10/19 News Roundup & Open Thread – The Progressive Wing

‘Democracy Has Won’: Year After Right-Wing Coup Against Evo Morales, Socialist Luis Arce Declares Victory in Bolivia Election

Twice postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, Sunday’s election was a do-over of last year’s presidential contest, which was thrown into chaos after the U.S.-dominated Organization of American States (OAS) leveled baseless allegations of “fraud” by Morales, who was eventually forced to resign and flee the country under threat by Bolivia’s military.
The coup against Morales sparked a wave of Indigenous-led protests that were violently repressed by the Bolivian military and police forces, which were granted sweeping immunity from prosecution by the anti-Indigenous Añez government.
“The OAS allegations were indeed the main political foundation of the coup that followed the October 20 election three weeks later,” Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote last month. “But they provided no evidence to support these allegations—because there wasn’t any. This has since been established repeatedly by a slew of expert statistical studies.”
From exile in Argentina, Morales on Monday celebrated Arce’s apparent victory as a “great triumph of the people.”
“Brothers and sisters: the will of the people has been asserted,” Morales tweeted. “This is an overwhelming victory… We are going to give dignity and liberty back to the people.”

More news, tweets, and good jibber-jabber in the comments.

82
Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

newest oldest most voted

Benny

Tip Jar….

Benny

Related to the OP:

reminder that corbyn stood by morales against the fascist coup regime in bolivia from the start, for which he was smeared by fascist-enabling conservatives and liberals pic.twitter.com/1oIfrijzzD
— ☀️👀 (@zei_squirrel) October 19, 2020

and here’s lula’s speech where he paraphrases that quotehttps://t.co/p6W0ds8NQy
— ☀️👀 (@zei_squirrel) October 19, 2020

polarbear4

gonna have to put that squirrel in my list. ty!

Benny

Not to be confused with the Motley Moose or Sick of Bernie crowds!

Benny

Reminder that @BernieSanders spoke up on this at the time, and he was right. https://t.co/AnByuUjqeW https://t.co/koJLWD1C3R
— Faiz (@fshakir) October 19, 2020

Benny

With Bankruptcies Mounting, Oil & Gas Companies Are Leaving a Multi-Billion Dollar Cleanup to the Taxpayer

The results may be publicly funded cleanups of the millions of oil and gas wells that these companies have left behind. In a new report, Carbon Tracker, an independent climate-focused financial think tank, has estimated the costs to plug the 2.6 million documented onshore wells in the U.S. at $280 billion. This estimate does not include the costs to address an estimated 1.2 million undocumented wells.
Greg Rogers, a former Big Oil advisor, and co-author of a previous Carbon Tracker report on the likely costs of properly shutting down shale wells, suggested to DeSmog that oil and gas companies have factored walking away from their cleanup responsibilities into their business planning.
“The plan is that these costs will be transferred, these obligations will be transferred to the state at some point,” Rogers told DeSmog, “Why would a company want to go out and spend hundreds of millions of dollars plugging all of these wells when it could instead pay its executives?”

The same companies Biden is likely to prop up first.

Benny

Have We Reached Peak Oil?

Growing concerns about climate change” are expected to keep reducing demand for fossil fuels, meaning those jobs lost now might not return after this downturn. Even if crude prices “claw their way back to $45 per barrel” by the end of 2021 — up from around the $40 price mark where they have remained for months — an estimated 70 percent of the jobs lost may disappear permanently. A drop to $35 per barrel, and the industry is looking at 100,000 jobs gone for good.
The collapse in oil prices hasn’t just hurt the drilling states, said Alexander Osipovitch and Ryan Dezember at The Wall Street Journal. “Wisconsin doesn’t produce a drop of oil or gas, but there has been a bust there too,” because of its supportive ecosystem for fracking. Wisconsin, along with northern states like Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois, employs thousands of workers in open-pit salt mines that ship “pebbly grains ideal for hydraulic fracking” by the trainload to drilling fields in Texas, Appalachia, and North Dakota. Now the “local governments that envisioned the mines bringing long-term prosperity are looking at budget crunches.”

Have we reached 'peak oil'? THIS MAKES @JOEBIDEN LOOK EVEN MORE RIDICULOUS ON FRACKING https://t.co/GA5zpULrhV
— Rodney Latstetter 🌹 #LaborParty (@proviewsusa) October 19, 2020

Benny

ConocoPhillips to Buy Shale Rival Concho for $9.7 Billion

ConocoPhillips COP +0.74% has agreed to buy Concho Resources Inc. CXO +1.31% for $9.7 billion in what would be the largest U.S. oil deal since the coronavirus pandemic began roiling global energy markets.
The acquisition gives ConocoPhillips, the largest oil producer in Alaska, a much larger footprint in the hottest oil field in the U.S., the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico. The combined company would be the largest U.S. oil independent, with output in the Permian second only to Occidental Petroleum Corp. OXY +0.40% , according to a JPMorgan Chase & Co. analysis of Enverus data.
“Sector consolidation is both necessary and inevitable,” ConocoPhillips Chief Executive Ryan Lance told analysts Monday following the announcement. “We both believe our industry needs solutions that address the lack of scale, poor returns and, increasingly, the challenges and opportunities of environmental, social and governance matters.”

polarbear4

Bernie would be going around, getting everyone geared up to employ people in GND jobs. gd

wi62

The tax payer pays for corporate welfare and we pay to clean up the aftermath and you wonder why people want massive change!!!

Benny

We the people aren’t getting a great return on our investments, or should I say lack of investments.

Benny

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Stands Up For New York’s Working Families Party

e WFP, which progressive labor unions and community groups founded in 1998 to provide a left-wing voice in New York politics, has long encouraged left-leaning voters to vote for Democratic candidates on its ballot line to show the strength of the party’s progressive wing.
But New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), a corporate-friendly moderate whom the WFP unsuccessfully sought to unseat in 2018, is trying to disempower the group. He slipped a provision into the state’s budget this year raising the vote threshold for a political party to remain on the ballot from 50,000 votes every four years to either 130,000 votes or 2% of the total vote ― whichever is higher ― every two years.
Since 114,000 New Yorkers voted on the WFP ballot line in 2018, the progressive organization is pulling out all the stops to ensure it meets the new threshold.
The WFP did not endorse Ocasio-Cortez ahead of the June 2018 primary that secured her a place in Congress. The organization decided instead to expend political capital on actor Cynthia Nixon’s bid to unseat Cuomo and a successful campaign to oust a group of Democratic state senators who aligned with the GOP.
Ironically for Ocasio-Cortez’s constituents in New York’s 14th Congressional District, which includes parts of the Bronx and Queens, the task of voting for the Democratic ticket on the WFP ballot line is slightly more complicated.
In May, Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign failed to submit the required number of valid petition signatures ― 15 ― for her to appear on the WFP ballot line. Residents of New York’s 14th who want to vote for Ocasio-Cortez, vote for the Biden-Harris presidential ticket and help the WFP retain its place on New York’s ballot must vote Biden-Harris on the WFP ballot line and Ocasio-Cortez on the Democratic Party line.

My buddy in Brooklyn had not considered going this route until I texted him with info by the birdies. He said he will now.

jcitybone

👍

Benny

Cornel West: ‘George Floyd’s public lynching pulled the cover off who we really are’

Cornel West: 'George Floyd's public lynching pulled the cover off who we really are' https://t.co/fexzEj7hoE
— Rodney Latstetter 🌹 #LaborParty (@proviewsusa) October 19, 2020

Benny

Intersected with health and environment..

Protesters who were exposed to chemical gas and smoke during the standoffs with federal agents in Portland report a constellation of immediate and enduring effects not usually associated with tear gas. https://t.co/PVEZaJl6hZ
— The Intercept (@theintercept) October 19, 2020

polarbear4

rec not taking. here it is :O)

Benny

Election day is in 360 hours
— Charlotte Alter (@CharlotteAlter) October 19, 2020

I wish it was 36 hours.

Benny

The idea is that cheap, expendable swarms could overwhelm the radars of air-defence networks, clearing a path for more expensive warplanes https://t.co/5dWv5IYUYZ
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) October 19, 2020

jcitybone

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/fauci-says-he-s-not-surprised-trump-contracted-covid-19-n1243857

Dr. Anthony Fauci says he’s not surprised President Donald Trump contracted Covid-19 after he attended an event full of people not wearing masks or social distancing.
In an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday night, Fauci was asked if he was surprised that Trump wound up getting infected.
“Absolutely not. I was worried that he was going to get sick when I saw him in a completely precarious situation of crowded, no separation between people, and almost nobody wearing a mask,” Fauci said. “When I saw that on TV, I said, ‘Oh, my goodness. Nothing good can come outta that, that’s gotta be a problem.’ And then sure enough, it turned out to be a superspreader event.”
Fauci was referring to the Rose Garden news conference in late September at which Trump announced that he was nominating Amy Coney Barrett to serve as a Supreme Court justice. Afterward, a number of people who participated in the event, including Trump, tested positive for Covid-19.
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during the interview that Trump “sometimes equates wearing a mask with weakness,” which the doctor said doesn’t make sense. He said he believes Trump’s efforts to push back against his recommendations regarding the coronavirus pandemic has less to do with the president being “anti-science” and more with him making a statement.
“I think deep down, he believes in science. If he didn’t, he would not have entrusted his health to the very competent physicians at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center,” Fauci said about Trump’s recent visit to the hospital to receive treatment for Covid.

jcitybone

If Trump actually believes in science like Fauci claims, stuff like this is even worse.

https://thehill.com/homenews/521638-trump-biden-will-listen-to-the-scientists-if-elected?amp&__twitter_impression=true

President Trump mockingly warned at his rally in Nevada late Sunday that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would “listen to the scientists” if elected and there would be more lockdowns to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
Trump told attendees in Carson City that supporters of his opponent would surrender their “future to the virus,” saying: “He’s gonna want to lockdown.”
“He’ll listen to the scientists,” Trump added in a mocking tone before saying, “If I listened totally to the scientists, we would right now have a country that would be in a massive depression instead – we’re like a rocket ship. Take a look at the numbers.”
He also took aim at Democratic governors, accusing them of “keeping their states closed” with preventative measures to mitigate the spread of the pandemic. According to Johns Hopkins University data, the coronavirus has led to more than 8.1 million cases in the U.S. and more than 219,000 deaths.
A spokesperson for Biden’s campaign, Andrew Bates, pushed back on the president’s comments in a statement on Twitter late Sunday, saying the claims are “tellingly out of touch and the polar opposite of reality.”

jcitybone

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/trumps-new-biden-insult-hell-listen-to-the-scientists.html

In both personal outlook and policy directives, science is not often a motivating factor in the decision-making process of President Trump, a man who chooses not to exercise because he reportedly believes it uselessly drains his body’s finite store of energy. And while Trump often downplays the importance of the field — including a comment last month in which he said “I don’t think science knows” the impact of climate change in California — rarely has he put his disdain on such obvious display as he did on Sunday night. At a rally in Carson City, Nevada, he told a crowd of unmasked supporters that Joe Biden will “listen to the scientists,” in a rigid tone and posture that suggested that only a sucker or loser would do such a thing

Trump’s peculiar insult wasn’t the only odd charge he lobbed at Biden at his Carson City rally. While the president has long trafficked in the conservative fable that Democrats are out to ruin Christmas, he directly blamed his opponent for any holiday interruptions this year. “The Christmas season will be canceled,” Trump said, describing a Biden win — without accounting for the fact that he will still be president either way come December 25. While the line is consistent with the president’s festive messaging for years now, it appears to ignore the recent audio leak from Melania Trump, who was recorded asking a friend, “Who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff?” Perhaps the First Lady’s vote is still up for grabs.

jcitybone

Vote this asshole out!

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/19/politics/donald-trump-anthony-fauci-coronavirus/index.html

President Donald Trump claimed on a campaign call that people are tired of hearing about coronavirus, which has killed more than 215,000 Americans and trashed Dr. Anthony Fauci as a “disaster” who has been around for “500 years.”
Trump also baselessly claimed if Fauci was in charge more than half a million people would be dead in the US.
“People are tired of Covid. I have these huge rallies,” Trump said. “People are saying whatever. Just leave us alone. They’re tired of it. People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots … Fauci is a nice guy. He’s been here for 500 years.”
The President is trailing in polling to Democratic rival Joe Biden in part due to his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. He recently returned to the campaign trail after being diagnosed with the virus himself and has shunned public health protocols for his political rallies.
Trump added: “Fauci is a disaster. If I listened to him, we’d have 500,000 deaths,” before later saying it would be 700,000 or 800,000. “If there’s a reporter on, you can have it just the way I said it, I couldn’t care less.” (CNN was given access to the call by a source.)
Trump again mocked Biden’s social distancing measures and denied reports that there are issues with his campaign staff.

jcitybone

Removed

jcitybone

The early vote in NC continues to surge at more than double to 2016 pace.
20.9% of registered voters have cast ballots
32% of the 2016 turnout
Dems are out to a 328K vote lead.

Thru Sunday 10/18 NC 1,526,792 accepted ballots: 608,564 mail, 918,228 in-person early (20.9% of 7,292,471 reg voters, 32.0% of 4,769,640 2016 turnout). 608,564 accepted mail ballots are 44.3% of 1,373,004 mail ballots requested. (party, race, top 25 counties, daily early) #ncpol pic.twitter.com/eNH8TS2MZx
— Gerry Cohen (@gercohen) October 19, 2020

NEW: Internally, the Trump campaign is increasingly worried that Trump’s chances of winning NC, a state they view as essential, have all but evaporated.
The campaign had considered NC "super safe" as recently as just a few weeks ago, sources told ABC Newshttps://t.co/HNC34XpGAi
— Will Steakin (@wsteaks) October 19, 2020

NYCVG

The early voting turnout numbers are absolutely Thrilling! Go, Democracy.

wi62

Remember R’s heads explode when the people vote

jcitybone

I plan on watching this soon

Here's an excerpt — I hope you can take a moment to read the whole column pic.twitter.com/dafUSnFzod
— Will Bunch Sign Up For My Newsletter (@Will_Bunch) October 18, 2020

Benny

I watched about 10 min of it this morning. I hope this is on past the election because it is so Sorkin-like of too many ensembles to keep pace for me at present.

But I really like the CSN&Y tune.