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Obama’s power plant rules could cut your electricity bill

by FeliciaStill Posted on July 24, 2015

Obama’s power plant rules could cut your electricity bill

By on 24 Jul 2015commentsShare

What will happen to your electric bill after the Obama administration starts limiting CO2 emissions from power plants? It could come down quite a bit, a new report finds — if your state leaders are smart.

Republican lawmakers have claimed that residential electricity bills will rise by up to $200 annually under Obama’s Clean Power Plan, based on a study put out in May 2014 by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. While the study has been widely discredited, opponents of Obama’s plan continue to cite it.

Now, a report by consulting firm Synapse Energy Economics suggests that state compliance with the plan — paired with investment in renewables and energy efficiency initiatives — could actually lead to big reductions in what Americans pay for power. The key? Early action.

Two of the report’s authors lay out the logic in EcoWatch:

By investing in high levels of clean energy and energy efficiency, every state can see significant savings with a total of $40 billion saved nationwide in 2030 … However, consumers will typically see the largest savings in states that build renewable resources early. Under the Clean Power Plan, these first movers will profit by becoming net exporters of electricity to states that are slower to respond. States that keep operating coal plants well into the future will tend to become importers after those plants retire, and energy consumers in those states will miss out on substantial benefits of clean energy and energy efficiency.

According to the report, if two-thirds of consumers participate in energy efficiency programs, electricity bills could be $35 cheaper per month than a “business-as-usual” scenario would predict for 2030. In fact, bills would be cheaper than they were in 2012, write the authors. The firm projects that the $35 savings would leave household electric bills at an average of $91 per month in 2030. (The EPA also expects household electric bills to drop under the plan, but the agency estimates they would be $8 lower per month.)

Keep in mind, though, that Synapse’s $35 figure is averaged across the U.S. as a whole. Since electricity prices already vary widely around the country, and the Clean Power Plan will be implemented differently by different states, the projected savings are subject to some massive variance. North Dakota residents, for example, could save $94 per month if their leaders are aggressive with renewable energy and efficiency.

But so far six governors have said they won’t draw up strategies for implementing the Clean Power Plan — so don’t expect early action from their states. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wrote an op-ed in March calling for states to defy the Obama administration over the power plant rules.

While the Synapse report wasn’t funded by a group with an obvious financial interest in the outcome (like, say, the corporate-backed Chamber of Commerce), it was supported by a group with a viewpoint: the Energy Foundation, “a partnership of major foundations with a mission to promote the transition to a sustainable energy future.” Which is something we can get behind.

Source:
A Clean Energy Future: Why It Pays to Get There First

, EcoWatch.

Climate rule to bring lower energy bills, report says

, The Hill.

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Jeb Bush Is Beating Hillary Clinton in the Goldman Sachs Primary

by LeilaniSandberg Posted on July 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the past three months, Goldman Sachs employees have donated more than $147,000 to Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, helping him to an early lead in what might be called the Goldman Sachs primary. But winning the biggest share of contributions from the controversial, economic-crash-enhancing investment firm isn’t going to be a cakewalk for Bush. At least three other major presidential candidates—including Hillary Clinton, who has longstanding ties to the Wall Street giant—have bagged money from Goldman, with two of them using Goldman Sachs lobbyists to raise money for their campaigns.

Bush’s biggest rival in the Goldman money chase is his fellow Floridian, Sen. Marco Rubio. Rubio’s campaign snagged just over $60,000 from Goldman Sachs. And Rubio has a Goldman insider hitting up his own network of wealthy friends for contributions. One of the three registered lobbyists bundling donations for Rubio is Joe Wall, a vice-president for government affairs at Goldman Sachs. Wall has so far reported bundling more than $90,000 for Rubio.

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Jeb Bush Is Beating Hillary Clinton in the Goldman Sachs Primary

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Puerto Rico Is Doomed, and It’s Our Fault

by BrentLeschen Posted on July 17, 2015

Mother Jones

Greece may have overcome a major hurdle in fixing its economy this week, but Puerto Rico faces a more complicated obstacle to managing its crippling debt: its murky status as a US territory.

“If Puerto Rico were a state, there wouldn’t be any question about it,” Jeffrey Farrow, a former adviser on Puerto Rico policy to President Bill Clinton, said of the island’s mounting debt crisis. “If it were a nation, it wouldn’t have to worry about US federal rules, and then it could try to develop its own economy.”

But Puerto Rico is neither a state nor a country. It’s technically a commonwealth, a status given to it in 1950 by the US government, which allowed it to draft a constitution and elect its own officials. But even its commonwealth status is unique. Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky are all commonwealths, but they have the full power of states. That’s not the case for this island of 3.6 million, which is, essentially, a colony, subject to the full control of the US Congress. The nature of its relationship with the federal government has left it with few options as it grapples with $72 billion in outstanding obligations that its governor, Alejandro García Padilla, says is “not payable.”

Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico’s non-voting representative in US Congress, called for Puerto Rican statehood in a recent New York Times op-ed. “Puerto Rico is not a sovereign country in a monetary union with the United States. From a constitutional perspective, Puerto Rico belongs to the United States,” he wrote. “It is disheartening to see many self-styled progressives, who otherwise speak eloquently about the importance of voting rights, go silent on this subject when it comes to Puerto Rico.”

The island’s high unemployment, poverty, and low household income, Pierluisi argued, result partly from poor local policy decisions, but the inequity it faces under federal law is a much bigger factor. Even though they are legally American citizens by birth, Puerto Ricans on the island can’t vote for president and have no voting representative in Congress. They pay Medicare taxes but Medicaid funding is capped for them. They are not covered by many provisions of the Affordable Care Act and are not eligible to claim the earned-income tax credit. Excessive borrowing, Pierluisi wrote, is in many ways due to these realities.

“It is little wonder, then, that Puerto Rico is in recession, has excessive debt and is bleeding population,” he wrote.

Pierluisi introduced a bill in February that would allow Puerto Rico’s cities and state-owned businesses to seek Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection in the same way that some US cities that have done, most recently Detroit. The bill has no co-sponsors and is stuck in a House subcommittee. The chair of the committee, Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.), has said that “Puerto Rico must make serious, timely, and demonstrable steps towards righting its fiscal ship before anything moves legislatively.” Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) plan to introduce similar legislation for debt relief, according to Politico, but it’s unclear when that might happen.

The crisis pits Puerto Rico’s creditors—including hedge funds, large US banks, and smaller investors—against the island’s public workers, with each side trying to avoid absorbing the inevitable losses. A July 14 report from the Puerto Rican investigative journalism outlet Centro de Periodismo—reprinted in English via Latino Rebels—suggests that since 2013, hedge funds have been particularly active in trying to manipulate the debt crisis to their advantage.

The report points out that hedge funds, some of which were also involved in both the Greek fiasco and an ongoing debt crisis in Argentina, have been lobbying Puerto Rican officials in an effort to reduce their losses as much as possible. The hedge funds have reached out to various past and current government officials—including former Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuño, former Secretary of State Kenneth McClintock, and Pedro Pierluisi, the island’s non-voting representative in Congress—in hopes of preventing wide-scale restructuring of Puerto Rico’s debt.

The issue has worked its way into the presidential campaign, with Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Jeb Bush all voicing support for Puerto Rico to have the same bankruptcy options as US states. “We’re not talking about a bailout,” Clinton said in a statement last week. “We’re talking about a fair shot at success.” Sanders issued a statement the same day, saying, “We also should recognize that the reason Puerto Rico has such unsustainable debt has everything to do with the policies of austerity and the greed of large financial institutions.”

Bush is the only Republican to touch the issue so far in the campaign, saying, “Puerto Rico should be given the same rights as the states.”

About 5 million Puerto Ricans live in the 50 US states and can vote in national elections. Maurice Ferré, a Puerto Rican who served six terms as the mayor of Miami, said there are 4,000 to 5,000 Puerto Ricans moving to Florida every month, and noted that they are a pivotal voting bloc in Florida.

McClintock, Puerto Rico’s secretary of state from 2009 to 2013 and president of its Senate from 2005 to 2008, agreed. “Puerto Ricans are the swing voters in the swing region of a swing state,” McClintock said. “So, come March of next year, the presidential primaries in Florida will be very important in terms of what is done with Puerto Rico in the future.”

But McClintock said there are things Congress could do right now to help Puerto Rico. It could change the repayment terms on money paid by the island to the US government for various project overruns, and adjust the way Puerto Ricans are treated under federal programs like Medicare. Or the government could steer more federal procurement dollars toward the island’s struggling economy.

“That’s not a bailout,” McClintock says. “It’s simply giving more federal procurement to Puerto Rico.” But that’s difficult to achieve, he says, without voting members of Congress.

McClintock and Fortuño, among others, have said that much of the island’s debt is payable. Fortuño, who lost his seat to Garcia Padilla in the 2012 election, told Mother Jones that he had “no idea” why the new governor would claim the island’s debts are unpayable. “From a strictly financial point of view, the information is incorrect,” he said, “and the message it sends to the marketplace is terrible.”

Without any intervention, Puerto Rico could default on some of its debts and cause massive turmoil in the US municipal bond market, which affects retirement funds, pensions, and other investments. It could also spur lawsuits against the Puerto Rican and US governments that could take years to work out.

Farrow, the former Clinton adviser, says the governor’s calls for debt relief could help propel legislative relief or Congress could enact other short-term policy fixes, but neither will offer a permanent fix of the underlying problem.

“Puerto Rico can be a state or a nation and can develop a successful economy under either one,” he says, “but right now its current political status makes no sense.”

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Puerto Rico Is Doomed, and It’s Our Fault

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Clinton Has Two Economic Messages: She’s Not Jeb Bush, and She’s a Lot Like Elizabeth Warren

by PatsySummerfield Posted on July 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton’s first major economic speech of the 2016 campaign had one clear target: Jeb Bush. The former Florida governor and top Republican fundraiser has pledged that, if elected president, he’d ensure 4 percent annual growth for the country. Clinton acknowledged the importance of growth but, without directly naming Bush, said that wasn’t enough. “I believe we have to build a growth and fairness economy,” she said. “You can’t have one without the other.”

In a speech at the New School in New York City Monday morning, Clinton laid out a broad vision of what she’d do to make the economy fairer should she win next year—though it was scant on policy details, with many promises of specific proposals to come in the next few weeks. “The defining economic challenge of our time is clear,” she said. “We must raise incomes for hard-working Americans so they can afford a middle-class life.” Clinton promised to bring more women into the workforce with family-friendly policies, amend the tax code that lets the rich pay lower rates, end the misclassification of employees and contractors, and fix business incentives to focus on the long term rather than quarterly reports.

Clinton avoided discussing her Democratic primary rivals in a speech that appeared tailored to the general election. Clinton painted Republicans as obsessed with trickle-down economics and accused Marco Rubio of promoting a tax plan that would channel money to the rich.

But Bush got the most attention. “You may have heard Gov. Bush say last week that Americans just need to work longer hours,” Clinton said. “Well, he must not have met very many American workers.” Clinton ticked off a list of professions where full-time work no longer guarantees people a sufficient livelihood. “They don’t need a lecture, they need a raise.” Clinton also defended the economic legacies of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama with a dig at the past two Bush presidencies. “Twice now in the past 20 years,” she said, “a Democratic president has had to come in and clean up the mess left behind.”

Though she didn’t discuss Bernie Sanders or Martin O’Malley, the anti-Wall Street crusader Sen. Elizabeth Warren—a liberal favorite who declined to mount a primary challenge against Clinton—was clearly on Clinton’s mind. Clinton’s remarks came into sharpest focus when she discussed the need for Wall Street reform. “Too big to fail is still too big a problem,” Clinton said, vowing to appoint regulators who would keep the banks in check.

She borrowed one of Warren’s favorite attacks: that the Obama administration has been too deferential to banks by being unwilling to use prosecutorial powers against specific Wall Street executives. “We will prosecute individuals as well as firms when they commit fraud or other wrongdoing,” Clinton promised.

It’s not just the major banks, Clinton said, but the hedge funds and nebulous financial firms that constitute the shadow-banking sector that need to be regulated. “We have to go beyond Dodd-Frank,” she said, referring to the financial regulation law. “Too many of our major financial institutions are still too complex and too risky.”

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Clinton Has Two Economic Messages: She’s Not Jeb Bush, and She’s a Lot Like Elizabeth Warren

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Here’s Why All the Bees Are Dying

by Reinaldo96Q Posted on July 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Bees are having a really hard time right now. For about a decade, they’ve been dying off at an unprecedented rate—up to 30 percent per year, with a total loss of domesticated honeybee hives in the United States worth an estimated $2 billion.

At first, no one knew why. But as my colleague Tom Philpott has reported extensively, in the last few years scientists have accumulated a compelling pile of evidence pointing to a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids. These chemicals are widely used in commercial agriculture but can have lethal effects on bees. Other pesticides are also adding to the toll. So are invasive parasites and a general decline in the quality of bees’ diets.

Clearly, that combination of factors poses a pretty serious problem for anyone who likes to eat, since bees—both the domesticated kind and their wild bumblebee cousins, both of which are in decline—are the main pollinators of many major fruit and nut crops. The problem is so severe that this spring President Barack Obama unveiled the first-ever national strategy for improving the health of bees and other key pollinators.

Now, it appears that lurking in the background behind the ag-industry-related problems is an even more insidious threat: climate change. According to new research published in the journal Science, dozens of bumblebee species began losing habitat as early as the 1970s—well before neonicotinoids were as widespread as they are today. Since then, largely as a result of global warming, bees have lost nearly 200 miles off the southern end of their historic wild range in both the US and in Europe, a trend that is continuing at a rate of about five miles every year.

As temperatures increase (the US is about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer today, on average, than in 1900), many plant and animal species in the Northern Hemisphere are shifting their range north. But by analyzing a vast archive of bee distribution records reaching back more than a century, ecologists at the University of Ottawa showed that bees are not joining that trend. Instead of shifting north like many other species, the bees’ range is only compressing in from the south, leaving less and less available habitat. That finding is illustrated in the chart below (and explained in more detail in the video at the bottom of this post, produced by Science).

Kerr et al, Science 2015

In a call with reporters, lead scientist Jeremy Kerr stressed that although pesticide use is a critical cause of bee mortality at local levels, it doesn’t explain the continent-wide habitat shrinkage that stands out in the bee data. But temperature trends do.

“They are in serious and immediate risk from human-caused climate change,” Kerr said. “The impacts are large and they are underway.”

The question of why bees aren’t pushing northward is a bit trickier, and it isn’t resolved in this paper. But Kerr said he suspects the answer could be the relatively long time it takes for bees to reach a critical mass of population that can be sustained in new places.

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Here’s Why All the Bees Are Dying

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Justice Department Investigating Whether Airlines Work Together to Keep Prices High

by VickiEllis Posted on July 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Justice Department is looking into whether airlines are cooperating to deliberately “work at a slower pace” in order to keep airline prices high, the Associated Press reports on Wednesday.

A department spokesperson confirmed the investigation but declined to list which airlines were subject to the probe. The potential “unlawful coordination” orchestrated by major airlines comes amid questions of why airline ticket prices have remained high despite plummeting oil prices and more fuel efficient aircrafts.

Following news of the probe on Wednesday, all U.S. airline stock prices took a dive.

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Justice Department Investigating Whether Airlines Work Together to Keep Prices High

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Here’s What We Know About the Terrorist Attacks That Hit Tunisia, France, and Kuwait

by KKMBrigette Posted on June 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Dozens of people were killed on Friday in Tunisia, France, and Kuwait in what authorities in all three countries are calling terrorist attacks. Here’s what we know so far.

Tunisia

The deadliest attack happened at a resort in Sousse, a Tunisian beach town popular with European tourists. Tunisian officials said 27 people were killed on the beach near the Imperial Marhaba hotel, some of them foreigners.

“One attacker opened fire with a Kalashnikov on tourists and Tunisians on the beach of the hotel,” a local worker told Reuters. “It was just one attacker. He was a young guy dressed in shorts like he was a tourist himself.”

John Yeoman, a tourist apparently staying at the Imperial Marhaba, tweeted descriptions of the attack and a photo of the barricade he constructed in his hotel room.

The shooting comes three months after another major terrorist attack at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, and it could devastate Tunisia’s vital tourist economy. “This could well be a dagger through the heart of Tunisian tourism, which would have very dark implications,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Mother Jones.

France

An apparent lone attacker drove a car through the gates of a factory in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, a city near Lyon in southwestern France, killing one man and leaving his severed head on the front gate of the complex. Gartenstein-Ross said the decapitation suggested the attack may have been inspired by ISIS, whose execution videos have frequently shown the decapitation of Western hostages.

French authorities arrested the suspected attacker, whom French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said was possibly named Yassin Sahli (his name has been spelled differently in various media reports) and was previously known to French law enforcement. “This person was under investigation for radicalization but this investigation was not renewed in 2008,” the Guardian reported. “He had no police record.”

KUWAIT

ISIS, the Sunni jihadist group that controls parts of Iraq and Syria, claimed responsibility for a bomb that exploded at a Shiite mosque in Kuwait City. Media reports have given conflicting numbers of victims, but the Kuwait Watch Organization, a human rights group, told the Associated Press that 16 people were killed. The bombing is the largest terrorist attack in Kuwaiti history; while Kuwait is a majority Shiite country ruled by a Sunni royal family, such large-scale sectarian violence is rare.

Just three days ago, an ISIS spokesman called for the group’s followers to ramp up attacks during the holy month of Ramadan. “Muslims everywhere, we congratulate you over the arrival of the holy month,” said Abu Muhammad al-Adnani in an audio statement released on Tuesday. “Be keen to conquer in this holy month and to become exposed to martyrdom.”

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Here’s What We Know About the Terrorist Attacks That Hit Tunisia, France, and Kuwait

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Obama’s Controversial Trade Deal Is Back From the Dead

by VictoriaPethebr Posted on June 23, 2015

Mother Jones

Things were looking grim for the Trans-Pacific Partnership—Obama’s controversial trade deal—after House Democrats turned on the president earlier this month and struck down a major provision in the “Fast Track” Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), a bill that would enable the president to complete trade-deal negotiations and present trade accords to Congress for an up-or-down vote with no amendments. But, in a stunning turnaround, the Senate voted 60-37 today to end debate on the fast-track legislation, a clear indication that it will pass and clear the way for Obama’s trade deal to move forward.

Fast-track legislation is nothing new. This type of authority has been granted to every president since Gerald Ford. But what makes it controversial is that it paves the way for negotiations to continue on the secretive and sweeping trade deals, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which have been met with heavy criticism from both liberal advocacy groups and Republicans who are concerned with granting the executive more power.

House Democrats nearly derailed the fast-track legislation earlier this month when they helped to vote down a measure, known as Trade Adjustment Assistance, that had been appended to the bill. By knocking down the TAA, a program widely supported by Democrats, House Dems gambled that their Senate counterparts would balk at passing the fast-track bill without the assistance program. But on Tuesday they lost that bet, when 13 Senate Democrats joined with their Republican colleagues to end debate on the TAA-less fast-track bill, which is expected to come to a final vote tomorrow. (The assistance program has been attached to another, more popular trade bill that will be voted on later this week.)

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Obama’s Controversial Trade Deal Is Back From the Dead

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Charleston’s Hometown Newspaper Is Putting Awful Cable News to Shame

by TiffanySimpkins Posted on June 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Shrinking newsrooms, digital “churnalism,” and armies of pundits carving up increasingly divided audiences—that’s the media we’re told we must accept to live in America today.

But have hope, news consumer! There’s another, less remarked-upon media phenomenon going on: the return of the heroic local newsroom dominating breaking national coverage.

From Boston to Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charleston, one thing has become crystal clear: To get real reporting—and to get it fast—you’ve got to switch off cable and go local. It’s here you’ll find the scoops, the sense of place, the authentic compassion; it’s here you can avoid the predictable blather from a candidate, or pundit, or hack filling airtime. It’s here you’ll find out what’s really happening to a particular group of Americans who have just been shoved into a tragic spotlight. Turn off the TV and Google the local paper on your phone. Find their Twitter feed. Follow their journalists.

Take Charleston. During the early hours of the story on Wednesday night, cable news frustrated viewers by coming late to the game, according to this breakdown by Adweek‘s cable-addict Mark Joyella. (CNN was first to report the news just after 10 p.m., and it stayed with the story, Joyella writes—though it attracted criticism on social media for simulcasting a live feed from its global operations, CNN International, instead of staying domestic.) When Fox News and MSNBC got into the story on Thursday, their programs lined up the usual suspects to engage in a cliched debate over the national narrative: Was it guns? Was it race? Was it mental illness? And the nationally televised blame game began in earnest: While Fox mused about whether pastors should pack heat, and attacked President Obama for bringing up gun control, MSNBC commentator Michael Eric Dyson criticized the president for “obscuring” race with guns: “When will this president finally see that he doesn’t have to run from his race or run from blackness?” Dyson said. I could go on.

Meanwhile, the Post and Courier, Charleston’s major daily newspaper—winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize—seized its hometown story immediately, posting an article just before 10 p.m. the night of the shooting. It hasn’t stopped pumping out sensitively reported articles from deep within the affected community since that first notice. The paper assigned somewhere between a half and two-thirds of its newsroom of 80 people to the task of covering the unfolding story, trying to patch reporters in on shifts as much as possible to keep them from burning out in the field. After covering the death of Walter Scott two months ago, the newsroom was experienced in switching into high gear, “though you’re never quite prepared for any of these things,” Mitch Pugh, the newspaper’s executive editor, told me on Friday.

For this newsroom, it’s personal, and reporters have begun to feel the strain. “A lot of our folks know people who were either in the church or close to people in the church,” Pugh said. “We’re trying to get people more into a shift mode, and get some mental health breaks, and some downtime to get some rest.”

Some reporters, he said, just “don’t want to let go of it.” That’s the nature of reporting in a city traumatized by an event of this magnitude.

Much more so than the bigger guys who parachute in, the major advantage of being the hometown paper is that this newsroom gets it. The journalists “understand deeply the complex relationship this community has had with the issue of race,” Pugh said. “I think we’re able to report on those issues in a more responsible and authoritative way than some of the outside media.”

Cable television has been on the ground in Charleston, doing reporting and making sure Lindsay Graham and other candidates answer tough questions about a Confederate flag flying near the statehouse. But not like the Post and Courier, whose coverage has sharply focused on the community—its grieving, the memorials, intensely moving profiles of the victims, and political reactions—not simply the obsessive speculation about the motivation of the alleged killer, 21-year-old Dylann Roof.

It’s a way for the paper to “focus on our community, on the victims, on the efforts to come together and heal,” Pugh told me.

Mourners cry out during a prayer vigil held for the victims of Wednesday’s shooting at Emanuel AME Church, in Charleston. Grace Beahm/The Post And Courier/AP

That intimacy with the community has led to some extra caution. With the stakes so high, getting it wrong is simply not an option. The newspaper, for example, knew the names of some victims on Wednesday night, but waited until they were confirmed through more official channels before reporting them. Any error would be magnified under the strain of shock and anger. “We weren’t interested in being first on that,” Pugh said. “We were interested in being right.”

But they could not get everything right. When newspapers hit the streets on Thursday, some were affixed with a jarring advertisement for a gun shop just above the headline: “Church attack kills 9“. The outraged reaction was immediate and the paper apologized. “I think that being forthright and honest and taking responsibility, most people will understand and accept that,” Pugh said of readers who called and wrote to complain. The paper now has policies in place “to ensure that does not happen again,” he added.

The increased profile may have also led to unwanted attention in the form of a potential hacking attack against the paper’s website, which became inaccessible on Friday for “20-to-30 minutes at a time, sporadically,” across the morning, Pugh said. The companies responsible for hosting the website investigated the possibility of an attack. “It’s starting to look like someone tried to take our site down,” Pugh told me, though it was too early to confirm.

The Post and Courier’s response to the massacre is reminiscent of other newspapers dominating the coverage when tragedy strikes in their communities: The Baltimore Sun’s relentless coverage of the protests after the death of Freddie Gray; the Boston Globe’s award-winning coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and manhunt; the St Louis Post-Dispatch’s forensic, and visually powerful (and also award-winning) coverage of the death of Michael Brown and furious protests for justice in Ferguson. There’s little wonder there’s some camaraderie among these city papers. In April, the Boston Globe sent lunch to the Baltimore Sun’s newsroom, a way of paying forward another act of generosity when in April 2013, the Chicago Tribune bought the Globe pizzas during the bombing coverage.

A letter from the Tribune to the Globe read: “We can’t buy you lost sleep, so at least let us pick up lunch.”

In each of these papers: heart-breaking, personal stories, rendered powerfully whether a national audience was watching or not.

We were.

The Post and Courier’s approach can be felt in the op-ed pages, too. A Thursday editorial read: “A shared revulsion for the killer’s inhumanity—and for the persisting poison of racism that apparently sparked his barbaric deed—unites us. A shared commitment for a better, more understanding future drives us.”

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Charleston’s Hometown Newspaper Is Putting Awful Cable News to Shame

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The "Umbrella Revolution" Just Scored a Major Victory in Hong Kong

by HannahLombardo Posted on June 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last fall, the streets of Hong Kong filled with protestors demonstrating for greater autonomy after China proposed an election system that would undermine their right to vote for the city’s highest official. Students and concerned citizens camped outside of government buildings and blocked major thoroughfares for weeks on end wielding umbrellas to protect against police tear gas (leading to the name “Umbrella Revolution”). Eventually the demonstrations lost steam and protestors acquiesced to government demands to evacuate the streets. Many feared that the end of the protests meant a win for China and a blow to democracy in Hong Kong.

However early Thursday, Hong Kong’s legislature voted down the Chinese proposal that instigated the massive demonstrations. Pro-democracy supporters are calling it a major legislative victory. In order to understand why, we have to back up a bit.

Hong Kong becomes part of China…sort of: In 1997, the United Kingdom handed over control of Hong Kong to China. Under an agreement known as “one country, two systems,” however, China promised that Hong Kong would maintain political autonomy and many civil liberties that are not afforded to mainland Chinese (Vox does a good job laying out this confusing transition). One right citizens of Hong Kong did not get was the ability to directly vote for the city’s executive chancellor. Instead, a mostly pro-Beijing 1,200-member election committee has chosen the leader through simple majority every 5 years. In 2007, though, China told Hong Kong it would be allowed to elect its leader by popular vote in 2017.

Fall 2014, protests begin: But then, in August of 2014, the Chinese Communist Party released a proposed election plan outlining their version of a popular vote. In it, a special committee controlled by the Chinese Communist Party would choose up to three candidates for whom Hong Kong’s 5 million eligible voters could cast a ballot. Hong Kong’s current chief executive, Leung Chun-Ying, supported the proposal but thousands of Hong Kong citizens viewed this system as a “sham democracy” that would allow China to continue exercising control over Hong Kong. They took to the streets flooding the area surrounding Hong’s Kong’s government buildings for weeks before finally going home.

Okay, so what just happened: Hong Kong’s Legislative Council voted today on whether or not it would enact the the election system proposed by China. It was struck down with only 8 lawmakers out of 70 voting for the proposal, a big hit to the Chinese Communist Party and victory for the pro-democracy camp.

What‘s next: Pro-democracy activists are praising the legislature’s move, but also point out there is a long way to go before real democracy is achieved. Because China’s election plan was voted down, the current system will stay in place until at least 2022. Some believe a more productive short-term approach to reforming Hong Kong’s election system would be pushing the current election committee to better represent the people of Hong Kong instead of Chinese interests.

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The "Umbrella Revolution" Just Scored a Major Victory in Hong Kong

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