Richard Wolffe at The Guardian writes—For Donald Trump, this was more than a terrible week. It was a turning point:
Trump has demolished his campaign, his brand and his party. He has squandered his vice-presidential pick and his convention, and several battleground states along with them. He picked several fights he could not win, and showed no sign of learning from his own failure.
It would be tempting to say this was just another week in the bizarre life of the Republican presidential nominee.
But it wasn’t. This week was a decisive turning point in the 2016 election, and there have been remarkably few of them in an campaign that is supposedly volatile.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Elitism won’t defeat Trumpism:
It’s certainly true that Trump appeals to outright racists and nativists. He is, first and foremost, the product of a Republican Party that has exploited extremism since President Obama took office. GOP leaders should be called to account whenever they try to prettify Trump by ignoring his assaults on Mexican Americans and Muslims, or when they disregard his checkered business record that belies his pretensions of being a friend to the working class.
Trump further damaged his credibility as a paladin of the downtrodden on Friday by naming what The Post’s Jim Tankersley called “a new team of ultra-rich financiers and businessmen” as his core economic advisers.
Nonetheless, there should be no ignoring the real distress Trump voters have experienced . As a practical matter, we will not ease the divisions in our country that his candidacy has underscored if we do not deal with the legitimate grievances of his supporters. As a moral matter, writing off Trump voters as unenlightened and backward-looking is to engage in the very same kind of bigoted behavior that we condemn in other spheres.
Let’s begin by disentangling the causes of both Trumpism and the related rise of far-right parties in Europe.
Bill McKibben at The New York Times writes—Embarrassing Photos of Me, Thanks to My Right-Wing Stalkers:
In one series, my groceries are being packed into plastic bags, as I’d forgotten to bring cloth ones. In other shots, I am getting in and out of … cars. There are video snippets of me giving talks, or standing on the street. Sometimes I see the cameraman, sometimes I don’t. The images are often posted to Twitter, reminders that I’m being watched.
In April, Politico and The Hill reported that America Rising Squared, an arm of the Republican opposition research group America Rising, had decided to go after me and Tom Steyer, another prominent environmentalist, with a campaign on a scale previously reserved for presidential candidates. [...]
This effort has resulted in all kinds of odd things appearing on right-wing corners of the web: out-of-context quotations from old books and articles apparently put on display to prove I’m a zealot, and photos from God knows who intended to make me out as a hypocrite (the plastic bags, for instance, and my travel by car, which, you know, burns gas). Mostly, they’ve just published those creepy videos, to remind me that I’m under surveillance.
I understand that this isn’t horrible in the way that police brutality is horrible, or having your home swept away by a flood is horrible. I know that in other parts of the world, environmentalists have worse things than cameras pointed at them. From Honduras to the Philippines, in the last two years, activists have been assassinated after getting in the way of megaprojects.
Timothy Egan at The New York Times writes—The Sore Loser Uprising:
Because Trump is consistently barbaric and such a prolific liar, it’s hard to sustain outrage over any one of his serial scandals. But his pre-emptive attack on the electoral process is very troubling.
To understand what Trump is up to, listen to his doppelgänger, the veteran political operative Roger Stone. He will say things that even Trump will not say, usually as a way to allow Trump to later repeat some variant of them.
It was Stone who called a CNN commentator a “stupid Negro” and accused the Gold Star parents of Capt. Humayun Khan of being Muslim Brotherhood agents. And it was Stone who threatened to give out the hotel room numbers of unsupportive Republicans at the party convention, the better for the Trumpian mob to find them.
He tastes the food for the king to make sure it’s not poison. If it doesn’t kill Roger Stone, it will not kill Donald Trump.
Alissa Torres at The Guardian writes—I'm a 9/11 widow. Watching the Khans' public heartbreak felt all too familiar:
The visible pain of Khizr and Ghazala Khan as they feuded with Donald Trump this week over the memory of their dead son brought up a world of all-too-familiar emotions. After my husband, Luis Eduardo Torres, died at the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, I stood on many smaller platforms as his widow, invoked his name and story to make a public point, and felt excruciating pain each time I did so.
The political fallout in the aftermath of September 11 horrified me: the post 9/11 world brought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – where Humayan Khan was was killed in 2004 – compromised our personal freedoms for security through the US Patriot Act, stepped up with harsh immigration policies while failing to pass much-needed positive reforms like the Dream Act, tortured prisoners, created Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp and more.
Like many 9/11 victim family members, I spoke up in response to terrible things being done in my loved one’s name. I felt especially impassioned about immigration crackdowns spurred by the attacks. My husband came from Colombia as an uneducated illegal immigrant. By the time he died, he was a senior currency broker, a job his bilingualism helped him get. It was his second day at work at Cantor Fitzgerald, and I was seven and a half months pregnant.
Mike Krauss at TruthDig writes—Forget Clinton’s and Trump’s Plans for the Economy: It’s Time to Erase Debt and Create Jobs:
So far, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton has offered a credible plan to restart the long-stalled U.S. economy. [...]
Clinton favors higher taxes on the wealthy and more spending for infrastructure. To keep the debt off the federal government balance sheet, she has specifically proposed so-called public-private partnerships. This is the Wall Street solution. Public guarantees will be used to attract private investors, who will finance, own and rent back to the people the entire public infrastructure of the United States.
Neither program gets at the real problems: Americans—families, students, businesses, state and local governments, school districts, etc.—are drowning in debt, and there is not enough money in circulation for productive, job-creating purposes. Instead, it is eaten up paying off debt.
There is an alternative. The U.S. Treasury has the power to extinguish debt, rebuild publicly owned infrastructure and propel the economy forward like a rocket. It is the power to create the nation’s supply of money, which Congress surrendered to the private banks that own the Federal Reserve upon the Fed’s creation in 1913. It’s time to take that power back.
Sarah van Gelder at Yes! Magazine writes—Why Say No to the TPP? Corporations Already Have Too Much Power:
So will the TPP get approved, and should it?
My view is that corporations already have too much power. At a time of climate change emergency, we don’t need to make it easier for transnational corporations to roll over the objections of communities everywhere with their new fossil fuel projects. At a time of growing inequality, we don’t need to make it easier to outsource jobs. At a time of widespread corruption of governments by powerful moneyed interests, we don’t need to give mega-corporations yet another tool to override the will of “we the people.”
Instead, our hope lies in shifting power to communities and regions—urban and rural—that prioritize safety, clean air, children’s health, and locally rooted livelihoods. The benefits might be invisible to economists and policy makers, because they can’t all be measured in profits and dollars. But human well-being and ecological resilience are what matter, whether in the streets of our cities and towns or in Nebraska’s abundant harvest of heirloom red corn.
Cyril Mychalejko at teleSUR writes—New World Bank Policies Imperil Environment and Land Defenders:
The World Bank approved Thursday its new "Environmental and Social Framework" which civil society groups say weakens human rights protections and will likely endanger the very communities the safeguards are intended to protect.
At issue are a series of contradictions which strengthens the oversight authority of the very governments that are pushing the mammoth development projects typically opposed by poor, Indigenous and working class communities. The likely result, critics say, will be more conflicts and more corpses, doubling down, as it were, on 2015, a year which the environmental NGO Global Witness says was the deadliest recorded year for environmental defenders, with an average of three slayings per week, worldwide.
Scott Lemieux at The New Republic writes—How Republican Efforts to Suppress the Vote Backfired Big Time:
The cases of the past month were remarkable for different reasons. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal’s decision striking down North Carolina’s particularly draconian voter suppression law found that the statute was intentionally discriminatory. This is normally a difficult standard to meet, but given the facts, Judge Diana Motz had little difficulty reaching her conclusion. The day after theShelby decision held that the state was not required to clear changes to its election laws with the Department of Justice, the North Carolina legislature requested race-based voting data. It proceeded to target African-American voters with, as Judge Motz put it, “almost surgical precision,” enacting five different measures that made it more difficult for them to vote.
Most of these changes—such as eliminating Sunday voting and reducing the time period for early voting—didn’t even pretend to have any electoral integrity, in contrast to voter ID laws, which are ostensibly about countering the nearly nonexistent problem of voter fraud. The only way North Carolina Republicans could have been more blatantly discriminatory would have been to show up at the ballot wearing white sheets, and a unanimous Fourth Circuit panel refused to look the other way.
The Fifth Circuit’s decision earlier in July striking down significant parts of a similar Texas law was also significant.
Christopher Hass at In These Times writes—Why Bernie Sanders Lost, and How the Next Progressive Challenger Can Win:
To argue that an anti-establishment candidate lost because the establishment was against him is to close off the possibility of ever successfully challenging that establishment—and that would be a deep disservice to Sanders, his supporters and all they accomplished. [...]
What Sanders did was pull back the curtain on a complacent Democratic establishment, revealing just how hungry people are—especially young people—for a more progressive and populist economic policy. Sanders’ supporters and volunteer networks are now part of every state, and their influence will be felt within state parties and progressive organizations for a long time to come. If they’re successful, in the future an establishment (including unions and issue-advocacy groups) that is less complacent, less compromising and more receptive to the wants of its members—a more small “d” democratic establishment—may not be so quick to close ranks around a presumptive nominee.
In that environment, a campaign that starts early, with a clear commitment to winning and focus on building a broad and inclusive coalition, could play out a lot differently. Sanders was right about the economic moment that we live in, but he somehow missed the larger social movements and forces—including the struggle for racial justice that is being waged in the streets every day.
Michael Purzycki at The Washington Monthly writes—A Model Carbon Tax: Canada once again leads the way – this time on how a carbon tax can fight climate change while growing the economy:
Many economists agree that one of the most efficient ways to reduce the carbon emissions that contribute to climate change is to tax it. But as appealing as it might be in theory, could a carbon tax work in practice?
In the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC), the answer seems to be “yes.” In fact, BC’s carbon tax – levied in 2008 – might be an ideal model for how a carbon tax could help to combat climate change without damaging economic growth.
BC’s carbon tax started at C$10 per metric ton, and has been $C30 per metric ton (about $23 in U.S. money) since 2012. In real-world impacts, the effect of this tax has been to raise the price of gasoline by 6.67 Canadian cents per liter (roughly 25 U.S. cents per gallon).
The tax has had undeniably significant effects on the province’s consumption of fossil fuels and, as a consequence, its carbon emissions. Stewart Elgie, a law and economics professor at the University of Ottawa, calculates that petroleum use per capita fell more than 16% in BC in the first five years of the carbon tax, while it rose 3% in the rest of Canada during the same period. “To put that accomplishment in perspective,” Elgie writes, “Canada’s Tokyo target [in global climate change accords] was a 6 percent reduction in 20 years.”