Kim Heacox at The Guardian writes—Alaska’s Arctic national wildlife refuge now has a $1bn price tag on it:
Years ago, camping in Alaska’s Arctic national wildlife refuge, I watched a herd of caribou – 100,000 bulls, cows and their three-week-old calves – braid over the tundra, moving to a rhythm as old as the wind.
“Not many places like this left today,” said my friend Jeff, sitting next to me above an ice-fringed river.
And so Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski believes this refuge—80 miles east of Prudhoe Bay—could generate $1bn over 10 years once it’s opened to oil leasing. She and her Republican colleagues slipped this drilling provision into the Senate Republican tax bill. [...]
Alaska’s lieutenant governor, Byron Mallott, has said that drilling in ANWR is necessary to deal with climate change. His caddywhompus logic: we need to drill for more oil to raise money to address a problem that’s caused by humanity’s addiction to oil. Why not just say the truth? We want the money.
Murkowski adds: “We have waited nearly 40 years for the right technology to come along for a footprint small enough for the environment to be respected.” They have not.
Hannah Jane Parkinson at The Guardian writes—Matt Damon, stop #damonsplaining. You don't understand sexual harassment:
Oh, Matt Damon. Where did it all go wrong? Well, almost everywhere.
Damon is currently the focus of a mixture of derision, anger and disbelief after he made, in the space of three days, multiple boneheaded comments on sexual harassment. At some point between these tone-deaf interventions his Good Will Hunting co-star (and a former girlfriend), Minnie Driver, helpfully pointed out where he was going wrong. And yet, instead of taking a seat to reflect on her critique, Damon came splashing back into a lake of ignorance like a dog which repeatedly forgets it is not good at swimming.
First, Damon waded in to say that sexual harassment exists on a spectrum, and that “there’s a difference between patting someone on the butt … and rape”. On the face of it, this is clearly true (and something that women have also said), but Damon is too ignorant (HOW? STILL?) to realise that being patted on the butt a thousand times by bosses, male friends, colleagues, and strangers, is an insidious invasion of personal space and an exhausting erasure of individuality. Death by a thousand cuts. As Driver put it, “[men] cannot understand what abuse is like on a daily level”.
He also doesn’t seem to realise that literally nobody is crying out for Matt Damon’s Opinion On This. [...]
Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser from 2013 to 2017 and a former United States ambassador to the United Nations, at The New York Times writes—When America No Longer Is a Global Force for Good:
President Trump’s National Security Strategy marks a dramatic departure from the plans of his Republican and Democratic predecessors, painting a dark, almost dystopian portrait of an “extraordinarily dangerous” world characterized by hostile states and lurking threats. There is scant mention of America’s unrivaled political, military, technological and economic strength, or the opportunities to expand prosperity, freedom and security through principled leadership — the foundation of American foreign policy since World War II.
In Mr. Trump’s estimation, we live in a world where America wins only at others’ expense. There is no common good, no international community, no universal values, only American values. America is no longer “a global force for good,” as in President Obama’s last strategy, or a “shining city on a hill,” as in President Reagan’s vision. The new strategy enshrines a zero-sum mentality: “Protecting American interests requires that we compete continuously within and across these contests, which are being played out in regions around the world.” This is the hallmark of Mr. Trump’s nationalistic, black-and-white “America First” strategy.
But the world is actually gray, and Mr. Trump’s strategy struggles to draw nuanced distinctions. Throughout, China and Russia are conflated and equated as parallel adversaries. In fact, China is a competitor, not an avowed opponent, and has not illegally occupied its neighbors. Russia, as the strategy allows, aggressively opposes NATO, the European Union, Western values and American global leadership. It brazenly seized Georgian and Ukrainian territory and killed thousands of innocents to save a dictator in Syria. Russia is our adversary, yet Mr. Trump’s strategy stubbornly refuses to acknowledge its most hostile act: directly interfering in the 2016 presidential election to advantage Mr. Trump himself.
One problem with Rice’s take on this is that the foundation of U.S. policy since World War II has been a decidedly mixed one in which certain principles are skirted while given lip service. Not that aspects of America’s leadership haven’t often been a force for good. They certainly have, often heroically so.
But from the outset of the postwar world, U.S. Latin American policy, for instance, funded, trained, and condoned numerous sociopathic dictators. This included one in Guatemala who committed genocide against indigenous people and put scores of people into mass graves with their thumbs tied behind their backs and bullets in their skulls while Ronald Reagan praised him as a friend of democracy unfairly smeared by human rights activists.
The U.S. encouraged the rabid generals of Argentina to “restore” democracy to Nicaragua, a democracy that hadn’t existed since the U.S. Marines had intervened in the first decade of the 20th Century. The CIA provided a torture how-to manual for the fascist thugs it supported throughout Central America. Not exactly a “shining city on a hill” for the tens of thousands of civilians murdered by death squads composed of men following leaders trained at the infamous U.S. School of the Americas.
Donald Trump certainly is an outlier in foreign policy. Partly this is because he’s the biggest ignoramus to be elected president since … ever. And partly because he thinks talking tough is being tough, treaties are for wimps, and threatening people and nations for not toeing the U.S. line is the way to advance American interests.
But other presidents at least had coherent if sometimes abhorrent foreign policy “doctrines,” like the preventive-war-promoting Bush Doctrine. Any Trump Doctrine will never be coherent. It is whatever comes out of his mouth or he tweets on a particular day. And given the impulsive recklessness combined with the ignorance he relentlessly exhibits, he’s the first president in a long time who has boosted the bomb-shelter business. However, we should not buy into the theme that foreign policy under Trump and under all of previous postwar presidents is like night and day. Because it isn’t.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—The age of betrayal is back:
We thought the corruption, self-dealing and social indifference of the Gilded Age were long behind us. But we underestimated the raw nerve of President Trump, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
This Triumvirate of Privilege has returned us to the “age of betrayal,” as writer Jack Beatty called the years of the robber barons. The goal has always been to roll back the social advances that the country has made since the Progressive Era. On Wednesday, the demolition crews in the House and Senate struck a devastating blow.
The tax law loots the federal treasury on behalf of major corporations and the richest people in America. It sharply shifts the nation’s tax burden onto wage and salary earners whom Trump, Ryan andArmando Valdés Prieto is a lawyer and political consultant in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and a former director of Puerto Rico's Office of Management and Budget. McConnell treat as serfs expected to bow before the wielders of capital, including real estate titans such as the president himself. It also creates an utterly unstable tax code. So many new opportunities for evasion were stuffed into this monstrosity that not a single person who voted for it can fully know what its effects will be.
This lobbyists’ wish list was passed with unconscionably reckless haste because those who confected it didn’t want mere citizens to grasp what they were doing. In this, they failed. The polls make clear that citizens, including many Republicans and many Trump supporters, know exactly whom this bill will benefit, and whom it will hurt. No tax cut in recent memory has been so unpopular.
Julianne Tveten at In These Times writes—It’s Time to Nationalize the Internet. To counter the FCC’s attack on net neutrality, we need to start treating the Internet like the public good it is:
While the assault on net neutrality is formidable, it’s not without formal opposition. The Republican-helmed FCC’s two Democrat Commissioners, Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel, have censured the decision and urged dissent. A number of state attorneys general—including those in New York, California, and Illinois—have vowedto sue the FCC over the ruling. Congressional Democrats, shepherded by Mass. Sen. Ed Markey, plan to file legislation to reverse the repeal.
Relying on such reactive regulatory appeals to herald the fight for a fair Internet, however, won’t guarantee one. The FCC’s revocation of net neutrality isn’t a call to merely restore the technocratic 2015 rules, but to reclaim the Internet as a public good to which all have the right to access.
The Internet was initially a product of public spending. The U.S. Defense Department first conceived it in the 1960s, following a period of feverish technological competition with the Soviet Union. By the early 1990s, the government ceded control of the Internet to the private sector, which had the putative capacity to host its rapid growth. Since then, the transition to corporate stewardship has stratified the digital landscape and isolated disenfranchised populations.
Armando Valdés Prieto, a lawyer and political consultant in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and a former director of Puerto Rico's Office of Management and Budget, at The Washington Post writes— How the GOP tax bill will wreck what’s left of Puerto Rico’s economy:
The tax bill [that passed] Wednesday could be as damaging to Puerto Rico’s economy as Hurricane Maria was.
Provisions of the legislation aimed at bringing operations and jobs back to the United States from overseas would apply to Puerto Rico just as they would to India, Ireland or any other foreign jurisdiction. The result will be the loss of American jobs and investment on the U.S. commonwealth. If President Trump signs it into law, it will be a hard blow at the worst possible time.
That Congress would pass such a measure with blithe disregard for its effects on Puerto Rico is no surprise. It is yet another example of the federal government’s lack of coherent policies regarding the commonwealth since at least the early 1990s, whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans. The result has been that much of the economic ground that had been gained since World War II has been lost, with growing dependence on either federal aid or stateside emigration as the solution to the island’s problems. That’s not sustainable, and it’s about to get far worse.
Americans. Puerto Ricans are Americans. What will it take for Republicans (and some clueless Democrats) to understand that?
Graham Vyse at The New Republic writes—Democrats: We Can Win Suburban Republicans With a Progressive Platform:
Brian Schatz didn’t think Republicans had thought this through. The Hawaii Democrat must have understood on some level why his GOP colleagues in the Senate were about to pass their massive tax giveaway to corporations and the uber-rich in the wee hours of Wednesday morning: President Donald Trump needed an eleventh-hour victory after a year of legislative failure, and Republican donors were explicitly threatening to halt financial contributions if lawmakers didn’t get something done. Still, hours before the vote, Schatz marveled at how the GOP could respond to major Democratic electoral victories over the past two months—a landslide in the Virginia gubernatorial election, and an upset for a Senate seat in Alabama—by passing an astoundingly unpopular bill that even neglects GOP-leaning voters in suburban swing districts.
“Suburbanites might make a decent amount of money, but they’re not hedge fund managers,” the senator told me Tuesday night at the Capitol Building. “They don’t have the amount of passive income that’s being rewarded in this bill. Middle-class folks who work for a living are not going to see the benefit of this. It is simply weird to me that they look at Virginia and they look at Alabama and they say, ‘Let’s harm suburbanites through the tax code.’”
If Schatz is right, the GOP is compounding an existing problem with suburban voters. Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that “from Texas to Illinois, Kansas to Kentucky, there are Republican districts filled with college-educated, affluent voters who appear to be abandoning their usually conservative leanings.” President Donald Trump repulses these voters, and some Democratic strategists are intent on winning them in 2018.
Emily Atkin at The New Republic writes—The Growing Movement to Take Polluters to Court Over Climate Change. As climate liability lawsuits rise, industry forces are fighting back:
There’s a vast conspiracy afoot to decimate American manufacturing. Wealthy environmentalists and greedy attorneys are trying to stuff their already-fat pockets by suing defenseless companies over their contributions to global warming. They allege that energy manufacturers create a “public nuisance” by emitting greenhouse gases and are liable for the damages this causes. Worse, they disguise themselves as do-gooders: They represent plaintiffs like Alaska Native American tribes who are losing their frozen land to warming temperatures, and communities impacted by sea-level rise. But these con artists aren’t really trying to save the planet. They’re trying to put American companies out of business.
That’s the core message of a new trade group quietly formed last month by the National Association of Manufacturers, the largest industry trade group of its kind and a powerful lobbying force in Washington.
Eric Levitz at New York magazine writes—6 Reasons for Progressives to Stop Worrying and Love the GOP Tax Scam:
While the intended consequences of the Trump Tax Cuts are contemptible, the legislation’s unintended consequences could actually, eventually make this country a better place. There’s good reason to think that the bill’s immediate effects will be less destructive than liberals feared — and that, in the long run, its passage could actually make the United States a more progressive nation.
1) It will help Democrats take back power. [...]
2) And when Democrats take back power, this bill will make it easier for them to pass large expansions of the welfare state. [...]
3) Republicans just raised taxes on everyone in a durable way — a likely precondition for social democracy in the United States. [...]
4) It could mollify future Democratic leaders’ fear of deficits, thereby removing a constraint on progressive policy. [...]
5) Blue states should be able to shield their safety nets from the effects of SALT repeal. [...]
6) Republicans probably don’t have the votes for spending cuts.
Richard Kim at The Nation writes—The GOP Tax Bill and the Crisis of American Democracy. The country is ruled by oligarchs and their enablers:
It just so happened that during the week that Republicans rammed a $1.5 trillion tax bill through Congress without a single Democratic vote, Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, was finishing up a fact-finding mission to the United States. Alston visited places like Georgia, Alabama, and West Virginia, which voted for Donald Trump, but he also stopped in California, which went for Hillary Clinton, and Puerto Rico, which wasn’t allowed to vote for president at all. [...]
His devastating report described the conditions facing the one in eight Americans who live in poverty—rotting teeth, crushing debt, homelessness, hunger, drug addiction, untreated illness, and pollution. It also identified the political choices that keep poor Americans poor: neglect, discrimination, the criminalization of poverty, privatization, and the evisceration of the social safety net. [...]
The impact of the GOP tax plan on this already miserable state of affairs was not lost on the special rapporteur. “The proposed tax reform package stakes out America’s bid to become the most unequal society in the world,” he said. Or, as Thomas Piketty and his colleagues recently put it, the tax plan will “turbocharge inequality in America,” making it look “more and more like a rentier society.”
Nancy LeTourneau at The Washington Monthly writes—How Some Liberals Feed Republican Messaging:
With the election of Donald Trump, we are finally seeing some people in the media question the kind of bothsidersim that masked what Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein labelled “asymmetric polarization.” But there are some liberals who continue to feed that kind of messaging. Here’s an example that comes just a Republicans are passing their horrendous tax cuts:
To demonstrate the fallacy of those quotes, this is important to keep in mind:
The idea that Congress is at fault totally ignores the fact that 100 percent of Democrats voted against this big give-away to the wealthy. Any message that feeds the idea that it is Congress—rather than Republicans—who are responsible for passing the most unpopular legislation in decades is not only misleading, it feeds right into the framing that Republicans are trying to promote.