ALSO SEE: Bloomberg Campaign Tweets Fake Sanders' Quotes Praising Dictators

Bernie Sanders Was Right About Cuba

By Ben Burgis, Jacobin

25 February 20

Bernie Sanders was right to applaud Cuba’s literacy programs even as he criticized the country’s undemocratic political system. He has nothing to apologize for.

ver the weekend, in an interview with Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes, Democratic presidential front-runner Bernie Sanders was asked about old video clips in which he praised the achievements of the Cuban Revolution without endorsing the island nation’s undemocratic political system. Sanders’s response to Cooper was a nuanced evaluation of the pros and cons of the Cuban model from a democratic socialist point of view.

“We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba,” he said, but “it’s unfair to simply say that everything is bad.” He then cited the enormously successful literacy program that Fidel Castro initiated immediately after the revolution, noting that it would be absurd to say the policy was “a bad thing” because “Castro did it.” Finally, answering Cooper’s follow-up question, Sanders unequivocally condemned the Cuban government’s jailing of political dissidents.

These manifestly reasonable comments were immediately denounced not just by conservatives like Kevin D. Williamson, who wrote a piece on the controversy for the National Review entitled “Bernie Sanders is a Moral Monster,” but also by Democrats like Florida congresswomen Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala, former Democratic National Committee head Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and most of Sanders’s rivals in the race for the Democratic nomination.

Generally speaking, the critics chose to focus on the middle part of the 60 Minutes clip, simply pretending that the snippet didn’t begin with Sanders denouncing the “authoritarian nature” of the Cuban government and end with him deploring that government’s jailing of dissidents. Williamson, for example, vaguely noted that Sanders said “some criticisms” of Cuba’s leaders were unfair and then immediately launched into a rant about how Castro “lined up political dissidents and shot them.” Similarly, former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg tweeted that Sanders “doesn’t recognize” that “we need a president who will be extremely clear” about human rights violations abroad.

The Narnia Standard

Are these critics attacking Sanders based on a willful misrepresentation of his comments? In the cases I just quoted, that certainly seems to be the case. Still, there may be a (slightly) more charitable way to interpret at least some of their complaints.

For example, in a CNN town hall on Monday, Pete Buttigieg responded to a quote in which Sanders said that “teaching people to read and write is a good thing” by faulting him for asking people to see the “bright side of the Castro regime.” Instead, Mayor Buttigieg insisted, we should “stand unequivocally against dictatorships everywhere in the world.”

To Buttigieg, it’s not good enough that Sanders clearly and unambiguously condemned the authoritarian aspects of Cuba’s system because his comments weren’t “unequivocal” in the sense of being entirely critical rather than including a mix of criticism and praise. The principle Buttigieg is appealing to is that it’s wrong to praise any policy of a dictatorship. Apparently, the “unequivocally” anti-dictatorship stand is to talk about all undemocratic countries “everywhere in the world” as if they lacked any positive features whatsoever — like Narnia before Aslan, where it was “always winter and never Christmas.”

This certainly seems to be the standard Sanders’s critics applied in a previous iteration of the same “praise for Communist dictatorships” attack, when clips were dredged up from the press conference that Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington, gave when he and his entourage returned from a trip to the USSR in 1988. Even though Sanders took time in the press conference to criticize the Soviet Union for its lack of democracy and for the poor quality of its housing and hospitals, the fact that he praised the undeniable architectural impressiveness of Soviet subway stations was treated as evidence that Sanders might as well have been a Stalinist — never mind that the man has spent his entire political career, even in his fire-breathing radical youth in Vermont’s Liberty Union Party, calling himself a “democratic” socialist precisely to differentiate his vision of a good society from the Soviet model.

One obvious problem with the Narnia standard for “unequivocal” criticism of authoritarian regimes is that it requires you to deny easily verified facts. Cuba did make tremendous strides in literacy, infant mortality, racial desegregation, doctor-patient ratio, and many other areas after the revolution. When the subject comes up, is a properly “unequivocal” opponent of dictatorships supposed to pretend not to know that all of this happened? Is the rule that you always have to respond by changing the subject?

Unsurprisingly, hardly anyone plays by this rule in practice. As commentator Eric Levitz points out in his excellent piece on the controversy, every president in the last several decades, Democrat or Republican, has “found positive things to say” about a regime in Saudi Arabia whose human rights record is far, far worse than Cuba’s.

Take one of the most indefensible parts of the Cuban state’s record: gay rights. In the years immediately after the revolution, gay men were arrested and put in labor camps. Since then, the situation has dramatically improved — so much so that in recent years, state-sanctioned gay pride parades have been held in the streets of Havana. Compare this to contemporary Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality remains a beheading offense.

And even in the specific case of Cuba, centrist Democrats haven’t generally held one another to the Narnia standard. For example, to the best of my knowledge, no major Democrat criticized Barack Obama for praising Cuba’s education system — in a speech he delivered in Cuba, no less — in 2016.

The Sanders Difference

Is the difference between Sanders’s comments and Obama’s that some worry Sanders secretly longs to import the authoritarian aspects of Cuba’s system to the United States? If so, this isn’t a rational concern. As Levitz points out, Sanders is a fervent believer in democratic rights — so much so that he’s taken considerably heat for suggesting that those in prison should still have the right to vote. His rating from the American Civil Liberties Union is 100 percent, and his commitment to free speech has led him to criticize student activists for shouting down right-wing speakers on college campuses.

Perhaps the worry isn’t that Sanders wants America to become an authoritarian one-party state, but that he thinks, in some sense, that it’s fine for Cuba to be such a state. This certainly seems to be what Kevin Williamson is suggesting when he writes that Sanders is “rather like the apologists for antebellum slavery who say, ‘Well, think of how much better-fed they were than they would have been in Africa.’”

Is the Cuban Revolution supposed to be the equivalent of the transatlantic slave trade in this analogy? If so, an obvious difference is that Africans lost their freedom. Far from replacing a democracy with a dictatorship, the Cuban Revolution replaced a dictatorship that oversaw monumental economic inequality, poverty, misery, illiteracy, de jure racial segregation, and high infant mortality with a dictatorship that promoted racial equality and redistributed much of the wealth of the ruling oligarchs to promote social goods like health care and education. And, as indicated by his condemnation of the “authoritarian nature” of Cuba’s leadership and his call for political prisoners to be freed, Sanders thinks that it would be better if Cubans — without losing their social rights to health care, higher education, and the rest — also gained the democratic rights he defends so passionately in the United States.

This is a fundamentally decent and principled position. Sanders should be commended for taking it. And if he becomes president despite his refusal to reduce complicated realities to the cartoonish slogans of two-dimensional anti-communism, he’ll have succeeded in showing future candidates that they don’t need to pander to the most extreme elements of the Cuban-American community in order to win.

Fossil-Fuel Subsidies Must End

By Geoffrey Supran, Peter Erickson, Doug Koplow, Michael Lazarus, Peter Newell, Naomi Oreskes and Harro van Asselt, Scientific American

25 February 20

Despite claims to the contrary, eliminating them would have a significant effect in addressing the climate crisis

hen it comes to tackling the climate crisis, ending $400 billion of annual subsidies to the fossil-fuel industry worldwide seems like a no-brainer. For the past decade, world leaders have been resolving and reaffirming the need to phase them out. All of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have committed to eliminating fossil-fuel subsidies, and the vast majority of the American public supports doing so. International financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have joined the chorus, pointing to the benefits of reform.

In 2018, however, a group of researchers questioned the magnitude of the climate benefits of subsidy reform, reporting that their simulations showed its effect would be “limited” and “small.” Stories in the press began asking whether such subsidies are such a big deal after all.

We think this is wrong. In a new paper in the journal Nature, we make the case that they do matter—a lot. In the 2018 study, emissions reductions from subsidy removal were calculated by the researchers to be five hundred million to two billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2030. This figure is by no means “small.” It amounts to roughly one quarter of the energy-related emission reductions pledged by all of the countries participating in the Paris Agreement (four to eight billion tons). Hundreds of millions of metric tons of CO₂ reductions is nothing to sneeze at, particularly when it can be achieved by a single policy approach that also brings strong fiscal, environmental and health benefits.

Moreover previous work has likely underestimated the emissions reductions that would occur, because commonly used techniques do not accurately capture the investment dynamics of fossil fuels. But these dynamics can greatly affect what oil and gas companies do.

In our analysis of the issue, we take the example of one specific subsidy: a federal tax break that allows U.S. oil producers to immediately deduct from their taxes most of the costs of constructing and drilling new wells. Conventional models assume that subsidies such as this are uniformly distributed across all oil fields, whereas in reality, governments often preferentially target new—rather than existing—capital investments. The result is a lowering of producers’ up-front cash-flow requirements, leading them to drill more new wells than they otherwise would. This process locks in and accelerates fossil-fuel production and, in turn, greenhouse gas emissions. We estimate that true emissions reductions from eliminating this tax-break subsidy could be more than an order of magnitude greater than was predicted using the conventional modeling approach.

And this tax break is just one subsidy. A separate, peer-reviewed analysis by some of us in 2017 demonstrated that without a dozen key subsidies, nearly half of the U.S.’s future oil production could be unprofitable at $50-per-barrel oil prices—the level at which prices may hover in a low-carbon future.

In other countries, the forms of subsidies can, of course, vary. But around the world, fossil-fuel production and consumption are supported in hundreds of ways. Indeed, the most troubling impact and legacy of fossil-fuel subsidies may be the political barriers—rather than financial ones—that fossil-fuel producers have erected against decarbonization efforts over a period of decades. Revenue boosts from subsidies can support not only more drilling but also product promotion, political activities and other efforts that reinforce the industry’s incumbent status. Subsidies also have a symbolic effect, signaling that this industry and its activities are beneficial for society as a whole and that they therefore should be encouraged.

In another paper, published just last month, experts studying the social tipping points for climate stabilization concluded that “redirecting national subsidy programs to renewables ... or removing the subsidies for fossil-fuel technologies are the tipping interventions that are needed for the take-off and diffusion of fossil-fuel–free energy systems.”

Economic models provide useful guidance to policy makers. But as we show in our article, most have a blind spot, failing to capture key ways in which subsidies send signals to markets and people. Overreliance on these models can create a false sense of certainty that misses the big picture: Of course subsidies matter to the fossil fuel industry and help to prop it up. That is why they were introduced in the first place and why the industry and its allies continue to defend them. As the Department of Energy itself concluded 40 years ago, federal subsidies have had a “large effect” on capital formation and oil production in the U.S. And more oil infrastructure and more production mean more greenhouse gas emissions.

The public and policy makers should be under no illusions about the basic realities at stake: Holding back catastrophic global warming requires dramatically reducing fossil-fuel production. And subsidies to fossil-fuel companies undermine that goal. Once upon a time, it made sense for countries to support their fossil fuel industries. But that time is over.