#Trump Infrastructure

[rjzimmerman]

The Flood-Protection Rule That Trump Rolled Back. (New York Times)

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

In the summer of 2017, Donald Trump stood in the lobby of Trump Tower and declared he would heal a “massive self-inflicted wound on our country” by eliminating red tape that he said was making construction in America an arduous, expensive process.

One policy he eradicated that day was a set of standards aimed at ensuring that anything built with taxpayer money — including hospitals, sewage treatment plants, bridges and libraries — could withstand flooding and rising seas caused by climate change.

Seven years later and in the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton, federal officials and flood experts say Trump’s decision to roll back those federal infrastructure standards has had financial ramifications. Those are just starting to come into view as officials continue to tally the damage from the storms.

According to state and federal data, at least five water treatment plants in Florida that were in the path of Helene and Milton were exempt from tougher national building standards and sustained damage from the hurricane ranging from water line breaks to power losses. In total, they were funded with about $200 million in federal spending.

Another seven water plants across the Southeast that together received more than $100 million in federal funding were built to lower flood standards and didn’t receive damage during Helene or Milton. But the plants are considered at high risk for damage in the future, and what worries experts is how many crucial infrastructure plants are similarly exposed.

“We can definitively say that risk increased,” said Alice C. Hill, a senior fellow in energy and environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The federal government continues to invest in infrastructure destined to fail in the light of worsening climate impacts.”

“Hurricanes Helene and Milton are a stark reminder that catastrophic flooding, and the climate crisis more broadly, present ongoing and worsening challenges for America’s critical water infrastructure,” said Zealan Hoover, a senior adviser to the E.P.A. administrator, Michael Regan.

Hoover said policies like the flood standard “have real consequences for Americans,” including ensuring that communities can maintain access to drinking water in the wake of disasters.

The standards in question were created under President Obama in 2015, who made the case that climate change would make floods more common and much more destructive.

The rules called for building structures two or three feet above the 100-year flood level, or built at the 500-year level. Alternately, federal agencies could analyze future climate change scenarios like sea-level rise or expected heavier floods, and build according to those projections. But the policy ran into opposition, particularly from homebuilders who argued that new restrictions would lead to higher construction costs even outside federally funded projects.

[tomorrowusa]

« I belong to neither party and have voted for both Democrats and Republicans — but because I believe him to be a defender of the Constitution and a public servant of honor and of grace at a time when extreme forces threaten the nation. I do not agree with everything he has done or wanted to do in terms of policy. But I know him to be a good man, a patriot and a president who has met challenges all too similar to those Abraham Lincoln faced.

Here is the story I believe history will tell of Joe Biden. With American democracy in an hour of maximum danger in Donald Trump’s presidency, Mr. Biden stepped in the breach. He staved off an authoritarian threat at home, rallied the world against autocrats abroad, laid the foundations for decades of prosperity, managed the end of a once-in-a-century pandemic, successfully legislated on vital issues of climate and infrastructure and has conducted a presidency worthy of the greatest of his predecessors. History and fate brought him to the pinnacle in a late season in his life, and in the end, he respected fate — and he respected the American people. »

— Historian Jon Meacham in a guest column at the New York Times on the legacy of President Joe Biden.

Biden restored calm, stability, and sanity to the federal government after a coup attempt and the horribly botched Trump response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He did more than anybody else outside Ukraine to keep it from falling into the kleptocratic totalitarian hands of imperialist Vladimir Putin. And Biden's infrastructure and stimulus programs have restored American manufacturing jobs which Trump's empty bombastic promises failed to do.

Historically, imagine combining Gerald Ford's modesty, John F. Kennedy's determination to prevent the spread of totalitarianism, FDR's efforts to create jobs, with Barack Obama's inclusiveness and you come close to defining the Biden presidency.

Of course Biden still has six months to go. He can now concentrate on governance without the distraction of an election campaign.

[meandmybigmouth]

WHY AREN'T RED STATE MAGA REPUBLICANS THAT VOTED AGAINST BIDEN LEGISLATION REFUSE TO ACCEPT THE MONEY ON BEHALF OF THEIR "SAVING AMERICA AGENDA"? OTHERWISE THEY ARE COMPLICITE IN AMERICA'S DESTRUCTION BY HIM....RIGHT?

[justinspoliticalcorner]

John Nichols at The Nation:

Donald Trump has made no secret of his determination to govern as a “dictator” if he regains the presidency, and that’s got his critics warning that his reelection would spell the end of democracy. But Trump and his allies are too smart to go full Kim Jong Un. Rather, the former president’s enthusiasm for the authoritarian regimes of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Tayyip Erdoğan, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán suggests the models he would build on: managing elections to benefit himself and his Republican allies; gutting public broadcasting and constraining press freedom; and undermining civil society. Trump, who famously demanded that the results of Georgia’s 2020 presidential voting be “recalculated” to give him a win, wants the trappings of democracy without the reality of electoral consequences. That’s what propaganda experts Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead once described as “demonstration elections,” in which, instead of actual contests, wins are assured for the authoritarians who control the machinery of democracy. The outline for such a scenario emerges from a thorough reading of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, which specifically proposes a Trump-friendly recalculation of the systems that sustain American democracy. The strategy for establishing an American version of Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” is not spelled out in any particular chapter of Mandate. Rather, it is woven throughout the whole of the document, with key elements appearing in the chapters on reworking the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the Federal Election Commission (FEC). In the section on the DHS, for instance, there’s a plan to eliminate the ability of the agency that monitors election security to prevent the spread of disinformation about voting and vote counting.

How serious a threat to democracy would that pose? Think back to November 2020, when Trump was developing his Big Lie about the election he’d just lost. Trump’s false assertion that the election had been characterized by “massive improprieties and fraud” was tripped up by Chris Krebs, who served as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the DHS. The Republican appointee and his team had established a 24/7 “war room” to work with officials across the country to monitor threats to the security and integrity of the election. The operation was so meticulous that Krebs could boldly announce after the voting was finished: “America, we have confidence in the security of your vote, you should, too.” At the same time, his coordinating team declared, “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.” This infuriated Trump, who immediately fired the nation’s top election security official.

In Mandate’s chapter on the DHS, Ken Cuccinelli writes, “Of the utmost urgency is immediately ending CISA’s counter-mis/disinformation efforts. The federal government cannot be the arbiter of truth.” Cuccinelli previously complained that CISA “is a DHS component that the Left has weaponized to censor speech and affect elections.” As for the team that worked so successfully with Krebs to secure the 2020 election, the Project 2025 document declares that “the entirety of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee should be dismissed on Day One.” The potential impact? “It’s a way of emasculating the agency—that is, it prevents it from doing its job,” says Herb Lin, a cyber-policy and security scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

This is just one way that Project 2025’s cabal of “experts” is scheming to thwart honest discourse about elections and democracy. A chapter on public broadcasting proposes to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as part of a larger plan to upend NPR, PBS, and “other public broadcasters that benefit from CPB funding, including the even-further-to-the Left Pacifica Radio and American Public Media.” More destabilizing than the total funding cut that Project 2025 entertains is a parallel plan to end the status of NPR and Pacifica radio stations as “noncommercial education stations.” That could deny them their current channel numbers at the low end of the radio spectrum (88 to 92 FM)—a move that would open prime territory on the dial for the sort of religious programming that already claims roughly 42 percent of the airwaves that the FCC reserves for noncommercial broadcasting. And don’t imagine that the FCC would be in a position to write new rules that guard against the surrender of those airwaves to the Trump-aligned religious right.

[...]

While project 2025 seeks to rewire the FCC to favor Trump’s allies, it also wants to lock in dysfunction at the Federal Election Commission, the agency that is supposed to govern campaign spending and fundraising. Established 50 years ago, the FEC has six members—three Republicans and three Democrats—who are charged with overseeing the integrity of federal election campaigns. In recent years, however, this even partisan divide has robbed the FEC of its ability to act because, as a group of former FEC employees working with the Campaign Legal Center explained, “three Commissioners of the same party, acting in concert, can leave the agency in a state of deadlock.” As the spending by outside groups on elections “has exponentially increased, foreign nationals and governments have willfully manipulated our elections, and coordination between super PACs and candidates has become commonplace,” the former employees noted. Yet “the FEC [has] deadlocked on enforcement matters more often than not, frequently refusing to even investigate alleged violations despite overwhelming publicly available information supporting them.”

John Nichols wrote in The Nation about how Project 2025’s radical right-wing wishlist of items contains plans to wreck and subvert what is left of America’s democracy.

See Also:

The Nation: June 2024 Issue

[trendynewsnow]

The 2024 Presidential Election Results and the Rise of Vote Fraud Theories

The Aftermath of the 2024 Presidential Election When President-elect Donald J. Trump was declared the winner of this year’s presidential election on Wednesday, initial vote tallies revealed a significant decline of millions of Democratic votes compared to the results from 2020. This apparent drop led some Republicans to argue that the 2020 election had been tainted by fraud, claiming that…

[bijoumikhawal]

frankly, the response that you all have to people hating Biden because he has been brazenly aiding genocide and even with these recent aid drops is being utterly monstrous (dropping expired non-halal items) and is not using the power he has to actually stop this... it is not only about Palestinians, though they are the primary concern. For some of us, it is a reminder that if the US started aiding our people's destruction, you'd stand by it out of cowardice that criticism might make your life harder.

[lindsaymendzs]

people not realizing that the results of a president’s term in office usually are most evident while someone else is in office and continue to have effects after the term is over is honestly i think one of the the reasons people who are ostensibly on the left are so flippant about the specter of another trump term

[thisisabernieblog]

The Trump distraction as 15 million lose healthcare, China-UAE Yuan gas sale, China works towards peace in Yemen, US 'leaks', MSNBC owned by Matt Taibbi, Israel attacks Gaza and Lebanon as BBC defends apartheid, 2 Black lawmakers expelled from Tennessee Legislature and billionaire parasites buying up our fresh water!

@lordandgodoftheobvious @brendanicus @apas-95 @missedthestartgun @cavern-creature @whatevergreen @dicknouget @definitely-ellie @infectedwithnyanites @theothersparrow @nandomando @venerabledreadnought @mirtifero @comrade-bastard @marxism-transgenderism @goatse-syndicalist-69

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

The number of Tesla Superchargers - stalls (globally):

1st: September 2012

10,000: June 2018

20,000: November 2020

30,000: November 2021 (+10,000 in 1 year)

35,000: June, 10 2022 (+5,000 in roughly 7 months)

40,000: November, 22 2022 (+10,000 in 1 year)

45,000: April 9, 2023 (+5,000 in less than 5 months, +10,000 in 10 months)

[randyite]

[humming-fly]

Remember to check your voter registration here (https://vote.gov/), and if you want a handy list of deadlines by state then you can check here: https://www.vote.org/voter-registration-deadlines/

Me, too! And you can't convince me otherwise.

[tomorrowusa]

Trump's most famous promise was to make Mexico pay for his squalid and corrupt border wall.

Amount collected from Mexico: 0 centavos.

Trump did give tax breaks to billionaires while giving COVID-19 to much of the rest of the country.

Trump's promises are as worthless as degrees from Trump University.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ilana Berger at MMFA:

The Biden administration is cutting car pollution and incentivizing automakers to produce electric vehicles. Right-wing media repeatedly misconstrued these efforts, falsely claiming they were attempting to take away voters’ gas-powered cars or forcing them to buy electric vehicles. No such federal mandate exists. Yet now the Trump-Vance campaign has adopted this false claim.

Harris has supported efforts to expand access to electric vehicles during her time as vice president, but that did not include a federal mandate

The EPA finalized a tailpipe emissions rule in March, but it was not a mandate. In March, the EPA established tailpipe emissions standards for the auto industry in a bid to slash greenhouse gas emissions. According to NPR, “The EPA rules are not written as an EV mandate or a ban on the sale of gas cars. … Instead, the EPA sets standards that apply across an entire fleet – meaning an automaker still can make vehicles with higher emissions, as long as they also make enough very low or zero-emission vehicles that it averages out.” [NPR, 3/20/24]

E&E News clarified that “there is no EV ‘mandate’ from the administration, although President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris have backed a series of climate policies that seek to incentivize the production and purchasing of EVs.” [ E&E News, 9/3/24]  

The New York Times also wrote of the EPA rule that it “does not mandate sales of electric vehicles, and consumers can still buy and drive gas-powered cars.” [The New York Times, 3/20/24]

The Inflation Reduction Act allocated billions toward supporting the adoption of EVs through tax credits, loans, and funding for charging networks, critical minerals, and battery manufacturing. Harris cast the tie-breaking vote that passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which created $47 billion in EV investment on top of tax credits and loans. [Atlas EV Hub, 9/2/22; accessed 9/6/22; Twitter/X, 8/7/24]  

Harris also oversaw parts of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that distributed funding to school districts for electric buses and to states for EV charging stations.The act, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, provided $7.5 billion to build a network of charging stations, and $900 million of that went to the electric school bus initiative. [AP News, 12/13/21; Spectrum News, 5/29/24]

Donald Trump’s campaign has echoed right-wing media lies about electric vehicles, such as falsely insinuating that Kamala Harris and the Democrats want to eliminate gas-powered cars and that they have issued an EV mandate (when no such thing exists).

[thepopoptic]

Trump Announcement: Musk & Ramaswamy to Run DOGE

[trendynewsnow]

China Unveils $1.4 Trillion Economic Revival Plan Amid Challenges

China’s Economic Revival Plan: A $1.4 Trillion Initiative On Friday, the Chinese government unveiled an ambitious plan worth $1.4 trillion aimed at revitalizing the nation’s economy. This initiative empowers local governments to refinance their overwhelming debts, which have left various cities struggling to meet their financial obligations. This decisive action is part of a broader strategy…