Tip jar for the usual bartenders…

Biden demonstrates how not to design a climate plan

In this cycle, there are indications that the most important priority for Democratic voters is climate change. Indeed, one analysis shows that at candidate events in Iowa, the only issue that citizens ask questions about more often than climate change is health care.

But so far, with a couple of exceptions like Jay Inslee and Beto O’Rourke, few of the candidates have offered much in the way of concrete plans on how to address climate change.

So it’s obviously of interest when the person leading in the polls drops hints about his yet-to-be-released climate plan. That’s what Joe Biden is now doing, but as Reuters reports, there’s a problem:

Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden is crafting a climate change policy he hopes will appeal to both environmentalists and the blue-collar voters who elected Donald Trump, according to two sources, carving out a middle ground approach that will likely face heavy resistance from green activists.

The backbone of the policy will likely include re-joining the United States with the Paris Climate Agreement and preserving U.S. regulations on emissions and vehicle fuel efficiency that Trump has sought to undo, according to one of the sources, Heather Zichal, who is part of a team advising Biden on climate change. She previously advised President Barack Obama.

The second source, a former energy department official also advising Biden’s campaign who asked not to be named, said the policy could also be supportive of nuclear energy and fossil fuel options like natural gas and carbon capture technology, which limit emissions from coal plants and other industrial facilities. […]

The approach, which has not been previously reported, will set Biden apart from many of his Democratic rivals for the White House who have embraced much tougher climate agendas, like the Green New Deal calling for an end to U.S. fossil fuels use within ten years. That could make Biden a target of environmental groups and youth activists ahead of next year’s primary elections.

It’s probably too early to criticize this vague set of ideas until we see exactly what it entails. But there’s already cause for concern: the people who have been authorized to speak to the press about this are framing it explicitly as something Biden “hopes will appeal to both environmentalists and the blue-collar voters who elected Donald Trump.”

We’re not naive here. Of course candidates are going to consider how the policies they propose will be received by voters. But can you at least pretend that you first decided what the best policy would be, and only afterward set about determining the most effective way to sell it to the electorate?

Biden’s people are just coming out and saying that he has an existing election strategy — hold Democratic voters and poach conservative blue-collar white voters from Trump — and they’re fashioning his climate plan so it slots into that strategy.

1. He’s proud he called it an existential threat. Don’t really care what you call something, we care what you’re going to do about it. 2. It’s nice that you did something bold in 1986, but are you going to do something bold now? 3. How did “keep the status quo” work out for HRC? https://t.co/o2BO1i6JPX

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) May 10, 2019

How the University of Iowa Recovered From the ‘Unfathomable’ Flood That Ruined It

Don Guckert’s job is keeping the buildings on the University of Iowa’s charming campus up and running, and safe. His most important lessons came from the worst days of his career, in June 2008, when the waters of the Iowa River washed across the campus, causing catastrophic damage.

The night before the waters flowed over the backbreakingly stacked sandbags, Mr. Guckert recalled, “I walked into the house, and looked at my wife and said, ‘We’re going to lose the campus.’”

In all, the raging waters caused $750 million in flood damage, with $36 million in equipment lost in one building alone. Twenty-two major buildings were damaged, some of them irreparably; a quarter of the school’s classroom space was lost, and one-sixth of the university’s 2.6 million square feet of space was closed. The level of flooding “was unfathomable to those of us who lived through the previous record flood” of 1993, said Rod Lehnertz, the university’s senior vice president for finance and operations.

Now Mr. Guckert has a side gig. He travels the country, telling other institutions what he and the University of Iowa have learned from the disaster, and explaining how others can prepare for the worst. Mr. Guckert said that in a changing world, people might not know what the worst could mean.

In his talks, he presents the lessons he learned from the 2008 flood, with slides titled “Plan for your next disaster, not your last one” and “Plan for Failure (Because Mother Nature Always Wins).”

Climate change is already affecting extreme weather events around the world. Hurricanes are wetter, and wildfires are bigger. And scientists expect conditions to get worse over time.

snip

Research has shown an increase in the frequency of flood events in parts of Iowa and elsewhere in the Midwest. The Iowa Flood Center estimates that what was once considered a 500-year flood in Iowa City is now an 80-year flood, meaning the probability of a flood of that magnitude occurring in any given year has risen from 0.2 percent to 1.25 percent.

Average annual interest rates on payday loans:

Delaware: 521%
Idaho: 652%
Nevada: 652%
Texas: 661%
Utah: 652%
Wisconsin: 574%

It's time to end exploitative lending that keeps Americans trapped in debt. We will cap interest rates on consumer loans and credit cards at 15%.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) May 10, 2019

TYT is going to be roasting Biden over the stale climate change plans.

I <3 this song!

For a Union Man, Joe Biden Sure Has a Lot of Big Donors Who Aren’t Fond of Labor

holding his first fundraiser at a mansion owned by the Comcast executive who supervises lobbying operations for the giant telecom company. Comcast’s lobbying division, in turn, works with the hugely influential American Legislative Exchange Council, which writes right-wing legislation—including “right to work,” “stand your ground” and voter-ID laws—on behalf of Republican state legislators. A canned quote from the Comcast exec who hosted Biden’s fundraiser actually shows up in a press release on ALEC’s website, while the New York Times recently wrote that Comcast’s relationship with organized labor “is often strained” and said it has “largely managed to fend off efforts by groups like the Communications Workers of America to organize its employees.” (Disclosure: I am a member of a union.)

This week, Biden held another fundraiser, this time hosted by a donor named Cynthia Telles at her at (large) Los Angeles home. Telles is on the board of directors of a Kaiser Permanente subsidiary that operates hospitals. (Her husband, Joe Waz, works as a “Senior Strategic Advisor” on “public policy and strategy” issues for … the Comcast Corporation.) That subsidiary is engaged in a dispute with mental health employees that has involved work stoppages in December and April, and some of the employees demonstrated outside Biden’s event:

.@NUHW members protest in front of the site of Joe Biden’s noon fundraiser in Hancock Park at the home of a Kaiser board member. Kaiser and @nuhw workers have been at odds over mental health resources pic.twitter.com/uu6Va9DHUV

— Melanie Mason (@melmason) May 8, 2019

The Los Angeles Times reported that Biden “did not interact with the protesters or address the demonstration in his remarks.”

The premise of Clinton-era Democratic politics, which was echoed to a lesser but still significant extent in Barack Obama’s administration, was that workers and executives could be on the same team, working together, for America. It’s a deal that has gone a lot better for executives than their employees, not just in terms of wages but also regarding issues that Biden’s big donors have direct interests in. It appears that Biden does not think he has to take sides, passing himself off as a friend of labor one day and getting money from a foe of labor on another. We’ll see if union voters agree.

Suicidal Strategy

Nonetheless, the opposition party seems content to keep going about its usual humdrum routines, indifferent to the obvious danger to the republic. As I write this, the barons of the Democratic Party’s dominant faction are acting a little like Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean in reverse. Instead of lifting the wagon that’s crushing Trump’s innocent victims (as Jean lifts the wagon off Fauchelevent in Les Misérables), the party establishment is trying to crush the candidate who has the best chance of beating Trump: Bernie Sanders. This began, well before Sanders launched his second presidential campaign, with leaks and anti-Sanders articles published in the New York Times, the voice of the great “center” of a party still dominated by the Clintons and Barack Obama. Sanders’s 2016 campaign was accused of sexism by female staffers, and Sanders himself has been criticized for his alleged inability to convince black voters of his good faith. A headline in the Times’ April 7, 2018, print edition reads, “Sanders, in Courting Blacks, Is Tripped Up by Notion He Slighted Obama.” The article itself, however, a report on a speech Sanders gave to an African-American audience in Mississippi, contains not a single mention of the insult with which he’s alleged to have stung the former president. Sanders simply notes the decline of the local Democratic Party in spite of Obama’s success, calling him an “extraordinary candidate” and a “brilliant guy.”

Since then, the Times has used every opportunity to present Sanders as an obstacle to Trump’s eventual overthrow. According to the newspaper, Sanders is perceived by the electorate as being too far to the left. In fact, the “reports” on the Sanders campaign turn out to be merely anti-Sanders editorials. The preferred candidate of the Times is Joe Biden, Obama’s two-term vice president and a reliable member of the wing of his party that supports the banks, big business, and free-trade agreements.

Outside the biggest media centers, the anti-Sanders current is even more apparent. “Are the Democrats going to commit political suicide by picking a leftist candidate to challenge President Trump in 2020?” asks Andrés Oppenheimer, an opinion writer for the Miami Herald, in a conversation described in his March 20 column. His question is addressed to the Democratic congresswoman Donna Shalala, whose congressional district includes a large part of the city of Miami. Shalala, a loyal part of the Clinton machine, replies, “I do not think that the candidate will be to the left of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama . . . I think most [contenders for the nomination] will be like me, safety-net capitalists. . . . The party knows that we cannot win the Midwest, we cannot win Florida, we cannot win any state in the South unless we have a candidate that is not too far to the left.” Translation: not too independent of the party machinery of patronage and fund-raising, of which Biden is a master.

There’s a real suicidal strategy for you. Hillary Clinton, cautious to a fault, a centrist, a friend of Wall Street and Walmart, lost every state included in Shalala’s regional list, except for Minnesota, Illinois, and Virginia. By contrast, thanks to his anti-NAFTA position, Sanders had defeated Clinton in the Wisconsin and Michigan primaries; those two states are filled with ex-Democrats who suffered under Clinton’s and Obama’s free-trade policies and crossed over to the Trump camp. It’s logical to think that Sanders, who’s been constant in his support of a working class deprived of jobs by factory relocations, would likewise win against Trump in Ohio and Pennsylvania. If we add those states’ 64 electoral votes to the 232 Clinton won in 2016, Sanders comes out the winner, even without Florida.

Heh heh, quite a meltdown.

It seems like Obama (2008) and Bernie (2016) criticism of Hillary Clinton for not being populist / grassroots enough (trade, Wall Street + lobbyist donations, Walmart board, Iraq war) were all effective lines of argument.

Not left versus center, but top versus bottom.

— Waleed Shahid (@_waleedshahid) May 10, 2019