033 The Erickson Report for March 11 to 25, Page 1: Continuing Climate Change

033 The Erickson Report for March 11 to 25, Page 1: Continuing Climate Change

I start by telling you about something you may never have heard of but affects you every day, particularly if you live in the eastern parts of the US, and could have a major impact on you with the next few decades and even more on your descendents before the end of the century - a date when, let's recall, that a US child born today has a good shot at seeing.

It's called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. It's part of a worldwide system of ocean currents distributing heat around the planet

Because the equator receives a lot more solar energy than the polar regions, heat builds up in the tropics. There is a principle in physics called thermodynamic equilibrium, which essentially means everything wants to be the same temperature as everything else. It's why your hot coffee cools off, because the heat energy in it is distributed to the surrounding air so that eventually the coffee and the air are the same temperature, have the same level of heat energy. That is true of the world just as it is for your coffee.

So the differing levels of heat energy in different parts of the ocean create currents that constantly carry warmer and cooler water in a conveyor belt of currents across and around the oceans. The warmer currents are in red, the cooler ones in blue. Warm water is less dense than cold water, so the warm currents are shallow ones, hear the surface of the water, while the dense, cooler, currents are deep ones - which is why the current can cross paths without interacting.

The point is, this system of currents has a major influence on both the long-term of climate and the short-term weather. It affects the wind patterns and how storms form - why for example, hurricanes often form more towards Africa and move westward across the Atlantic.

That warm current also explains why south and southwest England have mild enough weather that winter snow is rare in London and you can find palm trees in Torquay even though London is at about the same latitude as the mouth of the St. Lawrence River between Newfoundland and Labrador.

Why do I bring all of this up? To see why, let's look more locally. Because this is a entire belt of currents, we could start at any point, but for what is relevant to us at the moment we'll start in the Caribbean, with warm water being brought along the southeast US coast before cutting across the Atlantic to Great Britain and then heading for Greenland.

As the water reaches the area around Greenland, it has cooled enough - become dense enough - to sink to deeper water, with that deep current propelled by the force of the water sinking behind it.

What keeps this system going is that the tropics continue to get more solar energy than the polar regions, so that differential in heat driving the system still exists. Also, water in polar regions is saltier than that in the tropics because ice is essentially fresh water, so the amount of it locked up in ice can't contain any of the salt. Saltier water is denser than fresher water, and that difference in density also helps propel the system. The relevance of all that will become obvious in a moment or two.

The news here is that a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience reports that this current is now moving more slowly than it has in at least 1,600 years and the belief is that this is directly related to climate change.

How? Because a warming climate will do two things: One, because polar regions are warming faster than the tropics the difference in heat energy between the two regions - one of the things driving the current - is being reduced. Second, melting polar ice puts fresh water into the oceans, reducing the salinity of polar oceans and therefore the difference in density between the warmer and cooler parts of the current, impacting another driver. A combined effect big enough and there isn't enough energy to drive the system - and the current breaks down, throwing global climate patterns into disarray, marked by storms and heat waves, along with effects such as faster sea level rise along parts of Europe, stronger hurricanes hitting the southeastern United States, and reduced rainfall across the Sahel.

Those effects can be so wide-ranging - North America to Europe to northern Africa - because, as years of research have made clear, the Atlantic portion of the world conveyor belt - the AMOC - is the engine that drives it, moving water at 100 times the flow of the Amazon river.

But that circulation has slowed down by at least 15% since 1950, something the new study calls "unprecedented in the past millennium." The specific suspected culprit is melting Arctic ice and the reduced salinity of polar oceans that results. The effects on weather patterns can already be detected.

The deeper concern is that if warming is not halted, the circulation may slow by 34% to 45% by the end of the century, by which time we may have already passed the tipping point, the point beyond which even if all warming was stopped entirely, it would be too late to prevent the circulation from slowing to a stop with catastrophic impacts.

Here it's necessary to note that, no, this is not the movie The Day After Tomorrow, the impacts would not be instantaneous, but over years and decades, yes, they would be devastating.

Realize that this is not a new concern. I wrote about this possibility, about this concern, 17 years ago. The difference is that then it was a longer-term concern about a serious but still hypothetical possibility. Now we have evidence that it is happening and that once again, we humans - especially we humans in advanced industrialized societies - are to blame.

This does not mean things are hopeless.

For one thing, a new report from Ember, a London-based environment think tank, found that in 2020, for the first time, the 27 countries of the European Union generated more electricity with renewables - wind, solar, and hydro - than with fossil fuels, continuing a shifting pattern developing over the past 10 years.

What's more, a study from late 2018 found that at that point, generating utility-level electricity through solar and wind was already cheaper than coal and new natural gas plants - without subsidies or a price on carbon.

The study from the financial firm Lazard Ltd. applied a Levelized Cost of Energy, or LCOE, analysis, which looks at the cost of power from a plant averaged over its entire lifetime. It found - over two years ago - that the cost of renewables had dropped so much that in many areas, building and running new renewables was already cheaper than just continuing to run existing coal and nuclear plants.

In other words, the economics are clearly in favor of a clean energy future.

Then there is the fact that according to the Peoples' Climate Vote, the largest survey of public opinion on climate change and policy solutions ever conducted, nearly 2/3 of people around the world, including 65% of those in the US, think it's a global emergency that warrants a serious response.

Survey data was gathered from 1.2 million respondents in 50 high-, middle-, and low-income countries covering 56% of the world's population. People between the ages of 14 and 18 expressed the greatest level of concern, with nearly 70% saying there is a climate emergency, but even 58% of those aged 60 and over agreed.

And then there is President Joe Blahden, who whatever his faults is more concerned about climate change than any previous president.

On his first day in office he canceled the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, the one intended to carry highly-polluting tar sands from Alberta to Texas. He has rejoined the Paris Accords, issued an executive order suspending new oil and gas leases on public lands, directed federal agencies to purchase electric cars by the thousands, and urged Congress to end some fossil-fuel subsidies.

And he has proposed to eliminate net greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by 2035 while proposing to invest $2 trillion over four years to transform to a clean energy economy. I'll note in passing that much of this would not have happened were it not for Bernie Sanders representatives on that unity task force, but the important thing here is that it happened.

And it's certainly doable, considering that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released a draft version of a report which argues that $2 trillion over 10 years would be enough to build an economy that is not only net-zero but would "also build a more competitive economy, increase high-quality jobs, and help address social injustice in the energy system."

Meanwhile, earlier this month the latest version of the federal CLEAN Future Act was introduced in the House of Representatives, an event greeted with applause by environmental groups such as Earthjustice and the NRDC.

This latest version aims to achieve US carbon neutrality by 2050 with an interim goal of reducing pollution by 50% from 2005 levels by 2030.

It all sounds so good, even allowing for the inevitable political hurdles and opposition from fat cats, corporations, and corporate-funded interests. It still sounds so good and so hopeful.

And it is, it is - as far as it goes.

Which is the problem: It doesn't go far enough.

For one thing, Blahden's order to suspend new oil and gas leases didn't prevent 31 new leases from being issued during his in 1st month in office.

For another, praise for the CLEAN Future Act was hardly universal. Groups like Friends of the Earth and Food & Water Watch said the legislation is fundamentally and dangerously lacking.

My own objection is that the bill treats fracking as a clean energy. But fracking is designed to increase production of natural gas. The whole point of it is not to move away from fossil fuels but to enable us to continue to rely on them. A climate program that embraces fracking is not serious. As Lukas Ross, program manager at Friends of the Earth put it, "A clean energy standard that qualifies fracked gas is a joke."

Meanwhile, Mitch Jones, policy director at Food & Water Watch, called the bill "a Green New Dud" because "it fails to grasp the fundamental truth of fighting climate change: We must stop extracting and burning fossil fuels as soon as possible. We should not waste time creating credit schemes and offsets markets, or prop up fossil fuels with carbon capture fantasies."

And we shouldn't. When I was preparing this piece, I kept thinking "if this was a war." But that's silly, because this is a war. A war we are waging on ourselves, on the climate, a war we are waging on the life networks and patterns of this planet and our collective future.

On January 27, Nature published a report saying that an analysis of ocean surface temperatures shows that the planet is hotter now than at any time in the preceding 12,000 years, and that it may actually be warmer than at any point during the last 125,000 years.

Each of the past four decades has been hotter than the one before. 2020 tied for the hottest year on record and the past seven years have been the seven hottest.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, more than 32,000 species are now threatened with extinction from human impacts like deforestation, pollution, and climate change; 500 of them could disappear in two decades. One critically endangered species is the North Atlantic right whale, of which fewer than 250 survive - and the greatest dangers facing them are collisions with boats and drowning from getting entangled in fishing nets, deaths which are on the increase because climate change is driving their food source, krill, further north, drawing the whales out of their protected areas.

No "natural cycle" or other BS is going to explain any of that that away.

It's not enough. Even the grand-sounding promises and solemnly-intoned pledges at international conferences are not enough.

According to new findings published in December by the United Nations Environment Program, if nations are to meet a central goal of the Paris agreement of holding the Earth's warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, they will have to “roughly triple” their current emissions-cutting pledges. If they are to keep heating below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), they would need to increase their targets at least fivefold - to make five times the cuts they are pledging.

And despite all the pledges, global greenhouse gas emissions, on average, have risen about 1.4 percent annually over the past decade. The world remains on a trajectory to see the temperature increase about 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) this century - a level that climatologists say would be catastrophic.

What we're doing - collectively - is simply not enough. And I mean the world, particularly the industrialized world, at large, not just the US. But if I've seemed a times to concentrate on the US, that's because I have. First off because it's us, it's the one we have the most control over. And we are the world's second largest producer of greenhouse gases and we have one of the if not the most carbon-intensive lifestyle. The carbon footprint of the average American is about 17.6 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents a year, about double the footprint of a person living in the EU or the UK, and almost 10 times that of the average citizen of India.

So yes, the world needs to do more and particularly we here need to do more and dammit yes, it will affect your lifestyle, yes, you might have to do without a few hi-tech goodies, yes, you might have to live with a little less convenience, you might have to take the train instead of flying everywhere, you might have to ride the bus to work instead of driving, you might have to make a lot of changes, some of them more significant than others.

But I'm going to ask you to think back a few decades - if you're as old as me, think back to the '60s. I want you to think back and ask yourself, I've asked this before but I'm asking it again and I want you to think seriously about it. I'm not considering how issues of poverty or bigotry or physical limitations might have affected you personally for this, just consider how the average, the typical, American lived then, the level of technology, the level of convenience, available at that time. And ask yourself: Was that way of living so terrible that you would sacrifice a world for yourself and your children rather than live that way again.

Because right now, yes, we are engaged in a war. And the problem is, we're winning.

21.3 - Bad news and some hope about global climate change

Bad news and some hope about global climate change

Last week I celebrated the large turnout for the Peoples Climate Marches, and I use the plural because there were hundreds of events, both in the US and around the world, with something around or even over 250,000 taking part in the US, so I wanted to follow up on that with some related news.

You have by now, I'm sure, heard about how the White House is hiding away information about climate change, including taking down several EPA websites containing detailed climate data and scientific information.

Agency mouthpiece J.P. Freire justified the moves, saying "we can't have information which contradicts the actions we have taken in the last two months," which amounts to an admission that what they have done contradicts the science, but they have far too little self-awareness to notice.

Freire also said the removal of the scientific data was to "make room" to "reflect the views of the leadership of the agency." Funny, I didn't realize the Internet was running out of space.

What makes the news particularly disturbing is that it comes against a background of an ever-higher mountain of evidence.

For one thing, a new scientific study from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that global temperatures could exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above their pre-industrial levels within the next 8 years.

The study focuses on a natural planetary system known as the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, or IPO (sometimes referred to as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation). It's an alternating pattern of ocean temperatures that shifts periodically between warm and cool phases, helping to drive temperature and weather patterns all over the world.

It's similar to the more familiar El Niño/La Niña cycle, but the phases of the IPO tend to last much longer - sometimes a decade or more.

For most of the 2000s, the IPO has been in a negative, that is, a cooling phase, and scientists think its effect has helped to offset the effect of climate change. In other words, it has kept the climate cooler than it otherwise would have been.

Many scientists believe that the IPO is now transitioning back into a positive, or warming, phase, which would amplify, rather than offset, human-caused climate warming. And that could mean the Earth could hit the 1.5-degree threshold as early as 2025, five years sooner than current projections. Five years might not seem like a long time but it does mean having five years less to act.

The figure of 1.5 degrees is not important in an of itself as a number, no more inherently significant than 1.4 degrees or 1.6 degrees, but it is a marker, a milepost, which takes its significance from the fact that the Paris Climate accords are geared around striving to keep global temperature from rising any more than that if only to provide a buffer against the standard "beyond here it gets really bad" level of a two degree increase.

That buffer may be hard to maintain, however, considering that a long-feared natural feedback loop for warming appears to be developing.

A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is reporting an increasing volume of carbon dioxide entering the air from thawing permafrost in the Alaskan tundra.

permafrost

Because Alaska is warming, the permafrost is thawing earlier and deeper in the spring and summer and refreezing later in the fall and winter, allowing more time for decomposing plant material to release CO2. Since 1975, there has been a 73 percent increase in the amount of carbon lost from the Alaskan tundra in the months of October through December. More CO2 means more warming which means more thawing which means more carbon release which means more warming and around and around you go.

There had been a hope that the "greening" of Alaska - because the warming also means a longer growing season - would allow the area to be a carbon sink, as growing plants suck up the CO2, but this latest study says that the loss from the thawing permafrost is outweighing that gain.

Still, still, still there is hope. Because it is possible - not possible in the sense of hypothetical but possible in the sense of yes it can be done - to move the United States to an economy powered entirely by renewable energy by 2050 and yes that includes heating and transportation. In 2014, an organization called The Solutions Project developed state-by-state proposals for a shift in the US to all renewables, varying by what mix would be most efficient in each case.

And it's not even just the US: It is technologically feasible to accomplish this for the entire world. A 2015 Greenpeace study done in conjunction with the German Aerospace Centre found that, in the words of the study:

There are no major economic or technical barriers to moving towards 100% renewable energy by 2050.

It also found that the world could be producing 85 percent of its energy needs with renewables in just 15 years.

The investment involved in this would be substantial, on the order of $1 trillion a year, but that may not be as much as it sounds when you consider that in 2015 the US GDP was over $18 trillion and the world product was over $74 trillion.

Even better, the study estimates that the costs would be covered by the slightly over $1 trillion a year in savings on fuel costs alone. What's more, such a project would create 20 million jobs over the next 15 years and would provide energy access to the one-third of the people of the world who currently lack it.

So yes, it is possible and according to a group called "Go 100%," 12 Countries, 70 Cities, 62 Regions or States - including major countries such as Denmark and Germany - have pledged to go 100% renewable by 2050.

And even as TheRump considers dropping out of the Paris agreement - which technically he can't do until November 2019 but he can just refuse to take any steps to implement it - the United States is already about halfway to meeting its commitment under that accord to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

All of which means that the only thing lacking for such a transition to an all-renewable economy is the political will.

Some in the Congress are trying to find that will. On April 27, two days before the Peoples Climate Marches, Senators Jeff Merkley, Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey, and Cory Booker introduced the "100 by '50 Act," laying out a plan to move the US to all renewables by 2050.

It involves phasing out fossil-fuel generated electricity supply in favor of renewables, electrifying transportation and heating systems by means including a requirement for zero-emission vehicles, ending new fossil fuel investments such as the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, ending subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, placing tariffs on imported carbon-intensive products, and creating and auctioning Climate Bonds to raise extra funds for projects - while at the same time making sure that poor and disadvantaged communities share in the benefits and workers affected by the changes are protected.

Yes, yes, yes, it's true, this bill will go nowhere in the current Congress - but nonetheless it is important that, again, the ground has been staked out; this can serve as a rallying cry, an organizing tool; this is not "gee, can we maybe cut back a little, please, if it's not too much trouble," this is calling for what should be done, can be done, not calling for what you maybe think might possibly get passed this session. And that is to the good.

All in all, things still seem dark to me with regard to climate change. I still have no faith that people - that Americans in particular, who often seem more inclined to fight than switch to renewables - can be roused from their corporate- and media-induced slumber in time to make a difference.

But at a time when at least a few Senators are waking up, when Bloomberg has opened a new website devoted to the idea that climate change is an economic issue, when sixteen Fortune 100 companies have signed a letter to the White House calling on the US to stay in the Paris Agreement, and when even Tiffany & Company, for pity's sake, can take out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the same thing, even an old cynic like me can't help but feel a little hope.

13.9 - Update: Dakota Access Pipeline

Update: Dakota Access Pipeline

Now for an Update regarding something we have talked about a couple of times: the Dakota Access Pipeline, or DAPL.

The first thing to note is that North Dakota state police, with armored vehicles and riot gear and with guns drawn, have forcibly shut down the Oceti Sakowin encampment, the main encampment established to protest the pipeline and its potential impact on the drinking water and the sacred lands of the Standing Rock Sioux.

The excuse, the one that is always employed in such cases, is that it was done for the safety and protection of those in the encampment. Not, of course, for the protection of the profit of any corporation.

On February 15, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum signed an emergency evacuation order claiming the risk of spring floods was justification to accomplish what they had desired to do all along: drive the people out. The order set a deadline of February 22 for everyone to get out or get arrested.

With just 200-300 of the earlier thousands of protesters still in the camp as the deadline approached, the remaining occupants burned down a number of the structures in what was described as a ceremony of departure as the people marched out, chanting and beating drums.

About 50 refused to leave, preferring nonviolent civil disobedience and arrest rather than submission in order to express their opposition to the order and their continuing opposition to the pipeline.

This bringing down of the hammer comes in the wake of TheRump signing executive actions last month to advance and accelerate approval of the DAPL by streamlining the regulatory process for construction and shortening any environmental review - and at the same time, we need to mention because it will doubtless come up later, tried to put the Keystone XL pipeline back in business.

That was followed up by TheRump canceling an an environmental-impact review mid-stream and the Army Corps of Engineers granting the final easement for pipeline construction beneath Lake Oahe without the usual two-week waiting period before an easement can be acted on.

This does not mean the fight is over, although if I'm to be blunt it looks pretty grim right now. But the spiritual occupation continues even if in a less dramatic way: New encampments are popping up on private land in the area, including one the Cheyenne River Sioux had earlier set up about a mile - or 1.5 kilometers - from the main camp.

And the fight in the courts goes on. On February 14, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed a new challenge to the project, arguing that the canceling of the environmental review is illegal, the waiving of the waiting period for the easement is "arbitrary and capricious," and the process "wholly disregard[s] the treaty rights of the Standing Rock Sioux."

Meanwhile, the stench of corruption over this whole thing continues to thicken. For one thing, it came out in November that TheRump had as much as $1 million invested in Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the pipeline, in 2015. In May 2016, the most recent information available, he still had as much as $50,000 invested in the company, along with as much as $250,000 invested in Phillips 66, an oil company which has a one-quarter share of Dakota Access.

And now it has emerged that when on last October 25 the Governors of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa sent a letter sent to the Army Corp of Engineers demanding approval of DAPL, they were quite literally working on behalf of Energy Transfer Partners: The letter contained only minor alterations from one provided to the governors by the LS2Group, a PR firm contracted by the pipeline builders to promote the project.

So right now things don't look so bright - but we need to keep on keepin' on. There is no other way.

What's Left #13

What's Left
for the week of March 2-8, 2017

This week:
Good News: minimum wage raise in St. Louis
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/2/28/1638759/-Minimum-Wage-in-St-Louis-Unexpectedly-Jumped-Today-from-7-70-per-hour-to-10-00

Good News: voting rights victory in Virginia
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/3/1/1638995/-Major-win-Supreme-Court-reverses-ruling-that-protected-Virginia-GOP-s-legislative-gerrymander
http://electionlawblog.org/?p=91402
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/3/1/1638995/-Major-win-Supreme-Court-reverses-ruling-that-protected-Virginia-GOP-s-legislative-gerrymander
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-680_c07d.pdf

Good News: 5th circuit says filming cops is 1st Amendment right
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/2/27/1638392/-Federal-Appeals-Court-rules-in-favor-of-the-First-Amendment-you-can-film-cops
https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/photographers-rights/filming-and-photographing-police
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/divided-federal-appeals-court-rules-you-have-the-right-to-film-the-police/

Clown Award: Bill O"Reilly
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/23/politics/louie-gohmert-gabby-giffords/
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/02/28/education-secretary-betsy-devos-faces-twitter-backlash-after-linking-hbcus-with-school-choice/21858125/
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/devos-tries-to-walk-back-statements-historically-black-colleges-school-choice
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/welcome-to-the-trump-plantation-historically-black-college-vandalized-after-betsy-devos-gaffe/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/2/19/1635487/-Trump-proclaims-new-terror-attack-Look-at-what-happened-last-night-in-Sweden-Sweden
https://mediamatters.org/blog/2017/02/24/bill-o-reilly-hosted-fake-swedish-defense-advisor-fearmonger-about-refugees/215463
http://mobil.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/fake-sweden-expert-on-fox-news-has-criminal-convictions-in-us-no-connection-to-swedish-security/
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2017/02/25/Fox-News-claims-Swedish-unknown-Nils-Bildt-is-national-security-advisor/3121488075119/

For the Record: Amnesty International says US not safe for refugees
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immgration-canada-border-idUSKBN1602NG

For the Record: Shell Oil knew about climate change in 1991
https://thecorrespondent.com/6285/shell-made-a-film-about-climate-change-in-1991-then-neglected-to-heed-its-own-warning/692663565-875331f6?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email

For the Record: Grace Slick donates Chick-fil-a money to Lambda Legal
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/2/27/1638374/-Singer-Grace-Slick-licenses-song-to-Chick-fil-A-and-then-donates-money-to-LGBTQ-organization
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/02/28/jackie-evanchos-transgender-sister-juliet-just-won-lawsuit-over/21858875/

For the Record: DOJ back to using private prisons
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2016/08/2582-good-news-federal-private-prisons.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/doj-private-prisons-sessions_us_58af529ce4b0a8a9b780669a#pt0-135499

Update: Dakota Access Pipeline
https://www.governor.nd.gov/news/burgum-issues-emergency-evacuation-order
http://www.alternet.org/activism/dakota-access-pipeline-protesters-set-fire-camp-ahead-evacuation
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/24/politics/trump-keystone-xl-dakota-access-pipelines-executive-actions/index.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/the-dakota-access-pipelines-final-stand/516225/
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/dakota-access-standing-rock-deadline-1.3993636
http://standwithstandingrock.net/standing-rock-sioux-tribe-asks-federal-court-set-aside-trumps-pipeline-reversal/
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-11-25/trump-s-stock-in-oil-pipeline-company-raises-concern
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dapl-pr-firm-wrote-pro-pipeline-letter-sent-by-three_us_58ac8bd7e4b0acc17645d7e6

Footnote: Seattle cuts ties to Wells Fargo over DAPL
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/seattle-cutting-ties-with-wells-fargo-over-dakota-access-pipeline/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/seattle-wells-fargo-dapl_us_589b56b2e4b0c1284f29da4b?7wtielrujdfs9k9
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/quotes

Outrage of the Week: GOPpers attack First Amendment right to assemble
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2017/02/113-rules.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/arizona-bill-protesters-racketeering_us_58af3692e4b060480e05e81d
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2017/02/23/arizona-senate-oks-racketeering-charges-riots/98296298/
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/legislature/2017/02/23/5-things-know-arizona-bill-arrest-protesters-riot/98302932/
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/plan-a-protest-lose-your-house-bill-sb-1142-killed-by-arizona-house-9121181
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/2/28/1638615/-In-a-victory-for-Democracy-Arizona-s-House-kills-Republican-led-anti-protest-bill
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/24/republican-lawmakers-introduce-bills-to-curb-protesting-in-at-least-17-states/?utm_term=.7e71adf974a8

1.1 - What we face with a Clinton administration

What we face with a Clinton administration

Hillary Clinton

This show is going to be a bit odd because I am doing it five days before the election, which means, it being a weekly show, that at least some of you are going to see it after the election is over - and what I'm going to be doing here is looking beyond the election to what will confront us after.

I'm doing this under the assumption that Hillary Clinton will be (or is now, depending on when you see this) president-elect, which despite the breathless blather about tightening national polls - which don't mean a damn thing under our presidential elector system - still seems highly likely.

So the question becomes what we of the left are going to have to deal with during a Clinton presidency.

Because Hillary Clinton, bluntly, is not nearly as progressive as she tried to paint herself during the primaries with her sudden and convenient commitment to populism, a commitment that increased in direct proportion to the shrinkage in the polling gap between her and Bernie Sanders and one which it was clear from the beginning could not be trusted: The last day of the Iowa primary campaign, she declared on the stump "I'm a progressive" only to say the very next day during an interview with Chris Matthews that "We've got to get back to the middle, the big center."

So no, not a true progressive.

Rather, she was the preferred candidate of the political, economic, and foreign policy establishments, the candidate that even though they might not be great fans of all of her proposals, she is still the one that establishment feels comfortable with, the one that establishment has confidence might rearrange the apples on the cart but will not upset it.

So we are going to find ourselves in opposition on a lot of issues and on a lot of occasions. And we had better be ready for that. We will have to watch carefully and be prepared to squawk loudly and to not care when we are told - as we will be - to be quiet and get in line behind Hillary because "OMG! Republicans!" We have got to be prepared to stand firm and not back down because just being better then the GOPpers is not good enough!

You want specifics, let me give you some on a few big issues.

Right at the top, remember that Hillary Clinton was the candidate of Wall Street, which raised $23 million for her campaign, besides having paid her at least $26.1 million in speaking fees over the years.

I have said a number of times that she has so many ties to Wall Street it looks like some kind of kinky bondage party. We are going to have to watch carefully and very likely raise a stink about who she wants to bring on board as advisers and more importantly regulators.

Because in speeches to the bankers and during the campaign she has argued for having the foxes guard the chicken coop, saying that Wall Street executives, not financial or legal experts from outside the industry, not consumer advocates, but the people who run the banks, are the best people to call in to regulate the banks.

Even in 2014, at a time everyone knew she was going to run but hadn't announced her candidacy, Politico was writing that "the big bankers love Clinton, and by and large they badly want her to be president" because she will not tamper with the Street's vast money pot.

In fact, she may even look to add to it: Tony James, president of the Blackstone Group hedge fund and someone whose name has been floated for Clinton's Treasury Secretary, has been openly promoting a plan to give financial firms control of hundreds of billions of dollars in retirement savings - and the word is Clinton's top aides are warming to the idea.

This plan would replace individual voluntary 401(k)s with a requirement that workers and employers to put a percentage of payroll aside, but not into Social Security, into individual retirement accounts to be, in James' words, "invested well in pooled plans run by professional investment managers" - in other words, by outfits like Blackstone, which could collect a fortune in fees.

What George Bush failed to accomplish - privatizing Social Security - Hillary Clinton could help along.

We also have to be prepared to make a stink not only over actions but over inactions, as there is every indication that a Clinton administration will continue the big bank protection racket of the Obama administration, lots of tough talk combined with no action.

And in keeping watch on that, we have to bear in mind that Hillary Clinton has blamed the 2008 crash on most everything except the deregulation championed by Bill Clinton and enacted during his administration and that she continues to oppose reinstating Glass-Steagall.

Beyond that, her entire supposedly "progressive" agenda consists almost entirely of nibbling around the edges, of maybe incremental change that will be presented to us as shockingly dramatic progress but which we will have to be prepared to say out loud is just not good enough.

Consider health care, where she proposes to tweak Obamacare - but she has specifically rejected single-payer in so many words, meaning anything she would do still has the failings of Obamacare in that she still relies on the insurance industry, still depends to work at all on the insurance industry thinking it's profitable enough, and the whole program is actually about health insurance, not about health care. We have to be take the opening offered by any such tweak to demand at least single-payer and even better a national health system because the Affordable Care Act is not good enough.

On climate change, she is all over the map and despite some good rhetoric on the topic, it's policies, not fine words, which matter, and on that count it doesn't look so good.

In a speech, she told an energy group that she wants to "defend natural gas" and, referring people pushing the slogan "keep it in the ground," "it" being fossil fuels, over a concern for global warming, she called them "wild" and said they should "get a life."

She finally came out against the Keystone XL pipeline after dithering about it until it was clearly unpopular, but she said she did it because it was "a distraction," not because it was a bad idea.

During the primaries she was forced to say she is against fracking but she told that same energy group that she wants to "defend" fracking and the fact is that during her time as secretary of state, she sought to export fracking to countries all over the world.

And to show how much we can trust her public assurances on the topic, she picked former Senator Ken Salazar, a big fan of fracking, to chair her presidential transition team.

Which in turn raises another issue where we have to watch and be ready to fight. Because Ken Salazar is also a big fan of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the TPP.

Clinton, as is fairly well known, had been in favor of the TPP; in fact she had called it "the gold standard" for trade agreements. But in the face of clear opposition among the public and Bernie Sanders making it an issue in the primaries, she gradually shifted her position from support to opposition. She even said she was opposed to a vote on the agreement during the lame duck Congressional session after the election.

But there is genuine reason to question how sincere that opposition is and how long past election day it will last.

There was the statement back in January by Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue that once elected, Clinton would flip back to supporting the TPP.

There was the statement in July from Virginia governor and Clinton bestie Terry McAuliffe that once in office, a few tweaks would enable Clinton to support the pact.

Her VP-to-be, Tim Kaine, is a "free trade" zealot who had been the Senate's most fanatical supporter of the TPP.

And of course there was the selection of Salazar to head the transition team.

On top of all that came leaked emails, one which made it clear that she opposed the deal at least in public because her campaign feared she would be "eaten alive" by labor and Sanders supporters if she didn't.

So even if the pact does not pass during the lame-duck session - which, happily, seems likely - that does not mean it will not come up again in the spring with a few "tweaks" that have turned it back into "the gold standard."

We will have to be prepared to fight on matters both of privacy and government secrecy. In Congress, she supported both the Patriot Act and its reauthorization. She has defended NSA spying. She has called American hero Edward Snowden "an enabler of terrorism" who should be prosecuted and imprisoned. During the first debate with TheRump she advocated an "intelligence surge," a new slogan describing, among other things, more intensive domestic surveillance.

In fact, her obsession with official secrecy is so great that as Secretary of State, she once threatened the United Kingdom with shutting off intelligence cooperation if a UK court as part of a then-current case published details of the mistreatment of a prisoner who had been wrongly imprisoned at Gitmo.

That mention of Gitmo brings us to another major concern: Hillary Clinton was not only the candidate of Wall Street, she was the candidate of the neocons - who supported her precisely because she was, in the words of one, "the candidate of the status quo" who would "resist systematic change" - and she was the candidate of the war hawks.

Clinton is a warhawk, far more than Obama ever was - which, when you consider he bombed seven countries during his administration and has troops on the ground in three, is saying something.

For example, by all accounts she was as Secretary of State the strongest voice within the White House for intervention in Libya. That worked out so well that after Qaddafi was killed -an event she quite literally laughed off as "we came, we saw, he died" - Libya descended into the chaos of a multi-sided civil war from which it still has not emerged.

She supported an expansion of the war in Afghanistan, one even bigger than the generals did, and resisted the drawdown of troops.

She has "wholeheartedly backed" the drone war in Pakistan and other nations that has killed at least hundreds of civilians and likely many more; supported so much so that as Secretary of State she had her legal counsel develop a legal rationale for expanding it.

When it comes to Israel, the only fair word is sycophant. From proposing as a candidate in 2008 a US "nuclear umbrella" over Israel, to in 2012, saying "We've gotta support Israel 110 percent here" while getting any mention of the Israeli siege of Gaza scrubbed from a ceasefire proposal, to in 2014, declaring that "If I were the prime minister of Israel, you're damn right I would expect to have [security] control" over the West Bank, she has repeatedly shown a clear bias and declared positions that would make the two-state solution in which she falsely claims to believe, impossible.

She declared a position on Iran's nuclear program that, had it been adopted, would have undermined the agreement that was reached and later said that her policy on Iran would be "distrust and verify." Which is at least consistent: During the 2008 primaries, she called Obama "naive" for saying he would be willing to talk to the Iranians.

And then there is Syria.

She has bemoaned that the US has not been more involved in Syria. As Secretary of State, she devised a plan to arm and train "moderate" rebel factions to create a "credible fighting force."

During the primary campaign she said Obama was "not tough enough" on Syria and called for more special ops troops to train local forces.

During primary debates, she called for a "safe zone" to be established in Syria, something that would require ground troops because there is no other way to secure such a zone.

And she has continued to argue for US-imposed "no-fly zones" in Syria, despite being unable during the third debate with TheRump to say what would happen if a Russian plane violated such a no-fly zone and despite having acknowledged in 2013 that imposing a no-fly zone would mean taking out air defense systems, including in populated areas, and that in doing so "you're going to kill a lot of Syrians."

Here's the bottom line on all this, as reported by the Washington Post on October 20:

In the rarefied world of the Washington foreign policy establishment, President Obama's departure from the White House - and the possible return of a more conventional and hawkish Hillary Clinton - is being met with quiet relief.

That foreign policy elite, which wants a "more assertive" foreign policy, which is eager for a "more interventionist" foreign policy, is actively looking forward to a Clinton presidency.

All of which means under President Hillary Clinton we face the prospect, the very real prospect, of more bombings and more wars in more places, including the clear possibility of a direct confrontation with Russia.

Altogether, silence, here as elsewhere, is not an option.

What's Left #1

What's Left
for the week of November 3-9, 2016

This week:

What we face with a Clinton administration
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2016/02/2364-rare-and-potentially-my-only.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2016/06/2508-update-what-to-expect-from-hillary.html
http://time.com/4532511/hillary-clinton-wikileaks-emails-john-podesta/
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/927
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/11/why-wall-street-loves-hillary-112782
http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/hillary-clinton-wall-street-financial-industry-may-control-retirement-savings
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/10/nomi-prins-hillary-clinton-will-continue-the-big-bank-protection-racket.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDBt1y0rgew
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/10/22/emails-show-clinton-campaign-weighing-keystone-xl-decision.html
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/23/hillary-clinton-fracking/
https://theintercept.com/2016/08/16/hillary-clinton-picks-tpp-and-fracking-advocate-to-set-up-her-white-house/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2016/05/2472-some-updates-on-secret-trade.html
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/34629-chamber-of-commerce-lobbyist-tom-donohue-clinton-will-support-tpp-after-election
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/terry-mcauliffe-hillary-clinton-tpp-trade-226253
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2016/08/2588-tpp-headed-for-lame-duck-showdown.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjMGHb_I_bo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/did-wikileaks-make-hillary-clinton-look-two-faced-or-clear-eyed/2016/10/12/ae59f3ba-8fc7-11e6-a6a3-d50061aa9fae_story.html?utm_term=.a2eca67c566c&wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1
http://time.com/4532511/hillary-clinton-wikileaks-emails-john-podesta/
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/9/14/journalist_hillary_clintons_criticism_of_snowden
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/23/hillary-clinton-national-security-plan-isis-baghdadi
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2009/08/here-we-go-again.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2015/02/1915-little-thing-wall-street-and.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y
http://www.voanews.com/a/libya-rival-governments-vie-control/3554992.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-concerned-force-libyas-capital-095220442.html?ref=gs
http://swampland.time.com/2014/01/14/hillary-clintons-unapologetically-hawkish-record-faces-2016-test/
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/unblinking-stare
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/drones-graphs/
http://swampland.time.com/2014/01/14/hillary-clintons-unapologetically-hawkish-record-faces-2016-test/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2008/12/um-what-happened-to-that-no-blank-check.html
http://www.alternet.org/world/5-most-hawkish-positions-embraced-hillary-clinton
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2012/11/left-side-of-aisle-84-part-3.html
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/01/14/face-it-a-vote-for-hillary-clinton-is-a-vote-for-war.html
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33299-clinton-syria-fact-check-safe-zones-ground-troops
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/hillary-syria-fact-check_b_8333396.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-syria-no-fly-zone-third-debate_us_58084280e4b0180a36e91a53
http://www.infowars.com/clinton-on-no-fly-zone-in-2013-youre-going-to-kill-a-lot-of-syrians-in-2016-could-save-lives/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/washington-foreign-policy-elites-not-sorry-to-see-obama-go/2016/10/20/bd2334a2-9228-11e6-9c52-0b10449e33c4_story.html#comments

Summing up: the role of the left

Re-introducing myself

236.4 - A rare (and potentially my only) commentary on the Democratic primaries

A rare (and potentially my only) commentary on the Democratic primaries

In the wake of the Iowa caucuses (and written before the New Hampshire primary), treasure this: It surely will be one of the few, and may well be the only, comments you will hear me make on the primaries. That is, the Democratic primaries; I won't even bother with the GOPper ones.

And a lot of what I have to say will be about the media, not so much about the candidates, although their differences to a good extent drive the differing media coverage.

But I'll start by confessing my biases. Not my political biases, which I expect will come as no surprise and are likely well known to anyone who has watched my show or followed this blog. But this is about purely personal biases.

Okay, first off, I have to admit that I personally don't like Hillary Clinton. I don't dislike her, I just can't take to her. This a pure, unreasoned, visceral reaction. She feels too staged, too constructed, to me. Those moments when in interviews or on the stump when she's being cheerful or chipper or a "good sport," as when in that last Iowa forum she was shown Bernie Sanders' closing ad and called it "great" and "poetry," at times like that it feels posed, it feels like she's playing a role, as if this is a character she wears in the same way Stephen Colbert wore his right-wing character. I feel that she would rather come off like a serious policy wonk like Sanders does but has learned to put on this facade because it's better politically.

If that's not true, if she really is by nature the cheerful extrovert she presents herself as, if she really is, ala Hubert Humphrey, the "happy warrior," then I'm sorry for misreading her.

I will also say that I don't think I misread her and I'm aware that the reason she does it is because there is still more than enough sexism that if she as a woman didn't come off as cheerful and a good sport that she would face a backlash that would have a serious impact on her support. Which means that she does it out of necessity. And even though I understand that, I still find she puts me off. Which is why I called it an "unreasoned, visceral reaction."

That said, I don't particularly like Bernie Sanders, either, not on a personal level. But it's for a very different reason.

I have friends in Vermont who know or at least knew Bernie Sanders. They worked closely on some of his early campaigns in Burlington and for Congress. They told me that the way he comes off in interviews and on the stumps is really him, he really is like that. It's not posed.

Hillary Clinton

Bernie Sanders

They also said he has a good sense of humor but that for him everything comes back to policy, that he really is a real policy wonk and he comes off that way.

Here's the thing: they also told me he loves to argue. In fact, he loves to argue so much that sometimes he would argue a point - just for the sake of arguing a point. He would argue things just to argue things.

I don't like people like that. I find them irritating and it feels like they are forever trying to prove to you that they are cleverer than you are.

I suppose now some people will be saying I'm too particular about who I like. Which is perhaps true, but the point here is that my preference between Clinton and Sanders is based on policy, not personality. I don't particularly want to get to know either of them.

With that out of the way, let's get to the subject. Right at the top, I have to say that it's absurd to say anyone "won" Iowa. Iowa is not an election, it is caucuses to choose delegates to the Democratic national convention. You can say so-and-so got more delegates, but to say they "won" as if it were a winner-take-all election is nonsense.*

What's more, this was about as close to a draw as you could get. Clinton and Sanders were separated by 0.2 percent and the delegate division was, by latest report as I do this, 23 for Clinton to 21 for Sanders. And six of those delegates were chosen by flipping a coin, with Clinton winning all six, which means her margin was the result of random chance.**

The only way anyone "wins" or "loses" Iowa is in the purely political sense of doing much better or much worse than expected. You could claim on that basis that Iowa was a "win" for Sanders because just a few months ago he was over 30 points behind, but for the past couple of weeks the polls had been calling it a tossup so that argument won't fly, either. This was a tie or as close as you could expect to come to one.

But the media kept going on about how Clinton "won" Iowa. Her campaign even called it an "historic" win; I'm not sure of the basis for that but I figure it for standard campaign hyperbole, so leave it be. Sanders' campaign did much the same thing, suggesting it was a "win" for him by emphasizing the size of the gap he closed.

But it was the media that set the tone of "Clinton wins!" It was just another example of the media closing ranks about the preferred candidate of the political and economic establishment, a media that first tried to ignore Sanders, then to dismiss him, then to mock him, and now, as I predicted to my wife it would, to set the bar impossibly high:

Remember first that before Sanders announced his candidacy and even after, Clinton was the "presumptive" nominee, the "of course she's going to win" candidate. Remember next that a poll done of Iowa caucus-goers the last week of October showed Clinton with a 65-24 lead over Sanders: a 41 percentage point lead. And remember third that when the caucuses were held, that advantage had shrunk to, again, one-fifth of a percentage point.

So how did this New York Time's "Upshot" blog analyze the results?

But in the end, a virtual tie in Iowa is an acceptable, if not ideal, result for Mrs. Clinton and an ominous one for Mr. Sanders.

Why? Because "He failed to win a state tailor made to his strengths." Exactly why Iowa is "tailor made" for a New England democratic socialist with a Brooklyn accent went unexplained beyond noting that Iowa is white and rural - Just like Vermont! - which I suppose would make, say, Idaho or Montana also "tailor made" for Bernie Sanders.

The point is, the standard went from "he can't win" to "he must win or else."

Just how bad did the coverage get? Consider this:

A couple of days before the caucuses, Buzzfeed reported that the Clinton campaign was actively training its Iowa volunteers in a maneuver that could take delegates away from Sanders by making Martin O'Malley a "viable" candidate in certain precincts. This was confirmed to Buzzfeed by a Clinton precinct captain.

The rules in the Iowa caucuses are rather complex, but here is a very oversimplified example of how that would work, as I understand it. Suppose there is a precinct with four delegates up for grabs (I'm not even going to try to get into "delegate equivalents," which is how the choices are actually counted). Clinton's people know that Sanders has 60% support, they have 30%, and O'Malley has 10%, and as a result the delegates are going to go three for Sanders and one for Clinton. If you have 15% support, you are a "viable candidate" and have to get at least one delegate. So enough Clinton people caucus with O'Malley supporters to bring him up to 15%. The result is that now the delegates go two for Sanders, one for Clinton, and one for O'Malley - and Sanders has lost a delegate.

It's sneaky - but it's entirely within the rules.

Okay. In response to the Buzzfeed report, a site called Vocativ.com put out an article headlined "Sanders supporters advocate using O'Malley as spoiler in Iowa" and subtitled "Bernie Sanders' campaign slammed Hillary Clinton's planned use of a political tactic, but his supporters are advocating the same strategy."

But if you get to the third paragraph, you discover that what Vocativ's "deep web analysts" - and yes that's that the article called them - what its "deep web analysts" had found was someone on a subreddit of Sanders fans suggesting it. Not Sanders, not the campaign, not any official, not anyone actually connected to the campaign, some individual supporters. With no indication that the campaign supported it or even less, trained people in how to do it.

By the time that that got to the splash screen of AOL.com, the headline had become "Sanders accused of dirty trick against Clinton" with the subhead that it "has emerged that Bernie Sanders' camp may be trying to rob Hillary Clinton of supporters with a sneaky move."

So what began as a confirmed report that the Clinton campaign was training its volunteers in a sneaky but legal tactic had morphed into a claim that Sanders was using a "dirty trick" to "rob" Clinton of delegates.

While that is perhaps an egregious example, it's far from the only one demonstrating a mass media bias that having failed to kill the Sanders campaign with silence would now attempt to kill it by setting impossibly high standards of achievement and political purity.

Let's be clear: I'm not talking about secret media cabals or grand conspiracies here, I'm talking about the natural outgrowth of a shared worldview, a common way of looking at the world, a commonality of perspective that leads to a commonality of conclusion and a commonality of action. I'll say it again: The media is closing ranks about the preferred candidate of the political and economic establishment, the candidate that even though they might not be great fans of all their proposals is still the one which that establishment feels comfortable with, the one that establishment has confidence might rearrange the apples on the cart but will not upset it. And that candidate, clearly, is Hillary Clinton.

Because Hillary Clinton, bluntly, is not nearly as progressive as she has been painting herself recently with her sudden and much too convenient commitment to populism, a commitment that has increased in direct proportion to the shrinkage in the polling gap between her and Sanders.

Not as progressive as claimed

In fact, it's not hard to make a case for why anyone who considers themselves progressive should not vote for Hillary Clinton even beyond that fact that her recent conversion to populism can't be trusted: The last day of the Iowa campaign, she was insistently declaring "I'm a progressive" only to say the very next day during a disturbingly fawning interview with Chris Matthews that "We’ve got to get back to the middle. We’ve got to get back to the big center."

For one thing, she is far more hawkish than people seem to realize. As an example, back in 2011, as Secretary of State, she was one of the most hawkish voices about the bombing of Libya and actually went so far as to tell a Congressional briefing that the Obama administration would simply ignore any attempts by Congress to assert its Constitutional authority in matters of war and peace.

She has also been an enthusiastic supporter of the drone war that has killed thousands of civilians.

In 2014, after leaving the administration, she declared a position on Iran's nuclear program that, had it been adopted, would have undermined the agreement that was reached and bemoaned that the US had not been more involved in Syria, including creating a "credible fighting force" and she has advocated a "no-fly zone" and a "safe zone," the latter of which, despite her flippant denials during a recent debate, would require ground troops.

Just recently, a couple of weeks ago she declared on Meet the Press that her policy on Iran would be "to distrust and verify." Sounding more like a member of Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet than a candidate for president of the US, she proposed new sanctions on Iran over a claim it's violating UN Security Council resolutions about its ballistic missile program. Which at least is consistent: During the 2008 primaries, she called Obama "naive" for saying he would be willing to talk to the Iranians.

In Congress, she supported both the Patriot Act, the one I dubbed the Traitor Act for its impact on civil liberties, and its reauthorization. More recently, she has defended NSA spying and called Edward Snowden an enabler of terrorism while saying she was "puzzled" why he fled the country when "we have all these protections for whistle-blowers" - apparently forgetting (no, of course she didn't actually forget) that the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistle-blowers than all previous presidents combined.

On the economy, suffice it to say that, as I said last time, she has so many ties to Wall Street it looks like some kind of kinky bondage party. Enough, in fact, that they are so comfortable with her that Tom Donohue, president of the US Chamber of Commerce said just recently that the only reason Clinton has come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership is because Sanders has and that if she's elected, she will switch back to supporting the pact she once called "the gold standard" for trade deals before starting to waffle in the face of its great unpopularity with primary voters.

Until she was challenged by Sanders' campaign, she supported fracking and for months she avoided taking a stand on the Keystone XL pipeline, only to finally come out in opposition on the grounds not that it's a bad idea but that it's a "distraction." She has said some good things on the topic of climate change but favors boosting fossil fuel supplies, which pretty much undercuts the argument.

There's more, but that's enough to make the point that yes, a solid case can be made that Hillary Clinton does not deserve the support of progressives.

Here's the sad part: Even given all that and all the rest I didn't address, she is still light-years ahead of, light-years beyond, anyone running on the GOPper side. So much so that were she to be the nominee and I lived in a toss-up state - which I assuredly do not - I would have to choke back my bile and vote for her.

Doubts about Sanders

I'm hoping I wouldn't have to make that choice. I do have problems with Bernie Sanders. His rather fumbling defenses of his weak record on gun control disturb me and he seems to lack, in the absence of a better term, a good feel for issues around racial and sexual justice, particularly where those issues are not easily connected to a class economic analysis.

This is not to say that he is bad on those issues, in fact his record on them is a solidly good one. But when he talks about the billionaire class running the country, when he talks about economic inequality, when he talks about changing the nature of power in the country, you can tell that he feels this, this is not just analysis, this is passion, this is commitment, this is genuine belief, this is emotional, this is his heart. And he doesn't seem to have that same feel for issues of racial and sexual justice. Lacking that sort of emotional connection, it's too easy for such issues to keep slipping down the list of priorities, forever sitting in the "In" box without ever actually getting moved to the desk.

And that worries me.

On the other hand, it's also true that his encounters with Black Lives Matter protesters indicated that he has the ability to listen and even learn something.

On the economy, as I said last time, he is not the socialist he claims to be and even less the socialist he is often made out to be by the media. A number of his proposals are good but I think they clearly do not go far enough.

But ultimately, bottom line, this is what is comes down to for me:

A little while ago, there was a brief kerfuffle when Sanders was asked about the fact that Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign had endorsed Clinton, which seemed rather odd considering he had a 100% lifetime voting record with each of them. He responded by referring to those groups as part of "the establishment." He quickly backed off that, realizing it was a gaffe. But while a gaffe, not untrue; I think he was referring to the national levels of those organizations, which at that level focus mostly almost exclusively on inside-the-beltway Congressional lobbying. That is, they are part of that establishment which I have been, and I think he was, talking about. Which raises, for me, an important difference between Clinton and Sanders.

First things first: She is a former Senator and a former Secretary of State who gets paid bunches in speaking fees to corporate gatherings. He is a sitting US Senator, a former member of the House, with something like a 33-year history in elective office, 25 of those at the federal level. Which means, if we are to be fair, that both these people are members of "the establishment."

Which brings us to the difference I spoke of between them, and it's a fundamental one, a sort of political "he-said-she-said."

She sees that establishment as what you have to work within and which sets the boundaries of the possible. He sees that establishment as what you have to go beyond to generate pressure (his "political revolution") to make that establishment do what it would not have done otherwise.

All of which brings to mind a slogan from the dreaded '60s: "Be realistic - demand the impossible." Because that is the only way true progress has ever been produced. And I prefer to go with hope.

As Edward McClelland of Salon wrote just prior to the caucuses (paraphrased),

Clinton's campaign is based on fear – the fear that Republicans will return to power and undo any progress made. Sanders is running on hope – hope for what he calls a "political revolution" that will take power out of the hands of billionaires.

If our society were likened to a house with a leaky roof, Bernie Sanders would be the one saying "I know it's hard but we've got to fix the roof!" while Hillary Clinton would be the one to advocate placing flower pots under the drips in order to beautify the rooms.

He is the voice of the hope for real progress and she is, ultimately, the voice of the hope that things won't get worse or at least will get worse more slowly. Which is why I am seriously considering, for just the second time in my life, changing my registration just so I can vote in a Democratic presidential primary. The first time was in 1988 when I switched from "independent" to Democrat to vote for Jesse Jackson. This time it will be a switch from Green to Democrat and the vote will be for Bernie Sanders.

*It is true that a number of primaries are not winner-take-all, so the same argument could be made about them. I would in those cases make an exception (and so accept there is a "winner") for those where getting the most votes makes a significant difference in the number of delegates (i.e., they are not awarded, for example, in numbers equivalent to each candidate's percentage of the vote but disproportionately go to the top vote-getter) and, in political terms, where the final margin is significantly larger or smaller than expected. I suppose it would also be fair to say someone "won" a non-winner-take-all primary if they were double-digits ahead of their nearest rival.

**Later accounts said the difference was closer to 0.3%. Other reports indicted that there were additional examples of coin tosses and Sanders won some of those. That, however, does not change the basic point that given that the number of coin tosses significantly exceeded the final margin, that margin, whoever it wound up favoring, was the result of random chance.

Sources cited in links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Humphrey
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/02/02/hillary-clinton-won-6-iowa-precincts-thanks-to-coin-tosses/21306679/
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/10/27/hillary-clinton-surges-in-latest-iowa-poll/
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/2/2/1478477/-NYT-Lede-Iowa-results-deeply-unnerving-to-Clintons-Sanders-is-right-to-call-it-a-virtual-tie
http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/hillary-bernie-math#.iy2bv2P2X
http://www.vocativ.com/news/277988/clinton-sanders-omalley-iowaflint
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/2/2/1478960/-Clinton-last-night-I-m-a-progressive-Clinton-today-We-ve-got-to-get-back-to-the-middle
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a41754/chris-matthews-hillary-clinton-interview/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/04/most-important-fact-about-libya-is-not.html
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33299-clinton-syria-fact-check-safe-zones-ground-troops
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/29052-five-reasons-no-progressive-should-support-hillary-clinton
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hillary-clinton-calls-no-fly-zones-syria
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/01/17/diplomacy-works-peace-groups-hail-iran-deal-clinton-talks-hawk
http://www.nationaljournal.com/defense/2014/04/25/hillary-clinton-edward-snowdens-leaks-helped-terrorists
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/search?q=TPP&max-results=20&by-date=true
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/34629-chamber-of-commerce-lobbyist-tom-donohue-clinton-will-support-tpp-after-election
http://grist.org/climate-energy/where-does-hillary-clinton-stand-on-fracking/
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/22/hillary-clinton-opposes-keystone-xl-pipeline
http://grist.org/climate-energy/8-things-you-need-to-know-about-hillary-clinton-and-climate-change/
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/my-day-bernie-sanders-and-hillary-clinton-two-iowa-rallies-explain-why-hillary-may-be