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Sen. Gillibrand: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren Leaders Of The Democratic Party

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who is seeking a second full term in 2018, is asked to name examples of leaders in the Democratic party. Gillibrand replaced Hillary Clinton in the Senate when she resigned to become President Obama’s Secretary of State.

On CNN Monday morning Gillibrand cited Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as leaders of the party.

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are testing Democrats’ left turn

It took a few minutes to find an opening, but when it came, Sen. Elizabeth Warren did not squander her best chance to connect with a heavily black audience inside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in late August.

“I was a Sunday school teacher,” said Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts and a former Harvard law professor, drawing a burst of applause before reciting from memory the verse in the Book of Matthew about helping “the least of these.”

A week earlier, at a black church in Detroit, Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, was handed his own opportunity to show a little-known side of himself to African-Americans: the pastor who introduced Sanders highlighted the senator’s youthful activism in the civil rights movement. But when Sanders took the podium, he made no mention of his attendance at the March on Washington, his arrest during a demonstration in Chicago against segregation or much of anything at all from his biography that could endear him to the congregants at the Fellowship Chapel.

The liberal senators are often linked, spoken of in the same breath as if there is scarcely any difference between them. But as Warren and Sanders work to expand their constituencies ahead of possible runs in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020, the differences between them are becoming more marked. How their overlapping audiences sort themselves out could prove revealing about the party they seek to lead.

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The Democratic center of gravity has plainly shifted leftward, as Sanders demonstrated last week when the senators eyeing presidential bids flocked to his news conference to support his “Medicare for all” legislation.

But between Sanders and Warren, there are important distinctions in political style, and whoever emerges as the dominant progressive candidate in 2020 will test how far Democrats have lurched in the two decades since Bill Clinton steered the party toward the center. The Democratic base’s choice could reveal how willing liberal voters are to disrupt the country’s political system the way Republicans did by nominating President Trump.

VINCENT FORT ANGERED DEMOCRATIC ELITES WHEN HE ENDORSED BERNIE SANDERS. CAN HE BE ATLANTA’S NEXT MAYOR?

ON A RECENT Saturday afternoon in Atlanta’s East Lake neighborhood, Vincent Fort was out working the voters. As the populist wing of the Democratic Party has surged in recent months, it has created an unusual problem for a politician like Fort. Accustomed to being on the outer edge of the party, he now sounds like pretty much everybody else.

Or, as he puts it to one voter, everybody else now sounds like him.

“They want to deal with gentrification and all that,” he says of his opponents, “but they haven’t done it until the epiphany of the last six months.”

Fort, who served as the Democratic whip in Georgia’s state Senate until he resigned to run for mayor, has been a fixture of populist politics in the state for two decades. While politics in Georgia have swung from left to right, Fort served as the rare example of a politician who stuck by his guns, in good times and bad.

Ben Speight, the organizing director of Teamsters Local 728, says endorsing Fort’s bid was a no-brainer for the union. “This is about a guy literally walking the walk, viewing his role as a state senator as a way of amplifying movements,” he observes.

For years, that form of movement politics made Fort a lone voice in the wilderness. But, with radical municipal politics rising in neighboring Jackson, Mississippi and Birmingham, Alabama, there’s a chance that his moment has finally arrived.

This radical money policy would easily pay for Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for all

Last week, Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-all dream got a lot more real. Long consigned to the fringes of politics, Sanders’ bill now has at least 15 cosponsors in the Senate. Admittedly, the bill is quite utopian, which has opened it up to criticism. But it should be understood as the opening bid in what will surely be a long and painful bargaining process.

That said, Sanders does have at least one big problem on his hands. Ironically, it’s not a problem created by his leftism or idealism. Rather, it’s created by the important way he actually agrees with the centrist political establishment.

Namely, how will Medicare for all be paid for?

Sanders has released some ideas for new taxes. But he tends to be pretty cagey on the question. At the same time, he doesn’t really deny that his proposal needs to be paid for, leaving him defenseless to charges of unseriousness.

Well, you know what? He should deny it.

It would be totally justifiable on the economics. But it would also drastically expand Sanders’ options for building a majority coalition of legislators.

A conversation with Bernie Sanders about ‘Medicare for all’ by John Nichols

Why do you think single-payer is gaining so much traction at this point?

SANDERS: What I think you’re seeing now is this:

The savage Republican attack (on the Affordable Care Act and other existing health care programs and protections), this effort to throw over 20 million people off the health insurance they have, people are resisting that.

People also understand that the Affordable Care Act did not go far enough. No one will tell you that deductibles are not too high, that co-payments are not too high, that premiums are not too high. The price of prescription drugs is totally unacceptable. Everybody acknowledges that. The Affordable Care Act did not resolve those issues.

People are saying, OK, we made some progress. Twenty million more people have health insurance; that’s important. In states like Kentucky and West Virginia, the number of uninsured plummeted; that is a good thing. But has health care reform gone anywhere near far enough? The answer is that it has not.

So now people are saying: What is the alternative? And then, suddenly, a lot of people are saying: You know what, maybe we should join every other major country on Earth in guaranteeing health care for all people. The good news for us is, we’re not proposing some kind of radical idea. I live 50 miles away — five zero — 50 miles away from Canada; they, without any big deal, under Liberal governments, under Conservative governments, they have a health care system that is far more cost-effective than ours, that guarantees health care to all people with prescription-drug costs that are far lower.

What Do Centrist Democrats Even Stand For?

Last week was a momentous one for left-wing politics in America. In a testament to his newfound influence on Capitol Hill, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced his “Medicare for All” single-payer health care bill with 16 co-sponsors. Even former Senator Max Baucus, a moderate Montana Democrat who helped kill a public option in the Affordable Care Act, is now on board. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank may have been exaggerating when he claimed that “Democrats have become socialists,” but there’s a reason that David Duhalde, deputy director of the Democratic Socialists of America, told him “this is a high water mark” for his ideology. “The left is the rising force in the party,” Michael Kazin, the Georgetown University historian and editor of the leftist Dissent magazine, told me. “It seems to be the part of the party that has ideas—the part of the party that stands for clear reforms.”

But plenty of Democrats aren’t ready to join Sanders in pulling their party left—including the woman who beat him in the 2016 primary. Promoting her new book in an interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein published Wednesday, Hillary Clinton distanced herself from “the far right and the far left, both of whom want to blow up system and undermine it.” She said, “I think we operate better when we’re kind of between center right and center left, because that’s where, at least up until recently, most Americans were.” A decreasing number of Democrats in Washington occupy that band in the political spectrum, but they exist—people like Progressive Policy Institute president Will Marshall and Third Way vice president Jim Kessler. In the face of an ascendant progressive populism—one credited with injecting big, bold policy ideas like single-payer and free college into the Democratic bloodstream—these moderates reject the idea that Democrats are (or ought to be) all socialists now. And they say they’ve got their own ambitious ideas for the party’s future, ones that can actually appeal to parts of the country that handed Donald Trump the presidency.

“We need big and systemic changes in this country,” Marshall told me. “That doesn’t mean they need to be social democratic imports from Europe…. Part of what’s curious about my friends on the left is they think America’s destiny is to become a European-style welfare state.”

https://youtu.be/t4_qOyg4zU4

Splintered: Single-Payer Litmus Test Has Cut The Democratic Party In Two

The Democratic Party establishment may be skeptical of it it, but there is enthusiasm and energy behind Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) single-payer initiative. So far, it has 15 co-sponsors. It’s not that they’re against the aims of the bill, alternatively called Medicare-for-all, it’s the price tag, the optics, and the strategy in selling it.

To the more centrist wing, it’s causing concern that progressive cohorts want to use this as a litmus test for elections, in which the Democratic Party’s already limited pool of talented up starters could further shrink if this is the death knell for a potential candidacy for any office.

Like it or not, the Democratic Party is not a national one. It’s been decimated during and after the Obama era, with 1,000 fewer Democrats in office than there were in 2008-09. The GOP control Congress, the White House, 69/99 state legislatures, and two-thirds of the governorships. The Republicans are at the apex of their power.

In the rural regions that are not receptive to hyper-left wing politics that dominate the Silicon Valley area. Democrats would get killed—and a large portion of the party, albeit the older wing, knows this.

As Democrats try to unite in order to push an agenda forward for 2018 and beyond, Sanders’ single-payer push had split them right down the middle—and there’s ample concern that this push to purity could lead to all-out civil war

The Guardians Maria Liveblog

Hurricane Maria: Storm grows in force to category 5 as Caribbean battered again – live

Senate passes $700 billion defense policy bill, backing Trump call for steep increase in military spending

The Senate passed a roughly $700 billion National Defense Authorization Act on Monday but failed to include an amendment that would have eliminated the automatic spending cuts under the controversial sequester mechanism.

The NDAA, which sets forth the Pentagon’s budget and major programs for the next fiscal year, does authorize an additional $8.5 billion for the Missile Defense Agency to strengthen homeland, regional and space missile defense. That authorization is $630 million above the Trump administration’s request.

The final vote was 89 to eight. It required a simple majority to pass the Senate.

The 2018 national defense bill also authorizes just over $141 billion for military personnel costs, including costs of pay, bonuses, benefits and moving expenses. It provides a 2.1 percent increase in pay for troops.

Outrage After Zinke Memo Reveals Unprecedented Assault on Public Lands

Conservationists are outraged by Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke’s proposal—as outlined in a memo to President Donald Trump that was leaked by media outlets late Sunday—to revoke or alter federal protections for at least 10 national monuments and expose protected lands and waters to commercial activity.

“If President Trump accepts Zinke’s advice, and moves to eviscerate monument protections, he’d be ignoring the law—and the will of the American people,” said Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) president Rhea Suh, who also vowed to fight the changes in court, should the president act on the secretary’s suggestions. Suh was not alone in her charge that it would be illegal for the president to make the proposed changes.

“Acting on these recommendations would represent an unprecedented assault on our parks and public lands, and undermine bipartisan progress to protect our lands and waters that dates to Theodore Roosevelt,” said Jamie Williams, president of the Wilderness Society. “We believe the Trump administration has no legal authority to alter or erase protections for national treasures.” Williams also promised to battle “these illegal and dangerous recommendations” in court, if Trump acts on them.

‘Red Alert’ Sounded: Trumpcare Is Back, More Brutal and Deadly Than Ever

The Trumpcare zombie has risen from the grave to terrorize the American public once more.

Progressive organizations, lawmakers, hospital groups, and healthcare specialists have issued a “red alert” as reporting over the weekend indicated that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is considering a vote by the end of this month on what Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called Sunday “yet another disastrous Republican proposal to throw millions of people off health insurance.”

In an email to supporters Sunday night, Ben Wikler, Washington director of MoveOn.org, warned that the Republican Party “is now a hair’s breadth away—closer than they’ve ever been—to passing a devastating healthcare repeal bill, shredding the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and gutting Medicaid.”

“All we need is one more [vote],” Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) concluded.

The plan under consideration was authored by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.). Summaries of the bill indicate that, if passed, it would be every bit as harmful as the Trumpcare proposals that failed to escape the Senate in July.

After Failing to Prosecute Bankers, Obama Cashes In With Wall Street Speeches

Less than a year has passed since he departed from the White House, and former President Barack Obama has already joined the “well trod and well paid” Wall Street speaking circuit, a decision many argued will negatively impact the Democratic Party’s credibility as it attempts to fashion a message around taking on corporate monopolies, tackling income inequality, and loosening the insurance industry’s control over the American healthcare system.

According to a Bloomberg report published Monday, Obama has in the last month delivered two speeches to massive financial firms—Northern Trust Corp and the Carlyle Group—for around $400,000 a pop, and he is slated to attend a three-day conference hosted by Cantor Fitzgerald next week, for which he will make another $400,000.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton faced a wave of intense criticism following her paid speeches to Wall Street during the 2016 presidential campaign, and later conceded that they weren’t politically wise.

Obama, however, doesn’t appear to harbor any concerns about the political impact his speeches may have—a fact that could be problematic for the Democratic Party, Bloomberg’s Max Abelson notes.

“While he can’t run for president, he continues to be an influential voice in a party torn between celebrating and vilifying corporate power,” Abelson writes. “His new work with banks might suggest which side of the debate he’ll be on.”

Bolstering Single-Payer Case, Report Shows How For-

Showcasing yet another downside of the nation’s for-profit system, a new report by ProPublica and the New York Times reveals that despite the U.S. opioid crisis, many insurance companies provide easy access to highly addictive opioid medications for pain relief while restricting access to less-risky but more costly alternatives.

As the nation’s opioid epidemic has grown, “drugmakers, pharmaceutical distributors, pharmacies, and doctors have come under intense scrutiny in recent years, but the role that insurers—and the pharmacy benefit managers that run their drug plans—have played in the opioid crisis has received less attention,” note the Times’ Katie Thomas and ProPublica’s Charles Ornstein.

The pair spoke with patients who have struggled to access pain relief medications through insurance providers such as Anthem and UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest insurer. They also analyzed Medicare prescription drug plans that covered 35.7 million Americans and found only a third of those with coverage could access “a painkilling skin patch that contains a less-risky opioid,” whereas nearly all plans covered “common opioids, and very few required any prior approval.” Further, they found that “insurers have also erected more hurdles to approving addiction treatments than for the addictive substances themselves.”

Still Getting It Wrong: How Media Pundits Keep Steering Democrats into the Shoals

In his Monday column at the New York Times, Paul Krugman said:

These days, America starts from a baseline of extreme tribalism: 47 or 48 percent of the electorate will vote for any Republican, no matter how terrible, and against any Democrat, no matter how good. This means, in turn, that small things — journalists acting like mean kids in high school, ganging up on candidates they consider uncool, events that suggest fresh scandal even when there’s nothing there — can tip the balance in favor of even the worst candidate imaginable.

He’s not alone. This is the explanation most elite media types will give for Trump’s victory, and it’s the one the neoliberal’s in the Democratic Party cling to. It’s also the reason the Democrats are unlikely to get the House or Senate back unless Trump, McConnell, Ryan and the rest of the Republicans do something so crazy that they sabotage themselves. With their latest health “care” gambit they may be in the process of doing just that.

But even if they do, and Democrats get one or both of the Houses back, it’s not the same as getting a mandate for reform. Getting elected because the other guy or gal is so abhorrent that even the crazies couldn’t bring themselves to vote for them is not the same as getting elected because you managed to sell your agenda.

And therein lies the problem. Democrats have no agenda, and they have no agenda because they believe the myth that the Party’s neoliberals, Krugman, Fareed Zakara, and many others of the elite media are spewing: that America is a closely divided nation that is center-right politically.

‘Militaristic and intimidating’: St Louis police criticized as protests stretch on

As protests over the acquittal of the former St Louis police officer Jason Stockley moved into their fourth night, some observers said the response from law enforcement had grown heavy-handed, and that local and state authorities had learned little from their actions during the Ferguson protests.

Stockley, who is white, was accused by prosecutors of murdering Anthony Lamar Smith, who was black, following a high-speed car chase.

During intense demonstrations on Sunday night in downtown St Louis, police were accused of co-opting and chanting the popular protest slogan “whose streets? Our streets”. The interim police chief, Lawrence O’Toole, whose department made more than 120 arrests, said at a press conference that St Louis police “owned the night”.

Cara Spencer, alderman for the city’s 20th ward, said she was “deeply disappointed” by the rhetoric.

“The chants were disheartening and ‘we own the night’ sets a bad tone,” she said.

Why Hurricanes Harvey and Irma Won’t Lead to Action on Climate Change

It’s not easy to hold the nation’s attention for long, but three solid weeks of record-smashing hurricanes directly affecting multiple states and at least 20 million people will do it.

Clustered disasters hold our attention in ways that singular events cannot—they open our minds to the possibility that these aren’t just accidents or natural phenomena to be painfully endured. As such, they can provoke debates over the larger “disaster lessons” we should be learning. And I would argue the combination of Harvey and Irma has triggered such a moment.

The damages caused by the storms will undoubtedly lead to important lessons in disaster preparation and response. For many, though, the most urgent call for learning has been to acknowledge at long last the connection between climate change and severe weather.

Will this cluster of disasters provide the lever that will move climate change in the U.S. from a “debate” to an action plan?

It’s easy to view disaster history in this cause-effect way—to hop in time from disaster to disaster and spot the reforms as though they naturally emerge from adversity and commitment to change. But as a historian with a focus on risk and disasters, I can say this view can be misleading.

Portland adopts Indigenous Peoples’ Day

The Portland City Council on Monday night unanimously approved a proposal to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the second Monday in October.

The measure does not replace Columbus Day, but creates a new celebration recognizing indigenous cultures in the region.

The city can’t replace Columbus Day because it is a federal holiday

Over 1500 indigenous communities in danger of losing their land

Argentina’s Indigenous Territorial Emergency Law, which restrains legal evictions and prevents native communities from losing their ancestral lands, expires in November. There are over 1500 communities in danger.

Coca-Cola sucking wells dry in indigenous Mexican town – forcing residents to buy bottled water

A Coca-Cola factory in Mexico is reportedly draining wells dry, forcing local residents to buy bottled water.

Natural supplies have run out in the indigenous town of San Felipe Ecatepec in the state of Chiapas, southern Mexico, meaning people must walk for two hours to fetch drinking water, one former local official said.

A nearby bottling plant, run by Mexican company FEMSA, consumed 1.08 million litres of water a day in 2016, according to reports.

Juan Urbano, a former president of the Communal Territory of San Felipe Ecatepec, told US-based website Truthout: “In the past four years, our wells have started drying up.

“People sometimes walk two hours a day to get water. Others have to buy their water.”

Indigenous victory: Brazil’s Temer decrees 1.2 million Amazon reserve

The Temer government, widely criticized for its attacks on indigenous rights, has approved its first significant measure in favor of the country’s indigenous communities.

Last week, Brazil’s official gazette published a decree, signed by Justice Minister Torquato Jardim, establishing the Indigenous Territory of Turubaxi-Téa along the middle reaches of the Negro River in the state of Amazonas. More than 900 Indians from ten different groups, distributed in eight villages, inhabit the reserve, which covers 1.2 million hectares (2.9 million acres).

It is an important victory for the Indians, who have been struggling for over two decades to have their lands recognized. The long delay has harmed the communities, as the un-demarcated land has been repeatedly invaded by loggers and farmers.

The indigenous groups are confident that the situation will now improve. “We are still suffering threats and other acts of disrespect,” said Carlos Nery Pira-Tapuya, president of the Association of Indigenous Communities on the Middle Negro River (ACIMRN). “But we believe that, once our territory is demarcated, there will be fewer invasions and in this way our communities will be able to make great advances in administering the territory.”

The Indian Act and the subsidization of the south

When Europeans arrived on the shores of what is now called North America, they encountered complex civilizations. At home in the cosmopolitan heartland of powerful confederacies, Indigenous people adopted settler people into a pre-existing web of relations: familial, military, diplomatic and commercial. Between 1600 and 1850, settler people adopted Indigenous diplomatic protocols and traditions: the British and French learned to make wampum belts to cement treaties, learned Indigenous languages and customs, and intermarried or were adopted into Indigenous communities by the assignation of a chiefly title that made diplomacy possible within the Indigenous familial tradition.

The adoption of new diplomatic protocols and customs, and the exchange of technologies, ideas, sciences and philosophies between settler and Indigenous people resulted from the meeting and melding of distinctly modern peoples. Indigenous technologies made travel possible in this vast and foreign land, and the adoption of steel and firearms vastly simplified, though did not fundamentally alter, many aspects of Indigenous life.

Today, it is hard for settler people to think of Indigenous people as modern, but rest assured, we Indigenous people of today are your modern contemporaries, just as we were in 1867 and 1763 and 1600. Like settler society, Indigenous people have happily adopted new technologies, while still maintaining ancient languages and traditions. But make no mistake: just because some of our practices and knowledge are ancient, these cultural traditions and beliefs remain as sacred parts of our modern identities, just as Christians, Jews and Muslims are modern-day Canadians. And bear in mind that so much of what defines the modern — the very concept of the nation state, the idea of international law, the basic notion of science as a series of testable propositions — these things are relatively recent innovations dating from around 1650. What is more, Indigenous people, just like the settler people, adopted these new conventions and ideas at precisely the same time in our shared history, just as we adopted phones, and television and computers in lockstep with the settler people.

It should come as no surprise that one of the first legislative acts of the young Dominion government was the creation of the Indian Act. Indigenous people were, in 1867, no longer needed as military allies, but they still held vast lands and territories, and now armed with modern weapons and horses, were a force to be reckoned with. At Confederation, buffalo still fed and clothed the Indigenous people of the Great Plains, and while much diminished by disease, Indigenous people in 1867 were not merely a modern people, they were a modern people in possession of the very lands the young Dominion government desired as part of its dream of nationhood.

Alabama Senate Candidate Roy Moore Calls Native Americans And Asian People ‘Reds and Yellows’

An Alabama Republican who is campaigning for the U.S. Senate referred to Native American and Asian people as “reds and yellows” in a bizarre campaign speech that appealed for unity and faith in God.

Roy Moore, who previously sat on the state Supreme Court, used the derogatory language as he spoke about racial divisions in footage uploaded on September 18 and shared by The Hill.

“We were torn apart in the Civil War; brother against brother, North against South, party against party. What changed?” Moore told the crowd.

Now we have blacks and whites fighting, reds and yellows fighting, Democrats and Republicans fighting, men and women fighting. What’s going to unite us? What’s going to bring us back together? A president? A Congress? No. It’s going to be God,” he added.

In the five-minute clip, Moore, who has the endorsement of the Tea Party, also asks voters to “turn back to God” as a solution to abortion, murders, shootings, “perverse sexual behavior,” sodomy, road rage and corruption in public office.

Sacred Native American sites in the Valley Destroyed with a Mighty Shrug

A steady stream of gray incense-like smoke with the scent of pine wafted from the grass lawn on the Shutesbury Town Common as Rolf Cachat-Schilling said a prayer blessing in a native language, to ward off evil intentions. A group of half a dozen people slowly lined up to be part of the ceremony.

We came here to do a memorial service, partially for our departed who we’re concerned are going to be dug up or their resting places are going to be damaged without properly assessing whether there’s people there or not,” said Cachat-Schilling of Shutesbury, who is part Nipmuc and part St. Regis Mohawk and a member of the Native American Inter-Tribal Council of Western Massachusetts.
The native community in Western Massachusetts has expressed criticisms and concerns about a solar project affecting a 30-acre piece of land called the Wheelock Track, owned by W.D. Cowls Inc. of Amherst, and located at Pratt Corner Road. The site is considered sacred due to native remains believed to be on the premises. At least 10 acres of woodlands would be cleared for the project to make way for a 6.2-megawatt solar project developed and leased by Chicago-based Lake Street Development.

Virginia’s environmental agency to press ahead on pipeline permits as other states hit the brakes

Facing a legal challenge, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection last week asked a federal court to vacate the water-quality certification it issued in March for the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

A day later, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality delayed its pending decision on water-quality certification for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, sending developers of the project, which is being led by Dominion Energy, a four-page request for more information.

“The project involves numerous stream crossings that have the potential to affect downstream water quality both temporarily during construction and permanently,” the North Carolina regulators wrote. “Your application and responses to the division provide thorough general descriptions of the plans for the project. However, more site-specific detail is necessary to ensure that downstream water quality is protected.”

Yet in Virginia, the state Department of Environmental Quality, which has been heavily criticized for its handling of the water-quality risks posed by the two pending natural gas pipelines, says it has no plans to slow down the process for either project. The pipelines face major resistance from environmental groups and some landowners and state lawmakers of both parties have asked the DEQ to slow the process.

“The process for these proposed pipelines has been unprecedented in its scope and depth,” said Virginia DEQ spokeswoman Ann Regn. “DEQ is taking the time it needs while meeting the agency’s obligations to address these certifications in a timely manner.”

State pipeline safety board discusses mapping and new risk analysis

The state pipeline safety board met for the first time Monday since it was revealed that Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline had lost some of its coating.

The controversial pipeline sends oil and liquid natural gas under the Straits of Mackinac. The board was updated on the coating issue. But it’s waiting on a plan and repair schedule from Enbridge before deciding what to do next.

The board did recommend state universities start a new study on the risks of the pipeline.

“I’m convinced that Michigan universities can put together a team to answer the questions but it’s going to be a very large task,” said Dr. Guy Meadows from Michigan Tech. A member of the pipeline safety board, Meadows will likely step down to head the study.

Meadows has previously worked for Enbridge, but board members say they’re confident Meadows, and the universities, will perform an independent study.

A prior risk analysis was scrapped after a conflict of interest emerged.

In ‘aggressive move,’ federal agency overrules New York on pipeline permit

Federal energy regulators undercut a New York environmental agency Friday, allowing a pipeline company to go forward with a project the state had previously blocked.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) granted a natural gas pipeline company permission to move forward with its project, even though the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation refused to grant the company a water quality permit required under the Clean Water Act. Under section 401 of the Clean Water Act, states must certify that a pipeline will not violate clean water standards before construction on that pipeline can begin.

FERC ruled the state failed to meet a statutory one-year deadline to act on the permit request and therefore waived its authority to issue a decision on the application. Pipeline opponents criticized the federal commission’s ruling to overturn the state environmental agency’s decision.

“FERC’s reversal of Governor Cuomo’s decision is an insult to New Yorkers and our right to protect our communities and our water,” Roger Downs, director of the Atlantic chapter of the Sierra Club, said in a statement. “States unquestionably have the authority to rule whether a dirty, dangerous fracked gas pipeline violates clean water laws, and nowhere is FERC granted the right to override that authority.”

The New York State DEC said in a statement that it is reviewing FERC’s decision and “will consider all legal options to protect public health and the environment.”

‘Big Charity’ director to unveil films on Bayou Bridge Pipeline

Filmmaker Alexander Glustrom, whose documentary “Big Charity” earned jury and audience awards at the 2014 New Orleans Film Festival, has shifted his focus to the proposed Bayou Bridge Pipeline in south Louisiana. Three short films directed by Glustrom on the subject, made in collaboration with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, will premiere Tuesday (Sept. 19) at the Carver Theater, 2010 Orleans Ave.

Conflicting Decisions On Pipelines Frustrate Industry And Landowners

In March 2016, workers for one of the nation’s largest natural gas pipeline companies cut down a large swath of maple trees in Susquehanna County–a rural patch of northeastern Pennsylvania.

A video shot by an activist shows the trees crashing down as chainsaws buzz.

Cathy Holleran was powerless to stop it. At the time, she was tapping the trees for her family’s maple syrup business, but the pipeline company condemned her land using the power of eminent domain.

Driving around a year-and-a half later, she’s still in disbelief. A court order had prevented her from interfering, and law enforcement officers came to protect the pipeline workers.

“We had to stay completely away. They brought armed U.S. Marshals with assault rifles and Pennsylvania State Police, and had guys walking all over property in bullet proof vests,” Holleran recalls. “I mean, really! We’re making syrup. What are we going to do? Are we going to go attack these guys?”

Dems fear lasting damage from Clinton-Sanders fight

Democrats are worried that the fight between former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is doing lasting damage to their party.

As the bickering between the former rivals grows more intense, Democrats say it needs to end.

“It reiterates that our party is still led by people with fatal flaws,” said one former senior Obama administration official.

Another former Obama official added, “It’s like watching two children bickering.”
The only winner from the infighting, they say, is the Republican president.

Well maybe Obama should have endorsed the person that would have expanded and built on his legacy instead of the person who will back/front stab him every chance she gets about how much better of a job she would have done…

Meet the Leader of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy

Almost no one knows who he is, but Jeff Merkley thinks there’s a spot for him on the left flank of the 2020 Democratic primary—whether or not Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren run.

He’s already beaten Warren to Iowa, and spent more time in Des Moines this month than Sanders has since last year’s caucuses.

A senator from Oregon for nearly nine years, Merkley is probably best known for being the only colleague of Bernie Sanders to endorse the Vermont senator last year. Most people could walk by him on the street, or even on the Senate subway, and not know who he is—a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll this week showed that 73 percent of Americans had never heard his name.

He has no campaign staff, and has raised no money. But he’s hoping that the credibility he has with progressive activists and the wild new world of lefty politics will change all that. So he’s starting early, even if the odds don’t look great right now.

“If I believe that something matters, I’ll throw myself into it, and I’m OK losing. But when you throw yourself in with that attitude, and you’re all about teamwork, sometimes you win,” Merkley told me for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast, recounting a career that’s already taken him through a surprise election as a state representative in Oregon to being picked as speaker of the statehouse to beating a popular incumbent to get to the Senate in 2008. “I’m willing to take on battles that I feel are important.”

Pro-DACA protesters call Pelosi a ‘liar’

Immigrant-rights protesters on Monday disrupted a San Francisco news conference at which House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had planned to promote the DREAM Act.

Pelosi and fellow Democratic California Reps. Barbara Lee and Jared Huffman were scheduled to speak about the legislation, which would provide a path to legal status to people approved for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and other undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. at a young age.

Instead, dozens of young people took over the event and called Pelosi “a liar” for saying she has fought against deportations.

A video from NBC Bay Area showed Pelosi shouting back at protesters, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The protest was organized by several Bay Area social justice groups, according to Luis Serrano, an organizer with California Immigrant Youth Justice, one of the groups involved.

“Democrats are representing themselves as the resistance when the reality is they haven’t done anything,” Serrano told POLITICO.

El-Sayed returning to Midland Wednesday

Abdul El-Sayed is returning to Midland on Wednesday to speak about his campaign for governor.

The Midland County Democratic Party is hosting his second public appearance in Midland from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at the United Steelworkers of America, 3510 James Savage Road.

At 7 p.m., the College Democrats at Central Michigan University are hosting the former physician, epidemiologist and public health expert on campus at Anspach Hall, Room 166 where he will speak with students and community members about his campaign for governor.

Doctor believes U.S. ready for first Muslim governor

Perhaps no state has embraced the political outsider as much as Michigan, where a venture capitalist won the last two governor’s elections and a real estate baron carried the presidential vote. Now Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is putting that affinity for newcomers to the test.

El-Sayed, a 32-year-old liberal doctor in Detroit, is mounting a surprisingly robust bid to become the nation’s first Muslim governor.

Democratic leaders are stunned by the sudden emergence of the former Rhodes scholar, who served as Detroit public health director, in the primary field after he quickly raised $1 million.

He is one of four viable Democrats and, for now, three Republicans in a race that his party considers a must-win to re-establish itself after eight years of GOP control of state government.

Michigan has one of the largest Arab populations outside the Middle East, but is it ready to elect a Muslim as chief executive? El-Sayed says yes, though he insists the election will be about his qualifications and grassroots movement.

“I think folks are looking for something fresh, new, exciting, competent. And we offer that,” said the self-assured El-Sayed, who emphasizes his work rebuilding Detroit’s health department after the city’s bankruptcy.

Democrats eager to unseat Md. Republican governor after 1 term

A nationally-known progressive in the race

Ben Jealous, former president of the NAACP, is making a run for governor. He’s known as an inspiring orator with a progressive message and “that’s going to appeal to a lot of people,” said Kurtz.

Jealous has already gotten an endorsement from a former U.S. presidential candidate: Sen. Bernie Sanders. If Jealous can succeed in fundraising, Kurtz said, “I think he’s going to be quite a serious contender for the nomination.”

‘St. Louis is the new Selma’: Protesters march silently through downtown Monday morning

In the three days since Judge Timothy Wilson handed down a not guilty verdict for former police officer Jason Stockley in the 2011 shooting death of Anthony Lamar Smith, protesters could be heard from blocks away while chanting at their respective demonstration sites.

“No justice, no peace” seems to be the favorite – and most applicable, since they are expressing their outrage for Stockley’s first-degree murder acquittal for the 2011 fatal shooting of Anthony Lamar Smith.

But many of those heard in Ferguson have been applied to the new wave of unrelenting direct actions – including the “Whose streets? Our streets!” chant that was appropriated by police following a mass arrest of protesters downtown last night.

But at 7 a.m. Monday morning those listening out for the protesting that many were expecting to resume heard nothing.

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“The purpose of this action was to let people know that our presence is powerful,” Cori Bush told the crowd after they made it to the steps of City Hall. “This was power walking down this street.”

She was one of four speakers who addressed the crowd for the 10 minutes they stood on the steps of City Hall. The gates had been chained and locked by the time they arrived, though trying to occupy the building didn’t appear to be on the agenda. Still as quiet as when they commenced to marching, they listened intently as Bush spoke on their behalf.

“We’re not afraid of being arrested. We’re not afraid of being talked about,” Bush said. “We’re not afraid to do whatever it takes to say to them ‘you will stop killing us.’

These 14 Scientists Are Opposing Anti-Science Conservatives in the Next Election

“So severe, even the nerds are here.”

So read a sign at a pro-science rally earlier this year, and the sentiment has been demonstrated repeatedly since the 2016 election. Scientists, often considered apolitical, have been speaking up for facts and evidence in the face of the most anti-science administration we’ve had in decades. And now, the nerds are running for office.

314 Action (named for, what else, the first three digits of pi), is a nonprofit group that formed last year to provide funding and resources to scientists seeking elected office. On Monday, it released a list of 14 candidates it is supporting who are running for Congress, state legislatures, and the Virginia governorship seat in 2017 and 2018. This is in addition to six incumbent scientist-politicians 314 endorses. Most of the candidates are challenging anti-science incumbents.

“What a lot of people realized from 2016 is that the traditional ‘career politician’ is not what voters are looking for,” Josh Morrow, 314’s executive director, told me over the phone. “They’re looking for authenticity and real stories and real people, so there’s a lot of excitement around our candidates.”

Though a few of the candidates have had some experience with politics, the vast majority are making their first foray into the realm and leaving behind impressive careers in science, technology, and medicine to do so.

Take Dr. Mai Khanh Tran, a Harvard-graduate pediatrician who is taking on longtime incumbent Congressman Ed Royce (along with four other Democrat candidates) in California’s 39th district. Dr. Tran has no political training or experience, but she told me after seeing the proposed changes to the Affordable Care Act, and realizing the impact it would have on her patients, she couldn’t stay on the sidelines any more.

Democratic congressional candidate for 9th District looks to break cycle

Liz Watson does not use the word anti-establishment to describe herself.

As a registered Democratic candidate for the Congressional 9th District and a former congressional staffer in Washington D.C., the term seems like a misnomer. Her main talking points often overlap with those of the three other Democrats competing for the nomination in May: a commitment to jobs, affordable health care, and education and a better future for working-class families.

But even though she won’t use the word anti-establishment, Watson said she has based her campaign on the idea that something is fundamentally wrong with how the establishment — in this case, Congress — is operating, and she positions herself as the only candidate capable of changing things from the inside.

Watson, a 42-year-old Bloomington native who graduated from Bloomington High School South, left the state to earn degrees at Carleton College and Georgetown University Law Center. She clerked for a federal judge, worked as a legislative counsel for Workplace Flexibility 2010 at Georgetown Law and privately practiced employment law. Over the course of her career — particularly the parts spent as a congressional staffer — Watson said it became clear Congress was not working on behalf of all Americans.

“The kinds of things that would really make a difference to families, those are things this Congress has not accomplished,” Watson said. “There are bills that would solve these issues, but that’s not what this Congress wants to do. What this Congress has been about has been very different.”

Watson drafted legislation to raise the minimum wage that was supported by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, as well as legislation to ensure fair scheduling for service-sector employees that received support from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, only to watch both pieces stall after being introduced in multiple congressional sessions. As a number of congressional decisions continued to disappoint her, Watson said she began to consider a run for the open congressional seat in Indiana.