Sasha Abramsky
A new federal proposal mandates strict cuts on water usage in states reliant on the Colorado River.
The post The American West Is Running Out of Water appeared first on The Nation.
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Leftwing leader Gabriel Boric also promises to impose stricter environmental rules
Backed by climate, health, and labor groups, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey on Thursday reintroduced the Green New Deal Resolution, which the progressive leaders have been
fighting for since they first unveiled it in February 2019.
“In the four years since we first introduced the Green New Deal, the tides of our movement have risen and lifted climate action to the top of the national agenda,” Markey (D-Mass.) said of the
resolution, which envisions a 10-year mobilization that employs millions in well-paying union jobs to help the country respond to the climate emergency.
“Thanks to the persistence of the Green New Deal movement, we succeeded in securing historic progress through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,” he noted, “and now we have an obligation to honor the origins of that success—which sprung from the young people and workers who never once stopped organizing for their future—by putting those dollars to work to create dignified jobs, rectify generations of systemic injustice, and reverse climate damage.”
Along with reintroducing the resolution—a largely symbolic move given the current makeup of Congress—the pair released a
guide for cities, states, tribes, nonprofits, and individuals about how those two laws “help bring the Green New Deal to life.”
“Finally, it is understood that the climate crisis demands a full transformation of our economy and society that the government must lead.”
While some progressives
criticized the Inflation Reduction Act for pouring “gasoline on the flames” of the climate crisis by extending the fossil fuel era, it was still widely heralded for investing a historic $369 billion in “energy security and climate change.”
Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Thursday that “when we first introduced the Green New Deal, we were told that our vision for the future was too aspirational. Four years later, we see core tenets of the Green New Deal reflected in the Inflation Reduction Act—the largest ever federal investment in fighting climate change, with a focus on creating good, green jobs.”
“But there is still much, much more to do to make environmental justice the center of U.S. climate policy,” the congresswoman acknowledged. “Today’s reintroduction marks the beginning of that process—of strengthening and broadening our coalition, and of laying the policy groundwork for the next fight.”
u201cWe need a #GreenNewDeal u2013 for the environment, for education, for housing, and for health care. Our planet and our future depend on it.nnProud to stand with @SenMarkey, @RepAOC, and @RepRoKhanna in demanding bold, holistic action that creates jobs and saves lives.u201d— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@Rep. Pramila Jayapal)
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The resolution is co-sponsored by several lawmakers in both chambers of Congress and endorsed by dozens of groups, including the Sunrise Movement, whose executive director, Varshini Prakash, said that Thursday “marks our recommitment to the bold vision of the Green New Deal—the only plan to stop the climate crisis at the speed and scale that science and justice demand.”
“Since the Green New Deal was first introduced, we have made climate a rallying cry for our generation and a political priority for our politicians,” Prakash continued. “And in just a few years, through our organizing, we have elected new leaders, helped pass the biggest climate bill in U.S. history, and built a new consensus in the Democratic Party—finally, it is understood that the climate crisis demands a full transformation of our economy and society that the government must lead.”
“Across this country, millions of young people still dream of a Green New Deal,” she added. “So as fossil fuel billionaires and right-wing extremists take on the battle for control of our classrooms and communities, we are fighting back. Together, we will take over, classroom by classroom, school by school, city by city until we win the Green New Deal in every corner of this country.”
u201cWeu2019re so grateful for this vast coalition of climate, labor, racial justice, & tribal communities who have brought a Green New Deal vision from the political fringes to a near-reality.nnAnd weu2019re not done yet!nnCheck out todayu2019s livestream of the GND resolution reintroduction u2b07ufe0fu201d— Green New Deal Network (@Green New Deal Network)
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Markey declared that “we have demonstrated that our movement is a potent political force, and in the run-up to the 2024 elections, we will direct this power to demanding solutions to the intersectional crises Congress has yet to address: in healthcare, childcare, schools, housing, transit, labor, and economic and racial justice.”
Also on Thursday and as part of that pledge, Markey partnered with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to introduce the Green New Deal for Health, a bill “to prepare and empower the healthcare sector to protect the health and well-being of our workers, our communities, and our planet in the face of the climate crisis, and for other purposes.”
The senator stressed that “the American healthcare system is broken—from the exorbitant medical bills and outlandish insurance premiums to maxed out emergency rooms and shuttering hospitals. With climate disasters on the rise, the health and safety of frontline environmental justice communities is more precarious than ever.”
“We urgently need to invest in a more sustainable system, one that is resilient to the impacts of climate change, supports its workers, and doesn’t rely on fossil fuels. We can’t have a healthcare system that makes us sicker while healthcare providers work to make us well,” added Markey—who, like Khanna, supports Medicare for All.
u201cThe people came together to build a multi-racial, multi-generational movement for a Green New Deal. nnTo the wrongs of environmental racism, to demand clean air & water, union jobs, lower costs, and a livable future.nnToday we introduced the #GreenNewDeal for Health!u201d— Congresswoman Summer Lee (@Congresswoman Summer Lee)
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The bill would invest $130 billion in community health centers, authorize $100 billion in federal grants for medical facilities to improve climate resilience and disaster mitigation efforts, require hospitals that receive Medicare payments to notify the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary at least 180 days before a full closure, and create a task force to ensure a greener medical supply chain.
“Across the world, hundreds of millions of people are already feeling the effects of climate change and the health consequences that often follow. From increased cases of asthma due to air pollution to disruptions at care facilities after extreme weather events, it’s clear we need to take steps now to protect public health,” said Khanna.
The healthcare legislation is also backed by progressives from both chambers and various advocacy groups and unions.
“Stopping the climate crisis will require us to transform every aspect of our society, our economy, and especially our healthcare system, to work for people and the planet,” said Sunrise’s Prakash. “Sen. Markey’s Green New Deal for Health finally addresses the staggering, often-overlooked costs to our health from fossil fuel-generated air pollution and climate change, and begins to build a system where people and workers are taken care of. If our generation is going to have a shot at a livable future, we must pass it as we strive towards our vision of a Green New Deal.”
Mississippi’s Republican Gov. Tate Reeves has until Friday to sign a bill that would create a separate police force and court system for Jackson, the state’s capital city. The bill is controversial for its subversion of local control and for its construction of a system in which white state officials will appoint the people in charge of the criminal justice system in a majority-Black city.
Hinds County, which includes Jackson, would become the only municipality in the state that doesn’t elect its own prosecutors and judges.
“We are finding ourselves jumping back to days of Jim Crow, days of apartheid.”
The bill is an extension of efforts to control and undermine the voices of the Black people who live in Jackson, said Rukia Lumumba, co-director of the Movement for Black Lives’ Electoral Justice Project and a candidate in the upcoming Democratic primary for a state House seat just north of Jackson.
“We are finding ourselves jumping back to days of Jim Crow, days of apartheid,” she said, “where we’re seeing this theory that Black people can’t govern, that Black people can’t make decisions for themselves around who is best suited to represent them in governing processes, and that Black people can’t create their own safety.”
The bill was written by Republican state Rep. Trey Lamar, who represents a district just under 200 miles away from Jackson. Lamar has framed the bill as an effort to make Jackson “safer” and to help its residents. “My constituents want to feel safe when they come here,” Lamar said during state House deliberations on the bill earlier this year.
Hinds County elected civil rights attorney Jody Owens as district attorney in 2019. The city of Jackson has a history of Black radical mayors, including Rukia’s father, Chokwe Lumumba, and brother, current Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, who won reelection in 2021. There have been attempts to pass similar bills targeting Jackson since at least 2012, Lumumba said.
The backlash is also playing out in national politics, where another reformist Mississippi prosecutor and federal court nominee is facing Republican opposition in the U.S. Senate because of his progressive politics. The effort to create a special justice system around Jackson should be seen as part of this national backlash to the elections of progressive and reform-minded officials, said Lumumba.
“We’re seeing attacks in so many places where we saw so many wins,” she said, pointing to efforts in Missouri to restrict the power of St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner.
Since 2020, states and municipalities across the country elected reform-minded district attorneys, passed criminal justice reforms, and continued efforts to improve equity in policing, housing, and health care.
“What we’re seeing is opponents to those successes figuring out how to tap into municipal control and county control and use the legislature as a source to literally deprive municipalities and counties of the power that they have to govern,” Lumumba said, “to engage in systems that are more accountable to the people.”
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on Aug. 5, 2022.
Photo: Dylan Hollingsworth/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Under the Jackson bill, H.B. 1020, state officials would appoint 11 positions that were previously elected, including judges, prosecutors, and public defenders in a newly created district that includes the city’s wealthy white residents.
“It’s dangerous because it creates a narrative of racial divide,” Lumumba said. “It creates a narrative that continues to perpetuate these stereotypes that Black people are not intelligent enough to do the job, that we are not capable.”
The proposed law would also expand the jurisdiction and size of the Capitol Police force, which was originally created to patrol state buildings and has recently expanded its control throughout an area dubbed the “Capitol Complex Improvement Zone.”
In a February opinion article, Mississippi civil rights advocates opposing the bill said it would create an apartheid system. “Imagine all-white juries in a city that’s nearly 83 percent Black, within a state where lynchings still occur,” they wrote.
The bill is part of a response to Jackson’s murder rate, which spiked in 2020 along with murder rates in cities and rural areas across the country. When a journalist asked about H.B. 1020 during a February press conference, Reeves, the governor, who is up for reelection this year, described Jackson as the “murder capital of the world.”
While gun violence and certain crimes like robbery and gun theft increased in 2021, overall crime in Jackson was down.
“The anecdotal data that the legislature is pushing through does not match the real data,” Lumumba said.
“What people don’t understand is that Mississippi is not the state where residents don’t care about progress.”
Though public safety is offered as a rationale for the bill, it focuses primarily on exempting the city’s wealthy white residents from local control, Lumumba said: “It focuses and centers its efforts around creating safety for a wealthier, predominantly white population in Jackson that is concentrated in a specific area.”
While state officials advance legislation to revoke local control in Jackson, Republicans are also working to pass bills to suppress voting rights in the state, Lumumba said.
“One thing that’s not understood is that these bills are being introduced because Jackson leadership, specifically the mayoral leadership, has been effective in moving the needle on water, moving the needle on public safety,” she said, noting Jackson’s recent creation of Mississippi’s first ever office of violent prevention and trauma recovery. “What people don’t understand is that Mississippi is not the state where residents don’t care about progress.”
The post Mississippi to Create Special Justice System for Just One City: Majority-Black Jackson appeared first on The Intercept.
Jeremy Jennings
April 20, 2023 12:51 pm ET
Alexis de Tocqueville’s journey to the United States in 1831 is one of the most famous journeys in the history of political thought. As he recorded in “Democracy in America,” he found a flourishing and stable society characterized by an “equality of conditions” (among white Americans) and the pursuit of “self-interest well understood.” This was Tocqueville’s only visit to the U.S.; he watched the country’s slide into civil war from a distance. America, he wrote in 1856, had come to disappoint all the “friends of democratic liberty.”
Yet Tocqueville continued to travel until his death in 1859, visiting England, Ireland, Italy and Germany. The country that preoccupied him from the late 1830s onward was Algeria, France’s most important African colony, which he visited in 1841 and 1846. Tocqueville’s writings about Algeria are the most controversial part of his legacy.
French military involvement in Algeria began in 1830, and from the outset, some critics opposed the attempt to create an overseas French Empire. Starting in 1839, resistance from the indigenous Arab and Berber population led France to respond with brutal suppression, embarking on a policy of full territorial conquest and intensive colonial settlement.
Tocqueville was attracted by the possibilities of a French presence in North Africa. As early as 1837, he wrote that he had no doubt France would “be able to raise a great monument to our country’s glory on the African coast.” He wanted to see the country for himself and prepared meticulously for his first visit to Algeria in 1841, accompanied by his travelling companion in America, Gustave de Beaumont.
“As in the U.S., Tocqueville was a tireless investigator in Algeria.”
As in the U.S., Tocqueville was a tireless investigator, travelling far and wide, interviewing as many people as he could, always taking extensive notes. But in contrast to America, what he saw in Algeria was far from pleasing to him. Beneath the beauty of the scenery and the exoticism of the surroundings—the city of Algiers, he told his father, was like something from one of the tales of “One Thousand and One Nights”—Tocqueville perceived a military regime that acted with obvious contempt not only for the Arab population but also for the French settlers. He also saw that the worst excesses of French governmental centralization had been imported into Algeria.
These initial observations informed Tocqueville’s later recommendations on French policy. To create a populous and flourishing colony in Algeria, he argued, French settlers should enjoy the same rights and legal protections as the citizens of mainland France. The exercise of arbitrary government and the excessive power of the military had to be ended.
Much less liberal and conciliatory in tone were Tocqueville’s remarks on how the indigenous population was to be treated. He argued that France had to complete the process of colonization as quickly as possible. He wrote that he had often heard complaints about the French in Algeria—that “we burn harvests, that we empty silos, and finally that we seize unarmed men, women and children.” These, he countered, were “unfortunate necessities,” and to which any colonial power “is obliged to submit.”
“I believe,” he continued, “that the right of war authorizes us to lay waste to the country and that we must do it either by destroying crops during the harvest season, or by making those rapid incursions known as razzias, the purpose of which is to seize men or herds of animals.” European settlement and military repression had to go hand in hand.
In later years, and especially after his second visit to Algeria, Tocqueville showed greater concern for the well-being of the Arab population. War alone, he recognized, would not be sufficient to consolidate French conquest. For pragmatic reasons, the colonial administration needed to establish a community of interests between the indigenous population and the settlers. “Civilized peoples often oppress and dispirit barbarous peoples by their mere contact,” Tocqueville wrote, pointing to the U.S. as an example: “The Europeans in North America ended by pushing the Indians off their territory.” Here was a history of conquest that the French should not seek to repeat.
“Despite seeing firsthand the repression and violence entailed in France’s project, Tocqueville did not lessen his support. ”
Still, despite seeing firsthand the repression and violence entailed in France’s project, Tocqueville did not lessen his support for the creation of a French Algeria. The judgment he displayed as attentive and observant commentator on America deserted him in Africa. Why?
Three reasons stand out. First, Tocqueville felt the sense of national humiliation visited upon France after the fall of Napoleon. To become a great power again, France needed an empire. Second, he believed that, if properly managed, Algerian colonization could benefit France’s own population and economy, by turning the unemployed and idle into patriotic and productive settlers. Lastly, while Tocqueville did not endorse a theory of racial superiority, like many of his contemporaries he believed that European civilization was superior to the Muslim civilization he studied in the Quran and witnessed on his travels. French rule would be enlightened rule, and all Algerians, including the indigenous population, would ultimately benefit from it.
In fact, France’s Algerian colony was maintained only at enormous financial cost, and the hope that French settlers would gradually replace the Arab and Berber population was never to be realized. Although Algeria was annexed to France in 1848, military resistance to French rule continued into the first decade of the 20th century. Violent conflict returned in 1954, when Algerian nationalists launched a rebellion against French rule, leading to a brutal war in which thousands died.
The colonial project that Tocqueville supported in the 1830s finally came to an end in 1962, when Algeria achieved independence, leading thousands of French settlers to flee back to France. Tocqueville may have been prescient about democracy in America, but like many other Europeans he misjudged both the ease of establishing a colonial empire and the benefits that would follow.
Mr. Jennings is Professor of Political Theory at King’s College London. This essay is adapted from his new book, “Travels With Tocqueville Beyond America,” published by Harvard University Press.
The Unsung Cooperative Hero Award & Ella Jo Baker
Vernon interviews Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Ph.D., Professor at John Jay College, and Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo, Co Editor at Grassroots Economic Organizing. Both are also economic social justice advocates. Vernon and his guests will discuss the Unsung Cooperative Hero Award, and its first recipient Ella Jo Baker.
Professor Jeff Bierman says bitcoin, gold, the S&P 500, bonds and oil are “moving together in automatic serial correlation,” and that’s not a good thing.
Brendan McDermid/File Photo/Reuters
- Ray Dalio wrote in a note this week that the financial system is close to needing “big restructurings.”
- The Bridgewater Associates founder cited higher debt burdens and rising interest rates.
- In his view, the economy is on the brink of a contraction that will make the next year or two difficult.
Ray Dalio wrote in a Wednesday newsletter that debt levels have become unsustainably high, setting up the financial system for major changes.
The founder of Bridgewater Associates said debts will increase so much that central banks will have to buy them.
“Given these conditions, it appears that interest rates that are high enough (and money and credit that is tight enough) to fight inflation and provide lender-creditors with adequate real returns will be unbearably high for borrower-debtors,” Dalio said. “This means the system is close to the point where big restructurings will be needed. Of course, which debtors and creditors are affected will vary.”
He also reiterated his “Big Cycle” framework that says the same economic patterns are repeated throughout history, namely the creation of enormous debt, conflicts within countries, conflicts between countries, the impact of nature, and technological changes like the internet or AI.
Each of the five forces, Dalio said, are now converging in magnitudes not seen in decades. Meanwhile, within the larger cycle, there’s a smaller, short-term cycle defined by economic weakness, with central banks creating high inflation and eventually recessions.
In his view — following nine consecutive interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve, historic inflation, an ongoing debt crisis, and credit crunch — this is where things stand now.
“We are now in the tight money to fight inflation phase of this cycle, just before the economic contraction that is likely to make the next year or two difficult ones in the economy,” Dalio wrote, adding that the political cycle moves loosely in sync with the economic cycle.
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The U.S. leading economic index sank 1.2% in March and declined for the 12th month in a row, continuing to signal a recession later in 2023.
Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images
- “Zombie” companies are facing a year of pain ahead, according to think tank expert Sonya Gibbs.
- Gibbs pointed to higher interest rates, which could strain finances at overborrowed firms.
- But higher rates are necessary to correct major problems in the market, she added.
Indebted “zombie” companies are headed for a year of pain as financial conditions continue to tighten, according to one think tank expert.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg TV, Sonja Gibbs, the head of sustainable finance at the Institute of International Finance, pointed to upcoming challenges stemming from higher interest rates in the market.
Over the past year, the Fed has hiked interest rates over 1,700% to control inflation – a move that’s significantly raised the cost of borrowing for firms. Rates are now targeted at 4.75-5%, the highest since 2007, and markets are pricing in another quarter-point increase in May.
“Over the longer term, it’s going to correct the problem of too-easy access to capital, too much debt and so on. In the short term though, higher rates are going to cause a lot of pain,” Gibbs warned.
That’s especially the case for what she calls “zombie” companies, or firms that overborrowed when interest rates were ultra-low but don’t earn enough to cover their debt-service costs or operating expenses.
“It’s why we call them zombies. They’re on borrowed time,” she said.
That pain will be amplified with the ongoing credit crunch, Gibbs added, as banks weathering huge holes in their balance sheets are now less willing to lend, or will only do so at higher rates.
Banks have tightened lending by the most they ever have, according to data from Morgan Stanley. And credit availability just saw its largest drop in 20 years according to the most recent small business lending survey.
“The next six months to a year are going to be very challenging in terms of making sure that companies can service their debt,” Gibbs said.
Other market observers have raised similar concerns as the Fed continues to raise interest rates. On the more bearish end of forecasts, “Dr. Doom” economist Nouriel Roubini warned markets of an incoming financial crisis as central bankers try to battle inflation and debt-laden entities at the same time.
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