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Here Are the Very Best Signs From New York City’s Big LGBT Solidarity March

Mother Jones

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Emptying out from brunch spots wielding wickedly pointed signs, and chanting, “We want a leader, not a creepy tweeter!” thousands of anti-Trump demonstrators from the LGBT community met for a rally on hallowed turf on Saturday afternoon: the plaza outside the Stonewall nightclub in New York City’s West Village—recently designated by the Obama administration as a National Monument for its historic role in the long fight for gay rights.

Eugene Lovendusky, 31, works in not-for-profit financing in New York City. James West

Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the Senate minority leader, received a mixed reception when he appeared in front of the microphone. “Grow some balls!” several people shouted. “Block everything!”—a reference to the ground-swell of progressive voters demanding Schumer lead Senate Democrats in styming President Trump’s agenda and appointments. (Protesters also gathered on Tuesday night outside the minority leader’s Brooklyn apartment.)

Schumer’s pledge to block Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for education secretary—”She can take her conversion therapy back to Michigan!”—was, on the other hand, met with cheers and applause.

James West

But it was clear from talking to multiple people in the LGBT community and their allies on this chilly but sunny Saturday that battle-lines have been drawn: many felt there could be no compromise with the Trump administration.

“It’s time to stop giving in,” said Alan Brodherson, a 52-year-old attorney. “Over the years, that’s what the Democrats have consistently done.”

“I don’t believe in complacency,” he said. “Be vigilant.”

Taylor James, a 29-year-old Canadian dancer and photographer who now lives in Los Angeles, was also impressed by the renewed sense of purpose amongst protesters. “It’s inspiring. In 50 years, in 40 years, I’ll look back to see how I stood up,” he said. “It feels very personal.”

Trump, he said, “forces us to show up.”

Taylor James, 29: “When you’re a liberal, you’re fighting to get to ground zero.”

Most people I spoke to said they turned up to show solidarity with the immigrants and refugees targeted by President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily barring travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries, along with suspending America’s refugee program. (The Trump administration suffered a set-back on Friday night when Judge James Robart of Federal District Court in Seattle issued an order temporarily blocking Trump’s executive action.)

Jaimie McGovern, 29, showed up simply because “the LGBT community is across every spectrum. We’re Muslim, we’re Hispanic.” She surveyed the turnout: “This is fantastic.”

Marissa Nargi, left, and Jaimie McGovern, both students, turned out to show their support for immigrants and refugees. James West

“We’re not going to stand by while Trump takes away rights one by one,” said IT worker David Vazquez, 31. “It seems like every day he comes out with something new. We need to keep from being discouraged.”

Mike Hisey, dressed as Kellyanne Conway with a blond wig and an outfit that evoked her now-famous inauguration getup, stood outside Stonewall itself, attracting a constant stream of requests for photographs with a deadpan face. “Protesting and march works,” he said.

“I’ve been protesting for 30 years.”

Mike Hisey, a.k.a. “Alt-Fact Kelly,” outside Stonewall nightclub in Manhattan’s West Village. James West

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Here Are the Very Best Signs From New York City’s Big LGBT Solidarity March

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A $1 Billion Foreign Investment in the US Happens About Once Per Day

Mother Jones

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We’re going to be seeing a lot of this over the next four years:

How do I know? Because Trump sounds like Dr. Evil here. ONE! BILLION! DOLLARS! For comparison, here is total foreign direct investment since the start of the century:

Every year, there are hundreds of investments of a billion dollars by foreign companies in the US. The Fiat Chrysler announcement is entirely routine.

Still, that’s hundreds of opportunities every year for Trump to blather about how he’s making America great again. Just keep in mind that it’s all nonsense. I figure trend FDI should reach about $3.9 trillion in 2017. Wake me up if Trump manages to get it significantly higher than that, but please don’t insult me by trumpeting every piddling contribution along the way as if he were raining pixie dust over the entire economy.

UPDATE: The original headline and text way overstated the flow of new FDI each year. Sorry. It’s fixed now.

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A $1 Billion Foreign Investment in the US Happens About Once Per Day

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Ford’s Plans in Mexico Have Nothing to do With Donald Trump

Mother Jones

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Here’s the news from Ford:

The automaker also said it is canceling plans for a new $1.6 billion plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, but confirmed that the next-generation of its Focus compact will be produced at its Hermosillo, Mexico factory.

Ford CEO Mark Fields said the decision to cancel the plant in Mexico was based in part on changing market conditions with sales of small cars declining as well as the pro-business climate the automaker expects under incoming President Donald Trump. “This is a vote of confidence for president elect Trump and some of the policies he may be pursuing,” Fields at the plant today.

The real reason this is happening is that Ford has suffered sales declines in its Fusion sedan, which is made at its Mexico plant, as well as sales declines in the Mustang, which is made in Flat Rock, Michigan. There’s not much point in building a new small-car plant anywhere if Fusion sales are down, and not much point in underutilizing its Flat Rock plant.

And it’s not as if Ford is moving any production from Mexico to the United States. All it’s doing in Flat Rock is some expansion to build self-driving and electric vehicles. This involves a grand total of 700 jobs, which were never going to be in Mexico in the first place.

In other words, this was a pure business decision. So why is Mark Fields giving Trump a big shout out? Because he figures there’s no harm in spinning this into flattery of the incoming president. It might help and it can’t hurt.

But it ain’t so. Ford sales of sedans and small cars are tanking. If they were doing better, they’d still be building that new plant in Mexico.

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Ford’s Plans in Mexico Have Nothing to do With Donald Trump

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Bernie Woulda Lost

Mother Jones

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Andrew Gelman takes issue with my claim that Bernie Sanders would have been a sure loser if he’d run against Donald Trump:

My guess would be that Sanders’s ideological extremism could’ve cost the Democrats a percentage or two of the vote….But here’s the thing. Hillary Clinton won the election by 3 million votes. Her votes were just not in the right places. Sanders could’ve won a million or two votes less than Clinton, and still won the election.

….The 2016 election was just weird, and it’s reasonable to say that (a) Sanders would’ve been a weaker candidate than Clinton, but (b) in the event, he could’ve won.

I won’t deny that Sanders could have won. Gelman is right that 2016 was a weird year, and you never know what might have happened.

That said, I really don’t buy it. This sounds like special pleading to me, and it relies on a truly bizarre scenario. We know that state votes generally follow the national vote, so if Sanders had lost 1-2 percentage points compared to Clinton, he most likely would have lost 1-2 percentage points in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania too. What’s the alternative? That he somehow loses a million votes in liberal California but gains half a million votes in a bunch of swing states in the Midwest? What’s the theory behind that?

And lucky me, this gives me a chance to bring up something else: the assertion that Sanders might very well have won those Midwestern swing states that Clinton lost. The argument is that all those rural blue-collar whites who voted for Trump thanks to his populist, anti-trade views would have voted for Sanders instead. After all, he also held populist, anti-trade views.

But this is blinkered thinking. It focuses on one positive aspect of Sanders’ platform while ignoring everything else. Take all those white working-class folks who have sucked up so much of our attention lately. Sure, many of them voted for Trump. And sure, part of the reason was his populist economics. But it wasn’t just that. They also liked the fact that he was anti-abortion and pro-gun and wanted to kick some ass in the Middle East. Would they also have voted for a guy who opposed TPP but was pro-abortion and anti-gun and non-interventionist and in favor of a gigantic universal health system and promoted free college for everyone and was Jewish? A guy who is, literally, the most liberal national politician in the country?

Sure, maybe. But if that’s what you’re counting on, you might want to rethink things. It’s absolutely true that Hillary Clinton ran 5-10 points behind Obama’s 2012 numbers in the Midwest. It’s also true that Obama was the incumbent and Mitt Romney was a pro-trade stiff who was easy to caricature as a private equity plutocrat who downsized working-class people out of their jobs. Was there more to it than that? Perhaps, and that’s something for Democrats to think about.

Whatever the case, though, Sanders would have found it almost impossible to win those working-class votes. There’s no way he could have out-populisted Trump, and he had a ton of negatives to overcome. And that’s not even taking account of how Trump would have attacked him. Sanders hasn’t had to run a truly contested election for a long time, and he flipped out at the very mild attacks he got from Hillary Clinton. I can’t even imagine how he might have reacted to Trump’s viciousness.

But I will take this chance to clarify one thing. American politics is so polarized that both parties are pretty much guaranteed about 45 percent of the two-party vote. So when I say Sanders would have lost in a landslide, that’s all I mean. Instead of Clinton’s 51-49 percent victory in the popular vote, my guess is that Sanders would lost 47-53 or so. In modern presidential politics, that’s a landslide.

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Bernie Woulda Lost

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Why Did Trump Win? A Roundup of the Most Popular Theories.

Mother Jones

In the past week, I’ve seen hundreds of pieces about why Donald Trump won and why Hillary Clinton lost. In the next few months, I’ll see thousands more. So do we have an answer yet?

Ha ha. Of course not. For the most part, people are just blaming all the stuff they already believed in. I recommend skipping those pieces entirely. I haven’t entirely made up my mind yet, but for the record, here’s how I’m currently feeling about all the usual suspects:

James Comey. Yeah, I think he made a big difference. Pretty much everyone on both sides agrees that support for Clinton shifted in response to Comey’s first letter and then again in response to his second letter. My guess is that his last minute intervention swayed the vote by about 2 percent. That’s not a lot, but in this election it was the difference between winning and losing.

Whitelash. In general, I’m unconvinced. White voters made up 72 percent of the electorate in 2012 and 70 percent in 2016. This doesn’t suggest that Trump motivated white voters to turn out in unprecedented numbers. Nor did white voters support Trump at a higher rate than they supported Romney. However, there’s more to this….

The white working class. Maybe. They did vote for Trump in greater numbers than they voted for Romney, but that merely extended a trend that’s decades old. The white working class has been getting steadily more Republican since Nixon, so it’s not clear if Trump accelerated this trend or merely benefited from it. It’s also possible that rural blue-collar whites had a substantial effect in a few key swing states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin) even if they didn’t have a big effect nationally. We need more data here.

Racism. This one is tricky. Obviously Trump appealed to white racism, but it’s not as if racism suddenly spiked in 2016. It’s about the same as it’s always been, and it’s hard to see in the data that it made a big difference compared to previous years. However, we did learn something new and disheartening: it didn’t make a difference. In 2012, 93 percent of Republicans voted for Romney. This year, 90 percent voted for Trump. It turns out that Republicans just don’t care about explicit appeals to racism and misogyny. You can be as openly bigoted as you want, and you’ll only lose 3 percent of the Republican vote.

Third parties. This doesn’t explain anything. Third-party candidates did double their vote share compared to 2012, but so what? Gary Johnson and Jill Stein were candidates in 2012 too. If they got more votes this year, it’s because the two major party candidates were less appealing than Obama and Romney—which is what we’re trying to explain in the first place.

The fundamentals. This probably had a bigger effect than it’s getting credit for. There are lots of models out there, but generally speaking they mostly suggested that 2016 was a very winnable year for Republicans. The economy was OK but not great; Democrats had been in office for eight years; and Obama’s approval rating was mediocre. Clinton was fighting a modestly uphill battle the whole way.

The media. I think the press played a significant role in Trump’s victory, though the evidence is all anecdotal. Two things were in play. First, Trump hacked cable news. He figured out that they’re basically in the entertainment business and will provide endless coverage to anyone who drives ratings. The more outrageous he was, the more coverage he got. Second, the media’s gullible willingness to cover Clinton’s email woes so relentlessly hurt her badly. It’s easy to say that Clinton has no one but herself to blame for this, and there’s something to that. Still, even long after they should have known better, the press reported every new development in breathless tones and 60-point headlines—even though, time after time, it turned out there was nothing there. They got played—and what’s worse, they got played by the same wide-ranging cast of Hillary haters that’s played them before.

Sexism. I don’t know. It obviously seems likely that it played a role, but I haven’t seen any real data to back it up.

Lousy turnout from Democrats. Maybe. It appears that voter turnout in general was down from 2012, but only slightly—and once all the votes are counted it might be dead even. In any case, turnout seems to have affected Democrats and Republicans about equally. We need more data before we can say much about this.

Millennials. This clearly had an effect. Young voters abandoned Clinton in much greater numbers than older voters (about 5 percent vs. 1 percent, by my calculation). Likewise, third parties got about 9 percent of the millennial vote, compared to 3 percent of the older vote. There’s not much question that Clinton did poorly among millennials, and this reduced her overall vote total by 1-2 percentage points. The question is why this happened. The options are (a) Clinton was a corrupt, neoliberal sellout that young voters were never likely to warm up to, or (b) Bernie Sanders convinced millions of millennials that Clinton was a corrupt, neoliberal sellout who didn’t deserve their vote. Take your pick.

Voter suppression. This had, at most, a small effect. Among the key “firewall” states that Clinton lost, Pennsylvania has no voter ID law; Michigan has a loose ID law that allows you to vote without ID if you sign an affadavit; and Wisconsin has a strict photo ID law. Wisconsin was very close, and voter ID might have made the difference there. But Clinton still would have lost.

The electoral college. Yeah, there was that.

Once again: this is my best take on all of these theories right now. But the actual evidence is still weak. CPS data won’t be available for years, and in the meantime we have exit poll data—which is suggestive but not much more—and a lot of people looking at county and precinct level data, trying to tease out who voted for whom. We’ll eventually know more, but it will take a while. Until then, it’s probably best not to be too sure of whatever your own pet theory is.

Except for James Comey, of course. That guy sucks.

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Why Did Trump Win? A Roundup of the Most Popular Theories.

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These Rust Belt Democrats Saw the Trump Wave Coming

Mother Jones

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Like labor unions everywhere, the local Plumbers & Pipefitters union in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley—a historically Democratic bastion due to the influence of labor—endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in September 2015 and urged its members to vote for her. But unlike in years past, when Roland “Butch” Taylor briefed about 200 members on the union’s support of Clinton and the prospective benefits of a Clinton presidency in May, the meeting didn’t go well. “I got a lot of boos,” he recalls. “I got a lot of chatter back. And out of the group, only one person came up and asked me for a T-shirt.”

“Right then and there, I knew something was wrong,” says Taylor, who retired a few months later. “I thought, ‘Well, maybe it will change as the campaign moves forward.'”

As the results on election night show, it didn’t change. Clinton fell well short of polls and expectations in the Rust Belt, losing two key swing states, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and two that were thought to be safe bets, Michigan and Wisconsin. Working-class white voters, including many union members, banded together into a pro-Donald Trump force that the strategists in Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters didn’t see coming until it was too late.

But local Democrats did. And they tried to warn the Clinton campaign.

In May, after thousands of Democrats had switched parties to vote for Trump in the primary, Mahoning County Democratic Party Chairman David Betras circulated a memo cautioning that Trump was making headway in his Rust Belt region and urging the Clinton campaign to take the threat seriously. The memo focused largely on the issue of trade, arguing that because Democratic politicians in Ohio regularly denounce the North American Free Trade Agreement and free trade generally, Trump’s anti-trade message was familiar and its appeal powerful. If the Clinton team didn’t find a way to counter it, Betras warned, she would lose a lot of votes she was counting on.

Betras sent the memo to Aaron Pickrell, an adviser to Clinton’s Ohio campaign team; David Pepper, the chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party; Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat who represents northeast Ohio; and union leaders in the region.

To counter Trump’s populist appeal, Betras urged Clinton to go vigorously after blue-collar workers by promising to bring back jobs. The key, Betras argued, was to have this message delivered not by politicians but by local blue-collar families in radio and television ads across the region. “The messages can’t be about job retraining,” he wrote. “These folks have heard it a million times and, frankly, they think it’s complete and total bullshit.” Instead, he argued, the ads should “focus on the reinvigoration of American manufacturing, and I don’t mean real high-tech stuff because they’ve heard that a million times before and they aren’t buying it.”

Betras wrote:

Talk about policies that will incentivize companies to repatriate manufacturing jobs. Talk about infrastructure—digging ditches, paving roads, building buildings and producing the materials needed to do it all. The workers we’re talking about don’t want to run computers, they want to run back hoes, dig ditches, sling concrete block. They’re not embarrassed about the fact that they get their hands dirty doing backbreaking work. They love it and they want to be respected and honored for it. And they’ll react positively if they believe HRC will give them and their kids the opportunity to break their backs for another ten or twenty or thirty years. Somewhere along the line we forgot that not everyone wants to be white collar, we stopped recognizing the intrinsic value of hard work.

Clinton did revoke her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal, supported unions and higher wages, and talked about an economy that would work for all people. While Trump spoke in broad strokes, her website boasted detailed economic plans, including one to bring back manufacturing. But it was clear from Bernie Sanders’ primary victories in Wisconsin and Michigan that she was lagging with the white working class. Like Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney four years ago, she was the candidate who made millions by giving speeches to Wall Street banks. (It certainly didn’t help that when pieces of those speech transcripts were released in the WikiLeaks hacks, the sentence that stood out most was: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.” Trump used that line at his campaign rallies to claim, falsely, that Clinton was going to open the borders completely.)

“Somewhere in all of this, we forgot that we’re the party of the working class,” says Betras, trying to explain Clinton’s loss. He believes the campaign did try to reach out to the blue-collar families of the Rust Belt, but that the attempts never reached the pitch and fervor they needed. “I did like her message of ‘Stronger Together,’ but that doesn’t get anyone a job, does it?”

The Ohio Democratic Party shared Betras’ memo with Clinton’s Ohio campaign team, according to state party spokeswoman Kirstin Alvanitakis. In an email to Mother Jones, Alvanitakis wrote that “Chairman Betras’s memo was a helpful reminder that Democrats should not neglect working-class voters and the Clinton campaign should acknowledge the very real struggles working families are facing in Ohio.”

She added, “The Ohio Democratic Party was the first state party in the nation to pass a resolution against fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and our leaders—including Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Tim Ryan, Rep. Marcy Kaptur and more—acutely understand the economic pressure facing working-class families because of terrible trade deals and big banks and corporate special interests run amok. The fact is that the typical Ohio household had a higher income three decades ago than it has had in the past few years.”

Betras believes strongly that economic populism was to thank for Trump’s Rust Belt victories, saying, “It was people who want a job and want to be able to work and want a job, and they would accept an imperfect messenger because at least he was saying that.” But of course there was more to Trump’s message. Some African American residents of Youngstown, the largest city in Mahoning County, have long believed that Trump’s appeal in the region had more to do with racial resentment than with economic populism—that Trump’s racially charged rhetoric united white voters against others who they believed were taking their jobs, their culture, and their country. (On Tuesday night, Clinton won Mahoning County by a hair thanks to backing in minority-majority Youngstown but lost the mostly white surrounding counties of the Mahoning Valley.) As a local African American labor organizer told Mother Jones this summer, “This whole racist rhetoric plays well with some people here.”

Like Betras, Taylor doesn’t believe his peers and neighbors who supported Trump are racist. But he understands how Trump’s talk about immigration appealed to people in the Rust Belt. A few years ago, his union was working on a billion-dollar natural gas processing plant, and the workers noticed that the bulk of the work was being done by Spanish-speaking laborers who arrived each morning on buses. “It brought a lot of resentment to the area because they’d never seen it before,” Taylor says. “People see that and then they go tell everybody else, and social media, the way it is, it just runs wild.” He believes Trump benefited when the community saw immigrants “taking jobs that Americans think they should be doing.”

When went to Youngstown in June and met Taylor, jovial and smartly dressed in a suit, he believed his peers would see through Trump’s demagoguery on trade and manufacturing and reject him. “We also are citizens of this country concerned about how he’ll react, whether it’s a nuclear war, God forbid, to racist comments, to deporting immigrants,” he said. “These are core beliefs that as citizens of this country we don’t stand for.”

In the aftermath of the election, even as Taylor looks backs and sees the writing on the wall, he sounds shaken by what the country—and specifically white-working class voters in the Rust Belt—allowed to happen. He acknowledges that the Clintons were “wrapped so close to NAFTA” (which Bill Clinton approved as president) and that Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees from big banks looked bad. “I see where people would have resentment,” he says.

But then, sounding close to tears, he adds, “She’s the most qualified person ever to run for the position, and I agree, she would have done a great job if given the opportunity. But she did not—she had the opportunity to win. She did not win.”

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These Rust Belt Democrats Saw the Trump Wave Coming

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Mass transit wins big in ballot initiatives

In an otherwise rough election for cities, poor people, and the environment, all three got a bit of good news from state and local ballot initiatives funding mass transit. Across the country, voters approved a majority of measures to expand bus and rail lines.

Smart Growth America, the pro-transit and urbanism advocacy group, compiled a list of the biggest transit initiatives on Tuesday’s ballots. Of the 27 measures tracked, 19 passed. And of the eight that failed, five received majority support but fell short because local tax increases required a supermajority.

Among the biggest successes were a sales tax increase to build new light rail in Seattle, a property tax to pay for repairs and maintenance on the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, and a slight sales tax hike to expand bus and rail services and upgrade bike lanes and sidewalks in Los Angeles County.

It wasn’t only the famously eco-friendly cities of the Left Coast that supported mass transit. Even in the South — the country’s most conservative region, with some of its most car-dependent metro areas — voters approved taxes for transit. Wake County, North Carolina, passed a half penny per dollar sales tax increase for new services, including three bus rapid transit lines and a commuter rail line. Atlanta passed two separate sales taxes for biking and walking trails, street and sidewalk improvements, and bus upgrades and rail expansions.

There were also positive results in smaller cities in the Midwest and Interior West. In Eastern Washington, the conservative side of the state, Spokane passed a 0.2 percent sales tax to fund more bus service and launch the area’s first bus rapid transit line. Indianapolis and surrounding Marion County voted for a 0.25 percent income tax to increase bus service. (The Indianapolis area has long had Republicans who support transit, such as former Mayor Greg Ballard and Carmel, Indiana, Mayor Jim Brainerd.)

The Center for Transportation Excellence, a pro-transit think tank, kept track of all transit-related ballot measures and found support for mass transit in small and mid-sized cities, too. Kansas City, Missouri, passed a 3/8-cent sales tax increase to build light rail, while Greensboro, North Carolina, voted for a transportation investment bond to fund new sidewalks.

There were also some disappointments. Measures to expand transit in Broward County, Florida, and in southeast Michigan failed. But, overall, the results were evidence that most Americans — even Trump voters — are willing to pay for greater, greener mobility.

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Mass transit wins big in ballot initiatives

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Fossil fuel workers want a piece of the growing renewable market.

The Republican candidate on Monday promoted his plan to purportedly save the government $100 billion over eight years. It involves cutting all federal spending on climate change programs, both domestic and international.

“We’re going to put America first,” Trump said at a Michigan rally. “That includes canceling billions in climate change spending for the United Nations, a number Hillary wants to increase, and instead use that money to provide for American infrastructure including clean water, clean air, and safety.”

As Bloomberg BNA reports, Trump didn’t give a precise tally for how he got to $100 billion:

[The] campaign press office said that the figure combined an estimate of what the Obama administration had spent on climate-related programs, the amount of U.S. contributions to an international climate fund that Trump would cancel, and a calculation of what Trump believes would be savings to the economy if Obama’s and Clinton’s climate policies were reversed.

That math, however, doesn’t work out: According to a 2014 report from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, a global temperature increase of just 3 degrees C would cost the United States 1 percent of GDP, or $150 billion a yearby damaging public health and infrastructure and battling sea-level rise, stronger storms, declining crop yields, and increased drought and wildfires.

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Fossil fuel workers want a piece of the growing renewable market.

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This November, Marijuana Activists are Pushing Pot Over Pills

Mother Jones

With less than a month to go before Election Day, several state level marijuana legalization campaigns have rolled out messaging that pitches weed as an alternative to deadly opioid painkillers.

This week, groups backing recreational legalization in Arizona and Massachusetts launched ads arguing marijuana should be an option for pain patients. Arizona’s Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol campaign ran its ad during Thursday night’s NFL game, featuring former pro quarterback Jim McMahon, whose career included a stint with the Arizona Cardinals, talking about the painkillers he was prescribed for injuries.

“I was using them daily pretty much the rest of my career,” he says in the ad. “It takes its toll.”

Framing marijuana as an alternative medical treatment is of course not a new argument for pot proponents, but the strength and prominence of the country’s opioid epidemic has given marijuana activists a new chance to argue that cannabis offers a safe, overdose free option to fight pain.

Legalization activists are pointing to recent studies to make their case. One paper that came out last month found that states with medical marijuana saw fewer suspects in fatal traffic accidents test positive for opioids. And earlier this year, researchers at the University of Michigan found chronic pain patients who used medical marijuana were able to reduce their use of opioid drugs by 64 percent.

“It’s not just an argument, it’s an argument based on solid data,” said Jim Borghesani, communications director for the legalization campaign in Massachusetts, a state with one of the higher rates of drug overdoses in the country.

Earlier this month, Nevada backers of recreational marijuana legalization ran an ad showing a marine veteran who says he was prescribed OxyContin, Percocet, and Hydrocodone. After taking so many pills, “You’re addicted; You know you’re addicted,” he said. With marijuana, he says he can treat his pain but “I can also live.”

Proponents of a Florida bill legalizing medical use are running an online ad similar to the TV spots from the recreational legalization campaigns, showing a doctor who condemns prescription painkillers as “dangerous narcotics that have significant risks.”

The death toll from opioid painkillers is staggering, rivaling that of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the late ’80s and early ’90s. In 2014, there were nearly 19,000 opioid painkiller deaths, along with more than 10,500 heroin overdose deaths, according to data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Painkiller abuse has ravaged communities across the country, and opened the door for a heroin addiction crisis in some towns.

Marijuana advocates have long pitched the drug’s promise to bring relief to people diagnosed with serious diseases, highlighting an evolving series of conditions.

“For years, it was all about cancer and AIDS and glaucoma and these things, and then all of a sudden in 2013 with Sanjay Gupta it became about epilepsy and kids with intractable seizure disorders,” said Ben Pollara, head of the pro-medical-marijuana campaign in Florida. “What you’re seeing with opiate use and abuse and addiction as a rationale for marijuana reform has come about it a similar way.”

Just about three weeks out from the election, a new Gallup Poll shows 60 percent of Americans support legalization.

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This November, Marijuana Activists are Pushing Pot Over Pills

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Obama took up Standing Rock, albeit delicately, at his last Tribal Nations Conference.

Yes, if Sen. Debbie Stabenow has her way. The Michigan Democrat announced The Urban Agriculture Act in Detroit on Monday.

The Department of Agriculture already offers support for city farmers, but this bill would add to those grants, loans, and education programs. It would also provide $10 million for urban ag research, $5 million for community gardens, incentives for farmers to provision neighbors with fresh food, and resources for composting and cleaning up contaminated soil.

So far Stabenow hasn’t released much more than a list of bullet points. The road from proposing a bill and passing a law is long, and details could change, which means there’s not much to analyze. But in general, urban ag is a mixed bag of policy greens.

Urban farms can build community, teach people about farming, and provide extra cash to laborers in cities, but they don’t create many good-paying jobs. If we farm vacant lots, rooftops, and former lawns, that’s likely a win for the environment. But if farms displace housing and spread cities out, that’s a loss. Similarly, if we replace plants grown under the sun with plants grown indoors under artificial lights, that’s no good for the climate.

For more on urban farms see our previous work, and this Next City analysis.

Credit – 

Obama took up Standing Rock, albeit delicately, at his last Tribal Nations Conference.

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