Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—Iowa’s Black Caucusgoers
Over three days in Des Moines — from Friday to Sunday — I interviewed more than 30 black people, and spoke briefly to many more at a black church, a black-owned barbershop, a popular soul food restaurant and at African-American social events.
My first impression from these conversations was that there existed a staggering level of ambivalence and absence of enthusiasm. [...]
Bill Clinton seems to understand the powerful role the griot plays in black culture, and he channels that spirit when he speaks, far more than any non-black candidate I’ve seen.
For Sanders’s part, he seemed to be judged too unfamiliar and too absent, particularly down the homestretch. This feels to me like a terrible tactical error.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—The long, painful road to Iowa:
If we had followed the New Deal path to political realignment, Obama’s election would have inaugurated another Democratic and progressive era, built on frustration with Middle East intervention and rage over Wall Street’s role in bringing down the economy.
But events and the underlying makeup of the U.S. electorate did not cooperate. While the economic implosion happened on Bush’s watch, most of the pain was experienced after Obama’s inauguration. FDR, by contrast, took over after three years of suffering, and all the blame for it fell on Herbert Hoover. [...]
Bernie Sanders draws in Democratic voters, especially the young, still looking for the transformational politics that was the flip side of Obama’s 2008 appeal. Sanders proposes to resolve the contradictions of Obamaism: Forget the part about bringing us together; just organize a progressive majority for real.
In the meantime, Hillary Clinton’s campaign might be summarized by the words of the old civil rights song: “Keep your hand on the plow, hold on.” She insists that painstaking, practical effort will, over time, get us to where Obama promised to go.
Jeet Heer at The New Republic writes—Spinning an Iowa defeat is an art form in itself:
It’s inevitable that some candidate in the crowded Republican field will under-perform tomorrow. How will his or her supporters spin the dismal news? History offers a guide. In 2008, Rudy Giuliani came in sixth in Iowa with 3 percent of the vote. You would think that such a terrible showing would be impossible to gild into a shining achievement. Yet John Podhoretz of Commentary wrote, “The result in Iowa could not have been better for Giuliani tactically.” David Frum, another Giuliani supporter, enthused, “Yet as the smoke clears, it’s going to become apparent that Rudy was the night’s big winner.”
The question is, who will be the pundit who will celebrate the likely disastrous showing of Jeb Bush and other candidates? Are there columnists even now preparing to argue that failure is victory and rejection is triumph?
Heather Smith at Grist writes—How the Koch brothers grew their tentacles:
How did the Koch brothers — Charles and David Koch, who are, respectively,the sixth and seventh wealthiest people in the world — become the Koch brothers, founders and funders of a vast right-wing message machine? Why aren’t they buying their own islands or hanging out at the Kentucky Derby, instead of pressuring politicians to vote against carbon taxes and spending ever-increasing amounts of money on local and national elections?
If you want to answer these questions, you won’t find a better starting place thanDark Money, a new history of the Kochs by Jane Mayer, an investigative reporter at the New Yorker. The reviews have understandably focused on the most indelible details Mayer has unearthed from the Koch past — particularly the stern German nanny with a policy of mandatory enemas for those children who didn’t master her toilet-training regimen. (The nanny quit in 1940, when Charles was 5, to return to Europe and help celebrate the Nazi conquest of France.)
They’ve also focused on Mayer’s discovery, after she published an article about the Kochs in the New Yorker, that the Kochs hired a group of “half a dozen or so” investigators to attempt to discredit her and her reporting. “Dirt, dirt, dirt” a source tells her. “If they couldn’t find it, they’d create it.”
Kim Phillips-Fein at The Guardian writes—Obama's true heir is Hillary Clinton. But that is a blessing for Bernie Sanders:
Both candidates understandably want the stamp of Obama’s approval. And it’s also true that Sanders is dreaming of pulling off what Obama accomplished in 2008 in terms of mobilizing voters who don’t usually come to the polls. But that’s where the similarity between Obama and Sanders ends.
Clinton really is the one carrying on Obama’s legacy – and it’s a legacy of which Sanders should want no part.
How can Sanders frame himself as Obama’s heir? And why would he want to? After all, his campaign is premised on responding to the crisis of the middle class in an era of skyrocketing inequality – a problem that has only deepened over the past eight years. [...]
For the first-time voters who flocked to the polls that year, inspired by a candidate who spoke of lasting changes, the past eight years have been ones of political disappointment.
Suzanne Goldenberg at The Guardian takes note of something I’ve been pushing since 2010 on climate change: Delay Is Denial. But she doesn’t say it quite that way in her essay—Republicans might as well deny climate change if they don't plan to address it:
Let’s call it the non-denial denial. Some Republican presidential candidates are beginning to peer out from behind the wall of climate denial that has defined the party as long as Barack Obama has been in the White House.
Finally, it seems, the most open expressions of climate denial – such as dismissing long-established scientific fact – may be seen as a bit retrograde, and possibly embarrassing, even by some who are looking for votes from an increasingly rightwing Republican party. […]
But mere acknowledgement of the existence of climate change is not enough. Neither Rubio nor Bush came forward to say what they would do to fight climate change [...] such oversight by candidates is really just another kind of denial.
Ann Jones at The Nation writes— After I Lived in Norway, America Felt Backward. Here’s Why:
Some years ago, I faced up to the futility of reporting truths about America’s disastrous wars, and so I left Afghanistan for another mountainous country far away. It was the polar opposite of Afghanistan: a peaceful, prosperous land where nearly everybody seemed to enjoy a good life, on the job and in the family.
It’s true that they didn’t work much–not by American standards, anyway. In the United States, full-time salaried workers supposedly laboring 40 hours a week actually average 49, with almost 20 percent clocking more than 60. These people, on the other hand, worked only about 37 hours a week, when they weren’t away on long paid vacations. At the end of the workday, about four in the afternoon (perhaps three during the summer), they had time to enjoy a hike in the forest, a swim with the kids, or a beer with friends—which helps explain why, unlike so many Americans, they are pleased with their jobs.
Often I was invited to go along. I found it refreshing to hike and ski in a country with no land mines, and to hang out in cafés unlikely to be bombed. Gradually, my war-zone jitters subsided and I settled into the slow, calm, pleasantly uneventful stream of life there.
Four years on, thinking I should settle down, I returned to the United States. It felt quite a lot like stepping back into that other violent, impoverished world, where anxiety runs high and people are quarrelsome. I had, in fact, come back to the flip side of Afghanistan and Iraq: to what America’s wars have done to America. Where I live now, in the homeland, there are not enough shelters for the homeless. Most people are either overworked or hurting for jobs; the housing is overpriced, the hospitals crowded and understaffed, the schools largely segregated and not so good. Opioid or heroin overdose is a popular form of death, and men in the street threaten women wearing hijabs. Did the American soldiers I covered in Afghanistan know they were fighting for this?
Zoë Carpenter at The Nation writes— How the EPA Has Failed to Challenge Environmental Racism in Flint—and Beyond:
People in Flint—and in many other communities of color across the country—routinely bear the brunt of environmental degradation and industrial pollution, and are regularly ignored by the officials who are supposed to protect them. For instance, a report released this month by the Center for Effective Government found that people of color are nearly twice as likely than whites to live near facilities that process dangerous chemicals. [...]
As was the case in Flint’s water crisis, state and local agencies are mostly responsible for the development of toxic industrial zones and for ignoring public-health threats in minority communities. But a major failing is occurring at the federal level, too. Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits recipients of federal funds—such as state environmental agencies—from making decisions that have discriminatory impact. The EPA’S Office of Civil Rights is supposed to police that beat by following up on complaints like the one about the biomass power plant in Flint, and by initiating affirmative investigations of its own. It should be an important backstop for communities who’ve been failed by their local officials, but it hasn’t exactly worked out like that.
The office has received over 300 discrimination complaints since it was established in the early 1990s. The agency has never once issued a formal finding of a violation. Instead, nine in ten communities that seek help from the EPA have had their claims rejected or dismissed, in many cases without an investigation, according to a recent analysis by the Center for Public Integrity.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes—Wind, Sun and Fire:
Most people who think about [ameliorating climate change] at all probably imagine that achieving a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would necessarily involve big economic sacrifices. This view is required orthodoxy on the right, where it forms a sort of second line of defense against action, just in case denial of climate science and witch hunts against climate scientists don’t do the trick. For example, in the last Republican debate Marco Rubio — the last, best hope of the G.O.P. establishment — insisted, as he has before, that a cap-and-trade program would be “devastating for our economy.”
To find anything equivalent on the left you have to go far out of the mainstream, to activists who insist that climate change can’t be fought without overthrowing capitalism. Still, my sense is that many Democrats believe that politics as usual isn’t up to the task, that we need a political earthquake to make real action possible. In particular, I keep hearing that the Obama administration’s environmental efforts have been so far short of what’s needed as to be barely worth mentioning.
But things are actually much more hopeful than that, thanks to remarkable technological progress in renewable energy.
Ari Paul at Jacobin writes—The Bloomberg Factor:
Michael Bloomberg, the eighth richest man in the United States and the former three-term mayor of New York City, has given himself until March to decide whether to run as an independent for president. By then, reports say, he’ll be able to get a sense of whether Bernie Sanders has a shot of getting the Democratic nod, and whether Donald Trump or Ted Cruz will nab their party’s nomination. While Bloomberg may not run, the mere mention of his candidacy could have profound political consequences. [...]
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Bloomberg will not be elected president if he runs. [...]
What Bloomberg can do, however, is scare Sanders-leaning progressives by playing the spoiler. Judging from the Clinton campaign’s recent barrage of attacks, the former secretary of state is increasingly nervous about her chances in the early contests. Sanders has an edge in New Hampshire and could very well beat her in Iowa. Clinton’s support also looks to be slipping among African-American voters in South Carolina, her purported “firewall.” [...]
Left critics of Sanders point out that he’s more social democrat than socialist, or argue he’s sheep dogging for the Democrats. But Michael Bloomberg knows which side he’s on, and he’s rattled. That alone says something about the moment we’re in, and the possibilities for progressive change.
Jim Hightower at Other Words writes—Manna from Hell: While soldiers who go to war risk death, the big corporations that go to war reap perpetual profits:
Unless, of course, you happen to be a global corporate peddler of rockets, drones, bombs, and all the other hellish weaponry of military conflict. In that case, war is manna from hell. So bring it on.
Indeed, it seems as if Beelzebub himself is in charge these days, with U.S. military forces enmeshed in at least 135 countries in 2015 alone. Plus, such chicken hawks as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are maniacally beating their flabby chests and screeching for even more military adventurism.
This perpetual warmongering is music to the ears of the people who serve as the CEOs and biggest investors in the war machine. It means a windfall of perpetual profits for them.
In a rare admission of their war-profiteering ethic, a group of major military contractors spoke late last year about how splendid war is. In leaked tapes from a wealthy investor conference reported by The Intercept, top weapon makers exulted about the spreading horror of the Islamic State and escalating wars across the Middle East and Africa.