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jlessner

Why a 'Virtual Tie' in Iowa Is Better for Clinton Than Sanders - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...owa-helps-hillary-clinton.html

iowa clinton sanders politics history US culture policy

shared by jlessner on 02 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • The Iowa Democratic caucuses were a “virtual tie,” especially after you consider that the results aren’t even actual vote tallies, but state delegate equivalents subject to all kinds of messy rounding rules and potential geographic biases.
  • he official tally, for now, is Hillary Clinton at 49.9 percent, and Mr. Sanders at 49.6 percent with 97 percent of precincts reporting early Tuesday morning.
  • But in the end, a virtual tie in Iowa is an acceptable, if not ideal, result for Mrs. Clinton and an ominous one for Mr. Sanders. He failed to win a state tailor made to his strengths.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • He fares best among white voters. The electorate was 91 percent white, per the entrance polls. He does well with less affluent voters. The caucus electorate was far less affluent than the national primary electorate in 2008. He’s heavily dependent on turnout from young voters, and he had months to build a robust field operation. As the primaries quickly unfold, he won’t have that luxury.
  • Iowa is not just a white state, but also a relatively liberal one
  • But these strengths were neatly canceled by Mrs. Clinton’s strengths. She won older voters, more affluent voters, along with “somewhat liberal” and “moderate” Democrats.
  • He has nearly no chance to do as well among nonwhite voters as Mr. Obama did in 2008
  • In the end, Mr. Sanders failed to score a clear win in a state where Mr. Obama easily defeated Mrs. Clinton among white voters.
  • Mr. Sanders will have another opportunity to gain momentum after the New Hampshire primary. He might not get as much credit for a victory there as he would have in Iowa, since New Hampshire borders his home state of Vermont. But it could nonetheless give him another opportunity to overcome his weaknesses among nonwhite voters.
  • As a general rule, though, momentum is overrated in primary politics. In 2008, for instance, momentum never really changed the contours of the race. Mr. Obama’s victory in Iowa allowed him to make huge gains among black voters, but not much more — the sort of exception that would seem to prove the rule. Mr. Obama couldn’t even put Mrs. Clinton away after winning a string of states in early February.
  • ick Santorum, Pat Buchanan or Mike Huckabee, who failed to turn early-state victories into broader coalitions.
  • Mrs. Clinton holds more than 50 percent of the vote in national surveys; her share of the vote never declined in 2008.
  • The polls say that her supporters are more likely to be firmly decided than Mr. Sanders’s voters.
  • Why a ‘Virtual Tie’ in Iowa Is Better for Clinton Than Sanders
kaylynfreeman

The Land That Failed to Fail - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-rules.html

Politics US policy

shared by kaylynfreeman on 20 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • China now leads the world in the number of homeowners, internet users, college graduates and, by some counts, billionaires. Extreme poverty has fallen to less than 1 percent. An isolated, impoverished backwater has evolved into the most significant rival to the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union.
  • in Beijing the question these days is less how to catch up with the West than how to pull ahead — and how to do so in a new era of American hostility
  • The pattern is familiar to historians, a rising power challenging an established one, with a familiar complication: For decades, the United States encouraged and aided China’s rise, working with its leaders and its people to build the most important economic partnership in the world, one that has lifted both nations.
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  • During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.
  • China’s Communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail.
  • There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • China’s Communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform” must never include democratization.
  • China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction for fear of running aground.
  • The careers of these men from Moganshan highlight an important aspect of China’s success: It turned its apparatchiks into capitalists.
  • Party leaders called this go-slow, experimental approach “crossing the river by feeling the stones” — allowing farmers to grow and sell their own crops, for example, while retaining state ownership of the land; lifting investment restrictions in “special economic zones,” while leaving them in place in the rest of the country; or introducing privatization by selling only minority stakes in state firms at first.
  • Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, tried to break the hold of these bureaucrats on the economy by opening up the political system. Decades later, Chinese officials still take classes on why that was a mistake. The party even produced a documentary series on the subject in 2006, distributing it on classified DVDs for officials at all levels to watch.
  • Afraid to open up politically but unwilling to stand still, the party found another way. It moved gradually and followed the pattern of the compromise at Moganshan, which left the planned economy intact while allowing a market economy to flourish and outgrow it.
  • American economists were skeptical. Market forces needed to be introduced quickly, they argued; otherwise, the bureaucracy would mobilize to block necessary changes. After a visit to China in 1988, the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman called the party’s strategy “an open invitation to corruption and inefficiency.”
  • The United States and Japan, both routinely vilified by party propagandists, became major trading partners and were important sources of aid, investment and expertise
  • At the same time, the party invested in education, expanding access to schools and universities, and all but eliminating illiteracy
  • mainland China now produces more graduates in science and engineering every year than the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan combined.
  • In cities like Shanghai, Chinese schoolchildren outperform peers around the world. For many parents, though, even that is not enough. Because of new wealth, a traditional emphasis on education as a path to social mobility and the state’s hypercompetitive college entrance exam, most students also enroll in after-school tutoring programs — a market worth $125 billion, according to one study, or as much as half the government’s annual military budget.
  • party made changes after Mao’s death that fell short of free elections or independent courts yet were nevertheless significant
  • The party introduced term limits and mandatory retirement ages, for example, making it easier to flush out incompetent officials. And it revamped the internal report cards it used to evaluate local leaders for promotions and bonuses, focusing them almost exclusively on concrete economic targets.
  • These seemingly minor adjustments had an outsize impact, injecting a dose of accountability — and competition — into the political system, said Yuen Yuen Ang, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “China created a unique hybrid,” she said, “an autocracy with democratic characteristics.”
  • They were rewarded with soaring tax revenues and opportunities to enrich their friends, their relatives and themselves. A wave of officials abandoned the state and went into business. Over time, the party elite amassed great wealth, which cemented its support for the privatization of much of the economy it once controlled.
  • The private sector now produces more than 60 percent of the nation’s economic output, employs over 80 percent of workers in cities and towns, and generates 90 percent of new jobs
  • the bureaucrats stay out of the way. “I basically don’t see them even once a year,” said James Ni, chairman and founder of Mlily, a mattress manufacturer in eastern China. “I’m creating jobs, generating tax revenue. Why should they bother me?”
  • even as he wraps himself in Deng’s legacy, Mr. Xi has set himself apart in an important way: Deng encouraged the party to seek help and expertise overseas, but Mr. Xi preaches self-reliance and warns of the threats posed by “hostile foreign forces.
  • China tapped into a wave of globalization sweeping the world and emerged as the world’s factory. China’s embrace of the internet, within limits, helped make it a leader in technology. And foreign advice helped China reshape its banks, build a legal system and create modern corporations.
  • It was a remarkable act of reinvention, one that eluded the Soviets. In both China and the Soviet Union, vast Stalinist bureaucracies had smothered economic growth, with officials who wielded unchecked power resisting change that threatened their privileges.
  • Mr. Lin was part of a torrent of investment from ethnic Chinese enclaves in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and beyond that washed over China — and gave it a leg up on other developing countries
  • The timing worked out for China, which opened up just as Taiwan was outgrowing its place in the global manufacturing chain. China benefited from Taiwan’s money, but also its managerial experience, technology and relationships with customers around the world. In effect, Taiwan jump-started capitalism in China and plugged it into the global economy.
  • Before long, the government in Taiwan began to worry about relying so much on its onetime enemy and tried to shift investment elsewhere. But the mainland was too cheap, too close and, with a common language and heritage, too familiar.
  • Now Taiwan finds itself increasingly dependent on a much more powerful China, which is pushing ever harder for unification, and the island’s future is uncertain
  • Many in Washington predicted that trade would bring political change. It did, but not in China. “Opening up” ended up strengthening the party’s hold on power rather than weakening it. The shock of China’s rise as an export colossus, however, was felt in factory towns around the world.
  • In the United States, economists say at least two million jobs disappeared as a result, many in districts that ended up voting for President Trump.
  • The pro-democracy movement in 1989 was the closest the party ever came to political liberalization after Mao’s death, and the crackdown that followed was the furthest it went in the other direction, toward repression and control. After the massacre, the economy stalled and retrenchment seemed certain. Yet three years later, Deng used a tour of southern China to wrestle the party back to “reform and opening up” once more. Many who had left the government, like Mr. Feng, suddenly found themselves leading the nation’s transformation from the outside, as its first generation of private entrepreneurs.
  • The fear is that Mr. Xi is attempting to rewrite the recipe behind China’s rise, replacing selective repression with something more severe.
  • The internet is an example of how it has benefited by striking a balance. The party let the nation go online with barely an inkling of what that might mean, then reaped the economic benefits while controlling the spread of information that could hurt it.
  • “The basic problem is, who is growth for?” said Mr. Xu, the retired official who wrote the Moganshan report. “We haven’t solved this problem.”
  • “The cost of censorship is quite limited compared to the great value created by the internet,” said Chen Tong, an industry pioneer. “We still get the information we need for economic progress.”
  • China is not the only country that has squared the demands of authoritarian rule with the needs of free markets. But it has done so for longer, at greater scale and with more convincing results than any other.
  • Washington is maneuvering to counter Beijing’s growing influence around the world, warning that a Chinese spending spree on global infrastructure comes with strings attached.
  • both left and right in America have portrayed China as the champion of an alternative global order, one that embraces autocratic values and undermines fair competition. It is a rare consensus for the United States, which is deeply divided about so much else, including how it has wielded power abroad in recent decades — and how it should do so now.
  • Mr. Xi, on the other hand, has shown no sign of abandoning what he calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Some in his corner have been itching to take on the United States since the 2008 financial crisis and see the Trump administration’s policies as proof of what they have always suspected — that America is determined to keep China down.
  • there is also widespread anxiety over the new acrimony, because the United States has long inspired admiration and envy in China, and because of a gnawing sense that the party’s formula for success may be faltering.
  • Prosperity has brought rising expectations in China; the public wants more than just economic growth. It wants cleaner air, safer food and medicine, better health care and schools, less corruption and greater equality. The party is struggling to deliver, and tweaks to the report cards it uses to measure the performance of officials hardly seem enough.
  • Now, many companies assign hundreds of employees to censorship duties — and China has become a giant on the global internet landscape.
  • Mr. Xi himself has acknowledged that the party must adapt, declaring that the nation is entering a “new era” requiring new methods. But his prescription has largely been a throwback to repression, including vast internment camps targeting Muslim ethnic minorities. “Opening up” has been replaced by an outward push, with huge loans that critics describe as predatory and other efforts to gain influence — or interfere — in the politics of other countries. At home, experimentation is out while political orthodoxy and discipline are in.
  • n effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture — and that to survive and surpass the United States it must
  • Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump’s America is in retreat while China’s moment is just beginning
  • The world thought it could change China, and in many ways it has. But China’s success has been so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world — and the American understanding of how the world works.
  • There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • But China had a strange advantage in battling bureaucratic resistance. The nation’s long economic boom followed one of the darkest chapters of its history, the Cultural Revolution, which decimated the party apparatus and left it in shambles. In effect, autocratic excess set the stage for Mao’s eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, to lead the party in a radically more open direction.
  • In other words, he appears to have less use for the “opening up” part of Deng’s slogan.
  • Now Mr. Xi is steering the party toward repression again, tightening its grip on society, concentrating power in his own hands and setting himself up to rule for life by abolishing the presidential term limit. Will the party loosen up again, as it did a few years after Tiananmen, or is this a more permanent shift? If it is, what will it mean for the Chinese economic miracle?
  • The question now is whether it can sustain this model with the United States as an adversary rather than a partner.
  • kaylynfreeman on 08 Feb 21
     
    "In effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture - and that to survive and surpass the United States it must. Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump's America is in retreat while China's moment is just beginning"
proudsa

Bernie Sanders's Political Revolution Nears Its End - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...484439

revolution bernie atlantic

shared by proudsa on 26 May 16 - No Cached
  • This is Sanders’s last stand, according to the official narrative of the corrupt corporate media, and if there is anything we have learned in the past year, it is the awesome power of the official narrative—the self-reinforcing drumbeat that dictates everything.
  • Sanders continued: “I believe that if we win here in California, and if we win the other five states that are voting on June 7, we’re going to go marching to the Democratic convention with a hell of a lot of momentum. I believe that if we do well here in California, we’ll march in with momentum and we’ll march out with the Democratic nomination!”
  • Sanders and his people have their own sets of rules. All you have to do is unskew the delegate counts, they explain, take out the superdelegates, imagine they all vote for Sanders, imagine certain primaries had been conducted according to different rules.
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  • The Bernie-or-Bust-ers tend to be young, male, and white; few describe themselves as Democrats, and many are new to voting. Women, people of color, and Democrats seem more open to Clinton.
  • They’re both challenging the system. We are people who don’t believe in the system! We want to make a new system where people take care of each other.”
  • The Sanders movement has become impervious to reality. Some have even called into question the nature of reality itself: “Bernie Sanders’ ‘political revolution’ is political only inasmuch as thought is political,” a self-described “metamodernist creative writer”
  • Sanders has repeatedly said he will not play the spoiler—by running as an independent or backing a third-party candidate such as Stein. He says he will do everything in his power to defeat Trump.
  • A spate of recent polls have shown Clinton tied with or slightly trailing Trump in November matchups, the apparent effect of a Republican Party that has unified and a Democratic Party that remains fractured.
  • Many Sanders supporters told me they had once liked Clinton, but over the course of the primary they have come to dislike and distrust her.
  • It seems fitting that this potentially final battle royale should take place in California, a big, liberal state populated by all the various Democratic tribes: the kombucha-sipping hipsters of San Francisco; the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley; the limousine liberals of Hollywood; the large black and Latino populations.
  • A poll of the state conducted earlier this month gave Clinton an 18-point lead over Sanders, but in a new poll released Thursday, that had narrowed to just two points.
  • This week, he was given five slots on the Democratic platform committee, which will allow him to influence what the party stands for—presumably an important goal.
  • “I was very loving toward Bernie Sanders until about a week ago, but now he’s working to elect Trump,” said Kathy Katz, 73, of Temecula. “We’re all way more liberal than the Democratic Party, but some of us realize you can’t win an election that way!”
  • Clinton, for her part, has taken to pretending Sanders does not exist. In her speech, she referred only to Trump, whose candidacy, she said, “may have started out as entertaining, but now it’s really, really concerning.” She added, “We have a bully pulpit in the White House—that doesn’t mean we want a bully in the White House!”
  • Sanders was introduced by a blind Filipino delegate and a gay actress who spoke passionately in favor of transgender rights and compared Sanders to a unicorn, because “he seems too good to be true.”
  • proudsa on 26 May 16
     
    "This Is How a Revolution Ends" - keep in mind the revolutions we have studied throughout the year (notice the differences and similarities)
blaise_glowiak

The Iran Talks Game Changer: An Israeli-Hezbollah War? | Common Dreams | Breaking News ... - 0 views

www.commondreams.org/...-changer-israeli-hezbollah-war

iran war israel lebanon hezbollah

shared by blaise_glowiak on 28 May 15 - No Cached
  • blaise_glowiak on 28 May 15
     
    There are signs Israel may be at war again this summer. This time, not with Hamas in Gaza but with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Such a war may be the result not only of spillover from the Syrian war or ongoing Israeli-Hezbollah tensions. The deciding factor may be an Israeli calculation that war will shift momentum in the U.S. Congress decisively against the pending nuclear deal with Iran -- a deal that critics say will increase Iran's maneuverability in the region, including its support for Hezbollah.
Javier E

With Gaza War, Movement to Boycott Israel Gains Momentum in Europe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-gains-momentum-in-europe.html

israel boycott diplomacy europe

shared by Javier E on 29 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • “We entered this war in Gaza with the perception that the Israeli government is not interested in reaching peace with the Palestinians,” said Meir Javedanfar, an Israeli analyst at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, a private university. “Now, after the casualties and the destruction, I’m very worried about the impact this could have on Israel. It could make it very easy for the BDS campaign to isolate Israel and call for more boycotts.”
  • In an agreement last December on scientific exchanges and funding, known as Horizon 2020, Brussels insisted, despite fierce opposition from the Israeli government, on keeping Israeli institutions in the West Bank, like Ariel University, out of the deal. Since European funding is so important to Israeli academic institutions, the Israeli government gave in
  • To that end, the European Union has demanded that all products produced by Israelis beyond the 1967 lines be labeled differently, and they are excluded from the duty-free trade agreement the bloc has with Israel proper. Goods from settlements are imported, but under different labels and tariffs. “There is no question of a boycott,”
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  • “Our relationship with Israel is close and one of the best we have in the region, but only with Israel in its 1967 lines unless there is a peace agreement,” said a senior European Union official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with diplomatic protocol. “We are clear, however, that what came under Israeli control in 1967 is not a part of Israel, so the settlements are illegal under international law and not helpful in the peace process.”
  • The European Union has gone considerably further than the United States, declaring that Israeli settlements over the Green Line are “illegal” under international law; the United States simply calls them “illegitimate” and “obstacles to peace.”
  • Some countries, like Britain, have gone further. Britain issued voluntary labeling guidelines in December 2009 “to enable consumers to make a more fully informed decision concerning the products they buy,” according to the UK Trade and Investment agency, because “we understand the concerns of people who do not wish to purchase goods exported from Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
  • More troubling to Israel, in December the agency warned companies and citizens to be “aware of the potential reputational implications” of investments in settlement areas. “We do not encourage or offer support to such activities,” it said.
  • Javier E on 29 Aug 14
     
    "boyc"
Javier E

For the sake of the Republican party, both Trump and Cruz must lose - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-bcda-62a36b394160_story.html

GOP 2016 nativism candidate

shared by Javier E on 23 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Trump is proposing a massive ideological and moral revision of the Republican Party. Re-created in his image, it would be the anti-immigrant party; the party that blows up the global trading order; the party that undermines the principle of religious liberty; the party that encourages an ethnic basis for American identity and gives strength and momentum to prejudice.
  • We are already seeing the disturbing normalization of policies and arguments that recently seemed unacceptable, even unsayable. Trump proposes the forced expulsion of 11 million people, or a ban on Muslim immigration, and there are a few days of outrage from responsible Republican leaders. But the proposals still lie on the table, eventually seeming regular and acceptable.
  • they are not acceptable. They are not normal. They are extreme, and obscene and immoral. The Republican nominee — for the sake of his party and his conscience — must draw these boundaries clearly
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  • Cruz is particularly ill-equipped to play this role. He is actually more of a demagogue than an ideologue. So he has changed his views on immigration to compete with Trump — and raised the ante by promising that none of the deported 11 million will ever be allowed back in the country. Instead of demonstrating the humane instincts of his Christian faith — a faith that motivated abolition and the struggle for civil rights — Cruz is presenting the crueler version of a pipe dream.
Javier E

Biden to pledge to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least half by 2030 - The Was... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...biden-climate-change

biden emissions climate policy politics crisis gop

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • “The Biden-Harris administration will do more than any in history to meet our climate crisis,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a speech Monday. “This is already an all-hands-on-deck effort across our government and across our nation. Our future depends on the choices we make today.”
  • the new pledge will offer the latest glimpse at the profound changes that Biden wants to set in motion, from decarbonizing the country’s energy sector to phasing out gasoline-powered vehicles. Administration officials have made clear that they see the effort not only as a climate pursuit but as a massive investment in a new generation of jobs nationwide.
  • Some nations, including those that are part of the European Union, already have locked in more aggressive emissions-cutting targets. The United Kingdom on Tuesday announced a commitment to reducing its emissions by 78 percent by 2035, compared with 1990 levels — a goal the government said would take the nation more than three-quarters of the way toward reaching net zero by 2050.
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  • “We’re going to do it in a way that’s very deliberate,” White House domestic climate adviser Gina McCarthy told reporters Monday in a call organized by the World Resources Institute. The administration wants to transition to a cleaner economy with good-paying occupations in communities that have been hit hardest by unemployment and underinvestment, she said. “It’s intended to meet the moment we are in.”
  • “We are on the verge of the abyss,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said Monday
  • China, the largest greenhouse gas polluter, has said it plans to reach peak emissions by 2030 and effectively erase its carbon footprint by 2060, though the details remain uncertain
  • despite myriad diplomatic tensions between the two countries, the United States and China vowed Saturday to jointly combat climate change “with the seriousness and urgency that it demands.”
  • The world remains nowhere near meeting the central Paris aim of limiting Earth’s warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels — or ideally, remaining closer to 1.5 Celsius. Failure to hit those targets, scientists have warned, will result in a cascade of costly and devastating effects.
  • “We are way off track,” Guterres said. “This must be the year for action — the make-it-or-break-it year.”
  • To craft the new pledge in the administration’s first 100 days, White House officials scrambled staffers at agencies across the government to look for funding, programs and policies that could help curb emissions in the years ahead. Agency by agency, sector by sector, federal officials tallied up the math in an effort to make Biden’s pledge credible.
  • The International Energy Agency this week projected that global carbon dioxide emissions are set to rise by 1.5 billion tons in 2021 — the second-largest increase in history — as the world comes out of the pandemic-induced downturn
  • “This is a dire warning that the economic recovery from the Covid crisis is currently anything but sustainable for our climate,”
  • In the United States, the power sector represents one of the best opportunities to cut greenhouse gas emissions. On Friday, a collection of 13 utilities, including Exelon, National Grid and PSEG, urged Biden to pursue a range of policies “to enable deep decarbonization of the power sector, including a clean electricity standard that ensures the power sector, as a whole, reduces its carbon emissions by 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.”
  • The Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, are already laying the groundwork to curb methane emissions from oil and natural gas drilling, in part by reviving Obama administration standards reversed under Trump
  • the EPA is moving ahead to phase down the production and importation of hydrofluorocarbons — which are widely used as refrigerants and in air conditioning — by 85 percent over the next 15 years, as mandated by Congress.
  • Environmental activists, Democratic lawmakers, foreign leaders and hundreds of private companies, including Apple and Walmart, have implored the White House to make the boldest climate pledge possible.
  • Advocacy groups and academics have published detailed analyses, demonstrating ways they say the nation could cut at least half its emissions by the end of the decade.
  • But other major emitters, including China, India and Russia, have yet to spell out how exactly they intend to help put the world on a more sustainable trajectory.
  • to reach the 50 percent target, the administration will have to make some difficult-to-guarantee assumptions about the future. For instance, that new regulations aimed at curbing emissions won’t be reversed by a future administration or the courts — even though Trump furiously dismantled key Obama-era climate policies.
  • some Republicans have insisted that the far-reaching changes needed to cut greenhouse gas pollution so fast could harm an already struggling economy, particularly in communities that still depend on the fossil fuel industry.
  • Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has argued that Biden’s aggressive climate actions could kill thousands of jobs in her state. On the Senate floor last month, she called the notion that new policies could quickly replace lost jobs in coal and other fossil fuels with ones in renewable energy “a fantasy world that does not exist.”
  • Persuading other key nations to bolster the promises they made in Paris remains critical if the world is to meet its collective goal of slowing Earth’s warming. The targets set by countries such as China, India, Russia and Brazil could dramatically affect whether the world can reach the goals set almost six years ago.
  • “The international community will have the opportunity to see that Biden is good for his word,” said Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “A lot of diplomacy is about momentum and building momentum.”
Javier E

Democrats Should Worry about British Labour's Collapse | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...about-british-labours-collapse

labour UK Politics crisis history policy Democratic party

shared by Javier E on 09 May 21 - No Cached
  • With the rise of Momentum, what had been implicit in Blair and Brown’s politics — the parties’ identification with London and the university towns — became codified in the group’s support for a cultural politics that broke with Labour’s historical commitments to family, community, and nation
  • This politics consisted of enthusiastic support for Remain.  In the runup to the 2019 vote, the activists joined hands with the pro-Blair MPs to favor a second referendum, a “people’s vote,” which they assumed would repudiate the 2016 results
  • They championed “open borders,” immediate eligibility for migrants to Britain’s extensive social services, including its free National Health Services, and voting rights for migrants, regardless of their citizenship, in national elections. They extolled “diversity” and condemned supporters of Leave as bigots and xenophobes.  Patriotism itself was identified with xenophobia.
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  • At the pre-election Labour Conference in Brighton in September 2019, which I attended, speakers called on Britain to provide reparations to make amends for its imperial past and even condemned Britain for global warming — presumably, by initiating the industrial revolution.
  • The young activists also espoused controversial views on family and gender
  • Prior to the 2019 election, an ad hoc group, the Labour Committee for Trans Rights, called for the expulsion from the party of two longstanding feminist organizations that restricted membership in their rape shelters to biological women
  • But Labour’s equivocal stand on Brexit and its identification with the cultural views of young, urban, college-educated activists overrode any appeal that its economic platform might have had.
  • In a post-election study, Paula Surridge, Matthew Goodwin, Oliver Heath, and David Cutts found the that support for Brexit was “strongly associated with cultural values.”  These values “cut across the traditional left-right divide” and undermined Labour’s historic identification with the economic left. 
  • After the election, trade unionist Paul Embery, a member of the group, wrote in his book Despised, “Labour today has virtually nothing to say to the small town and post-industrial Britain, the kind of places out there in the provinces which were once its mainstay.  It is no longer the ‘people’s party’, but the party for the woke, the Toytown revolutionary and Twitter.”
  • The other factor in Labour’s defeat in 2019 and on Thursday was Boris Johnson’s ability to get a deal on Brexit and his  move leftward on economic policy.
  • Johnson, who replaced May in July 2019,  made none of those mistakes. He got parliament to endorse the outlines of a Brexit deal, and he pledged to increase funding for the NHS and to initiate an industrial policy to “level up” Britain’s deindustrialized regions. Johnson’s politics hit the sweet spot in the British electorate: social democratic on economics, but conservative (although not in the American sense of the religious right) on social and cultural policy.  That’s the magic formula that allowed the Tories to lay siege to Labour’s Red Wall.
  • Johnson’s success with the vaccine and his budget boosted his popularity and laid the basis for the Tories’ success in Thursday’s election.
  • Starmer tried to distance Labour from Momentum, Corbyn, and the cultural left.  He declared that he was “proud to be patriotic” and advised Labour officials to display the Union Jack at their appearances.  He opposed the demand to expel the feminist groups and called on the party to “put family first.”  But as Thursday’s results showed, the damage was already done.  Barring a major misstep by Johnson and the Tories, Labour could be out of power for the rest of the decade.
  • the Democrats’ success in 2020 could prove fleeting.  In 2020, they were blessed with a candidate who was able to stem, and in a few instances slightly reverse, the flight of working class voters in middle America from the Democratic Party. That was critical to Biden’s success in a state like Pennsylvania.
  • But Biden is a 78-year-old relic who in his person and in his emphasis on economics reflects an older labor-oriented Democratic party that is being replaced by a party preoccupied with culture and identity.
  • Many of the young Democrats elevate racial issues above those of class — framing what could be universal appeals to national betterment in racial terms; they want to increase immigration and grant citizenship to unauthorized immigrants, but appear indifferent to securing America’s borders
  • they justifiably champion the rights of transgender women —  biological men who identify as women — to be free from discrimination in employment or housing, but dismiss concerns that a blanket identification of sex with declared gender could threaten rights specific to biological women;
  • and as homicides rise, and as justifiable protests against police brutality turned into mayhem and looting, they have advocated defunding  rather than reforming the police.
  • Democrats’ identification with these kind of views played a role in Democratic losses in Congressional races in 2020.
  • Democrats in 2020 were also blessed with a perfect opponent in Donald Trump.  Trump’s bigotry and corruption turned off far more voters than it attracted.
  • If Trump continues to be the poster-boy for the Republican Party, Democrats will benefit in 2022 and 2024, but if he recedes, and his most ardent followers fade into the background, the Democrats could suffer defeat in Congressional elections and in the presidential election of 2024
brickol

Klobuchar gains momentum in Iowa - but can a centrist hope to win there? | US news | Th... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-iowa-democrats-2020-election

politics US election culture

shared by brickol on 04 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The Minnesota senator is reaching out to Iowa’s smallest towns and rural settlements ahead of the vital February caucus and seeing increasing numbers
  • Hiller, whose state is the vital first one to cast ballots in the party’s nomination race to pick an opponent to Donald Trump, was impressed by the Minnesota senator, a fellow midwesterner who desperately needs a strong showing in Iowa to boost her 2020 presidential campaign.
  • That sort of reaction is music to Klobuchar’s ears as she carried out a gruelling tour through 27 counties in rural Iowa in an attempt to build a groundswell of support through reaching out to the state’s smallest towns and rural settlements. With this strategy, even a couple dozen attendees counts as a success.
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  • Two dozen others had turned out to see the Minnesota senator in tiny Ida Grove that same day, a county that doesn’t even have 1,000 registered Democrats. But most striking to Klobuchar was a crowd of around 50 packing the Sac County Cattle Company on a Sunday night just before Christmas.
  • Klobuchar is blunt about her shared background with Iowa’s voters. She brags about being from the midwest, and how she can win in rural Minnesota counties that Trump took by 20 points.
  • Klobuchar said those gatherings are a sign of what to expect on Iowa’s caucus day on 3 February. Klobuchar sits at about 6% support among probable Iowa caucusgoers, according to the most recent Des Moines Register Iowa poll in October, but a strong debate showing in Los Angeles brought her notice
  • A crowd that size in Sac City, anywhere in rural America, means something
  • The proprietor said Klobuchar’s crowds were at least the size of King’s, or any other Republican who has come calling.
  • Her entire argument is built around electability in midwest swing states such as Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan and Ohio
  • “He’s treating farmers like poker chips in one of his bankrupt casinos,” she said to the delight of her audience at one stop
  • The question is whether her momentum, which is mainly confined to Iowa, is too little too late. In less than six weeks, caucusgoers will trudge through a frigid night to precinct meetings in schoolhouses and courthouses – while she may be chained to Trump’s impeachment trial in the US Senate, which is set to start sometime in January and last for an unknown time.
  • “In an ironic way, her stardom in the Senate will hurt her campaigning in Iowa, where she desperately needs to do well.”
  • Klobuchar says a doubling of office spaces in Iowa and positive responses in Des Moines Register/CNN Iowa polls are signs of hope. Best says her strongest advantage is that overwhelming majorities of probable caucusgoers have favorable opinions of her and list her in their top three selections.
  • She says people there have a thirst for economic prosperity that can be achieved realistically, not with promises like Medicare for All. She never mentions challengers from the progressive wing by name. “We can win them back telling the truth. We can bring those people back.”
  • voters in rural areas like Sac City and Rockwell City are easier to organize than in Democratic metro strongholds such as Des Moines or Iowa City. Those who show up in Rockwell City are reliably Democratic and less issue-focused. Rarely do they see a candidate with Klobuchar’s resume. When they do, they leave with a strong impression.
  • “It’s a lot easier to get viability in Sac county than Polk county,” said Scholten. “She recognizes that people are familiar with her. Sac City isn’t a long way from the Iowa-Minnesota border.”
  • Those who hear Klobuchar’s message like her focus on the midwest.
osichukwuocha

New Layoffs Add to Worries Over U.S. Economic Slowdown - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...yoffs-unemployment-claims.html

new york times crisis culture pandemic economics

shared by osichukwuocha on 01 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Companies including Disney, the insurance giant Allstate and two major airlines announced plans to fire or furlough more than 60,000 workers in recent days,
  • Democrats are pushing a $2.2 trillion proposal, while the White House has floated a $1.6 trillion plan.
  • the economy rebounded in May and June with the help of stimulus money and rock-bottom interest rates. But the loss of momentum since then, coupled with fears of a second wave of coronavirus cases this fall
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  • said 787,000 people filed new applications for state jobless benefits last week
  • When you combine the layoffs with fiscal aid drying up, it points to very soft momentum in the final quarter of the year.
  • . A $50 billion bailout in March obligated the carriers to hold off on job cuts through Oct. 1.
  • For those like Ms. Perez who lost work earlier in the year, the end of the $600 federal unemployment supplement has added to financial hardships.
  • Consumer spending on goods — whether for immediate consumption, like food, or used over a longer term, like appliances — now exceeds levels preceding the pandemic. But outlays for services, which account for roughly two-thirds of the nation’s economic activity, remain down about 8 percent.
  • The economic picture is not completely bleak. Personal spending was up 1 percent last month, and readings of consumer confidence have been gaining.
  • When she was furloughed in mid-March after the pandemic hit, she thought she would be out of work for just a few weeks. But on Tuesday, a text message from her union representative told her that her job would not be coming back.“I was just in shock,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it.”
  • Ms. Perez said she could pay her rent and utilities on the roughly $250 a week she receives in state unemployment benefits, but could not afford any extra expenses, like the car she needs after hers broke down in March.
  • Travel, entertainment, and leisure and hospitality employers have been among the hardest hit by the pandemic, and they continue to lag even as other areas of the economy have reopened. The American Hotel & Lodging Association, a trade group, said that without new stimulus legislation, 74 percent of hotels would lay off additional employees and two-thirds would be out of business in six months.
  • I will have to go to every church around me and ask for help,” she said. “I will stand in food lines with the kids, because I cannot leave them at home. I will apply anywhere that I can for help, because there’s no way that I can allow us to be homeless.”
Javier E

Facebook Whistleblower's Testimony Builds Momentum for Tougher Tech Laws - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...efore-senate-panel-11633426201

facebook whistleblower testimony momentum congress

shared by Javier E on 06 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • “I saw Facebook repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profit and our safety. Facebook consistently resolved these conflicts in favor of its own profits,” Ms. Haugen told a Senate consumer protection subcommittee. “As long as Facebook is operating in the shadows, hiding its research from public scrutiny, it is unaccountable. Until the incentives change, Facebook will not change.”
  • “There is no one currently holding Mark accountable but himself,” she said. Facebook under Mr. Zuckerberg makes decisions based on how they will affect measurements of user engagement, rather than their potential downsides for the public, she said.
  • “Mark has built an organization that is very metrics-driven,” she said. “The metrics make the decision. Unfortunately that itself is a decision.”
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  • Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), the chairman of the subcommittee conducting Tuesday’s hearing, called on Mr. Zuckerberg to appear before Congress to testify, terming the company “morally bankrupt.”
  • Facebook has said it plans to continue doing internal research and is working on ways to make that work available to others. The company has recently battled with some academic researchers over access to its data, but Facebook says that it works cooperatively with many others.
  • Republican and Democratic lawmakers at the hearing renewed their calls for regulation, such as strengthening privacy and competition laws and special online protections for children, as well as toughening of the platforms’ accountability. One idea that got a particular boost was requiring more visibility into social-media data as well as the algorithms that shape users’ experiences.
  • “The severity of this crisis demands that we break out of previous regulatory frames,” she said. “Tweaks to outdated privacy protections…will not be sufficient.”
  • A good starting point, she added, would be “full access to data for research not directed by Facebook. On this foundation, we can build sensible rules and standards to address consumer harms, illegal content, data protection, anticompetitive practices, algorithmic systems and more.”
  • Ms. Haugen also raised national-security concerns about Facebook, citing foreign surveillance on the platform—for example, Chinese monitoring of Uyghur populations—and what she termed Facebook’s “consistent understaffing” of its counterintelligence teams.
  • Ms. Haugen made the case for policy changes to address her perceived concerns. In products such as cars and cigarettes, she said, independent researchers can evaluate health effects, but “the public cannot do the same with Facebook.”
  • “This inability to see in Facebook’s actual systems and confirm that they work as communicated is like the Department of Transportation regulating cars by only watching them drive down the highway,” she said, arguing for an independent government agency that would employ experts to audit the impact of social media.
  • She said that if Congress moves to change Section 230, a federal accountability law that protects Facebook and other companies from liability for user-generated content, it should distinguish between that kind of content and choices that companies make about what type of content to promote.
  • “Facebook should not get a pass on choices it makes to prioritize virality and growth and reactiveness over public safety,” she said.
  • Ms. Haugen was hired by Facebook two years ago to help protect against election interference on Facebook. She said she acted because she was frustrated by what she viewed as Facebook’s lack of openness about the platform’s potential for harm and its unwillingness to address its flaws.
  • “I would simply say, let’s get to work,” said Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.), who has sponsored several measures on algorithm transparency. “We’ve got some things we can do here.”
  • “There’s always reason for skepticism” about Congress reaching consensus on legislation, Mr. Blumenthal said after the hearing. But he added that “there are times when the dynamic is so powerful that something actually is done…I have rarely, if ever, seen the kind of unanimity on display today.”
Javier E

Opinion | Ben Rhodes: Henry Kissinger, the Hypocrite - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-kissinger-the-hypocrite.html

hypocrisy kissinger legacy politics us history international relations

shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • From 1969 to 1977, Mr. Kissinger established himself as one of the most powerful functionaries in history. For a portion of that time, he was the only person ever to serve concurrently as national security adviser and secretary of state, two very different jobs that simultaneously made him responsible for shaping and carrying out American foreign policy.
  • the ease with which he wielded power made him a natural avatar for an American national security state that grew and gained momentum through the 20th century, like an organism that survives by enlarging itself.
  • In the White House, you’re atop an establishment that includes the world’s most powerful military and economy while holding the rights to a radical story: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
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  • But I was constantly confronted by the contradictions embedded in American leadership, the knowledge that our government arms autocrats while its rhetoric appeals to the dissidents trying to overthrow them or that our nation enforces rules — for the conduct of war, the resolution of disputes and the flow of commerce — while insisting that America be excused from following them when they become inconvenient.
  • He helped extend the war in Vietnam and expand it to Cambodia and Laos, where the United States rained down more bombs than it dropped on Germany and Japan in World War II. That bombing — often indiscriminately massacring civilians — did nothing to improve the terms on which the Vietnam War ended; if anything, it just indicated the lengths to which the United States would go to express its displeasure at losing.
  • For decades, he was a coveted guest at gatherings of statesmen and tycoons, perhaps because he could always provide an intellectual framework for why some people are powerful and justified in wielding power
  • Mr. Kissinger was fixated on credibility, the idea that America must impose a price on those who ignore our demands to shape the decisions of others in the future. It’s hard to see how the bombing of Laos, the coup in Chile or the killings in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) contributed to the outcome of the Cold War.
  • But Mr. Kissinger’s unsentimental view of global affairs allowed him to achieve consequential breakthroughs with autocratic countries closer to America’s weight class — a détente with the Soviet Union that reduced the escalatory momentum of the arms race and an opening to China that deepened the Sino-Soviet split, integrated the People’s Republic of China into the global order and prefaced Chinese reforms that lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
  • From a strategic standpoint, Mr. Kissinger surely knew, being a superpower carried with it a cavernous margin of error that can be forgiven by history
  • Now history has come full circle. Around the world, we see a resurgence of autocracy and ethnonationalism, most acutely in Russia’s war against Ukraine
  • Just a few decades after the end of the Vietnam War, the same countries we’d bombed were seeking expanded trade with the United States. Bangladesh and East Timor are now independent nations that receive American assistance. Chile is governed by a millennial socialist whose minister of defense is Mr. Allende’s granddaughter.
  • Superpowers do what they must. The wheel of history turns. When and where you live determines whether you get crushed or lifted by it
  • But that worldview mistakes cynicism — or realism — for wisdom. The story, what it’s all about, matters. Ultimately, the Berlin Wall came down not because of chess moves made on the board of a great game but rather because people in the East wanted to live like the people in the West.
  • Economics, popular culture and social movements mattered. Despite all our flaws, we had a better system and story.
  • Credibility, after all, is not just about whether you punish an adversary to send a message to another; it’s also about whether you are what you say you are. No one can expect perfection in the affairs of state any more than in relations among human beings.
  • But the United States has paid a price for its hypocrisy, though it’s harder to measure than the outcome of a war or negotiation. Over the decades, our story about democracy has come to ring hollow to a growing number of people who can point to the places where our actions drained our words of meaning and “democracy” just sounded like an extension of American interests.
  • Similarly, our insistence on a rules-based international order has been ignored by strongmen who point to America’s sins to justify their own.
  • The generous defense is that Mr. Kissinger represented an ethos that saw the ends (the defeat of the Soviet Union and revolutionary Communism) as justifying the means. But for huge swaths of the world, this mind-set carried a brutal message that America has often conveyed to its own marginalized populations: We care about democracy for us, not for them.
  • In Gaza the United States has supported an Israeli military operation that has killed civilians at a pace that has once again suggested to much of the world that we are selective in our embrace of international laws and norms.
  • Meanwhile, at home, we see how democracy has become subordinate to the pursuit of power within a chunk of the Republican Party.
  • This is where cynicism can lead. Because when there is no higher aspiration, no story to give meaning to our actions, politics and geopolitics become merely a zero-sum game. In that kind of world, might makes right.
  • his is also a cautionary tale. As imperfect as we are, the United States needs our story to survive. It’s what holds together a multiracial democracy at home and differentiates us from Russia and China abroad.
  • That story insists that a child in Laos is equal in dignity and worth to our children and that the people of Chile have the same right of self-determination as we do. For the United States, that must be a part of national security. We forget that at our peril.
Javier E

(3) Chartbook 285: Cal-Tex - How Bidenomics is shaping America's multi-speed energy tra... - 0 views

adamtooze.substack.com/...ook-285-cal-tex-how-bidenomics

transition power generation politics policy

shared by Javier E on 27 May 24 - No Cached
  • If the Texas solar boom, the biggest in the USA, has little to do with Bidenomics, are we exaggerating the impact of Bidenomics? Rather than the shiny new tax incentives is it more general factors such as the plunging cost of PVs driving the renewable surge in the USA. Or, if policy is indeed the key, are state-level measures in Texas making the difference? Or, is this unfair to the IRA? Are its main effects still to come? Will it pile-on a boom that is already underway?
  • What did I learn?
  • First, when we compare the US renewable energy trajectory with the global picture, there is little reason to believe that Bidenomics has, so far, produced an exceptional US trajectory.
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  • Everywhere, new investment in green energy generation is being propelled by general concern for the climate, shifting corporate and household demand, the plunging prices for solar and batteries triggered by Chinese policy, and a combination of national and regional interventions
  • How different would we expect this data to look without the IRA?
  • The most useful overview of these modeling efforts that I have been able to find is by Bistline et al “Power sector impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” in Environmental Research Letters November 2023. If anyone has a better source, please let me know.
  • The top panel shows the historical trajectory of US generating capacity from 1980 to 2021. The second half of the graphic shows how 11 different models predict that the US electricity system might be expected to develop up to 2035, with and without IRA.
  • all the models expect the trends of the 2010s to continue through to the 2030s which means that solar, wind and battery storage dominate America’s energy future. Even without the IRA, the low carbon share of electricity generation will likely rise to 50-55% by 2035. Bidenomics bumps that to 70-80 percent.
  • The question is: “How does the renewable surge of 2022-2024, compare to the model-based expectations, with and without the IRA?”
  • The answer is either, “so so”, or, more charitably, it is “too early to tell”. In broad terms the current rate of expansion is slightly above the rate the models predict without the provision of additional Bidenomics incentives. But what is also clear is that the current rate of expansion, is far short of the long-run pace that should be expected from the IRA
  • At this point, defenders of the IRA interject that the IRA has only just come into effect. Cash from the IRA is only beginning to flow. And in an environment of higher costs for renewable energy equipment and higher interest rates, cash matters.
  • As Yakov Feygin put it: “Maybe the pithiest way to put it is that there are pre-IRA trends and outside IRA trends, but IRA has served to rapidly compress the timeframes for installation in a lot of technologies. So five years has turned into two, for example.”
  • So, to judge the impact of the IRA to date, the real question is not what has been built in 2022 and 2023, but what is in the pipeline.
  • Advised by JP Morgan, sophisticated global players like Ørsted are optimizing their use of both the production and investment tax credits offered by the IRA to launch large new renewable schemes. Of course, correlation is not the same as causation
  • Where the IRA is perhaps doing its most important work may be in incentivizing the middle bracket of projects where green momentum is less certain.
  • According to Utility Drive: “The 10 largest U.S. developers plan to build 110,364 MW of new wind and solar projects over the next five years, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, but the majority of these projects remain in early stages of development. Just 15% of planned wind and solar projects are under construction, and 13% are considered to be in advanced stages of development, … ”
  • The states that I have highlighted in red stand out either for their unusually low existing level of renewable power capacity or their lack of current momentum.
  • Along with Texas, the pipelines for the PJM, MISO and Southeast regions (which includes Florida) look particularly healthy.
  • The relatively modest California numbers should not be a surprise. As Yakov Feygin and others pointed out, what is needed in California is not more raw generating capacity, but more battery storage. And that is what we are seeing in the data.
  • The numbers would be even larger if it were not for the truly surreal logjam in California’s system for authorizing interconnections. According to Hamilton/Brookings data the volume of hybrid solar and batter capacity in the queue for approval is 6.5 times the capacity currently operating in the state. In other words there is an entire energy transition waiting to happen when the overloaded managerial processes of the system catch up
  • Texas’s less bureaucratic system seems to be one of its key advantages in the extremely rapid roll-out of solar.
  • though it may be true that globally speaking the United States as a whole is a laggard in renewable energy development,
  • If California (with an economy roughly comparable to that of Germany at current exchange rates) and Texas (with an economy roughly the size of Italy’s) were countries, they would be #3 and #5 in the world in solar capacity per capita.
  • the obvious question is, which are the laggards in the US energy system.
  • So there is a lot to get excited about, at, what we are learning to call, the “meso”-level of the economy (more on this in a future post).
  • What the state-level data reveal is that there are a significant number of large states in the USA where solar and wind energy have barely made any impact. Pennsylvania, for instance
  • The relative levels of sunshine between US states is irrelevant. As the global solar atlas shows, the entire United States has far better solar potential than North West Europe. If you can grow corn and tobbaco, you can do utility-scale solar. The fact that Arizona is not a solar giant is mind boggling.
  • Texas is both big and truly remarkable. California already is a world leader in renewable energy. Meanwhile, the majority of the US electricity system presents a very different picture. There is a huge distance to be traveled and the pace of solar build-out is unremarkable.
  • This is where national level incentives like the IRA must prove themselves
  • And these local battles in America matter. Given the extremely high per capita energy consumption in the USA, greening state-level energy systems is significant at the global level. It does not compare to the super-sized levels of emissions in China, but it matters.
  • Indonesia’s total installed electricity generating capacity is rated at 81 GW. As far as immediate impact on the global carbon balance is concerned, cleaning up the power systems of Pennsylvania and Illinois would make an even bigger impact.
  • A key test of Biden-era climate and industrial policy will be whether it can untie the local political economy of fossil fuels, which, across many regions of the United States still stands in the way of a green energy transition that now has all the force of economics and technological advantage on its side.
Javier E

Dark matter may be source of exotic space particles, physicist says - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-a941-a19bce7af755_story.html

dark matter particles universe

shared by Javier E on 03 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • The AMS sorts through these particles, measuring their momentum and charge.The device can discern whether a particle is a positron, which is a form of antimatter. It is the antiparticle of the electron, identical but with the opposite charge. Our universe has largely been swept clean of antimatter, because when matter and antimatter collide, they are mutually annihilated
  • new bits of antimatter can be created within our galaxy in certain kinds of events. One way is if two particles of dark matter collide.Dark matter emits and absorbs no light, and interacts with ordinary matter in a ghostly fashion, primarily through gravity. Dark matter affects the way galaxies move; they rotate in a manner that suggests that they are carrying some unseen load of matter.In the past two decades, other experiments and detectors have bolstered the notion that dark matter is far more abundant than ordinary matter. What it is, exactly, remains unclear. The AMS, however, has picked up signals from more than 400,000 positrons, and they came into the detector from all directions, with no variation over time. That is consistent with the idea that they are coming from collisions of particles of dark matter that saturate the galaxy.The other possible origin is that positrons are emitted by rapidly rotating, ultra-dense stars called pulsars, which are scattered throughout the galaxy. Ting said Wednesday that his results cannot rule out that possibility.
katieb0305

North Carolina Reckons With its Jim Crow Past - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...501257

politics US history

shared by katieb0305 on 28 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • n 2016, bitter and unyielding contests have placed the state at the center of national debates about race, civil rights, violence, and elections. In the span of a year, an anti-transgender bathroom bill sparked rallies and a fierce debate over civil rights, flames licked the streets of a resegregated Charlotte during protests over a police shooting, a local GOP office was firebombed, and a collection of new laws have been enacted—and promptly challenged in court. But the most contentious and sustained rift has been in the arena of voting rights, and it is there where White’s words resound most loudly.
  • Inserts in the hymnals boasted of the church’s commitment to racial, sexual, and gender inclusivity and advertised a training for sensitivity to transgender and gender non-conforming folks.
  • The latent difficulty of registering to vote compounds with some other obstacles for minorities to depress turnout even in the absence of Jim Crow laws.
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  • “The 14th Amendment says every person has a right to equal protection under the law,” he told the crowd.  “When you engage in intentional voter discrimination, you are robbing people of their equal protection under the law.” His words were both a benediction and a battle cry.
  • Even after 1965, North Carolina still struggled mightily with racial equality at the ballot. Thirty-six percent of all eligible black adults were registered to vote in North Carolina in 1963, and while that number jumped to 50 percent after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, it stalled there.
  • By 1980, the proportion of registered black voters had barely inched up to 52 percent. Adjustments made in 1982, including a new legal test for discrimination based on the effect of changes rather their intent, restored some momentum.
  • Why didn’t—or couldn’t—more black people vote once extended the franchise? One reason is that all the structural barriers to voting hadn’t been eliminated. Research indicates that polling places in minority neighborhoods tend to be less common, understaffed, and underfunded relative to those in white neighborhoods, making longer lines in minority areas much more likely.
  • Economic and social frustrations deeply affected vulnerable people of color in North Carolina.
  • That infusion of black voters—who mostly vote Democratic—helped to unseat Republican Senator Elizabeth Dole, deliver one of North Carolina’s House seats to a Democrat, and give the party the General Assembly,
katieb0305

Obamacare's Problems Probably Won't Save Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...498605

obamacare trump problems atlantic

shared by katieb0305 on 28 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • It’s crunch time for the Affordable Care Act.Days after a long, thorough speech from President Obama defending the law and laying out his vision for it in the years ahead, the administration released confirmation of what the industry had been signaling for most of the past few months: double-digit percentage point premium increases for benchmark plans for people insured through plans purchased on the Obamacare insurance marketplaces, known as exchanges, this upcoming year.
  • Young people are still slow to sign up, premiums have steadily risen in the exchanges, and big insurers like Aetna have left the exchanges, leaving several counties and at least one entire state with only one insurer.
  • Republicans seeking to destroy the law, and Democrats who have become increasingly vocal about further reforms or radical changes to the law. But will the bad news about Obamacare actually affect the election in a meaningful way?
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  • the news of premium hikes will work in his favor, though his criticism in reaction to news has revealed more about the limitations of his own policy knowledge than anything about how he’d fix the problem.
  • For one: The administration’s announcement is a mere formalizing of increases many people familiar with the industry predicted throughout the year.
  • If Trump is indicative, Republican politicians don’t have the language to capitalize on some of the weaknesses of the law right now. Over the past two years, neither their calls for blanket repeal of Obamacare, nor the coverage of historic gains in insurance coverage, have meaningfully altered public opinion one way or the other.
  • Only a small sliver of the population is enrolled through the exchanges, and most people in the country are covered through their employers, where premiums have risen at rates similar to previous years.
  • The federal government will protect most Americans from the real financial impacts of a spike in premiums, and only between five and seven million people will bear the full sticker shock of Obamacare premium hikes.
  • Additionally, most people with subsidized coverage who are directly threatened by the loss of Aetna or other major insurers won’t have to go shopping for new plans until 2017.
  • he future of the Affordable Care Act isn’t even the top health care issue for registered voters, but that finding comes with a few grains of salt. Sixty-six percent of those polled viewed the future of Medicare as a non-exclusive “top priority,” with an equal proportion viewing access and affordability of health care as such.
  • Proposals like Donald Trump’s that involve remaking a system that is just beginning to settle have challenges with winning over many people who actually have to navigate the changes involved.
  • So what’s left for Republicans and Donald Trump? Probably not another health-reform-fueled revolution. It’s unlikely that premium increases can influence enough lives now to provide that kind of momentum at the polls, and Trump’s incoherence looks more like a last-ditch gambit than legitimately savvy capitalization on what appear to be real problems with the law.
  • Americans are seeking affordable ways forward with what they have in ways that disrupt their lives the least. For now, their response is probably not panic
alexdeltufo

The Memphis Massacre of 1866 and Black Voter Suppression in the American South - The At... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...481737

shared by alexdeltufo on 08 May 16 - No Cached
  • The unrest started with a rumor of black-on-white crime: Black soldiers stationed at Fort Pickering on the city’s south bluffs had allegedly killed white policemen attempting to arrest an African American soldier.
  • Although much has changed since the end of the Civil War, the fact remains that political violence undermines the democratic process even where civil-rights protections are supposedly in place.
  • Ulysses S. Grant would carry Memphis’s Shelby County in two presidential elections aided by African American men, to whom the state extended voting rights in 1867,
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  • But as in so many corners of the Confederacy, the camps where former slaves lived swelled with the hungry, the sick, and those seeking to find opportunity and family.
  • This set the stage for the violent days of May 1866. When the rumor of the black-on-white crime spread, Fort Pickering’s commander, General George Stoneman, confiscated black soldiers’ weapons and ordered them to their barracks.
  • Around the same time, a white mob assembled, including police and firemen, and attacked the camp of former slaves and African American neighborhoods.
  • Violence resumed late the next morning when “a posse of police and citizens again appeared in South Memphis and commenced an indiscriminate attack upon the Negroes,
  • he Massacre showed the failures of Reconstruction even as congressional Republicans seized control from President Andrew Johnson, a Tennessean and former military governor of the state.
  • Newly elected legislators in states like South Carolina showed up in their old Rebel uniforms. And though white civil-rights supporters lived in Memphis and other cities, they were targets of violence—including during the Memphis Massacre.
  • After all, there was political benefit in this kind of aggressive legislating: African Americans made up the largest bloc of Union-loyal Southerners during the war and were potential Republican voters.
  • The Enforcement Act of 1870 outlawed both state and private violence against African Americans, reenacting the 1866 Civil Rights Act under the auspices of the Fourteenth Amendment.
  • In 1871, the federal government placed nine South Carolina counties under martial law, and federal courts convicted more than 100 defendants charged under these acts.
  • he U.S. Supreme Court held in U.S. v. Cruikshank that the perpetrators of the 1873 Colfax Massacre in Louisiana could not be convicted for federal civil-rights violations because the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause did not extend to individuals’ crimes,
  • It took 90 years for the state-built edifice of Jim Crow to be torn down by the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964,
  • A new retreat from Civil Rights is getting renewed momentum today in the wake of the 2013 decision Shelby County v. Holder. The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority invalidated sections 4 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
nataliedepaulo1

Mosul battle: Iraq gaining momentum against IS - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-middle-east-38552980

battle politics

shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 09 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • The announcement by the Iraqi military that its forces have reached the Tigris River for the first time in the battle for Mosul marks a significant moment in the 12-week campaign to recapture so-called Islamic State's (IS) last major stronghold in the country.
  • Broad-based advances suggest that IS resistance is "showing signs of collapse" in east Mosul, as suggested by Brett McGurk, the senior US official in the counter-IS coalition, in a tweet on 8 January.
  • Iraqi forces are now present in 35 of east Mosul's 47 neighbourhoods, including the largest and most densely populated parts of the east side.
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  • Thus far the battle has seen far less damage done to Mosul's infrastructure than previous attritional struggles like Ramadi in Iraq or Kobane in Syria, though the daily damage to neighbourhoods has intensified since the offensive restarted.
abbykleman

DC's 'March for Life' to highlight gains by abortion opponents - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...ins-abortion-opponents-n712906

shared by abbykleman on 27 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 27 Jan 17
     
    WASHINGTON- For the first time in years, abortion opponents will have all the political momentum when they hold their annual rally Friday on the National Mall. The March for Life, held each year in Washington to mark the anniversary of the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, said it will have one of its biggest-name speakers in years: Vice President...
bodycot

Race between Bernie and Hillary tightens One of the latest polls this week sh... - 0 views

www.yahoo.com/...ia-primary-poll-000000198.html

shared by bodycot on 03 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Sanders has been barnstorming across California in hopes of winning the primary and, his team argues, momentum to help win over so-called superdelegates who have already vowed to back Clinton. Because pledged delegates are awarded proportionally, a narrow Sanders win in California would do little to help him catch up to Clinton, who also holds a decisive lead in pledged delegates.
  • “California is the big enchilada,” Sanders said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press.” “Obviously, if we don’t do well in California, it will make our path much, much harder.” He added: “I’m knocking my brains out to win the Democratic nomination.”
  • Trump was not going to take a loss without throwing a few below-the-belt punches of his own (emphasis ours).
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  • the tournament will now be held at the exclusive Club de Golf Chapultapec outside Mexico City
  • Trump and the PGA Tour have had a long and rocky relationship
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