Kate Aronoff at In These Times writes—After the Keystone XL Approval, Here’s What’s Next for the Climate Movement:
After months of public hearings and deliberation, Nebraska’s Public Service commission on November 20 approved a route for the Keystone XL pipeline in a 3-2 decision. The years-running fight against the controversial infrastructure project, however, is far from over: Organizers up and down the project’s route are already lining up to stop it, whether in courts or on construction sites. And whether Keystone XL ends up getting built or not, the battle against it has already changed the way Americans relate to the fossil fuel industry. […]
The Canada-based oil company isn’t likely to see opposition to their now-trademark project stop anytime soon. Before the ruling came down, members of the Sioux Nation gathered in South Dakota to sign a historic treaty, pledging to resist the pipeline. “Nothing has changed at all in our defense of land, air and water of the Oceti Sakowin Lands,” pipeline fighter Faith Spotted Eagle told that gathering. “If anything, it has become more focused, stronger and more adamant after Standing Rock.”
At least 8,000 people have also already pledged to risk arrest to get in TransCanada’s way, through a document being circulated by environmental groups.
TransCanada faces legal challenges over the Keystone XL elsewhere along its proposed route as well. Montana’s initial environmental review of the pipeline is being challenged in court, with critics alleging the process that led the way for its approval wasn’t thorough enough. Two days after the PSC issued its decision, a federal judge rebuffed TransCanada and the White House by ruling that a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s approval of the pipeline could proceed, erecting yet another barrier to its construction.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Our political foundation is rotting away:
Great nations and proud democracies fall when their systems become so corrupted that the decay is not even noticed — or the rot is written off as a normal part of politics.
President Trump has created exactly such a crisis. He has not done it alone. The corrosion of norms and values began long before he propelled the nation past the edge, and his own party is broadly complicit in enabling his attacks on truth, decency and democratic values.
In fact, Republicans are taking full advantage of the bedlam Trump leaves in his wake. They are using a twisted process to push through a profoundly flawed tax bill with scant scrutiny.
The convoluted proposal is so generous to the wealthiest interests in the country and so damaging to significant parts of the middle class and the poor that GOP leaders know it would not survive extended debate.
They dare not take on Trump because doing so might derail the pursuit of what are now their party’s only driving purposes: court packing, the care and feeding of the privileged, and the gutting of federal social services and regulation.
Jill Filopic at The Guardian writes—Matt Lauer is gone. He's left heartbreak in his wake:
What’s stunning about the Lauer firing, though, is how decisively NBC acted – especially considering that Lauer is one of their marquee names, and has anchored one of their most-watched and profitable shows for two decades. The evidence for his misbehavior must be pretty solid (a video? A hot mic?), but so too must be NBC’s conviction that keeping a harasser or assailant on staff would be financial and reputational suicide.
This is new. And it’s a feminist victory.
Today Show co-host Savannah Guthrie captured what so many women feel when men we like, admire, or love commit harassment or assault. “All we can say is we are heartbroken; I’m heartbroken,” she said. That heartbreak extended to Lauer, her “dear, dear friend,” as well as the women he wronged. Guthrie said she is “heartbroken for the brave colleague who came forward to tell her story.”
A decade ago – heck, a year ago – media executives and network decision-makers would have taken the heartbreak that so many of us feel when a person we like is accused of wrongdoing, and extended it primarily to the man accused of harassment.
Steven Greenhouse at The Guardian writes—America is in crisis. The Republican tax plan will make that worse:
A very unfortunate, but little-discussed aspect of the legislation is that by increasing the national debt by a projected $1.5tn, and perhaps $2tn, the plan would make it far harder for the nation to address the pressing domestic crises I mentioned above – and that doesn’t even include the damage from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.
In some ways, the tax plan, believe it or not, would worsen several of our domestic crises. Amazingly, Congress’s own joint committee on taxation has found that the Senate plan would, in the out years, raise taxes most percentage-wise on the poorest households, specifically those making less than $30,000 a year.
With millions of senior citizens facing a financial squeeze or downright poverty, the tax bill would make things worse for many seniors by triggering an automatic $25bn cut in Medicare next year – and probably more such cuts in subsequent years.
As the federal deficit and debt soar because of the tax plan, congressional Republicans will no doubt push all the harder to rein in deficits by cutting social security and Medicare, further hurting the nation’s senior citizens. And that at a time when social security is a lifeline for millions of seniors – one-third of Americans over age 65 receive 90% or more of their income from social security.
Did you catch that? Congress’s own joint committee on taxation calculated that in a few years the biggest burden will fall on people least able to afford it and yet Republicans are going to vote for this monstrosity anyway? For the record, that is feature not a bug.
Madeleine K. Albright, secretary of State during Bill Clinton’s second term as president, writes—The national security emergency we’re not talking about:
America’s diplomatic professionals have issued a dire warning about the crisis facing the State Department: Scores of top diplomats, including some of our highest-ranked career Foreign Service officers, have left the agency at “a dizzying speed” over the past 10 months.
“The rapid loss of so many senior officers has a serious, immediate and tangible effect on the capacity of the United States to shape world events,” wrote former ambassador Barbara Stephenson, president of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA).
As a former secretary of state, I agree. This is not a story that has two sides. It is simply a fact that the United States relies on diplomacy as our first line of defense — to cement alliances, build coalitions, address global problems and find ways to protect our interests without resorting to military force. When we must use force, as in the fight against the Islamic State, our diplomats ensure that we can do so effectively and with the cooperation of other countries.
Richard Eskow at the Campaign for America’s Future writes—Mulvaney’s In, Bankers Win, and Trump Shafts Americans Again:
Who is Mick Mulvaney? He’s Wall Street’s flunky, a tool of the serial fraudsters who nearly brought down the global economy. Mulvaney took the lead in blocking an ethics investigation into the use of ex-lobbyists by the Trump administration, a move one Bush Administration ethics official called “unprecedented and extremely troubling.”
Throughout the Obama years, Mulvaney insisted he was a hardliner on government deficits. He embraced his role as leader of the “shutdown caucus” that was willing to bring government to a halt rather than increase the nation’s debt. He nearly derailed relief efforts for Hurricane Sandy victims with an amendment that would have blocked any expenditures that weren’t offset by spending cuts elsewhere.
Then, as Donald Trump’s Budget Director, Mulvaney embraced a package of tax cuts for the rich and for corporations that increases the deficit by $1.5 trillion, justifying it with fringe economic ideas incubated in the far right.
That’s a pretty convenient conversion. But no such conversion awaits Mulvaney at the CFPB. He hated it then and, as recent comments have demonstrated, he hates it now.
Eric Levitz at New York magazine writes—There Is No Economic Theory That Justifies the GOP Tax Plan:
Most liberal criticism of the Trump tax cuts has focused on the fact that Arthur Laffer was a false prophet, and supply-side economics is a superstition. [...]
Supply-side theory may be snake oil — but the GOP tax bill is straight-up sewer water. Which is to say: There is no economic theory that justifies the tax bill currently moving through the Senate, not even the “trumped-up trickle-down” kind.
America’s top conservative economists have tacitly admitted as much. Earlier this week, Robert Barro, Glenn Hubbard, Michael Boskin, and six other economists wrote a letter to Steve Mnuchin, informing the Treasury secretary that the GOP’s tax-reform plan would accelerate economic growth by spurring investment. But in order to reach this conclusion, these right-wing wonks didn’t merely rely on a discredited economic theory — they also posited a wholly fictional Republican tax plan.
The Editorial Board of The New York Times writes—The Senate Is Rushing to Pass Its Tax Bill Because It Stinks:
The Senate tax bill, a 515-page mammoth, was introduced just last week, and the chamber could vote on it as soon as Thursday. This is not how lawmakers are supposed to pass enormous pieces of legislation. It took several years to put together the last serious tax bill, passed in 1986. Congress and the Reagan administration worked across party lines, produced numerous drafts, held many hearings and struck countless compromises. This time it’s not about true reform but about speed and bowling over the opposition in hopes of claiming a partisan victory. The country ought to be dismayed by the way senators like Bob Corker, Susan Collins and Ron Johnson appear to be backing away from their principled objections based on half-measures promised by President Trump and the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, that will not address its big flaws.
This rush to the Senate floor has been orchestrated by Mr. McConnell, following the same playbook he used in the failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The longer people have to study the details, the less likely the bill is to pass. People should know by now about the big stuff: the giant permanent corporate tax-rate cut, the small and temporary tax cuts for the middle class, the repeal of the A.C.A.’s individual mandate and the $1.4 trillion added to the federal deficit over 10 years. But other provisions are not as well understood and deserve to be called out.
Sarah Sunshine Manning (Chippewa-Cree-Hopi) at TruthDig writes—Stop Calling Anyone 'Pocahontas':
[T]here is much more to this Trump insult than a pattern of buffoonery or mistreatment of indigenous peoples that must be explored. The fallout of this entire debacle is as worthy of dissecting as the incident itself. Unfortunately, media and consumers of media alike have a propensity for the sensational. News is hot, and then it’s not. The issue disappears and the most substantive lessons are lost.
And when it comes to Native American communities and our scant representation in mainstream media, the issues and struggles remain long after our flash of superficial acknowledgement. By and large, the mainstream media ignore indigenous people. Our representation in public education is abusive, sparse and inaccurate. We are afterthoughts, at best, in American politics. As a result of widespread misrepresentation and underrepresentation of indigenous peoples in American society, Native American educators, journalists, artists and thought leaders are often left to make up for the shortcomings of public education and media. [...]
Cherokee scholar Dr. Adrienne Keene pointed to the greater absence of indigenous people in American narratives. “If this Trump/Pocahontas thing is the first time you’ve Tweeted about Native peoples this #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth (or ever) … just think on that for a minute,” Keene wrote on Twitter. [...]
This discourse, right here and now, is valuable. But we cannot stop here. Conversations about indigenous issues must become more common. Indigenous people and indigenous voices must be regular features of national conversations and they must be daily—not just in the month of November, and not just in moments of relevance to the media’s coverage of our disrespectful president.
Mark Trahant, a Shoshone-Bannock journalist and University of North Dakota journalism professor, articulates this point well in his latest blog: “There are so many critical (Native American) stories worth writing about now, such as the tens of thousands of Native children who will lose health insurance soon unless Congress acts.”
Alex Shepard at The New Republic writes—Donald Trump’s Islamophobia has entered a dangerous new phase:
These videos are racist and clear incitements to violence. They portray Muslims as inherently violent and locked in an existential conflict with Christians and white people. The reason they’ve even alarmed conspiracy theorists like InfoWars’s Paul Joseph Watson is that they dispense with any subtext and get straight to the Islamophobic text. Trump is not merely saying that we should stop bad Muslims who are perverting Islam, but that Islam itself represents a threat to the West, to white people, and to Christianity.
This strain of Islamophobia was at the center of Trump’s presidential campaign and his administration’s succession of blocked executive orders banning travel from a number of Muslim-majority countries. But the videos Trump retweeted on Wednesday nevertheless represent a new evolution in his embrace of conspiracy theory–fueled xenophobia. A day after it was reported that Trump is still pushing the lie that Barack Obama was not born in America, and the same morning that Trump suggested that Joe Scarborough murdered an intern, Trump is pushing unverified videos from a racist political party. And that’s terrifying, even for Trump.
Nicholas Kristoff at The New York Times writes—Are We Headed Toward a New Korean War?
If there was a message in North Korea’s launch of a new missile capable of reaching anywhere in the United States, it was that America’s strategy toward that country is failing — and that war may be looming.
The American public is far too complacent about the possibility of a war with North Korea, one that could be incomparably bloodier than any U.S. war in my lifetime. One assessment suggests that one million people could die on the first day.
“If we have to go to war to stop this, we will,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told CNN after the latest missile test. “We’re headed toward a war if things don’t change.”
President Trump himself has said he stands ready to “totally destroy” North Korea. His national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, says Trump “is willing to do anything necessary” to prevent North Korea from threatening the U.S. with nuclear weapons — which is precisely what Kim Jong-un did.
One lesson from history: When a president and his advisers say they’re considering a war, take them seriously.
Emily Atkin at The New Republic writes—The New Tragedy of Coal Country: The Trump administration has successfully convinced West Virginians that they'll never have to give up on coal:
[T]he case that repealing the Clean Power Plan will save the coal industry is weak, and Republicans and the coal industry know it. While there has been an uptick in coal production since Trump took office, it is unlikely to last because the rise of cheaper natural gas—not environment regulations—is driving coal’s decline; even Trump’s Department of Energy has acknowledged as much. Though the CPP is not in effect, markets have already shifted to a cleaner energy economy; as Vox points out, technological advances have made natural gas and wind power “cheaper than coal power in most places, and solar power is heading the same direction.” And even Murray believes Trump should “temper his expectations” when it comes to saving coal jobs. “He can’t bring them back,” [Murray Energy CEO Robert] Murray said in March.
The relationship between West Virginia and coal is a paradox. In a state where nearly half of all children live in low-income households, coal provides some of the best working-class jobs around—dangerous and unhealthy jobs, yes, but also secure and high-paying. Yet the industry is also responsible for blowing off the tops of the state’s mountains and polluting the state’s water, making it undesirable for other businesses and thereby keeping many others jobless and poor. But this is only a paradox if one accepts that no other industry can replace coal in West Virginia—that the only way to save these communities is by saving coal, rather than creating a growth industry to replace it.
Martin Longman at The Washington Monthly writes—Alan Dershowitz Is an Apologist for Official Misconduct:
Alan Dershowitz laments that “We are surrounded on all sides by news of criminal investigations into politicians.” He sees this as a dangerous development in which political differences are weaponized by the Justice Department. He apparently doesn’t see it as part of a hitherto losing battle to enforce some basic norms and standards of good governance.
Whereas I see it as a major problem that corruption cannot even be punished in cases where convictions were initially obtained, such as in the trials of Sen. Ted Stevens, Rep. Tom DeLay and Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, Dershowitz sees these cases as examples of prosecutorial extremism. While Dershowitz approvingly notes that New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez’s case just ended in a mistrial, I see it as absolutely appalling that such base corruption could be in any sense permissible in an elected official.
Dershowitz doesn’t devote a single word to describing what these politicians did that caused them to be charged with felonies, and I don’t see how we can debate this issue without looking at the alleged crimes.