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McConnell Says Corporations Should Follow His Lead and Not Get Involved in Government |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Thursday, 08 April 2021 12:11 |
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Borowitz writes: "Senator Mitch McConnell urged the nation's largest corporations to follow his example and not get involved in governing the country."
Sen. Mitch McConnell. (photo: Tom Williams/Getty)
McConnell Says Corporations Should Follow His Lead and Not Get Involved in Government
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
08 April 21
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 enator Mitch McConnell urged the nation’s largest corporations to follow his example and not get involved in governing the country.
Speaking to reporters, the Senate Minority Leader said that he “could have easily used my position over the years to make the country a better place, but I have wisely resisted that temptation.”
“Whether it was giving Americans affordable health care or passing stronger gun laws, I have been careful not to influence the government to accomplish things,” he said. “I wish corporations would follow my lead.”
He urged the C.E.O.s of major companies to spend a day with him in Washington to “see how getting nothing done is done.”
McConnell cut short his remarks to reporters, saying that he had to return to his office to get to work on not improving the country’s infrastructure.
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FOCUS: Finally, Green Infrastructure Spending in the Trillions |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35861"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Thursday, 08 April 2021 11:48 |
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McKibben writes: "The U.S. federal government is proposing to spend a sum of money that starts with a 'T' on an infrastructure bill, and much of that money (two trillion dollars) is aimed at fighting the climate crisis."
Among other things, Joe Biden's infrastructure plan aims to spur the market for electric cars like the Chevrolet Bolt. (photo: William Widmer/Redux)
Finally, Green Infrastructure Spending in the Trillions
By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
08 April 21
But is it enough? And how would we know if it were?
 he U.S. federal government is proposing to spend a sum of money that starts with a “T” on an infrastructure bill, and much of that money (two trillion dollars) is aimed at fighting the climate crisis. That is remarkable, and not just when you consider that we’re only seventy-five days out from an Administration that didn’t believe climate change was real. In my lifetime, we’ve spent sums like that mainly on highly dangerous infrastructure—aircraft carriers, fighter jets, nuclear weapons—and the wars in which they were used. To see a proposal to spend it on solar panels and trains is moving, and also just the slightest bit annoying: Why weren’t we doing this all along? Why weren’t we doing it in the nineteen-eighties, when scientists first told us that we were in a crisis? So it seems a fitting moment to really try to tally up the score: What are we doing as a nation now, is it enough, and how would we know if it were?
One of the best summaries of what’s in the Biden proposal comes from David Roberts in his Volts newsletter: he highlights the “coolest” features, from electrifying the postal-service delivery fleet (and a fifth of the nation’s school buses) to a national climate lab situated at a historically Black college and a major transmission grid for renewables that may follow existing rail rights of way. The energy systems engineer Jesse Jenkins, on Twitter, points out that the bill should spur the electric-car industry—the subsidy for buyers would make the cost difference with gasoline cars “disappear.” Julian Brave NoiseCat salutes provisions of the plan that would send forty per cent of the investments to disadvantaged communities, which is a sharp turn from the way big federal spending bills have worked for most of American history.
The criticism, at least from environmentalists, was of the “Yes and” variety. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that she thought we should be spending not two trillion dollars but ten trillion. Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, which has done as much as any organization to get us to this moment, pointed out that the bill incorporates much of what the Green New Deal advocates, including ten billion for a Civilian Climate Corps to put people to work building out the new energy infrastructure. But “we’re just orders of magnitude lower than where we need to be,” she said. “And I think that that fight over the scale and scope of what needs to happen in terms of employment and the creation of jobs, in terms of the scale of investment and the urgency, is going to be a terrain of struggle as this plan gets debated and discussed in Congress.” She’s surely right about that, and I fear there’s likely to be as much pressure to reduce the spending as to increase it.
The question of whether it’s “enough” is, of course, the right one—and the answer is no. Summer sea-ice coverage in the Arctic has declined by fifty per cent since the nineteen-eighties, and there were a record thirty named tropical storms last year, with one of them, off the New England coast, nudging up against smoke coming from the wildfires on the other side of the country, in California. We should be investing every penny we can in green projects, and even then we would still face an ongoing rise in temperature. That’s why movements need to keep pushing hard to build support for climate action.
But another test of whether this spending is sufficient will come in the next couple of months as we watch for decisions from Washington on big projects such as the Line 3 tar-sands pipeline, which stretches across Minnesota. One would hope that a two-trillion-dollar jobs program—with all kinds of promises about union contracts—would buy enough good will with organized labor for Biden to get away with killing these projects. Politicians like building things more than they like shutting things down, but dealing with the climate crisis requires doing both, and if this generous new proposal gives Biden the freedom to act aggressively, then we’d get a double return on the investment.
The Administration faces similar tensions on other fronts. John Kerry, the global climate czar, has been working Wall Street in recent weeks, trying to get the financial giants on board before the global climate summit that the Administration has called for April 22nd. The banks are happy to make proclamations about their net-zero plans for 2050, and they’re happy to pledge lots of lending into the suddenly trending renewables sector, but they’re not happy about stopping their lending to the fossil-fuel industry. Like the building trades, they’d be most thrilled about making money off both the old and the new. And, of course, that would be fine, except for physics.
There’s a lot of this ambivalence going around. (Reuters reported last week that a draft statement from the World Bank commits to “making financing decisions in line with efforts to limit global warming” but not to stopping lending for fossil-fuel projects.) That’s why, late last month, more than a hundred organizations sent Kerry a letter arguing that “no amount of new green finance commitments can credibly undo the damage that their fossil fuel financing is doing to the climate, to U.S. climate leadership, and to our chances of meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement.” (Full disclosure—the letter opens by citing an essay that I wrote for this magazine.) It would be smart of both the Administration and the banks to pay heed. If not, Robinson Meyer points out in The Atlantic, as the Administration’s commitment to dramatically cut carbon emissions by 2030 starts to become a reality, there will be a “fire sale” of fossil-fuel assets that could do real damage to the economy. It would be much better to prick this carbon-and-finance bubble now.
This is what the climate fight is going to look like for the foreseeable future: not a fight over whether we should be doing something but a tussle over how much we should do. And the cheapest parts of the fight—monetarily, if not politically—involve shutting down the dangerous things that the fossil-fuel industry does. We’re in a much better place politically than we were a few months ago, but in February we passed a scary landmark—there’s now fifty per cent more CO2 in the air than there was when the Industrial Revolution began. In the end, measuring carbon in the atmosphere and the temperature rise it causes is how we’re going to actually keep score.
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A New Study Draws a Line From January 6 to Charlottesville |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Wednesday, 07 April 2021 12:45 |
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Pierce writes: "Jackpot. If you ever wonder why the Republican party can't cut loose of the crazy, refer to the results of this study."
January 6th Capitol riot. (photo: Getty)
A New Study Draws a Line From January 6 to Charlottesville
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
07 April 21
If you ever wonder why the Republican Party can’t cut loose of the crazy, refer to the results of this study.
 obert Pape is a political scientist at the University of Chicago who specializes in the study of various security threats. In Tuesday’s Washington Post, he published a column based on research that he and his team had done into the lives of 377 people who were arrested in connection with the insurrection of January 6. You very likely will not be flattened by the news that Economic Insecurity does not hold a prominent place in the data. Neither will you be stunned by what form of insecurity actually does.
The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), working with court records, has analyzed the demographics and home county characteristics of the 377 Americans, from 250 counties in 44 states, arrested or charged in the Capitol attack. Those involved are, by and large, older and more professional than right-wing protesters we have surveyed in the past. They typically have no ties to existing right-wing groups. But like earlier protesters, they are 95 percent White and 85 percent male, and many live near and among Biden supporters in blue and purple counties…
…Nor were these insurrectionists typically from deep-red counties. Some 52 percent are from blue counties that Biden comfortably won. But by far the most interesting characteristic common to the insurrectionists’ backgrounds has to do with changes in their local demographics: Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges.
Jackpot.
If you ever wonder why the Republican party can’t cut loose of the crazy, refer to the results of this study. First, the crazy cuts across all economic and social demographics. And second, if we take these results as a measure of The Base, then The Base is a helluva lot bigger than to 34 million people who voted for the former president* last November. Like Joyce’s snow in Ireland, crazy is general all over the party. It is a legitimate movement. And its fundamental engine is old-fashioned racial terror.
CPOST also conducted two independent surveys in February and March, including a National Opinion Research Council survey, to help understand the roots of this rage. One driver overwhelmingly stood out: fear of the “Great Replacement.” Great Replacement theory has achieved iconic status with white nationalists and holds that minorities are progressively replacing White populations due to mass immigration policies and low birthrates. Extensive social media exposure is the second-biggest driver of this view, our surveys found. Replacement theory might help explain why such a high percentage of the rioters hail from counties with fast-rising, non-White populations.
It is telling that the white-supremacists who rioted in Charlottesville chanted, “You will not replace us” as they marched through the streets. That should have been enough to tell us that the threat to rational self-government in this country is deep and entrenched, and it will not go away when and if the economy turns around. It has nothing to do with money. It has to do with the disappearance of phantom entitlements on which this society depended for too long. Either we get a handle on this or we can lose it all. This study should be the seedbed for a serious intellectual investigation of the wild kingdom.
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FOCUS: Has America Come Any Closer to Dr. King's Dream? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53457"><span class="small">Jesse Jackson, Chicago Sun Times</span></a>
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Wednesday, 07 April 2021 11:32 |
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Excerpt: "Dr. King would be marching with those who seek to make it easier to vote. He would be appalled by George Floyd's murder, but not surprised."
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (photo: Getty)
Has America Come Any Closer to Dr. King's Dream?
By Jesse Jackson, Chicago Sun Times
07 April 21
Dr. King would be marching with those who seek to make it easier to vote. He would be appalled by George Floyd’s murder, but not surprised.
 ast weekend marked the 53d anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. Over half a century. Has America come any closer to his dream?
He would be pleased at some of our progress. Segregation is no longer the law of the land. The Voting Rights Act helped open doors. Dr. King would be pleased that a majority of Americans joined to elect and re-elect an African American president. Georgians just elected a black minister from Dr. King’s own historic church to the U.S. Senate. There are now 60 African American members of Congress, 54 Latino members, 20 Asian American or Pacific Islander Americans and 5 native Americans.
Yet the reconstruction has brought reaction. By a 5-4 decision, right-wing judges on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, even after overwhelming majorities of both parties voted to reauthorize it. Now across the country, Republicans, fearful of the growing involvement of minorities and the young, are seeking to impose restrictions that make voting more difficult.
Dr. King would be marching with those who seek to make it easier to register and to vote. He’d be urging the Senate to pass S1, the For the People election reform bill that would go far to limit voter suppression, gerrymandering and counter the role of secret big money in politics. He surely would be delighted that African American business leaders of major corporations and banks have joined in urging the corporate community to speak out against efforts to suppress the vote.
George Floyd’s murder would appall but not surprise Dr. King. The shameful mass incarceration of African Americans and the structural racial inequities of our criminal justice system demand reform. Again, Dr. King would be marching with the Black Lives Matter movement and would be encouraged by the multiracial outpouring of largely peaceful, nonviolent protests demanding reform.
Economic justice was the third movement of Dr. King’s civil rights symphony — and the most incomplete. The pandemic has once more stripped the veil off of America’s structural racial inequalities. African Americans and Latinos were the most likely to be infected, the most likely to lack health care, the most likely to be frontline workers, the least likely to be able to work from home.
When the economy shut down, African Americans and Latinos suffered the largest loss of jobs, and the greatest collapse of incomes. We are also vulnerable to the most evictions and foreclosures. The schools our children attend are the least likely to have adequate ventilation or space for social distancing.
The level of economic violence suffered daily by poor and low-income families is immoral and unnecessary. Millions of Americans still lack the basic right to adequate health care. Dr. King’s legacy has helped to inspire a new Poor People’s Campaign, giving voice to the 140 million low income and impoverished Americans who struggle to survive.
Dr. King protested as the War on Poverty was defeated in the jungles of Vietnam. He understood that a bloated military budget, constant interventions across the world, the arms race that threatened all humanity sapped the resources, energy and attention needed to make America better.
Today, the military budget is even higher — in comparable dollars — than it was at the height of the Cold War. The U.S. maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries. We fight endless wars on the other side of the world. And worse, we seem headed into a new Cold War, this time with both Russia and China, and have launched a trillion-dollar program to build a new generation of nuclear weapons that we don’t need and cannot use.
Our priorities remain distorted. There were no Republican votes for Biden’s Rescue Plan to deal with the pandemic and the economic collapse. Many predict that there will be no Republican votes for Biden’s American Jobs Plan to rebuild and modernize our infrastructure and begin to deal with the existential threat of catastrophic climate change. Yet there will be bipartisan support for a military budget far beyond our security needs.
Over half a century. We’ve come a long way, yet we still have so far to go. Hope is provided by a new generation — more diverse, more engaged, better educated, and increasingly on the march.
They are bringing new energy and new numbers to the struggle for justice and peace. About that, Dr. King surely would be pleased.
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