When a cop tells you to do something, do it. You hear this folk wisdom a lot, and it
 basically comes in two varieties. The first version is the central lesson of “the Talk” that so many African-American parents give their children about how to survive a police encounter: Keep your hands on the wheel. Don’t make sudden movements. Say “Yes, officer. No, officer.”1

The other version isn’t merely practical advice but reflects a deeper belief about the sanctity of police authority. It’s what lies behind the question you so often hear: Why didn’t she just do what the cop said? That inquiry comes unbidden every time an incident of police violence is captured on video. Even when the citizen in question is, say, a 16-year-old foster child sitting at her desk in her classroom in Columbia, South Carolina, refusing to leave, only to be body-slammed and dragged across the room. 
Why didn’t she just comply? None of this would have happened if she’d just listened.2

Section 29-16(1) of the municipal code of the city of Ferguson, Missouri, codifies this principle. It is a crime to “[f]ail to comply with the lawful order or request of a police officer in the discharge of the officer’s official duties.” As the Department of Justice would later show, the police much abuse this statute. Ferguson cops routinely issue orders that have no legal basis and then arrest citizens who refuse those orders for “failure to comply.” It’s a neat little circular bit of authoritarian reasoning.3

One video captured during the Ferguson protests in August 2014 encapsulates the absurdity of this abuse of police power. In it, Ferguson police order protesters who are standing in their own yards to go back inside their homes. When they refuse to comply, the police shoot tear gas at them, as one of the men protesting shouts, “This is my backyard! This is our home! This is our residence!”4

Can the police do this? Don’t you have a right to stand in your own yard? Thirteen years before the Declaration of Independence, British member of Parliament William Pitt defended the rights of Englishmen to privacy in their own home. He declared: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England cannot enter—all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!”5

The events on the streets of Ferguson in the days after Michael Brown’s death didn’t outrage black people alone—they spooked people of all races. People who’d never had occasion to personally distrust the police wondered what the hell weapons of war were doing on the streets of this small St. Louis suburb. Politicians from both parties raised their voices to express concern, and to urge restraint, as the nightly news carried images of the kinds of disorder—tear gas, riot gear, clashes with police—that we normally associate with countries where the government sends in armed troops to put down dissidents, or where the possibility of all-out war does not seem remote.6

Of course none of this would have happened, some argued, if protesters had done what they were told. If everyone had listened to the police, everything could have continued as it always had.7

Societies operate through formal procedures of law and force but also through norms of compliance. Without those norms, nothing would function. Suppose you want to make a left-hand turn, but a traffic cop says you can’t. You don’t ask her to cite the law. You assume there’s a good reason for her to be blocking that street. Maybe there’s been an accident. Or maybe there will be less traffic, and things will be more orderly, if she keeps you and everyone else from making a left at rush hour. Fine. Fair enough. Do what the cop says.8

But as a principle of American self-governance, “do what the cops say” is a pretty strange unofficial motto. This great land of ours was founded by men who, to borrow a phrase, refused to comply, who not only resisted lawful orders but rebelled against the government that issued them. Colonists chased the king’s officers through the streets, beat them, tarred and feathered them, and wheeled them through town for all to mock and shame. As distant as it may seem now, that’s our national heritage when it comes to “lawful orders.”9

everal mornings after Michael Brown was 
shot and killed, and a group of angry youths burned down the local QuikTrip gas station, I ran into a few gentlemen assembled in that same burned-out parking lot, arguing and talking about politics as they cleaned up the site. One man in his 50s, with a wiry intensity, looked into the camera and said, “We want the world to know that we are a dignified, intelligent people, and we deserve every liberty that the United States Constitution affords any citizen.”10

But what was the Constitution doing, really, in Ferguson? It seemed an absurdly remote abstraction, as practical a piece of protection as reciting a poem into the barrel of a gun. And yet, in a grand irony, the document itself—and the nation it binds together—was born of almost the exact same set of grievances as those of the protesters getting teargassed in the streets of Ferguson.11

We are taught in grade school that the motto of the American Revolution was “No taxation without representation.” The tyrannical King George III insisted on taxing the colonies against their will, employing ever more draconian measures to do so, until the colonists could take it no longer. But dig a little deeper into the history, and it turns out the spark of the revolution was not so much taxation as the enforcement of a particular tax 
regime—in other words, policing.12

Today the word “taxes” conjures up images of our modern administrative state, with automatic payroll deductions and marginal brackets. But that image fails to capture what taxation meant in the colonies at the time of the revolution. Under the British colonial system, the lion’s share of taxes was assessed as tariffs. Merchants and consumers in the colonies had to import nearly all of their products from British companies and pay very steep tariffs to do so. To the mercantilist empires at the time, the logic was impeccable: Colonies meant cheap commodity imports for the home country, a lucrative market for manufactured exports, and significant revenues through tariffs on all those exchanges. (The British would later employ this same logic to outlaw Indians on the subcontinent from making their own salt or weaving their own garments.)13

This system, of course, only kicked in when the British Empire made the goods the colonists wanted to buy. Often, many popular products weren’t produced anywhere in the empire. Madeira wine, for example, was made in rival Portugal and became quite popular in the colonies (George Washington was a famous devotee of the beverage), but it had to be smuggled in.14

Despite their illegitimacy before British law, local shipping magnates who trafficked in illicit goods like Madeira were men of great wealth, prestige, and power. John Hancock, the man whose signature dominates the founding documents, was one of the most infamous smugglers of his day. He was a criminal, basically—and he and his fellow smugglers kept the colonies running. Without the goods they smuggled, there would have been little local economy to speak of.15

Because the black market was so widespread, agents of the Crown tended to view the colonies as a den of iniquity, a seedy place overwhelmingly populated by hustlers, hucksters, and shady characters. One British officer referred to the residents of Newport, Rhode Island, one of the main smuggling hubs at the time, as “a set of lawless piratical people…whose sole business is that of smuggling and defrauding the King of his duties.”16

Smuggling in the colonies, in other words, was not so different from drug-dealing in economically depressed neighborhoods and regions today. During the pre-
Revolutionary era, smugglers created economic activity that caused huge knockoff effects: a cascade of subsidiary industries and cash flow that kept a whole lot of people in the money. The same goes for dealers in, say, Westside Baltimore or the South Side of Chicago, or northern Maine or eastern Kentucky. Sure, the drug trade is illegal, reckless, and destructive, but it encourages commerce in places where the legitimate economy produces few jobs. Dealers, like smugglers, become institutions—the way, say, New Englanders viewed John Hancock in the years leading to the revolution.17

In fact, smuggling was so embedded in colonial society that British officers complained they couldn’t find anyone to enforce the law who wasn’t somehow connected to it. When they did manage to prosecute cases, they found that colonial juries engaged in their own version of nullification. Between 1680 and 1682, New England’s head of customs brought 32 seizure cases to trial. He lost 30.18

The laws were unenforceable because the market demand was nearly limitless, and the colonies were an ocean away. And for much of the 18th century, the British Empire’s attitude toward our founders’ rampant smuggling was one of benign neglect. The law was enforced in the same way drug laws are very loosely “enforced” on elite college campuses. Authorities know it’s happening, but they don’t go out of their way to bust people for it. Between 1710 and 1760, as the population of the colonies quintupled to over 1.5 million, the total number of customs agents rose from 37 to 50.19

ut then, as is so often the case, a war 
changed everything. Between 1754 and 1763, Britain fought a bloody and expensive campaign against the French and allied indigenous tribes in North America. As the so-called Seven Years’ War dragged on, colonial officials watched in horror as smugglers openly flouted wartime laws that prohibited trading with the French enemy. When Britain signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the conflict, it gained much of Canada and Florida—but it had incurred a staggering amount of debt. The inexperienced young king, George III, turned to tariff enforcement in the colonies as a relatively painless way of replenishing the royal coffers. Or so he thought.20

Because taxes were ultimately enforced through police actions, the British crackdown essentially inaugurated America’s first tough-on-crime era. More customs officials were granted more expansive powers, while courts were streamlined to produce swift punishment and avoid the maddening jury nullification that had made it so hard to punish smugglers in previous decades. After 1763, customs officials no longer looked the other way in exchange for small bribes. Instead, they began operating in ways that looked a lot like what we now call “stop-and-frisk.” They took to trawling the coast, stopping merchant ships to search and harass them. Authorities had no specific cause for these searches other than their confidence that they’d find illicit goods.21

This was the same approach and justification that the New York Police Department infamously used to search for drugs and guns in the pockets of hundreds of thousands of young men, disproportionately black and brown, on the city’s streets in the 2000s. In a landmark ruling, a federal district judge found that stop-and-frisk amounted to wholesale, systematic violation of the Fourth Amendment protections against unwarranted search and seizure. “While it is true that any one stop is a limited intrusion in duration and deprivation of liberty, each stop is also a demeaning and humiliating experience,” Judge Shira Scheindlin wrote. “No one should live in fear of being stopped whenever he leaves his home to go about the activities of daily life.”22

The British legal tradition has no Fourth Amendment, but common law had developed some privacy protections—at least for some. American colonists, however, became subject to British invasions of their carriages, ships, and homes without the safeguards enjoyed by their English cousins. Widely used “writs of assistance” allowed British officials to invade their homes willy-nilly, as part of a broader scheme to squeeze American pocketbooks. After the Seven Years’ War, the hated writs of assistance empowered British customs officials to stop and search ships coming into New England ports.23

You can imagine how insulting and humiliating the colonists found this arrangement. As subjects of the Crown, they felt entitled to the legal rights enjoyed by their brethren across the ocean, yet the king had functionally relegated them to second-class status. British subjects in Britain experienced one set of rights; British subjects in the colonies experienced a lesser set.24

The use of the writs was also disruptive. When citizens come to expect and understand a certain level of enforcement, they tailor their behavior accordingly. I have a keen sense that if I park in any of the various illegal spaces in my neighborhood, I’ll probably get a ticket, and when I do, I understand it as the cost of the illegal action that I knowingly took. But if you’re looking to make a community furious, then arbitrarily fiddle with enforcement norms and see what happens. Imagine if suddenly the Cambridge, Massachusetts, authorities were to import the law-enforcement approach used in central Harlem to police Harvard University. A massive police presence would be visible on every quad and in front of every dorm. Cops would stop and frisk students on their way to class; they would search the swank homes of parents of students caught with drugs. The student body and their very powerful parents would revolt.25

In the American colonies, the backlash was intense. At first, the smugglers and their allies in the revolutionary hotbeds of New England port towns mounted legal challenges. James Otis Jr., a Harvard-trained Boston lawyer and charismatic orator, rose to prominence as the chosen advocate of the smuggler class. In 1761, representing merchants pro bono, Otis appeared before the Superior Court of Massachusetts to argue against the British use of writs of assistance, calling them the “worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty and the fundamental principles of law, that ever was found in an English law-book,” and “a power that places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.”26

But opposition to the crackdown wasn’t limited to the courts: Petitions and pamphlets tumbled forth with ever-mounting indignation and fury. Mob violence was a central feature of the burgeoning revolutionary movement. Customs officials found themselves surrounded, jeered at, and harassed as they attempted to execute their official duties. Often mobs would simply steal back the confiscated contraband.27

The problem that King George III faced would bedevil authorities for centuries, from the revenuers of Prohibition to the modern Drug Enforcement Administration: When the state declares some popular good illicit, the state must pursue ever more draconian means to snuff it out. And as customs officials were granted more and more power to extinguish illicit trade, they inevitably began to abuse it. Often they made their money as a percentage of the value of the goods they confiscated, putting them in the same position as pirates. Abuse and corruption were widespread, and as enforcement ratcheted up, so did colonial hatred of the men doing the enforcing. When extra customs officials proved insufficient to the task, the British authorities called in the Navy. Now military vessels and sailors boarded and searched ships suspected of smuggling. The spectacle of this militarized policing enraged the colonists.28

Animus built toward the most famous incident of the pre-Revolutionary period, the Boston Tea Party. Contrary to what you may have learned, the tea dumped from ships of the British East India Company was relatively cheap, even after including the price of the import tariff. The Crown had granted the East India Company sole monopoly of the import of this tea, making it the single legal competitor to the vast armada of smugglers of illegal Dutch tea that flooded the colonies. And, in fact, what so enraged the revolutionary mob that defiled this shipment was that the Crown had recently lowered the import tariff on this legal tea, making it more economically competitive with smuggled tea. In other words, the Tea Party was triggered not by taxes being raised but rather by a tax cut. The event only makes sense in the broader context of an enforcement regime whose abuses and excesses had destroyed the government’s legitimacy.29

Escalating conflict between smugglers and the officers who policed smuggling was one of the chief drivers toward the outbreak of violent insurgency that led to the country’s founding. It was the point of the spear, where the inherent contradictions of colonial rule were made most acutely, painfully, and sometimes violently manifest. When the colonial insurrectionists railed against the king, it was his customs officers who embodied his tyranny. And sure enough, in the Declaration of Independence, in the list of petty indignities and offensive tyrannies of the Crown, we find an excoriation of the king for the fact that he has “sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”30

o what does all of this have to do with 
Ferguson? When you zoom out past the precipitating incident of Michael Brown’s death and look at the Ferguson police as a whole, you find an enforcement regime strikingly similar to the British Crown’s. The fundamental offense of British customs policing was that its driving rationale was revenue. Like the customs officers who interdicted smugglers to bring in tariffs, the police in Ferguson were ordered to write tickets to bring in money. That kind of law enforcement had nothing to do with public safety or welfare, and the public knew it. As the Department of Justice wrote in its report on the patterns and practices of the department:31

Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson’s police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community.32

Like the regime in the American colonies, the enforcement regime in Ferguson had a lot to do with the lack of democratic accountability. In 1990, Ferguson was 74 percent white and 25 percent black. A decade later, African Americans were a slim majority, and by the time Michael Brown was shot and killed, they comprised about two-thirds of the town’s 21,000 residents. The white people who stayed had a certain pride in their own enlightenment and open-mindedness. “It’s ironic this happened in Ferguson, because Ferguson had the reputation of being one of the most progressive [towns] in north St. Louis County,” native Umar Lee told me. But if they are relatively enlightened, the white citizens of Ferguson are also disproportionately empowered: Despite the fact they are a minority of the municipality, they dominate its political leadership.33

In Ferguson, just about every single black person I spoke to had at least one story (often many) about humiliating traffic stops by Ferguson police officers that had nothing to do with public safety. The statistics bear them out. In 2009, in a city of just 21,000, there were 24,000 traffic cases in the Ferguson municipal court, and by October 31, 2014, that figure had grown to 53,000. Nearly all levels of Ferguson’s municipal government had pushed for the increase. In March 2010, the city’s finance director warned the police chief, Tom Jackson, that “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year.” By 2014, the year of Michael Brown’s death, tickets and citations were still increasing as rapidly as they ever had. The DOJ found evidence that black residents of Ferguson received speeding tickets “at disproportionately high rates overall” and that the Ferguson police department’s “enforcement practices on African Americans is 48 percent larger when citations are issued not on the basis of radar or laser, but by some other method, such as the officer’s own visual assessment.”34

The model of cops as armed tax collectors didn’t stop with simple traffic stops for speeding: The entire municipal court system was designed to function like a payday-lending operation. Relatively small infractions quickly turned into massive debts. Many traffic citations required the ticketed person to make court appearances, but the local court would hold sessions only three to four times a month for just a few hours. Because of the limited hours, the court couldn’t process everyone who came for their court date. Those left outside were cited for contempt for failing to appear. Not coming to court triggered another fine, and failure to pay that fine counted as its own form of contempt, adding to the total.35

By 2015, fines and fees would make up more than one-fifth of the city of Ferguson’s total revenue. The local leadership class clearly saw tickets and citations as a convenient source of cash that would fill the city’s treasury without their having to do the politically difficult work of raising taxes. The problem with raising, say, property taxes is that the most engaged, empowered citizens will revolt against it. So instead, why not just squeeze all you can out of a less powerful group of citizens by raising the revenue through enforcement? The citizens receive municipal services, and the subjects have to pay for them. King George III succumbed to the same temptation.36

Of course, just as with the colonial customs officers, a policing regime designed to extract revenue and stamp out petty nonviolent offenses is going to need ever-grander grants of power. In addition to the oft-abused “failure to comply” statute, Ferguson cops could marshal a bevy of other municipal infractions—such as “manner of walking in roadway” violations—for their purposes. This meant that the black citizens of Ferguson lived in a different country than their white neighbors. They lived in a country without a Fourth Amendment, without the fundamental right to privacy, the right to be “secure” in one’s personal effects, whether in one’s body, house, or car. They lived (and continue to live) the contingent existence of the occupied.37

ll this was the context for what happened in Ferguson after Michael Brown was killed. I’ve never been anywhere in the United States that felt as revolutionary as those days of unrest there. And it wasn’t primarily because of the protesters or the relatively small handful of (mostly) young men looting and setting things on fire. It was because the response of the cops was so heavy-handed, so panicky. In response to the outrage that poured forth on that summer afternoon, the police of Ferguson and St. Louis County mobilized as if for war: flak jackets, masks, helmets, camouflage, assault weapons, and armored vehicles. Cops pointed their long guns at civilians who assembled for peaceful protest and fired tear-gas canisters indiscriminately.38

Presented with a challenge to its power, an illegitimate regime will often overreact, driven by the knowledge that all it has is force. On the streets of Ferguson, one could, in every moment, feel the police officers’ lack of legitimacy. There was nothing behind them; their guns provided their only authority. One threatened to mace me on live TV because I drifted too close to him while broadcasting. And in his contorted face, I could see how terrified he was.39

There was one detail of Michael Brown’s death that protesters and residents alike kept returning to, and it wasn’t the “hands up” contention. It was the body. After the shooting, Michael Brown’s body lay in the street for more than four hours: bloody, baking in the hot August sun. His brains spattered on the concrete. Police would say they needed to be diligent with their forensic investigation, but to those who assembled in the minutes after Brown’s death, the inert, uncovered, disrespected body was the perfect symbol of the Ferguson police’s contempt. One resident who was there said it felt like the kind of thing the Mafia would do after a hit—just leave the body out for all to see as a warning.40

To desecrate the dead is to humiliate the living, and humiliation may be the most powerful and most underappreciated force in human affairs. The angry citizen can shout, and the terrified citizen can lock the doors, or flee, or move, or arm himself. But the humiliated citizen can neither express her feelings nor respond to the offense. For it is in the nature of humiliation that it happens at the hands of someone with greater power: the police officer who pulls over the young black man behind the wheel and wants to hear no lip; the corrupt bureaucrat who comes to inspect the businessman’s shop, looking for violations; the surly immigration official who goes through the immigrant’s belongings.41

In Ferguson, people were enraged at Michael Brown’s death and grieving at his passing, but more than anything else they were sick and tired of being humiliated. At random, I could take my microphone and offer it to a black Ferguson resident, young or old, who had a story of being harassed and humiliated. A young honors student and aspiring future politician told me about watching his mother be pulled over and barked at by police. The local state senator told me that when she was a teenager, a police officer drew a gun on her because she was sitting in a fire truck—at a fireman’s invitation. At any given moment, a black citizen of Ferguson might find himself shown up, dressed down, made to stoop and cower by the men with badges.42

We can all access some version of this feeling—even people of tremendous privilege can know the sting of humiliation. But for subjects of authoritarian rule, humiliation is the permanent state of existence. “There is the man at the top,” Frantz Fanon wrote of his native Martinique, “and there are his courtiers, the indifferent (who are waiting), and the humiliated.” In a colonial system, you can have power and be close to those with power, or you can 
be humiliated.43

To the founders, the solution to the humiliations of the Crown was violent revolution, then a republic. Of course, in the tortured and prolonged negotiations that ultimately created the Constitution, many of the original grievances—particularly the unreasonable searches and seizures, the lack of due process, and the heavy-handed quartering of soldiers in colonists’ homes—went unaddressed. Final ratification came only after citizens were assured that a Bill of Rights, which explicitly addressed many of the Crown’s egregious overreaches, was on its way. The framers thus included in the Fourth Amendment these words:44

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.45

The existence of the Bill of Rights is an acknowledgment of the fact that democracy, by itself, is no guarantee against the potential excesses of the state’s police power. But on the ground in Ferguson, the Bill of Rights itself seemed to have no force. So the question that kept tugging at me, amid the tear gas and the sonic cannon, the shouts and protests and fires, was: What exactly was “the law” in this heretofore little-known town? Whose authority held here, and why? Was it covered by the Constitution, or had we all managed to slip into some legal multiverse, where the standard rules, the ones our forefathers had fought and died for, that we pledged allegiance to as schoolchildren, simply did not exist?46

erhaps the most remarkable aspect of the
 DOJ report is how open and honest the city officials are about their police department’s purpose, how certain they seem that no one is watching them. Their comments suggest no winking and nudging, no ironic and knowing smiles. Just plain statements of financial goals, of dollars and cents. At one point the department started a new “I-270 traffic enforcement initiative” in order to “begin to fill the revenue pipeline.” The masterminds behind it warned that the initiative would require “60 to 90 [days] of lead time to turn citations into cash.”47

None of the people administering this enterprise appear concerned that what they’re doing is a gross violation of their duty to their constituents. And when you ask yourself how this report came to be written, the reason for their nonchalance is evident. The damning pages of the report exist only because a 17-year-old black boy was shot and killed by a police officer, and because that shooting led to an uprising. That uprising in turn led to the DOJ getting involved, which in turn led to the investigation that produced this audit.48

But how many other police departments are like the one in Ferguson? We happen to know of this one because of this young man’s death, because of the outrage and activism that followed that death. But Ferguson’s practices were hiding in plain sight for all to see for years. And in fact, when I talked to people in Ferguson, they didn’t think there was much that was special about it. A Washington Post investigation of the municipal court system in the towns surrounding Ferguson found identical violations across the board. This is what “the law” looks like in the Colony, where real democratic accountability is lacking, when the consent of the governed is absent or forsaken or betrayed, and when the purpose of policing and courts isn’t the maintenance of safety and provision of justice but rather some other aim.49

But empires of old kept their colonies at a distance: Rome conquered the Gauls across the Alps. France ruled Algeria from across the Mediterranean. King George III dispatched troops across the Atlantic to administer the New World. In the United States in 2016, such distance does not exist: The “rough” part of Ferguson is maybe a thousand yards from the “nice” neighborhoods.50

And so the maintenance of the Nation’s integrity requires constant vigilance. The borders must be enforced without the benefit of actual walls and checkpoints. This requires an ungodly number of interactions between the sentries of the state and those the state views as the disorderly class. The math of large numbers means that with enough of these interactions and enough fear and suspicion on the part of the officers who wield the gun, hundreds of those who’ve been marked for monitoring will die.51

One of those deaths was a Staten Island grandfather named Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a New York cop in July 2014. In a small working-class neighborhood in Staten Island, Garner sold individual cigarettes—loosies—which are illegal in New York. In other words: Eric Garner, like John Hancock, was a merchant trafficking in black-market goods. He was offering what the market demanded—a cheaper, unbundled, untaxed cigarette. And the government seeking to crack down on this offense harassed him—he’d been arrested twice for selling loosies in 2015 alone. Day after day, Eric Garner simply had to swallow a particular type of ritualized humiliation. He had to take it. Every day, the humiliation and frustration built within him.52

On the day he died, Eric Garner was wrestled to the ground and put into a chokehold as he screamed with increasing desperation, “I can’t breathe,” 11 times, until he lost consciousness and died. All this was recorded as plain as day on a smartphone that captured Garner’s final protests:
“Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it. It stops today…. Every time you see me, you want to harass me. You want to stop me [garbled] selling cigarettes. I’m minding my business, officer, I’m minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone. Please please, don’t touch me. Do not touch me.”53

Those final words could have been just as well addressed to a colonial customs officer: Every time you see me, you want to harass me. It stops today.54

Listen to Chris Hayes on the Start Making Sense podcast.

There are three different temporal perspectives from which to evaluate the presidency of Barack Obama. There’s the perspective of November 8, when it was widely anticipated that he would hand off the White House to his favored successor and thus cement his legacy. Then there’s the perspective of November 9, when the most shocking electoral upset in American history was accomplished by a man who is in every way—from ideology to temperament to skin color—a repudiation of our nation’s first black president. Lastly, there’s the perspective historians will take decades from now, as they assess Obama’s entire tenure in comparison with what came after it—so long as what comes after isn’t total nuclear annihilation. (I’m joking… mostly.) Obviously, it’s the last of these perspectives that will prove most useful. But sitting here in 2016, I don’t have the luxury of distance, and so I find myself torn between the first two.1

How to appraise the presidency of Barack Obama as the specter of President Trump looms? The clearest way to reconcile the two perspectives is to understand how Obama’s presidency, and all that it accomplished, could have led to the election of Trump. I think there are basically two tweet-length explanations:2

1. America elected a black man president, and about half the country proceeded to lose its goddamn mind.3

2. The white working class realized that the American dream is a sham. Then a con artist promised to restore it, and they bought the con.4

This is, of course, not a comprehensive list. This election, decided by about 100,000 votes in three states, was so overdetermined that you can plausibly list two dozen factors that were “decisive.” But allow me to focus for a moment on the second account.5

In 2012, I wrote a book, Twilight of the Elites, about the crisis of authority in American life. Noting that America’s trust in its institutions was at an all-time low, I argued that a cascade of elite failure, ever-growing inequality, and declining mobility had brought the nation to the brink of a genuine democratic crisis. There were, I wrote at the time, two basic types of response to this fact. Institutionalists “see the erosion of authority and declining public trust as a terrifying trend,” whereas insurrectionists “see the plummeting of trust in public institutions as a good thing if it can act as a spur for needed upheaval and change.”6

Despite his pledge to “fundamentally change the way Washington works,” Barack Obama was always an institutionalist. He ran on the promise of restoring wise stewardship to institutions that had been trashed by the reckless and feckless. Rather than blowing them up, he urged significant reforms aimed at making our institutions more responsive. Standing before the millions who had gathered on the National Mall on the blindingly frigid morning of January 20, 2009, he delivered a kind of institutionalist pep talk: “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”7

As a substantive project, Obama’s institutionalism was, in many ways, a historic success. For all the flaws in his handling of the foreclosure crisis, for all the insanity of the early-onset austerity he agreed to in his negotiations with congressional Republicans, for all the unprecedented obstructionism of that same Republican Congress, the fact is that the United States emerged from the financial crisis in better shape than almost any other similarly positioned economy. By the end of Obama’s two terms, wages were growing at their fastest pace in 60 years, unemployment was down to 4.6 percent, and 20 million more people had health insurance. Life had improved—tangibly, if at the margins—for millions. You could fill a book (indeed, a library) with celebrations and criticisms of the Obama administration, but we grade presidents on a curve, and who since Franklin Roosevelt has been a better Democratic president? Given Lyndon Johnson’s shameful legacy in Vietnam, I think the answer is no one.8

As a political project, Obamaism would also appear, at first blush, to be a staggering success. For the first time since FDR, a Democratic president won a majority of the vote in two successive elections. But the Democratic Party was eviscerated during Obama’s eight years, losing Congress and going from 29 to 18 governorships and from total control of 17 state legislatures to just six.9

Part of this is the natural entropy of governance: The party in power bleeds political capital. But something else happened at the level of political narrative, which is that the Democratic Party under Obama became associated with institutionalism. Its message was: Things are getting better; America still works; just hang on, because daybreak is around the corner. This allowed the Republicans—the party of plutocracy and deregulation and the US Chamber of Commerce—to become, in the person of Donald J. Trump, the insurrectionist party, the party of those who believe, as Trump said so many times, that “the system is rigged.” And it turned out there were enough people who cottoned to that message, spread out among enough swing states, to deliver a manifestly unqualified fraud to the White House, even if he had some 2.7 million votes less than his opponent.10

Among white voters, perhaps the most salient demographic division is between those who have a college degree and those who don’t. The former group went for Trump 48 to 45 percent (a slimmer margin than Mitt Romney’s by 11 points), whereas whites without a college degree voted for Trump by a staggering 67 to 28 percent. That’s almost exactly the same margin by which Latinos went for Hillary Clinton.11

One way of thinking about this is that the white working class started voting like a minority group. It makes a perfect, perverse kind of sense that a college degree would represent such a hard dividing line, since our modern meritocratic social contract is so predicated on earning a four-year degree. If you do, you get to become part of the American dream, and if you don’t—well, basically, you’re on your own. Obamaism offered substantive and consistent help to those tens of millions of Americans of all races without a college degree trying to escape—or simply to survive within—the vise of modern capitalism. But the story that Obama and the Democrats kept telling was the story of meritocracy and social mobility.12

After the election, I conducted a kind of exit interview with retiring Senate minority leader Harry Reid. I asked him what the Democratic Party stands for, and after speaking of his own upbringing in deep poverty in the rural town of Searchlight, Nevada, he said: “People have asked me the last year, ‘What message do you want to leave with people?’ And here’s the message: I want everyone in America to understand, if Harry Reid can make it in America, anyone can. And I want those young men and women out there who are looking for a way out to realize, if Harry Reid can make it, anybody can. That’s what America is all about.”13

This is, in some ways, a perfect summation of the Democratic Party’s message in the Obama era: In America, anyone can make it out, anyone can rise to the highest heights. Immigrant, native-born, black, white, disabled, gay, straight, male, or female—no matter your background, there’s a place at the top for you. Even if this were perfectly true (and it’s not), we’re now seeing what happens when the Democratic Party is perceived, by white working-class people at least, as the party for those who make it out. But millions didn’t make it out—so who champions them?14

The answer is that someone came along and more or less said, “Fuck all that. You won’t have to go to college to live your dreams; I’ll deliver them to you myself. I’ll reopen the coal mines. I’ll wave a magic wand, and this place that’s been pummeled will be restored. You can stay here and live your dreams. Your town can be great again.”15

I think Obama recognized the need to speak to the dislocation and alienation of the Americans who didn’t make it out as well as anyone. There’s a reason he won all those counties that Trump flipped: It was Obama’s extraordinary political talent to connect with citizens from all walks of life that made him one of the greatest figures in American history. A century from now, schoolchildren will be celebrating his birthday.16

But I’m left to wonder what it must be like inside his head now. Does he have a blissful moment every morning where he wakes up with no memory of what happened in November, a sweet morning calm before remembering the catastrophe? And I also wonder if that blissful moment before reality sets in is how we’ll remember his presidency.17

Listen to Chris Hayes discuss Obama’s legacy on the Start Making Sense podcast.

Facing a shortage of lethal injection drugs, Utah’s GOP majority legislature just passed a bill clearing the way for execution by firing squad. The Nation’s Chris Hayes interviewed Utah State Representative Paul Ray, the author of the legislation, about what motivated him to propose the bill and the overall ethics of firing squads.

“Is the barbarism of whatever horrific murder has been committed…the standard the state should be using?” Hayes asked. Representative Ray replied that given the shortage of injection drugs, a firing squad helped provide “some closure” in capital cases. “There’s another option,” Hayes said. “You can not execute people.”

—Avi Asher-Schapiro

This footage, which All In producers filmed, shows the police loudly threatening Chris Hayes and his media team as they attempt to film the chaos in Ferguson. As Chris Hayes approached the scene with cameras, police threatened to mace them—one officer shouted, “Hey! Media! Get behind us! Do not pass us! You’re getting maced next time you pass us.”

—Hannah Harris Green

Several passengers who perished on flight MH17 were HIV researchers en route to a conference in Melbourne, where they believed their discussions could end the AIDS epidemic. “There was a real sense of profound optimism going into this conference,” The Nation’s executive editor Richard Kim told Chris Hayes on All In Friday. One researcher in particular who was aboard the flight, Joep Lange, believed that the medical community possessed the necessary knowledge required to end AIDS—they only lacked the resources. “That struggle, to get the political will and human resources—that was Dr. Lange’s entire life. He was not just a brilliant researcher and scientist. He was an activist,” said Kim.

—Hannah Harris Green

Why is so much of the funding for anti-marijuana activist organizations coming from pharmaceutical companies? Joining Chris Hayes on All In last night, Lee Fang explained the tangled links between big pharma companies who make opioid prescription drugs and anti-legalization activist groups that he uncovered while reporting his article, “The Real Reason Pot Is Still Illegal.”

According to Fang, the anti-drug activists who focus on pot have their priorities misplaced, as prescription painkiller abuse is an “epidemic” that is sweeping the country. “The CDC says it kills over 16,000 people a year,” Fang told Hayes.
—Hannah Harris Green

On Wednesday morning, House minority leader Mitch McConnell and other Republican representatives successfully blocked Elizabeth Warren’s student loan bill—a piece of legislation that would have allowed the millions of Americans saddled with student loan debts to refinance them at a lower interest rate. McConnell referred to the bill as a “tax increase bill styled as a student loan bill,” and encouraged Republicans to filibuster to stop it. fifty-eight senators, three of them Republicans, voted for the bill, while only thirty-eight voted against it, but it was still not enough to overcome the filibuster.

An outraged Elizabeth Warren told Chris Hayes last night that the choice should have been simple. “Do you stand with the billionaires, protecting every single tax break that they get? Every loophole, every subsidy? Or do you stand with the students? The people who went out there, played by the rules and tried to get an education and are trying to start their lives,” she demanded.

Now, McConnell better watch his seat: Warren says she’ll be going to Kentucky to campaign for Alison Lundergan Grimes, McConnell’s Democratic opponent in this fall’s election, who Warren said has been in favor of the student loan bill and would be likely to bring about the positive change that McConnell is trying to resist.

—Hannah Harris Green

In a memorable 2009 speech on the House floor, Florida Representative Alan Grayson claimed that the Republican plan for healthcare involved two simple steps: don’t get sick and, if you do, die quickly. According to Nation editor-at-large Chris Hayes, those controversial comments are proving scarily accurate. While dozens of Republican governors have blocked the expansion of Medicaid in their states, Hayes draws on the example of Massachusetts—which expanded access to health insurance, lowering the state’s mortality rate by 3 percent—as proof that “insuring the previously uninsured saves lives.” Under the Affordable Care Act, the national rate of uninsured has dropped to the lowest point since Gallup began recording the figure. As Hayes said, “Blocking the implementation of Obamacare will cost lives.”
—Mara Kardas-Nelson

“Are you the unluckiest reporter in America today?” WNYC’s Brian Lehrer asked Nation Editor-at-Large Chris Hayes on Monday morning. Hayes laughed. The day before, the third episode of Years of Living Dangerously had aired on Showtime, in which Republican Congressman Michael Grimm admitted, in an interview with Hayes, the existence of man-made climate change. The following morning, Hayes woke up to news that Grimm had been taken into federal custody for alleged fraudulent business practices. “Well, we got a Republican convert on climate change,” Hayes joked, “too bad he got indicted the next day.” Fraud or not, Grimm’s change of heart is a positive step for Republicans, who continue to diminish the severity of the climate crisis. “If we continue doing what we’re all collectively doing on this planet,” Hayes told Lehrer, “we will get to a point where Fargo is like Phoenix.” Which is to say, climate change doesn’t care whether conservatives believe it exists, it’s going to destroy the planet if we don’t act.
—Sam Adler-Bell

To prevent the catastrophic scenario of a planet heated by more than 2 degrees Celsius, 80 percent of the world’s current fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground. What’s standing in the way of making sure that happens? It’s not climate change denialism—it’s money. Those reserves are valued at an estimated $20 trillion, a number that seems impossible for fossil fuel companies to walk away from. “What does it take to make concentrated powerful interests relinquish their wealth on this scale?” was the question tackled on yesterday’s episode of MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes, as well as in his new Nation companion piece. The only time business owners have let go of a revenue source on that scale was when the United States ended slavery. It’s a tough mission, but as guest and Gasland director Josh Fox reminds us, “What is money worth when there is no civilization?”
—Corinne Grinapol

Before the cannons fired at Fort Sumter, the Confederates announced their rebellion with lofty rhetoric about “violations of the Constitution of the United States” and “encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States.” But the brute, bloody fact beneath those words was money. So much goddamn money.

The leaders of slave power were fighting a movement of dispossession. The abolitionists told them that the property they owned must be forfeited, that all the wealth stored in the limbs and wombs of their property would be taken from them. Zeroed out. Imagine a modern-day political movement that contended that mutual funds and 401(k)s, stocks and college savings accounts were evil institutions that must be eliminated completely, more or less overnight. This was the fear that approximately 400,000 Southern slaveholders faced on the eve of the Civil War.

Today, we rightly recoil at the thought of tabulating slaves as property. It was precisely this ontological question—property or persons?—that the war was fought over. But suspend that moral revulsion for a moment and look at the numbers: Just how much money were the South’s slaves worth then? A commonly cited figure is $75 billion, which comes from multiplying the average sale price of slaves in 1860 by the number of slaves and then using the Consumer Price Index to adjust for inflation. But as economists Samuel H. Williamson and Louis P. Cain argue, using CPI-adjusted prices over such a long period doesn’t really tell us much: “In the 19th century,” they note, “there were no national surveys to figure out what the average consumer bought.” In fact, the first such survey, in Massachusetts, wasn’t conducted until 1875.

In order to get a true sense of how much wealth the South held in bondage, it makes far more sense to look at slavery in terms of the percentage of total economic value it represented at the time. And by that metric, it was colossal. In 1860, slaves represented about 16 percent of the total household assets—that is, all the wealth—in the entire country, which in today’s terms is a stunning $10 trillion.

Ten trillion dollars is already a number much too large to comprehend, but remember that wealth was intensely geographically focused. According to calculations made by economic historian Gavin Wright, slaves represented nearly half the total wealth of the South on the eve of secession. “In 1860, slaves as property were worth more than all the banks, factories and railroads in the country put together,” civil war historian Eric Foner tells me. “Think what would happen if you liquidated the banks, factories and railroads with no compensation.”

* * *

In 2012, the writer and activist Bill McKibben published a heart-stopping essay in Rolling Stone titled “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” I’ve read hundreds of thousands of words about climate change over the last decade, but that essay haunts me the most.

The piece walks through a fairly straightforward bit of arithmetic that goes as follows. The scientific consensus is that human civilization cannot survive in any recognizable form a temperature increase this century more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Given that we’ve already warmed the earth about 0.8 degrees Celsius, that means we have 1.2 degrees left—and some of that warming is already in motion. Given the relationship between carbon emissions and global average temperatures, that means we can release about 565 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere by mid-century. Total. That’s all we get to emit if we hope to keep inhabiting the planet in a manner that resembles current conditions.

Now here’s the terrifying part. The Carbon Tracker Initiative, a consortium of financial analysts and environmentalists, set out to tally the amount of carbon contained in the proven fossil fuel reserves of the world’s energy companies and major fossil fuel–producing countries. That is, the total amount of carbon we know is in the ground that we can, with present technology, extract, burn and put into the atmosphere. The number that the Carbon Tracker Initiative came up with is… 2,795 gigatons. Which means the total amount of known, proven extractable fossil fuel in the ground at this very moment is almost five times the amount we can safely burn.

Proceeding from this fact, McKibben leads us inexorably to the staggering conclusion that the work of the climate movement is to find a way to force the powers that be, from the government of Saudi Arabia to the board and shareholders of ExxonMobil, to leave 80 percent of the carbon they have claims on in the ground. That stuff you own, that property you’re counting on and pricing into your stocks? You can’t have it.

Given the fluctuations of fuel prices, it’s a bit tricky to put an exact price tag on how much money all that unexcavated carbon would be worth, but one financial analyst puts the price at somewhere in the ballpark of $20 trillion. So in order to preserve a roughly habitable planet, we somehow need to convince or coerce the world’s most profitable corporations and the nations that partner with them to walk away from $20 trillion of wealth. Since all of these numbers are fairly complex estimates, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that we’ve overestimated the total amount of carbon and attendant cost by a factor of 2. Let’s say that it’s just $10 trillion.

The last time in American history that some powerful set of interests relinquished its claim on $10 trillion of wealth was in 1865—and then only after four years and more than 600,000 lives lost in the bloodiest, most horrific war we’ve ever fought.

It is almost always foolish to compare a modern political issue to slavery, because there’s nothing in American history that is slavery’s proper analogue. So before anyone misunderstands my point, let me be clear and state the obvious: there is absolutely no conceivable moral comparison between the enslavement of Africans and African-Americans and the burning of carbon to power our devices. Humans are humans; molecules are molecules. The comparison I’m making is a comparison between the political economy of slavery and the political economy of fossil fuel.

More acutely, when you consider the math that McKibben, the Carbon Tracker Initiative and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) all lay out, you must confront the fact that the climate justice movement is demanding that an existing set of political and economic interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars of wealth. It is impossible to point to any precedent other than abolition.

* * *

The connection between slavery and fossil fuels, however, is more than metaphorical. Before the widespread use of fossil fuels, slaves were one of the main sources of energy (if not the main source) for societies stretching back millennia. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, nearly all energy to power societies flowed from the natural ecological cascade of sun and food: the farmhands in the fields, the animals under saddle, the burning of wood or grinding of a mill. A life of ceaseless exertion.

Before fossil fuels, the only way out of this drudgery was by getting other human beings to do the bulk of the work that the solar regime required of its participants. This could be done by using accrued money to pay for labor, but more often than not—particularly in societies like the Roman Empire that achieved density and scale—it was achieved through slavery. Slavery opened up for the slave owners vast new vistas of possibility. The grueling mundane exertions demanded of everyone under a solar regime could be cast off, pushed down on the shoulders of the slave.

In this respect, the basic infrastructure of energy distribution and exploitation in the plantation South was not so different from feudal Europe or ancient Egypt. During the first half of the nineteenth century, coal, whale oil, pneumatic power and all manner of mechanization penetrated the more urbanized North, while the South remained largely mired in the pre-industrial age. In 1850, only 14 percent of the nation’s canal mileage and 26 percent of its railroad mileage ran through slave states, and the industrial output of the entire region was only one-third that of Massachusetts alone.

Not only that, but as time marched forward, the South lagged further and further behind. In Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson notes that while in 1850 slave states had 42 percent of the population, they “possessed only 18 percent of the country’s manufacturing capacity, a decline from the 20 percent of 1840.” The same holds true for the South’s percentage of railroad miles, which was declining as the war approached. In 1852, James D.B. DeBow, a vociferous advocate of diversifying the Southern economy, lamented that “the North grows rich, and powerful, and great, whilst we, at best, are stationary.” (This underdevelopment would haunt the South well into the twentieth century: in 1930, only 38 percent of residents of the former Confederate states had electricity, compared with about 85 percent in states that had been free.)

This lagging wasn’t just happenstance: many historians argue that it was, in fact, the availability of the cheap, plentiful energy resource of slavery that meant the South faced less pressure to urbanize, electrify or industrialize. Slavery, and the energy it provided, was a kind of crutch giving the antebellum South its own version of what modern-development economists now call, in a very different context, a “resource curse”—that is, an overreliance on a resource (in this case, enslaved human beings) that stunts economic diversification and development.

Crucially, as slavery became more profitable to the planter class and ever more central to the economic health of the South, the ideas about slavery grew increasingly aggressive, expansionist and reactionary. “Very few people at the time of the Revolution and the Constitution publicly affirmed the desirability of slavery,” Foner observes. “They generally said, ‘We’re stuck with it; there’s nothing we can do.’”

Even in much of the South, slavery was at first seen as a necessary evil, a shameful feature of the American experience that would necessarily be phased out over time. Many slave-owning founders shared in this consensus. Slave owner and Virginian Patrick Henry referred to slavery in a private letter as an “abominable practice…a species of violence and tyranny” that was “repugnant to humanity.” His fellow Virginian Richard Henry Lee called the slave trade an “iniquitous and disgraceful traffic” in 1759 while introducing a bill to try to end it. Thomas Jefferson, at times an ardent defender of slavery and the white supremacy that undergirded it, confessed in 1779 that “the whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.”

When Jefferson wrote those words, slavery had nowhere near the economic grip on the South that it would have during the cotton boom in the first half of the nineteenth century. Between 1805 and 1860, the price per slave grew from about $300 to $750, and the total number of slaves increased from 1 million to 4 million—which meant that the total value of slaves grew a whopping 900 percent in the half-century before the war.

This increase in the price of slaves was due largely to two factors. In 1808, the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves took effect, permanently constraining supply. From then on, all new slaves came as the offspring of existing slaves. And then there was cotton. It’s hard to overestimate the impact that cotton had on the South during the decades leading up to the war. No place on earth produced more cotton, and the world’s demand was insatiable. Economic historian Roger L. Ransom writes that “by the mid-1830s, cotton shipments accounted for more than half the value of all exports from the United States.” So lucrative was the crop that the planter class rushed into it, leaving behind everything else. As McPherson notes, per capita production of the South’s principal food crops actually declined during this period.

All of this led to a heady kind of triumphalism. In 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina plantation owner, took to the floor of the Senate to inquire mockingly:

What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? I will not stop to depict what every one can imagine, but this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.

It is perhaps not surprising that under conditions of stupendous profit and accumulation, the rhetoric of the South’s politicians and planter class changed to a florid celebration of the peculiar institution. “By the 1830s, [John C.] Calhoun and all these guys, some of them go so far as to say, ‘It would be better for white workers if they were slaves,’” Foner tells me. “They have a whole literature on why slavery should be expanded.” Indeed, here’s Calhoun in 1837:

I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.

Here’s Hammond in the same “Cotton is king” speech, playing the same notes:

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement…. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves.

“Our negroes,” according to Southern social theorist George Fitzhugh, “are not only better off as to physical comfort than free laborers, but their moral condition is better…. [They are] the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.”

So the basic story looks like this: in the decades before the Civil War, the economic value of slavery explodes. It becomes the central economic institution and source of wealth for a region experiencing a boom that succeeded in raising per capita income and concentrating wealth ever more tightly in the hands of the Southern planter class. During this same period, the rhetoric of the planter class evolves from an ambivalence about slavery to a full-throated, aggressive celebration of it. As slavery becomes more valuable, the slave states find ever more fulsome ways of praising, justifying and celebrating it. Slavery increasingly moves from an economic institution to a cultural one; it becomes a matter of identity, of symbolism—indeed, in the hands of the most monstrously adept apologists, a thing of beauty.

And yet, at the very same time, casting a shadow over it all is the growing power of the abolition movement in the North and the dawning awareness that any day might be slavery’s last. So that, on the eve of the war, slavery had never been more lucrative or more threatened. That also happens to be true of fossil fuel extraction today.

* * *

America is in the grip of a fossil fuel frenzy almost without precedent. By 2015, the United States is projected to surpass Saudi Arabia as the largest producer of oil in the world. After sixty years of being a net importer of fuel, we are now a net exporter, and it’s possible that we will break our 1970 record for peak oil production. This comes thanks to both deepwater drilling and shale fields like the Bakken formation in North Dakota, whose previously inaccessible reserves have been unlocked by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies, also known as “fracking.”

These same technologies have also produced an unprecedented natural gas surge, as fracking wells are sunk into the soil of ranches and parks and hillsides across the country. Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale alone produces about 14 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day—the equivalent of more than 2.4 million barrels of oil. Shale extraction has quadrupled in the past four years and now accounts for about 40 percent of the annual natural gas yields in the United States, which recently surpassed Russia as the world’s largest natural gas producer.

At the very same time that extraction has come to play an increasingly dominant role in the US economy, we have seen a dramatic reversal in the politics of fossil fuel and climate change. Whereas high-profile Republicans once expressed ambivalence about our reliance on fossil fuels, viewing it as a kind of necessary evil that would ultimately be phased out, in the last five years the extraction of fossil fuels has become—to steal a phrase—“a positive good.”

During the 1988 vice-presidential debate, Dan Quayle argued that “the greenhouse effect is an important environmental issue. It’s important for us to get the data in, to see what alternatives we have to the fossil fuels…. We need to get on with it, and in a George Bush administration, you can bet that we will.”

That wasn’t quite the case, but in 1989, Newt Gingrich was one of twenty-five Republican co-sponsors of the Global Warming Prevention Act, which held that “the Earth’s atmosphere is being changed at an unprecedented rate by pollutants resulting from human activities, inefficient and wasteful fossil fuel use, and the effects of rapid population growth in many regions” and that “increasing the nation’s and world’s reliance on ecologically sustainable solar and renewable resources…is a significant long-term solution to reducing fossil-generated carbon dioxide and other pollutants.” In 1990, President George H.W. Bush said at an IPCC event, “We all know that human activities are changing the atmosphere in unexpected and in unprecedented ways.”

While his son did little to curb carbon emissions when he took his turn at the presidency, he did at least give it lip service. Speaking ahead of the 2005 G8 Summit, George W. Bush said, “It’s now recognized that the surface of the earth is warmer, and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem.” As part of the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, he signed into law minimum efficiency requirements to begin to phase out the use of incandescent bulbs in 2012. (A law that would, in the Obama era, become a top conservative target, as the Tea Party rallied to support the incandescent bulb as if it were a constitutionally enshrined right.)

And in 2008, somewhat miraculously, John McCain’s platform featured support for a cap-and-trade bill that would have effectively put a price on carbon. But even by that year, you could already feel a seismic shift in the rhetoric. I sat in the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul in 2008 and watched Sarah Palin lead thousands of people in a thunderous chant of “Drill, baby, drill!”

After Obama’s election, things moved quickly: McCain dropped support for his own legislation to regulate carbon pollution. In 2010, Bob Inglis, a conservative congressman from South Carolina, was soundly defeated by a Tea Party challenger in the Republican primary, due chiefly to Inglis’s refusal to deny the science on climate change. A year later, Gingrich called his appearance alongside Nancy Pelosi in a 2008 ad urging action on climate change the “dumbest single thing I’ve done in years,” recanting his acceptance of the science and embracing denialism. He was not alone—in fact, outright denialism is now more or less the official Republican line. In 2011, and again in January of this year, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to block the EPA from regulating carbon emissions and against amendments that would acknowledge that climate change is, in fact, happening.

And it’s not just denialism: extracting and burning carbon is now roundly celebrated by conservative politicians, as if plunging holes into the earth to pull out fossilized peat is a sign of the nation’s potency. In 2012, Mitt Romney said he would build the controversial Keystone XL pipeline himself. Texas Representative Steve Stockman tweeted in March 2013 that “the best thing about the Earth is if you poke holes in it oil and gas come out.”

Remember, all of this is happening at the same time that (a) fossil fuel companies are pulling more carbon out of the ground than ever before, and (b) it’s becoming increasingly clear that those companies will have to leave 80 percent of their reserves in the ground if we are to avert a global cataclysm. In the same way that the abolition movement cast a shadow over the cotton boom, so does the movement to put a price on carbon spook the fossil fuel companies, which even at their moment of peak triumph wonder if a radical change is looming around the corner.

Let me pause here once again to be clear about what the point of this extended historical comparison is and is not. Comparisons to slavery are generally considered rhetorically out of bounds, and for good reason. We are walking on treacherous terrain. The point here is not to associate modern fossil fuel companies with the moral bankruptcy of the slaveholders of yore, or the politicians who defended slavery with those who defend fossil fuels today.

In fact, the parallel I want to highlight is between the opponents of slavery and the opponents of fossil fuels. Because the abolitionists were ultimately successful, it’s all too easy to lose sight of just how radical their demand was at the time: that some of the wealthiest people in the country would have to give up their wealth. That liquidation of private wealth is the only precedent for what today’s climate justice movement is rightly demanding: that trillions of dollars of fossil fuel stay in the ground. It is an audacious demand, and those making it should be clear-eyed about just what they’re asking. They should also recognize that, like the abolitionists of yore, their task may be as much instigation and disruption as it is persuasion. There is no way around conflict with this much money on the line, no available solution that makes everyone happy. No use trying to persuade people otherwise.

* * *

If I’ve done my job so far, you should, right about now, be feeling despair. If, indeed, what we need to save the earth is to forcibly pry trillions of dollars of wealth out of the hands of its owners, and if the only precedent for that is the liberation of the slaves—well, then you wouldn’t be crazy if you concluded that we’re doomed, since that result was achieved only through the most brutal extended war in our nation’s history.

So here is why we’re not doomed. Among many obvious differences between the slave power and the fossil fuel cabal is this definitive one. Slaves were incredibly valuable in large part because they produced huge amounts of value with relatively little capital required. Slave owners merely had to provide food, water and shelter (often wretchedly insufficient) and maintain a system of repression and surveillance to guard against the ever-present threat of rebellion or escape. Compared with many other kinds of investments, unlocking the value of slaves required very little of the plantation owners.

Such is not the case with fossil fuels. Fossil fuel extraction is one of the most capital-intensive industries in the world. While it is immensely, unfathomably profitable, it requires ungodly amounts of money to dig and drill the earth, money to pump and refine and transport the fuel so that it can go from the fossilized plant matter thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface into your Honda. And that constant need for billions of new dollars in investment capital is the industry’s Achilles’ heel.

A variety of forces are now attacking precisely this vulnerability. The movement to stop the Keystone XL pipeline is probably the largest social movement in American history directed at stopping a piece of capital investment, which is what the pipeline is. Because without that pipeline, a lot of the dirty fuel trapped in the Alberta tar sands is too costly to be worth pulling out.

The divestment movement is pushing colleges, universities, municipalities, pension funds and others to remove their investment from fossil fuel companies. So far, eighteen foundations, twenty-seven religious institutions, twenty-two cities, and eleven colleges and universities have committed themselves to divestment. Together, they have pledged to divest hundreds of millions of dollars from the fossil fuel companies so far.

Of course, that’s a drop in the global pool of capital. But some of the largest funds in the world are sovereign wealth funds, which are subject to political pressure. The largest such fund belongs to Norway, which is seriously considering divesting from fossil fuels.

Investors, even those unmotivated by stewardship of the planet, have reason to be suspicious of the fossil fuel companies. Right now, they are seeing their investment dollars diverted from paying dividends to doing something downright insane: searching for new reserves. Globally, the industry spends $1.8 billion a day on exploration. As one longtime energy industry insider pointed out to me, fossil fuel companies are spending much more on exploring for new reserves than they are posting in profits.

Think about that for a second: to stay below a 2 degree Celsius rise, we can burn only one-fifth of the total fossil fuel that companies have in their reserves right now. And yet, fossil fuel companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars looking for new reserves—reserves that would be sold and emitted only in some distant postapocalyptic future in which we’ve already burned enough fossil fuel to warm the planet past even the most horrific projections.

This means that fossil fuel companies are taking their investors’ money and spending it on this extremely expensive suicide mission. Every single day. If investors say, “Stop it—we want that money back as dividends rather than being spent on exploration,” then, according to this industry insider, “what that means is, literally, the oil and gas companies don’t have a viable business model. If all your investors say that, and all the analysts start saying that, they can no longer grow as businesses.”

Please support The Nation. Donate now!

In fact, in certain climate and investment circles, people have begun to talk about “stranded assets”—that is, the risk that either national or global carbon-pricing regimes will make the extraction of some of the current reserves uneconomical. Recently, shareholders pushed ExxonMobil to start reporting on its exposure to the risk of stranded assets, which was a crucial first step, though the report itself was best summarized by McKibben as saying, basically, “We plan on overheating the planet, we don’t think any government will stop us, we dare you to try.”

That is the current stance of the fossil fuel companies: “It’s our property, and we’re gonna extract, sell and burn all of it. What are you gonna do about it?”

Those people you see getting arrested outside the White House protesting Keystone XL, showing up at shareholder meetings and sitting in on campuses to get their schools to divest are doing something about it. They are attacking the one weak link in the chain of doom that is our fossil fuel economy.

As the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” What the climate justice movement is demanding is the ultimate abolition of fossil fuels. And our fates all depend on whether they succeed.

Read more of The Nation’s special #MyClimateToo coverage:
Mark Hertsgaard: Why TheNation.com Today Is All About Climate
Naomi Klein: The Change Within: The Obstacles We Face Are Not Just External
Dani McClain: The ‘Environmentalists’ Who Scapegoat Immigrants and Women on Climate Change
Mychal Denzel Smith: Racial and Environmental Justice Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Earth Day’s Founding Father
Wen Stephenson: Let This Earth Day Be The Last
Katha Pollitt: Climate Change is the Tragedy of the Global Commons
Michelle Goldberg: Fighting Despair to Fight Climate Change
George Zornick: We’re the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Cheap Date
Dan Zegart: Want to Stop Climate Change? Take the Fossil Fuel Industry to Court
Jeremy Brecher: ‘Jobs vs. the Environment’: How to Counter the Divisive Big Lie
Jon Wiener: Elizabeth Kolbert on Species Extinction and Climate Change
Dave Zirin: Brazil’s World Cup Will Kick the Environment in the Teeth
Steven Hsieh: People of Color Are Already Getting Hit the Hardest by Climate Change
John Nichols: If Rick Weiland Can Say “No” to Keystone, So Can Barack Obama
Michelle Chen: Where Have All the Green Jobs Gone?
Peter Rothberg: Why I’m Not Totally Bummed Out This Earth Day
Leslie Savan: This Is My Brain on Paper Towels

Take Action: Stop Cove Point

New York Mets second baseman David Murphy was harshly criticized in the sports media this week. His crime? Murphy missed two games for the birth of his first child. The issue was humorously addresed on All in With Chris Hayes by guest host Joy Reid, joined via telephone by Hayes, who was himself on paternity leave. The irony of the situation was not lost on him. "There's actually a nice, tight analogy here between cable news and baseball," he said. "They play 162 games, OK? He's going to miss three games, which is, by the way, in the collective bargaining agreement that the union negotiated." Hayes had no sympathy for the "neanderthalish" views of sportscasters like Boomer Esiason and Mike Francesa. "Take some time with your frickin’ kid and take some time with the partner in your life who brought the kid into the world" he said. "That actually is part of being a man."
—Dustin Christensen

Fancy a side of irony with your corporate hypocrisy? Last night on MSNBC, Nation Editor-at-Large Chris Hayes profiled ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, a vocal proponent of hydraulic fracking, who is suing to prevent the construction of a water tower near his eighty-three-acre, $5 million horse ranch in Bartonville, Texas. The purpose of the tower? Storing water for fracking. Tillerson and his super-wealthy neighbors are concerned, the lawsuit states, that the fracking tower might “devalue their properties and adversely impact the rural lifestyle they sought to enjoy.” As Hayes put it, “Rex Tillerson is leading the fracking revolution, just not in his backyard.”
—Sam Adler-Bell

While we hold up Roosevelt, Washington and Lincoln as exemplars of American democracy, there have been some duds in the presidential lineup. Nation Editor at Large Chris Hayes celebrated President’s Day with a rundown of the presidents “whose maleficence, incompetence, cluelessness, racism, violence, and ethnic cleansing made the country and the world worse.” Joining him were Columbia professor Dorian Warren, author Jim Moore, and Nation Washington DC Correspondent John Nichols, who selected Andrew Johnson as the country's worst president thanks to his blatantly racist leadership in the post-Civil War years. Nichols noted that Johnson, who took office after Lincoln’s assassination, blocked the 1866 Civil Rights Act, fought against the Fourteenth Amendment and vetoed allowing states to enter the union for fear they might tip the balance in favor of civil rights.
—Simon Davis-Cohen

The takeaway concept of Occupy Wall Street—the 1 percent versus the 99—continues to shape our perception of modern American society. Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel appeared on MSNBC’s All in With Chris Hayes, alongside radio host Sam Seder, to talk about the rising populist backlash against income inequality and the dissociation of 1 percenters from this vital conversation. As vanden Heuvel pointed out, “Until we have public financing, we are not going to be able to unravel the rigged system. The rules are built for the wealthiest."
—Allegra Kirkland

Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel joined Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz on MSNBC's All in With Chris Hayes to examine the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address. Vanden Heuvel praised Obama’s decision to use executive orders to bypass an immobile Congres, insisting that the defensive response of the GOP was out of line with the limited economic reforms the president proposed. “The Nation is not for extreme manifestations of executive power," she said, "but executive power in support of the jobless, in support of the planet, in support of the homeless…in my mind this is not about left and right, it’s about right and wrong.”
—Allegra Kirkland

After making a career-defining play that sent his team to the Superbowl, Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman launched into a spirited on-camera rant against ‘49ers wide receiver Michael Crabtree. The clip has since gone viral, and Chris Hayes spoke with Nation writer Dave Zirin, commentator Tara Dowdell and former-NFL player Roman Oben about the racialized response to Sherman’s diatribe. As Zirin pointed out, “It’s a racial Rorschach test by so many in politics who want free speech and want people to be passionate, but only certain people.”
—Allegra Kirkland

During coverage of last night’s elections, MSNBC host and Nation editor-at-large Chris Hayes contrasted Tuesday’s results with the off-year elections of four years prior. While GOP wins in 2009 predicted a forthcoming House takeover, last night’s results don’t point to “the same kind of prophecy,” Hayes observed. He was later joined by colleagues Alex Wagner and Steve Kornacki to talk Chris Christie’s re-election and what it means for the New Jersey governor’s almost inevitable 2016 run for president.

—Steven Hsieh

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

One day into the government shutdown—despite emerging fissures within the GOP and widespread public opposition to their strategy—House Republicans continue to hold the federal government hostage in their attempt to delay the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Fox News has ramped up their spin machine, calling the crisis a “slimdown.” Meanwhile 72 percent of Americans oppose a government shutdown to block the Affordable Care Act.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes documents the human cost of the Republican’s intransigence and the growing frustration within the GOP to the Tea Party caucas’ political unteneble position.

—Jake Scobey-Thal

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

On October 17, the US government will no longer be able to fund itself. In order to meet the spending obligations that Congress has already debated and appropriated, House Republicans will have to agree to raise the debt ceiling. Though every partisan and policy-maker agrees that the failure to meet debt obligations would be catastrophic, Republicans, once again, are holding the economy hostage by tying the vote to a series of conservative legislative principles.

This week, House Republicans leaked their demands—the ransom note includes, among other things, a one year delay to the Affordable Care Act, progress on the Keystone pipeline and tax reform measures based on Paul Ryan budget. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes notes, “Republicans are blackmailing the American people with the agenda that lost the last presidential election by 3.5 million votes.”

—Jake Scobey-Thal

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Last night President Obama gave a speech outlining the administration’s policy towards Syria. Obama not only made the case for intervention, but also, as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes notes, “attempted to articulate a vision of America’s role in the world.” The speech came just one day after Russian officials expressed support for a potential diplomatic solution that would require the Assad regime to relinquish all remaining chemical weapons caches, opening the door for an alternative to military action.

Hayes spoke with Katrina vanden Heuvel, Nation editor and publisher, and Joy Reid, managing editor of theGrio.com, about whether a war-weary public would accept Obama’s moral argument and the renewed possibility of a negotiated settlement.

—Jake Scobey-Thal

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

With the president now seeking congressional approval for punitive attacks on Assad, lawmakers can no longer posture—they must now cast a vote.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes addresses where he stands on airstrikes in Syria, explaining why he thinks military action would be destructive and ineffectual, and outlining a range of “concrete things we can do that don't involve missiles.”

—Jake Scobey-Thal  

Take Action: Demand Your Reps Vote No on Military Intervention in Syria

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Bond holders are at odds with municipal workers over who will bear the brunt of Detroit’s bankruptcy. Yesterday, unions and two public pension funds that represent City workers and retirees submitted formal objections to Detroit’s bankruptcy filing, arguing that emergency manager Kevin Orr is miscalculating how much the City’s pension obligations are underfunded.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes is joined by Lee Saunders, president of the AFSCME union, and Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, to respond to the right-wing caricature of Detroit’s demise and debate whether the City’s effort to defund pension plans is unconsitutional.

—Jake Scobey-Thal

Bankruptcy court is not a democracy.

Solar panels are seen at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada, on August 1, 2008. (Reuters/Steve Marcus)

Editor’s note: The following is in response to Wen Stephenson’s post, “Dear Chris: Good Job. Now Let’s Get Real.”

I don’t really disagree with your point, Wen, which is that we didn’t emphasize the full scope and depth of the problem and scope and depth of the solution. We let people off too easy, we painted too encouraging and rosy a picture. But that was a choice, and one I still stand behind. There are different aspects of the climate story one can choose to emphasize and different tones to strike, partly depending on the audience or the specific set of facts involved or, as in this case, one’s own judgment about how to best penetrate the reflexive shell of indifference and hopelessness that even the most conscientious people have erected between themselves and the problem.

Some think that doubling down on the severity of the crisis—its world-historical size and importance—will break through, but I know that I find myself retreating even further from that kind of storytelling. It is very, very easy to look at the facts as they stand now and conclude that we are screwed. And, perversely, the right has begun to very ably use this in their own rhetoric. Albert Hirschman once divided reactionary arguments into three categories: perversity, futility and jeopardy. We are now seeing the right pivot from arguments that emphasized perversity and jeopardy to sheer futility. I hear it all time: “OK, even if we act, isn’t it too late? Won’t China and India just keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere?” Etc.

So I strongly believe that it is extremely important to convince people that the problem is, in fact, solvable. Our record of environmental regulation of pollution, in fact, shows that very often the eventual cost is far, far less than was originally estimated. Human ingenuity is an incredible thing! So if you picked up a certain upbeat undercurrent in the show, you weren’t wrong. I happen to think the problem, as big and terrifying as it is, really is solvable and really will be solved. And I think it’s doubly important to let people know that so as to engender the level of investment and action we need to make sure that hopeful future is ours.

Read Wen Stephenson’s original post to Chris Hayes, “Dear Chris: Good Job. Now Let’s Get Real.”

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news and news about the economy

The US criminal justice system disproportionately incarcerates individuals from disadvantaged communities, particularly people of color. For privileged Americans, this system is often an afterthought—prison is for other people. Netflix’s new hit show Orange is the New Black aims to address what happens when these two worlds collide. The show, which is based on a true story, chronicles the travails of Piper Chapman, an upper-class white women, as she spends a year in federal prison.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes is joined by Piper Kerman, the author of the memoir on which the show is based, to discuss the unequal application of criminal justice, as well as Kerman’s year in prison and the women with whom she spent it.

—Jake Scobey-Thal

Salamishah Tillet on how the show seeks to challenge the racial stereotypes of women of color.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

After the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, conservative legislatures from North Carolina to Texas rejoiced by enacting a range of discriminatory measures. But was it too early to celebrate? This morning, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department would be using Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act—a section that remains intact after the Supreme Court’s decision—to ask a federal court in Texas to subject the state to a pre-clearance regime whenever the state tries to change voting laws and practices.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes is joined by Congressman Marc Veasey (D-Texas) and Julie Fernandes, senior policy analyst with Open Society Institute, to try to figure out what the federal government can do to combat Texas’ new voter suppression laws.

—Jake Scobey-Thal

Ari Berman on the country’s worst voting law yet.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

After Harry Reid’s threat to amend Senate rules broke the longstanding Republican filibuster, Richard Cordray was finally confirmed Tuesday as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB, which was created as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, regulates consumer financial products so that they work for ordinary Americans.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes was joined by the visionary of the bureau, Senator Elizabeth Warren, to celebrate Cordray’s confirmation and discuss what’s next in the fight to reign in Wall Street.

—Jake Scobey-Thal

Why were the banks fighting against CFPB? Because it works.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

On Sunday, Ohio Governor John Kasich signed into law a state budget that includes some of the most restrictive anti-abortion measures in the country. One day later—and just a week after the now famous Wendy Davis filibuster—the Texas state legislature kicked off their second special session, in which Republican lawmakers aim to pass their own legislation that would make Texas one of the hardest places in the country for women to get an abortion.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes is joined by Texas State Senator Leticia van de Putte and Ohio-based columnist Connie Schultz to discuss the draconian tactics these legislatures have employed to bypass public debate and offer some friendly PR advice for the men that sign anti-abortion bills.

—Jake Scobey-Thal

When it comes to abortion, Katrina vanden Heuvel is sick of being patronized.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

George Zimmerman is charged with second-degree murder in the killing of Trayvon Martin. As the last person to speak with Martin before his death, Rachel Jeantel took the stand this week as a key witness for the prosecution.

After a cross-examination in which the defense attempted to impugn Jeantel’s credibility, much of the court commentary devolved into crass and racialized barbs attacking her intelligence. But as Nation blogger Mychel Denzel Smith wrote yesterday, amid this tactical denigration, “Rachel stood and defended herself and Trayvon (and frankly, many other black youth) against the condescension, against silencing, and against the character attacks.”

Quoting Denzel Smith, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes defends Jeantel and takes her haters to task for their “willful” misunderstanding of a young, black woman’s vernacular.

—Jake Scobey-Thal

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In a speech that Al Gore described as “the best on climate by any president ever,” President Obama forcefully called for action to address man-made global warming. Refusing to wait for skeptics or be sidelined by industry special interests, the president outlined a series of executive actions aimed at curbing climate change. And it is about time. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes talks to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse about what has stunted the climate debate and why Republicans can’t accept that the EPA actually exists.

—Jake Scobey-Thal

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

While the immigration bill is getting bipartisan support in the Senate, the House is a different story. Yesterday, Representative Steve King led a six-hour press conference outside the Capitol steps to raise concerns about the pathway to citizenship. While right-wing intransigence is nothing new, these calls for obstruction from the Tea Party caucus are in conflict with more mainstream Rebulicans’ support for the bill. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes evaluates Speaker John Boehner’s options: kill the bill to appease his base; or bring it to the floor for the good of the party—and, more than likely, say goodbye to his speakership.

—Jake Scobey-Thal

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

On Tuesday, the immigration reform bill passed a crucial procedural hurdle. With the Senate set to begin formal debate on the bill, Chris Hayes explains why Marco Rubio continues to attach amendments that undermine his own legislation.  

—Jake Scobey-Thal 

Atlanta's cheating scandal has gripped the nation, with 35 educators indicted Friday for raising their students' standardized test scores. But while the scandal should be investigated and dishonest teachers held to account, the overall picture is more complicated. On the first episode of his new primetime show on MSNBC, Chris Hayes also takes a critical look at the testing-obsessed education system that has created an incentive for this kind of cheating.

Speaking with a panel that includes Nation contributor and NYU education professor Pedro Noguera, Hayes discusses the nationwide practice of evaluating education mainly on the basis of test scores under George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind and Barack Obama's Race to the Top laws. 

—Alec Luhn

It's a been a big week for Nation contributors Chris Hayes and Katha Pollitt, Katrina vanden Heuvel writes.

When Alan Dershowitz led the charge against a forum at Brooklyn College discussing the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement as a counter to Israeli aggression in the occupied territories, the pile-on from both sides of the political spectrum was quick. New York politicians from Assemblyman Dov Hikind to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Comptroller John Liu all publicly called for the College’s Political Science department to drop its support for the forum. All the forum’s detractors took issue with the fact that the forum was unbalanced, and did not represent the spectrum of views on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Brooklyn College’s president has since come out strongly in support of the panel’s value as an expression of free speech, and the forum will take place as scheduled on February 7. But as Chris Hayes explains in this clip, there was something disingenuous about the cries of imbalance in the first place. 

The Brooklyn College panel will feature Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti, both of whom have written on BDS for The Nation.

It turns out a deal with Grover Norquist isn’t exactly set in stone. During the past couple weeks, several top Republicans said they’d bail on the lobbyist's anti-tax pledge if it meant averting the so-called “fiscal cliff.” On Sunday's Up, Chris Hayes said the death of the “Norquist consensus” reflects the country's shift of opinion on taxes—as Americans, in general, pay their lowest rate since the ’80s. But Hayes says ending tax breaks for the richest Americans is only the first step to a more prosperous society. Eventually, he says, everyone should have to give more in exchange for better social programs.

—Steven Hsieh

Lee Fang reports that just two billionaire-backed non-profits make up 66 percent of Grover Norquist's budget.

One of the stipulations in the Gaza cease-fire appears to be a loosening of Israel’s restrictions on the transfer of goods into the territory. On Sunday’s Up, Chris Hayes says this long-sought agreement could validate Hamas’s tactic of firing 1,500 rockets at Israel and killing six people. Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority’s peaceful diplomacy efforts have been met with increased Israeli settlement growth in the West Bank. By refusing to condemn Israel's oppressive policy towards Palestine, Hayes says, “We in the US are creating the conditions in which terrorism…brings strategic benefits, while the path of nonviolence leads to a dead end.”

—Steven Hsieh

For more on Gazans' reaction to the ceasefire, read Sharif Abdel Kouddous's report from the ground.

Abraham Lincoln was not the saintly visionary that he often comes across as in contemporary accounts. Instead, he was an eminently practical politician who understood that to abolish the shame of slavery, he would have to compromise and cede ground to his foes. The Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and author Tony Kushner joined Chris Hayes on Saturday to explain just how his views of the sixteenth president changed as he worked on the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, now in theaters.

Of course, Hollywood will take some liberties with history. Jon Wiener’s latest examines Spielberg’s oversight in ‘Lincoln.’

The attack on Gaza reached a disturbing milestone Monday, as the Palestinian death toll surpassed 100. On Sunday’s Up, Chris Hayes’s panel—composed of Noura Erakat of Georgetown University, +972 magazine’s Noam Sheizaf, Yousef Munayyer of The Jerusalem Fund, and Newsweek’s David Frum—traced the context of the current crisis. The question on the table, as laid out by Erakat, is whether “Israel wants a diplomatic solution” or to just pummel Palestinians into subjegation.

—Steven Hsieh

For more on the attack on Gaza, read Mohammed Omer’s report from the ground.

It’s no secret that Mitt Romney carried white voters last Tuesday. What’s more significant is the GOP’s inability to make a dent in the minority vote. Even Asian-Americans, who overwhelmingly voted for George H. W. Bush twenty years ago, went 73 percent for Obama. On his show Saturday, Chris Hayes says that unless they change, the Republican party’s “cultivation” of white “identity” politics will continue alienating America’s increasingly diverse population.

—Steven Hsieh

Katha Pollitt writes that on Tuesday, voters rejected the right’s “you’re-on-your-own” doctrine.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy’s destruction, it seems crass for climate change to have escaped our political discourse this past election cycle. After all, global warming will ensure that catastrophic storms like Sandy happen more frequently in the future. On his Saturday show, Chris Hayes called for a revitalization of the climate change movement, asking “which side are you on?”

—Steven Hsieh

Mike Tidwell says we have three options when it comes to facing climate change.

With the 2012 election hinging on Ohio—more specifically, the coal towns of Southeast Ohio—it’s no surprise that both candidates are touting fossil-fuel friendliness, rather than green conscience. On his Saturday morning show, Chris Hayes said we can’t count on Washington to fix “our single greatest governing challenge” for us. Instead, passionate activists need to speak up to strengthen the public’s “weak, nonchalant preference for us to ‘do something’ about that whole climate change thing.”

—Steven Hsieh

For more on coal industry politics, read Lee Fang on the National Mining Association's voter coercion efforts.

On his show Saturday, Christopher Hayes defended process against the backdrop of the vice presidential debate, during which Martha Raddatz questioned the “negativity” of both tickets’ campaigns. The nastiness of electoral politics may put us off, Hayes says, but it’s how “we as human beings channel and resolve conflict in a non-violent fashion.” The European Union, which is taking flack for winning the Nobel Peace Prize, despite its ongoing crisis, represents the triumph of process in maintaining peace on a continent “that was the site of some of the most horrifying war, violence, brutality, sadism and genocide in the history of the planet.”

—Steven Hsieh

Mitt Romney adopted controversial language during the Republican primaries to demonstrate his hard-line position on immigration. Romney referred to the undocumented as "illegal aliens," and even suggested making their lives so hard that they'd "self-deport." On Up With Chris Hayes, a vibrant panel—composed of journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, WNYC's Brooke Gladstone, PBS's Maria Hinojosa and Columbia linguist John McWhorter—talked about the implications of using the term "illegals." How much does the language we use affect our political discourse?

—Steven Hsieh

Obama is leading nearly every poll, yet the conservative media continue to try to deny or discredit this fact. On Up this Saturday, Chris Hayes called this alternate reality—propped up by GOP talking heads—the Republican bubble trap. He warns Mitt Romney and the right about the pitfalls of playing to the echo chamber, citing advice from rapper Biggie Smalls: “Never get high on your own supply.”

—Steven Hsieh

For more on the pandering conservative media, read Ben Adler on The Wall Street Journal and Fox News’ failure to disclose key vested interests.

Mitt Romney’s contention that “47 percent” of Americans won’t vote for him not only condemns nearly half the country, but shows alarming political and class naïveté. Contrary to Romney’s “makers and takers” dichotomy, the American electorate votes on more fragmented lines. The Nation’s John Nichols joins Saturday’s panel on Up with Chris Hayes, pointing out that more than 30 percent of poor Americans have voted for Republicans in past elections.

—Steven Hsieh

For more on the political fallout from Romney’s “47 percent” video, read Greg Mitchell’s latest poll analysis.

How interlocked is poverty with the poor state of public education? As the Chicago Teachers Union heads into its second week on strike, guests on Up with Chris Hayes, hosted this weekend by Majority Report’s Sam Seder, talked about the deeply rooted challenges facing America’s crumbling school system. Nation columnist Gary Younge joined this Sunday’s discussion, saying, “There’s a limit to how much education excellence you can get when kids are getting shot and not eating breakfast.”

—Steven Hsieh

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Corn prices have spiked 50 percent over the past two months—the same months that have established this season as our worst period of drought in more than fifty years. Lack of water combined with extreme heat for stretches of 100 or more days is spelling doom for crops like corn and soybeans, and prices are following suit.

On his show Sunday, Chris spoke with an Ohio produce farmer whose fields of failed crops point to a problem that goes far beyond her family’s losses: the reverberations of parched fields in the Midwest may be felt around the world.

—Zoë Schlanger

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

With a pitch-perfect emblem of gilded-age greed as his opponent, and private equity in the spotlight, why isn’t Obama much farther ahead in the polls? Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel went on Chris’s show this weekend for a look at how the Obama campaign’s attack on Romney’s Bain Capital record might sit with the Democratic 1 percent, and how the party can address that elephant in the room.

—Zoë Schlanger

Despite record-breaking heat and devastating fires, the idea that the earth is warming still illicits as much hostility and doubt as did, well, the idea that cigarettes cause cancer before the death toll overwhelmed the tobacco industry’s PR efforts.

With 27 percent of meteorologists surveyed calling global warming a hoax, what will it take to get people to care about global warming? On his show Sunday, Chris Hayes took a look at life in the disaster era and what options exist to combat climate ignorance.

—Zoë Schlanger

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Arizona’s harsh immigration statute, SB 1070, took a judicial beating last month at the hands of the Supreme Court. Of the four provisions reviewed, the Court found three unconstitutional. With several other states considering similar legislation, where does the bill go from here?

On his show Sunday, Chris spoke with the bill’s co-author, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who didn’t sound too worried (two of the stricken provisions are “relatively minor,” he said). After the years the Kansas Republican has spent championing the bill, Chris wanted to know, “Why is this the thing that animates you?”

—Zoë Schlanger