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Monthly Archives: February 2017

The Democratic Party Needs Keith Ellison


02/04/2017 11:40 am ET | Updated 20 hours ago
Richard Trumka
President, AFL-CIO

María Elena Durazo
Vice Chair, Democratic National Committee; General Vice President, UNITE HERE

The American people have faced stagnant wages and rising inequality for decades. Many Americans voted for Donald Trump or decided not to vote at all because Democrats failed to communicate effectively with working people and turn out the vote – end of story. The fact is that shouldn’t have happened. The Democratic Party has long been the Party of working people, and needs to do a better job of making that case. No one knows this better than Keith Ellison, and we are proud to endorse him as the next Chair of the Democratic National Committee.
These are extremely challenging times. President Trump has put forward a nominee for Labor Secretary who openly disdains workers. Congressional Republicans are readying plans to roll back worker protections, repeal the Affordable Care Act and end Medicare as we know it. And in state capitals across the country, the assault on workers and unions has been fierce and swift. Now more than ever, working people need public servants who will stand up and fight for better jobs, higher wages, good benefits and a voice at work.
Keith knows how to win elections, and has a track record of defeating anti-worker forces wherever they are. When Keith was first elected to Congress in 2006, his district had the lowest turnout in Minnesota. Voters just didn’t feel engaged. They didn’t feel like they mattered. Keith decided to do something about it: he organized. He knocked on as many doors as possible. With labor at his side, he talked about the issues that mattered to people. It worked. Since Keith began his grassroots voter turnout campaign, his district is the highest performing in the state. And on top of all this, he’s been getting pro-worker candidates elected from the school board to the U.S. Senate, traveling to nearly 30 states just last cycle.

When nurses went on strike to keep their health insurance, Keith was there. When communications workers went on strike to protest pension cuts, Keith was there. When hotel workers went on strike for a decent wage, Keith was there.

He hasn’t done this alone. Keith has always organized alongside working people. He’s marched on our picket lines and offered support to our members. When nurses went on strike to keep their health insurance, Keith was there. When communications workers went on strike to protest outsourcing and pension cuts, Keith was there. When hotel workers went on strike to stand up for a decent wage, Keith was there.
Each and every time, he’s pounded the pavement, not for some sort of political benefit, but to stand in solidarity with those who want a better life for ourselves and our families.
That’s who Keith is, and that’s precisely why he’s long been a friend of labor – especially in the halls of Congress. He’s voted to increase the minimum wage, advocated for better working conditions and proposed a bill to make union organizing a civil right. As Co-Chair of the Progressive Caucus, he’s used his microphone over and over again to speak up when unions or working people have come under attack. Simply put, labor has the strongest possible ally in Keith-someone whose primary focus is to create opportunity for all and grow the middle class, regardless of what you look like, where you were born, or who you are.
And now that he’s running for DNC Chair, he’s not wavering in his commitment to us—not one bit. He understands that many working people voted for Donald Trump because the Democratic Party didn’t make a compelling enough case. He understands we are hungry for political leaders that listen to us and work with us, and that labor’s agenda will always lead our politics, not the other way around. With Keith at the helm of one of America’s two major political parties, working people will be in a much better position to have our issues advanced and our concerns heard.
Both of us have been a part of the labor movement for decades, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. But we’re not in the business of mincing words. Tough days lie ahead for working people. And so, it is more important than ever that we have a leader who will stand up, fight, organize and win.
There is no doubt in our minds: Keith Ellison is the person for the job. He has our strong support. We encourage you to give him yours, as well.
Richard Trumka is president of the 12.5 million member AFL-CIO, America’s labor federation.. Maria Elena Durazo is a Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee, and a General Vice President of UNITE HERE.
Follow Richard Trumka on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/RichardTrumka
Follow María Elena Durazo on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/@LALabor
More: Dnc Democratic Party Keith Ellison

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Mitch McConnell Sees ‘High Level of Satisfaction’ With Trump Administration


I am wondering what Mr. McConnell is drinking or smoking ?MA.

WASHINGTON — While there is plenty of anxiety in Washington about the shaky early performance of the Trump administration, don’t count Senator Mitch McConnell among the hand wringers.
Mr. McConnell, a Kentucky Republican and the majority leader, says he and his Senate Republican colleagues are quite satisfied with the Trump team so far. In fact, he said, they are reassured by signs that President Trump is going to hew to a conservative agenda after early fears that the president — a relatively unknown quantity to most elected Republicans — might not really be one of them.
“The country doesn’t need saving,” Mr. McConnell said when asked during an interview in his Capitol office if there was any cause for a senior-level congressional intervention given early chaos in the evolving West Wing.
“I think there is a high level of satisfaction with the new administration,” he said, dismissing concerns about dissonant eruptions from the new president and some of his top staff members. “Our members are not obsessed with the daily tweets, but are looking at the results.”

He added: “No matter what sort of theatrics that go on around the administration, if you look at the decisions that are being made, they are solid — from our perspective — right-of-center things that we would have hoped a new Republican president would have done.”
Mr. McConnell has broken with the president on a few subjects, taking a much harder line against President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia than Mr. Trump has and objecting to some of the president’s “drain the swamp” initiatives, including a proposal for congressional term limits.
Other members of the Republican establishment — inside and outside Congress — have expressed growing alarm about the conduct and competence of the White House. But Mr. McConnell said things might even be turning out better than anticipated.
“Back during the campaign, there were a lot of questions: Is Trump really a conservative? A lot of questions about it,” Mr. McConnell recalled. “But if you look at the steps that have been taken so far, looks good to me.
“It is the kind of thing we would have expected of one of the others, had they been nominated and elected,” Mr. McConnell said, referring to Republican presidential candidates defeated by Mr. Trump who had more conventional political and government backgrounds.
Mr. McConnell’s view clashes violently with that of Senate Democrats and their allies around the country. They have viewed the beginning of the Trump era as a disaster best exemplified by an immigration executive order they decry as unconstitutional and un-American, as well as a selection of cabinet choices they rate as unqualified and carrying the very same baggage that has prevented others from being confirmed in the past.
Even some Republicans have criticized as inept and amateurish the rollout of the immigration order, which is now at the center of a federal court fight. Others have expressed trepidation at the prospect of being hammered in a Trump tweet if they run afoul of the new president.
Mr. McConnell, who is known for being able to take the temperature of his colleagues and to act accordingly, said he sensed no real unease about Mr. Trump on the Republican side of the aisle.
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“We have had very good unity on our side,” Mr. McConnell said. “People are genuinely excited about taking the country in another direction. I don’t find any decision that he has made surprising.”
He said Senate Republicans had been enthusiastic about Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees, dazzled by his Supreme Court pick and elated at the chance to roll back what he called the regulatory rampage of the Obama administration
“A lot of us were wondering, what is Trump really going to be like?” Mr. McConnell said. “He used to support Democrats and have various views earlier in his life about politics. But when he got to the point of actually having the office and making the decisions, I think the decisions have been very comforting to my members, most of whom are a little bit right of center and further right of center.”
It goes without saying that having Mr. Trump in the White House gives House and Senate Republicans the opportunity to pursue an aggressive legislative agenda if they can find common ground. That prospect should be heightened by installing colleagues like Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama and two fellow Republicans, Representatives Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina and Tom Price of Georgia, at the highest levels of the administration. Mr. Sessions is Mr. Trump’s nominee for attorney general while Mr. Mulvaney has been tapped to run the White House Office of Management and Budget and Mr. Price to head the Department of Health and Human Services.
Mr. McConnell looms as potentially the president’s most important ally in Congress because success in the Senate is central to any legislative victory.
But Republicans have not even started on the legislative end of the new Congress. Now their job is going to be made more difficult by the increasingly hard line that Democrats are taking against Mr. Trump by opposing his cabinet nominees en masse. Mr. McConnell’s frustration at Democratic tactics boiled over Tuesday evening when he invoked a rarely used Senate rule to force Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, to end a speech on the grounds she was impugning the integrity of Mr. Sessions, a fellow senator, by criticizing his record on civil rights.
“It is a superficially poisonous atmosphere, not a fundamentally poisonous atmosphere,” Mr. McConnell said.
Still, he noted that Republicans could do much of their preliminary work in the Senate just by relying on their party’s 51 votes there as they take up health care, tax changes and nominations, and could try to work out the differences with Democrats later.
“Sooner or later we will get around to things that will require some level of cooperation,” Mr. McConnell said. “Hopefully there will be a kind of dysfunction fatigue. I think it will set in way before then.”
His point raises a question: Will that same passage of time produce a kind of Trump fatigue among the now-satisfied congressional Republicans?

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And We Don’t Digress!


The next several years will provide political and humorous fodder which will emanate from Washington D.C. and the Whitehouse at least for the next few years. The staffing of the Whitehouse seems to have at least 1 prerequisite: the ability to lie deny and backtrack with no shame. The information staff of the Whitehouse apparently are just glad to be there. This is possibly the largest staff of prevaricators since the Nixon Whitehouse. It has always been the job of chief information folks to put forth the President’s words correctly and honestly. It seems that this group got both of them right. TOTUS is uncontrollable in his outbursts (much like a bratty child) so his mouthpieces espouse the same insanity without such much as blink. That is pretty much like acting (but not entertaining or informative) except for the damage their “talks” create. Speaking in superlatives does not translate into actions. It is apparent that the President and his  minions think that superlatives are the same as actions. This is similar to the some members of Congress citing “The American People” as reasons for doing harm to those same American people. Each day there is new evidence that we are in the hands of a certifiable  amoral miscreant aided by an errant political party. Our duty as voters is simply to look beyond the talking and understand  what these Government pimps are doing to us in our names and feeding it to us like poisoned Kool aid.

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Silencing Elizabeth Warren backfires on Senate GOP


The Beat Goes On!! Our current Congress again shows how un-American they are ( or are they?). In my opinion this is one  of if not the worst Congress we have had in years. This particular Congress has shown that they are incapable of doing the job they campaigned on and have further moved us back 20 years. This TOTUS will soon prove to be the undoing of the GOP along with their anti-American activities. If as a voter you think we will be OK, think again. This administration has the potential to out us in more danger than any previous and the GOP is determined to install poor choices for his cabinet. I have reproduced the letter below this post. MA.

Washington (CNN)The Senate has silenced Elizabeth Warren.
And by doing so, majority Republicans just handed the liberal firebrand a megaphone — further elevating President Donald Trump’s fiercest and most prominent critic in the Senate and turning her into a Democratic hero.
The rebuke of Warren came after the Massachusetts Democrat read a letter written 30 years ago by Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., opposing the nomination of Jeff Sessions for a federal judgeship.

#LetLizSpeak: ‘She persisted’ becomes rallying cry for Warren supporters
Warren cited the letter during a debate on the nomination of Sessions — now an Alabama senator — as Donald Trump’s attorney general. Reading from King’s letter to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986, Warren said: “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge.”
Republicans cried foul — charging that Warren violated Senate rules against impugning another senator. A vote along party lines upheld that decision, turning what could have been an ordinary late-night partisan floor speech for political devotees into a national story.
“They can shut me up, but they can’t change the truth,” Warren later told CNN’s Don Lemon.
Warren is now forbidden from participating in the floor debate over Sessions’ nomination ahead of a confirmation vote expected Wednesday.
“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said on the Senate floor.
The line was an instant classic — the kind liberals imagine being replayed ad nauseum in TV ads in a future presidential campaign.

Elizabeth Warren set to release book taking on Trump
It couldn’t have come at a better time for Warren, who is up for re-election in 2018. On Tuesday, she announced she hired an aide who is an expert on national security, a move that could help burnish her expertise in that area, as well as the publication of a new book, which will become available in April.
Liberals had been frustrated with Warren’s vote in committee in favor of Ben Carson, Trump’s nominee for secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Coretta Scott King letter Elizabeth Warren was trying to read
No more.
By Tuesday night, the hashtag #LetLizSpeak was trending on Twitter.
Warren used Twitter to attack Sessions and McConnell.
“I will not be silent about a nominee for AG who has made derogatory & racist comments that have no place in our justice system,” she wrote.
In a follow-up tweet, she said: “I will not be silent while the Republicans rubber stamp an AG who will never stand up to the @POTUS when he breaks the law.”
And then: “Tonight @SenateMajLdr silenced Mrs. King’s voice on the Sen floor – & millions who are afraid & appalled by what’s happening in our country.”

President Trump and the end of the American Century


Matt Bai
National Political Columnist
Yahoo News January 19, 2017

It’s inauguration week just as the Framers must have imagined it: citizenry streaming into the capital from every state to celebrate the most sober and symbolic moment in the democracy, even as the soon-to-be president tears into an American hero, fends off criticism from allies, deflects a sexual harassment suit and wails that his public approval ratings are rigged.
This is how the Trump presidency begins, and the American Century ends.
I don’t say this in a way that’s gloomy or hysterical; don’t count me among those who assume the nation is headed off a cliff. (Count me, instead, among those who think the odds of us doing all this again in three years or less are about 50-50.)
I’m only saying that political epochs, like the one into which every one of us was born, have demarcation points that can only be clearly seen in retrospect. And we’re living through one right now.
Any calendar will tell you, for instance, that the 19th century ended in 1901, the year President McKinley was assassinated and Teddy Roosevelt took his place. But most historians would argue that, for any practical purpose, the previous century of British dominance — Pax Britannica and all that — really saw the curtain fall in 1914, at the onset of the First World War.
The empire would hold together for another 30 years after that, give or take, but beginning with the campaign against Germany and its allies, the orchestra was playing Britain off-center stage. The costs of planetary preeminence, already a burden in peace, were unsustainable in war.
The 20th century as we think of it probably began about 30 years later, after Franklin Roosevelt solidified American dominance over the western half of a globe riven by ideology. From then on, Washington was at the epicenter of world events, the seat of unrivaled might among free nations.
America was the most expansive country in the world, but whereas Britain had chiefly expanded its physical domain, we expanded our standard of living at a staggering rate. We expanded our markets to much of the world, education to all reaches of the country and — at long last — civil rights to the citizenry.
We expanded the cultural reach of America — movies and sitcoms, soft drinks and sports teams, transcendent celebrity and defiant individualism — to every hamlet on earth where you could string an electrical wire.
But just as the British Empire strained to maintain its momentum in the decades leading up to World War I, so too did our vast expansion run up against the boundaries of time and technology.
Globalism, made possible by cheaper technologies and transportation, gave rise to competitors, even as automation made our own workers redundant. Factory towns cratered. The price of maintaining global hegemony, both in lives and in credit, became harder to justify.
Government continued to grow, but now so did the chasm between the rich and everyone else.
Still, well into the 21st century, the nation’s political establishment clung tenaciously to this ideal of an essential, expansive America. It was at the heart of George W. Bush’s calamitous adventure in Iraq and of his party’s bid to create a new federal program for prescription drugs. It was the vision behind Barack Obama’s health care plan, his pact with Iran and his failed effort to forge a new market in Asia.
And it’s precisely what Donald Trump’s election repudiates.
Trump has said all kinds of conflicting things about almost everything; I expect he’ll contradict himself a half dozen times on the Capitol steps alone. But in this one respect he has been faithful: He believes the time has come for withdrawal and isolation, rather than expansion and globalism.
Trump rejects free trade. He rejects our disproportionate role in the military defense of Europe and the West. He rejects the diversifying of our culture and the opening of our borders.
He embraces the kind of tariffs that were once thought the relic of an old international system. He would cede the shaping of markets to a Chinese leadership that now, improbably, seems to be the world’s largest cheerleader for trade. He imagines profound beauty in a wall.
Ronald Reagan, to whom Trump would like to compare himself, defied his critics by reaffirming our global ambition to enemies abroad. Trump launches his presidency by telling our allies we’ve had enough.
His antipathy toward the political establishment is an antipathy toward globalism itself. His ambition is personal, not national. His promise to make America great is a promise only to a subset of Americans to whom modernity has been callous.
It is a vision that resonates widely. In fact, it is the only aspect of Trump that does.
A poll by the Washington Post and ABC News this week found that Trump arrives in Washington with the lowest approval rating of any president-elect in 40 years — about half as much support as Obama had at the same time in 2009. Remarkably, though, Trump inspires enviable confidence when it comes to creating jobs and stopping terrorism.
Americans may not countenance a literal wall, but they see promise in the idea of hunkering down for a while, of trying to do a little less abroad and at home.
You can say this is only a momentary digression. You can imagine that Trump represents a kind of national catharsis, after which we will get ourselves together and continue on with the sober business of statecraft and global leadership.
But here’s the thing: Once you leave a vacuum, it’s not so easy to step back in and say you were only messing around. Economic rules get written. Rising powers exploit the moment. The world looks elsewhere for predictability.
This is what Vladimir Putin understands, by the way. This is why he loves Trumpism. Russians are nothing if not patient, and they’ve been waiting about 75 years for this moment. Even as Trump prepares to place his hand on a Bible, the world is shucking its reverence for American democracy, aghast at our penchant for triviality. When I was in Australia last summer, when Trump was just a nominee, the comment I heard again and again from the political elite was some version of: What exactly do you people think you’re doing? Do you not get how much the world relies on your stability? Yes, we get it. And apparently we’re tired of it. No offense, but we’re all expanded out over here.
Of course America can still be great in the decades ahead. (And yes, Mr. President-elect, it is.) We’re bound by demographics to become a more diverse, more enlightened country, not less so. We remain the world’s leading exporter of culture and consumerism. We’re awash in technological talent, and we command more military machinery than any nation in history.
But like the British before us, we’re increasingly reconciled to being one power among many — to act modestly on our own behalf, rather than grandly in the service of what Joe Biden, speaking at Davos this week, called the “liberal international world order.”
The vastness of America’s vision gives way now to the smallness of Trump’s appeal. The American Century recedes, 140 characters at a time.

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Beseiged BY The Snollygosters


The new administration has not and possibly will not solve the disconnect between our Congress and their constituents. After years of bafflegab and politispeak many people still do not know that the ACA that they enjoy is the same as the Obamacare that they hate and the Congress is working to repeal and replace. Aside from that issue (among others) we are overlooking the wholesale takeover of Congress by people who do not have the welfare of anyone in their minds. Forget about party’s and look at the individuals! There are members of Congress who want to trash Social security (the savings you worked for all of your life) stating that is “broke and under funded”. This is  just an out-and-out lie. Social security is doing fine. These naysayers are attempting to put OUR money into some dubious private agency for administration. To recap: Congress member pull an average annual salary of about $170,00. and will receive about $70,000  in retirement, then social security later along with a premium healthcare plan forever.  All of these perks were put in place by the Congress without our (the American People) input. Keep in mind that the Congress appears to be composed of finger pointers and rumor mongers who in their infinite dysfunction have consistently under served “the American People” they so loudly proclaim to represent. I am not singling out any party since neither side has a stellar record in representing anyone other than themselves. There was a quote by someone who stated” you can tell they are lying because their mouth is moving” or something similar. I stand by  my assertion that the Congress is the government entity we need to pay close attention to not the Commander In Chief (sometimes he merely an instrument of obstruction).

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We’re probably underestimating how quickly electric vehicles will disrupt the oil market


 David Roberts

1 day ago

Seba says electric vehicles will be cheaper than regular cars, unpredictably rapid growth happens pretty predictably. 

Just about every analyst agrees that the electric vehicle market is poised for rapid growth. But how rapid?

It’s not an idle question. The rate of EV growth will have huge implications for oil markets, auto markets, and electric utilities. Yet it is maddeningly difficult to predict the future; forecasts for the EV market are all over the place.I don’t think the wide range of projections means that we’re blind here, though — I think we can make educated guesses. Specifically, I think history justifies optimism, the belief that the high-end projections (like those in a new study I discuss below) are closer to the truth.

Let’s walk through it.

EVs could do serious damage to oil — or not much

Transportation accounts for a huge portion of US carbon emissions. As recently as 2014, it was behind the electricity sector — 26 percent of US emissions to electricity’s 30 percent. But as Vox has reported, and the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) just confirmed, as of 2016, they have crossed paths. “Electric power sector CO2 emissions,” EIA writes, “are now regularly below transportation sector CO2 emissions for the first time since the late 1970s.”

This is happening because power sector “carbon intensity” — carbon emissions per unit of energy produced — is falling, as coal is replaced with natural gas, renewables, and efficiency.

The only realistic prospect for reducing transportation sector emissions rapidly and substantially is electrification. How much market share EVs take from oil (gasoline is by far the most common use for oil in the US) will matter a great deal.

However, as Rice University’s Dan Cohan explains in The Hill, EV forecasts are all over the map.

The EIA’s “Annual Energy Outlook 2017” is much more bullish about EVs than in previous years — its forecast for the EV market is “nearly double its forecast from last year, and nearly 10 times its forecast from 2014.” It no longer thinks hybrids or plug-in hybrids will play a major role. It believes EVs are ready.

However, even with that boost, EIA has EVs at 8 percent of US market share in 2025 (it’s 1 percent today), plateauing there as US mileage standards stop falling. The other big, influential forecast, BP’s 2017 Energy Outlook, has EVs at just 6 percent of global market share by 2035.

“Overall,” BP writes, “the increase in demand for car travel from the growing middle class in emerging economies overpowers the effects of improving fuel efficiency and electrification, such that liquid fuel demand for cars rises by 4 [million barrels a day through 2040] — around a quarter of the total growth over the Outlook.”

That is … something short of revolutionary.

As Cohan notes, however, others are more optimistic:

Bloomberg New Energy Finance expects electric vehicles to represent 35 percent of new car sales globally by 2040. Greentech Media Research expects 11.4 million electric vehicles on the road in the U.S. in 2025, compared to 7.5 million in the EIA’s latest Outlook.

Projections for EV growth feed into projections for oil demand. EIA, IEA, and BP expect demand for oil to continue rising into the 2040s and even beyond.

On the other hand, Michael Liebreich, the head of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, expects oil demand to peak in 2025. The CFO of Royal Dutch Shell agrees — he said the company expects it to peak within five to 15 years. The World Energy Council predicts peak demand in 2030.

Into this milieu comes a big new study that claims all those previous projections are hopelessly pessimistic.

New study says oil and coal are in trouble

Today saw the release of a new study from the Grantham Institute for Imperial College London and the Carbon Tracker Initiative. It argues that solar photovoltaics (PV) and EVs together will overtake fossil fuels, quickly. “Falling costs of electric vehicle and solar technology,” they conclude, “could halt growth in global demand for oil and coal from 2020.” That would be a pretty big deal.

The “business as usual” (BAU) scenarios that typically dominate these discussions are outdated, the researchers argue. New baseline scenarios should take into account updated information on PV, EV, and battery costs. (The EIA doesn’t expect inflation-adjusted prices of EVs to fall to $30,000 until 2030, even as multiple automakers say they’ll hit that within a few years.)

And baseline scenarios should take into account the commitments made in the Paris climate agreement, they say.

(All the data and assumptions are available along with the study, and there is an interactive dashboard that allows you to fiddle around with scenario results, if you want to dig in.)

Using that new baseline produces some pretty eye-popping numbers. To wit: “EVs could make up a third of the road transport market by 2035, more than half the market by 2040, and more than two thirds of market share by 2050.” And also: “Oil demand could be flat from 2020 to 2030 then fall steadily to 2050.”

Again, that would be a very big deal! Most big forecasters, and big energy companies, expect coal to rise at least through 2030 and oil to rise basically forever.

These new scenarios do not reflect hippie idealism, they just take seriously a) the cost curves demonstrated by PV, EVs, and batteries so far, and b) what countries said they would do in Paris. They assume that all this talk about climate change is not a bunch of BS — that it’s a real problem and we’re really going to try to solve it. (Admittedly, Trump has complicated that picture, but he can’t stop the rest of the world.)

If these forecasts play out, fossil fuels could lose 10 percent market share to PV and EVs within a decade. A 10 percent loss in market share was enough to send the US coal industry spiraling, enough to cause Europe’s utilities to hemorrhage money. It could seriously disrupt life for the oil majors. “Growth in EVs alone could lead to 2 million barrels of oil per day being displaced by 2025,” the study says, “the same volume that caused the oil price collapse in 2014-15.”Yet, according to the study’s authors, virtually none of big fossil fuel companies are taking the possibility seriously, or planning for it.

 

So EV forecasts range from modest to revolutionary. What should we make of this?

It seems to me that we don’t come to these questions with a clean slate. The very kind of models this study critiques are the ones that have consistently underestimated the growth of solar and wind. They use baseline scenarios that assume no further cost and policy changes when, in reality, cost and policy changes are both rapid and inevitable.Multiple drivers (pardon the pun) are lining up behind EVs — rapidly falling battery costs, rising range, synergy with other new energy technologies, widespread international policy support, growing consumer interest, and (my pet dark horse) wireless EV charging. Experience shows that markets at the center of this kind of interest and activity do not continue to grow on a steady, linear path. They take off, lurching into exponential growth. That shift is impossible to predict in advance with any precision, but at this point, we ought to know that it’s coming.By now, we need not be neutral toward this range of projections. History has taught us that for new, distributed, consumer-focused technologies, unexpected explosive growth is … to be expected. Big oil companies and investors would do well to prepare.

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Which Name? Trumpism Or Bannonism?

In the 1950’s Senator Joseph McCarthy went on a “witch hunt’ for communists, in the process he ruined many lives and in the end was proven to be a purveyor of unproven lies and innuendo (sound familiar?). We now have a similar situation which we can call by several names: Trumpism, Bannonism,Trumpedation or just Racism. I have posted below a short history of McCarthyism during the 50’s in the hope that it explains what could be coming down the road at us. Communism does exist and we all know it, it also has an existence here and around the world in one form or another. We must remember American style freedom has a worldwide existence too along with many variations according to the culture where it exists. In our current history we have a President who mirrors McCarthy through the influence of others (his Staff) or through a need for recognition as a celebrity  or a bully, its hard to be sure which. Given Mr. McCarthy’s meltdown and end, we are not sure how Mr. Bannon  (or Trump) may end.MA

McCarthyism, named after Joseph McCarthy, was a period of intense anti-communism, also known as the red scare, which occurred in the United States from 1948 to about 1956 (or later), when the government of the United States actively persecuted the Communist Party USA, its leadership, and others suspected of being communists. Loyalty tests were required for government and other employment and lists of subversive organizations were maintained.

The word “McCarthyism” is not a neutral term, but now carries connotations of false, even hysterical, accusation, and of government attacks on the political minority. From the viewpoint of the political and cultural elite, the suppression of radicalism and radical organizations in the United States was a struggle against a dangerous subversive element controlled by a foreign power that posed a real danger to the security of the country, thus justifying extreme, even extra-legal measures. From the radical viewpoint it can be seen as class warfare. From the viewpoint of the thousands of innocents who were caught up in the conflict it was a massive violation of civil and Constitutional rights.

One of the tools used was the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 which required Communists and Communist organizations to register with the federal government. The McCarran Act was gradually ruled unconstitutional in a series of Supreme Court decisions, beginning in 1964, and it was completely repealed in 1990. Another was the Smith Act of 1940, a federal criminal statute outlawing “advocacy of violent overthrow of the government.”

Under the Smith Act, the leadership of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party were prosecuted, as was the leader of the Communist Party, Eugene Dennis, and eleven members of the party’s National Committee. Since CPUSA had not explicitly advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, the prosecution was on somewhat shaky ground, and based its case against the party’s leaders on Communist works of literature they possessed. Instead of arguing this legal technicality, the CPUSA leadership denounced the law under which they were tried itself, a defense which failed. Others who were tried under the Smith Act in later years successfully based their defences on more technical grounds. The Smith Act was declared unconstitutional in its full form by the Supreme Court in 1957, and limited to much more specific offences.

Another major element of McCarthyism was the internal screening program on federal government employees, conducted by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. This comprehensive program vetted all federal government employees for Communist connections, and employed evidence provided by anonymous sources whom the subjects of investigation were not allowed to challenge or identify. From 1951, the program’s required level of proof for dismissing a federal employee was for “reasonable doubt” to exist over their loyalty; previously it had required “reasonable grounds” for believing them to be disloyal.

The hearings conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy gave the red scare the name which is in common usage, but the red scare predated McCarthy’s meteoric rise to prominence in 1950 and continued after he was discredited by a Senate censure in 1954, following his disastrous investigation into the U.S. Army which started on April 22 of that year. McCarthy’s name became associated with the phenomenon mainly through his prominence in the media; his outspoken and unpredictable nature made him ideal as the figurehead of anti-communism, although he was probably not its most important practitioner.

McCarthy headed the Permanent Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations; other significant legislative committees were the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), officially called the United States House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities, and the Senate equivalent, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. These committees independently investigated specific individuals and made allegations that many were communists. They had no official power of punishment, but those named as communists or communist sympathisers by the various committees often found themselves fired from their jobs and sometimes ostracised from society. These committees often received information on suspected communists and communist sympathisers from the FBI, which found them useful to attack suspects against which it did not have enough evidence to push for a criminal prosecution. These national committees were imitated by committees within state and even local government; these committees, sometimes known as ‘little HUACs’, were however generally less effective than the national committees.

Charlie Chaplin was one person accused of un-American activities, and the FBI was involved in arranging to have his re-entry visa cancelled when he left the States for a trip to Europe in 1952. In effect, his film career was over despite not being found guilty of any offence. Walt Disney worked closely with the FBI at this time also, chiefly by way of giving inside information from the film industry, but himself came under suspicion at one stage. Some people feel he used these alleged powers to denounce people who may have been a commercial threat to his operations.

The most publicly visible elements of McCarthyism were the trials of those accused of being communist agents within the government. The two most famous trials were those of Alger Hiss (whose trial actually began before McCarthy started brandishing his lists, and who was not in fact convicted directly of espionage, but of perjury) and of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Such trials typically relied on information from informers, such as Whittaker Chambers (whose testimony led to the downfall of Hiss) and the three men whose confessions and testimony were vital to the Rosenberg trial, Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold and David Greengrass. It was revealed in the 1990s that the government had been relying on access to secret Soviet communications that showed that all of these, Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Klaus Fuchs, and many others, including Harry Dexter White, U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, were in fact paid agents of the Soviet Union. These communications are known collectively as the Venona papers.

The Rosenbergs were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1951 and executed in 1953. Hiss was convicted in 1950 of perjury for denying on oath that he had passed documents to the Soviet Union while working for the State Department in the 1930s, and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. Both cases have aroused considerable controversy down the years and remain debated in the present day, and have to some extent been revitalised by the opening of much of the Soviet archives in the early 1990s. This provided new evidence on all these cases, but the Venona evidence is still disputed by partisans.

The red scare affected many people in Hollywood, resulting in arrests of various figures in the film industry. Many were also “blacklisted”, meaning that they were unable to work in the film industry (although some screenwriters were able to work under pseudonyms).

McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade faltered in 1954 as his hearings were televised, for the first time, allowing the public and press to view firsthand his bullying tactics. The press also started to run stories about how McCarthy ruined many people’s lives with accusations that were not supported by any evidence in some cases. Famously, he was asked by the chief attorney of the Army, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” McCarthy suffered a backlash in public opinion and was investigated and then censured by the Senate for not cooperating with the investigating committee, and for publicly calling them the “involuntary agent” and the “attorneys-in-fact” of the Communist Party. After the censure, McCarthy lost his other committee chairmanship, and reporters stopped filing stories about his claims of continuing communist conspiracies. He faded from the spotlight overnight. McCarthy died in office of hepatitis, probably caused by alcoholism, in 1957.

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Why So Many People Loathe Congress


This column for Mr. Hightower supports my statements about paying attention to Congress rather than the big elections, too many of forget that Congress enacted a law that they receives a cost of living increase each year so they do not have to publicly talk about it and at the same time keep that information from us the taxpayers who pay them.MA

Jim Hightower
Uncle Sam wants you. Not the symbolic Uncle Sam, but Sam Johnson. Although he’s been a member of Congress more than a quarter of a century, it’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of him. He’s a lawmaker who holds a congressional set but just sits in it, achieving so little that he’s unnoticeable. But Look out, Johnson has suddenly leapt into action, and we all need to take notice, because this Texas Republican has unveiled what he calls his “plan to permanently Save Social Security.” To get you to support the plan, Uncle Sam wants you to believe that this successful and very popular retirement program is “going bankrupt”. He knows that’s a lie, but he hopes it’s a big enough lie to panic you into doing anything to save the program. Then, to make his particular plan easy to swallow, he coats it with another lie, claiming that he’s merely “modernizing, updating and ensuring” the benefits and solvency of Social Security, which a big majority of Americans count on to avoid living out their golden years in stark poverty. In fact, conniving old Uncle Sam’s plan is to “save” Social security by gutting it. The congressman’s press release announcing his “reform act” doesn’t even mention the key fact that it’s entirely a scam, based o making worker keep paying the same 12.4 percent tax on their wages but getting drastically less paid back to them when they retire. How much less? It would range from about 20 percent less to 69 percent less, adding up to a total cut of 11.6 trillion in promised benefits to America’s workers.
It was bad enough that a so-called public servant would slap the middle class with such a raw deal, but worse that he tries to do it so dishonestly. Maybe he just doesn’t care – after all, having been a congress critter for 28 years, not only can Johnson draw a big social security check, but he can also get more than $70,000 a year from his congressional pension. What a deal. For Uncle Sam that is. For nearly half a century now, America’s middle class working families have been pummeled by corporate greedmeisters and their political henchmen. Haven’t they been punished enough?
No, says House Speaker Paul Ryan. Along with Uncle Sam and other top Republican leaders of Congress. Ryan intends to slash the little bit of retirement that middle class and low income workers depend on. And ultimately, Speaker Ryan is out to kill our social security program altogether, piously preaching that dependence on such public “entitlements” weakens our nation’s morality. Entitlements? Social Security isn’t a welfare program-regular working people pay a large percentage on every dime of their wages into the Social Security pension fund year after year. They earn their retirement. Morality? Social Security embodies America’s core moral value of fairness and our society’s commitment to the common good. And it works- before it was enacted, half of all American’s spent their “Golden Years” in poverty. Social Security has saved the great majority of us from old age penury. Where is the morality I taking this earned retirement and modicum of dignity from millions?
Besides a sermon on the morality of entitlements should never come from a Congress Critter’s mouth. Speaker Ryan himself wallows in a mud pit of Congressional entitlements that working stiffs couldn’t imagine: A $223.500 annual paycheck, free limousine and chauffeur, a maximum-coverage health plan, a tax-paid PR agent, lavish expense account, free travel… and, of course a platinum level congressional retirement program funded by the very taxpayers who’s Social Security he’s out to kill. Yet Ryan wonders why Congress’ public approval rating is plummeting toward single digits.

Jim Hightower is a National radio commentator and author

Not My Intention, But!!!!!


I is and was not my intention to spend much of my time on the TOTUS (DOTUS) however the issuances from the White House are coming too fast. The recent immigration ban, the installation of a right wing racist above the  seasoned military of the Joint chiefs, the selection of a trio of advisors who can hardly put together a coherent sentence. Those items being said, we are heading for a potential 4 year headache of epic proportion . We can expect little to no help from the Neer Do Wells in Congress since aside from a few have been waking around with their heads up the chute for years. Since the election of the “Boy I Wonder”, the Alt Right thinks they are! The backers of Trumps (voters) at least some of them are experiencing voters remorse and it will get worse as the years go by. The correct action is as follows:

  1. do not re elect the same Congress people.
  2. Do your homework-find out what the truth is not what the candidates tell you.
  3. Get your ass out and vote
  4. Understand that this is America and immigrants started this country so we are all the result of immigration forced or otherwise!   Remember if you stand for nothing you will fall for anything.

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