John Nichols at The Nation writes—A Huge Win for Organized Labor in Missouri:
Americans want strong unions. That’s the message from polling that shows more than 60 percent of voters nationwide approve of organized labor. And that’s certainly the message from Missouri, where voters on Tuesday overturned the state’s so-called “right-to-work” law by an overwhelming margin. [...]
In a state where Republicans have won the last five presidential elections and where the GOP now controls the executive and legislative branches of state government, 65 percent of the Missourians who cast ballots on Tuesday voted to scrap the “right-to-work” measure that was enacted just months after a corporate-aligned Republican grabbed the governorship from the Democrats in 2016.
“The defeat of this poisonous anti-worker legislation is a victory for all workers across the country,” declared AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka as the results came in Tuesday night. “The message sent by every single person who worked to defeat Prop. A is clear: When we see an opportunity to use our political voice to give workers a more level playing field, we will seize it with overwhelming passion and determination.
The False Equivalency Column of the Day comes to us via The Washington Post’s George F. Will column. In Poor Portland progressives: So much to protest, so little time, he spreads the notion that standing up to fascists equals being fascist.
Bill McKibben at The New York Times writes—Free California of Fossil Fuels:
The State Senate passed a measure last year that would commit California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, to running on 100 percent clean energy by 2045. Now it is up to the Assembly to provide crucial leadership by passing that legislation, S.B. 100. If any place on earth can handle this transition, it’s California, home to some of the planet’s strongest sunshine and many of its finest clean-tech entrepreneurs.
Already, thanks to strong efforts at efficiency and conservation and the falling price of solar power, the average California household spends almost 50 percent less on energy than the average family in, say, Louisiana. But unless the Assembly passes S.B. 100 before the current session ends, much of that momentum will evaporate. After great organizing (including from my colleagues at 350.org chapters across the state), 72 percent of Californians back the bill; it’s now a test of confidence versus cravenness for members of the Assembly.
The governor, Jerry Brown, has been strangely quiet on S.B. 100, which is odd since it should be the no-brainer capstone to his clean-energy endeavors.
David Dayen at The New Republic writes—Congress Makes Corruption Too Easy:
Six years ago, Congress passed the STOCK Act, which for the first time made members of Congress liable for insider trading, just like any other investor. On Wednesday, the Justice Department issued the very first indictment under that law when it arrested Representative Chris Collins, Trump’s earliest supporter in Congress, and accused him of sharing inside information about an Australian pharmaceutical company with his son and other investors.
Last year, Collins allegedly learned, before the public did, about the failure of a clinical trial for a multiple sclerosis drug by Innate Immunotherapeutic. He told Cameron Collins, his son and a fellow shareholder, who dumped his stock. Cameron then distributed the information to at least six other investors, who also sold the stock before news broke about the failed trial, dropping the stock price by 92 percent. All told, the defendants and their friends avoided over $768,000 in losses, according to the indictment.
The STOCK Act was intended to prevent members of Congress, who have access to all kinds of non-public information, from using their knowledge to make money for themselves and others. But Collins came by his information in a different, almost unbelievable way: He was on the board of directors of Innate Immunotherapeutics while also serving in Congress.
Christine Emba at The Washington Post writes—Farewell, Infowars. You won’t be missed:
It took months for these platforms to decide to stop hosting him, and their decision this week was clearly not what they would have preferred. As recently as last month, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg expressed reluctance to remove even Holocaust denial from the platform, for goodness’ sake. There’s no reason to think the removal of Infowars from Apple and YouTube will have any chilling effect on anyone who conducts themselves according to these sites’ publicly available terms of service — or even, in many cases, somewhat outside of them.
Fine. If you’re an up-and-coming conspiracy theorist who traffics in absurd falsehoods and plans to build an empire through a combination of fear-mongering and dietary supplement sales, the events of this week may give you pause.
Kara Swisher at The New York Times writes—Rules Won’t Save Twitter. Values Will. The platform won’t ban the dangerous liar Alex Jones because he “hasn’t violated our rules.” Then what’s the point of these rules?
Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Spotify and most other major internet distributors banished [Alex] Jones, either permanently or for some unspecified star-chamber-determined amount of time, for hate speech and other violations.
But not Twitter. Instead, Jack Dorsey, the chief executive, founder and tweet inventor himself, took to his own platform to explain in the high-minded tone that one takes with small children that Mr. Jones wasn’t suspended from Twitter because he “hasn’t violated our rules.” [...]
Let’s ignore for a second that taking really valuable one-off actions can, in fact, be a very laudable thing and listen to more key-tapping by Mr. Dorsey: “If we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce (and evolve) impartially regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that’s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction. That’s not us.”
Translation: Twitter is doubling down on the same squishy point of view that has allowed too much of it to become a cesspool over the last several years, and it has little intention of truly cleaning up.
Emily Atkins at The Republic writes—Air Pollution Denial Could Become EPA Policy. For decades, the agency has said that inhaling soot in any amount is unsafe. The Trump administration might change that:
Much of the Republican Party has long denied the science of climate change—that humans are causing the planet to warm. They’ve been less willing, historically, to deny the science of air pollution, which states that breathing in soot is bad for humans. But norms have changed since Donald Trump became president. For the last year and a half, fringe theories once promoted only by tobacco lobbyists and the very far-right dshave seeped into the offices of the Environmental Protection Agency. Now, those theories could soon be reflected in official EPA regulations intended to protect the public’s health.
A story published Monday in environmental policy outlet E&E News details the evidence. “After decades of increasingly strong assertions that there is no known safe level of fine particle exposure for the American public, [the] EPA under the Trump administration is now considering taking a new position,” reporter Niina Heikkinen wrote. [...]
Under these changes, which are being considered by EPA acting administrator Andrew Wheeler, [fine particulate matter less than 2.5 nanometers in diameter] would no longer be considered a “non-threshold pollutant”—one that causes harm at any level of exposure. Instead, it would become a “threshold pollutant,” or one that causes harm only above a certain exposure level. Wheeler is considering this change most likely because it would help him to legally justify repealing the Clean Power Plan, a set of Obama-era climate regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal plants.
Sarah Jones at The New Republic writes—Trump’s New Strategy to Demonize Immigrants:
On Tuesday, NBC News reported that Trump’s immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, is preparing a rule that would penalize documented immigrants for using certain public benefits: Use of food stamps, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or even Obamacare could cost a documented immigrant a green card or prevent them from gaining citizenship. [...]
Trump officials have sent the proposal to the White House Office of Budget and Management, the last step before the rule is released to the public for comment.
The rule is premised on the notion that non-citizens burden citizen taxpayers by taking welfare benefits or other public funds. But the evidence doesn’t support this. Not only is it extremely difficult to immigrate legally to the United States, it’s even more difficult to access benefits after doing so. A fair examination of the evidence points to one inescapable conclusion: Trump’s policy isn’t intended to shore up the welfare state for citizens, but to undermine it by reducing immigration.
John Patrick Leary at Jacobin writes—The Third Way Is a Death Trap. Centrists look at a burning planet, a racist in the White House — and plead for moderation:
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortéz’s congressional primary victoryin New York and the rise of other democratic socialist candidates has scrambled the political landscape. Demands that just a couple years ago seemed unthinkable in mainstream US politics — Medicare for All, a universal jobs guarantee, free college — are now the centerpiece of viable political campaigns.
But the centrists aren’t giving up. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni rushed to moderation’s defense a few weeks back, pronouncing it “sexier than you think.” Former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman followed up a column in March touting the win of a centrist Democrat in Illinois with a column last month pillorying Ocasio-Cortéz
The centrist think tank Third Way is still all in with a “Social Contract for the Digital Age,” released earlier this year. Its headlining measures: an “Innovation Trust Fund,” a “Boomer Corps,” and something called a “College Value Guarantee.”
Its supporters concede that these are dull ideas — but for American centrism, so proud of its pragmatism, dullness has become a mark of virtue. Moderation is as much emotional as it is political; never shoutingis a test of statesmanship.
But with Donald Trump in the White House and the planet burning, just how pragmatic is centrism?
Josh Fruhlinger at The Baffler writes—International Man of Monocracy. From Russia stuff to Somali scams, Paul Manafort skates from oligarchy to oligarchy:
[I]f Russiagate is less an act of Cold War revival theater than a symptom of interlocking oligarchies across post-Soviet kleptocracies and the supposedly liberal West, Manafort’s career is a great way to get the background on how that all went down. Because for decades, he’s seen despots’ need for friends in the United States as his personal ticket to a lifestyle that includes, just for example, nearly a million dollars spent on carpets. Let’s take a walk through his thoroughly scummy career! [...]
Not that Manafort was an unknown to Trump: he and his pal Roger Stone both met Trump via Roy Cohn around 1980, when they were working on Reagan’s campaign. Manafort helped Reagan with his Southern operation, which notoriously included a winking speech about state’s rights just a few miles from the site of the Freedom Summer murders. It was that year that Manafort and Stone teamed up with Charles Black, who had helped run Jesse Helms’s Senate campaign and defended his notorious “White Hands” ad, to form a lobbying firm, Black, Manafort, & Stone. Manafort and Stone subsequently played key roles in the formation of the Reagan administration. (Black would go on to work on all the respectable Republican presidential campaigns, even John McCain’s.) And it was during this stretch, starting in the 1980s, that Manafort began one of the most lucrative phases of his career. Though he would occasionally dabble in, say, influence peddling in scammy HUD projects in New Jersey, he committed himself to his true passion, which was helping burnish the image of extremely bad people outside the United States.
Theo Anderson at In These Times writes—Despite El-Sayed’s Loss, The Left Scored Some Huge Wins—and Showed It’s Winning the War:
Kansas has been ground zero for right-wing ambitions and zealotry over the past half century. It’s the home of the Koch brothers—the libertarian oil tycoons behind a wide swath of anti-union and anti-environmental campaigns. [...]
Kansas appears to have seen enough. A progressive civil rights attorney, James Thompson, won the nomination in the Fourth District, on a platform calling for Medicare for all, marijuana legalization, an end to mandatory minimum prison sentences, investment in programs to end homelessness and a robustly progressive platform across the board.
In July, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaigned for both Thompson and Brent Welder, who ran in the Third District. Welder narrowly lost—but he lost to Sharice Davids, a former mixed martial arts fighter who would be the first Native American woman elected to Congress if she wins in November. And that seems like a distinct possibility. The Republican incumbent, Kevin Yoder, isn’t polling well in a district that Hillary Clinton actually carried in 2016.
Organized labor is a second target that punched back on Tuesday. There was the high-profile, high-stakes case of Missouri, where voters soundly defeated anti-union “right to work” legislation that was passed by the state legislature.
Ross Barkan at The Guardian writes—Ohio's tight race shows Democrats are ready to do battle everywhere
On Tuesday night, Danny O’Connor, a Democrat, ran in a virtual tie with Republican Troy Balderson in a special election for Ohio’s 12th congressional district. Trump, like past Republican presidential candidates, won the district comfortably. Pat Tiberi, who vacated the seat to take a lucrative gig with a business group, is a Republican.
Who wins and who loses is almost beside the point. Republicans, once more, had to expend tremendous money and effort (outspending the opposition) on a district that should easily be theirs. O’Connor is not particularly remarkable as a candidate, but like all Democrats running in a high-profile races now, he is an avatar of the times.
Simon Tisdall at The Guardian writes—American democracy is in crisis, and not just because of Trump. Dark money, unchecked presidential power and a politicised supreme court are wrecking the world’s flagship democracy:
Nineteen months into the Trump presidency, US democracy is running into serious trouble – but it is not all, or even mostly, Donald Trump’s fault. This crisis of governance has been building for decades. It is only now, as Trump’s iconoclastic assaults on established beliefs, laws, institutions and values test the system to destruction, that the true scale of pre-existing weaknesses and faultlines is becoming apparent.
This deep crisis of confidence, bordering on national meltdown, comes as the US hurtles towards midterm elections in November – a familiar American ritual now rendered strangely unpredictable by fears of foreign manipulation and an FBI investigation that could, by some estimates, lead ultimately to Trump’s impeachment. The process of degradation affects US citizens and all those around the world who hold up the US democratic system as a paradigm worthy of emulation. Friends worry that the country’s ability to sustain its traditional global leadership role – moral and practical – is being undermined. Enemies, principally anti-democratic, authoritarian competitor regimes in Russia and China, hope this is so.