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08 November 20
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Dan Rather | We Have a New President
Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page
Rather writes: "We have a new president. After all that we have seen and endured, amidst pain and outrage, loss and danger, we now will enter a new chapter in our national story."
The nature of our electoral system had a nation, and the world, waiting anxiously on the vote in a handful of states, nevermind that the general will of the American people has delivered a much more overwhelming verdict. There will be a lot more to say in the days, weeks, and months ahead. Amidst the fatigue and the uncertainty of the future, we must stay steady and resolute in finding a way to heal and move our nation forward to tackle its many challenges.
There are a lot of looming dangers, political and otherwise. There are senate runoffs and a raging pandemic. What will Donald Trump do? What about his enablers in the Republican Party? What about our public health and our national sanity? The questions start gushing like an open fire hydrant. But for now, the voting system held, a president-elect has been declared and America has a different destiny. #Courage.
Even before becoming president-elect, Joe Biden has been working on a coordinated, national plan for fighting the coronavirus. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
President-Elect Biden Has a Plan to Combat COVID-19. Here's What's in It
Allison Aubrey, NPR
Aubrey writes: "As coronavirus cases surge around the country, President-elect Joe Biden says voters have given him a mandate to take action."
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Donald Trump. (photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Rebecca Gordon | In a Looking-Glass World: Our Work Is Just Beginning
Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
Gordon writes: "For the last four years, progressives have been fighting largely to hold onto what we managed to gain during Barack Obama’s presidency."
EXCERPTS:
In 2016, the country was already riven by deep economic inequality. While Hillary Clinton promised “good-paying jobs” for those struggling to stay housed and buy food, we didn’t believe it. We’d heard the same promises so many times before, and yet the federal minimum wage was still stuck where it had been ever since 2009, at $7.25 an hour. Would a Clinton presidency really make a difference for working people? Not if we didn't push her -- and hard.
The candidate we were worried about was never Donald Trump, but Hillary Clinton. And the challenge we expected to confront was how to shove that quintessential centrist a few notches to the left. We were strategizing on how we might organize to get a new administration to shift government spending from foreign wars to human needs at home and around the world. We wondered how people in this country might finally secure the “peace dividend” that had been promised to us in the period just after the Cold War, back when her husband Bill became president. In those first (and, as it turned out, only) Clinton years, what we got instead was so-called welfare reform whose consequences are still being felt today, as layoffs drive millions into poverty.
We doubted Hillary Clinton’s commitment to addressing most of our other concerns as well: mass incarceration and police violence, structural racism, economic inequality, and most urgent of all (though some of us were just beginning to realize it), the climate emergency. In fact, nationwide, people like us were preparing to spend a day or two celebrating the election of the first woman president and then get down to work opposing many of her anticipated policies. In the peace and justice movements, in organized labor, in community-based organizations, in the two-year-old Black Lives Matter movement, people were ready to roll.
And then the unthinkable happened. The woman we might have loved to hate lost that election and the white-supremacist, woman-hating monster we would grow to detest entered the Oval Office.
For the last four years, progressives have been fighting largely to hold onto what we managed to gain during Barack Obama’s presidency: an imperfect healthcare plan that nonetheless insured millions of Americans for the first time; a signature on the Paris climate accord and another on a six-nation agreement to prevent Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons; expanded environmental protections for public lands; the opportunity for recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals -- DACA -- status to keep on working and studying in the U.S.
“In Short, There Is Still Much to Do”
My favorite scene in Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1966 film The Battle of Algiers takes place at night on a rooftop in the Arab quarter of that city. Ali La Pointe, a passionate recruit to the cause of the National Liberation Front (NLF), which is fighting to throw the French colonizers out of Algeria, is speaking with Ben M’Hidi, a high-ranking NLF official. Ali is unhappy that the movement has called a general strike in order to demonstrate its power and reach to the United Nations. He resents the seven-day restriction on the use of firearms. “Acts of violence don’t win wars,” Ben M’Hidi tells Ali. “Finally, the people themselves must act.”
For the last four years, Donald Trump has made war on the people of this country and indeed on the people of the entire world. He’s attacked so many of us, from immigrant children at the U.S. border to anyone who tries to breathe in the fire-choked states of California, Oregon, Washington, and most recently Colorado. He’s allowed those 230,000 Americans to die in a pandemic that could have been controlled and thrown millions into poverty, to mention just a few of his "war" crimes. Finally, the people themselves must act.
On that darkened rooftop in an eerie silence, Ben M’Hidi continues his conversation with La Pointe. “You know, Ali,” he says. “It’s hard enough to start a revolution, even harder to sustain it, and hardest of all to win it.” He pauses, then continues, “But it’s only afterwards, once we’ve won, that the real difficulties begin. In short, there is still much to do.”
It’s hard enough to vote out a looking-glass president. But it’s only once we’ve won, whether that’s now or four years from now, that the real work begins. There is, indeed, still much to do.
Gay Pride parade in Las Vegas. (photo: AP)
Nevada Is the First US State to Protect Gay Marriage in Its Constitution
Carter Sherman, VICE
Sherman writes: "The Silver State has quietly achieved a major milestone: It's the first state in the country to enshrine protections for gay marriage in its constitution, reversing an older amendment that had banned it."
EXCERPT:
More than 60 percent of Nevada voters on Tuesday decided in favor of a ballot measure requiring the state to issue marriage licenses to couples regardless of gender and to treat their marriages as equal.
“It feels good that we let the voters decide,” Chris Davin, president of Equality Nevada, told NBC News. “The people said this, not judges or lawmakers. This was direct democracy—it’s how everything should be.”
The push to get this measure in front of voters started back in 2017, when the Nevada state legislature originally approved it. The state constitution’s 2002 ban on same-sex marriage has not been enforced for years, thanks to the Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015. But the idea of a state constitutional amendment took on new urgency when the late, liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was replaced by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
LGBTQ rights supporters now fear the court’s 2015 landmark decision may be in danger, as there is now a new 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
Nevada’s new constitutional amendment would make sure that even if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Obergefell, erasing federal protections for same-sex marriage, gay couples in Nevada will still be able to marry. (Religious organizations and clergy members can still decline to marry gay couples.)
During her confirmation hearing just weeks ago, Barrett, a devout Catholic, refused to give her opinion on Obergefell, citing past Supreme Court nominees’ traditional reticence to comment on precedent. She also refused to say whether she believed that Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case that abolished state sodomy laws, was correctly decided.
About 5 percent of Americans identify as LGBT, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. Although the Supreme Court ruled in June that employers can’t fire people just for being gay or transgender, LGBTQ people still largely lack broad federal anti-discrimination protections.
As of 2020, more than 60 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage, the Public Religious Research Institute found. That’s an enormous leap from 2007, when just about one-third of Americans said the same.
Despite mixed results for progressive initiatives, this year’s election included numerous wins for LGBTQ legislators. Sarah McBride became the country’s first openly trans state senator in Delaware, while Mauree Turner won a seat in the Oklahoma state legislature, making Turner the nation’s first openly nonbinary state legislator.
More than 1,000 LGTBQ candidates ran for office at the state, local, and federal levels this year. Nearly 600 made it to Election Day, according to the LGBTQ Victory Fund, the premiere national organization that focuses on electing LGTBQ people at all governmental levels. At least 160 of the Victory Fund’s 312 endorsed candidates won their races this year.
Angela Davis on September 10, 2012 in Toronto, Canada. (photo: Jemal Countess/Getty Images)
Angela Davis on the Struggle for Socialist Internationalism and a Real Democracy
Astra Taylor, Jacobin
Taylor writes: "In mid-October, renowned filmmaker and writer Astra Taylor spoke with legendary thinker and radical Angela Davis in a livestream event cosponsored by Jacobin and Haymarket Books."
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Employees of Jordan's Independent Election Commission prepare ballot boxes at a polling centre in Jordan's capital, Amman. (photo: Khalil Mazraawi/AFP)
Jordan to Elect New Parliament Amid Deepening Economic Crisis
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Voters in coronavirus-battered Jordan will head to the polls on Tuesday to elect a new parliament amid a deepening economic crisis worsened by the pandemic."
EXCERPT:
Jordan has taken an economic hammering from COVID-19 with some $3bn lost in vital tourism revenues in the first nine months of 2020.
Campaigning for the legislative elections was also forced to switch to videos posted on social media platforms, especially Facebook.
Home to some of the world’s finest archaeological sites, including the ancient city of Petra, tourism normally accounts for 14 percent of Jordan’s GDP.
But the industry has been brought to a standstill by the COVID-19 pandemic.
War in the region is further taxing resources. The country is home to some 2.2 million Palestinian refugees and more than 650,000 Syrian refugees, according to the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR.
Jordan estimates the cost of hosting Syrian refugees at about $10bn and regularly complains of a lack of international support.
In March 2020, the IMF approved $1.3bn in aid for Jordan, subsequently adding about $396m in emergency funds to soften the impact of COVID-19.
Joe Biden. (photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
Joe Biden Could Bring Paris Climate Goals 'Within Striking Distance'
Fiona Harvey, Guardian UK
Harvey writes: "The election of Joe Biden as president of the US could reduce global heating by about 0.1C, bringing the goals of the Paris agreement 'within striking distance', if his plans are fulfilled, according to a detailed analysis."
Biden’s policy of a target to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and plans for a $1.7tn investment in a green recovery from the Covid crisis, would reduce US emissions in the next 30 years by about 75 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide or its equivalents. Calculations by the Climate Action Tracker show that this reduction would be enough to avoid a temperature rise of about 0.1C by 2100.
However, Biden is likely to face stiff opposition to many of his proposals, from the Republican party nationally and at state level, while his room for manoeuvre will be limited by the Democrats’ showing in the Senate. If legal challenges to his plans are brought, they will be decided by a heavily conservative supreme court.
The US is the world’s biggest economy and second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, but Donald Trump reversed measures taken by Barack Obama to reduce greenhouse gases, and rejected the Paris agreement on climate change, which binds nations to hold global heating to well below 2C, with an aspiration to limit temperature rises to 1.5C.
Trump’s stance left the US increasingly isolated among major economies. In recent weeks, China’s president, Xi Jinping, surprised the world by pledging to reach net zero emissions by 2060, and to cause emissions to peak by 2030. That would be enough to reduce the world’s projected temperature rise by 0.2C to 0.3C, according to Climate Action Tracker.
Japan has also recently endorsed a net zero target, as has South Korea, and the EU has its £1tn green deal. If Biden’s pledges were to be followed through, that would mean economies producing more than half of global carbon emissions had a publicly stated pledge of reaching net zero emissions by about 2050.
This adds up to the potential for a “historic tipping point” on the climate, according to Climate Action Tracker. The US and China’s pledges would be enough to reduce global heating to about 2.3C or 2.4C by the end of the century. That is about 25-40% of the effort needed to limit heating to 1.5C, the aspirational goal of the Paris agreement.
Bill Hare, of Climate Analytics, one of the partner organisations in the Climate Action Tracker, said: “This looks like an historic tipping point: with Biden’s election, China, the US, the EU, Japan, South Korea – two-thirds of the world economy and over 50% of global greenhouse gas emissions – have net zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century commitments. These commitments are very close, if not within, 1.5C-consistent pathways for this set of countries and for the first time ever puts the Paris agreement’s 1.5C limit within striking distance.”
Biden has promised to rejoin the Paris agreement and to invest in low-carbon technology that would put the US on a path to drastically lower emissions in the next decade.
Rejoining Paris will be a boost to international climate action, but domestically the president will face a deeply divided nation and may struggle to push forward his climate plans. Many states, cities and local governments are signed up to strong climate action, although some face legal challenges to doing so.
Under the Paris agreement, all countries must come forward every five years with strengthened national commitments – called nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – to curb greenhouse gas emissions, which means new NDCs stipulating fresh targets for 2030 are due by the end of this year. Biden will not be able to meet that deadline, but will be under pressure to draft a US NDC in time for the postponed UN climate summit, Cop26, which was scheduled to begin on Monday but will take place next November because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden will face stiff opposition from some business interests and from Republican climate sceptics emboldened by four years of Trump’s presidency. This may make it impossible to realise the full emissions reductions’ policies that Biden endorsed in his presidential campaign.
However, if under his presidency the US adopts a clear stance on the climate internationally, the impact will be much greater around the world than just the contribution from its own emissions reductions, say experts. The influence of the US is such that it would have a multiplier effect on other economies.
“It is the US driving the world in this direction that will be most important,” said Todd Stern, who served as the US special envoy for climate change under Obama. “If you have got the US, the EU, China working together you can expand to the whole world. It is not just about the US’s domestic emissions, but the US position as a world leader.”
Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser, now a lecturer at American University in Washington, said Biden could also push other countries to take faster action on the road to the 2050 goal. “Biden intends to reanimate the Paris process and much else, likely committing the US to a zero net emissions goal by 2050, while focusing on more aggressive 2030 targets, not just for the US, but by compelling China and other emitters towards more serious 2030 goals,” he said. “These are just the beginning of what promises to be an extraordinarily ambitious Biden international climate agenda, trying to make up time for the lost Trump years and prevent climate destabilisation.”
To seize the initiative, Biden should quickly set out a pathway to stiff emissions cuts by 2030, said Nat Keohane, senior vice-president for climate at the Environmental Defense Fund. “This is not just about the US re-entering the Paris agreement, but about a credible and ambitious target for 2030,” he said. “The Paris agreement is no longer about agreement, but about meeting the commitments and raising [countries’] ambition. To have the US back in the game rather than on the sidelines is critically important.”
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