Month: October 2021

It is bizarre here to watch Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) argue that preclearance is outdated and unneeded. Moments after the Shelby decision scrapped the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act, draft bills restricting voting came out of drawers in Republican legislators’ desks in state capitols across the country, including, famously, in mine (N.C.).

https://twitter.com/GaryLegum/status/1449734826311966721?s=20

In fact the Supreme Court left it to Congress to update the Voting Rights Act to speak “to current conditions,” which is just what the bills Kinzinger opposes attempt to do.

The Brennan Center addressed the issue last summer:

In Shelby County, a 5–4 majority invalidated that formula, ruling that it was too out-of-date. For nearly 50 years, the preclearance regime blocked discriminatory voting changes in several states — Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia — and a number of localities elsewhere. Between 1998 and 2013 alone, Section 5 blocked 86 discriminatory changes, including 13 in the 18 months before Shelby County.

But even as the Supreme Court credited the VRA for improving conditions for voters of color, a majority decided that Section 4’s preclearance formula was no longer constitutional because “things have changed dramatically.” As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out in her dissent, however, it made no sense to get rid of a policy because it was working. She wrote presciently, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

During the eight years since then, the rainstorm has grown into a torrential downpour. New voting restrictions, like stricter voter ID laws, have proliferated across the country. Voter purges — the removal of voters from the rolls — have surged in localities once covered by preclearance. The Brennan Center has calculated that if once-covered jurisdictions purged at the same rates as uncovered jurisdictions between 2012 and 2018, 3.1 million fewer voters would have been purged. Polling place closures in previously covered jurisdictions, along with fewer resources allocated in places that are becoming less white over time, has meant long wait-times to vote. And Brennan Center research shows that Black and Latino voters are more likely than white voters to experience the longest wait times on Election Day.

This year, we are seeing the most aggressive voter suppression effort since Jim Crow. To date, 17 states have enacted 28 laws that restrict voting access. Several of these laws have already been challenged in court. But preclearance could have stopped many of these policies in their tracks, without wasting the time and resources of our legal system or risking voter confusion.

In Shelby County, the Supreme Court left the ball squarely in Congress’s court, directing it to pass a renewed Voting Rights Act with a preclearance formula that “speaks to current conditions.” Congress is planning to do just that in the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill — a new version of which is expected to be introduced later this year — will contain a revised coverage formula that looks at more modern issues of discrimination. It will also set forth certain discriminatory voting practices — like voter ID laws and polling place closures — that are subject to preclearance regardless of where the policies are implemented. And the bill has procedures for states or localities to show that preclearance doesn’t make sense for them anymore, among several other provisions.

“If we actually went into this as adults with real discussions, I think we can solve things,” says Kinzinger, complaining about Twitter comments and deriding how Democrats gave their voting bills catchy names to make them embarrassing to vote against like the Republicans did with their ‘‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001’.’

Great. Put your vote where your mouth is.

People really need to reevaluate their priorities. A lot of people. Globally. Two stories this morning represent polar opposites on the human values spectrum.

The first is Politico’s tale of money laundering of a less-splashy kind. The Washington Post’s series on the Pandora Papers tends to find global money laundering where we expect it: in exotic properties on the French Riviera and in countries with lax financial oversight. Politico’s story exposes the U.S. is one of the latter.

On a 320-acre campus in the late 1990s, Motorola had built a 1.5-million-square-foot facility for manufacturing cell phones in tiny Harvard, Ill. “But within a few years of finishing construction, the bottom had fallen out of Motorola’s business model” and the $100 million site was abandoned, an albatross aound the town’s neck. Then a glimmer of hope for the tiny town:

Then, in 2008 — as the country began tipping fully into the Great Recession — an investor in his early 20s from Miami named Chaim Schochet showed up. Working on behalf of a firm called Optima International, Schochet offered $16.75 million for the empty building. A far cry from the Motorola investment, but more than locals could have hoped for. They happily accepted. Glimmers of potential sprang once more. “Hope burns eternal,” Roger Lehmann, a member of the Harvard Economic Development Corporation, said after the purchase.

At the time, there was no reason to think Schochet and his colleagues were anything but savvy businesspeople, snapping up properties across the Midwest. Optima International was a parent company to a constellation of related firms (including one called “Optima Harvard Facility LLC”). Prosecutors would later dub this the “Optima Family,” with its American operations overseen by two Americans named Mordechai Korf (Schochet’s brother-in-law) and Uri Laber. As the Justice Department alleged in a series of civil forfeiture cases, this “Optima Family” plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into investments in state after state: commercial real estate in Cleveland and Dallas and Louisville, steel factories in West Virginia and Kentucky and Ohio, production plants in Michigan and New York and Indiana. Time and again, these investors swooped in, pledging jobs, revitalization and a lifeline for towns watching their economic lifebloods dry up.

All alleged schemes for hiding ill-gotten funds offshore. Only now, to Russian and Chinese oligarchs and others, the U.S. is “offshore.” Sites across the U.S. Midwest have become low-profile places for stashing wealth out of sight and out of the reach of taxing authorities in other countries. “Investors” swoop in, buy up distressed properties, promise renewal, then leave them to rot. The story is as facination as it is disheartening for what it says about global kleptocracy:

We only know about Harvard because American and Canadian authorities, aided by partners in Ukraine and New Zealand, targeted the specific money laundering networks allegedly linked to Kolomoisky and Gong. But given the miles-wide availability of other American money laundering services — from real estate to private equity, hedge funds to anonymous trusts, artwork to accountants — there’s no reason to think the Motorola plant is the only multimillion-dollar American asset that’s been bandied between parallel kleptocratic networks.

“I’m not sure people do understand how damaging taking dirty money really is to the United States,” former FBI agent Karen Greenaway, who has deep experience investigating post-Soviet money laundering networks, testified in 2019. “Dirty money is like a rainstorm coming into a dry streambed. It comes very quickly, and a lot of it comes very fast, and the stream fills up, and then it gets dry again.”

On the opposite pole is Michelle Goldberg’s profile of Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the leader of the House Progressive Caucus. Jayapal’s is a classic immigrant story:

Jayapal was born in the South Indian city of Chennai and raised mostly in Indonesia, where her father worked in the oil business. At 16, she moved to America by herself to attend Georgetown. Her parents had fairly conventional ideas about what immigrant success looked like. “To my dad, only three professions were worthy of his ambition for me: doctor, lawyer or business person,” she wrote in her 2020 book, “Use the Power You Have: A Brown Woman’s Guide to Politics and Political Change.”

But after a stint at a leveraged buyout firm and business school, she found the work unfulfilling. A 1989 visit to a giant refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border led her into a job in a Seattle international development nonprofit and eventually into politics. Now she is fighting to see President Biden’s agenda passed by Congress and sent to his desk.

The travails of that challenge you know, including progressives leveraging their numbers to ensure both the infrastructure package and the reconciliation bill pass:

The reconciliation bill, otherwise known as the Build Back Better Act, includes some of President Biden’s key campaign promises, which he, obviously, has an interest in enacting. “Build Back Better, the president’s agenda, the Democratic agenda, would have died had we not done what we did,” said Jayapal.

If progressives are able to save the bulk of Build Back Better, Biden’s presidency will be transformative. American life will become less unequal and precarious. Parenting will no longer be a ticket to immiseration for many. Drug prices will go down, and people on Medicare will enjoy added benefits like vision and dental care.

It is the contrast in values and life choices that shakes me this morning. The Pandora Papers reveal a shady, global network of criminals whose only interest is in building their own wealth, often ill-gotten, and in shielding it from the world community that created it for them to plunder. Meanwhile, we have public servants whose principal interest lies in improving the lives of millions. How the former is even a choice is beyond comprehension.

Get ready for more of this. A lot more:

Ten days ago, an Oklahoma jury convicted a Native American woman of manslaughter for miscarrying a pregnancy after 15-17 gestational weeks. She’s one of 57 such cases documented in the state since 2006 — and 1,200 in the United States.

https://www.oxygen.com/crime-news/brittney-poolaw-convicted-of-manslaughter-over-miscarriage-in-oklahoma

Women prosecuted in these cases are disproportionately women of color, who often higher rates of miscarriage and stillbirth to begin with.

Poolaw’s fetus had a congenital defect, and she was suffering from placental abruption and chorioamnionitis at the time of her miscarriage.

Originally tweeted by Megan Carpentier (@megancarpentier) on October 15, 2021.

Obstetricians determine gestational ages based on the date of the woman’s last period prior to getting pregnant — i.e., before the date of conception. The U.S. Supreme Court determined with Roe v. Wade in 1973 that legal viability is after the 28th gestational week, when fetal survival is generally above 90 percent, but medical viability is pegged at 25-26 weeks, when the fetus has more than a 50 percent chance of surviving outside the womb, according to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only defines a fetus as “stillborn” if it is delivered after 20 weeks gestational age; before that, it’s medically considered a miscarriage.

The Lawton Constitution reported last year that, according to police, the then-19 year-old Poolaw miscarried at home in early 2020 and was brought to the Comanche County Memorial Hospital with the umbilical cord still attached to the fetus. She told the medical staff that she had used both methamphetamines and marijuana while she’d been pregnant.

Later, in interviews with police, Poolaw allegedly confirmed that she’d smoked marijuana but used methamphetamines intravenously, including as recently as two days prior to her miscarriage. She also allegedly told them, according to the Lawton paper, “that when she first became pregnant, she didn’t know if she wanted to keep the baby or not.”

It is unclear from those reports whether she had actively decided to continue the pregnancy, given that she had been 15 to 17 weeks along, simply hadn’t made a decision or had few other options but to continue it. The nonprofit Guttmacher Institute notes that 53 percent of women in Oklahoma live in the 96 percent of counties with no facilities that offer abortion services — Comanche County among them — and the state requires a woman go to a provider twice, 72 hours apart, in order to obtain an abortion. Abortion is, by law, not covered by most private insurance plans in the state without an extra rider, and it isn’t covered by Medicaid except in extremely limited circumstances.

(In April 2021, Oklahoma’s governor signed three bills that will effectively eliminate all abortion access in the state — including a ban on any abortions after six weeks gestational age. The new laws are scheduled to take effect in November. They would not, however, have applied in Poolaw’s case.)

Technically speaking, Oklahoma state law did not criminalize women for miscarriages, stillbirths or other fetal harm for which prosecutors felt the woman was at fault until September 2020, when the state Supreme Court ruled that, despite the state’s child neglect and homicide laws making no reference to fetuses, the laws nonetheless encompassed a viable fetus whose mother used drugs.

Still, prosecutors in the Poolaw case filed charges against her in March 2020, almost six months before the court’s ruling.

In March 2021, the medical examiner released the results of the autopsy on the fetus that Poolaw had miscarried, as reported by KSWO. Tests of the fetus’ then-still-developing liver and brain were positive for “methamphetamine, amphetamine and another drug,” but they also found evidence of “a congenital abnormality, placental abruption and chorioamnionitis.” (The medical examiner did not specifically name the congenital abnormality.)

The CDC defines congenital abnormalities as “a wide range of abnormalities of body structure or function,” some of which can be incompatible with fetal viability. Placental abruption is when the placenta separates from the uterine wall, which can be a cause of miscarriage or stillbirth and also kill the mother, according to the Mayo Clinic; it occurs in 1 in 100 pregnancies, according to the March of Dimes. One of its causes can be chorioamnionitis, an infection of the amniotic fluid and the two membranes of the amniotic sac, according to the Cleveland Clinic, that can, on its own, prove fatal to the mother and fetus. That is thought to stem from a mother’s urogenital tract infection; a 2010 study of chorioamnionitis in Clinics in Perinatology suggests that it occurs in up to 4 out of 100 pregnancies. The risks of its most serious complications are reduced by timely prenatal care.

(Notably, Native American women have more than twice the maternal mortality rate of white women and are 150 percent more likely to have stillbirths — defined as fetuses over 20 weeks — than white women, according to the CDC. Most studies blame this on Native American women’s disproportionate poverty rate and their access to health care — including prenatal care — as well as systemic racism.)

Meanwhile, though there are few studies of meth use during pregnancy, a 2016 study in the Journal of Addiction Medicine on meth use and pregnancy outcomes both noted that “No consistent teratological effects of in utero [methamphetamine] exposure on the developing human fetus have been identified” and that, in other studies of drug use during pregnancy “the effects of poverty, poor diet, and tobacco use … have been shown to be as harmful or more harmful than the drug use itself.” That study found that the most common effects of continuous meth use during pregnancy are low birth weight and premature birth (though the average birth date was still late in the third trimester).

There are so many things that a birthing vessel (aka host) can do that might lead to a miscarriage. In fact, if this is a template for other jurisdictions any miscarriage can probably be defined as a homicide since the vessel didn’t provide a proper home for the baby or it wouldn’t have miscarried. Goes without saying.

Don’t think it’s not going to go that far. They are already doing it.

This guy knows Trump buried the insurrection bodies. He must testify:

How did so many mild-mannered, otherwise intelligent Americans become convinced that former President Donald Trump really did win the 2020 election? Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, is in a perfect position to know. And now that he’s been subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Congress has a chance to hear it straight from him.

The committee ordered him Wednesday to produce documents by Oct. 29 and appear before the panel for a deposition that same day. While he wasn’t central to the planning of the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the deadly attack, as we try to better understand the days and weeks that led up to Jan. 6, Clark’s testimony would provide a crucial piece to the puzzle.

How did so many mild-mannered, otherwise intelligent Americans become convinced that former President Donald Trump really did win the 2020 election?

Among the most pressing questions Clark could help answer: What were the overlaps between his efforts inside the government and those outside, which nearly succeeding in preventing the transfer of power on Jan. 20? And how did Trump’s lies get such a foothold inside the U.S. government itself?

While the committee has a lot of tough nuts to crack — especially former White House strategist Steve Bannon — and not a lot of time, Clark doesn’t seem likely to be one of them. Clark refused to testify voluntarily before the Senate Judiciary Committee, but it’s doubtful he’ll defy a congressional subpoena, not when more former Trump officials are cooperating with the commission than are actively obstructing them. (Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Pentagon official Kash Patel, for the record, are the ones taking the less fiery approach.)

It’s in Clark’s best interest — and the country’s — to tell the committee how he became a devotee to the conspiracies that Trump seeded. The path he took from bureaucrat to would-be coup enabler is one that’s vital to study, if for no other reason than to bar any future travelers from wandering down it.

We’ve already learned a lot about Clark’s hunt for a quasi-legal justification to keep Trump in power. In the final weeks of the Trump administration, Clark was the acting head of the civil division at the Justice Department, which represents the U.S. in litigation involving national policies. He’d spent the previous two years leading the Justice Department’s environmental division. When he was promoted in September 2020, he wasn’t on anyone’s radar as a major player in the administration, let alone someone Trump even knew or would rely on as his man inside the Justice Department.

But as The New York Times reported in January, less than a month after Election Day, Clark was all in on the notion that Trump’s loss could be reversed. Between the election and mid-December, Pennsylvania state Rep. Scott Perry, who also thought the election results could be overturned, introduced Clark to Trump. The president “quickly embraced” him, The Times reported, unbeknownst to the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, or his deputy, Richard Donoghue.

By the end of the month, Clark was trying to persuade Rosen to send a letter urging Georgia’s Legislature to consider overturning Joe Biden’s victory in the state. The draft letter, which ABC News published in August, suggested that a special session of the Legislature should convene because of the (Trump-initiated and unsubstantiated) claims of fraud and that legislators should throw their support behind electors supporting Trump, not Biden.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., told MSNBC that Clark had drafted similar documents for six states whose altered results would have given Trump another term in the White House. If only a handful of legislatures had acted as the letters insisted was fully legal, Trump would have stolen the election — all thanks to Jeffrey Clark.

According to a recently released Senate Judiciary Committee report, Clark also pushed Rosen and Donoghue to get a briefing from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That briefing, he explained in an email, would potentially give Trump the cover to declare that China had hacked voting machines during the election — a conspiracy that Clark never offered evidence to back up.

The letters were never sent, and the briefing never happened, as Rosen and Donoghue refused to give their backing. But the White House hadn’t given up on Georgia — or Clark. According to emails the House Oversight Committee released in June, on Jan. 1, Meadows wrote Rosen asking him to have Clark specifically investigate “signature match anomalies” in Fulton County. “Can you believe this?” Rosen wrote to Donoghue as he forwarded Meadow’s message. “I am not going to respond to the message below.”

Clark’s reported machinations are wildly out of character, according to people who knew him beforehand.

Two days later, Clark played his Trump card: The president intended to have him replace Rosen. That night, Rosen was in the Oval Office fighting for his job, with most of the Justice Department’s senior leadership ready to resign if Clark took the helm. The rebellion worked, and Trump backed down. But he clearly hadn’t given up on his claims that he’d won the election, as his riot-inciting speech on Jan. 6 showed.

There’s more at the link. I wrote a bit about Clark’s deep ties to the GOP legal establishment. He is one of the boys.

These moms are ill-mannered miscreants for the cause:

The three-dozen women who showed up at the Brevard County school board meeting last week wore identical “Moms for Liberty” T-shirts, declaring they don’t “CO-PARENT with the GOVERNMENT.”

They snickered and jeered their way through a board member’s defense of the district’s classroom mask mandate, eventually getting kicked out of the room.

What a great example for their children. Act like a snotty, juvenile bully at official meetings. I’m sure their kids’ future employers will be very impressed:

Afterward, a gaggle huddled under an oak tree nearby, listening to the proceedings via cellphone. When the board voted to keep the mask ordinance in place, Jody Hand, a 52-year-old mother of three, jumped to her feet. “I am going to be spending every minute making sure parents know they don’t have control over their children anymore,” she shouted.

Hand’s anger offers a window into Moms for Liberty, a controversial organization looking to play a major role in next year’s elections. Launched initially in Brevard County to support “parental rights” in public schools, Moms for Liberty chapters have spread nationwide. Its leaders hope to convert brawlish pandemic-era cultural divisions into lasting political power.

The organization is channeling a powerful frustration among conservative mothers, who feel increasingly sidelined by school administrators and teachers. And their targets are sprawling — not only mask mandates but also curriculums that touch on LGTBQ rights, race and discrimination, and even the way schools define a scientific fact.

A Moms for Liberty chapter in Tennessee questioned whether a textbook that included a photograph of two sea horses mating was too risque for elementary schools. Members in Suffolk County, N.Y., have begun describing school mask policies as “segregation,” urging their children to rip off their masks in classrooms in protest.

That’s great. Teach your kids to create chaos in the classroom.

And in Indian River County, Fla., a chapter recently objected to fourth-graders being taught how to spell “spinal tap,” “isolation” and “quarantine” because they were too “scary of words” to teach at that grade level, said Jennifer Pippin, head of the Indian River chapter.

Right. Parents know best. Educators are kind of like their servants just there to “teach” whatever claptrap these ignorant fools tell them to teach. I guess these teachers are actually just babysitters.

In 10 months, Moms for Liberty has grown to 135 chapters in 35 states, with 56,000 members and supporters, according to the organization’s founders. The group hopes to one day have chapters in all 3,143 counties or equivalents in the United States.

“Now is the time to capture these parents for the long-term,” said Tina Descovich, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty. “If you miss this opportunity, when they are really engaged [during the pandemic], it’s going to be hard to engage them in the future.”

But the group’s critics warn that Moms for Liberty has sowed divisions among parents and made it harder for school officials to educate students while keeping them safe.

Gary Shiffrin, head of the Brevard Association of School Administrators, who has been involved in public education since 1971, blames Moms for Liberty for the most disruptive educational environment he has seen, besides the lingering opposition to desegregation early in his career.

“They have decided they are going to be the spokespeople for conservatism, and this won’t end when covid ends,” said Shiffrin, a former teacher and high school principal.

It won’t end with COVID. It’s just beginning.

Taking over school boards isn’t new. The old conservative movement used to do that too. But this is a national campaign . Even Steve Bannon is in on it.

Frankly, I don’t know why they just don’t pull their kids out of school and homeschool them. But that was back when they were sincere in their lunacy. Today, these groups are cynical extremists banding together to own the libs any way they can. And they’re using their kids — and everyone else’s — as pawns. In the end, if they can succeed in destroying the public schools due to lack of teachers and administrators willing to put up with this boatload of shit, it’s all good.

The right wing refusniks are more numerous here in the US but they exist elsewhere too:

​A mandate for all workers in Italy to show a government-issued Covid-19 pass came into force on Friday, triggering protests at key ports and fears of disruption.​ ​Anyone who is on a payroll — in the public or private sector — must have a ‘green pass’ with a QR code as proof of either full vaccination, recent recovery from infection or a negative test within the previous 48 hours.

Employees who go to work without the pass risk a fine of up to 1,500 euros ($1,730) and suspension without pay. Employers could also face fines if they allow staff to work without it.​ ​The largest demonstrations were at the major northeastern port of Trieste, where labor groups had threatened to block operations and around 6,000 protesters, some chanting and carrying flares, gathered outside the gates.Around 40% of Trieste’s port workers are not vaccinated, said Stefano Puzzer, a local trade union official, a far higher proportion than in the general Italian population.Regional governor Massimiliano Fedriga told SkyTG24: “The port (of Trieste) is functioning. Obviously there will be some difficulties and fewer people at work, but it’s functioning.”

“The green pass is a bad thing, it is discrimination under the law. Nothing more. It’s not a health regulation, it’s just a political move to create division among people…,” said Fabio Bocin, a 59-year old port worker in Trieste.​ ​In Genoa, Italy’s other main port, around 100 protesters blocked access to trucks, a Reuters witness said.

In Rome, police in riot gear stood by in front of a small rally with people shouting “No green pass.” A protest was also to be held in the capital’s Circus Maximus on Friday afternoon.Italian government statistics say that 81 percent of the eligible population has been fully vaccinated and more than 85 percent have had the first dose. Italy has also begun booster shots for those with compromised immunity and who are over 80.

The certificate has been required on long distance trains and indoor venues including restaurants, museums and gyms since September 1.​ ​Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s cabinet approved the rule — one of the world’s strictest anti-Covid measures — in mid-September,. It is effective until the end of the year.

Some 15% of private and 8% of public sector workers have no green pass, an internal government document seen by Reuters estimates.The government hoped the move making the health pass mandatory would convince unvaccinated Italians to change their minds, but with over 80% of residents over the age of 12 already fully inoculated and infection rates low, that surge has not materialized.

The right-wing League and Brothers of Italy parties and some unions say that, to address the risk of staff shortages, the validity of Covid tests should be extended from 48 to 72 hours, and they should be free for unvaccinated workers.​ ​But the government has so far resisted those calls. The center-left Democratic Party, which is part of Draghi’s ruling coalition, says that making swabs free would be the equivalent of an amnesty for tax dodgers.

I don’t even want to think about what our wingnuts would do if the government tried to do something this draconian. It wouldn’t be pretty.

I will never understand why people are refusing a free, effective, life-saving shot. But apparently there are millions of them all over the world.

So it’s being reported that Joe Manchin has put the kibosh on one of the most important pieces of the Democrats’ climate legislation: the program to rapidly replace the nation’s coal- and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear energy. Apparently, it’s just not going to happen. Because of one man. So that’s that.

It’s very depressing. But maybe this piece by Bill McKibben will make you feel a little bit better:

So many things have broken the wrong way since the Paris climate accords were agreed in mid-December of 2015. Within eight weeks Donald Trump had won his first presidential primary, an insane comet streaking across the night sky, trailed by outliers like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. The world has endured opéra bouffe distractions like Brexit, and the true paralyzing emergency of the pandemic.Sign up for our weekly environment newsletter, Green Light.

And yet here we are, staggering and stumbling towards the real follow-up to Paris, starting 31 October in Glasgow. The international order, such as it is, is held together with baling wire and duct tape: China (its housing market cratering) and the US (between rebellions) are spitting at each other, India half-lost in its ugly experiments with repression, Europe Merkelless. The global south is ever more rightly angered by the failure of the north to deliver on its necessary pledges for climate finance – and to pay for the increasingly obvious damage that global warming has inflicted on nations that did nothing to cause it. But somehow all these players must stitch together a plan for dramatically increasing the speed of a global transition off fossil fuel – and if they don’t, then Paris will forever be the high-water mark of climate action. (And the actual high-water mark of rising seas will jump upward.)

At least no one remains in the dark about the importance of the work: since Paris we’ve endured the hottest heatwaves, the biggest and fastest storms, the highest winds, the heaviest rains; we’ve watched both the jet stream and the Gulf Stream start to sputter. The physical world, once backdrop, is now foreground, a well-lit stage on which the drama will play out.

And to make the theater interesting, there are two things that have broken the right way, two things that will have to be the bulwark of progress in Glasgow.

One is the continuing astonishing fall in the cost of renewable energy and the batteries with which to store it. This trend was evident by the time of Paris, but still new enough that it was hard to trust it: we still thought of wind and sun as expensive, a sacrifice. We now understand that they are miracles, both of engineering and economics: last month an Oxford team released an (undercovered) analysis that concluded: “Compared to continuing with a fossil-fuel-based system, a rapid green energy transition will probably result in overall net savings of many trillions of dollars – even without accounting for climate damages or co-benefits of climate policy.” That is, the faster we move towards true renewable energy, the more money we save, and the savings are measured in “many trillions of dollars”.

And the second lucky break is the continuing astonishing growth in the size of citizens’ movements demanding action. Again, this was already evident in Paris: 400,000 people had marched on the UN the year before demanding action, and as Barack Obama said at the time, “we cannot pretend we do not hear them. We have to answer the call.” He’d been able to slink back from Copenhagen in 2009 with no agreement and pay no political price; by Paris that had changed. But it’s changed even more in the six years since, particularly since August 2018 when Greta Thunberg began her first climate strike. There are thousands of Thunbergs now scattered across the planet, with millions of followers: this may be the biggest international movement in human history.

Those two strengths go up against the equally powerful bulwarks of the status quo: vested interest and inertia.

The first, the fossil fuel lobby, has suffered damage in recent years: a global divestment campaign, for instance, has put $15tn in endowments and portfolios beyond its reach, and it builds little now without resistance. People increasingly see through the fossil fuel lobby’s attempts at greenwashing. But it maintains its hold on too many capitals – in the United States, the Republican party is its wholly owned subsidiary, which makes progress halting at best. And the planet’s financial superpowers – Chase, Citi, BlackRock and the rest – continue to lend and invest as if there was nothing wrong with an industry that is literally setting the Earth on fire.

As for inertia, it’s a deep obstacle, simply because the climate crisis is a timed test. Without swift change we will pass irrevocable tipping points: winning slowly on climate is simply another way of losing. Every huge forest fire, every hurricane strike, every month of drought heightens public demand for change – but every distraction weakens that demand. Covid could not have come at a worse time – indeed, it very nearly undid these talks for the second year in a row.

So, that’s the playbill. We have two big forces on each side of the drama, behemoths leaning against each other and looking for weakness to exploit. In the wings, old hands like John Kerry, the US climate envoy, push and probe; if the US Senate actually passes a serious climate plan before Glasgow, his power will increase like some video game character handed a magic sword. If the price of gas keeps rising in Europe, perhaps that weakens chances for a breakthrough.

We know which side will win in the end, because vested interest is slowly shifting towards the ever-larger renewable sector, and because inertia over time loses ground to the movements that keep growing. But we don’t know if that win will come in time to matter. Glasgow, in other words, is about pace: will it accelerate change, or will things stay on their same too-slow trajectory? Time will tell – it’s the most important variable by far.

I hope his measured optimism is well taken. Nothing is more important.

Brad Friedman’s tweet (below) led me to Greg Sragent’s tweet which led me to Brian Beutler‘s post and back here to Digby’s Friday post, “What’s popular anyway?” commenting on the same Beutler post about “popluarism,” its merits, its flaws, and why anyone thinks picking “the most popular ideas to run on” is in any way revolutionary.

Progressives have been warning for 20+ years that Democrats' and their millionaire backers' failure to financially support independent progressive media – in the way GOP billionaires do – would allow the rightwing media echo chamber to metastasize and take over, and here we are https://t.co/nmEChjwDHq

— Green News Report (@GreenNewsReport) October 15, 2021

Digby wrote:

Beutler’s critique is right on the money in my opinion. The public doesn’t understand the implications of most issues and they often tell pollsters what they want to hear. They very often have contradictory views and spout conventional wisdom. Good analysts can sort that out to some degree and professionals who conduct focus groups are able to see through some of the subjects’ attitudes to get to what they really think. But none of that is static. People change their minds, they waffle they go with the crowd or take contrarian stances for all kinds of reasons. Events can change everything.

Mostly people just vote with their tribe because it’s easier. And in this polarized political environment the real task for the parties is to find a way to get people to identify with yours and/or reject the other guy’s. There are ways to do this. As Beutler points out, Democrats have examples like Tester, Brown and Baldwin to prove that.

Voters need to identify more with you than with your policies. You can’t buy that from a pollster. If you could, Terry McAuliffe would be doing better in Virginia.

Regarding Tester (an actual farmer), Beutler wrote this two weeks ago:

So what does appeal to this vague-ish middle that is also compatible with moral leadership? Well, here, for instance, is how Jon Tester presents himself to voters. What is Jon Tester’s policy agenda? You can read that here if you want, but as someone who follows Senate developments very closely my answer to the question was “hell if I know!” What I do know, because it’s what he broadcasts, is that he has a farm and isn’t afraid to (figuratively) pop lying, corrupt Washington politicians in the nose. I also know that he is a huge asset to the party who would never in a million years pull Sinema-esque antics or run scared from a debt-limit vote or abandon his culture-drenched appeals in favor of promoting further means testing of social spending. 

Some variation on that formula seems to buy way more good will than promising people what focus groups say they want. Sherrod Brown and Barack Obama are actual pointy-headed former college professors with complicated left-of-center policy visions, but they developed good political brands for themselves with a mix of working-class bromides, ethical conduct, and outsider positioning and it bought them tons of running room, without subjecting them to all the perverse traps that the bipartisanship fetish or “do popular things” can entail.

The word we’re looking for here is authenticity. Those “stupid” voters can sniff out a phony a mile away. As I’ve said:

As a field organizer in the South, I remind canvassers that, no, those voters are not stupid. They’re busy. With jobs and kids and choir practice and soccer practice and church and PTA and Friday night football and more. Unlike political junkies, they don’t keep up with issues. They don’t have time for the issues. When they go to the polls they are voting to hire someone to keep up with the issues for them. And when they look at a candidate — your candidate — what they are really asking themselves is simple: “Is this someone I can trust?”

One of my favorite southernisms is, “I wouldn’t trust anyone my dog doesn’t like.” That, I caution canvassers, is how most Americans really vote, like it or not. And if you don’t purge the thought, those “low information” voters? They will know you think they’re stupid before you do. Right before you ask for their votes.

What makes Tester, Brown and Baldwin acceptable to more conservative voters is they don’t look down on them and they don’t try to bullshit them when answering questions. They don’t dance around what they really think to find a politically beige answer. Those come out sounding evasive. Voters know where guys like Tester stand and will respect someone for that even if they disagree on many issues.

Lack of that sense is among the things that killed Hillary Clinton’s campaign, for all her manifold skills as a public servant. By accounts of people who know her, she’s caring, warm and funny in small groups. But years of right-wing personal attacks and a culture of misogyny meant she did not go out in public without carrying a shield, Wonder Woman-style. Clinton’s was invisible, but it was there. She gave the impression she was peering at you from behind it, and that made her look shifty as a candidate. Her “deplorables” comment cemented that image among people already inclined to distrust her.

I was always impressed by a lefty politician here that he accepted an invitation to speak at a 2012 congressional candidates’ forum sponsored by a local T-party group. Cecil Bothwell was the only Democrat in attendance, and he tried to answer their every question, loaded or not. Mountain Xpress assembled a thread pulled from event tweets:

• Bothwell: Agenda 21 is mostly a fabrication, the UN is NOT moving to take over U.S. gov as many Tea Partiers claim.

• Bothwell on jobs: It’s my view that the Fed gov can help create jobs through infrastructure, transportation projects. Gov spending is a key way to improve economy, just as it was during Great Depression. I realize this goes against the “Taxed Enough Already” philosophy, but I think paying taxes is patriotic.

• Bothwell: I strongly support Obama’s health care reform. It will help bring us in the right direction: a single-payer system.

• Tea Party crowd is listening politely to Bothwell, even as he argues against almost every idea they tend to support.

• Bothwell largely blames military and war spending over last decade for high deficit.

• Folks laugh at Bothwell for saying “the bailout for GM largely worked.” He responds: If you don’t support those jobs, fine. I do.

• Bothwell says he was against the bank bailouts, however.

At the end of it (IIRC), the T-partiers who listened politely thanked Bothwell for coming. He didn’t win any votes, but he earned their respect for stating plainly what he believed, for not talking down to them, and for not trying to snow them with euphemisms. They might not agree, but neither would they hate his guts for disagreeing.

That’s the sense Tester conveys. It’s not about policy. It’s not about message. HE in his flat-top is the message: authenticity. It doesn’t come from poll testing what’s popular.

This thread by Jennifer Cohn is from August, but it caught my eye in light of the wheels within wheels turning out wingnuts armed to further the demise of popular democracy in this country. Long before there was the T-party and Trump, there was Morton Blackwell and the Leadership Institute.

Jennifer Cohn ✍🏻 📢

   29 Aug, 14 tweets, 5 min read 

OMG I KNEW this critical race theory fake moral outrage reeked of Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute. Turns out I was right. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. But I didn’t know it for sure until this. 1/

The Right-Wing Political Machine Is Out to Take Over School Boards by Fanning Fears of Critical Race Theory | Right Wing Watch

The right-wing campaign to stifle teaching and discussion about racism in U.S. history and institutions is fearmongering about critical race theory to mobilize right-wing activists and conservative vo…https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-right-wing-political-machine-is-out-to-take-over-school-boards-by-fanning-fears-of-critical-race-theory/

2/ “The Leadership Institute, which has trained generations of right-wing activists, is promoting a 20-hour online course to train conservatives how to run 4 their local school boards in order to ‘stop the teaching of Critical Race Theory b4 it destroys the fabric of our nation.” 

3/ Its why I’ve tweeted so much about Morton Blackwell lately. Examples:

4/ This guy. He teaches this to his thousands of Republican minions. They are more than happy to manufacture the necessary outrage. It’s their specialty.

5/ This is Morton Blackwell too. He’s all about political technology.

6/ THIS is an example of political technology. Morton must be very proud of the monster he created. washingtonpost.com/technology/202…

7/ “An email promoting an online presentation about the Leadership Institute’s new training sessions, which begin on Aug. 9, declares that ‘conservatives are preparing a school board takeover and you can get involved.’”

The Right-Wing Political Machine Is Out to Take Over School Boards by Fanning Fears of Critical Race Theory | Right Wing Watch

The right-wing campaign to stifle teaching and discussion about racism in U.S. history and institutions is fearmongering about critical race theory to mobilize right-wing activists and conservative vo…https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-right-wing-political-machine-is-out-to-take-over-school-boards-by-fanning-fears-of-critical-race-theory/

8/ Yep. Check out their Twitter account. They are going for it alright.

9/ And they are training them young. Just like the Nazis did. This is scary stuff.

10/ “My right-wing degree
How I learned to convert liberal campuses into conservative havens at Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute, alma mater of Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Jeff Gannon and two Miss Americas.” 5/25/05

My right-wing degree

How I learned to convert liberal campuses into conservative havens at Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute, alma mater of Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Jeff Gannon and two Miss Americas.

11/ 4/10/21 https://theintercept.com/2021/04/10/campus-reform-koch-young-americans-for-freedom-leadership-institute/

A Billionaire-Funded Website With Ties to the Far Right Is Trying to “Cancel” University Professors

Campus Reform and its publisher, the Leadership Institute, are siccing armies of trolls on professors across the country.https://theintercept.com/2021/04/10/campus-reform-koch-young-americans-for-freedom-leadership-institute/

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We on the left think ourselves pretty smart. Just not smart enough to invest long-term in furthering political goals we might not see come to fruition for decades. The right’s billionaires have no problem with investing for the long term.

A very generous mother

Female chimpanzee Kitoko is currently looking after two little ones at once. When heavily pregnant, she promptly adopted the son of her sister Fifi, who was unable to look after her newborn for health reasons.

On 26 June, 28-year-old female chimpanzee Fifi gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Everything seemed to have gone well, except for the fact that Fifi handed her baby over to other members of the group unusually early. However, Fifi continued to regularly suckle the little one. After around two weeks, Fifi became weak and developed a limp in her hind legs. Although the zoo vet gave Fifi intensive care, she showed no signs of improvement. The vet could not find any cause for Fifi’s symptoms. At the end of July, the zoo keepers noticed that Kitoko, Fifi’s sister, was caring for the newborn the majority of the time and had even begun to suckle it. A few days later, Kitoko gave birth to her own baby boy, who she initially appeared to ignore. However, father Kume (18) and other members of the group insisted that Kitoko should look after the young male. Experienced mother Kitoko has been taking care of the two little ones ever since. Both are doing well and developing normally. The young female is called Sangala and Kitoko’s son is named Sabaki.

Adoption in the wild

Chimpanzees will sometimes also adopt babies in the wild. Baby chimpanzees are dependent on their mothers for the first six years of their lives. If the mothers die prematurely, the young animal’s chances of survival in the wild fall dramatically. If other members of the group adopt the orphaned little one, their chances of survival remain high.

However, orphaned offspring that are adopted are usually somewhat older than this – there are only two known instances in the wild of young aged under two being adopted. Scientific studies have shown that the chances of adoption in the wild are higher among related animals, and that adoptions by sisters of the deceased mother are particularly successful.

The fact that Sangala was adopted by Kitoko as a newborn is most likely thanks to the circumstances in the zoo. In the wild, the dying mother would have distanced herself from the group and taken her little one with her. The available resources and group dynamic at Basel Zoo enabled Kitoko to take on her sister’s baby. As Kitoko was expecting a baby of her own, she was prepared to look after the little one.

More here.