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Koch Brothers Struggle to Block Climate Action in State Legislatures |
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Wednesday, 04 May 2016 08:12 |
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Haq writes: "An alphabet soup of polluter-funded groups is taking credit for the latest state legislative push against climate action. The groups, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the American Energy Alliance (AEA) and the State Policy Network (SPN), all receive funding from the Koch brothers and their goal is to stymie the Clean Power Plan."
The Koch brothers. (illustration: DonkeyHotey/Flickr)
Koch Brothers Struggle to Block Climate Action in State Legislatures
By Aliya Haq, EcoWatch
04 May 16
 n alphabet soup of polluter-funded groups is taking credit for the latest state legislative push against climate action. The groups, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the American Energy Alliance (AEA) and the State Policy Network (SPN), all receive funding from the Koch brothers and their goal is to stymie the Clean Power Plan (CPP), President Obama’s signature effort to cut carbon pollution from power plants.
The good news is that, so far, polluter interests are not yielding much return on their investment from the money and these front groups they’ve injected into state capitols.
Of the 50 state bills introduced this year to obstruct the CPP, 56 percent already have died. Another 34 percent of those bills are languishing and we expect most of them to expire when state legislatures adjourn. Polluter interests lost ground in West Virginia, whose legislature passed a bill that improves its ability to act on the Clean Power Plan. The Koch brothers did score a recent victory in their home state of Kansas to stop the state’s work on the CPP, but it’s not a huge loss because the state had already suspended the process anyway. Additionally, the wind industry in Kansas still plans to expand generation despite Clean Power Plan setbacks, because the state has incredible wind energy resources.
The Clean Power Plan is on a solid legal foundation and is likely to be upheld. The stay issued by the Supreme Court only hits the pause button on CPP implementation deadlines and has no bearing on the legal merits of the case. Many governors want to use this extra time wisely to develop the best possible pathway to reduce carbon pollution, so they can hit the ground running when the CPP deadlines are reinstated. Governors generally want to preserve the freedom and flexibility to act in the best interests of their state and these polluter-linked state legislative maneuvers would undermine those best interests. The legislative schemes range from requiring excessive legislative approval for a governor’s plan to Environmental Protection Agency, to mandating a work stoppage for CPP planning.
The Koch groups have been targeting state budgets as a vehicle to protect polluter interests, with limited success. In Colorado, the budget language does not include restrictions to planning for the Clean Power Plan—it only modestly cut the air agency budget (a vast improvement from the initial proposal to defund the entire agency). In Virginia, the budget rider restricting funds for Clean Power Plan work can be interpreted narrowly and Gov. McAuliffe wants to continue with development of a state Clean Power Plan. Gov. McAuliffe views the Clean Power Plan as “a necessary response to climate change and an opportunity for Virginia to become a leader in clean energy.” And, between you and me, I already had low expectations for Wyoming even before the legislature defunded the state’s Clean Power Plan process and I was pleasantly surprised when Wyoming leaders called for continued progress despite the budget restriction. In addition, just a few weeks ago, coal mining and utility executives in Wyoming reinforced this sentiment that the state needs to start planning for carbon reductions.
Outside of state budgets, polluters are also pushing stand-alone bills to restrict the Clean Power Plan progress in states:
- In Pennsylvania, Gov. Wolf vetoed the budget bill that included a rider to obstruct the Clean Power Plan and then coal-friendly legislators pulled the language into a new bill that’s coming up for a vote this month.
- In Ohio, a new bill dropped last week that extends the state’s freeze on clean energy standards by an additional three years and also includes provisions to obstruct the Clean Power Plan. Gov. Kasich has said extending Ohio’s clean energy freeze is “unacceptable” and that he will veto an extension.
- In Missouri, a number of bills intended to hobble the Clean Power Plan are headed for expiration when the legislature adjourns next month. They include a variety of strategies from requiring legislative approval of CPP plans to creating an interstate compact that supersedes federal authority ( … a very ambitious proposal, if you ask me).
While many legislatures already have adjourned, some are still in session so a few bills could be in play. We will continue monitoring statehouses for developments, but so far it seems that the Koch brothers and polluter interests are not getting their money’s worth in legislatures.
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The Jaw-Dropping Realities of Our Widening Economic Divide |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Tuesday, 03 May 2016 14:05 |
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Reich writes: "Chuck Collins from the Institute for Policy Studies has new data showing the majority of Americans now have less than $1,000 in their savings and checking accounts combined."
Robert Reich. (photo: unknown)
The Jaw-Dropping Realities of Our Widening Economic Divide
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
03 May 16
 huck Collins from the Institute for Policy Studies has new data showing the majority of Americans now have less than $1,000 in their savings and checking accounts combined. If they slip on the sidewalk or have a problem with their car, they can be left penniless.
On the other side of the widening economic divide is an equally jaw-dropping reality: The 400 wealthiest Americans now own more wealth than the entire GDP of India, a nation of nearly 1.3 billion people.
The problem isn’t inequality per se. It’s the consequences of the degree of inequality: a shrinking middle class that’s increasingly frustrated and angry, a politics that as a result has become polarized and shrill, fewer opportunities for the poor to ascend into the middle class, and a democracy that’s overrun with money from the wealthy. The trend is unsustainable, politically and economically.
Bernie’s campaign is a start. But regardless of whether he’s elected president, we must be mobilized and organized to reverse this.
What do you think?
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The Supreme Court Just Refused to Shield Corporate America From a $15 Minimum Wage. What Happens Now? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=26368"><span class="small">Alan Pyke, ThinkProgress</span></a>
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Tuesday, 03 May 2016 14:04 |
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Pyke writes: "With the Supreme Court's decision Monday not to hear the fast food industry's lawsuit against Seattle, the nation's first $15 minimum wage law is safe - and opponents of higher pay floors for U.S. workers are running low on options."
Protesters rally for fair wages in Seattle, April 15, 2015. (photo: Elaine Thompson/AP)
The Supreme Court Just Refused to Shield Corporate America From a $15 Minimum Wage. What Happens Now?
By Alan Pyke, ThinkProgress
03 May 16
 ith the Supreme Court’s decision Monday not to hear the fast food industry’s lawsuit against Seattle, the nation’s first $15 minimum wage law is safe – and opponents of higher pay floors for U.S. workers are running low on options.
The decision upholds two previous rulings that Seattle’s law does not discriminate against franchise firms like McDonald’s. The case was the most prominent legal challenge to a large minimum wage hike in recent years, and one of several to fail.
But while the hugely profitable industries that oppose Fight for $15 workers and their allies aren’t making much progress on the legal front, they’re far from done fighting. The minimum wage battleground reaches far beyond the legal arguments that have failed in Seattle, New York, and Washington, D.C.
With defeat in court long expected, have opponents have turned instead to a more devious strategy: Cutting off working people’s primary avenue to economic independence before they even get to walk down it.
Paternalism At The Statehouse
You might expect self-described free-market critics to be content to let cities and states flirt with wage hikes, knowing that if they go too far the market will correct. But instead, corporate interests and their conservative allies are setting out to deny local communities the chance to even experiment with higher pay floors.
Lawmakers in dozens of states have sought to preempt local employment laws of all kinds, from minimum wages to paid sick leave laws to anti-discrimination protections in the workplace.
Preemption has started to draw more attention in the past year. But this is no newfangled innovation. Statehouse preemptors have been putting thumbs in local eyes for more than a decade. The American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) “Living Wage Mandate Preemption Act” model legislation has been kicking around back rooms since the early 2000s.
For almost as long, states have been barring local communities from forcing corporate interests to shift money from shareholders to workers. Florida barred its towns and counties from hiking wages all the way back in 2003, a full decade before New York City fast food workers walked off the job and launched the Fight for $15.
From 2011 to 2013, lawmakers in 31 states introduced 105 bills drafted by the corporate interests behind ALEC designed to chip away at wage standards at state and local levels. Few became law.
But since low-wage workers’ protests erupted into a national campaign with a long and growing string of victories under its belt, the idea of circumventing local democracy with preemption measures has started to take off. The similar, parallel momentum behind state and local paid sick leave laws prompted a similar backlash.
Arizona adopted a preemption bill in 2013, but had it struck down in state court last year. That hasn’t stopped tantrum-minded conservatives from trying to manipulate local decisionmakers: Gov. Doug Ducey (R) has promised to retaliate against cities that raise their wage floors by denying them state funding.
Nor has it discouraged other lawmakers. Michigan adopted the idea last year. Missouri too, over Gov. Jay Nixon’s (D) veto. Virginia Gov. Terry McCauliffe (D) successfully vetoed a wage preemption law this spring. New Mexico, Washington, and Idaho all saw lawmakers flirt with the idea too.
And this spring, lawmakers pulled a fast one in Alabama. Birmingham, its most populous city, decided to slowly raise its minimum wage to $10.10 over an almost two-year glide. But even that amount – equivalent to what the federal minimum wage used to buy in the late 1970s, before Reaganism and supply-side thinking let inflation swallow its buying power and doom millions of working families to deep poverty – so pissed off state leaders that they passed a preemption law in a legislative sprint this Winter.
Now, the state’s working class is fighting back in court. A lawsuit filed Thursday against Gov. Robert Bentley (R) argues that keeping minimum wage levels down in the poverty zone in such a deeply black, deeply poor state violates the Constitution.
Urban Legends
Nefarious and undemocratic preemption laws may be trendy these days. But there are still plenty of minimum wage opponents out there doing it the old fashioned way by scaring the bejesus out of voters and media figures.
Since the academic literature on wage hikes is a conflicting morass, it's easy to pluck out a few friendly studies and gin up a scary prediction: Jobs will vanish, the dead will rise, your dog will stop loving you.
Many times, such fearmongering relies upon a 2014 Congressional Budget Office analysis of a huge number of research papers on the minimum wage. The CBO study of a $10.10 minimum wage found it would mean a million fewer Americans would live in poverty – but would also “reduce total employment by about 500,000 workers.”
Republicans flocked to that half-million-jobs figure. But economists have questioned the CBO’s assumptions about how employers would respond to wage hikes, and argued the boost might even bring a net gain in employment. And both critics and boosters of a wage hike agree that raising the pay floor would take a giant bite out of the poverty rate.
What’s more, the literature that the agency was reviewing is riddled with “publication bias.” The economist consensus is that minimum wage increases have little or no impact on overall job levels, but papers with that conclusion struggle to get published in journals looking for something splashier than the conventional wisdom. And some of the most heavily negative studies the CBO looked at have serious methodological flaws.
Race To The Bottom
If you can’t scare people off before a wage hike becomes law, it’s easy to poll a few business owners and draw a wild conclusion.
Business-friendly interests tried that in Seattle, declaring it Apocalypse Now for the city’s beloved restaurant scene before the country’s first $15 minimum wage law had even begun its six-year sliding-scale march. The doomsayers were wrong, according to both the actual data and the specific restaurant owners who they had cited as examples. Even Investors Business Daily, a reliably right-wing economics rag, acknowledged in March that data indicate job growth defies conservative expectations post-wage-hike in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.
None of that is stopping political leaders from trying to exploit wage-hike fears for their own benefit.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) is currently touring California, weeks after that state adopted a $15 minimum wage plan. Scott hopes to lure California businesses to Florida. He insists 700,000 jobs will be lost in the coming years thanks to the hike Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA) signed last month.
The estimate is bogus, according to UC Berkeley economist Michael Reich.
But it’s a big, flashy number. And after minimum wages stagnated for decades around the country, it’s easy to throw out gaudy claims about job-killing. There just aren’t many case studies out there to tell us with confidence just who’s right and who’s wrong about the kinds of large-but-flexible wage hikes that Seattle, New York, California, and dozens of other governments have decided to enact.
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FOCUS: WhatsApp, Used by 100 Million Brazilians, Was Shut Down Nationwide by a Single Judge |
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Tuesday, 03 May 2016 12:25 |
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Excerpt: "A Brazilian state judge ordered mobile phone operators to block nationwide the extremely popular WhatsApp chat service for 72 hours, a move that will have widespread international reverberations for the increasingly contentious debate over encryption
and online privacy."
James Clapper. (photo: unknown)
WhatsApp, Used by 100 Million Brazilians, Was Shut Down Nationwide by a Single Judge
By Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman, The Intercept
03 May 16
Brazilian state judge ordered mobile phone operators to block nationwide the extremely popular WhatsApp chat service for 72 hours, a move that will have widespread international reverberations for the increasingly contentious debate over encryption and online privacy. The ruling, issued on April 26, became public today when it was served on mobile service providers. It took effect at 2 p.m. local time (1 p.m. ET); as of that time, people in Brazil who tried to use the service could not connect, nor could they send or receive any messages. Failure to comply will subject the service providers to a fine of 500,000 reals per day ($142,000 per day).
WhatsApp is the most-used app in Brazil, a country of 200 million people (it is now owned by Facebook, the country’s second-most used app). An estimated 91 percent of Brazilian mobile users nationwide — more than 100 million individuals — use WhatsApp to communicate with one another for free (it has 900 million active daily users around the world). Brazilians spent this morning, in the hours before the block took effect, frantically sending each other messages on WhatsApp warning that the service was going down for three days.
This ruling comes from the same judge, Marcel Maia Montalvăo, of a small town in Sergipe state, who two months ago ordered Facebook’s vice president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, to be detained over WhatsApp’s failure to cooperate with a subpoena issued as part of a criminal investigation. The judge said the arrest was justified by Facebook’s “repeatedly failing to comply with judicial orders” in a drug-trafficking case. Pursuant to that order, Dzodan was arrested by federal police and held in custody for a full day, until an appellate court overturned the order.
Afterward, the Facebook executive insisted that “the way that information is encrypted from one cellphone to another, there is no information stored that could be handed over to authorities.” WhatsApp similarly said: “WhatsApp cannot provide information we do not have.” According to Folha de Săo Paulo, Brazil’s largest newspaper, today’s ruling ordering the shutdown of WhatsApp stems from the same case.
The extraordinary orders reflect what is becoming a global controversy over the fight of technology companies to offer their users “end-to-end” encryption. That service, which has become quite in demand in the wake of reporting from the archive provided by Edward Snowden, ensures that only the users — but not the company itself — can access the content they are sharing. The post-Snowden fixation of tech companies to demonstrate a genuine commitment to protect the privacy of their users (motivated by business self-interest) has driven a wedge between the once-fully collaborative Silicon Valley and U.S. government surveillance state partners, creating a protracted and bitter public PR war that culminated last month in the Apple/FBI fight over access to iPhones.
As a result of its encryption protections, the position of WhatsApp in response to subpoenas has been that it is incapable of turning over users’ communications because the encryption not only keeps governments and non-state actors out but also the company itself. Over the past several years, numerous countries have begun enacting laws to bar companies from using any encryption that they cannot circumvent, and the Obama administration has been debating whether to support legislation that would allow only the use of encryption to which government agencies have backdoor access (in the 1990s, the Clinton administration used the Oklahoma City bombing to argue for a similar law, but it was blocked by a coalition of privacy advocates from both parties in Congress).
This is not the first time WhatsApp service has been interrupted in Brazil. Last December, in a separate case, a lower court judge in Săo Paulo state ordered service providers to block the app for 48 hours as retribution for its failure to cooperate in a criminal investigation. An appeals court overturned the ruling but only after hours of service outage, invoking “constitutional principles” to say that “it does not seem reasonable that millions of users are affected because of the inertia of a company.”
In many ways, Brazil — with huge numbers of internet users and a growing online population of young people — is a key battleground for the global struggle for internet freedom. The Wall Street Journal called Brazil “the social media capital of the universe.” In January, after the last WhatsApp shutdown, two analysts from the Brazil-based Igarapé Institute, Robert Muggah and Nathan Thompson, wrote in the New York Times, “The country has one of the fastest growing populations of internet users in the world. Online tools like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp are used not only to express opinions; they are an affordable alternative to exorbitantly priced Brazilian telecom providers.”
In a country with turbulent political conflicts and a highly engaged online population, the debate over internet freedom has become very prominent. Along with Germany, the Brazilian government, in the wake of the Snowden revelations, was the most vocal in denouncing the U.S. for excessive NSA surveillance (Brazil was a key target for such spying). In 2014, the government enacted what it claimed was a law to protect internet freedom, “Marco Civil da Internet,” that did provide some privacy protections but also granted new surveillance powers to the government. Just last month, the government demanded, and received, a new draconian anti-terrorism law that provided it with extreme new law enforcement powers (causing ex-President Lula da Silva to break with his party, which controls the government, by telling The Intercept in an interview that he opposes the new law).
And now, as The Intercept reported last week, a new cybercrime bill on the verge of being enacted could codify internet-shutdown powers of the type the state judge today imposed. In a Facebook post, Ronaldo Lemos, founding director of the Institute of Technology and Society of Rio de Janeiro and an architect of Brazil’s landmark 2014 Marco Civil internet legislation, wrote: “Tomorrow, the Cybercrime CPI will vote on a proposal to make this type of block lawful. If the CPI proposal goes forward, this will be the new normal in the country. Every week we would have news of sites and services that are blocked, as it is in Saudi Arabia and North Korea.”
It is stunning to watch a single judge instantly shut down a primary means of online communication for the world’s fifth-largest country. The two security experts in the NYT wrote of the first WhatsApp shutdown: “The judge’s action was reckless and represents a potentially longer-term threat to the freedoms of Brazilians.” But there is no question that is just a sign of what is to come for countries far from Brazil: There will undoubtedly be similar battles in numerous countries around the world over what rights companies have to offer privacy protections to their users.
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