has motivated prominent civil rights leaders from Georgia to add their names to the lawsuit: Axel Adams, executive editor of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition that grew out of two nonprofit organizations founded by Jesse Jackson; Joe Beasley, the former southern regional director for Rainbow PUSH; and SCLC President Dr. Charles Steele Jr., who currently holds the post held by Dr. Martin L. King Jr. until his assassination.

Steele told the gathered media and rights leaders, "Many people have died and paid the supreme sacrifice for people to have the right to vote. What is taking place here in Georgia is an insult to all these efforts and accomplishments."

Dr. Charles Steele, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, announces that he will join the suit against Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp.

I tried to get Kemp's answers to the NAACP's and SCLC's charges that the mass purge of 1 in 10 Georgia voters was aimed at decimating the Black electorate so he could steal the governorship from Abrams.

Technically, Kemp removed voters after they had skipped voting - and failed to return a postcard that, according to Morgan County Elections Board member Helen Butler, "Looks like junk mail. You'd throw it away." Butler, who also serves as executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People's Agenda, is wary of Kemp's purge methods. Just last year, her group settled a suit against Kemp that forced him to return over 40,000 voters to the rolls.

The National Voter Registration Act specifically prohibits cancelling voter registrations for not voting. But the failure to vote, in combination with not returning a postcard or other information, can be used to justify a cancellation if there is legitimate belief this is evidence the voter has moved.

"But they have not moved," notes Swedlund, who says not returning a postcard is an "absurd, dangerous" way to determine if voters have moved - especially if their rights are at stake. And basing cancellations on non-responses to postcards is, Swedlund notes, endemically biased against voters who move often, including the poor, students, and Black and Latino voters - in other words, Democrats.

Notably, Swedlund's analysts found that 108,000 of the names on Kemp's hit list were also on the notorious "Interstate Crosscheck" list, which my investigations team had obtained from an insider in Kemp's office as part of my investigations for Rolling Stone.

The lists were created for Georgia by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, President Donald Trump's "fraudulent voter hunter." Kobach himself, interviewed in Kansas, told me the list was sent to Kemp and others to indicate a voter had moved out of state. In fact, we went through each and every Crosscheck-tagged voter's name - and only 2,000 of the 108,000 Crosschecked voters who were purged have left the state. And the majority of others purged had not moved from their original registration address. In simple terms, most of those whose registrations have been cancelled are legitimate Georgia voters.

Representatives from Kemp's office issued a statement this week denying they used the Crosscheck list, but they did not know we had obtained the list despite Kemp's resistance. Furthermore, Kemp's former deputy and his predecessor as Secretary of State both confirmed Georgia participated in Crosscheck.

Meanwhile, Kemp had no clear response as to why the others were removed.

So, I thought it important to get the answers about the purges from the horse's mouth. But Kemp has weaved and ducked all my interview requests in my several trips to Georgia beginning in 2014.

So, this time, I decided to track down his campaign bus. On Tuesday, I located the candidate in the parking lot of a BBQ joint in Newnan, 38 miles outside Atlanta. You could smell the pigs roasting.

I asked Kemp, bluntly, "Mr. Kemp are you removing Black voters from the voter rolls just so you can win this election?"

Kemp's answer was to turn his back as I was physically body-blocked, then grabbed and hauled away by Georgia "smokies," the local county deputy sheriffs. (They claimed that Sprayberry's Barbecue ordered me off the property, but the owner said otherwise.) It was later reported that his handlers had clocked me before the bus pulled in.

The civil rights leaders are dissatisfied with Kemp's response and will press our litigation. "Georgia," said the SCLC's Steele, "needs to know that we're not going to take it anymore."

Note to Georgia residents: You can find out if your registration has been cancelled here. Type in your name and zip code now - you have only Monday and Tuesday to re-register.

(c) 2018 Greg Palast is author of the New York Times bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

Much of the frozen water portion of the Earth, otherwise known as the cryosphere, is melting.

This is not news: It's been happening for decades. What is news is that the long-term melting trends in the Arctic, Antarctica, and with most land-based glaciers are accelerating, often at shocking rates, largely due to human-caused climate change.

Antarctica is melting three times as fast as it was just 10 years ago, alarming scientists. A study earlier this year showed 3 trillion tons of ice had disappeared since 1992. That is the equivalent of enough water to cover the entire state of Texas with 13 feet of water, and raise global sea levels a third of an inch.

"From 1992 to 2011, Antarctica lost nearly 84 billion tons of ice a year (76 billion metric tons)," read the AP story on the study. "From 2012 to 2017, the melt rate increased to more than 241 billion tons a year (219 billion metric tons)."

"I think we should be worried," one of the study's 88 co-authors, University of California, Irvine's Isabella Velicogna, told AP. "Things are happening. They are happening faster than we expected."

In fact, the polar ice caps have melted faster in the last 25 years than they have in the last 10,000 years.

In the Arctic, the Greenland Ice Sheet is losing an average of 270 billion tons of ice each year, and the strongest sea ice in the region broke up for the first time on record this summer.

All of this melting is causing sea level rise to accelerate.

For glaciers that exist outside of the Polar Regions, the situation is even worse.

"You can count on all alpine glaciers in the world to be gone by 2100," Dan Fagre, US Geological Survey (USGS) research ecologist and director of the USGS Climate Change in Mountain Ecosystems Project, told Truthout.

Truthout spoke with experts like Fagre, as well as others with expertise in the Antarctic and Arctic, who shared an often-grim prognosis of what lies in store for the cryosphere.

Greenland

Ruth Mottram>is a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute who has been studying Greenland for the last 11 years, and the Arctic for the last 15. Mottram is also one of the scientists behind the Polar Portal - a Danish web portal that gives near real-time data on the Arctic, including sea ice and Greenland ice sheet processes.

She explained to Truthout that melting in Greenland can vary significantly from year to year and is highly dependent upon weather conditions any given year.

"However, since the turn of the millennium there has been a series of summers where there have been increasingly large amounts of melt and runoff into the ocean," Mottram explained.

She studies the surface mass budget, which is the balance between income - snowfall - and the outgoing melt and runoff. Mottram and her colleagues sum these up daily on the Polar Portal, as well as over the entire year, which in turn gives them an idea of the "health" of the ice sheet.

Her data is alarming.

"Of the top 10 lowest surface mass budget years," Mottram said of this data, "only 2 occurred before the year 2000."

She explained that on top of this, the ice sheet can also lose mass by calving (ice breaking off a glacier at its terminus) from glaciers and basal melting.

"Yet, both of these processes also have to be balanced by snowfall and what we see in the last two years is that the total budget, as opposed to the surface-only budget, has been roughly neutral - around 0," she added.

However, Mottram also pointed out how the ice sheet has lost 200 - 300 gigatonnes (one gigatonne is about 1 cubic kilometer) of ice every year from 2003-2011. This means that the two aforementioned neutral and relatively lower melting years, as she put it, "do not nearly reverse the mass losses of the last decades."

Greenland Ice Sheet meltwater is influencing the circulation of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a massive oceanic conveyor belt current that moves huge amounts of warm water from the tropics northward, and from the Atlantic up toward the Arctic. The AMOC plays a critical role in creating the mild climate of the UK and other parts of Western Europe.

"There is also some evidence that Arctic climate change in general is influencing mid-latitude weather patterns - leading to the kind of persistent and extreme weather that leads to, for example, the heatwave we had in northern Europe this year," Mottram explained. "The idea is that the warming of the Arctic - which has been more rapid than in other parts of the planet - has led to a smaller difference in temperature between pole and tropics, which then leads to a more wavy jet-stream."

While Mottram believes longer observations are needed on this topic, some studies have pointed out how the wavier jet-stream is intensifying extreme weather events like hurricanes, as well as altering global climate patterns.

Meanwhile, the increasing melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet is directly linked to the increase in calving and iceberg production at outlet glaciers.

"These can pose hazards to shipping and fisheries," Mottram added. "But they also allow the ice sheet to contribute water to the ocean faster than just by melting."

She and her colleagues also note the number of storms tracking up the east coast of Greenland of late, which have brought a lot of snow and rain to eastern Greenland and seem to be penetrating higher up into the Arctic - possibly due to the lower sea ice extent there.

"The winds associated with these storms can bring quite high temperatures to east and northeast Greenland, and this year we twice saw very unusual warm periods - associated with Foehn winds (similar to the Chinook in north America) - that also opened up the pack ice around the coast of Greenland," Mottram explained. She also pointed out the role this could have played in the way in which the aforementioned "last ice area" of sea ice recently began to move away from the coast and break up.

This led to the north coast of Greenland briefly becoming navigable over the summer. The Polarstern and Oden - two research ships from Germany and Sweden respectively - were able to access areas of the Arctic to do research much more easily than had been expected.

The same is true of the Venta Maersk - the Danish "ice class" container ship that was the first to traverse the northern sea route this summer.

"It's not to say it's easy to sail in the Arctic right now, quite not," Mottram said. "But the time is coming soon!"

Michael MacCracken, the chief scientist for climate change programs at the Climate Institute in Washington, DC, told Truthout that the loss of land ice, such as the loss of mass from the Greenland Ice Sheet, clearly raises sea level globally.

"This threatens low-lying coastal areas and island nations, and additionally, the rise in sea level can lift up glacial ice streams around Antarctica," he said. "This then allows ocean waters better access to the ice streams, warming them and making calving more likely, ultimately contributing to further sea level rise."

Antarctica

NASA emeritus scientist Robert Bindschadler, who worked for 35 years as a glaciologist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, previously told Truthout that the world may see three to four meters of sea level rise by the year 2200.

Bindschadler has led 18 field expeditions to Antarctica, published more than 130 scientific papers, and advised the US Congress and a former vice president on the stability of ice sheets and ice shelves. His current primary concern about what is happening in the Antarctic is linked to the fact that many of the glaciers there exist within deep valleys, as remote sensing has proven as of late.

"These deep valleys matter because they mean the glacier is sitting in a trough so deep that were you to remove the ice, it is below sea level," Bindschadler told Truthout. "The damage the ocean can do only extends to the point where the glacier retreats onto the land. But the fact that these big outlet glaciers in Antarctica are sitting in a valley whose floor is below sea level means they can never escape the impact the oceans have on them."

In other words, these land-based glaciers are now at risk of being melted from below by warming seawater that could flow into the valleys within which the glaciers are located.

He pointed out another worrisome fact about these valleys: Many of their depths may increase the further they get from the ocean.

"So, the ocean has greater impact on them the more they melt, which means the potential for fast and continual retreat of these outlet glaciers is probably more widespread than we appreciated four years ago," Bindschadler added.

Bindschadler is concerned that these valleys - in which so many of the major glaciers exist - could be the next major factor in how glacial ice is rapidly released into the oceans, causing sea levels to rise further.

Alpine Glaciers

Fagre, who is the lead investigator in the USGS Benchmark Glacier Program and has been working in Glacier National Park since 1991, is concerned about how mountain snowpack has been shrinking in Glacier National Park, like in so many other places, over the last half century.

In Glacier National Park, the snow is on the ground an average of 30 days less than it used to be.

"Since the planet is warming up, more of the precipitation in Glacier is now falling as rain instead of snow," Fagre told Truthout. Since they're less likely to be covered in snow, glaciers are more directly exposed to the sun, which obviously hastens their melting.

In 1850, Glacier National Park, before it was designated a national park, contained 150 glaciers, covering around 100 square kilometers. Today, only between 14 and 15 square kilometers of ice coverage remain, an 85 percent loss. Instead of 150 glaciers, there are now only 26. Even this alarming tally of ice loss is a conservative estimate, as measuring area doesn't account for thinning.

Fagre and his team started monitoring the mass balance of Glacier National Park's Sperry Glacier in 2005.

"Our program mirrors what the others are seeing in Alaska and the Cascades," he said. Aside from a couple of years where the glacier accumulated more ice, the glacier lost mass consistently, "as is true for almost every mountain glacier in the world for which we have mass balance information." "Our trajectory has well exceeded previous worst-case projections for many of our glaciers," said Fagre, and added that the Blackfoot and Jackson Glaciers in the park had melted faster than the predictions by a full decade.

"What we've found since then is that they continue to go, and at unsustainable rates," he said.

"This is an explosion, a nuclear explosion of geologic change," Fagre said of the global impacts from climate change, particularly in the cryosphere. "This is unusual. It is incredibly rapid and exceeds the ability for normal adaptation. We've shoved it into overdrive and taken our hands off the wheel."

Conclusion

Kevin Lister, an associate with the Climate Institute in Washington, DC, co-authored a paper with MacCracken for the UN that addressed the crisis in the Arctic, among other climate change-related issues.

Lister and MacCracken's paper showed that the natural rate of carbon sequestration is so slow as to not be measurable. This doesn't bode well for the possibility of halting climate change: The researchers say that carbon sequestration will be incapable of bringing atmospheric CO2 down to safe levels even in the hypothetical circumstance of a zero-carbon economy emerging.

Their paper also shows that while carbon sequestration and mitigation measures must continue to be pursued, "the likelihood is that that they will be unable to bring [atmospheric] CO2 down fast enough."

Lister believes that climate change "is fundamentally irreversible as there is strong evidence that the heating effects of the amplifying mechanisms are greater than that of increases in [atmospheric] CO2."

Lister told Truthout that he and MacCracken have argued that dramatic solutions to the climate crisis "must be pursued with all urgency."

"Should we fail to make a start, then the scale of intervention that we need and the risks associated with it will increase exponentially with any delay," Lister said.

If the Democrats were serious they would have treated each reactionary GOP nominee over the decades as a bullet to the heart of their constituents. They did not.

Brett Kavanaugh took his seat on the far right of the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, but before the Court's newest racist, pro-torture, corporate, patriarchal pig could don his new robes the Democratic National Committee was filling email boxes with appeals for funds to turn Republican victory into defeat in November. "The only way we'll be able to protect our rights is by regaining a Democratic majority in Congress," writes Seema Nanda, the DNC's chief executive officer. "If we don't, women's reproductive justice, affordable health care, and the future of our democracy will all be at risk."

The Democrats have been singing that same song for decades -- indeed, generations -- even as they passively allowed reactionary justices to become dominant on the High Court, their hard right rulings only slightly tempered by the "swing" votes of, first, Sandra Day O'Connor -- who is credited with rescuing "diversity," the pale replacement for affirmative action, as a public policy option - and, later, Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose seat Kavanaugh now fills. Whenever the Democrats' GOP-lite policies became indefensible, the party's apologists would caution exasperated Black voters: "But what about the Supreme Court? You can't allow the Republicans to decide the law of the land for the next 20 years!"

But their assurances that the Democratic Party would hold back the corporate legal juggernaut were always a sham. Yes, an ultra-right judiciary portends disaster for Black, working and poor people, but not for the oligarchs that fund and control both mass parties in this country. No Supreme Court produced by the two corporate parties could possibly pose the slightest threat to the core interests of the ruling class or the capitalist system.Indeed, the judiciary becomes more reactionary in synch with the consolidation of wealth at the top of the economic pyramid, which is reflected in the rightward lunge of both corporate parties. If the Democrats were sincere in their vows to block the troglodytes' steady march to judicial hegemony -- if they were serious about preventing a human rights apocalypse -- they would have treated each reactionary High Court nominee put forward by the GOP over the decades as a bullet to the heart of their constituents, and shut down the Congress to force the nomination to be withdrawn. But the Democrats have always been unwilling to create a political crisis in order to prevent a human rights meltdown for Black and poor people.

The Supreme Court was already a right-wing club when John Roberts was nominated in 2005. Twenty out of 42 Democrats voted to confirm the reactionary jurist. Two months later, right-winger Alito was confirmed after 19 Democrats joined 53 Republicans to halt a filibuster against his nomination by Senators Barack Obama and Harry Reid. Brett Kavanaugh represents an imminent threat to "women's reproductive justice, affordable health care, and the future of our democracy," as DNC operative Seema Nanda put it,because the Democratic Party, as a body, collaborated in laying the groundwork for an ultra-right majority. And, when West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin made it clear he would vote to confirm Kavanaugh, the party's honchos made it just as plain that he would not be punished.

Yet, the Democrats have the gall to continue playing the Supreme Court card, when it is already too late to reverse the damage they have helped to inflict. Make no mistake: the Democratic Party is a corporate party that will never create a real political crisis -- never shut down the Senate, which is within the power of a unified minority party - unless the interests of their masters, the Lords of Capital, are threatened.

A Huffington Post article from June 27 of this year reported that some Democrats discussed the idea of a Senate shutdown in 2016, when the Republican leadership refused to act on President Obama's nomination of the "moderate" corporatist, Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court-- an insult and unanswered challenge action that paved the way for Kavanaugh's seating, a year later. "We should have shut down the Senate," said Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii. "We made a calculation that we were going to win the 2016 [presidential] election and confirm a nominee. And it didn't work out."

Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal corrected the narrative. "Self-immolation was not an option," he told reporters, which is another way of saying he and other Democrats were not willing to create a political crisis over the issue. Neither was Obama willing to a respond to the GOP declaration of political war by refusing to conduct governmental business as usual with the Republican-controlled Congress until Garland's nomination was acted upon. That's because, even if a fifth reliable ultra-right vote on the Supreme Court ensures decades of misery for Blacks, workers and poor people, that is not sufficient cause for Democrats to disrupt the governmental order. And it never will be.

The Democrats are a fraudulent opposition, and totally shameless, moving from election to election, financed by an oligarchy whose interests both parties regard as paramount. They have no vision beyond endless austerity and war, the same agenda as the Republicans -- with a racial and ethic "diversity" twist.

The long legal twilight time is over and deep darkness has now fallen on the U.S. Supreme Court, with the active and passive collaboration of the Democratic Party. A real opposition must be mobilized in the streets, and in alternative electoral formations that take their cues from the street mobilizations.

When the former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was released from prison a few weeks ago, the news conjured memories of a corporate scandal that now seems almost quaint - and it was also a reminder that Enron executives were among the last politically connected criminals to face any serious consequences for institutionalized fraud.

Since Skilling's conviction 12 years ago, our society has been fundamentally altered by a powerful political movement whose goal is not merely another court seat, tax cut or election victory. This movement's objective is far more revolutionary: the creation of an accountability-free zone for an ennobled aristocracy, even as the rest of the population is treated to law-and-order rhetoric and painfully punitive policy.

Let's remember that in less than two decades, America has experienced the Iraq war, the financial crisis, intensifying economic stratification, an opioid plague, persistent gender and racial inequality and now seemingly unending climate change-intensified disasters. While the victims have been ravaged by these crime sprees, crises and calamities, the perpetrators have largely avoided arrest, inquisition, incarceration, resignation, public shaming and ruined careers.

That is because the United States has been turned into a safe space for a permanent ruling class. Inside the rarefied refuge, the key players who created this era's catastrophes and who embody the most pernicious pathologies have not just eschewed punishment - many of them have actually maintained or even increased their social, financial and political status.

The effort to construct this elite haven has tied together so many seemingly disparate news events, suggesting that there is a method in the madness. Consider this past month that culminated with the dramatic battle over the judicial nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.

September began with John McCain's funeral - a memorial billed as an apolitical celebration of the Arizona lawmaker, but which served as a made-for-TV spectacle letting America know that everyone who engineered the Iraq war is doing just fine.

Has anyone been held accountable for the financial crisis?

The underlying message was clear: nobody other than the dead, the injured and the taxpayer will face any real penalty for the Iraq debacle.

Next up came the 10th anniversary of the financial crisis - a meltdown that laid waste to the global economy, while providing lucrative taxpayer-funded bailouts to Wall Street firms.

To mark the occasion, the three men on whose watch it occurred - Fed chair Ben Bernanke, Bush treasury secretary Hank Paulson and Obama treasury secretary Tim Geithner - did not offer an apology, but instead promised that another financial crisis will eventually occur, and they demanded lawmakers give public officials more power to bail out big banks in the future.

In a similar bipartisan show of unity, former Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn gave an interview in which he asked "Who broke the law?" - the implication being that no Wall Street executives were prosecuted for their role in the meltdown because no statutes had been violated. That suggestion, of course, is undermined by banks' own admissions that they defrauded investors (that includes admissions of fraud from Goldman Sachs - the very bank that Cohn himself ran during the crisis). Nonetheless, Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder - who has now rejoined his old corporate defense law firm - subsequently backed Cohn up by arguing that nobody on Wall Street committed an offense that could have been successfully prosecuted in a court of law.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon garnered non-Onion headlines by floating the idea of running for president - a reminder that a decade after his firm played a central role in destroying countless Americans' economic lives, he remains not only unincarcerated and gainfully employed, but so reputationally unscathed that he is seen as a serious White House candidate.

Again, the message came through: nobody who engineered the financial crisis will pay any real price for wreaking so much havoc.

Then as Hurricane Florence provided the latest illustration of climate change's devastation, ExxonMobil marched into the supreme court to demand an end to a state investigation of its role denying and suppressing climate science. Backed by 11 Republican attorneys general, the fossil fuel giant had reason to feel emboldened in its appeal for immunity: despite investigative reporting detailing the company's prior knowledge of fossil fuel's role in climate change, its executives had already convinced the Securities and Exchange Commission to shut down a similar investigation.

Once again, the message was unavoidable: in the new accountability-free zone, companies shouldn't be bothered to even explain - much less face punishment for - their role in a crisis that threatens the survival of the human species.

Now comes the latest stage of the immunity project: the installation of Kavanaugh as the sentinel standing watch over this sprawling accountability-free zone from a lifetime perch on America's very own star chamber.

Kavanaugh is the nominee of Donald Trump, who as a businessman helped set the legal precedent protecting corporate titans from fraud charges, and who as president has appointed a cabinet of accountability evaders - from the treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, who escaped prosecution during the financial crisis, to the transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, who avoided consequences for her role at Wells Fargo during that company's mass fraud. Kavanaugh is also the nominee of an accountability-free party whose last House speaker was deemed "a serial child molester"by a judge, whose potential next House speaker is named in a college sexual abuse scandal, and whose White House occupant was caught on camera bragging about sexually accosting women.

To the delight of the Republican party, Kavanaugh is not backing down in the face of multiple credible accusations of sexual misconduct. On the contrary, in a snarling refrain that must seem all-too-familiar to victims of sexual assault, Kavanaugh is angrily insisting that "you'll never get me to quit."

In the context of this political moment, Kavanaugh's defiance is more than merely a plea of innocence. It is more than just an ideological warrior's yearning to serve on a court that has been making it ever-harder for commoners to hold the aristocracy accountable. It is a grand edict detailing the entire culture of entitlement and immunity inside the accountability-free zone.

Here is a corporate lobbyist's son armed with a prep school education, a diploma from his grandaddy's Ivy League alma mater, a writing credit on Ken Starr's Clinton-Lewinsky report, a law review article arguing that Congress should consider exempting presidents from indictments, and a sheaf of judicial opinions that consistently side with power.

Kavanaugh has precisely the pedigree that is the ticket into the accountability-free zone. His braying at senators, his laughably obvious dissembling, his refusal to explicitly support an FBI review of his accusers' allegations - this is the behavior of someone who seems to believe a supreme court seat is his to arrogate.

Indeed, Kavanaugh has been inside the aristocracy's hermetically sealed bubble for so long that he is genuinely surprised and outraged that anyone would dare get in his way - as are his biggest boosters such as the Republican majority leader, Mitch McConnell. Promising a forceful defense of the accountability-free zone, McConnell explicitly lashed out at sexual assault survivors who are now begging Republicans to vote down Kavanaugh's nomination.

"I want to make it clear to these people chasing my members around the hall here, or harassing them at the airports, or going to their homes. We'll not be intimidated by these people," McConnell declared.

To be sure, you could write this last month off if it was an anomaly - but it is the norm, not the exception.

Over the last decade, we saw presidential administrations of both parties decrease white-collar prosecutions and grant telecom companies retroactive legal immunity for their role in the government's mass surveillance system. We witnessed the director of national intelligence, James Clapper brazenly mislead Congress about that surveillance, then face no charges of perjury - and then be rewarded with a CNN contributor gig.

We watched the Trump White House grant "waivers" - another word for immunity - to its own employees who violate seemingly strict ethics rules, and we watched the Obama labor department waive punishment for a politically influential financial firm after it had been convicted of operating what law enforcement officials said was a scheme that "knowingly and willfully aided" tax fraud.

We saw congressional Republicans so utterly eviscerate the Internal Revenue Service's budget that "there may never be a better time to be a tax cheat," according to a recent ProPublica report.

We have seen no consequences for a pharmaceutical company that made big money off peddling opioids - and now we see the same company turn the crisis into another prospective profit opportunity by patenting a treatment to help wean people off opioids.

Taken together, all of it evinces the same underlying message echoing throughout the country: to paraphrase Leona Helmsley, accountability is for the little people, immunity is for the ruling class.

If this ethos seems familiar, that is because it has preceded some of the darkest moments in human history - the eras of violent purges, authoritarian dictators and sharpened guillotines. There is no guarantee that is our future - and let's hope it isn't our destiny. Whether or not things proceed in that terrifying direction, though, the moral question remains: what can be done to restore some basic sense of fairness and justice?

Of late, one proffered answer is hard-hitting journalism - and there is no doubt that righteous media vigilantes such as Ronan Farrow have occasionally sparked some much-needed paroxysms of accountability. However, for every investigative reporter doing the hard work to break open a much-needed story of corruption and criminality, there is an entire machine that continues to provide platforms to those who are firmly ensconced in the accountability-free zone.

Turn on CNN, and you will see Iraq war cheerleaders like David Frum and Bill Kristol as honored guests depicted as the new vanguard of democracy.

Flip on MSNBC, and it is much the same thing. In the morning you get economic analysis from Steve Rattner, who was given his media platform even after securities regulators charged him "with participating in a widespread kickback scheme" and he was banned from the securities industry. In the afternoon you get Nicole Wallace, who helped run the Bush administration's PR operation during the Iraq war. And in the evening you get the news from Brian Williams, who was bequeathed a new show after he was busted for serially lying about his war reporting.

Meanwhile, if you take a peek at the business press, you will behold an entire corner of the journalism world that saw few mea culpas or firings after it missed almost all of the warning signs in the lead-up to the financial crisis.

No, if there is an answer, it will not originate from media (at least not until there's radical change in that industry). To wedge open the gates of the accountability-free zone, everyday citizens will have to be organized enough to overcome already well-organized money.

In the political arena, that means electing pro-accountability candidates of both parties, and then forcing them to follow through on prosecuting wrongdoers and voting down aristocracy-approved nominees who represent the accountability-free zone.

In the consumer economy, it will require boycotts, pressure campaigns, union drives, #MeToo movements, shareholder resolutions and other direct actions to hold companies and executives accountable (and as the recent minimum wage campaign against Amazon proves, those efforts can succeed). It will require support for companies that offer different models of corporate behavior, and it will require swarms of cable-news-addled dittoheads to shut off the TV and instead support other forms of media that are serious about questioning, scrutinizing and challenging power.

In the job market, it will require employers to actually fire executives when they lie, cheat, steal, harass and otherwise mistreat their workers.

And at a cultural level, it will require any and all efforts to rescind and deny social status to those who have committed egregious war, financial and sexual crimes - and it will require doing that even if those miscreants wear nice suits and have gilded credentials.

This is no easy way forward and there are no shortcuts - but if we avoid this path, then the accountability-free zone will fortify itself and we will probably see the rise of an institutionalized form of moral hazard that dooms us to a tragic repetition of history.

After all, if there are no social or professional consequences for those who lied a country into a trillion-dollar war that amassed hundreds of thousands of casualties - if that war's architects can remain in good standing and in high-prestige jobs - what will deter any politician or pundit from supporting a similar military conflict when it is politically opportune?

If there are no legal consequences for profiteers who defrauded the global economy into a collapse, what will deter those profiteers from doing that again?

If there are no financial consequences for fossil fuel moguls who knowingly created an ecological crisis, what will deter them from continuing to try to profit off that crisis as the planet burns?

And if a petulant zealot like Kavanaugh can be credibly accused of sexual harassment, repeatedly distort the facts during his confirmation, temper-tantrum his way through congressional hearings and still get catapulted on to the nation's highest court - what will deter any other power-hungry child of privilege from behaving in exactly the same way?

The answer is nothing - which is exactly the point for the aristocracy. But that cannot be considered acceptable for the rest of us outside the accountability-free zone.