Author Archives: AbelSmallwood

Trump Plans to Cram His Entire Legislative Agenda Into Days 96-99

Mother Jones

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Did Mack Sennett ever make “The Keystone Cops Go to Washington”? No? No matter. That’s what it feels like right now.

Let’s see if I can do justice to our current legislative follies. For starters, it appears that we’re going to get health care, tax reform, and infrastructure all in one week. Why? I guess so that President Trump can say he got going on all of them in his first hundred days. Which totally doesn’t matter and Trump couldn’t care less about it. But he released a truly comical list of all his accomplishments anyway. Not that he cares. But anyway. Let’s move on.

Health care: The House Freedom Caucus has allegedly agreed to an amendment to the previous House bill—the one that crashed and burned last month thanks to the HFC’s opposition—that now makes it acceptable. They haven’t actually said so in public yet, but maybe tomorrow they will. Maybe. Basically, it allows states to opt out of the essential coverage requirements of Obamacare. Except for Capitol Hill, that is. Members of Congress will continue to get every last thing on the list. And there’s no change to pre-existing conditions except for one teensy little thing: insurance companies can charge you more if you have a pre-existing condition. How much more? The sky’s the limit, apparently. Does $10 million sound good? In practice, of course, this means that they don’t have to offer coverage to anyone with a pre-existing condition.

Tax reform: It turns out the Treasury Department really was taken by surprise on this, so Wednesday’s announcement will be little more than the same stuff Trump released on the campaign trail. Corporate taxes get cut by nearly two-thirds, to 15 percent. Ditto for “pass through” corporations like, oh, just to pull an example out of the air, The Trump Organization. There will be no offsetting spending cuts. There will be no border tax. There will be nothing much for the non-rich except a modest change to the standard deduction. There will, of course, be no details about which deductions and loopholes, if any, Trump plans to plug. It will be a gigantic deficit buster. And just for good measure, it’s probably literally unpassable under the Senate’s rules.

Infrastructure: In a laughable attempt to get Democratic support for his tax bill, Trump plans to add infrastructure spending and a child tax credit to it. The problem is that Trump’s infrastructure plan is little more than a giveaway to big construction companies, and his child tax credit—designed by Ivanka!—is little more than a giveaway to the well off. In other words, instead of one thing Democrats hate, the bill now has three things Democrats hate. I’m just spitballing here, but I’m not sure this is how you make deals.

This is lunacy. The barely revised health care bill probably won’t pass the House, let alone the Senate. Tax reform is just a PowerPoint presentation, not an actual plan. Plus it’s such an unbelievable giveaway to the rich that even Republicans will have a hard time swallowing it. And the infrastructure stuff is DOA. It will almost certainly be opposed by both Republicans and Democrats.

This is like watching kids make mud pies. I guess that’s OK, since this is all terrible stuff that I hope never sees the light of day. Still, I guess I prefer even my political opponents to show a little bit of respect for the legislative process.

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Trump Plans to Cram His Entire Legislative Agenda Into Days 96-99

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John Boehner’s Big Triumph Is Now Just a Big Shit Sandwich

Mother Jones

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I could use a good laugh, and this afternoon I got one. For starters, as the White House hinted yesterday, Joe Biden won’t be attending Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech next month before a joint session of Congress. Apparently he’ll be out of the country that day:

The vice president’s office on Friday confirmed the plans to skip the March 3 speech. “We are not ready to announce details of his trip yet, and normally our office wouldn’t announce this early, but the planning process has been underway for a while,” a spokesperson for the office said.

So where exactly will Joe be? Well, um, somewhere. The planning process “has been underway for a while,” the White House insists with a straight face, but they don’t know yet what country they’ve been planning to send him to. But they’ll think of one. Maybe Latvia or something.

This is all part of the mounting fury from Democrats in Congress and the White House over the speech, and it’s become increasingly clear that the whole thing is a major blunder for Netanyahu. But who to blame? The invitation came from Speaker of the House John Boehner, so why not blame him? Today Netanyahu did exactly that, throwing him under the proverbial bus with barely a passing glance:

A senior Israeli official suggested on Friday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been misled into thinking an invitation to address the U.S. Congress on Iran next month was fully supported by the Democrats….“It appears that the speaker of Congress made a move, in which we trusted, but which it ultimately became clear was a one sided move and not a move by both sides,” Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Tzachi Hanegbi told 102 FM Tel Aviv Radio on Friday.

Poor John Boehner. You almost feel sorry for the guy sometimes. President Obama has been running rings around him for months now, infuriating the Republican caucus and causing Boehner endless headaches over Cuba, immigration, net neutrality, Homeland Security shutdowns, and dozens of other subjects. No matter how hard he tries, Boehner just hasn’t been able to get ahead of any of this. Instead he’s been forced over and over to respond to Obama’s agenda while desperately trying to keep the peace among the tea partiers who control his future.

Then, finally, it looked like he’d pulled something off. He announced the Netanyahu speech two weeks ago, catching the president off guard and garnering huzzahs from every corner of the the conservative movement. Finally, a victory!

But now it’s all turned to ashes. His big spectacle is in tatters, with Democrats in open revolt and pundits of all stripes agreeing that he overreached by going around the White House on a foreign policy matter. It’s been nothing but a headache, and even Netanyahu has joined the lynch mob now. What’s worse, there’s nothing he can do. The speech is still four weeks away, and Boehner has no choice but to let the whole dreary debacle play out. He already knows his show is a flop, but the curtain has to come up anyway and Boehner has to keep a stiff upper lip the whole time.

Poor guy.

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John Boehner’s Big Triumph Is Now Just a Big Shit Sandwich

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Tar-sands industry loses $17.1 billion thanks to public opposition

Tar-sands industry loses $17.1 billion thanks to public opposition

4 Nov 2014 7:06 AM

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Tar-sands industry loses $17.1 billion thanks to public opposition

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Here’s some good news for your tar-sands blues: Grassroots activism makes a difference! $17.1 billion of difference, in fact. According to a new report produced by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and Oil Change International, oil companies and investors looking to gain from Alberta’s tar sands lost a whopping $30.9 billion between 2010 and 2013.

While part of that is chalked up to fluctuating American oil markets, $17.1 billion is claimed to be a direct result of all those pesky tar-sands protesters and their pesky legal challenges.

And the industry just didn’t see it coming, reports DeSmogBlog:

Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International, added industry officials never anticipated the level and intensity of public opposition to their massive build-out plans. …

“Business as usual for Big Oil — particularly in the tar sands — is over,” Kretzmann said.

The report said market forces and public opposition have played a significant role in the cancellation of three major tar sands projects in 2014 alone: Shell’s Pierre River, Total’s Joslyn North, and Statoil’s Corner Project.

Keystone XL pipeline delays have caused all kinds of financial trouble for those who thought they were going to make money on this thing, according to the report:

The delays and cancellations have exposed the fact that tar sands investments, once thought to be highly lucrative, are showing signs of financial weakness. With growing public awareness and market hesitancy, expansion of tar sands production in Canada will remain contested terrain for the foreseeable future.

And a whole lot of it comes from your badass selves, First Nations of Canada, for leveraging land sovereignty challenges and environmental health concerns and building a movement that’s now known across the world.

The growing environmental movement, [Greenpeace Canada campaigner Melina Laboucan-Massimo] said, has been better at incorporating the voices of local First Nations living on the front lines of the tar sands. …

“Now people are quite aware that that’s what been happening and there has been a public dialogue created on that and there has been more pressure on the government to really address the environmental concerns, the health issues and indigenous rights violations. I feel like people really are a lot more aware of these issues now than in the past.”

All hail civil disobedience! Thanks, Thoreau; we knew there was something to that.

Source:
“Citizen Interventions” Have Cost Canada’s Tar Sands Industry $17B, New Report Shows

, DeSmogBlog.

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Tar-sands industry loses $17.1 billion thanks to public opposition

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Tar-sands industry loses $17.1 billion thanks to public opposition