Tip jar for the usual suspects…

Former President George HW Bush Dies at Age 94

The second of five children, Bush was born on June 12, 1924 in Milton, Massachusetts, to Prescott and Dorothy Bush. After graduating from Yale University in 1948, he struck out for Texas and found success, first as an oilman and later as a Congressman.

The misfortune of bad timing hurt him at times in his pursuit of higher office, yet a string of high-profile appointed positions reflected the faith others had in him.

Bush ran in November 1966 for Congress and won, becoming the first Republican from Houston and the star of the growing Texas GOP. After Bush’s second term and a failed Senate bid, President Richard Nixon appointed Bush to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and, later, chairman of the Republican National Committee.

His tenure coincided with investigations into the Watergate affair, which resulted in Nixon’s resignation. New President Gerald Ford appointed Bush “envoy” to China — the two nations did not yet have full diplomatic relations, so Bush could not be called an ambassador — then director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Bush returned to Houston in 1976, when Ford was defeated. He ran for president but ended up instead the two-term vice president to Ronald Reagan, proving a loyal second.

In 1988, Bush won the top office decisively. He came to be widely respected by foreign leaders and diplomats, but his political profile at home was different, dogged by assertions that he was a bland and hazy character, aloof and dilettantish.

Bush had not been in the White House long when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. His cautious posture as the Soviet Union was beginning to unravel was a highlight of his presidential term, which also saw negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (eventually to be ratified in November 1993), and the victorious Operation Desert Storm, a multinational response to the military invasion of Kuwait by neighboring Iraq.

At home, plagued by inherited budget deficits and a Congress under the control of Democrats, Bush was pushed into a tax increase that belied his explicit promise to allow none. His legislative achievements included the Americans with Disabilities Act, a bolstered Clean Air Act, and an increased minimum wage.

With the loss of a second presidential term came intense pain, physical and emotional, that he fully acknowledged. Some of it arose from the frustration he felt that the public did not understand him, and perhaps never had.

December 5th has been declared a national day of mourning.

Will Congress give Vice President Mike Pence a pay raise before leaving town for the holidays?

A pay bump for Pence, and other top executive branch officials, is caught up in a dispute between Democrats and Republicans in Congress over whether to give civilian federal workers a 1.9 percent pay raise over President Donald Trump’s objections.

Republicans want to tie that increase to raising the salaries of more than 1,000 top government executives whose pay has been frozen at 2010 levels.

Democrats complain that Republicans want to boost administration officials’ pay only when they control the White House.

“There is no reason that the Trump administration, which boasts the wealthiest Cabinet in modern history, should be held to a different standard than the Obama administration when it comes to pay increases,” said New York Rep. Nita Lowey, the top Democrat on the House committee that writes that annual spending bills. “If Republicans were really focused on fiscal responsibility for America’s kids and grandkids, they wouldn’t be trying to increase pay for the vice president and senior Trump officials.”

Humphrey noted in yesterday’s thread, but worth mentioning again.

I think it’s a good idea to start thinking bigger in finding avenues to combat the rise of authoritarianism, whether it be Russian aggression, Middle East, or Trumpism.

NAFTA 2.0 Signed: A Deal for ‘The Corporate One Percent’

U.S. President Donald Trump, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto signed a trade agreement to replace NAFTA on Friday—a deal some lawmakers and advocacy groups say is still fundamentally flawed as it stomps on the rights of workers and the environment and empowers “the corporate one percent at the expense of the rest of us.”

Simply put, “The NAFTA 2.0 text is not the transformational replacement of the corporate-rigged trade-pact model that progressive activists, unions, and congressional Democrats have long demanded,” wrote Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.

Inked by the North American leaders on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, the deal, formally called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in the U.S., comes after more than a year of negotiations. Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland noted that the signing follows “what has been, at times, a difficult process.” As The Toronto Star reported:

Trudeau’s government has informally referred to the new agreement as a new NAFTA, noting that much of the original remains in place. Trump, who has called NAFTA the worst trade deal in world history, has wrongly insisted he is terminating NAFTA and replacing it with something entirely new.

Given that continuity, a number of family farm organizations from the U.S. and Canada including the National Farmers Union Canada and the U.S.-based National Family Farm Coalition have urged a better deal, one “that promotes fair and sustainable food systems.” Unmet in the new deal, they say, are their demands to “restore local and national sovereignty over farm and food policy; stop corporate giveaways in trade agreements; and ensue economic viability and resilience in rural communities.”

“This New NAFTA is a huge missed opportunity,” said Karen Hansen-Kuhn, director of Trade and Global Governance at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “Family farm groups in all three countries insisted on new rules to rebuild rural economies and food systems. Instead, we have a deal that locks in many of the old rules that have driven farmers out of agriculture for more than two decades.”

Free the Free Press From Wall Street Plunder

By 2014, America’s two largest media chains — GateHouse and Digital First — weren’t venerable publishers with any commitment to truth or civic responsibility. Instead, their managers believe that good journalism is measured by the personal profit they can squeeze from it.

As revealed last year in an American Prospect article, GateHouse executives demanded that its papers cut $27 million from their operating expenses. Thousands of newspaper employees suffered in large part because one employee — the hedge fund’s CEO — had extracted $54 million in personal pay from the conglomerate, including an $11 million bonus.

The core idea of the “civic commons” is that we are a self-governing people, capable of creating and sustaining a society based on common good. A noble aspiration!

But achieving it requires a basic level of community-wide communication — a reliable resource that digs out and shares truths so people know enough about what’s going on to be self-governing. This is the role Americans have long expected their local and regional newspapers to play — papers that are not merely in our communities, but of, by, and for them.

Of course, being profit-seeking entities, papers have commonly (and often infamously) fallen far short of their noble democratic purpose. Overall, though, a town’s daily (or, better yet, two or more dailies) makes for a more robust civic life by devoting journalistic resources to truth telling.

Local ownership matters, as some 1,500 of our towns have learned after Wall Street demigods have swept in without warning to seize their paper, gut its journalistic mission, and devour its assets.

For example, Digital First, a huge private-equity profiteer, snatched the St. Paul Pioneer Press and, demanding a ridiculous 25 percent profit margin from its purchase, stripped the newsroom staff from a high of 225 journalists to 25!

As the Prospect’s Robert Kuttner reported, these tyrannical private equity firms produce nothing but profits for faraway speculators.

He notes that the blandly named entities only exist “thanks to three loopholes in the law.” The first lets them operate in the dark; the second provides an unlimited tax deduction for the massive amounts of money they borrow to buy up newspapers; and the third allows them to profit by intentionally bankrupting the paper they take over.

Our right to a free press is meaningless if Wall Street thieves destroy our communities’ presses. The good news is that many enterprising people are devising ways to rescue their newspapers. For more information, go to dfmworkers.org.

There are lots of articles in the major newspapers about World Aids Day, but I think Sfbob’s diary at TOP is a good one to read, especially as he is HIV positive and has been for a long time.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/12/1/1816411/-World-AIDS-Day-2018-Getting-Older-with-HIV

As one of the architect of the drug war dies, a leftist president in Mexico pledges to end it. Thank god the embarrassment that was the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto is over. Hopefully the leftist @lopezobrador_ government lives up to its promise.https://t.co/FZYIB9gyB5

— Tomas Kennedy (@tomaskenn) December 1, 2018

I hope this will be the case.

Now they're coming after Marc Lamont Hill's other job: as a professor at Temple. The chair of the board of trustees would like to see him fired. https://t.co/76CPmkRfE4

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) December 1, 2018

I’ll look the Chronicle of Higher Ed to see if the AAUP is going to stand up for him. This is so wrong if indeed the BoT at Temple is not allowing him to exercise free speech. Allegedly, the AAUP has seen a revival since academic freedom has been threatened more and more.

Can't wait for this week's show! I sit down with a true inspiration — @AndrewGillum. What topics do you want us to cover? #vanjonesshow. Saturday, 7pm ET on @CNN pic.twitter.com/sanuPI2xuq

— Van Jones (@VanJones68) November 27, 2018

I’ll be recording this for sure.

Mariner East pipelines: Judge reviews request for immediate shutdown

An administrative law judge for the state Public Utility Commission heard testimony this week on whether Sunoco can operate its controversial Mariner East pipelines — a set of export lines moving natural gas liquids across Pennsylvania — while the judge reviews a request to permanently shut down the lines.

Seven residents of Chester and Delaware counties filed a petition for emergency relief last week, arguing Sunoco has failed to address public concern around what would happen in the case of an emergency leak. The petitioners also filed a “Notice to Defend,” which asks the PUC for a permanent shutdown.

The Mariner East project has faced numerous technical, legal, and environmental problems. It is made up of three parallel natural gas liquids lines — the Mariner East 1, the Mariner East 2, and the Mariner East 2X. The PUC temporarily stopped service on the Mariner East 1 line earlier this year, citing safety concerns related to sinkholes, and saying that a pipeline leak could have a “catastrophic” effect on public safety.

PUC administrative law judge Elizabeth Barnes said she intends to render a decision on the residents’ emergency relief petition by Dec. 10 or 11. The full commission meets on Dec. 20 and can either uphold her decision, reverse it, or partially uphold it.

During a second day of testimony Friday, Sunoco called on John Zurcher, a pipeline industry consultant, as an expert witness. He said the company’s public information efforts about what people should do in the event of a leak is appropriate and in line with industry standards. He noted people may be able to detect a leak through smelling petroleum, seeing a vapor cloud, or hearing the products escaping from the line.

“Companies spend a tremendous amount of time getting this information out,” Zurcher said. “Pipeline companies are part of the community. We want people to know where the pipelines are and how to recognize a leak.”

The residents’ attorney, Michael Bomstein, said a leak in the heavily populated areas in southeastern Pennsylvania could be devastating, and the company’s public notices have been “inadequate, misleading and contradictory.”

Mayor de Blasio defended the Amazon deal when pressed about it during his talk at the #sandersinstitutegathering18 today. But he didn't seem to win over critics here, who say they are appalled by the agreement to bring the company to NYC. https://t.co/wnI4ULSYdK

— Grace Rauh (@gracerauh) December 1, 2018

In my on-boarding to Congress, I get to pick my insurance plan.

As a waitress, I had to pay more than TWICE what I’d pay as a member of Congress.

It’s frustrating that Congressmembers would deny other people affordability that they themselves enjoy. Time for #MedicareForAll.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) December 1, 2018