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alexsmitposts · 4 years ago

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The Insanity of Sustainability “Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War” – Plato. This wisdom is as valid today as it was 2,500 years ago. Wars go on and on. They are exactly the anti-dote of sustainability. They may be the only “sustainability” modern mankind knows – endless destruction, killing, shameless exploitation of Mother Earth and its sentient beings, including humans. Yes, we are hellbent towards “sustainably”, destroying our planet and all its living beings, with wars and conflicts and shameless exploitation of Mother Earth – and the people who have peacefully inhabited her lands for thousands of years. All for greed, and more greed. Greed and destruction are certainly “unsustainable” features of our western “civilization”. Not to worry, in the grand scheme of things, Mother Earth will survive. She will cleanse herself by shaking and shedding off the destroyers, the annihilators – mankind. Only the brave will survive. Indigenous people, who have abstained from abject consumerism and instead worshipped Mother Earth and expressed their gratitude to her daily gifts. There are not many such societies left on our planet. In the meantime, we lie about the sustainability we live in. We lie to ourselves and to the public at large around us. We make believe sustainability is our cause – and we use the term freely and constantly. Most of us don’t even know what it is supposed to mean. “Sustainability” and “sustainable” anything and everything have become slogans; or household words. Such buzz-words, repeated over and over again, are made for promoting ideas, and for bending people’s minds to believe in something that isn’t. We pretend and say that we work sustainably, we develop – just about anything we touch – sustainably, and we project the future in a most sustainable way. That’s what we are made to believe by those who coined this most fabulously clever, but untrue term. It is the 101 of a psycho-factory. As Voltaire so pointedly said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities; can make you commit atrocities.” Sustainability. What does it mean? It has about as many interpretations as there are people who use the term – namely none specific. It sounds good. Because it has become – well, a household word, ever since the World Bank invented, or rather diverted the term for “sustainable development” in the 1990s, in connection, first, with Global Warming, then with Climate Change – and now back to both. Imagine! – There was a time at the World Bank – and possibly other institutions, when every page of almost every report had to contain at least once the word “sustainable”, or “sustainability”. Yes, that’s the extent of insanity propagated then – and today, it follows on a global scale, more sophisticated – the corporate world, the mega-polluters make it their buzz-word – our business is sustainable, and we with our products promote sustainability – worldwide. In fact, sustainable, sustainable growth, sustainable development, sustainable this and sustainable that – was originally coined by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, the Rio Summit, the Rio Conference, and the Earth Summit – held in Rio de Janeiro from 3 to 14 June in 1992. The summit is intimately linked to the subsequent drive on Global Warming and Climate Change. It exuded projections of sea level risings, of disappearing cities and land strips, like Florida and New York City, as well as parts of California and many coastal areas and towns in Africa and Asia. It painted endless disasters, droughts, floods and famine as their consequence, if we – mankind – didn’t act. This first of a series of UN environment / climate summits is also closely connected with the UN Agendas 2021 and 2030. The UN Agenda 2030 incorporates or uses as main vehicle – the 17 “Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)”. In a special UN Conference in 2016, Bill Gates was able to introduce into the 16th SDG “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”, the 9th of the 12 sub-targets – “By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.” This is precisely what Bill Gates needs to introduce digital IDs – most likely injected via vaccines, beginning with children from developing countries – i.e. the poor and defenseless are time and again used as guinea pigs. They won’t know what happens to them. First trials are underway in one or several rural schools in Bangladesh – see this and this. These 17 sustainable development goals, are all driving towards a Green Agenda, or as some prominent “left” US Democrat-political figures call it, the New Green Deal. It is nothing else but capitalism painted Green, at a horrendous cost for mankind and for the resources of the world. But it is sold under the label of creating a more sustainable world. Never mind, the enormous amounts of hydrocarbons – the key polluter itself – that will be needed to convert our “black” economy into a Green economy. Simply because we have not developed effective and efficient alternative sources of energy. The main reasons for this are the strong and politically powerful hydrocarbon lobbies. The energy cost (hydrocarbon-energy from oil and coal) of producing solar panels and windmills is astounding. So, today’s electric cars – Tesla and Co. – are still driven by hydrocarbon produced electricity – plus their batteries made from lithium destroy pristine landscapes, like huge natural salt flats in Bolivia, Argentina, China and elsewhere. The use of these sources of energy is everything but “sustainable”. See also Michael Moore’s film“Planet of the Humans”. Hydrogen power is promoted as the panacea of future energy resources. But is it really? Hydrocarbons or fossil fuels today amount to 80% of all energy used worldwide. This is non-renewable and highly polluting energy. Today to produce hydrogen is still mostly dependent on fossil fuels, similar to electricity. As long as we have purely profit-fueled hydrocarbon lobbies that prevent governments collectively to invest in alternative energy research, like solar energy of the 2nd Generation, i.e. derived from photosynthesis (what plants do), hydrogen production uses more fossil fuels than using straight gas or petrol-derived fuels. Therefore hydrogen, say a hydrogen-driven car, maybe as much as 40% – 50% less efficient than would be a straight electric car. The burden on the environment can be considerably higher. Thus, not sustainable with today’s technology. To enhance your belief their slogans of “sustainability”, they put up some windmills or solar cells in the “backyard” of their land- and landscape devastating coal mines. They will be filmed along with their “sustainable” buzz-words. *** The World Economic Forum (WEF) and the IMF are fully committed to the idea of the New Green Deal. For them it is not unfettered neoliberal capitalism – and extreme consumerism emanating from it, that is the cause for the world’s environmental and societal breakdown, but the use of polluting energies, like hydrocarbons. They seem to ignore the enormous fossil fuel use to convert to a green energy-driven economy. Capitalism is OK, we just have to paint it green (take a look at this). *** Let’s look at what else is “sustainable”- or not. Water use and privatization – Coca Cola tells us their addictive and potentially diabetes-causing soft drinks are produced “sustainably”. They tout sustainability as their sales promotion all over the world. They use enormous amounts of pristine clean drinking water – and so does Nestlé to further promote its number One business branch, bottled water. Nestlé has overtaken Coca Cola as the world number One in bottled water. They both use subterranean sources of drinking water – least costly and often rich in minerals. Both of them have made or are about to sign agreements with Brazil’s President to exploit the world’s largest freshwater aquifer, the Guarani, underlaying Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. They both proclaim sustainability. Both Coca Cola and Nestlé have horror stories in the Global South (i.e. India, Brazil, Mexico and others), as well as in the Global North. Nestlé is in a battle with the municipality of the tiny Osceola Township, Michigan, where residents complain the Swiss company’s water extraction techniques are ruining the environment. Nestlé pays the State of Michigan US$ 200 to extract 130 million gallons of water per year (2018). Through over-exploitation both in the Global South and the Global North, especially in the summer, the water table sinks to unattainable levels for the local populations – which are deprived of their water source. Protesting with their government or city officials is often in vain. Corruption is all overarching. – Nothing sustainable here. These are just two examples of privatizing water for bottling purposes. Privatization of public water supply on a much larger scale is at the core of the issue, carried out mostly in developing countries (the Global South), mainly by French, British, Spanish and US water corporations. Privatization of water is a socially most unsustainable feat, as it deprives the public, especially the poor, from access to their legitimate water resources. Water is a public good – and water is also a basic human right. On 28 July 2010, through Resolution 64/292, the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognized the human right to water and sanitation and acknowledged that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realization of all human rights. The public water use of Nestlé and Coca Cola – and many others, mind you, doesn’t even take account of the trillions of used plastic bottles ending up as uncollected and non-recycled waste, in the sea, fields, forests and on the road sides. Worldwide less than 8% of plastic bottles are recycled. Therefore, nothing of what Nestlé and Coca Cola practice and profess is sustainable. It’s an outright lie. Petrol industry - BP with its green business emblem, makes believe – visually, every time you pass a BP station – that they are green. PB proclaims that their oil exploration and exploitation is green and environmentally sustainable. Let’s look at reality. The so far considered largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It was a giant industrial disaster that started on April 20, 2010 and lasted to 19 September 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect, spilling about 780,000 cubic meter of raw petroleum over an area of up to 180,000 square kilometers. BP promised a full cleanup. By February 2015 they declared task completed. Yet at least 60% of oil and tar along the sea shore and beaches have not been cleaned up – and may never be removed. – Where is the sustainability of their promise? Another outright lie. BP and other oil corporations also have horrendous human rights records – just about everywhere they operate, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, but also in Asia. The abrogation of human rights is also an abrogation of sustainability. In this essay BP is used as an example for the petrol industry. None of the petrol giants operate sustainably anywhere in the world, and least where water table-destructive fracking is practiced. Sustainable mining – is another flagrant lie. But it sells well to the blinded people. And most of the civilized world is blinded. Unfortunately. They want to continue in their comfort zone which includes the use of copper, gold and other precious metals and stones, rare earths for ever more sophisticated electronic gear, gadgets and especially military electronically guided precision weaponry – as well as hydrocarbons in one way or another. Sustainable mining of anything unrenewable is a Big Oxymoron. Anything you take from the earth that is non-renewable is by its nature not sustainable. Its simply gone. Forever. In addition to the raw material not being renewable, the environmental damage caused by mining – especially gold and copper – is horrendous. Once a mine is exploited in a short 30- or 40-years’ concession, the mining company leaves mountains of contaminated waste, soil and water behind – that takes a thousand years or more to regenerate. Yet, the industry’s palaver is “sustainability”, and the public buys it. In fact, our civilization’s sustainability is zero. Aside from the pollution, poisoning and intoxication that we leave around us, our mostly western civilization has used natural resources at the rate of 3 to 4 times in excess of what Mother Earth so generally provides us with. We, the west, had passed the threshold of One in the mid-sixties. In Africa and most of Asia, the rate of depletion is still way below the factor of One, on average somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6. “Sustainability” is a flash-word, has no meaning in our western civilization. It is pure deception – self-deception, so we may continue with our unsustainable ways of life. That’s what profit-bound capitalism does. It lives today with ever more consumerism, more luxury for the ever-fewer oligarchs – on the resources of tomorrow. The sustainability of everything is not only a cheap slogan, it’s a ruinous self-deception. A Global Great Reset is needed – but not according to the methods of the IMF and WEF. They would just shovel more resources and assets from the bottom 99.99% to the top few, painting the “new” capitalism a shiny bright green – and fooling the masses. We, The People, must take The Reset in our own hands, with consciousness and responsibility. So, We the People, forget sustainable but act responsibly.

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berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

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As government leaders, environmental experts, and concerned citizens from around the world gathered last week in San Francisco at the Global Climate Action Summit, a message has emerged from progressive activists: Action on climate change is about more than just power plants or temperature goals. The climate movement has become a powerful political force, with tens of thousands of people from across America’s largest cities and smallest communities calling for an end to the unsustainable use of fossil fuels—but now the call includes plans that create jobs and address the possible disproportionate effects on marginal and at-risk communities. Progressive politicians are following their lead, increasingly realizing that the only way to equitably meet the challenge of a clean-energy revolution is a 21st-century economy that guarantees clean air and water, modernizes national infrastructure, and creates high-quality jobs.

Insurgent Democratic candidates have been the rock stars of the 2018 election cycle, with large parts of the progressive agenda rocketing up the charts with them. And key to that agenda is these candidates’ embrace of activist positions on climate change, jobs, and environmental justice. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—who caught the nation’s attention with her inspiring primary win over a member of the Democratic House leadership, Representative Joe Crowley—includes in her platform “transitioning the United States to a carbon-free, 100-percent renewable energy system, and a fully modernized electrical grid by 2035.” Randy Bryce—the hard-hatted, union-backed veteran known as “IronStache”—is running to take the Wisconsin seat being vacated by House Speaker Paul Ryan. He calls for a “massive investment in green infrastructure that would generate tens of thousands of new jobs,” bring an end to fossil-fuel use, and build community resilience.

Similar initiatives are championed by Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib, who is hoping to be the first Muslim woman elected to Congress; Andrew Gillum, the Democratic nominee who could be the first African-American governor of Florida; and Kevin de León, who is up against 26-year incumbent US senator and Democratic institution Dianne Feinstein in California. Their proposals vary in form and potential, but they each fall under the same banner.

They call it a Green New Deal.

The name draws on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal economic reform and job programs of the 1930s. The novel environmental framing has been traced back to a decade ago, when New York Times columnist and hardly man-of-the-left Thomas Friedman used it to call—in a distinctly capitalist context—for caps on emissions and an end to fuel subsidies. But today, in the hands and on the platforms of a new wave of activist candidates, the Green New Deal has become something more comprehensive and ambitious. A new report by Data for Progress outlines this vision, demonstrating that, like in FDR’s time, this new deal is one that should energize progressive voters.

The Green New Deal is a broad, yet specific, set of policy goals and investments that blend environmental sustainability and economic stability in ways that are both just and equitable. First, the study factors in the best current research to ensure the components of a Green New Deal meet the urgency and scale of our greatest environmental threats: heading off further climate change by taking fossil fuels out of the economy, restoring our forests and wetlands so they can suck more carbon out of the atmosphere, and finishing the job of cleaning our air and water. Second, a Green New Deal is about bringing sustainability and stability to the economy. This means sustainable agriculture and zero waste, upgrading our infrastructure and urban transit systems, and building up resilience to the severe weather disasters in both urban and rural communities.

Third, a Green New Deal is a job creator. Targeted investments in clean energy, energy efficiency, reforestation, and construction will generate private-sector green jobs. The combination of training and a green-job guarantee ensures there is employment and a livable wage waiting for anyone who wants to join the 21st-century sustainable, clean-energy workforce. Finally, and most importantly, a Green New Deal is founded upon principles of equity and justice. The goal is to avoid the past mistakes of similar initiatives by resolving the inequities felt by those—particularly in low-income, indigenous, and minority communities—who historically endure a greater share of environmental harm and receive fewer benefits.

This is what makes the Green New Deal different. Environmentalists who might have once ignored economics and equity have learned the hard lessons of the past. In the state of Washington, for example, Ballot Initiative 732 was a first-of-its-kind carbon-tax law in 2016—however, it lost support by failing to provide for investment in the most vulnerable and hardest-hit communities. A revised initiative, 1631, which promises investments in green programs with immediate economic benefits, heads to the ballot this November. With broader support and a better chance of passing, it could provide a roadmap for beating back opposition from powerful fossil-fuel lobbies. This year, seven state houses—in Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington—have seen the introduction of carbon-pricing legislation with some consideration of equity.

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#politics #the left #green new deal #new deal #progressive #progressive movement #environmental justice #climate change #economic justice #The Nation

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reomanet · 6 years ago

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Can Bernie Sanders Beat Donald Trump In the 2020 Race? – The Atlantic

Including the Republicans who believe there’s no way he can beat Donald Trump. Edward-Isaac Dovere Nov 25, 2018 Bernie Sanders’s decision about running for president again has become less about ideology and more about electability. Jim Bourg / Reuters Bernie Sanders’s decision about running for president again isn’t about trying to bend the race toward his progressive politics—it’s about whether he can convince himself that he’s the Democratic candidate with the best chance of beating Donald Trump. He thinks the answer might be yes, but he isn’t quite sure. On Tuesday, he’ll release his new book, Where We Go From Here , a rundown of the ways he’s been able to keep a hold on American politics, from the demands he gave Hillary Clinton at their post-primary meeting to his political and legislative wins since. He’ll kick off the release with a speech at George Washington University on Tuesday night, and later in the week he’ll convene a summit of allies at his Sanders Institute, back home in Burlington, Vermont. Meanwhile, Sanders is trying to figure out where he goes from here. “Going out there and being able to articulate a progressive vision and not being able to beat Trump is not good enough,” said Jeff Weaver, Sanders’s 2016 campaign manager and part of his inner circle. Among many Sanders supporters who love him and cheer for him at rallies but still wonder whether he could really go all the way, that’s the debate circulating: Would he be able to have a bigger influence on the 2020 race by getting in himself or by sitting it out and looming over everyone who ran? Most Republicans would see a Sanders candidacy as a gift, letting them paint the entire Democratic Party in socialism. The idea that he might emerge as the candidate against Trump is too much of a dream for them to even admit. Many Democrats agree. Sanders’s team thinks all those people haven’t woken up to the new political reality, or to the power clearly demonstrated this year by independents and Millennials. “He’s uniquely positioned to do better against Trump in the general because he appeals to white working-class and rural voters—much better than a conventional Democrat does,” said Ben Tulchin, who was Sanders’s 2016 pollster and remains in touch with his team. “He also is very popular and has done well in the Midwest, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, which are critical to winning.” Read: Bernie Sanders’s pitch to Trump voters Most of the potential 2020 Democratic candidates deciding whether to pull the trigger are deep into staff interviews and debates about the timing of exploratory-committee announcements, but Sanders has turned inward. The number of people he’s actually talking to is tiny. The time they’re spending on what they consider the transactional politics of endorsements and influence is close to nonexistent. “The place where the country is now is so far off, so out of whack, that those kinds of tactical discussions really don’t give an appropriate amount of appreciation of the danger that Trump and his kind of politics represent to American policy,” Weaver said. “If you had a crystal ball and could say, ‘This is the person, and the only person who could beat Trump,’ then you would have the entire party lining up against him. But I don’t think that’s clear yet.” Sanders knows that a 2020 campaign would be his last shot at running for president—he turned 77 in September. But he also knows that running isn’t the only way he could be a factor. Some around the senator, who was just reelected to a third term, think he could be a presence in the chamber while continuing to be the kind of outside force that helped pressure Amazon to raise wages over the summer. Sanders’s midterm campaign swing was, on the one hand, a success—no prospective presidential candidate drew crowds as big as his, and he drew them consistently, from South Carolina to Iowa to Colorado. Candidates as varied as Jacky Rosen, who won her Senate race, and Andrew Gillum, who narrowly lost his governor race in Florida, were eager to appear with him. On the way to the University of Reno rally, Sanders stopped by the Culinary Workers’ union hall and was greeted with chants of “2020! 2020!” There were a number of events like that off the public schedule during Sanders’s tour, as well as meetings with local politicians and other leaders who struck the senator and his team as being much more open to him than they were the last time around. And he and the crowd were both clearly enjoying it in Reno when he directly took on the protesters holding a Trump flag off the side of a multistory parking lot. “Really?” he said. “Do you really want to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1 percent? Do you really want to throw 32 million Americans off the health care that they have?” On the other hand, many of the candidates Sanders campaigned for lost, and many of the bigger calculations that would be part of a 2020 run are setting in. In a field this big and fluid, none of the candidates can claim their chances of winning are high, and Sanders has slowly accepted that he’d likely start with a much smaller share of the vote than he ended up with when it was a binary choice between Hillary Clinton and him in 2016. He is high up in the polls, and he might have high name recognition, but he’d be fighting for attention and votes in a field that could range from Elizabeth Warren to Mike Bloomberg, and include everyone in between. Read: Sanders and Warren are heading for a standoff . Imagine instead, say some Sanders supporters and some operatives working for competitors not eager to compete with him, that he sits out the race. He could then have everyone else spend the campaign appealing to him for support and living in fear of even a chiding tweet about straying too far from him on Medicare for All, college tuition, or anything else. He could boost or kneecap whomever he wanted, whenever he wanted. They’d all be dancing to his music. To Vincent Fort, an early Sanders supporter and a Georgia state senator, the idea of being an outside influence sounds a lot like the argument that was used to urge him against getting into last year’s Atlanta mayoral race. “It seems like you’ve got candidates putting up schemes or ideas to undercut his candidacy,” Fort said. “You’ve got people saying, ‘Bernie elder statesman, influence maker.’ The best way to influence policy in this country is to be president of the United States.” Fort lost his race, failing to make the runoff round. Abdul El-Sayed, who ran a Sanders-inspired and Sanders-endorsed primary campaign for governor in Michigan this year, which ended in a distant loss, said he knows jumping in again will be a difficult decision, but he hopes the answer will be yes. El-Sayed said he thinks Sanders will “make an extremely strong president.” And if it doesn’t lead to the Oval Office, El-Sayed said, “that race is more robust with him in it, independently of where we ultimately end up.” Ro Khanna, a California congressman who in 2016 knocked out an incumbent Democrat on his second try for the seat, said he thinks Sanders should run again—and he has told the senator directly. The goal, Khanna said, is “not simply occupying the presidency, but shaping the policy direction for the nation and the policy direction of the progressive movement and the country … I don’t think you can do that behind the scenes, being a kingmaker.” In Where We Go From Here , Sanders notes his successes in getting the Democratic National Committee to eliminate superdelegates and in persuading many Democratic politicians to sign on to Medicare for All. He lays out his foreign-policy philosophy. He also devotes chapters to his support for gun-control laws, addressing a weakness in his record that Clinton exploited in the 2016 campaign, and another to Martin Luther King Jr., which seems aimed at the weakness he had attracting black voters. Read: Bernie Sanders offers a foreign policy for the common man . “The political revolution is about thinking big. It’s not about one election, one candidate, one issue. It’s about creating a movement that will transform the economic, political, social and environmental life of our country,” Sanders writes in the final chapter. A few pages later, he ends the book on a vaguer note than Weaver, whose own book, out this past spring, ended, “Run Bernie run!” “This is not a time for despair. This is not a time for depression. This is a time to stand up and fight back,” Sanders writes. “Please join us.” We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected].

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alamante · 6 years ago

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As the risks of his trade war become apparent in key electoral battlegrounds, his low-yield summits with the leaders of Russia and North Korea are lampooned and the Russia investigation threatens, the President is trying to do what he does best — bend political reality.

“Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” the President said in a speech in Kansas City, Missouri, on Tuesday, amid signs that the antennae that sensed political forces in the 2016 election that no one else detected are quivering with potential trouble ahead.

In an implicit suggestion of vulnerability, Trump pleaded with his voters to “stick with us, folks,” and warned that it would take time for his high-risk strategy of sticking it to some of America’s biggest trade partners to pay off.

Once, the President said trade wars were easy to win. But on Tuesday, he all but admitted that counter-tariffs by foreign governments, targeted specifically at regions that voted for him in 2016, meant that some of his people were going to get hurt.

“They’re all aiming at anybody that likes me,” Trump said, but he argued he had no choice but to take advantage of the economy’s strength to pick a fight with trade powers that he said had been “ripping us off for decades.”

“China is targeting our farmers, who they know I love & respect, as a way of getting me to continue allowing them to take advantage of the U.S. They are being vicious in what will be their failed attempt. We were being nice – until now! China made $517 Billion on us last year,” he tweeted Wednesday morning.

Experts say Trump is responding to the pain tariffs are causing on some of his key supporters.

“The President is starting to get a sense that these tariffs are starting to have an impact and they are getting to be more of a problem than he anticipated,” said Tim Hagle, a political scientist at the University of Iowa, a state where the fallout from the trade war is already being felt.

If Trump is to stave off a Democratic blue wave in November, two things will be crucial: a continued economic spurt that gives him the capacity to argue that he’s ushered in a new era of national prosperity, and bumper turnout among GOP voters in key congressional races.

So any perception that everything is not going well, or that Trump’s trade war will have victims as well as victors, could damage GOP candidates, as Democrats hope for a blue wave that could help them with the House and severely curtail the President’s freedom to maneuver.

That’s one reason why Trump renewed his attacks on the media on Tuesday.

“Just stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” he said in Missouri.

Trump pleads for patience

Many Trump voters are predisposed to reject the media’s interpretation of political reality — and sincerely believe that the President speaks directly to their concerns in a way news organizations fail to understand.

But it is also not clear that voters will heed Trump’s plea to avert their eyes from pain they perceive on the prairies. The White House seems to be admitting as much by unveiling the farm aid package.

While Trump can justifiably argue that he is following through on his promises to disrupt a global trade system that many Americans feel has transferred prosperity from industrialized areas in the US to low-wage economies in the developing world, there are also clear losers from his approach.

He is taking a gamble — that his supporters are so angry at foes like China and American friends like the EU over trade that they are willing to take a hit in the hope the President can turn the tables in the long term.

Trump reached the White House because his trade message resonated in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Pennsylvania, where Rust Belt industries were hammered by globalization.

But some of those states are now feeling blowback from foreign efforts to target commodities like corn, pork, soybeans and other agricultural goods in order to avenge the billions of dollars in tariffs the President has imposed.

Trump has often worried publicly that his voters may not show up in November without him on the ballot. If the trade conflict hits economic growth, or Americans start to chafe at more expensive imports, and rural areas are pummeled by an agricultural slump, his nightmare could come closer to reality.

With that in mind, Trump urged his people not to lose faith.

“We’re opening up markets,” he said Tuesday. “You watch what’s going to happen. Just be a little patient.”

But collateral damage in the farming industry is already testing the bond of loyalty between the President and some grassroots backers.

Michael Petefish, a 33-year-old Trump supporter who’s a fifth-generation soybean farmer in southern Minnesota, described the farm aid package as “a Band-Aid on a broken leg.”

“To be blunt, it seems pretty political and seems like they want to shore up some midterm support,” Petefish said.

“Twelve billion as a standalone figure sounds like a lot of money, but when you look at the impacts of this trade war, $12 billion doesn’t scratch the surface. … Our problems are much bigger than $12 billion,” Petefish told CNN’s Dan Merica.

A Hawkeye test

Trump is likely to reinforce his support for farmers when he travels to Iowa on Thursday because the state offers a test case for the sentiment of grassroots voters in the fall.

In a sign that the administration is worried about trade blowback in the Hawkeye State especially, Vice President Mike Pence is just back from a visit and offering a promise: “Under President’s Trump’s leadership we are always going to stand with American farmers.”

Iowa’s political significance to Trump’s political future cannot be doubted.

If Democrats flip the state in 2020 and add its neighbor, Wisconsin, and Florida, they have a path to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. Before then, Democrats are targeting several races that they believe could help them recapture the House this year.

Republicans do have advantages in Iowa. The unemployment rate, at 2.7 % in June, is below the national average. Trump won the state by nearly 10 percentage points two years ago, though his approval rating has since dipped. Social and religious conservatives in Iowa and elsewhere were vital for the President in 2016, and he has repaid their loyalty with two Supreme Court picks and by moving the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

“The biggest fan may very well be the evangelicals. They wanted that built,” Trump noted Monday, in another sign that he is watching his electoral coalition like a hawk.

But Iowa’s mostly Republican officeholders have also sounded the alarm, warning the President in a letter last month that his tariffs have “real consequences.”

And while there was a cautious welcome for the farm aid package on Tuesday, many Republicans warned that it was just a short-term solution.

“Many US products face market barriers abroad. I don’t fault the President for trying to get a better deal for Americans, but it’s not fair to expect farmers to bear the brunt of retaliation for the entire country in the meantime,” said Iowa’s Sen. Chuck Grassley.

“What farmers in Iowa and throughout rural America need in the long term are markets and opportunity, not government handouts,” Grassley said.

There was also evidence of an ideological divide between Republicans and their President. Bailing out farmers to mitigate the consequences of a tariff-raising strategy runs directly counter to generations of GOP economic orthodoxy.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who is often loath to criticize Trump, said: “I just don’t think the tariff route is the smart way to go.”

There were grumbles about the farm aid package from inside the weekly caucus meeting of Republican senators.

One GOP senator wouldn’t name names, but said on condition of anonymity that members from agricultural states reported general frustration with the President.

“It was people from farm country saying, ‘Things have changed,’ (a) lot fewer MAGA hats around,” the senator said.

CNN’s Lauren Fox contributed to this story.

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viralhottopics · 8 years ago

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Is anti-Trump furor papering over Democrats’ working-class woes?

Detroit (CNN)Gobsmacked by their base’s ferocious rejection of Donald Trump’s presidency, the candidates to chair the Democratic Party scrambled Saturday to show how devoted they are to the cause.

Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez bragged to the Democratic National Committee’s “future forum” about racing to airport protests in Houston and then San Francisco. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, made sure everyone knew he was the only one to skip David Brock’s donor summit to participate in the Women’s March in Washington.

Put him in charge, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison pledged, and “We will be asking Democrats all over the country, ‘Bring coffee to the marches. Be in the marches yourself. Carry a sign.’ “

As for those white rural and exurban voters who so brutally rejected Democrats in November — well, bringing them back into the fold is also a priority for those vying to lead the party.

If the base allows it.

After three weeks of anti-Trump protests, Democrats are still stunned by the sudden burst of energy. The party’s organs are all racing to keep up as dozens of events pop up — often on Facebook, without any party chapter or progressive organization’s involvement at all — each weekend.

“The activism of people who are concerned about the Trump administration’s threat to the country is very energizing to us,” said US Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, the 2016 Democratic vice presidential nominee and one of the swing-state senators up for re-election in 2018. “We don’t view that as threatening — we love the energy.”

The energy, though, is all rooted in ferocious opposition to Trump — the same strategy that failed Hillary Clinton in 2016.

That reality has some Democrats on Capitol Hill fretting that the rising anti-Trump fervor is putting the party at risk of papering over the same problems with voters in rural and exurban America they woke up with on November 9.

“If you can’t get them back to where they’re looking and thinking, ‘The Democratic Party still represents me,’ then you’ll always be in the minority,” said US Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia.

“The anger that people feel is righteous and justified, but it can’t just be a party against Mr. Trump,” said US Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia.

“I understand the righteous anger against some of the President’s policies, but we also need to lay out a narrative that’s more than just a series of position papers — that gives us an overarching theme,” Warner said. “And that’s what I’m looking for.”

The 2018 map vs. the base’s demands

Manchin and nine other Senate Democrats are up for re-election in 2018 in states that Trump won.

Four of those Democrats — Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp and Montana’s Jon Tester — are in states where Trump crushed Clinton.

Just how much latitude those senators need — and should be given by the base on votes like Cabinet and Supreme Court confirmations — is the challenge confronting Democrats now, as the party frantically searches for ways to protect those red-state Democrats without jeopardizing the base’s energy and enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, much of the base is demanding total opposition to Trump — no matter the political costs for Democrats in red states.

And there are no sacred cows, as US Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, learned when she voted in committee to confirm Ben Carson for Housing and Urban Development secretary. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, was the target of protective protesters who recently marched to his home, chanting an expletive that rhymed with his first name.

These progressives see the party’s future in energizing women, minorities and young people in cities and suburbs — particularly in Sun Belt states, including Georgia and Arizona.

“Those working-class white voters aren’t the future of the party,” said Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the liberal blog DailyKos.com, which has already raised $400,000 for a Democratic candidate in the expected runoff for the US House seat in Georgia soon to be vacated by Tom Price, Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services secretary.

“Most of them are stuck in fake-news land anyway, and no amount of reality will penetrate that bubble. They think 1.5 million people attended Trump’s inauguration. They think Obama only needed 50 votes to pass his Supreme Court nominees,” Moulitsas said. “They’re lost. It’s a waste of time to try and win them back when there are so many core-Democratic-base who didn’t register or vote last cycle. Almost half the country didn’t vote, and the bulk of the non-voters were liberal-leaning people many of them now marching in the streets.

“So instead of trying to chase people trapped by Breitbart and its cohorts in conservative media, give them a reason to get excited about rallying around Democrats,” he said.

Alternate political universes

Democrats’ short-term fate, though, rests in part on whether the party can hold onto Senate seats in Trump states.

In those areas, senators are struggling to wrap their minds around the alternate universes of the Trump presidency so far.

In one — where the women’s marches, airport protests and pro-Obamacare town hall turnout are the dominant storylines and former alt-right Breitbart news executive Steve Bannon is seen as a shadow president — Trump has walked himself into repeated controversies and revealed himself to be just what the Clinton campaign warned he was.

In another — where rural and exurban voters with little economic opportunity sought to send someone to shake up a political world they thought had lost touch with their needs — Trump has pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, jumpstarted the Keystone pipeline, taken steps toward renegotiating other trade deals, hosted top labor union leaders at the White House and is fulfilling some of his top campaign promises.

“You folks have been terrific to me,” Trump told union representatives as they joined Harley-Davidson executives in a recent meeting at the White House. “Sometimes your top people didn’t support me but the steelworkers supported me.”

Many left-leaning organizations are still trying to feel their ways around the new White House.

“It’s like ‘Game of Thrones’ right now in the Trump administration — it’s kind of hard to tell who’s going to come out on top,” said Thea Lee, the AFL-CIO’s deputy chief of staff.

US Rep. Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who represents many of those “downriver” voters, said she is focused on how to use language that makes clear that “I am inclusive of everybody, but I’m also fighting for those UAW workers who think we’ve forgotten them, or those Teamsters whose pensions are being threatened to be cut.”

Dingell added: “Those are our constituents who we have to be a voice for, too. We’ve got to find a way to talk about it so they know we are the fighters for them and that we will stand strong, and that we care about those issues.”

The populist solution

Increasingly, Democrats are moving toward a message styled after populist stalwarts such as Warren, Bernie Sanders and US Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

Their case: The problem wasn’t Trump’s promises, or what his campaign represented — it’s that in office, he’s promoting his billionaire friends and failing to take care of those who carried him to the presidency.

US Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, another Democrat up for re-election in 2018, said 9,000 people turned out in January at a pro-Obamacare rally in Macomb County — a key swing region that helped tip Michigan for Trump.

“There were people that I know that attended that supported President Trump that didn’t really believe he was going to take away their health care or cut their Medicare,” she said. “People thought they were voting for change, and now are saying, ‘Wait a minute, I didn’t mean that.’

“I’m still fighting for the same people in Michigan that want a shot to stay in the middle class,” Stabenow said. “I think this is really more about (communicating) that.”

Other Democrats made a similar argument — saying the activist energy is increasingly pushing them toward populist policies.

US Rep. Cheri Bustos, an Illinois Democrat who easily won in a district Trump carried, said the party’s problems can be addressed partially through simple moves such as “supermarket Saturdays,” job-shadowing blue-collar workers and sitting through lengthy appearances on rural radio stations.

“We’ve also got to make sure that we’re disciplined about what our values are. We know that our policies resonate with people — with these folks who want to try Trump,” she said.

“Our theory right now is that they’re going to have buyer’s remorse — that they tried him because they wanted something different; they were tired of the status quo; they felt left behind by this wage stagnation,” Bustos said. “We have the right policies to address that. But we haven’t always gone deep into the kind of districts where people have felt left behind.”

The Supreme Court problem

A particular cause of heartburn for red-state Democratic senators is the upcoming confirmation battle over Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch.

It was, after all, the expectation that Trump would appoint conservative justices — whose tenures would long outlast his presidency — that kept many moderate Republicans behind his candidacy.

It’s a conundrum: Do Democrats risk undercutting their own cause by waging war over Trump’s most conventional decision yet?

So Senate Democrats are slow-walking their way around Gorsuch, promising to give him due consideration — buying themselves more time to figure out whether they have 41 out of 48 Democratic votes necessary to block him, and whether it’s even the fight they want.

“Explaining anything having to do with courts or law is a challenge — not because it’s inconsequential but because it can’t be dramatized with a picture and a face and a voice,” said US Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut.

“So we need to make sure the American people understand what’s at stake,” Blumenthal said. “The gobbledygook and the legal jargon are very confusing. And just now as I’m talking to you, I’m realizing that I’m sort of going off into the ether.”

Moulitsas said red-state Democrats should forget using those votes to try to prove themselves as moderates.

The likes of Donnelly and Heitkamp “aren’t going to win re-election on the strength of Trump voters impressed by their confirmation votes,” he said.

“The best chance they have to win in their tough states will be by riding this incredible wave of energy. It may not be enough, but pissing off the base certainly isn’t the better bet. You either ride in with the people who brought you, or go down fighting honorably,” Moulitsas said. “Pretending to be a ‘Republican, but a little less bad’ has never inspired a dramatic re-election victory.”