Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
Likes:
|
Post by Deleted on Aug 27, 2019 2:53:00 GMT -5
(I can't access the article unfortunately)
How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
Likes:
|
Post by Deleted on Aug 27, 2019 2:54:28 GMT -5
Bernie Sanders’s ‘Green New Deal’: A $16 Trillion Climate Plan
Mr. Sanders’s climate change proposal calls for the United States to eliminate fossil fuel use by 2050. “We must be extraordinarily aggressive,” he said in an interview.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
Likes:
|
Post by Deleted on Aug 27, 2019 2:58:18 GMT -5
Largest marine protected area in Atlantic Ocean will soon be official
The tiny island is the summit of a vast underwater mountain range that houses a rich diversity of species.
The nearly 170,000 square miles of ocean around Ascension Island, one of the world’s most pristine and biodiverse ocean ecosystems, will soon be officially protected.
From the surface, Ascension Island—a tiny volcanic outpost in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean between Brazil and the west coast of Africa—looks remote and isolated.
But the small island is perched on the summit of a 10,000-foot underwater volcano in the mid-Atlantic ridge, one of the world’s longest mountain ranges.
On August 24, the Ascension Island government announced plans to turn its national waters into a marine protected area, and today, the U.K. government announced plans to set aside 7 million pounds ($8.5 million) for marine conservation.
A portion of that money is expected to go toward maintaining the Ascension Island MPA, which costs an estimated 150,000 pounds per year to maintain. The total protected area is nearly twice the size of the entire U.K. and larger than the state of California.
The U.K. government has not yet provided a breakdown of what the budget will be, and the MPA will not officially go into effect until it does. (A response from the U.K. government had not been provided by the time of this article’s publication.)
|
|
|
Post by Outsider on Aug 27, 2019 5:15:28 GMT -5
I'm really pulling for Warren; she's got a plan for that! She's also gaining momentum - rather than losing it.
|
|
|
Post by Outsider on Aug 27, 2019 5:17:27 GMT -5
Elizabeth Warren Manages to Woo the Democratic Establishment The party insiders at the DNC’s summer meeting seemed unexpectedly drawn to the senator from Massachusetts. SAN FRANCISCO—Joe Biden is ostensibly the candidate of the Democratic establishment. But it was Elizabeth Warren—who’s built her career on trying to challenge the status quo—who spent the weekend wowing party insiders. At this point in Warren’s campaign, it’s not a surprise anymore when she spends hours working a “selfie line” after a major event, as she did following two massive rallies she’s held in the past week. But it was a surprise when more than 150 of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors similarly lined up on Thursday night after her speech at a dinner here—and it struck even some of the Democrats waiting to take photos with her. “These are people who should not like her,” said one attendee, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity to avoid showing favoritism. “And they love her.” The next day, at the summer meeting of the Democratic National Committee, party members were on their feet cheering when she took the stage for a brief address. When he spoke there, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey seemed to land more applause lines overall. A few other candidates were also received warmly, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who gave a notably conciliatory speech about the proud legacy of the Democratic Party that perhaps no one could have imagined him delivering after his burn-down-the-DNC campaign in 2016. But it was the Massachusetts senator who got a standing ovation before she’d even said a word, and another as soon as she’d finished speaking. From the start, Warren’s campaign was built on the theory that she’s an outsider whom insiders can live with, and an insider who has credibility with outsiders—in 2016 terms, someone who can attract both Sanders and Hillary Clinton voters. Primary voting is months away. The DNC’s 2020 convention is almost a year from now. But on Friday afternoon, in the huge, bland hotel ballroom where the DNC meeting was held, Warren’s theory seemed to be working out. She “stretches across a broad spectrum of Democrats,” said Don Fowler, a DNC chair in the 1990s, a longtime Clinton-family loyalist, and someone who’s been to more DNC meetings over more election cycles than most people in Democratic politics today. Explaining what he thinks her appeal is to establishment Democrats, Fowler told me that for all of Warren’s talk of “big, structural change”—by fundamentally reworking the economy—“she does not include in her presentation the implication of being against things, except the current president.” Warren’s insider-outsider routine is one reason, Democratic operatives and analysts told me—and one another, in private conversations—that they’ve begun to see her as the odds-on favorite to win her party’s nomination. However, a few of the Democrats I spoke with noted that her positioning could become a trap: With Sanders and Warren expected to battle even more intensely in the coming months, the change-hungry part of the Democratic base might begin to ask why establishment insiders seem so comfortable with her. Jay Jacobs, the chair of the New York Democratic Party, told me a few hours after Warren’s Friday speech that although his politics aren’t as far left as Warren’s, “there wasn’t a thing she said today that I could not have written.” Jacobs, who was made chair by the Biden-backing Governor Andrew Cuomo, added, “The times do call for bolder action.” “I hope Sanders supporters see Warren’s broadening support as a good thing and won’t now cynically try to paint her as beholden to insiders, because she’s not,” said a DNC member who isn’t currently committed to any candidates and who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We will see.” Most of the Democrats I talked to didn’t seem especially upset that Biden did not attend the summer meeting. But they did have their suspicions about why he skipped it: Multiple state-party chairs and other attendees told me—speaking only on the condition of anonymity—that they assumed he was wary of receiving a less-than-wild reception compared with other candidates. Asked for comment on those assumptions, the Biden spokesman Andrew Bates wouldn’t say whether they were correct or not, but he noted that the former vice president often attends DNC events. “This weekend he was in New Hampshire, where he had great events speaking directly to voters about the stakes of this election,” Bates said. Just like every other group of voters, DNC members have their own interests, and Warren tried to appeal to the things that make them tick. In her speech on Thursday, she reminded the audience that in March 2018, she wrote $5,000 checks to each state party from her campaign account, part of an overall $11 million she raised for Democratic Party efforts. During the midterms, she also endorsed and campaigned for candidates across the country. Her work on behalf of other Democrats is likely helpful with the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately types who live for these major meetings of Democrats. And even if most DNC members are staying studiously neutral in the primaries, several of them told me they like what they’ve seen in the massive ground operation Warren is assembling in the early-voting states. To those who spend their professional lives thinking about campaign mechanics, this is alluring. “To her advantage, it appears as though she did not let the growing pains of the early stage of her campaign sidetrack her from creating an infrastructure,” said Trav Robertson, the Democratic Party chair in South Carolina, one of the early states where campaign action is already under way. “Her campaign’s been fascinating to watch,” he told me. “It’s a study of ‘Steady and slow wins the race.’” Read: The activist left already knows who it wants for president Warren has made her detailed policy plans a core part of her brand on the campaign trail, and that approach seems to interest establishment Democrats too. After all, they’re the type of voters most likely to actually read those proposals. Sanders “is providing more of economic aspirations; she’s providing more of a road map,” said Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, the executive vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, and a member of the DNC executive committee. “Even in this room, she comes across as practical, smart,” he said, standing in the hotel ballroom. “I think there is a sense of respect for her and the way she’s conducting her campaign.” Do the opinions of party insiders even matter anymore? The answer is a resounding “maybe.” DNC members are among the superdelegates whose power in the presidential-nominating process was stripped last year. But all the people at the summer meeting are active and influential in local politics, and they have the potential to softly sway opinions in ways that could ripple out of their communities. The DNC members won’t come together like this again for almost a year. The next meeting, announced on Saturday afternoon, is set for July 17, 2020, in Milwaukee—the day after the Democratic nominee delivers his or her acceptance speech at the next convention. Democrats have a history of summer flings with lefty insurgents ahead of presidential primaries—think Howard Dean in 2003 and Sanders in 2015. At least for now, though, Democrats seem to be having fun watching Warren. “Most of all, she’s smart as shit,” Fowler told me as he tried to put his finger on why he and others like her. “You don’t want a dumb-ass president.” www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/elizabeth-warren-dnc-summer-meeting/596791/
|
|
|
Post by Outsider on Aug 27, 2019 5:20:36 GMT -5
The Glimmer of a Climate New World Order I didn’t know politics could move this fast. It has been barely a week since the world woke up to reports of fires tearing through the Amazon rainforest, and already a new sort of global red line has been established — the first of its kind to be drawn around climate behavior. Led by grandstanding French president Emmanuel Macron, the leaders of the G-7 have essentially told Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro that the burning of the Amazon simply cannot stand. Bolsonaro is himself a showboat, of course, usually excited by the opportunity to troll the community of globalists and liberal cosmopolitans almost literally embodied in the leaders of the G-7 — and particularly in forums bringing those leaders together as though they are puppet-mastering the rest of the world over a continental breakfast. And yet, over the last few days, Bolsonaro has performed a dramatic about-face, moving from shrugging his shoulders at the fires and blaming them on leftist NGOs, to acknowledging they are a problem and deploying his military to put them out. Presumably, this is not just the result of Macron’s rhetoric — “our house is on fire,” the French leader tweeted late last week — but what followed: a promise to spike a major European trade deal with Brazil if Bolsonaro did not take the fires seriously. In other words, a threat to apply the same tools of leverage and sanction and shame to crimes of climate as have been applied, in the past, to violations of human rights and territorial sovereignty. This is, of course, unprecedented—and much more significant than the paltry $20 million the nations of the G7 pledged to send to Brazil to help fight the fires. It was also, in a way, inevitable. If climate change does transform life on this planet at anything like the scale and speed scientists promise it will, our politics will change with it — and probably quite dramatically. One question this raises is: In what ways? Another is: Will we like what warming does to us? The answers to both are very much open, and we’ve barely begun to develop a political science around climate change that might help us think through the possibilities. On Friday, I wrote about the fact that, on the very same day that the Brazilian fires became news in America, the U.S. lost its one candidate for president, Jay Inslee, who was committed to taking climate change as seriously as the world’s scientists insist we all must — and I suggested that action on climate may well require an entirely different kind of politics than one that consigns principled crusaders like Inslee to the bin of also-rans. Less than 24 hours after Inslee dropped out, Bernie Sanders dropped his own climate plan — one much grander than anything even Inslee proposed. If Sanders’s gambit represents one new kind of climate politics, this G-7 climate shaming surely counts as another. But what kind is it? Saturday at the Atlantic, Franklin Foer proposed that meaningful action to combat warming may require that the bedrock principle of national sovereignty be retired, such that leaders like Bolsonaro (or, for that matter, Trump) won’t be able to operate with impunity on climate issues which, despite playing out within those nations’ borders, impact the rest of the world as well (often more so, since impacts are distributed unequally). “If there were a functioning global community, it would be wrestling with how to more aggressively save the Amazon, and acknowledging that the battle against climate change demands not only new international cooperation but, perhaps, the weakening of traditional concepts of the nation-state,” he wrote. “The case for territorial incursion in the Amazon is far stronger than the justifications for most war.” Foer was writing before Bolsonaro “capitulated,” but the prospect of climate wars seems even more pressing now. The G-7 shame campaign was only a modest step in that direction — individual nation-states acting in concert, not to undermine the sovereignty of a bad actor but to remind him how dependent his country is on the support of other nations, and to threaten to withdraw that support. But it nevertheless allows you to imagine a possible world, probably at least a few years away, in which a similar group of nations — or a similarly concerned single superpower — does take the next step and threatens military action. That is, of course, what often does follow from a sequence of sanctions, and it is more or less how in the aftermath of World War II the nations of the west “consecrated” the principle of human rights. (That is, by fighting wars in its name, if often for other material reasons). If the 21st century is conducted in the shadow of warming as the second half of the 20th was in the shadow of the Holocaust, that sort of succession — from human rights to climate change as the universal touchstone of geopolitics and speakable expression of great-power rivalry — seems not just possible but inevitable. So — is that where we are headed? Honestly, I don’t know, and don’t know anyone who does. As with everything else when it comes to climate, we are headed into a brave new world with nothing resembling a playbook. But in their brilliant book Climate Leviathan, the political scientists Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright plot a matrix of possible future political responses to climate. The two axes are the relationship to the nation state (i.e., does the world recognize national sovereignty in the face of climate change?); and the relationship to capitalism (i.e., does the world respond to the crisis by doubling down on the importance of capital, or does it retreat from it?). They name the resulting quadrants: Climate Mao (anti-capitalist and nationalist); Climate Behemoth (capitalist and nationalist), Climate Leviathan (capitalist and globalist) and Climate X (anti-capitalist and globalist, basically ecosocialism, which they’re rooting for). But they also acknowledge that each category is too neat — a conceptual framework, not a map of our future. My own guess is that they’re right: that we won’t have any one new paradigm for climate politics, that no one prediction will come to pass in any total way, but that we will evolve those new politics along many different ideological axes. What would that mean? That there won’t just be ecofascism of the kind that’s been talked about a lot over the last month — right-wing governments throwing up border walls and defining the needs of their own people, in a resource-scarce world, as infinitely more important than the needs of anyone else. There could also be ecofascism of the environmentalist stripe, governments running roughshod over the rights of their citizens to impose deeply disruptive responses to warming and all its impacts — eminent domain on environmental-panic steroids, decarbonization on a military footing. There will likely be more moderated forms of both — some rise in nativism that doesn’t totally revolutionize existing political cultures, some expansion of government authority that adds to rather than obliterates status-quo powers. There may be some form of ecosocialism and, elsewhere, some rejection of economic growth and an embrace of what’s been called “de-growth.” But on the left, some modulated versions are probably likelier, too: a more empathic and redistributive politics that stops short of true collectivization, for instance, and some growing awareness among left-wing leaders around the world that growth is merely one measure of progress, and perhaps a misleading or counterproductive one. In New Zealand, prime minister Jacinda Adern is already pointing the way there. And probably it won’t be any one of these futures but something more like all of them, all at once, in different places at different times — with different nations responding differently to the challenge, even different parts of single nations, with some regions and some parts of government acting from one set of ideological goals while others move in different directions. That is to say, it is likely to be all quite messy, as politics always is, however much we might wish to imagine a single future, or a single climate “solution” — and however much the neoliberal order of the last political generation promised that all plots moved predictably markets-ward. In a weird way, the G-7 bullying this past weekend extends the same promise — and makes the awakening of climate conscience among the world’s most powerful nations look somewhat less like a radical political departure than the simple extension of existing (and imperiled) neoliberalism into the realm of climate concern. Still, this is progress. In fact, quite significant progress, I think, since market forces remain quite powerful tools, and since we need all the tools we can get in addressing a crisis of this scale. But, of course, it also has some blindspots. To begin with, the fires, judged on their own, actually aren’t all that significant a climate event. They are bad, since all fires are bad, climate-wise. But the relatively limited aid the G7 will be sending to fight them is a sign that these fires are neither catastrophic in the short term nor hard to control—$20 million being less than one percent the annual budget of CalFire, the California state fire program. Of course, Bolsonaro’s broader plan to develop and deforest the Amazon would be such an outrageous carbon catastrophe — it could release, over a decade, as much carbon as the U.S. and China, the world’s two biggest emitters, release in a year — that it would represent the enactment of a sort of great-man theory of climate disaster. But the fires burning this month are, as the New York Times has shown, mostly on land that has already been deforested — farmers clearing their land as part of their annual rhythm, if on land that was once rainforest and perhaps in a coordinated way to make an ugly gesture of solidarity with their president and his plan to open up yet more of the land. There are more fires burning today in Congo and Angola than in Brazil, almost none of which are true wildfires, like those we’ve seen devastate California and Siberia, but are controlled and defeatable with a relatively minimal effort. This all makes the G-7 campaign an important symbolic gesture, but perhaps only that, and one for which the ultimate test is what happens after the fires are put out: Will Bolsonaro’s deforestation plan continue, or not? Or perhaps that is only the penultimate test, since there is also the question of whether pressure like this can be employed by nations like France and Canada and the UK to punch up and not just punch down — to influence the world’s biggest carbon emitters, namely China and the United States. And if the gesture is mostly symbolic, what is the symbol obscuring? Canada’s Justin Trudeau was the first leader to echo Macron’s call to action, but he recently approved the TransMountain pipeline; Japan is financing coal plants built abroad that are as much as 40 times more polluting than those they allow within their borders. In fact, every single member nation of the G-7 is hiding some significant climate hypocrisy behind their pressure on Bolsonaro, however laudable that pressure is. But if the sum total of their collective action this year will be effectively dispatching the Brazilian military to fight fires local farmers had mostly under control, it will be a critically insufficient response. If their pressure forces Bolsonaro to abandon his plans for the Amazon, that would be considerably better. And yet there is much more to be done still, in each of their home countries, none of which are meeting the pledges they made under the Paris accords just three years ago. To pretend that Bolsonaro is the world’s only climate villain, or the Amazon the only region in the world currently in climate crisis, is an act of grand self-delusion. Still, the value of symbolism is not to be discarded. For a very long time, climate scientists and activists lamented the disinterest of the average person in the issue, in part blaming the media for failing to communicate the scale of the crisis and the urgency of action. They were right, in a way: climate change simply wasn’t on the front page of the New York Times or Washington Post every day, and almost never made it onto television news. On the newspaper side, that has already changed, with quite remarkable speed: It’s not every day yet, but the country’s major papers do now devote enviable acreage to the story, often several times a week and frequently illustrated with dramatic above-the-fold photography. The progress in television has been slower, but here the Amazon fires may mark a different kind of turning point — and a recognition among producers that, while climate change may have a longstanding reputation as a ratings-killer, natural disasters do not, especially those that produce fire. Perhaps the blockbuster wall-to-wall coverage of the recent burning of Notre Dame was good training on this point, too. This fire season has been an unusually mild one, so far, for California, and we’ve yet to see the major hurricane events that have whipped through the Caribbean each of the past two summers. But the coverage of the Amazon fires suggests that, when those terrifying impacts happen, producers may finally be ready to showcase them in the way they should. It is horrible for anyone living in their path, of course, that disasters are getting more frequent and more punishing. But judged strictly from the semi-sociopathic perspective of journalistic narrative, the climate change story is getting “better.” Rather than relying on dry-sounding predictions of centuries-long sea-level rise measured in the centimeters or inches, natural disasters and extreme weather are teaching us all how to tell stories that horrify us into action, even of an imperfect kind. nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/climate-at-the-g-7-glimmers-of-a-new-world-order.html
|
|
|
Post by Outsider on Aug 27, 2019 5:22:25 GMT -5
Trump’s presser confirms it: He has no idea why he’s losing trade war Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft. Donald Trump wearing a suit and tie: There has seldom been clearer proof that Trump is in fact the world’s worst negotiator. © Christian Hartmann/Reuters There has seldom been clearer proof that Trump is in fact the world’s worst negotiator. “It’s the way I negotiate. It’s done very well for me over the years, and it’s doing even better for the country.” That was President Trump, speaking at a Monday press conference at the G7 summit in France. He was talking about the fact that in recent days he has vacillated back and forth between praising China and harshly criticizing it, all while claiming that the trade war he initiated is going great for America as evidence mounts that it is pushing us toward recession. The truth, however, is that there has seldom been clearer proof that Trump is in fact the world’s worst negotiator. And the price Americans are paying for his weakness keeps getting higher. While trade is one of only two policy issues (immigration is the other) that Trump has shown he has sincerely felt opinions about, he labors under a series of misconceptions, bred by ignorance and what appears to be a complete lack of interest in grasping how the trade war appears from China’s perspective. Which is of course the basis of smart negotiation. You can’t get a good deal unless you understand what the person on the other side wants, needs, is willing to tolerate, and can’t abide. The man who wrote “The Art of the Deal” (or had someone ghostwrite it for him) doesn’t appear to get it. The theory of mounting a trade war is that while both countries will inevitably suffer, the other country will be less able to sustain the damage and will give in to your terms. If all you knew was that China sells more goods and services to the U.S. than we sell to China, you might think that they’d blink first, since it would appear that they have more to lose. But that ignores the interplay of politics and economics, which operate very differently in each country. The first thing to realize is that because China has an authoritarian political system, its leaders are much more insulated from short-term public anger than the leaders of a democracy are. Trump has to worry about being reelected in 2020; Xi Jinping may well be president for life. If Xi wants to extend this trade war for another year or two or three, he can do it. If Trump does, it greatly raises the likelihood that he will no longer be president seventeen months from now. At his press conference, Trump repeated multiple times that the trade war had cost China 3 million jobs. It’s unclear where he got that figure from, but even if it were true, it wouldn’t be much evidence that they’re experiencing so much economic pain that they’ll inevitably cry uncle. In a country of 1.4 billion people, that represents about two-tenths of one percent of the population — a substantial number, but not enough to trigger a political crisis. And China’s unemployment rate, at least officially, is under 4 percent, about where ours is, which means those people would be able to find other work. But Trump is convinced that China is hurting more than we are. “I think they wanna make a deal, and I think they should make a deal, and I think if they don’t make a deal, it’s gonna be very bad for China,” he said at the press conference. That’s the second part of Trump’s argument: America’s economy is so spectacular that we can absorb more economic pain than the Chinese. “We’ve just got to accept the pain that comes with standing up to China,” said Trump toady Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) on CBS this Sunday. “How do you get China to change without creating some pain on them and us? I don’t know.” That is unlikely to be a very persuasive argument to those directly affected by the trade war, including some important constituencies like farmers, who are growing increasingly distressed as their incomes are hit by China’s inevitable retaliation. And the domestic manufacturers who were supposed to be helped by increased tariffs on Chinese goods aren’t benefiting either. While some manufacturers are indeed leaving China to avoid the tariffs, instead of bringing those jobs to America, they’re sending them to low-wage countries like Vietnam. That’s not even to mention the broader economic consequences that could affect all Americans if the trade war pushes us toward a recession. I’m reasonably certain that if anyone tried to explain to Trump the reasons why China is in a better position than the United States to tolerate the continuation of this trade war, he’d get bored and stop paying attention. As he wrote in “The Art of the Deal," “My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.” Understanding the other side is not part of his calculation. So when “pushing and pushing” fails, he learns nothing. We saw that in his multiple failed legislative initiatives, from the attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act to the government shutdown of 2018-2019. Every time, he showed no evidence that he knew anything about the members of Congress whose votes he needed, nor cared what incentives and fears they faced. And every time he lost. At some point, the same thing will happen with the trade war. The economic damage to the United States will become clearer, his reelection chances will get dimmer, and he’ll say to himself, “Who could have known the Chinese would be so patient and be better able to endure short-term pain than us?” The fact that pretty much everyone except for him knew it will not register. www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/opinions-trumps-presser-confirms-it-he-has-no-idea-why-hes-losing-trade-war/ar-AAGmbxp
|
|
|
Post by Outsider on Aug 27, 2019 5:28:02 GMT -5
Trump's words of warning: "I always find a way to win." Take him seriously We're nearing a crucial election and Trump's poll numbers are dreadful. So why does he sound so confident? When the authoritarian leader speaks, it is best to believe him. Last Friday on Twitter, Donald Trump proclaimed that Democrats' attempts to defeat him would prove fruitless: But it won’t work because I always find a way to win, especially for the people! The greatest political movement in the history of our Country will have another big win in 2020! Such words are a promise and a threat. They are made even more ominous in the context of polls that show Trump trailing most of the likely Democratic nominees in the 2020 election, other surveys that show his support dropping to 36 percent, and clear evidence that the U.S. economy is now on the brink of recession, which makes Trump even more vulnerable in the voting booth. Past behavior is usually an indicator of future behavior. Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened not to leave office in 2021. During the 2016 presidential campaign Trump also threatened that he would not respect the outcome of the election if Hillary Clinton won. This is part of a much larger pattern of contempt for American democracy, the rule of law, and the U.S. Constitution by Donald Trump and his allies. He has threatened — leading Democrats and other "enemies" with prison, attempted to silence and intimidate journalists he sees as critical, and has declared individuals and groups to be "treasonous" if they do not submit to his will. Trump and his allies are already moving to delegitimate the 2020 presidential election by claiming that "illegal aliens" and "voter fraud" are part of a larger conspiracy by the Democrats and the news media, who even want to cause a recession to prevent him from being re-elected. As conclusively proven by Robert Mueller, as well as by other investigators and experts, Vladimir Putin's operatives interfered in the 2016 presidential election with the aim of installing Donald Trump in the White House. Russia and other hostile foreign countries are continuing to subvert American democracy by engaging in online propaganda and other influence campaigns in support of Trump and the Republican Party. These efforts will increase as the 2020 presidential election approaches. Last week featured a whirlwind of events which showed how Trump's authoritarian behavior and politics are being amplified and enabled by his apparent mental health issues. Trump believes that he is “King of Israel” and “the second coming of God.” Trump also said that he is the "Chosen One" sent by god or preordained by Fate to rule. He claimed that Jewish Americans who support the Democratic Party are somehow disloyal to their faith. For Trump, his supporters and their media, "real" Jewish people only support him and the Republican Party. As part of Trump and the Republican Party's feverish ongoing campaign of racism and white supremacy he has again suggested that the 14th Amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship — added to the Constitution after the Civil War to ensure the rights of black Americans — should be overturned. There was the surreal: Trump proclaimed his desire to buy Greenland. Rebuffed by Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, he then threw (another) public temper tantrum, calling her "nasty," an epithet he reserves for women who challenge him. As part of his trade war, Trump ordered American companies not to do business with China. (This is well outside the normal range of presidential power.) He also raised tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods — a de facto tax increase on the American people. His actions caused panic among investors, causing the Dow Jones average to drop hundreds of points on Friday. Trump also compared Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell to Chinese President Xi Jinping, a leader whose government engages in ethnic cleansing, kills and imprisons political dissidents and other rivals, and is currently brutalizing the people of Hong Kong and other parts of China. Writing for the Daily News, former Republican strategist Rick Wilson summarized last week's events in Trump's America this way: Nothing about the week we just lived through is comforting. Nothing about it can be excused or ignored. Donald Trump is not a well man. Here in the dog days of August, Washington should be its usual sleepy self, the political class having wisely fled the humidity and misery of D.C. Instead, Trump’s performance left people both inside and out of the political class wondering about the president’s sanity and fitness for office. Most states have some form of involuntary commitment law for people who are a danger to themselves and others. With Donald Trump's election in 2016, America took more baby steps towards fascism and authoritarianism. Almost three years into Trump's regime, he and his movement are now running towards that ignoble destination. Unfortunately, the majority of Americans seem stuck in a state of learned helplessness, watching the disaster unfold but doing nothing to stop it. Trump and his allies know that the 2020 presidential election is their opportunity to turn Trumpism from a fascistic aberration into America's new normal. They will steamroll the opposition to achieve that goal. This will surely be one of the most important elections in American history. The American people have an opportunity to vote Donald Trump out of office. This is a critical moment where alternative possibilities and futures can be won or lost for the country. There have been other such fulcrum points in American history: the premature end of Reconstruction, FDR's "Economic Bill of Rights," the 2000 Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, Sept. 11, 2001, the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and then the backlash-fueled election of Donald Trump. In his new book "The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy," columnist and American Prospect co-founder Robert Kuttner explains the perils of the upcoming presidential election: If the Republicans win another election in 2020, the supposedly exceptional United States will become more like other nations that display the forms of democracy but little substance. In such nations the incumbent party is effectively the permanent government. The opposition gets to make noise but not to take power. A corrupt alliance between the governing party and its supporters in the corporate plutocracy sustains the incumbent regime. ... We must believe that American democracy is not quite done for. America, in Lincoln's words, could enjoy a new birth of freedom in 2020. But that will not happen automatically or passively through the swing of some historical pendulum. It will take inspired radical leadership, mass organizing, and citizen mobilization of the kind that we see only in America's finest hours. The 2020 presidential election and the Age of Trump also force another long overdue confrontation between the myths and realities of American democracy and the country's history. America was founded as a democracy for white landowning men. Black people were deemed to be human property. Indigenous people were to be exterminated as part of the country's "manifest destiny." Nonwhites en masse were viewed by white society as not being fit for democracy. Women effectively had no voice in the polity — except through their husbands, fathers, brothers or other men. To improve, American democracy has required a lengthy ongoing struggle against those defects and the country's core character as a democracy structured around domination for some groups and subordination for others. Is America really a democracy? And what would a real democracy actually look like? In the post-Trump era, what type of democracy should the American people be fighting to create? In her new book "Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone," Astra Taylor signals to those difficult questions: I don't believe democracy exists; indeed, it never has. Instead the ideal of self-rule is exactly that, an ideal, a principle that always occupies a distant and retreating horizon, something we must continue to reach toward yet fail to grasp. The promise of democracy is not the one made and betrayed by the powerful; it is a promise that can be kept only by regular people through vigilance, invention and struggle. ... Defining the contours of this still-unseen democracy is something we can do only collectively. Think and reason the mob must, including thinking through democracy's abiding paradoxes. On Friday night Donald Trump left the White House to travel to France for the G-7 summit. Before boarding Air Force One, Trump paced about on the tarmac, like a professional wrestling villain, insulting his opponents, telling lies, boasting about his greatness and of course making threats as he spoke to reporters. This was a national embarrassment — and an irresistible spectacle. During his verbal fusillade, Trump he cited an obscure law — the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act — and claimed he could use it to command American businesses to follow his orders. Many legal observers initially scoffed at Trump's claims to possess such power. In the coming days and weeks, they may well be proven wrong. The would-be or actual dictator's threats must always be taken seriously. This is especially true in a failing democracy like the United States, whose political norms are based on assumptions that the president and the country's other elected officials are reasonable people with some respect for the rule of law and democratic traditions. In a country where fascism has been so quickly normalized, many people have already forgotten that the United States is in a declared state of national emergency. As the Brennan Center's Elizabeth's Goitein warned last year, Trump could, with the flick of his pen, activate laws allowing him to shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the United States or freeze Americans’ bank accounts. Other powers are available even without a declaration of emergency, including laws that allow the president to deploy troops inside the country to subdue domestic unrest. This edifice of extraordinary powers has historically rested on the assumption that the president will act in the country’s best interest when using them. With a handful of noteworthy exceptions, this assumption has held up. But what if a president, backed into a corner and facing electoral defeat or impeachment, were to declare an emergency for the sake of holding on to power? In that scenario, our laws and institutions might not save us from a presidential power grab. They might be what takes us down. No one person should have all that power; Nonetheless, Donald Trump does. Donald Trump will likely, somehow, gets his way in his trade war with China through manipulating the law, bullying, intimidation or some combination of all three. Once again American democracy and the rule of law (and the health of the world economy) will be further imperiled. The 2020 presidential election, now 14 months away, may be too late to save the United States from the harm done by Donald Trump, the Republican Party, their media and their voters. Donald Trump and his movement are like slow-acting poison. The question is whether American democracy has received a lethal dose, and will shamble on for a few more years or decades before succumbing. www.salon.com/2019/08/26/trumps-words-of-warning-i-always-find-a-way-to-win-take-him-seriously/
|
|
|
Post by forgottenlord on Aug 27, 2019 7:19:13 GMT -5
I'm really pulling for Warren; she's got a plan for that! She's also gaining momentum - rather than losing it. It's just a drinking game.
|
|
|
Post by forgottenlord on Aug 27, 2019 7:46:28 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by foggyisback on Aug 27, 2019 8:22:35 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by forgottenlord on Aug 27, 2019 9:16:06 GMT -5
Dear Police,
I get it. It sucks having every moment of your time as an employee being constantly monitored. It feels like an infringement on your privacy, like someone is constantly looking over your shoulder. But guess what. Most of us have that in some form. Go into a McDonalds, they have cameras on their tills. Go into a bank, they have cameras *everywhere*. Go into an office, there is software to monitor anyone's machine. It sucks. I hate it. But we all have to put up with it because a small minority abuse their position and steal and cheat and just generally make the rest of our lives worse. They're assholes so we have to pay. And that's exactly why you have to put up with the same bullshit the rest of us do.
Sorry.
|
|
newhivemaster
Hive Listener
Hive Master
Posts: 2,660
Likes: 10,489
|
Post by newhivemaster on Aug 27, 2019 9:44:19 GMT -5
SigDig for Tuesday, 8/27/2019 Good morning, Hive! 7 northern white rhino eggs
This weekend, scientists in Italy took frozen sperm previously removed from two of the planet’s last living male northern white rhinos (both of whom have since died) and used it to try to artificially fertilize eggs taken from the last two living females of the species. They hope to create as many as seven embryos, with a goal of creating a herd of at least five of the animals that could be returned to their natural habit. What did you do over the weekend? Where they will no doubt be hunted into extinction...AGAIN! Raise them in a zoo!
|
|
DocDrama
Hive Whisperer
A Musical Note or a Shark Fin
Posts: 6,927
Likes: 16,423
|
Post by DocDrama on Aug 27, 2019 10:06:10 GMT -5
Monday Gold Prospecting Trip.
Since we found a spot last week that had promise we went back to the Iowa Hill bridge again yesterday to see if it would pay out. The spot we hiked to was in the shade of the mountain until about 10am. It's a good thing we got there at about 830am because it got real hot fast. And there wasn't much more gold than we found last week. It was roast-a-rama hiking out. But it's nice to be in the woods anytime.
|
|
|
Post by doddeb on Aug 27, 2019 10:07:08 GMT -5
Keep it up
|
|
|
Post by doddeb on Aug 27, 2019 10:08:53 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by doddeb on Aug 27, 2019 10:15:06 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by doddeb on Aug 27, 2019 10:16:37 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by doddeb on Aug 27, 2019 10:18:05 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by doddeb on Aug 27, 2019 10:23:42 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by doddeb on Aug 27, 2019 10:25:01 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by doddeb on Aug 27, 2019 10:34:56 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by doddeb on Aug 27, 2019 10:36:46 GMT -5
|
|
DocDrama
Hive Whisperer
A Musical Note or a Shark Fin
Posts: 6,927
Likes: 16,423
|
Post by DocDrama on Aug 27, 2019 10:40:54 GMT -5
Destroying the farm economy and then mocking the farmers right in their faces? A hundred years ago he would have tarred and feathered and run out of town. The whole Trump admin. wants to destroy our whole way of life. Pure evil!
|
|
newhivemaster
Hive Listener
Hive Master
Posts: 2,660
Likes: 10,489
|
Post by newhivemaster on Aug 27, 2019 10:43:40 GMT -5
Yeah, I've thought this for a while. The ONLY charities that should be tax deductible are should be the ones that feed, shelter, and clothe those in need. People starve while museums and art galleries are funded to excess. The WORST example is the 1% using contributions to private schools as charitable deductions to get their damned kids admitted.
|
|
|
Post by forgottenlord on Aug 27, 2019 10:56:08 GMT -5
Didn't he do the same shit like a week ago? Well, not in front of farmers but...
|
|
|
Post by forgottenlord on Aug 27, 2019 11:01:25 GMT -5
Wow, isn't that familiar. Hours after rejecting the G-7 package, Bolsonaro has backtracked and said that he will accept it if Macron apologizes for statements made last week.
|
|
|
Post by doddeb on Aug 27, 2019 11:40:11 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by forgottenlord on Aug 27, 2019 12:21:06 GMT -5
Joe Walsh should've said something like "Intellectually, I agree with you. Emotionally, I'm not ready to take that leap yet." I think he was pivoting in that direction at about 1 minute
|
|
|
Post by forgottenlord on Aug 27, 2019 12:36:59 GMT -5
It should be noted that it's a bipartisan but small segment of Congress that sent the letter and it doesn't look like it includes any of the leaders of either party but I'm having a hard time cross referencing against all the chairs/ranking members. It's not nothing but it's not checkmate
|
|