Thursday, July 12th, 2018
Stephan: Yesterday someone asked me what I thought a country that was run by intelligent men and women who made policy on the basis of facts and sought the wellbeing of their nation and the planet, as opposed to the U.S. model where policy is made on the basis of ideology, theology, or just stomach gas, would actually look like. As it happens the Netherlands has just provided us with an answer to the question. Here it is.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands
Credit: Jack Taylor/Getty Images
A coalition of seven Dutch political parties recently unveiled a climate policy proposal that is breathtaking in its ambition. If it becomes law, it will codify the most stringent targets for greenhouse gas reductions of any country in the world.
There are still several steps between the proposal and passage, including debate in both houses of Parliament, and lawmakers may make changes. But given the broad political support — the parties involved control 113 of 150 seats in Parliament — it is widely expected to pass in something like its current form by late next summer.
It would be the world’s eighth national climate law (after the UK, Mexico, Denmark, Finland, France, Norway, and Sweden), but it boasts a few features that make it particularly notable.
It’s bipartisan! Or rather, heptapartisan.
Here in the US, we’ve grown depressingly accustomed to climate battles breaking down along partisan lines: Democrats push (inadequate) solutions; Republicans deny that the problem exists or that anything needs to be […]
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Thursday, July 12th, 2018
Michael Corcoran, - truthout
Stephan: Republicans cannot govern because they are not interested in social wellbeing. What they care about is their personal power, their personal greed, and being good servants of the uber-rich who fund their campaigns and put them into office. If you live in a Red value state, I'd consider moving. Things are going to get much worse in those states very quickly
GOP cruelty is not new, but it seems to be reaching new depths. Case in point: In Kentucky, Gov. Matt Bevin is now using the lives of Medicaid patients like pieces on a chessboard in an act of revenge and political spectacle.
Governor Bevin’s administration announced that he would deprive Medicaid patients of dental and vision benefits, effective immediately. This unilateral (and some say illegal) maneuver impacts 460,000 peoplein Kentucky. This occurred just hours after a federal court stopped his Kentucky Health plan, which would throw people off Medicaid with work requirements, deductibles and other administrative and economic obstacles.
The case in question is Stewart v. Azar. Through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Trump administration announced new guidelines in January to remake the program in the GOP’s image. His administration told the states they could implement work requirements and many other “community engagement” policies. These approaches have nothing to do with providing care, and everything to do with gutting the rolls. They would fundamentally change Medicaid, turning a program aimed at helping the deserving poor into a program that disciplines them for being poor in the first place.
On June 29, Federal Judge James E. Boasberg of the DC circuit, rejected Trump’s Department of […]
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Thursday, July 12th, 2018
Umair Haque, - Eudaimonia
Stephan: Here is a very provocative essay that raises some points I think each of us ought to consider. Our country is like a patient with a potentially fatal fever whose system is breaking down in chaos while the medical staff is playing cribbage. I find the complacency and uninterest -- that's right not disinterest -- that I see and hear around me every day stunning and alarming.
Some things in life, my friends, are unpredictable. The weather. True love. The stock market. But some things are entirely, utterly, and almost boringly predictable, too. And strangely, those aren’t small things. Sometimes, they’re big things. One of the most predictable things of all is fascism, the classical sequence of a proto-fascist collapse.
Don’t believe me? Let’s think about. It goes something like this: economic stagnation, a falling middle class, a rising demagogue, who scapegoats and demonizes minorities, blaming the troubles of the many on the few and the different. Soon enough, something like this follows: paramilitaries are formed, parallel judiciaries, law enforcement, and citizenship are created, camps rise, apartheid laws begin, minorities are expropriated of savings, homes, and assets (which are redistributed to the pure of blood, because, remember, the economy is stagnant), forced exile, ghettoization, enslavement, and finally, extermination. The lying press! Enemies of the people! Vermin! Animals! We know how this goes, don’t we?
Where would you saw we are in that […]
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Thursday, July 12th, 2018
Stephan: If you read me regularly you know that I follow not just the insurance industry, but the re-insurance industry where your insurance company lays off part of its risk. I do this because the insurance companies were the first corporate entities to really take climate change seriously because they have to consider future risk, and I knew that when a corporation or a family can't get insurance then things change. Here is an example of what I mean.
A towboat pushes barges towards the Mill Creek Station power plant on the Ohio River in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S., September 15, 2017. According to the company, Louisville Gas and Electric, Mill Creek Station is a coal-fired power plant producing over 1400 megawatts of power and burning approximately 4.8 million tons of coal per year.
Credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder
The elimination of coal power isn’t just good for the environment… it’s quickly becoming good for the corporate bottom line. Insurance giant Swiss Re has enacted a policy that refuses coverage to any company that either generates 30 percent or more of its revenue from coal power, or uses at least 30 percent coal power to run its operations. Swiss Re touted the move as reflecting its commitment to limiting global warming (it made a pledge in 2015 alongside the Paris climate accord), but it also casts this as a shrewd business move.
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Wednesday, July 11th, 2018
AMANDA MARCOTTE, Politics Writer - Salon
Stephan: I have decided to dedicate today's edition of SR to the Nazism of the Trump administration and its blatant racism. The story of what is happening on the border and with immigration is already getting lost, pushed aside by the Supreme Court, NATO, Putin madness of this incompetent, corrupt, psychopathic president and the zombies who serve him. So let me start with this report. This is what White racism looks like, in case you have any question. It is so vile, I never thought something like this could happen in the U.S.
A year-and-a-half into Donald Trump’s presidency, it’s become quite clear that the anti-immigrant animus he exhibited on the campaign trail, and which compelled so much enthusiasm from white voters of all income levels, is also the guiding philosophy of his presidency. Kicking out or detaining as many immigrants as possible, or at least the ones perceived as nonwhite, has arguably been the top priority of the Trump White House. That has resulted in escalated deportation, the now-notorious family separation policy meant to intimidate people out of seeking legal asylum, and the ending of legal status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from what the president has called “shithole countries,” such as Honduras or Haiti.
Now comes a troubling new development that threatens to get buried under all the Brett Kavanaugh pageantry: The Trump administration is reportedly shaking the branches to come up with a legal pretext to strip citizenship from people it perceives as not white enough to belong in the United States. This specific strategy relies on redefining certain immigrants as “criminals,” but in reality, this move is […]
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