RSN: Deborah Toler | Is Stacey Abrams Progressive?

31 May 20

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RSN: Deborah Toler | Is Stacey Abrams Progressive?

Deborah Toler, Reader Supported News
Toler writes: "Stacey Abrams is being widely touted as Joe Biden's best pick for the vice-presidential nomination. She has been a rising star in the Democratic Party ever since her historic and groundbreaking run in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race."

But — while having a black woman on the ticket would be welcome — progressives need to understand that Abrams is firmly entrenched in the centrist establishment wing of the party.

Because Abrams ran an excellent race for governor in the Georgia context — fully deserving the widespread support she received from progressive organizations and individuals — it is easy to misunderstand her political approach as being more progressive than it is. In December 2018, weeks after losing (or, more accurately, having the gubernatorial race stolen from her), Abrams stepped onto the national stage while signaling her embrace of the Democratic Party’s corporate wing. She joined the board of directors at the Center for American Progress (CAP), which is second to none as a powerful political operation for the party’s Clinton-aligned forces, fiercely hostile to the Bernie Sanders wing of the party.

For many years, no “think tank” in Washington has done more to wage political war on Sanders than CAP under the leadership of fervent Clinton loyalist Neera Tanden. So, Abrams’s public statement when she joined the CAP board is notable: “I am honored to be joining the board of the Center for American Progress. Led by the extraordinary Neera Tanden, CAP has been at the forefront of progressive policy development and activism for years. Together we will find and support bold solutions on health care, voting rights, the economy, and other critical issues our nation faces.”

A little more than a year later, in early 2020, Abrams doubled down on throwing her lot in with the corporate wing of the party when she joined the board of a major big-money organization, Priorities USA.

The first African-American woman to be the gubernatorial nominee of a major party, Abrams came to national prominence as a result of her grassroots campaign against Georgia’s Republican then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp. He refused to recuse himself from running his own election and worked assiduously to purge more than 1.4 million voters from the rolls between 2012 and 2018. Abrams, leading the New Georgia Project, drew 800,000 more Democratic voters to cast ballots in 2018 than in the 2014 midterms. Despite poll site closings, nonfunctional voting machines, and other voter suppression factors, Abrams “lost” the election by only 55,000 votes.

Abrams ran on a platform that was progressive for Georgia. She supported Medicaid expansion, universal background checks, universal pre-K, criminal justice reform, and the introduction of automatic voter registration. She also supported pay equity and expanded sick leave. She won union support with her backing of the right to form a union and to collectively bargain for fair wages and safe workplace conditions. Those positions, coupled with her massive grassroots get-out-the-vote campaign, excited everyone from Oprah (who went door-to-door for her) to progressive activists like the Bernie Sanders-inspired group Our Revolution. Indeed, Bernie himself formally endorsed Abrams.

From a national perspective, however, those were mainstream Democratic Party positions, with limits on how progressive her platform was. She supported a $15-per-hour minimum wage for cities such as Atlanta but not for the state as a whole, arguing that such an increase would destabilize many of the state’s local economies. She did not advocate for single-payer health care.

Overall, Abrams argues for the supremacy of identity over class politics. “I’m not going to do class warfare; I want to be wealthy,” she has said. A longtime member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations, she laid out her views on identity versus class politics in a 2018 article in the Council’s Foreign Affairs magazine. In that article, she argued that minorities and the marginalized have little choice but to fight against the particular methods of discrimination employed against them. And she rejected politics based on “the catchall category known as ‘the working class,’” citing the long history of conflict between black and white laborers in the U.S.

During a presentation titled “A Conversation with Stacey Abrams” at a May 2019 Conference on Diversity in International Affairs sponsored by CFR, Abrams said that “income inequality is a danger because of what it signals to our economy,” and the solution is to take aggressive steps to “ensure that more people can make more money …” But, she added: “I disagree sometimes with the notion that if we just reduce the top then that’s enough, because if we reduce the top but we don’t increase the bottom and we don’t strengthen the middle, then we’re going to be in the same place again.”

“And so,” Abrams said, “I do believe that we have a framework for addressing income inequality. Now let’s be clear, I’m less concerned about what the richest person than I am about making sure other people have the opportunity to have that too. And as long as we’re focusing on pulling down as opposed to pulling up, then we’re having the wrong conversation because when you’re only focused on the pulling down, people can argue that that’s just classism.” (This resonates with Joe Biden’s comments to the Brookings Institution in 2018 — “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.” — and his assurance to donors last year that “nothing would fundamentally change” under his presidency.)

Abrams typically hedges her ideological position. “I was a Hillary surrogate who has hired Obama folks and Bernie folks and Clinton folks,” she told Time magazine in 2018. “I am absolutely a progressive,” she continued, “but I would not say that I represent any wing of the Democratic Party except for the Democratic Wing.” But her decisions to join the boards of both the Center for American Progress and Priorities USA signal her decision to join the ranks of the Democratic Party establishment.

The Center for American Progress is a behemoth in Democratic Party circles, along with its sister organization the CAP Action Fund that shares its staff. (The 501(c)4 Action Fund does more explicit lobbying and electoral work.) CAP’s $60 million budget comes primarily from philanthropic sources such as the Foundation to Promote Open Society, the Sandler Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Walton Family Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. CAP claims that less than 3 percent of its budget comes from corporations. These have included Amazon.com, Facebook Inc., Google, Microsoft, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Comcast NBC Universal, CVS Health, Lyft, Uber Technologies, Verizon and Walmart.

Although CAP bills itself as an “independent nonpartisan policy institute dedicated to improving the lives of all Americans,” in reality it is a hotbed of Democratic operations for the party’s corporate wing. CAP research has shaped the Democratic Party’s centrist policy positions for more than a decade, with fierce allegiance to the Clinton wing. As such it has actively opposed the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders in both the 2016 and 2020 primary campaigns.

CAP’s founder in 2003 was John Podesta, who had served as Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff; he went on to be a senior counselor to Barack Obama and campaign adviser to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 primary. CAP’s president since 2011, Neera Tanden, advised Obama and both Clintons. She was a policy adviser to Bill Clinton and later worked as Hillary’s policy director during the 2008 primary battle with Obama. Describing herself as a Hillary Clinton “loyal soldier,” Tanden acknowledged that she was an informal adviser to the 2016 Clinton campaign and that she privately gave the campaign political advice.

One of the key differences between the establishment and progressive wings of the Democratic Party is disagreement over the role big money should play in electoral politics. That Abrams is comfortable with big money playing an outsized role in electoral politics was evident in her support of Michael Bloomberg’s entry into the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. While failing to publicly note Bloomberg’s record of imposing anti-Muslim, anti-black, unconstitutional policing tactics on New York City during his time as mayor, Abrams defended what amounted to Bloomberg’s attempt to buy the Democratic presidential nomination.

Appearing on ABC’s “The View” in mid-February, Abrams said of Bloomberg: “Every person is allowed to run and should run the race that they think they should run, and Mike Bloomberg has chosen to use his finances. Other people are using their dog, their charisma, their whatever.” She added: “I think it is an appropriate question to raise. But I don’t think it is disqualifying for anyone to invest in fixing America.” When asked if Bloomberg’s $5-million contribution to her political action committee Fair Fight Action had any influence on her position, Abrams responded: “I am grateful to any person who contributes to Fair Fight. We have more than one hundred thousand contributors, his check just had a few more zeroes on it.”

When commenting on Bloomberg’s entry into the Democratic primaries, Abrams quipped “for once we know where the money is coming from.” Priorities USA is affiliated with the Democratic Super PAC Priorities USA Action. Priorities USA is a lavishly funded nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization and is an embodiment of not knowing where the money is coming from, since it relies on unlimited anonymous contributions. Joining this group’s board puts Abrams in touch with some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors and, when coupled with her board membership at CAP, gives her major access to the party’s establishment power structure.

This is in keeping with Abrams’s political ambitions. She has made no secret of her interest in becoming the nominee for vice president this year. She recently told Elle magazine: “I would be an excellent running mate. I have the capacity to attract voters by motivating typically ignored communities. I have a strong history of executive and management experience in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. I’ve spent 25 years in independent study of foreign policy. I am ready to help advance an agenda of restoring America’s place in the world. If I am selected, I am prepared and excited to serve.”

Abrams has also made clear that she plans to run for president down the political road. When the time comes, given her approach to political positioning and campaign fundraising, there are scant reasons to believe she would opt for the kind of progressive, small-donor models embodied in the 2020 campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. While she likes to describe herself as a progressive and as a pragmatist, Stacey Abrams is now on a national path that looks far more “pragmatic” than progressive.

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Deborah Toler is a researcher at RootsAction.org. She was previously a Program Director at Oxfam America and a Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First).

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.

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The Grand Old Trees of the World Are Dying, Leaving Forests Younger and Shorter
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Welch writes: "California's giant sequoias can live for more than 3,000 years, their trunks stretching two car lengths in diameter, their branches reaching nearly 300 feet toward the clouds."

The effects on wildlife and the ability of forests to store CO2 from fossil fuels could be enormous.

But a few years ago, amid a record drought, scientists noticed something odd. A few of these arboreal behemoths inside Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks were dying in ways no one had ever documented—from the top down.

When researchers climbed into the canopies, they discovered that cedar bark beetles had bored into a few branches. By 2019, at least 38 of the trees had died—not a large number, but "concerning because we’ve never observed this before,” says Christy Brigham, the park’s chief of resource management.

Beetles have ravaged hundreds of millions of pines across North America. But scientists had assumed that stately sequoias, with their bug-repelling tannins, were immune to such dangerous pests. Worried experts are investigating whether some mix of increased drought and wildfire, both worsened by climate change, have now made even sequoias susceptible to deadly insect invasions.

If so, these ancient sentinels would be just the latest example of a trend experts are documenting around the world: Trees in forests are dying at increasingly high rates—especially the bigger, older trees. According to a study appearing today in the journal Science, the death rate is making forests younger, threatening biodiversity, eliminating important plant and animal habitat, and reducing forests’ ability to store excess carbon dioxide generated by our consumption of fossil fuels.

“We’re seeing it almost everywhere we look,” says the study’s lead author, Nate McDowell, an earth scientist at the U.S. Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

More old trees dying, everywhere

To paint the most detailed picture of global tree loss to date, nearly two dozen scientists from around the world examined more than 160 previous studies and combined their findings with satellite imagery. Their analysis reveals that from 1900 to 2015, the world lost more than a third of its old-growth forests.

In places where historical data is the most detailed—particularly Canada, the western United States, and Europe—mortality rates have doubled in just the past four decades, and a higher proportion of those deaths are older trees.

There is no single direct cause. Decades of logging and land clearing play a role, scientists say. But increasing temperatures and rising carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels have significantly magnified most other causes of tree death. From Israel’s eucalyptus and cypress plantations to Mongolia’s birch and larch stands, scientists are documenting longer and harsher droughts, more severe outbreaks of insects and disease, and increasingly catastrophic wildfires.

“We will see fewer forests,” says Monica Turner, a forest ecologist at the University of Wisconsin. “There will be areas where there are forests now where there won’t be in the future.”

Changes worldwide

With 60,000 known tree species on Earth, those shifts are playing out differently across the planet.

In central Europe, for instance, “You don’t have to look for dead trees,” says Henrik Hartmann, with Germany's Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. “They’re everywhere.”

In one recent year, following a week of excessive heat, hundreds of thousands of beech trees dropped their leaves. Bark beetles are also killing spruce, which is not unusual. But hotter weather weakens trees, making them more vulnerable and allowing the insects to multiply and survive through winter into the next year.

Even in colder regions, “You get a couple of hot years and the forests are suffering,” says Hartmann, who was not an author on McDowell’s study. “We’re approaching a situation where the forests cannot acclimate. There are individual species that are being driven beyond the threshold of what they can handle.”

That also may be true in some of North America’s treasured spots. For 10,000 years, fires have roared through Yellowstone National Park every 100 to 300 years. In 1988, such conflagrations caught the world’s attention as they charred and blackened 1.2 million acres.

Turner, the Wisconsin ecologist, has been studying the aftermath of those fires ever since. And the lessons aren’t quite what we once thought they were.

The heat from flames usually helps lodgepole pine cones release their seeds as their sticky resin melts. But in 2016, when those new forests were not yet 30 years old, a new fire raged inside an old burn site from 1988. Because we live in a hotter, drier world, the new fires burned more intensely—in some cases wiping out almost everything. The very process that usually helps create new forests instead helped prevent one from growing. “When I went back, I was just astonished,” Turner says. “There were places with no small trees left. None.”

Just last year, massive fires marched through a dry Australia, smoldered across 7.4 million acres in northern Siberia, and focused the world’s attention on blazes in the Amazon.

In parts of that rainforest, dry seasons now last longer and come more often. Rainfall has dropped by as much as a quarter and often arrives in torrents, bringing massive floods in three out of six seasons between 2009 and 2014. All that activity is altering the rainforest’s mix of trees. Those that grow fast and reach the light quickly, and are more tolerant of dry weather, are outcompeting species that require damp soils.

The consequences of all these changes around the world are still being assessed. The first national look at tree mortality in Israel showed vast stretches disappearing, thanks largely to scorching heat and wildfires. In a country largely blanketed by stone and sand, forests mean a great deal. Trees support nests for eagles and habitat for wolves and jackals. They hold soil with their roots. Without them, plants that normally rise in trees’ shadows are suddenly exposed to higher temperatures and bright light.

“Trees are these big plants that design the ecosystems for all the other plants and animals,” says Tamir Klein at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Earlier this month Klein met with the Israeli forestry chief to talk about the country’s southern forests, which may not survive the century. “They came to me and asked, What are we supposed to do? We don’t want the desert to move north,” Klein recalls.

“We’re dealing with a very tough situation. It’s a race to the unknown.”

Earlier signs

The seeds of the Science study were sown in the early 2000s when lead author McDowell moved to the southwestern U.S. to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Outside his office window he saw fields of dead juniper and piñon pine. An intense heat wave had wiped out 30 percent of the pines on more than 4,500 square miles of woodland. “I thought, as a tree physiologist I’m going to have a short stay here because they are all dead,” he remembers.

McDowell and several colleagues began pondering how tree loss would alter forests’ ability to sequester CO2—and how to better predict such devastation in the future. A decade later, a co-worker examined tree rings and past temperature swings and found a relationship between heat and tree deaths. Then he simulated how the forest would change based on temperature projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The results suggested that by 2050, normal temperatures in the Southwest could be similar to rare past heat waves that led to severe tree-killing droughts. “That was really frightening,” McDowell says.

McDowell and other scientists began to look more broadly. Many people had assumed rising CO2 would feed tree growth. But as the planet gets hotter, the atmosphere sucks moisture from plants and animals. Trees respond by shedding leaves or closing their pores to retain moisture. Both of those reactions curtail CO2 uptake. It’s like “going to an all-you-can-eat buffet with duct tape over their mouths,” McDowell says.

In a tropical forest, the vast majority of tree mass can be in the top one percent of the largest trees. “These big old trees disproportionately hold the above-ground carbon storage,” says study co-author Craig D. Allen, a forest ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “When they die, it creates space for smaller trees, but they have much less carbon in them.”

That’s important, because most global carbon models used by the IPCC assume that forests will do far more to offset our fossil fuel use. The reality may be far less clear.

“When old trees die, they decompose and stop sucking up CO2 and release more of it to the atmosphere,” McDowell says. “It’s like a thermostat gone bad. Warming begets tree loss, then tree loss begets more warming.”

While some significant change to forests is inevitable, Turner says cutting our fossil fuel emissions can still make a huge difference. One scenario she has documented suggests that curbing CO2 in the next few decades could cut future forest loss in Grand Teton National Park by half.

In some cases, though, more radical solutions may be required.

In his meeting, Klein urged Israel’s forest leaders to consider planting acacia trees, normally found in the Sahara, in place of pine and cypress. They manage to keep growing even during the hottest days of the year.

“It is sad,” Klein adds. “It won’t look the same. It won’t be the same. But I think it’s better to do this than just have barren land.”

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