Group items tagged

Based on the size of G.D.P., not investing is Israel directly would be like not investing in Colorado. And despite the chants that charge otherwise, many endowments appear to have little to no direct exposure to Israel or to many of the American companies protesters want to blacklist.

But there’s a key difference between avoiding fossil fuels and shunning Israel. The institutions that divested from oil and gas made sure to describe it as financially prudent, albeit sometimes with shallow investment logic.

This time, Israel’s social license is the only thing that is on the table. And if Israel is on the table, what other countries should lose their social license?

The annual Harvard-Yale football game was delayed for almost an hour on Saturday as climate change activists rushed the field at the end of halftime.

Unfurling banners with slogans like "Nobody wins. Yale and Harvard are complicit in climate injustice,"

Clad in winter coats and hats, about 150 students sprawled around the 50-yard line at Yale Bowl as loudspeaker announcements and police demanded protesters leave the field.

Rich people don't just have bigger bank balances and more lavish lifestyles than the rest of us -- they also have bigger carbon footprints.

Oxfam has estimated that the average carbon footprint of someone in the world's richest 1% could be 175 times that of someone in the poorest 10%. Studies also show that the poor suffer the most from climate change.

Rich people also have more flexibility to make changes.

Local politicians announced plans on Monday to make Oslo, the capital of Norway, the first-ever European capital to totally ban cars in a district of a city. The ban will go into effect by 2019. 

the new measures will implement a "comprehensive and permanent ban" on cars in central Oslo and fund a "massive boost" in public transportation investment.

"We want to have a car-free center," politician Lan Marie Nguyen Berg told the news agency. "We want to make it better for pedestrians, cyclists. It will be better for shops and everyone." Reuters reports Oslo has somewhere short of 350,000 cars. Among the new projects being discussed are 60 kilometers of bike lanes and special accommodations for disabled residents and commercial deliveries.

Mr. McKibben said he recognized that a rapid transition away from fossil fuels would be exceedingly difficult. But he said strong government policies to limit emissions were long overdue, and were being blocked in part by the political power of the incumbent industry.

Mr. McKibben’s goal is to make owning the stocks of these companies disreputable, in the way that owning tobacco stocks has become disreputable in many quarters.

Mr. McKibben has laid out a series of demands that would get the fuel companies off 350.org’s blacklist. He wants them to stop exploring for new fossil fuels, given that they have already booked reserves about five times as large as scientists say society can afford to burn. He wants them to stop lobbying against emission policies in Washington. And he wants them to help devise a transition plan that will leave most of their reserves in the ground while encouraging lower-carbon energy sources.

Kushner Companies said Monday that the name drop at the event in Beijing on Saturday was not intended to be an "attempt to lure investors"

Nicole Kushner Meyer, the sister of White House adviser and President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, mentioned her brother's new role in the administration during a pitch for her family's property

"In 2008, my brother Jared Kushner joined the family company as CEO, and recently moved to Washington to join the administration," she said at the conference.

The demonstrations are in the service of a constellation of hyperlocal and national goals, from small, material targets like tearing down statues of racist men that literally loom large over communities, to a whole-scale reimagining of how law enforcement is conducted in this country, including divesting from police departments and eliminating special legal protections for officers

“The demands all come together to stop the war on black people,” said YahNé Ndgo, an organizer with Black Lives Matter Philadelphia. “The ultimate demand is the end to violence, to end the war against black life.”

The nationwide demonstrations could carry on for days or weeks—maybe even through November, organizers told me. And yesterday’s protest in Washington may have just been a dress rehearsal for a massive March on Washington in August.

, the reaction of the vast majority of Republicans is to hide or spin for Trump

The excuses for not objecting when he does egregious things include (these are real examples uttered by one or more Republicans on the Hill, operatives, advisers, etc.):

He’s not president yet.

Obama plays a “long game.” The defining element of his global strategy is that it reflects the totality of U.S. interests — foreign and domestic — to project leadership in an era of finite resources and seemingly infinite demands.

For too many critics, the answer is almost always for the United States to do more of something and show “strength” by acting “tough,” though usually what that something is remains very vague. And doing more of everything is not a strategy.

The foreign policy debate, on the other hand, tends to be dominated by policy day traders — or flashy real estate developers — whose incentives are the opposite: achieving quick results by making a big splash, getting rewarded with instant judgments and reacting to every blip in the market.

I was one of the many who admired the orderly commitment and resolution of the women’s march on Washington the day after President Trump’s inauguration.

Yet my admiration is mixed with worry. As I step through the police lines, I bring a message with me: Your demonstrations are engineered to fail. They didn’t stop the Iraq war. They won’t stop Donald Trump.

With the rarest exceptions—and perhaps the January 21 demonstration will prove to be one—left-liberal demonstrations are exercises in catharsis, the release of emotions. Their operating principle is self-expression, not persuasion. They lack the means, and often the desire, to police their radical fringes, with the result that it’s the most obnoxious and even violent behavior that produces the most widely shared and memorable images of the event.

there are no federal laws governing schools like those built on the World Wide model. A 2011 Congressional bill that would have banned physical abuse and the withholding of food at such schools died in committee after it was opposed by lawmakers reluctant to impose new federal standards on a matter often regulated by states.

Instead, states oversee the facilities variously as camps, boarding schools or residential treatment facilities, and state regulators often hesitate to step in because the programs exist in an ill-defined area of the law. For example, private boarding schools are not regularly inspected and are not required to be licensed or accredited, according to the federal Department of Education.

Daily life is highly structured, with limited free time. Students, who are required to wear uniforms, generally perform schoolwork at their own pace for about five hours a day, though many students and parents say the curriculum is far less rigorous than that of local public schools. While some of the programs have gyms, usually only those who have earned enough points for good behavior can use them. Former students say those points can be rescinded quickly after months of hard work. Violating rules often leads to being placed in isolation, or being “restrained” — held on the floor for as long as an hour by staff members, who students say twist their limbs in painful positions until they stop resisting. Other punishments at World Wide programs have included pepper spraying, handcuffing, being forced into dog cages and being made to sit or stand in uncomfortable positions for hours, according to former students and claims in lawsuits.

Israel and key international supporters have sharply ratcheted up their campaign against the Palestinian-led Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, with senior Israeli officials declaring it a strategic threat.

The moves came as the UK’s National Union of Students (NUS) voted on Tuesday to formally ally itself with the aims of BDS. Following the vote, Hebrew media reported that Israeli MPs were due to hold a special session in the Knesset to discuss the issue.

Israeli critics point to the call for a right to return and the opposition of some leaders of the movement to a two-state solution – which they describe as a mistake – as evidence that BDS is antisemitic.

Goldberg: A few years ago, we thought that J Street, the Jewish left, was going to drive the agenda. But now people to the right of AIPAC (the mainstream pro-Israel lobby)  are doing much of the driving. How did that happen? Oren: There’s a very simple answer to that. J Street’s power derived from the fact that it is an extension of the Obama Administration. The Obama Administration invited J street into the room with other Jewish organizations and sent high-level officials to speak at their conventions. But the reservoir of support for J Street is not particularly large. The American Jewish community is five million people. What percentage of that number is actually involved in Jewish affairs? What percentage of those are involved with Israel, and what percentage of people involved with Israel wake up in the morning saying, ‘I care about Israel but I’m pained by Israel’s policies.’ That’s a very low percentage. The right is growing much more rapidly, even as a percentage within the Jewish community. There’s a greater percentage that is more religious, more conservative. That disparity is going to grow in favor of the right in coming years.

Goldberg: But on policy, what do you do? Oren: We have to understand that people who aren’t anti-Israel have criticisms of specific Israeli policies. We have to show greater flexibility on the peace issue. Israel is willing to go a serious distance on peace. We always have to show that we’re ready to sit at the table if the Palestinians are willing to act accordingly. That’s something we can do, we can make that case. Our problem has been building outside the settlement blocs and the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem. Those areas were recognized by the Bush-Sharon letter of 2004 as remaining within Israel’s boundaries in the event of a final-status negotiation. We should keep to that in a final-status-compatible way.  If the Palestinians don’t want to do this, then here’s what we’re going to do on our own, to make the situation better and lay the groundwork for a future peace. That’s what we have to do, and I think that this logic would be compelling to most American decision-makers.

Goldberg: Is the damage in any way permanent here? Oren: I think the damage could be diplomatic damage. I don’t think Americans are going to stop their work for Iron Dome (an American-funded anti-missile system). The rumors are that the U.S. is cutting back on intelligence sharing, but that would a self-inflicted wound. But we could feel the damage at the U.N., or some other international body. We don’t only rely on the U.S. for a military Iron Dome, but for a diplomatic Iron Dome as well.

There are few historical guides. It is hard to think of a precedent for a president who endorses violence against political foes, sees the Justice Department as his own personal prosecutor, calls the press “the enemy of the people,” tears children from parents, brags of multiple sexual assaults, threatens to lock up his opponents, enthuses about war crimes, “falls in love” with the foulest dictator on the planet, refuses to divest of personal holdings in office, lambastes allies, treats the Treasury as a casino, actively endorses the poisoning of the environment, destabilizes NATO, baits minorities, lies incessantly, and oversees a resurgence of the white nationalist right. Any single gesture in any one of these areas would have been political death for most previous presidents

White anxiety and discomfort in the face of mass immigration is not going to disappear. As I argued last week, it will likely intensify. The global pressures that suppress wages are not waning. The despair in so much of left-behind America cannot be blotted out indefinitely with fentanyl. The collapse of local communities is not going to turn around overnight, and automation is unstoppable. Fear of change is correlated to the pace of change, and the latter shows no sign of deceleration

this new alignment is organized less around policy or the role of government, than on the feelings of security and confidence in the modern world. And in our current crisis, the closed, fixed, fearful view of the world is, understandably, in the ascendant

s anyone who reads the news knows, Donald Trump will decide by May 12 whether to “withdraw from” or “pull out of” or “abandon” or “scrap” or “jettison” (the synonyms keep coming) the nuclear deal with Iran. Why May 12? Because last October, Trump declared that Iran isn’t complying with the agreement. Under a law passed by Congress, that “decertification” means Trump can reimpose the sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear activities that were waived as part of the deal. Trump hasn’t reimposed those sanctions yet. But he’s demanded that Iran make vast new concessions. And he’s threatened that if Iran does not do so by May 12, “American nuclear sanctions would automatically resume.”

The Trump administration has likely been violating these clauses. The Washington Post reported that at a NATO summit last May, “Trump tried to persuade European partners to stop making trade and business deals with Iran.” Then, in July, Trump’s director of legislative affairs boasted that at a G20 summit in Germany, Trump had “underscored the need for nations … to stop doing business with nations that sponsor terrorism, especially Iran.” Both of these lobbying efforts appear to violate America’s pledge to “refrain from any policy specifically intended to directly and adversely affect the normalisation of trade and economic relations with Iran.”

The Trump administration still issues licenses for routine personal divestment transactions: for instance, people who want to sell off their property or close their bank accounts in Iran. But as far as Ferrari can tell, the Trump administration has issued few, if any, licenses for commercial transactions. That’s hard to verify: There is no public database of OFAC licenses, and the Treasury Department didn’t respond to my request for comment. But in recent months, two close observers of the Iran deal have echoed Ferrari’s observation. As the pro–nuclear deal National Iranian American Council’s Reza Marashi reported earlier this year, “To hear senior Western diplomats tell it, the Trump administration has not approved a single Iran-related OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) license since taking office.” If true, this too likely violates the Iran deal.

Mohammed Barkindo, the secretary general of Opec, said there was a growing mass mobilisation of world opinion against oil, which was “beginning to … dictate policies and corporate decisions, including investment in the industry”

He said the pressure was also being felt within the families of Opec officials because their own children “are asking us about their future because … they see their peers on the streets campaigning against this industry”.

“Thank you! Our biggest compliment yet!” tweeted Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish initiator of the school student strike movement, which continues every Friday.