The Hoarding of the American Dream

The Atlantic

The Hoarding of the American Dream

In a new book, a Brookings scholar examines how the upper-middle class has enriched itself and harmed economic mobility.

Annie Lowrey June 16, 2017

There’s a certain type of financial confessional that has had a way of going viral in the post-recession era. The University of Chicago law professor complaining his family was barely keeping their heads above water on $250,000 a year. This hypothetical family of three in San Francisco making $200,000, enjoying vacations to Maui, and living hand-to-mouth. This real New York couple making six figures and merely “scraping by.”

In all of these viral posts, denizens of the upper-middle class were attempting to make the case for their middle class-ness. Taxes are expensive. Cities are expensive. Tuition is expensive. Children are expensive. Travel is expensive. Tens of thousands of dollars a month evaporate like cold champagne spilled on a hot lanai, they argue. And the 20 percent are not the one percent.

A great, short book by Richard V. Reeves of the Brookings Institution helps to flesh out why these stories provoke such rage. In Dream Hoarders, released this week, Reeves agrees that the 20 percent are not the one percent: The higher you go up the income or wealth distribution, the bigger the gains made in the past three or four decades. Still, the top quintile of earners—those making more than roughly $112,000 a year—have been big beneficiaries of the country’s growth. To make matters worse, this group of Americans engages in a variety of practices that don’t just help their families, but harm the other 80 percent of Americans.

“I am not suggesting that the top one percent should be left alone. They need to pay more tax, perhaps much more,” Reeves writes. “But if we are serious about narrowing the gap between ‘the rich’ and everybody else, we need a broader conception of what it means to be rich.”

The book traces the way that the upper-middle class has pulled away from the middle class and the poor on five dimensions: income and wealth, educational attainment, family structure, geography, and health and longevity. The top 20 percent of earners might not have seen the kinds of income gains made by the top one percent and America’s billionaires. Still, their wage and investment increases have proven sizable. They dominate the country’s top colleges, sequester themselves in wealthy neighborhoods with excellent public schools and public services, and enjoy healthy bodies and long lives. “It would be an exaggeration to say that the upper-middle class is full of gluten-avoiding, normal-BMI joggers who are only marginally more likely to smoke a cigarette than to hit their children,” Reeves writes. “But it would be just that—an exaggeration, not a fiction.”

They then pass those advantages onto their children, with parents placing a “glass floor” under their kids. They ensure they grow up in nice zip codes, provide social connections that make a difference when entering the labor force, help with internships, aid with tuition and home-buying, and schmooze with college admissions officers. All the while, they support policies and practices that protect their economic position and prevent poorer kids from climbing the income ladder: legacy admissions, the preferential tax treatment of investment income, 529 college savings plans, exclusionary zoning, occupational licensing, and restrictions on the immigration of white-collar professionals.

As a result, America is becoming a class-based society, more like fin-de-siècle England than most would care to admit, Reeves argues. Higher income kids stay up at the sticky top of the income distribution. Lower income kids stay down at the bottom. The one percent have well and truly trounced the 99 percent, but the 20 percent have done their part to immiserate the 80 percent, as well—an arguably more relevant but less recognized class distinction.

Why more relevant? In part because the 20 percent are so much bigger than the one percent. If you are going to raise a considerable amount of new income-tax revenue to finance social programs, as many Democrats want to do, dinging the top one percent won’t cut it: They are a lot richer, but a lot fewer in number. And if you are going to provide more opportunities in good neighborhoods, public schools, colleges, internship programs, and labor markets to lower-income families, it is the 20 percent that are going to have to give something up.

Reeves offers a host of policy changes that might make a considerable difference: better access to contraception, increasing building in cities and suburbs, barring legacy admissions to colleges, curbing tax expenditures that benefit families with big homes and capital gains. Still, given the scale of the problem, I wondered whether other, bigger solutions might be necessary as well: a universal child allowance to reduce the poverty rate among kids, as the Century Foundation has proposed, say, or baby bonds to help eliminate the black-white wealth gap fostered by decades of racist and exclusionary government policy, as Darrick Hamilton has suggested. (So often, the upper-middle class insulating and enriching itself at the expense of the working class has meant white families doing so at the expense of black families—a point I thought underplayed in Reeves’ telling.)

Yet, as Reeves notes, “sensible policy is not always easy politics.” Expanding opportunity and improving fairness would require the upper-middle class to vote for higher taxes, to let others move in, and to share in the wealth. Prying Harvard admission letters and the mortgage interest deductions out of the hands of bureaucrats in Bethesda, sales executives in Minnetonka, and lawyers in Louisville is not going to be easy.

Members of the upper-middle class, as those viral stories show and Reeves writes, love to think of themselves as members of the middle class, not as the rich. They love to think of themselves as hard workers who played fair and won what they deserved, rather than as people who were born on third and think they hit a triple. They hate to hear that the government policies they support as sensible might be torching social mobility and entrenching an elite. That elite is them.

12 Ways Trump Has Declared War on Food Safety

EcoWatch

12 Ways Trump Has Declared War on Food Safety

By Scott Faber June 15, 2017

President Trump is waging a full-scale campaign to roll back decades of progress toward making America’s food safer, healthier and more clearly labeled. If successful, the Trump administration would do more to increase hunger, obesity and food-borne illness than any other administration in American history.

Since taking office Trump has:

Proposed to cut food safety funding for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by $117 million.
Proposed to cut funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, by $193 billion—a 25 percent cut—and cut international food aid by $2 billion.
Delayed new labeling rules for menus and packaged foods that would give consumers more information about calories and added sugars, and so far failed to issue a draft rule to implement a new law on disclosing genetically modified ingredients in food.
Weakened new rules designed to drive junk food out of U.S. schools.
Proposed to eliminate several U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that helped farmers sell directly to local consumers.
Proposed to eliminate funding for an entire division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that works to reduce obesity.
Withdrawn new rules to protect drinking water supplies from polluters and proposed cutting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) budget by 31 percent.
Proposed to suspended two of the largest farmland stewardship programs and mothball others.
Postponed new rules designed to strengthen animal welfare standards on organic farms and proposed to eliminate funding for programs that help farmers switch to organic farming.
Reversed a ban on a pesticide linked to brain damage in kids and proposed cutting EPA funding for pesticide review programs by 20 percent.
Punted on new rules to protect farm-workers from pesticides, and proposed to eliminate a program to train migrant and seasonal farm-workers.
Mothballed new voluntary sodium guidelines that would drive reformulation of foods.

In addition, Trump has called for so-called regulatory “reforms” that would block agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture from adopting new rules designed to keep food safe, update food labels or provide students healthier meal options in schools.

Thanks to Trump, it may soon be harder for Americans to feed their families, build healthy diets, and eat food free of dangerous pathogens and pesticides.

The Standing Rock Sioux Claim ‘Victory and Vindication’ in Court

The Atlantic

The Standing Rock Sioux Claim ‘Victory and Vindication’ in Court

A federal judge rules that the Dakota Access pipeline did not receive an adequate environmental vetting.

Robinson Meyer June 14, 2017

A federal judge ruled in favor of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe on Wednesday, handing the tribe its first legal victory in its year-long battle against the Dakota Access pipeline.

James Boasberg, who sits on D.C. district court, said that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers failed to perform an adequate study of the pipeline’s environmental consequences when it first approved its construction. In a 91-page decision, the judge cited the Corps’ study of “the impacts of an oil spill on fishing rights, hunting rights, or environmental justice” as particularly deficient, and he ordered it to prepare a new report on its risks.

The court did not, however, order the pipeline to be shut off until a new environmental study is completed—a common remedy when a federal permit is found lacking. Instead, Boasberg asked attorneys to appear before him again and make a new set of arguments about whether the pipeline should operate.

The tribe faces a mixed result: The ruling may establish some important precedents, particularly around environmental justice and treaty rights. But there’s no indication that the requirement to perform a new study will alter the outcome of the case—or even get the pipeline switched off in the interim.

“This is a a very significant victory and vindication of the tribe’s opinion,” said Jan Hasselman, the lead attorney for the case and an employee of Earthjustice, an environmental-advocacy group that represented the Standing Rock Sioux.

“The court slices things pretty thin, but there were three major areas that he found deficient, and they’re not insignificant. They’re central to the problems that we’ve been highlighting the whole time,” Hasselman told me.

Energy Transfer Partners, which owns and operates the pipeline, did not respond to a request for comment before publication. A representative for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could not be reached.

The Dakota Access pipeline runs 1,100 miles across much of the Great Plains, connecting the Bakken oil formation in North Dakota to a refinery and second pipeline in Illinois. Oil began flowing through the pipeline earlier this month.

The pipeline became a rallying point for both climate activists and indigenous civil-rights advocates last year, as thousands of people—many of them Native Americans—gathered on the Standing Rock reservation to protest and physically obstruct the pipeline’s construction. By late October, Standing Rock had become the largest and most high-profile Native protest in the United States in four decades.

Boasberg’s ruling centered on two ways that the Corps’s environmental study was inadequate. First, he said, the Standing Rock Sioux are assured certain hunting and fishing rights in their most recent treaty with the U.S. government. Many of the tribe’s members rely on fish or hunted game as a steady food source.

Before approving the pipeline, the Corps did not study whether an oil spill at the pipeline would kill most of the river’s fish. It also did not report on whether the chemicals used to clean up a spill could poison local game, rendering them unfit for human consumption

“Even though a spill is not certain to occur at Lake Oahe, the Corps still had to consider the impacts of such an event on the environment,” the judge said.

This emphasis on consideration points to the broader nature of the legal fight: This case is not about how the pipeline may harm Standing Rock, but whether the Corps adequately studied and reported on those harms before approving it in the first place. Most environmental-law cases in the United States are fought on this kind of procedural territory—it’s a product of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, which mandates the government study the environmental effects of any decision it makes but does not require it to make especially green decisions.

Boasberg’s second complaint with the Corps was on similar methodological grounds. According to federal regulation, every major project constructed near a poor community, community of color, or Native American reservation must be studied on environmental-justice grounds. The Corps shrugged off many of these rules, arguing that no affected group lived within a half-mile of the pipeline route.

The Corps was technically correct. The Dakota Access pipeline runs 0.55 miles north of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.

“Federal agencies are given a lot of leeway until they do something that just, on the face of it, seems ridiculous,” says Sarah Krakoff, a law professor at the University of Colorado. “I think that that’s what happened here.”

Boasberg’s decision, she said, had implications far beyond Standing Rock and this particular pipeline dispute.

“In the vernacular, it’s a big deal,” she told me. “It’s an important step for a court to recognize that both environmental-justice claims and the failure to adequately analyze Indian treaty rights can be the basis for the reversal of an agency’s environmental analysis.”

With the project so far along, she said it was unclear if any procedural problem could convince Boasberg to temporarily shut down the project.

The tribe was not successful on every claim. The judge ruled that the Corps did not violate administrative law when it quickly approved the pipeline earlier this year. He has also previously ruled that the Dakota Access pipeline does not infringe on Standing Rock’s cultural heritage, nor does it damage the religious practice of another group of Sioux, the Cheyenne River Tribe.

The complicated legal history of the Dakota Access pipeline has stemmed from one important conflict: The pipeline mostly runs across private land, allowing Energy Transfer Partners to quickly secure permission and construct most of it last year. But it also must cross the Missouri River, a federal waterway controlled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Therefore the dispute at Standing Rock has played out over the last year as the vast majority of the pipeline stood completed and ready for operation. In late July 2016, the Corps first granted an easement allowing the pipeline’s construction. But less than two months later, in early September, the Obama administration stepped in and asked Energy Transfer Partners to voluntarily stop work on the project. It also announced it was reviewing the Corps’s easement.

President Barack Obama revoked the permit entirely in early December 2016 at the end of that review. His administration also ordered Energy Transfer Partners and the U.S. Army Corps to study whether the pipeline could be re-routed.

That study did not last long. On his fifth day in office, President Donald Trump reversed Obama’s order and told the Corps to approve the pipeline as quickly as possible.

The president celebrated the pipeline during a speech last week in Cincinnati. “The Dakota Access pipeline is now officially open for business—a $3.8-billion investment in American infrastructure that was stalled,” he said. “Nobody thought any politician would have the guts to approve that final leg. And I just closed my eyes and said: Do it.”

“It’s up, it’s running, it’s beautiful, it’s great. Everybody is happy, the sun is shining, the water’s still clean. When I approved it, I thought I’d take a lot of heat. But I took none, actually none. But I take so much heat for nonsense that it probably overrode the other,” Trump added.

Hasselman referenced the speech as he spoke to me Wednesday. “That’s such a perfect metaphor for this whole process,” he said. “The government closed its eyes to the impacts of this pipeline on the people of Standing Rock—and their history at the hands of the same government.”

David Archambault III, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, told me last week that while he is not ultimately optimistic about the legal battle, he feels duty-bound to pursue it.

“When we first entered into this, we understood the history, we knew the facts, we knew the laws,” he said. “We still have to bring it all up. Because just because [the situation] is legally right, it’s morally and ethically wrong. What happened at Standing Rock is a movement, and you don’t see the benefits of a movement until way later.”

Trump’s Travel Costs Are Staggering, Yet Five Years Ago He Complained About $1 Million Annually for Biden

Newsweek Politics

Trump’s Travel Costs Are Staggering, Yet Five Years Ago He Complained About $1 Million Annually for Biden

T. Marcin, Newsweek June 13, 2017

Five years is a long time—a veritable eternity in the volatile U.S. political landscape—and how far we have come since June 13, 2012, exactly five years ago Tuesday, when Donald Trump tweeted about then–Vice President Joe Biden’s travel costs, claiming they were a burden to taxpayers.

“Biden @VP Spends $1 Million Annually for Weekend Trips,” Trump tweeted at the time, linking out a Newsmax story. The article noted that Biden was being shuttled to and from his home state of Delaware on the taxpayer’s dime despite the vice president being tasked with “[rooting] out wasteful government spending.” Newsmax calculated, as Trump’s tweet suggested, that taxpayers were forking over about $1 million annually to shuttle Biden around.

Now, Biden’s costs seem downright pedestrian when compared with the amount Trump has required of the taxpayer in his nearly five months in the White House.

Air Force records obtained by the conservative group Judicial Watch show that just the flights for two trips to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida cost more than $1.2 million.

Through his first 100 days, Trump spent one-quarter of his time in Florida, costing taxpayers some $7 million, according to Judicial Watch. Exact details of Trump’s total travel costs remain somewhat murky until official documents trickle out, but prior rough estimates suggested that in just a few months Trump may have cost taxpayers about one-third of what President Barack Obama cost through eight years in office.

As a private citizen, Trump often complained about Obama taking time off or playing golf. “President Obama has a major meeting on the N.Y.C. Ebola outbreak, with people flying in from all over the country, but decided to play golf!” he tweeted in 2014.

Democratic lawmakers didn’t seem to forget that. “For someone who complained about President Obama traveling a lot, he’s going to supersede President Obama’s travel, all eight years [of it], within a year, which is just absolutely ridiculous,” Arizona Representative Ruben Gallego told NPR in April.

Don’t expect spineless Republicans to defy Donald Trump

Chicago Tribune Commentary

Don’t expect spineless Republicans to defy Donald Trump

Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post June 13, 2017

President Donald Trump’s delusional outburst Monday claiming to have accomplished more than any president other than FDR at this stage in his presidency and the fawning praise recited by Cabinet members (in their best imitation of the Politburo) serve to remind us that this is not a normal presidency, and will never be one.

On the day that another court ruled against Trump’s travel ban, a passable health-care reform bill is nowhere in sight and little appetite exists for a mammoth tax cut (another one beyond the America Health Care Act) with correspondingly mammoth debt, we can see just how divorced Trump has become from the reality of his failing presidency. That leaves many political watchers to wonder aloud why Republicans stick by the president.

It’s not like Hillary Clinton would be president, the argument goes. They’d get a sane, much more conservatively doctrinaire president in Mike Pence. They’d no longer have to defend outlandish behavior, minimize his weird affection for dictators or turn a blind eye toward conflicts of interest. GOP lawmakers wouldn’t have to run with him as a ball and chain around their ankles in 2018. And Democrats, who have not had to devise much in the way of an agenda, would have to rewrite their entire 2018 and 2020 scripts. From a self-serving perspective, continual defense of him seems downright nutty.

All of that is absolutely accurate but ignores a few salient facts.

First, unlike Senate and House Republicans during Watergate, there are few genuine leaders of principle whose sense of propriety is offended by Trump. The moral and intellectual quality of the current crew of Republicans pales in comparison to the type of Republicans who finally told Richard Nixon the jig was up. Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., House Minority Leader Jacob Rhodes, R-Ariz., and Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, R-Pa., who went to the White House, have few if any equals in today’s House and Senate.

Those who do have the stature to move against Trump don’t necessarily have the base of the party, and those who have visions of the presidency dancing in their heads have been among the most craven apologists (e.g., Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas) for Trump. In short, the charge that Republicans by and large put party above country is entirely valid. They’d rather let the country careen from disaster to disaster and scandal to scandal than stick their necks out.

Second, elected Republicans by and large cower in the shadow of Fox Non-News hosts, talk-radio opportunists and right-wing interest groups. They fear noticeable distancing from Trump will prompt the vultures of the right to swoop down up them, leaving only bones behind. So long as the characters who populate the right stick with Trump, elected Republicans, sadly, won’t lead. The tribal identification with party has robbed most in the GOP of common sense, good judgment and even patriotism.

Third, given the first two factors, Republicans continue to rationalize support for Trump, or at least line-straddling. Maybe this will all die down. They could still get tax reform. Once the president is forced out, the party will descend in chaos. Hey, gerrymandering will protect the House majority!

Finally, politicians read the polls. They see Republicans by and large still support the president. They have yet (at least until Georgia’s 6th Congressional District special election on June 20) to lose a House seat in the Trump era. For now abandoning Trump seems more risky that sticking by him, especially if one has no concern for appearing like a slavish partisan.

What if Trump decides to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, as Trump confidante Chris Ruddy, chief executive of NewsMax, said Trump is considering? That would spark a good deal of outrage in the press and among independents and Democrats. It might even cost Trump some support from sensible Republicans. A wholesale mutiny among Republicans, however, would not be guaranteed — even then. That reality gives one a full appreciation for how reluctant Republicans are to step out of line — even when it comes to defending an independent investigation by a man many of them praised.

In sum, the sad answer is that these Republicans won’t act out of principle, won’t challenge the right-wing echo chamber and won’t give up the delusion that they can get parts of their agenda through. Given truth serum, nearly all would prefer Pence to replace Trump; they just cannot summon the courage to make that happen.

I suppose some undeniable smoking gun either of Trump’s Russian complicity or obstruction of justice could force their hand, but increasingly it looks like the only thing that will convince them to abandon Trump is the certain prospect of political ruin. Even more likely, they’ll have to lose the House in 2018 before they realize Trump is politically radioactive.

Washington Post

Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective.

The Hard Truth Keeps Trickling Out, Little by Little

Esquire

The Hard Truth Keeps Trickling Out, Little by Little

It increasingly looks like Russian hackers may have affected actual vote totals.

By Charles P. Pierce Jun 13, 2017

The last outpost of moderate opinion on the subject of the Russian ratfcking during the 2016 presidential election seems to be that, yes, there was mischief done and steps should be taken both to reveal its extent and to prevent it from happening again in the future, but that the ratfcking, thank baby Jesus, did not materially affect the vote totals anywhere in the country. This is a calm, measured, evidence-based judgment. It is also a kind of prayer. If the Russian cyber-assault managed to change the vote totals anywhere, then the 2016 presidential election is wholly illegitimate. That rocks too many comfort zones in too many places.

(Bear in mind, for the moment, that we are discussing Russian ratfcking, and not the myriad problems with how we ourselves manage our elections. That’s for another time, except in the context of how those inherent problems facilitated the Russian chicanery.)

It may well be that the Russians didn’t affect the actual numbers last November but, as Bloomberg points out, that was not for lack of trying.

In Illinois, investigators found evidence that cyber intruders tried to delete or alter voter data. The hackers accessed software designed to be used by poll workers on Election Day, and in at least one state accessed a campaign finance database. Details of the wave of attacks, in the summer and fall of 2016, were provided by three people with direct knowledge of the U.S. investigation into the matter. In all, the Russian hackers hit systems in a total of 39 states, one of them said. The scope and sophistication so concerned Obama administration officials that they took an unprecedented step — complaining directly to Moscow over a modern-day “red phone.” In October, two of the people said, the White House contacted the Kremlin on the back channel to offer detailed documents of what it said was Russia’s role in election meddling and to warn that the attacks risked setting off a broader conflict.

One of the mysteries about the 2016 presidential election is why Russian intelligence, after gaining access to state and local systems, didn’t try to disrupt the vote. One possibility is that the American warning was effective. Another former senior U.S. official, who asked for anonymity to discuss the classified U.S. probe into pre-election hacking, said a more likely explanation is that several months of hacking failed to give the attackers the access they needed to master America’s disparate voting systems spread across more than 7,000 local jurisdictions.

This may be so, but it’s becoming increasingly harder to believe that, in one of those 7,000 local jurisdictions, the Russians didn’t strike gold. American democracy went out on the roof last fall.

Apparently, the Obama administration first caught wind of the attack when the Illinois system was seriously compromised.

Illinois became Patient Zero in the government’s probe, eventually leading investigators to a hacking pandemic that touched four out of every five U.S. states. Using evidence from the Illinois computer banks, federal agents were able to develop digital “signatures” — among them, Internet Protocol addresses used by the attackers — to spot the hackers at work. The signatures were then sent through Homeland Security alerts and other means to every state. Thirty-seven states reported finding traces of the hackers in various systems, according to one of the people familiar with the probe. In two others — Florida and California — those traces were found in systems run by a private contractor managing critical election systems.

The Obama people went to condition red; the Department of Homeland Security tried to declare state election systems to be part of our critical national infrastructure, which they clearly are. The Republicans in Congress shot that down. Curiouser and curiouser, some states declined to cooperate fully with DHS. As the invaluable Marcy Wheeler pointed out on the electric Twitter machine Tuesday morning, one of the recalcitrant states was Georgia, where you can’t audit the voting machines, and where they are having a crucial—and extremely expensive—special congressional election next Tuesday.

Depressingly, the Obama administration decided to keep a lid on most of what it knew so as not to undermine the public’s confidence in the integrity of the election, even though those same people in the Obama administration knew that the integrity of the election was completely up for grabs. There are a lot of dangers to self-government, and one of those dangers that’s done a lot of damage in my lifetime has been the feeling that the American people are such fragile ornaments that we don’t dare risk telling them the truth of something lest they fall to the floor and shatter to pieces. This is just the latest example of this infantilizing attitude toward our general democratic obligation to be wise to what out government is doing.

We are creeping ever closer to actual evidence that there was Russian ratfcking of the vote totals in the last election. Not long ago, people wouldn’t even suggest that out loud. We were made vulnerable to something like this because of the interference by the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, by the curious goings-on in Ohio in 2004, by a relentless campaign to convince the country of an imaginary epidemic of voter fraud, and by a decade of voter suppression by any means necessary. The Russians wanted to undermine the confidence Americans had in their elections? We made it pretty damn easy to do that.

Trump Is Too Late to Stop the Windmills

Bloomberg View, Opinion-Energy

Trump Is Too Late to Stop the Windmills

Coal isn’t coming back. Technology and demand won’t let it.

By Justin Fox June 13, 2017

There seems to be little doubt that Barack Obama’s energy and environmental policies had a significant impact on how electricity is generated in the U.S. Tougher air-pollution rules, subsidies for wind and solar power, and a commitment to reduce carbon emissions coincided with a fracking-driven boom in natural gas production to shift the fuel mix in a big way: -1-

Now Donald Trump is president. He is an avowed friend of coal who has already signaled that he wants to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on climate change and put a stop to the Clean Power Plan that Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency adopted to force continuing declines in carbon emissions by utilities. He also hates windmills.

So why is it that all of the people I’ve talked to and heard speak on panels this week in Boston at the annual convention of the Edison Electric Institute, a utilities trade group, seem to think the shift toward renewables and away from coal is just going to keep going?

Mainly because they think Trump is too late (and my Bloomberg View colleague Noah Smith agrees). “We’re over the tipping point now,” said Jan Vrins, head of the global energy practice at the consulting firm Navigant. “I think the train has left the station.” Said Gerry Anderson, chief executive officer of Detroit-based utility DTE Energy Co.: “The administration can’t turn a 70-year-old coal plant into a 20-year-old coal plant.”

It’s not that the new administration won’t be able to slow things down. Regulatory policies do matter. It’s just that Obama seems to have seized a moment of opportunity when regulatory policies and subsidies mattered most, -2- but now other factors predominate. Vrins again: “We talk about three buckets: policy, technology and market demand. Tech and market demand are driving it now.”

The basic story is this: Since the advent of electrical utilities in the U.S., burning coal has been the country’s chief means of generating power. -3- That means most coal plants have been around for a while. When they break down, utilities now have all sorts of reasons not to build new ones. During the Obama years, tough regulation of mercury and other pollutants was not only one of those reasons, but it also accelerated the retirements of otherwise still-functional plants. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity sifted through investor and regulatory filings and found that utilities attributed three-fifths of the coal retirements since 2010 to EPA regulations.

Unlike the carbon-focused Clean Power Plan, which was tied up in court even before Trump was elected, most of those rules are already fully in place and will be hard to remove. Meanwhile, there are lots of other factors weighing against building new coal plants. One is the likelihood that, once Trump is out of office, the federal government will go back to targeting carbon emissions. In the meantime, lots of state and local governments are continuing to push for more use of renewables in power generation. Customers are clamoring for it, too, as long as it doesn’t cost more. And because of big efficiency improvements in wind and solar (and, yes, federal and state subsidies, although those are getting less important over time), it doesn’t cost more.

So when a utility needs to “invest in more modern generation facilities,” said DTE Energy’s Anderson right after his comment about 70-year-old coal plants, “the choices for new generation are natural gas and renewables.”

This isn’t to say that everyone in the electrical utility industry is equally enthusiastic about all aspects of this transition. The rapid turn to natural gas as an electricity source, especially in the Northeast, has raised lots of concerns about reliability. “During cold periods, there’s not enough capacity in those pipes to bring in all the gas we need,” said Gordon van Welie, president and CEO of New England’s regional transmission organization. The rise of wind and solar has resulted in negative prices for power in some areas when the wind is blowing especially hard or the sun is shining especially strongly — which isn’t a great thing for power markets. The growth of distributed energy generation and storage, and the state subsidies that support it, brings all sorts of headaches for utilities as well as opportunities.

Utilities have also been coping for the past decade with a decline in per-capita electricity use in the U.S., driven by efficiency gains and new technologies such as LED light bulbs. That actually may be one more reason, though, for them to embrace the transition away not just from coal but also from fossil fuels in general. The only way to achieve sharp drops in overall carbon emissions is for electrification to “move more deeply into transportation, heating, industry,” said Susan Tierney, a veteran federal and state energy official who is now a senior adviser at the Analysis Group, a consulting firm. So electrical utilities have an opportunity to reverse their demand downtrend in a big way — but only if the electricity they generate is largely carbon-free.

Put it all together and, as EEI senior vice president Philip Moeller summed it up for me, “the cost of renewables has come down significantly and customers want them, and those trend-lines are going to continue.” They’re not always going to continue uninterrupted — as you can see in the above chart, natural gas has actually lost ground to coal in recent months as rising gas prices drove utilities to use less of it. I guess it’s also possible that those in the electrical utility business are underestimating the regulatory changes in store from the Trump administration. But it still seems quite significant that the people who generate the nation’s electrical power appear to have no plans to halt the transition away from coal and toward wind and solar.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Where’s solar, you ask? It’s big in a few states — in California it’s the No. 3 source of utility power behind natural gas and hydroelectric — but nationwide it’s still nowhere near the top five yet in utility electricity generation. Counting rooftop solar would boost its share somewhat, but still not nearly enough to surpass wind.

My former Time magazine colleague Michael Grunwald argued this in his 2012 book “The New, New Deal.” Subsequent events seem to be proving him right.

Reliable data on this only goes back to 1949, but it’s hard to see what could have out-generated coal before then.

To contact the author of this story:
Justin Fox at justinfox@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net

Trump is likely to get much, much worse. Here are a few big things to watch for.

Washington Post, The Plum Line Opinion

Trump is likely to get much, much worse. Here are a few big things to watch for.

By Greg Sargent June 12, 2017

A look at President Trump’s first year in office, so far

THE MORNING PLUM:

Are Republicans prepared for the possibility that President Trump’s abuses of power could continue their slide to depths of madness or autocracy that make the current moment look relatively tame by comparison? This isn’t meant as a rhetorical question. It is genuinely unclear — from the public statements of Republicans and the reporting on their private deliberations — whether they envision a point at which Trump’s conduct could grow unhinged enough, or threaten serious enough damage to our democracy, to warrant meaningful acknowledgment, never mind action.

Politico’s Playbook this morning tries to sum up the thinking among Republicans. The gist: Republicans are increasingly worried they will lose the House amid a “toxic political environment that appears to be worsening.” They cite the possibility that they won’t secure any serious legislative wins, as well as “serious concerns” about “more revelations” coming on Trump. In the background, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation “remains the wild card.”

For sure, but how much worse could this get? The chatter on the Sunday shows hinted at where we may be headed. Here are a few things to watch for:

The tapes Trump hinted at turn out not to exist. On ABC’s “This Week,” Jay Sekulow, a member of Trump’s legal team, said Trump will make a decision very soon on whether to release the tapes he may have made of his conversations with then-FBI Director James B. Comey. After the news broke that Trump may have demanded a “loyalty” pledge from Comey, the president tweeted that Comey had better hope he doesn’t have tapes of their conversations. Trump has since hinted he still might release them, and congressional investigators have demanded them.

This state of play is utter lunacy in its current form — the White House has still not said whether these tapes exist, even as Trump hints they might still be coming, and we are so numb to Trump’s daily crazy at this point that we now oddly treat this as somewhat unremarkable. Maybe they do exist. But what happens if the White House, in response to those congressional demands, ultimately confirms that they don’t? Experts think the White House will have to come clean in some way. At that point, it would be confirmed that Trump invented the existence of these tapes to chill Comey from offering a full public accounting of the events leading up to his firing — which itself was a massive abuse of power, given that Trump allowed it was because of the FBI’s Russia probe — in the full knowledge that Comey was going to serve as a witness before long. What will Republicans say about that?

Trump tries to get the special prosecutor fired. Also on ABC’s “This Week,” Sekulow refused to rule out the possibility that Trump might end up trying to order Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to fire Mueller. It is possible that Trump is cognizant enough of the history here (Richard Nixon tried pretty much the same thing) to avoid the drastic step of trying to get Mueller axed mainly because he’s closing in on wrongdoing.

But Trump is not inclined to let institutional constraints limit his options, and he and his team have already shown themselves to be less than shrewd at gaming out the consequences of trampling on them. The circumstances of Trump’s firing of Comey are a case in point. The White House thought it could get away with floating the idea that Rosenstein had provided the rationale (his memo fingered Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe). But that story fell apart, raising the possibility that Rosenstein had provided Trump cover for the real rationale, which Trump subsequently admitted on national television was Comey’s handling of the Russia probe. This basically required Rosenstein to appoint the special counsel.

So can we really count on Trump refraining from trying to get Mueller removed? Nope. Somewhat unlike in Nixon’s time, Republicans may well still stand by Trump even if this happens. If so, they’d be in a considerably darker place than they are even now. And so would we all.

MEANWHILE, WHAT HAPPENS IF TRUMP TESTIFIES UNDER OATH? Trump has now said that he’s “100 percent” ready to testify under oath to special counsel Mueller about his interactions with Comey. But Bloomberg Politics’ Paul Barrett points out that this could create a big problem later:

Trump, through his comments, has limited his lawyer’s maneuvering room. The “100 percent” promise means that if Mueller asks the president to testify under oath — and Mueller eventually will ask — the president has unilaterally disarmed himself from arguing that there’s some reason he shouldn’t have to be questioned under penalty of perjury.

If so, what does Trump say under oath? His lead lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, is flatly contesting Comey’s contention that Trump tried to influence his ongoing probe, and Trump has claimed Comey is lying. But as Brian Beutler points out, even many Republicans are not doing that, which amounts to a “tacit acknowledgment that Trump is lying” about his conversations with Comey, even as they are vaguely defending Trump’s conduct in them.

If Trump should end up testifying, the president would now be under dramatically increased pressure to tell the truth. And Republicans would be under dramatically increased pressure to clarify whom they really believe.

Pelosi ‘very worried’ about Trump’s fitness for office

The Hill

Pelosi ‘very worried’ about Trump’s fitness for office

By Mike Lillis June 9, 2017

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is questioning President Trump’s fitness to hold his office.

The House minority leader said Friday that Trump may simply lack the curiosity, discipline and stamina to be a competent commander in chief. Trump’s Friday Twitter attack on former FBI Director James Comey, Pelosi said, is just the latest evidence.

“The president’s fitness for office is something that has been called into question,” Pelosi said during a press briefing in the Capitol. “It takes a certain curiosity to learn the facts, to base your comments on evidence and data and truth. It takes a certain discipline to be able to prioritize what is important as we try to bring the country together. And it takes some kind of stamina to keep your thoughts together.

“And I’m very worried about his fitness.”

Pelosi said White House officials should rein in Trump’s impulsive Twitter finger but expressed doubt that anyone on Trump’s team has the “courage” to do so.

“His statements need some discipline, and I don’t know if anyone in the White House has the courage to discipline the president,” she said. “It’s too bad because he needs work. And he needs sleep.”

Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee captivated Washington on Thursday by providing his take on one-on-one conversations with the president.

The former FBI director said he took the president at his word that he had been fired for his handling of the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election, including possible links to Trump’s campaign. He also said he believed Trump had directed him to end an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Comey stopped short of accusing Trump of obstructing justice, saying that determination is the purview of the current investigative team, being led by special counsel Robert Mueller, Comey’s predecessor atop the FBI.

“That’s a conclusion I’m sure the special counsel will work towards,” he said.

Trump remained silent throughout Thursday’s hearing, but returned to Twitter Friday morning with accusations that Comey had lied under oath.

“Despite so many false statements and lies, total and complete vindication…and WOW, Comey is a leaker!” Trump tweeted.

Comey also acknowledged in his testimony that he leaked through an intermediary his memo on a meeting with Trump that included the discussion about Flynn. That became an explosive story in The New York Times a week after his firing.

Pelosi rejected any suggestion that Comey’s testimony vindicated the president. But Trump’s approach to Comey, she quickly added, is consistent with his strategy as a longtime businessman.

“He operates this way: First he tries to charm you. … If that doesn’t work, he tries to bully you. If that doesn’t work, he walks away from the deal. And if that doesn’t work, he sues you,” she said.

According to CNN, Trump’s outside attorney is poised to file a complaint with the Justice Department against Comey over the leak.

“He’s true to form, true to his nature,” Pelosi said.

Pelosi said Trump had acted deliberately to clear the room after a meeting before talking with Comey.

“He knew that what he was doing was incriminating, and he didn’t want any witnesses,” she said.

But like Comey, Pelosi stopped short of charging Trump with obstructing justice. Trump has “abused power,” she said, but the deeper legal implications are still unclear.

“There’s no question he abused power,” she said. “Whether he obstructed justice remains for the facts to come forward, and that’s what we want are the facts.”

Pelosi amplified Democrats’ long-held request that GOP leaders create an outside, independent panel — akin to the 9/11 commission — to step in with its own investigation of Russia’s election meddling.

“We are limited,” she said, “by what the Republicans are willing to do.”

Business Insider

Pelosi: My first meeting with Trump as president was unlike anything I’ve experienced with other presidents

Veronika Bondarenko, Business Insider June 10, 2017

The first thing President Donald Trump said upon meeting congressional leaders was that he won the popular vote, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said on Friday.

During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” talk show, Pelosi recalled her first meeting with Trump at the White House after he was elected.

“First thing he says to open the meeting: ‘You know, I won the popular vote,'” she said, later adding that she had to tell Trump there were no facts to support his assertion.

Trump won the 2016 election by a wide margin in the Electoral College but lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by about 3 million.

Trump’s disputing of these numbers and allegations of voter fraud created controversy for him in the wake of the election.

Pelosi said that even though she and President George W. Bush had disagreed on many things, they were at least operating from a shared understanding of facts.

“I wish he were president now,” Pelosi said of Bush, adding that he once told her she would end up missing him. “I wish Mitt Romney were president. I wish John McCain were president.

“We all have to start at a place when we’re dealing with facts, evidence, data, and then you can compromise,” Pelosi said.

Fox News Was Attacking Barack Obama for Using Dijon Mustard at This Point in His Presidency

Newsweek

Fox News Was Attacking Barack Obama for Using Dijon Mustard at This Point in His Presidency

Chris Riotta, Newsweek June 9, 2017

Donald Trump isn’t the only president to have faced harsh criticisms just months into office. At this point in former President Barack Obama’s tenure as the leader of the free world, right-wing news outlets were condemning his use of Dijon mustard as a condiment. Yes, really.

In news from eight years ago that appears to be from some alternate reality, Obama left the White House and went out for a local bite to eat with vice president and BFF Joe Biden in May. The two politicians ordered hamburgers, MSNBC journalist Andrea Mitchell reported at the time, with the sitting president requesting mustard on his red meat.

The story was featured on Sean Hannity’s show, Hannity’s America, as a screen showed a photoshopped image of Obama surrounded by bottles of mustard with the words “PRESIDENT POUPON” plastered on a red and white banner.

Let that soak in for a minute. Trump tweeted his support for Fox News Friday, commending them for the network’s morning show Fox And Friends’ “great reporting” job on ex-FBI Director James Comey’s Thursday testimony. The network’s rejection of Obama’s taste palette compared to its incredible support of the embattled Trump White House was seen by Twitter users as shocking at best, and propagandistic at worst.

Reporters Dominic Holden and Sahil Kapur from BuzzFeed and Bloomberg both shared similar tweets reflecting on Fox News’ coverage of Obama’s presidency just months after his first inauguration following the highly anticipated hearing. Comey’s testimony provided details on his nine conversations with Trump before the president fired him in an effort he says was to ease pressure off of the administration from the ongoing federal investigation into Russia’s meddling in last year’s election.

Trump reportedly described his former FBI director as a “nut job” in a conversation with Russia’s top diplomats in the Oval Office, explaining his reasoning for firing Comey before allegedly revealing top secret intelligence to Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

Fox News has spent the last five months strongly supporting Trump’s conservative agenda, defending the president against ongoing controversies enveloping his White House and accusations of collusion with the Russian Kremlin. The network has also continued to push fake news about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s health, following a televised commencement speech critical of Trump.

Compare Fox’s defense of the Trump/Russia investigation to the mustard scandal its conservative TV personalities were decrying Obama’s presidency over just eight years ago. Then remind yourself that, yes, this is the new normal.

Obama criticized Fox News and Sean Hannity at the time in an interview with Fox News’ former anchor Bill O’Reilly, noting the extremism and hate he was facing from the right during his short time in the Oval Office.