19 April 20
We are really struggling for the bare-bones budget that we need to function. The reason, the ratio of readers to donors is 1000 to 1.
Many people are helping. Many, many more are not.
Have to break through that barrier.
Situation growing unnecessarily dire, again.
In earnest.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
19 April 20
RSN: Marc Ash | The Biden Conundrum
Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
Ash writes: "Anytime you forget how dangerous Donald Trump is to both the Republic and Democracy, he reminds you. He will not let you forget for an instant, a nanosecond, how important it is to rescue the presidency from his megalomaniacal greed and incompetence."
READ MORE
Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
Ash writes: "Anytime you forget how dangerous Donald Trump is to both the Republic and Democracy, he reminds you. He will not let you forget for an instant, a nanosecond, how important it is to rescue the presidency from his megalomaniacal greed and incompetence."
It is difficult but essential to remember that no matter how bad Trump is, however high the stakes may be for removing him from office, Trump is not the problem, he is a manifestation of the problem.
The problem is corruption. It is the stage on which Trump stands. You can rid the nation of Trump by removing him from office, but without systemic change, you cannot eliminate the conditions that brought him to power and allow him to remain in power.
In 2015 both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders emerged as anti-establishment candidates. Sanders rarely appeared on cable news broadcasts, and those appearances were limited to very brief soundbites. Trump, on the other hand, got more on-air coverage than any other presidential candidate in history. Why?
Sanders threatened the systemic corruption; Trump reveled in it, embodied it. Sure Trump was charismatic, quotable, and compelling, in a dark and sadistic way, but he was something the corporate media understood and did not feel threatened by in the same way they felt threatened by Sanders’s message of reform.
Enter Joe Biden
At a point when Sanders seemed poised to capture the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination, there were voices on Democratic-leaning cable broadcasts bluntly saying that Trump would be preferable to Sanders. Defeating Sanders was a mission.
The candidate Democratic broadcasting really preferred was Joe Biden. He represented the promise of a return to the corporate-friendly Democratic Party policies of the eighties and nineties. A promise that indecently cannot be kept.
Is Joe Biden better than Trump? Yes. Biden is clearly the better man and better for the country. But Biden brings significant problems of his own.
Biden repairs the transatlantic relationship between the US and its traditional European partners, but he aggravates tensions between Russia and its global partners.
Biden understands economic matters better than Trump, and you can expect a more robust and stable economic climate in the US, but a fundamental realignment of the US economy to make it more competitive in a global economy probably isn’t going to happen.
On race relations, you can expect a quantum leap forward should Biden replace Trump. Trump’s incendiary ethnic rhetoric is unlike anything that has ever emerged from the White House, ever. He isn’t the first racist in the Oval Office, but he is by far the most vocal and strident. Biden easily beats Trump on race relations. But does he really have a meaningful long-term impact? It’s not likely. His old-school Democratic Party North-South synergy mindset lends itself better to maintaining the status quo than to the fundamental change and real progress on race relations that would break new ground for generations to come.
In totality, anything or anyone who gets Donald Trump out of the White House is a good thing. Joe Biden, however, isn’t the agent of change the country desperately needs and deserves. With so much on the line, it was an epic tragedy that at this moment the corporate press chose the Democratic nominee.
The point of the Progressive movement is to achieve social progress. That has been barred from the Oval Office again. Creating the conditions for a second Trump term doesn’t do anything to advance that agenda. Yes, it is necessary to vote for Biden to remove Trump from office. But that leaves very important work undone.
The Democrats and their corporate benefactors have forestalled social progress again. Trump has to go. The struggle for progress, however, must intensify.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
READ MORE
Biden may not embrace progressive demands, but his cabinet could. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Want to Push Biden Left? Focus on These Appointments.
Eleanor Eagan, In These Times
Eagan writes: "Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders ended his presidential campaign but assured his supporters that 'the struggle continues.' And he's right."
READ MORE
Eleanor Eagan, In These Times
Eagan writes: "Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders ended his presidential campaign but assured his supporters that 'the struggle continues.' And he's right."
READ MORE
This syringe was used to inject 250 micrograms of a vaccine researchers hope may be effective against the coronavirus. (photo: Ian Haydon)
Three COVID-19 Vaccines Are Under Clinical Testing, WHO Confirms
teleSUR
Excerpt: "'Another 70 vaccines are in development,' WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus added at a press conference."
READ MORE
teleSUR
Excerpt: "'Another 70 vaccines are in development,' WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus added at a press conference."
READ MORE
A woman walks by the closed storefront of a Copenhaver stationery store during the coronavirus outbreak in Dupont Circle, Washington, DC, on April 17. (photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
The Democrats New Plan Would Guarantee Paychecks for Workers Who Are Furloughed or Laid Off
Li Zhou, Vox
Zhou writes: "Support for a once-radical idea - the government funding of company payrolls - is growing in Congress, as the legislative body scrambles to respond to the coronavirus pandemic and the massive economic fallout that’s resulted."
READ MORE
Li Zhou, Vox
Zhou writes: "Support for a once-radical idea - the government funding of company payrolls - is growing in Congress, as the legislative body scrambles to respond to the coronavirus pandemic and the massive economic fallout that’s resulted."
READ MORE
A healthcare worker and a patient. (photo: ABC News)
Operation Reopen America: Are We About to Witness a Second Historic Failure of Leadership From Trump?
Ed Pilkington and Dominic Rushe, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "On a day in which the US suffered its highest death toll from Covid-19, with a total of more than 680,000 confirmed cases and 34,000 deaths, public health experts were scrutinizing the president’s new guidelines and coming to rather different conclusions."
READ MORE
Ed Pilkington and Dominic Rushe, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "On a day in which the US suffered its highest death toll from Covid-19, with a total of more than 680,000 confirmed cases and 34,000 deaths, public health experts were scrutinizing the president’s new guidelines and coming to rather different conclusions."
READ MORE
A man searches through a rubbish bin during a countrywide lockdown to combat the spread of coronavirus in Lebanon where millions are at risk of going hungry. (photo: Ali Hashisho/Reuters)
'Worse Than the War': Hunger Grows in Lebanon Along With Anger
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "The past six months have brought hardships unseen in Lebanon even during the bitter days of its 15-year civil conflict that ended in 1990."
READ MORE
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "The past six months have brought hardships unseen in Lebanon even during the bitter days of its 15-year civil conflict that ended in 1990."
READ MORE
In this 4 June 2010 photo, a worker picks up blobs of oil with absorbent snare on Queen Bess Island at the mouth of Barataria Bay near the Gulf of Mexico in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. (photo: Gerald Herbert/AP)
'I Pray to God It Never Happens Again': US Gulf Coast Bears Scars of Historic Oil Spill 10 Years On
Oliver Milman, Guardian UK
Milman writes: "A decade on, with an incomplete recovery, coastal Gulf communities face a Trump administration that is attempting to reverse many of the safety-based regulations imposed after the oil spill. Residents are hoping this won't lead to a repeat."
hen the explosion ripped through the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, Leo Linder was standing in his living quarters in his underwear. He suddenly found himself facing a fellow rig worker in what had been a separate room because the force of the explosion had blown the walls away.
READ MORE
Oliver Milman, Guardian UK
Milman writes: "A decade on, with an incomplete recovery, coastal Gulf communities face a Trump administration that is attempting to reverse many of the safety-based regulations imposed after the oil spill. Residents are hoping this won't lead to a repeat."
The Deepwater Horizon devastated the ecology and economy from Texas to Florida but BP-funded recovery programs are ongoing and the sector is a big employer
hen the explosion ripped through the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, Leo Linder was standing in his living quarters in his underwear. He suddenly found himself facing a fellow rig worker in what had been a separate room because the force of the explosion had blown the walls away.
Linder wasn’t to know it at the time but the blast was to trigger the worst environment disaster in US history, with the BP operation spewing more than 4.9m barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, fouling hundreds of miles of shoreline from Texas to Florida, decimating wildlife and crippling local fishing and tourism industries.
The spill also had a human cost, with 11 workers dying in the disaster. One of them, Gordon Jones, had relieved Linder around an hour before the explosion. “He said, ‘What the hell are you doing, go home,’” Linder said. “In many ways he saved my life. The guilt from surviving, as well as the damage done, still gnaws at me. It kills me.”
The 10th anniversary of the disaster, which began on 20 April 2010, marks a period of devastation and partial recovery, with billions of dollars extracted from BP to aid a clean-up that is still under way. Projects to replenish damaged oyster-catching areas and restore degraded marshland are ongoing. An enduring image of the spill was a brown pelican, the state bird of Louisiana, struggling in oily gunk. But a project to restore Queen Bess island, a crucial rookery for thousands of the birds, is only now nearing completion.
The recovery has been patchy, with some businesses unable to recover and some people forced to move away.
“It was a bit like a bad dream,” said Albertine Kimble, a retiree who has spent the past two decades in Carlisle, a small town south of New Orleans. “It was impending doom, it affected the fisheries and the birds. It was even more depressing than Hurricane Katrina and that flooded my house.”
Kimble has had to raise her house twice on stilts due to the threat of flooding in an area prone to storms and coastal erosion accelerated by the climate crisis. The process has also been worsened by the oil and gas industry’s practice of forging canals through wetlands, which has introduced corrosive salt water. The nearby town of Pointe à la Hache was turned into a “ghost town” as fishing opportunities vanished, Kimble said.
“It was a bit like the coronavirus, just dead,” she said. “I don’t think it’s recovered, to tell you the truth.”
The fishing industry is a major constituent of life in southern Louisiana and shutting down the ability to catch fish, oysters and shrimp was a major blow to communities. Many of the fishermen and women used their boats to help the clean-up effort by deploying booms and spreading oil dispersant.
Even after the Gulf was declared safe to fish in again, crews initially reported pulling in smaller catches of oddly deformed fish with oozing sores. Dolphins started dying in record numbers, tuna and amberjack developed deformities to their heart and other organs. Scientists have also found lingering problems within the web of marine life.
Recent research by the University of Florida found the richness of species in the Gulf has declined by more than a third due to direct and indirect impacts of the spill. A separate study of 2,500 individual fish from 91 species by the University of South Florida found oil exposure in all of them.
Many of the species are popular types of seafood. The extent of the exposure has startled researchers.
“We were quite surprised that among the most contaminated species was the fast-swimming yellowfin tuna as they are not found at the bottom of the ocean where most oil pollution in the Gulf occurs,” said lead author Erin Pulster, a researcher at the university’s college of marine science.
The seafood industry lost nearly $1bn, while house prices in the region declined by as much as 8% for at least five years, according to a report by the conservation group Oceana.
“It was an entire Gulf of Mexico-wide event,” said Tracey Sutton, a marine scientist at Nova Southeastern University. told Oceana. “Nobody was ready for this scale of pollution. As far as we know, the actual impact of the spill is not over yet.”
Deepwater Horizon exploded 40 miles off the coast and shot out oil that proved devilishly difficult to clean from the nooks and crannies of Louisiana’s marshland. An initial attempt to cap the spill was unsuccessful, necessitating the drilling of a secondary relief well to stem the flow. It took four months to completely stop the gushing oil.
In all, BP paid out about $65n in compensation, legal fees and clean-up costs, which includes billions for affected states. A judge ruled the petrochemical giant was “grossly negligent” in the lead-up to the disaster. Subcontractors Transocean and Halliburton were “negligent”, the judge said.
The payment of the compensation money adds to the complex relationship states like Louisiana, which bore the brunt of the spill, have with the oil industry. The industry caused an environmental and societal catastrophe along the coast and is contributing towards the climate crisis that threatens more and more of the state with inundation each year.
But the compensation paid has helped fund various coastal conservation projects and oil and gas remain major, and largely popular, employers in the region. Linder was only on Deepwater Horizon because the pay was four times the $28,000 a year he was earning as an English teacher.
“I don’t think anyone realized right off the bat we’d have this unprecedented natural disaster,” said Chip Kline, an assistant to Governor John Bel Edwards and chairman of the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA).
“During the spill there were some intense moments with BP but in Louisiana we have an economy largely driven by oil and gas; it employs a lot of Louisiana residents. We try to strike a balance.”
A decade on, with an incomplete recovery, coastal Gulf communities face a Trump administration that is attempting to reverse many of the safety-based regulations imposed after the oil spill. Residents are hoping this won’t lead to a repeat.
“It made me sick to the stomach thinking about all the oil out there in the beautiful Gulf of Mexico,” said Kimble. “I hope and pray to God it never happens again.”
READ MORE
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.