Amazingly, the CNN moderator Anderson Cooper actually eked out a climate-change question Sunday night. No big deal—merely the biggest crisis since homo sapiens became sapient:
Emma Foehringer Merchant at The New Republic writes—On fracking, Sanders has a one word answer: “No”:
In response to a cut-and-dry question about whether the candidates support fracking, Sanders got the chance to clearly put daylight between his climate policy and Clinton’s. (Both candidates claim they have the most comprehensive plan to combat climate change.)
Clinton listed a number of scenarios in which she does not support fracking (“When any locality or state is against it” or if there are methane leaks or water contamination). “By the time we get through all my conditions I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place,” she said. Sanders was more definitive: “My answer is a lot shorter: No, I do not support fracking.”
It was only a few days ago that the curiously coiffed man-child who’s leading the race for the Republican nomination said on national TV, without a hint of shame, “Look at these hands. If they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee you.”
On Sunday night in Flint, Michigan, the two candidates competing for the Democratic nomination debated issues that matter not in high school locker rooms, but in real life.
A few pundits are no long avoiding the “f” word:
Rick Perlstein at In These Times writes—The Truth About Donald Trump’s Populism:
Why has Donald Trump been so successful? Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone, thinks he has the answer.
He writes, “Reporters have focused quite a lot on the crazy/race-baiting/nativist themes in Trump’s campaign.” Taibbi, though, will not be bamboozled: “These comprise a very small part of his usual presentation. His speeches increasingly are strikingly populist in their content.” Trump’s pitch, which Taibbi seems at least partially to accept: “He’s rich, he won’t owe anyone anything upon election, and therefore he won’t do what both Democratic and Republican politicians unfailingly do upon taking office, i.e. approve rotten/regressive policies that screw ordinary people.”
And though Taibbi insists this insight lifts him above the common scribbling herd, he’s hardly alone. Ryan Lizza, in the New Yorker, quoted conservative intellectual Henry Olsen to likewise suggest that Trump is thriving because he “is posing a new question: To what extent should the GOP be the advocates for those struggling in the modern economy?”
I attended the same Trump rally in Plymouth, N.H., as Taibbi. Matt should clean the wax from his ears: I heard the crazy and the race-baiting and the nativist themes raining down like dirty dollar bills at a strip joint. [...]
No, the core inanity here cuts much deeper. It’s an ignorance of a simple historical fact: Every fascist achieves and cements his power by pledging to rescue ordinary people from the depredations of economic elites. That’s how fascism works.
Or the “o” word:
Charles M Blow at The New York Times writes—The End of American Idealism:
Our government is broken. We have a legislative branch that increasingly sees its role as resistance rather than action. There is an opening on the Supreme Court that Republican leaders in the Senate, in a breathtaking and unprecedented move, are saying they won’t let this duly elected president fill.
The appointment may fall to the next president.
But that same Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech, swinging the door wide open to allow to the ultrawealthy to have nearly unlimited influence on the electoral process.
No wonder a 2014 study found that America has effectively transformed into an oligarchy instead of a democracy.
And yet, that is an idea that most Americans are pathologically incapable of processing.
Pretending to make things better will quickly prove a snare and a delusion:
Wade Graham at the Los Angeles Times writes—Are we greening our cities, or just greenwashing them?
Architecture and urban design are in the throes of a green fever dream: Everywhere you look there are plans for “sustainable” buildings, futuristic eco-cities, even vertical aquaponic farms in the sky, each promising to redeem the ecologically sinful modern city and bring its inhabitants back into harmony with nature. This year, two marquee examples are set to open: Bjarke Ingels' Via 57 West in New York, a 32-story luxury-apartment pyramid enfolding a garden, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, by Jean Nouvel, a complex shielded from the harsh climate of the Arabian Peninsula by an enormous white dome. The dreamers' goal is even bigger: “eco-cities” that will leapfrog the last century's flawed development patterns and deliver us in stylish comfort to a low-carbon, green future.
In part, the dream reflects a pragmatic push for energy efficiency, recycled materials and lower carbon emissions — a competition rewarded with LEED certification in silver, gold or platinum. But it also includes a remarkable effort to turn buildings green — almost literally — by covering them in plants. Green roofs are sprouting on Wal-Marts and green walls festooned with ferns and succulents in Cubist patterns appear on hotels, banks, museums — even at the mall, as I found on a recent trip to the Glendale Galleria in Los Angeles.
All of this is surely a good idea, at some level: trying to repair some of the damage our lifestyle has done to the planet by integrating nature into what have been, especially in the modern era, wasteful, harsh, alienating, concrete urban deserts. But, despite the rhetoric of reconciling the city with nature, today's green urban dream is too often about bringing a technologically controlled version of nature into the city and declaring the problem solved, rather than looking at the deeper causes of our current environmental and urban discontents.
Nearly 30 years ago, Frank J. Popper and Deborah Popper discussed the Buffalo Commons in their essay “The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust. E.O. Wilson has gone much further as Jedediah Purdy at The New Republic explains in—A Wild Way to Save the Planet:
There is plenty of theoretical ambition where humanists and public intellectuals meet the global ecological crisis. On a well-stocked bookstore shelf, you can find calls for interspecies democracy, “post-humanism,” and a revival of ancient Stoicism to learn “how to die in the Anthropocene,” the new era in which human powers shape the planet alongside geological forces. But philosophical radicalism doesn’t have much practical payoff. Some eco-theorists are vegetarians, some like to take their pets for walks, and pretty much all would support a carbon tax but have no special insight on how to get it passed.
So it is exciting that Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard evolutionary theorist and two-time Pulitzer winner, has devoted his new book, Half-Earth, to an audacious and concrete proposal: We should set aside half the planet’s surface for nonhuman life. Rain forests, savannas, deserts, alpine meadows, and many more places should be preserved, mostly undisturbed, perhaps visited occasionally and observed at home through a few aptly placed web cams. Wilson would consecrate to nonhuman life as much of the planet as you can see from space, as much as the sun shines on.
Half-Earth completes the 86-year-old Wilson’s valedictory trilogy on the human animal and our place on the planet. [...]
William Greider at The Nation writes—Democrats and Republicans Are Quietly Planning a Corporate Giveaway—to the Tune of $400 Billion:
Young people are the good news of 2016. They see the stressful realities of American life more clearly than their elders and are rallying around the straight talk of Bernie Sanders. Meanwhile, the big hitters back in Washington politics are working on an ugly surprise not just for the kids but for all of us—another monster tax break for US multinational corporations.
The bad news is that key leaders of the Democratic Party—including the president—are getting on board with Republicans, despite some talk about confronting income inequality. Influential Democrats intend to negotiate with Republican counterparts on the size and terms of post-facto tax “forgiveness” for America’s globalized companies. This is real money they’re talking about—a giveaway of hundreds of billions.
Why haven’t voters heard about this from candidates? Because Republicans and Democrats both know it would make angry voters even angrier.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—The GOP vulgarians:
Call me old-fashioned or even a prig, but I have a rather elevated view of what politics can be and what it can achieve. For decades, in good political moments and bad, I have repaired for inspiration and comfort to the political philosopher Michael Sandel’s description of politics at its best. “When politics goes well,” he wrote, “we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone.”
In the GOP right now, it’s not going well.
You can place a lot of the responsibility for all this on Trump and, yes, the media. As I was writing this, MSNBC (for which I’ve worked over the years) and CNN were simultaneously broadcasting live the same Trump speech. Welcome to Trump State Television. Broadcasters have reveled in the ratings to be gained from airing Trump’s stream-of-consciousness (if politically effective) rants, and the coarser the better.
Joel Bleifuss at In These Times writes—Hillary Clinton Won Super Tuesday, But Bernie Sanders Won the Future:
In the short-term, with Clinton moving closer to the nomination, it looks like we're sitting down to a pretty lean victors banquet. Where is “change” on the menu? Next to “crumbs”?
But in the long-term, who is the real winner? Who has put ideas on the table that herald a future that transcends the status quo? As he has done before, on Super Tuesday, in state after state, Sanders won a majority of Democratic voters under the age of 30. Clinton may yet win the nomination, but the future of the party belongs to Sanders.
The kids in the Sanders’ movement are not clueless dreamers. The harsh realities of employment precarity, debt, low wages, inequality, climate change, etc., have forced young Americans to reassess their circumstances in a cold, harsh light. [...]
Clinton and Sanders offered America’s millennials two futures. They made their choice.
Liz Ryan Murray at Other Words writes—Paying for Low-Wage Pollution:
Imagine if a corporation set up shop in your community and immediately dumped toxic sludge in your local waterways and buried radioactive waste next to your biggest playground. You and your neighbors, I bet, would demand full compensation from that corporation to pay for the clean-up and public health costs.
You’d have a strong case.
What about corporations that pollute communities not with chemicals, but with poverty wages? The impact can be every bit as toxic, and yet companies that pay low wages get off scot-free. In fact, their CEOs usually get bonuses.
Economic justice activists across the country are fighting back against this outrage. They’re demanding that corporate polluters pay a price for low wages.
The New York Times Editorial Board objects to the Republicans’ Baseless Abortion Investigation:
Initially convened in response to the videos, the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, a part of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, pledges to “get the facts about medical practices of abortion service providers and the business practices of the procurement organizations who sell baby body parts.”
Its first hearing last Wednesday was a showcase for fallacious attacks on fetal tissue research. [...]
Wednesday’s hearing showed that limiting or ending access to legal abortion services is part of the agenda. One witness said that women who have had abortions “forfeit the moral standing needed” to decide what should happen to the fetal tissue. One panel member, Representative Diane Black, Republican of Tennessee, bizarrely asked, “Have we reached a point in our society where there effectively is an Amazon.com for human parts, including entire babies?” — a comment that has no basis in reality.