Mother Jones

California Just Did Something That Will Make the Rest of the Nation’s Liberals Green With Envy

Bipartisan agreement on climate change is possible.

Oliver Milman      July 18, 2017  

This story was originally published by The Guardian and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

California legislators have voted to extend a centerpiece program to cut greenhouse gas emissions, burnishing the state’s reputation as a bulwark against Donald Trump’s demolition of climate change measures.

In a rare show of bipartisan agreement on climate change, eight Republicans joined with Democrats in California’s two legislative houses to extend the cap-and-trade emissions system a further 10 years until 2030.

The emissions-lowering scheme, the second-largest of its kind in the world, aims to help the state reach its target of cutting planet-warming gases 40% by 2030, compared to 1990 levels.

“Tonight, California stood tall and once again, boldly confronted the existential threat of our time,” said Jerry Brown, California’s governor. “Republicans and Democrats set aside their differences, came together and took courageous action. That’s what good government looks like.”

The cap-and-trade program, established in 2006 under then governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, sets a limit on emissions and requires polluters to either reduce their output or purchase permits from those who have. As the limit steadily becomes stricter, it nudges businesses to take the more financially attractive option of cutting their pollution.

California, the sixth-largest economy in the world, is in stark opposition to Trump’s administration. The president has said he will withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement and has set about dismantling federal policies that lower emissions.

Brown has positioned himself as a countervailing force to Trump, visiting China to talk to its leaders about climate change and promising to build and launch weather-monitoring satellites should federal budget cuts endanger programs handled by Nasa and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOOA).

“A lot of you people are going to be alive, and you’re going to be alive in a horrible situation,” Brown told California lawmakers at a committee hearing shortly before the vote. “This isn’t for me, I’m going to be dead. This is for you, and it’s real.”

“A lot of you people are going to be alive, and you’re going to be alive in a horrible situation,” Brown told California lawmakers. “This isn’t for me, I’m going to be dead. This is for you, and it’s real.”

Many Californian Republicans remain opposed to the cap-and-trade system, warning it will pose a “crushing” blow to small businesses. But the bill ended up gaining an unusual level of Republican support, with the extension also supported by key conservative constituencies, including the California Chamber of Commerce and associations representing manufacturers and agriculture interests.

Concessions to get some Republican support, such as the limiting of separate regulations on refineries, risked alienating more liberal Democrats. Some environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, attacked the bill for allowing polluters to continue emitting greenhouse gases if they offset them with green projects, including those outside California.

But other climate activists declared themselves pleased with the outcome, pointing out that it showed that action to reduce emissions is bipartisan and popular.

“California is once again showing Washington DC and the rest of the world that fighting climate and air pollution is the right thing for our health, economy and future,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund.

California’s pioneering attitude to climate change action was underlined by separate court action launched on Monday, aimed at holding fossil fuel companies accountable for global warming.

Marin and San Mateo counties, along with the City of Imperial Beach, filed a lawsuit in the California superior court to complain that 37 oil, gas and coal companies knew burning their products would increase carbon pollution and cause sea levels rise.

“Defendants have known for nearly 50 years that greenhouse gas pollution from their fossil fuel products has a significant impact on the Earth’s climate and sea levels,” the complaint states.

The municipalities are claiming damages from the fossil fuel firms, echoing a strategy used against the tobacco industry in the 1990s that resulted in multi-billion dollar payouts.

The companies targeted in the lawsuit include Shell, Exxon Mobile, Chevron and BP. According to the municipalities, these businesses have caused around 20% of all industrial carbon dioxide and methane pollution since the 1960s.

The Dallas Morning News

Dakota Access-style protests may happen often, panel tells pipeline companies

Written by Wire Services     July 19, 2017

BISMARCK, N.D. — Well-funded and organized protests like the one involving the disputed Dakota Access oil pipeline may become commonplace, officials said Wednesday as they urged the industry to prepare for such activity.

The struggle over the recently completed $3.8 billion pipeline was discussed at an annual oil industry conference in Bismarck, with a panel dissecting what the industry learned. Native Americans and other opponents worried about the pipeline’s effect on the environment established a massive encampment in North Dakota to protest it.

“The opponents will not rest,” said Craig Stevens, a spokesman for Grow America’s Infrastructure Now, a pro-pipeline coalition of businesses, trade associations and labor groups.

Stevens called such protests the “new normal” and the “new cost of doing business.” He said pipelines will be targeted by those wanting to stop the use of fossil fuels, by attempting to “kill the heart by cutting the veins.” Stevens said the oil industry must battle what he called misinformation about pipeline projects while touting benefits, such as jobs.

“It is important for us to engage the opposition … and provide context to the overall debate,” Stevens said.

The Dakota Access pipeline began moving North Dakota oil to Illinois on June 1. But a judge has ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to do more study on its impact on the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, which believes the pipeline threatens sacred sites and the Missouri River that provides drinking water for millions of people. Texas-based developer Energy Transfer Partners maintains it’s safe.

Troy Eid, a former U.S. attorney in Colorado who specializes in Native American law, said tribal consultation is key in building such projects and something the industry must take “much more seriously.”

Based on information supplied by ETP in court documents, delays have cost it more than a half-billion dollars.

Companies can save money in the long run by doing more work with tribes “on the front end,” he said.

One-fifth of all oil production comes from in and around American Indian reservations, Eid said.

“Tribes are going to be in this game,” he said.

By James MacPherson / Associated Press

The Nation

VIDEO: People in Denmark Are a Lot Happier Than People in the United States. Here’s Why.

When governments provide benefits and services that allow its citizens to thrive, everyone wins.

By The Nation Twitter    July 17, 2017

Text by Joshua Holland. Graphics and animation by Rob Pybus. This work was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and its Puffin Story Innovation Fund.

Last week, in Denmark, Malthe and Lærke Knudson had a baby girl they named Emma. That same day, the Robinsons—Dale and Beth—had a little baby in the United States. They called her Rachel.

Right now, they’re just two little babies keeping their parents awake at night. But Emma and Rachel were born in countries that have very different priorities, and that’s going to lead to pretty different futures.

It all boils down to this: Though Danes pay a lot more than Americans in taxes and government fees, they get a whole lot more back in social services.

As a result, Americans end up spending twice as much out-of-pocket for those social goods and services. Let’s see how that plays out over their two lives.

Early Childhood Education

In six months, Emma will probably enroll in preschool. By law, every 6-month-old Danish baby is guaranteed high-quality preschool, and parents can’t be charged more than a quarter of the cost of those services. Parents who can’t afford it? They don’t have to pay.

In the United States, kids from low-income families are often eligible for full-time Head Start programs. Even then, the program only has enough funding for a half-million slots nationwide. But the Robinsons make too much to qualify, so they’ll either have to park little Rachel with Dale’s mom, or one of them will have to get a second job to help cover the cost of daycare. That little luxury could set the Robinsons back as much as $22,000 a year.

Danes receive a child benefit which starts with $225 a month at birth, and goes to $140 a month from age 7 to 17. That’s not a benefit just for poor people, everyone gets it!

Child Benefit

It costs a lot to raise kids these days no matter where you live, but the Knudsons will enjoy a child benefit which starts at $225 a month. When Emma hits age seven, they’ll get $140 a month until she’s 17. That’s not a benefit just for poor people; everyone gets it!

Rachel, on the other hand, will have to start learning some cool tricks ASAP in order to get into a decent elementary school and prepare herself for a high school that will help her get into a good college.

Public Schools

Some American schools are world class, but others, often serving students from low-income families, can rank down there with those in developing countries.

That means the Robinsons may soon be shopping for a house in another school district—a notion that would never even occur to the Knudsons, because all of the public schools in Denmark are really good.

Free College

Emma and Rachel are both good students, and they’ll both go to college when they get older. In Denmark, almost every college student attends public colleges and universities, which don’t charge tuition.

Rachel will navigate a very different educational system. She’ll probably end up with a good deal of debt—in the US, 71 percent of the class of 2015 graduated with student-loan debt averaging around $35,000.

Many Danes get about seven weeks of paid vacation every year.

Vacation

Fresh out of school, the young women enter the workforce. And again, they’ll have very different experiences.

If Rachel is lucky, she’ll get two weeks a year of paid vacation, but maybe not—the US is the only industrialized nation that does not require any amount of paid vacation. Emma, like most full-time workers in Denmark, is guaranteed five weeks of paid vacation time a year.

That doesn’t include the nine public holidays, which most employees get. And many Danes enjoy a sixth week of paid vacation during the holidays. And that’s how you relax like a Viking!

Leisure Time

Danes and Americans have similar incomes, but Americans work a whopping 24 percent more hours per year. That means that Danes get to spend about an hour and a half more each day on leisure activities than Americans.

Unemployment Benefits

When Rachel loses her job she’ll qualify for unemployment benefits that cover about half of her income, usually up to half a year.

Emma will face a similar situation—hey, it happens to the best of us—but she’ll get up to 90 percent of what she was making, and she can collect that for up to two years and sometimes more!

Employment

Now, some people say those generous benefits create a culture of dependency and discourage people from looking for a job, but 73 percent of working-age Danes have a paid job, compared with 60 percent of Americans.

Health Care

And Emma will always have access to an excellent public health-care system. In Denmark, everyone’s covered. Americans, on the other hand, spend two and a half times as much per person on health care as the Danes, but around one in eight are still uninsured.

With our lack of paid parental leave, the US has a gender pay gap around three times as large as Denmark’s.

Parental Leave and Gender Pay Disparity

Some day, Emma and Rachel will meet the right partner and have babies themselves. Emma won’t pay anything for delivering her baby, but Rachel will pay around $5,000 out-of-pocket for a normal delivery.

Rachel also lives in the only advanced economy that doesn’t mandate paid family leave. She can take some unpaid time, but for most women, there’s no guarantee that her job will be waiting for her.

One in four American women quit or are laid off when they have a baby, so they lose seniority and end up with an uneven work history. According to one study, each child lowers an American woman’s earnings by 6-8 percent.

Emma and her partner, on the other hand, will be able to divide a full year of paid parental leave between them. Many Danes work under union contracts that give them up to 100 percent of their salaries during that time, but if they don’t, the government will give them $630 per week while they’re on leave.

This is one reason why the gender pay gap is around three times bigger in the United States than it is in Denmark.

Retirement

Emma and Rachel will watch their kids grow up, and then they’ll look to enjoy their golden years.

According to the World Happiness Report, Denmark is the 2nd happiest country in the world. The US is 15th.

As an average American, Rachel will work two years longer than Emma. Emma’s pension will cover two-thirds of her pre-retirement income, while Rachel’s Social Security benefits will cover less than half of what she had earned.

The Result?

Emma will have lived her life under the crushing burden of democratic socialism. That combination of state-funded education, health care, parental leave, and plenty of other benefits has made the citizens of Denmark the second happiest in the world. And Americans? Number 15.

Watch the full video here.

Chicago Tribune

What is wrong with Donald Trump?

Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald    July 16, 2017

So here we are, six months later. How time has trudged.

But the calendar does not lie. On Thursday, we will be half a year through the Trump Era. And, contrary to his signature promise, America seems less great by the day. Nor are his other promises faring particularly well.

There is no sign of progress on that border wall, much less any idea how he is going to make Mexico pay for the thing. His promise to preserve Medicaid and provide health care for everyone has dissolved into a GOP bill that would gut Medicaid and rob millions of their access to health care.

Meantime, the guy who once said he would be working so hard he would seldom leave the White House spends more time on golf courses than a groundskeeper.

But for all that Trump has not achieved, there is, I think, one thing he indisputably has. He has taught us to live in a state of perpetual chaos and continuous crisis. Six months later, the White House commands the same horrified attention as a car wreck or a house fire.

In that sense, the recent revelation that the Trump campaign, in the person of Donald Trump Jr., did in fact collude with a hostile foreign power to influence the 2016 election was just another Tuesday. Sure, it might have been shocking from the Bush or Obama campaigns. But under Trump, we live in a state of routine calamity.

Besides which, a few days from now, there will be something else. With Trump, there inevitably is. Things can always get worse — and usually do.

And when they do, we can count on the GOP, that inexhaustible fount of righteous outrage, to stand tall and courageously look the other way. For almost 20 years, the party has never seen a minor episode (Travelgate), a sheer nothing (Whitewater) or even an international tragedy (Benghazi) it could not turn into Watergate II. Yet, as credible accusations of treason, obstruction, collusion and corruption swirl about this White House, the GOP has been conspicuous in its acquiescent silence. It seems the elephant has laryngitis.

But the rest of us can’t stop talking.

Indeed, from the studios of CNN to the bar stools of your neighborhood watering hole, amateur psychoanalysis has become America’s favorite pastime in the past six months. Dozens of theories have been floated, all aimed at answering one question:

What is wrong with him?

But I have come to believe that question misses the point. Sixty-three million people voted for this. And make no mistake, they knew what they were getting. It was always obvious that Trump was a not-ready-for-prime-time candidate, but they chose him anyway. And the rest of us need to finally come to grips with the reason why.

It wasn’t economic anxiety. As a study co-sponsored by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic magazine reported in May, people who were worried for their jobs voted for Hillary Clinton. But people who dislike Mexicans and Muslims, people who oppose same-sex marriage, people mortally offended at a White House occupied by a black guy with a funny name, they voted for Trump.

That’s the reality, and it’s time we quit dancing around it.

This has been said a million times: Donald Trump is a lying, narcissistic, manifestly incompetent child man who is as dumb as a sack of mackerel. But he is the president of the United States because 63 million people preferred that to facing inevitable cultural change. So I am done asking — or caring — what’s wrong with him. Six months in, it’s time we grappled with a far more important question.

What in the world is wrong with us?

Tribune Content Agency. Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald.

The Guardian

Dark Money Review: Nazi oil, the Koch brothers and a right-wing revolution

New Yorker writer Jane Mayer examines the origins, rise and dominance of a billionaire class to whom money is no object when it comes to buying power

David Koch listens to speakers at the Defending the American Dream Summit, in Washington DC in November 2011. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Charles Kaiser     July 14, 2017

Lots of American industrialists have skeletons in the family closet. Charles and David Koch, however, are in a league of their own.

The father of these famous rightwing billionaires was Fred Koch, who started his fortune with $500,000 received from Stalin for his assistance constructing 15 oil refineries in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. A couple of years later, his company, Winkler-Koch, helped the Nazis complete their third-largest oil refinery. The facility produced hundreds of thousands of gallons of high-octane fuel for the Luftwaffe, until it was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1944.

In 1938, the patriarch wrote that “the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy and Japan”. To make sure his children got the right ideas, he hired a German nanny. The nanny was such a fervent Nazi that when France fell in 1940, she resigned and returned to Germany. After that, Fred became the main disciplinarian, whipping his children with belts and tree branches.

These are just a handful of the many bombshells exploded in the pages of Dark Money, Jane Mayer’s indispensable new history “of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right” in the US.

A veteran investigative reporter and a staff writer for the New Yorker, Mayer has combined her own research with the work of scores of other investigators, to describe how the Kochs and fellow billionaires like Richard Scaife have spent hundreds of millions to “move their political ideas from the fringe to the center of American political life”.

Twenty years after collaborating with the Nazis, Fred Koch had lost none of his taste for extremism. In 1958, he was one of the 11 original members of the John Birch Society, an organization which accused scores of prominent Americans, including President Dwight Eisenhower, of communist sympathies.

In 1960, Koch wrote: “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America.” He strongly supported the movement to impeach chief justice Earl Warren, after the supreme court voted to desegregate public schools in Brown v Board of Education. His sons became Birchers too, although Charles was more enamored of “antigovernment economic writers” than communist conspiracies.

After their father died, Charles and David bought out their brothers’ shares in the family company, then built it into the second largest privately held corporation in America.

“As their fortunes grew, Charles and David Koch became the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America,” Mayer writes. Charles’s goal was to “tear the government out ‘at the root’.”

Another man who studied Charles thought “he was driven by some deeper urge to smash the one thing left in the world that could discipline him: the government”.

Much of what the American right has accomplished can be seen as a reaction to the upheavals of the 1960s, when big corporations like Dow Chemical (which manufactured napalm for the Vietnam War) reached the nadir of their popularity.

In 1971, corporate lawyer (and future supreme court justice) Lewis Powell wrote a 5,000-word memo that was a blueprint for a broad attack on the liberal establishment. The real enemies, Powell wrote, “were the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences”, and “politicians”.

He argued that conservatives should control the political debate at its source by demanding “balance” in textbooks, television shows and news coverage – themes that were echoed in inflammatory speeches by Richard Nixon’s vice-president, Spiro Agnew.

The war on liberals was so effective that practically everyone reacted to it: from the New York Times, which hired ex-Nixon speechwriter Bill Safire to “balance” its op-ed page, to the Ford Foundation, which gave $300,000 to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in 1972. The impact was cumulative: almost four decades later, Barack Obama was astonished by one of the first questions asked to him, by a New York Times reporter, after he became president: “Are you a socialist?”

The AEI was one of dozens of the new think-tanks bankrolled by hundreds of millions from the Kochs and their allies. Sold to the public as quasi-scholarly organizations, their real function was to legitimize the right to pollute for oil, gas and coal companies, and to argue for ever more tax cuts for the people who created them. Richard Scaife, an heir to the Mellon fortune, gave $23m over 23 years to the Heritage Foundation, after having been the largest single donor to AEI.

Next, the right turned its sights on American campuses. John M Olin founded the Olin Foundation, and spent nearly $200m promoting “free-market ideology and other conservative ideas on the country’s campuses”. It bankrolled a whole new approach to jurisprudence called “law and economics”, Mayer writes, giving $10m to Harvard, $7m to Yale and Chicago, and over $2m to Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown and the University of Virginia.

The amount of spent money has been staggering. Between 2005 and 2008, the Kochs alone spent nearly $25m on organizations fighting climate reform. One study by a Drexel University professor found 140 conservative foundations had spent $558m over seven years for the same purpose.

The next step for the radical right was to support the creation of the Tea Party movement, through organizations like Americans for Prosperity, which was funded by the Kochs.

“The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and Americans for Prosperity provided speakers, talking points, press releases, transportation, and other logistical support,” Mayer writes. As the writer Thomas Frank has pointed out, the genius of this strategy was to “turn corporate self-interest into a movement among people on the streets”.

The last element of this multi-pronged campaign saw the direct investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in political campaigns at every level, from president to city councilor. In 1996, a last-minute $3m campaign of attack ads against Democrats in 29 races, a campaign which may have been financed by the Kochs, was considered outrageous and extravagant. But after the disappearance of virtually all restrictions on campaign contributions – another result of rightwing lobbying and the supreme court’s Citizens United decision – $3m is now a tiny number.

In the 2016 elections, the goal of the Koch network of contributors is to spend $889m, more than twice what they spent in 2012.

Four years ago, because Obama had the most sophisticated vote-pulling operation in the history of American politics, and a rather lackluster opponent, a Democratic president was able to withstand such a gigantic financial onslaught. This time around, it’s not clear that any Democrat will be so fortunate.

• Charles Kaiser is a writer based in New York. He is the author of 1968 in America, The Gay Metropolis and The Cost of Courage.

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