13 November 20
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12 November 20
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Jesse Jackson | A White House That Once Again Calls on Our Better Angels
Jesse Jackson, Chicago Sun Times
Jackson writes: "The people of this nation have spoken. They have delivered us a clear victory. ... We have won with the most votes ever cast for a presidential ticket in the history of this nation."
“I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify. ... Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now.”
With these words, the president-elect, Joe Biden, set a new tone and a new mood in Washington. No longer will the bully pulpit of the White House be used to spew lies and insults or to fan division and hatred. The White House will once again call on the “better angels” of Americans and not our “darkest impulses.”
With the new tone, Biden offered new priorities and action. He listed the staggering challenges that face the country and its new president: the battle to control the coronavirus, to build prosperity, to secure health care, to “achieve racial justice and root out systemic racism,” to save the climate.
The most urgent, of course, is the pandemic, with the virus now peaking once more in states across the country. Gone is the magical thinking that it would soon disappear. Gone is the illusion that the economy could be rebuilt while the pandemic raged. “We cannot repair the economy, restore our vitality, or relish life’s most precious moments — hugging a grandchild, birthdays, weddings, graduations, all the moments that matter most to us — until we get this virus under control,” said Biden. Common sense, perhaps, but something that has been missing for too long.
Biden announced that he was ready to act, putting together a task force of leading scientists and experts to detail how to go forward. When he is sworn in on Jan. 20, he will hit the ground running. At the same time, he will push strongly for the passage of a rescue package in the coming lame-duck session of Congress — with aid for the millions still unemployed, action to avoid a blizzard of evictions and foreclosures, resources to get the disease back under control, aid to states and localities whose budgets have been savaged by the virus and economic recession and more. Without this, as the Trump appointed head of the Federal Reserve has been warning, the economy will be driven into a new downturn.
A new mood. A new plan of action. Once more, hope is reborn.
I harbor no illusions. This country is deeply divided. Trump is howling at the moon about the election, but he will spread his poison to millions. Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell has shown in the past that he is willing to obstruct everything in order to bring down a Democratic president. Biden’s faith and good will is already being tested.
Biden owes his election to the growing citizen movements that demanded change — from Black Lives Matter, to #MeToo, to the growing climate movement and more. His campaign was aided by thousands of community organizers who worked tirelessly to make that change happen. He graciously acknowledged his debt to the African-American voters who saved his candidacy and helped propel his victory.
Those movements and organizers now must redouble their efforts. The last great reform period in America came when Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement joined with a president, Lyndon Johnson, to move this country closer to equal justice for all.
That same energy and more will be needed to meet the challenges of this day.
It is always darkest before the dawn. And now, with this election, the first rays of a new day begin to shine. Now is the time to come together, to build, and to keep hope alive.
Malian refugees gather at an aid distribution point in Goudoubo camp, Burkina Faso, 3 February 2020. (photo: Sylvain Cherkaoui/UNHCR)
Nick Turse | A Convergence of Calamities: Record Numbers of War-Displaced to Be Dwarfed by Those Driven From Their Homes by Climate Change
Nick Turse, TomDispatch
Turse writes: "At least 100 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to violence, persecution, or other forms of public disorder over the last decade, according to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. That's about one in every 97 people on the planet, roughly one percent of humanity."
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Activist Mel Lopez during a rally in support of Joe Biden in Orlando, Florida. (photo: John Raoux/AP)
Juan González | Mainstream Media Has Missed the Real Story About Latinx Voter Turnout
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Well, I said last week, and I'll repeat it again, the key narrative of this election is not whether there was a small shift in the percentage of Latinx voters in some areas of the country turning toward Trump. The main story is that in an election which saw historic turnout, people of color - and especially Latinos - had an unprecedented increase in voting."
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James O'Keefe of Project Veritas Action, a right-wing organization with a history of fabricating claims. (photo: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times)
USPS 'Whistleblower' Told Agents Project Veritas Penned His Ballot-Tampering Claim
Allison Quinn, The Daily Beast
Quinn writes: "A postal worker whose allegation of ballot-tampering was at the center of Republican efforts to challenge the outcome of the presidential election has admitted to investigators that Project Veritas actually penned the affidavit laying out his claims."
A two-hour audio recording released by Project Veritas on Wednesday shows Richard Hopkins being interviewed by federal investigators over his claim, first publicized by Project Veritas, that he had overheard a postmaster instructing workers in Erie, Pennsylvania, to backdate mail-in votes to meet the Election Day deadline. The audio had been touted by the conservative group as proof that Hopkins was manipulated by investigators but still stood by his allegations, despite House Democrats saying earlier this week that the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General told them Hopkins admitted to fabricating the claims.
But instead, it captured him doing the very opposite, according to The Washington Post. When he was asked if he wanted to stick with his claim about ballot-tampering, Hopkins said, “At this point? No.” He said his allegation had stemmed from “assumptions” he made after overhearing tidbits of staffers’ conversations in the mail facility. Hopkins told investigators not only that his affidavit was written by Project Veritas but that he wasn’t even entirely sure of what the group had included in it because he was in “so much shock I wasn’t paying that much attention to what they were telling me.” A spokesman for Project Veritas acknowledged having a hand in the affidavit but insisted that the “affidavit was drafted with Mr. Hopkins’ input and requested revisions,” according to the Post.
An NAACP volunteer helps register Travis county, Texas voters in east Austin during a push to engage voters, 19 September 2020. (photo: Bob Daemmrich/Shutterstock)
'Whatever It Takes': How Black Women Fought to Mobilize America's Voters
Jessica Washington and Tiffany Arnold, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "After one of the most turbulent presidential elections in US history, the two races in the battleground state will determine if the balance of power in Washington will fall to the president-elect once he is sworn into office."
“We understand fully how important these races are,” says Mosley, the senior state coordinator for Georgia’s Black Voters Matter, a nonprofit dedicated to voter engagement.
“We’re still here. We’re still working,” Mosley said.
Democrats have long pointed to Black voters, more specifically, Black women, as a crucial voting bloc, decisive to elections since former president Bill Clinton’s victories in the 1990s. But this November, successfully flipping the southern, Republican-led state of Georgia to the Democrats for the first time in 28 years has drawn attention to the organizational power of Black women, whose large-scale mobilization efforts appear to have resulted in massive turnout among people of color in those cities, experts say.
“What might have been different is the greater role of on the ground mobilization and voter registration efforts in states like Georgia, and I think that that was the effort that was largely built by Stacey Abrams and others on the ground,” said Jamil Scott, an assistant professor in the government department at Georgetown University.
Rather than rely on outside political consultants swarming into battleground states, Abrams, who lost to the Republican Governor Brian Kemp in 2018, led that charge in Georgia this year, says Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, a national network advocating for women of color in politics. There was a 69% increase in voter turnout among women of color in Georgia this year compared to 2016, according to Allison, who cites data She the People analyzed from progressive data firm Catalist.
“You have a group of voters of Black women who are the most effective organizers on the ground because they are trusted voices and are working in organizations year round. They don’t come in six weeks before and kind of rent out a storefront, they’re actually invested in, long-term, empowering the community through civic and political action,” she said.
In America, this election year has not played out in a vacuum. Rather, it has been met with – and compounded by – America’s year of reckoning with police brutality and systemic inequality, which has driven even more people to vote.
Thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest police brutality in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths earlier this year as the Black community also shouldered the disproportionate impact of Covid-19. The meeting of those moments spurred political mobilization among Black voters, says Tim Stevens, the CEO of Pittsburgh’s Black Political Empowerment Project, a nonprofit voting rights organization based in Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, where Trump was swiftly defeated last week.
“The tragedies … made what was already present in the heart of Black people and people of color even more evident and more urgent,” said Stevens.
Those mobilization efforts were evident as ballots were counted in diverse urban centers in key states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania where large populations of Black voters in Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia helped push Biden towards victory.
Then there were a number of prominent Black women in leadership roles – like Abrams, Nikema Williams, who took on John Lewis’ congressional seat and is chair of Georgia’s state Democratic party, and Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms – helped fuel mobilization efforts among Black women this election, suggests Dianne Pinderhughes, a professor of political science and the chair of the department of Africana studies at the University of Notre Dame.
One organizer in Pennsylvania points to the most prominent: the first-Black and South Asian American vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris. “We had the same feelings we had when Obama was first elected,”says Brittany Smalls, the Pennsylvania state coordinator for Black Voters Matter. “We just never thought we would see the day that a woman in leadership looks like us.”
Now, as Americans across the country shift their attention away from the presidential race and to the runoff elections in Georgia, organizers like Mosley say they are keen to build on their success, in an election that could ultimately determine what kind of presidency Joe Biden will have.
“This is the culmination of years and years and years of work, when other people didn’t think it was possible,” said Mosley. “We know how important the Senate is, and so if we can play a role in getting one – or possibly two seats – to try to shift that balance of power, you need to understand that Black women will do whatever it takes.”
A Mexican American woman in El Paso, Texas, with a pin for President Donald Trump's 2020 campaign. (photo: Cengiz Yar/Getty)
The Myth of the Latino Vote and What Newsrooms Must Learn From 2020
Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Houston Chronicle
Trevizo writes: "In 2016, when it became clear that Donald Trump would become president, media outlets across the U.S. were blindsided by the results. They pledged to do better representing the larger communities that make up America. That included conservatives, those in rural areas (a complex group on its own) and, yes, Latinos."
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Utility poles damaged by Hurricane Zeta are seen Oct. 29 in Grand Isle, Louisiana. (photo: Bill Feig/AP)
Trump Administration Official Who Questions Global Warming Will Run Key Climate Program
Andrew Freedman, Jason Samenow and Brady Dennis, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "David Legates, a meteorologist who claims that excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is good for plants and that global warming is harmless, has been tapped to run the federal agency that oversees a major scientific report on how climate change is affecting the United States."
Legates, a controversial figure who joined the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in September, will move to a new slot as head of the U.S. Global Change Research Program as early as Thursday, according to two people familiar with the move who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
Legates could not be reached for comment.
His views on climate run counter to the scientific consensus that human activities — primarily the burning of fossil fuels — have generated greenhouse gases that are causing global temperatures to rise, ice sheets to melt, sea levels to rise and triggering other irreversible damage to the planet.
A NOAA spokesman declined to confirm Legates’s move.
The shift would put Legates in position at least to influence the authors chosen to craft the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report that periodically examines climate change damage and includes projections for the United States, down to regional and local levels.
The assessment is used by federal and state governments and industry to make decisions about infrastructure projects, to allocate resources and to plan for disasters.
The version released in 2018 has been cited in court cases in which cities, states and individuals sued fossil fuel companies and the U.S. government, arguing that they have failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions despite knowing about the severity of the problem.
That assessment was released under the Trump administration but had been largely completed by federal agencies and outside scientists under President Barack Obama. It angered the White House by warning that human-caused climate change already was fueling deadlier wildfires, increasingly intense hurricanes and brutal heat waves.
The report’s authors warned that climate change poses a severe threat to Americans’ health and pocketbooks, as well as to the country’s infrastructure and natural resources.
“I don’t believe it,” President Trump later said of those findings.
A former NOAA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Legates’s appointment made little sense.
“Sometimes these moves are made at the end of an administration. It’s like tilting at a windmill: It’s a nice move to your base, but there’s no substance to it,” the former agency official said.
As a political appointee, Legates would serve until the end of Trump’s term. The position of executive director of the research program is typically filled by someone on loan from another agency, and in this case Legates would be coming from NOAA.
A new administration would be able to remove him from the research program, which is under the purview of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
While President-elect Joe Biden (D) is preparing to take control of the federal government in January, Trump and his Republican allies are disputing the election results, without any evidence of widespread voter fraud or large-scale inaccuracies.
Climate scientists and environmental groups see Legates’s ascension as a way to skew the next assessment from the start. They expect him to recruit authors who share his views and those of Trump, who has a history of downplaying and denying the government’s own findings on climate change.
The move has rattled rank-and-file scientists at NOAA, the lead agency working on the climate assessment, according to people inside and outside the organization. For much of Trump’s tenure, there has been little political interference at NOAA, the notable exception being Trump’s hand-drawn alteration of an official hurricane forecast, an incident known as “Sharpiegate.”
“I think [Legates] can make messes that the Biden people are going to have to clean up, especially with respect to personnel appointments and author nominations and assignments,” said a former scientist with the research program, who stressed that new leadership could reverse any changes implemented by Legates.
The research program brings together 13 federal agencies that work on climate change. They include the Smithsonian Institution, NOAA and NASA. In addition to crafting the National Climate Assessment and other reports, the program works to “advance understanding of the changing Earth system.”
A career scientist, Michael Kuperberg, led the program for more than five years, but the White House abruptly removed him from that role late Friday and sent him back to his former position in the Office of Science at the Energy Department.
Kuperberg’s dismissal and Legates’s appointment come just as Betsy Weatherhead, a mainstream climate scientist, takes over as the federal coordinator of the next assessment, which is just getting underway. Weatherhead will work with the research program but be formally located within the U.S. Geological Survey, and, unlike Legates, she is not expected to leave Jan. 20 when Biden takes office.
While the bulk of the work on the report will take place under Biden’s administration, government officials are starting to select participating scientists now, with the first deadline for author nominations this Saturday. Once authors are selected, it can be difficult to remove them. If the roster includes climate change contrarians who, like Legates, have argued that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and promoted the benefits of burning fossil fuels for energy, mainstream climate scientists may steer clear of the endeavor.
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University who was a lead author of the 2018 assessment, said it might be difficult to change authors after selection but that the structure of the report could be changed under the next administration. She said she is more worried about the staff at the research program office.
“They are dedicated, hard-working and committed people who have done their very best with a very difficult mandate the last four years, and I am concerned that Legates might be, or might administer, the coup de grace for many of them,” she said.
The next report is not scheduled to be released until 2023, and any significant delays could push it beyond Biden’s first term.
“The report is supposed to be nonpartisan and nonpolitical from top to bottom,” said Shaye Wolf, the climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a research and advocacy organization. She said the appointment of Legates is a “troubling attempt to sabotage our nation’s premier scientific assessment of climate change.”
“The National Climate Assessment is our climate health report card. The Trump administration didn’t like its grade, so the teacher got fired,” Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), said in a statement. “Putting a Big Oil loyalist in charge of this critical document and the Global Change Research Program is like putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department. The science behind the worsening climate crisis is undeniable, its deadly impacts are irrefutable, and it’s time we banish climate denial from every place in the federal government.”
Sen. Maria Cantwell (Wash.), ranking member on the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees NOAA and the climate research program, said in a statement that Legates’s appointment is intended to "sabotage the federal government’s essential climate change research and planning efforts.”
“This essential report, a collaboration of 13 different agencies, is used to determine regional impacts and how best to tackle solutions. The last thing our farmers, foresters and fishermen need is a report that denies economic impacts and fails to provide solutions,” she said.
Others said they doubted that Legates would have a lasting impact, given the short window before January.
“I don’t see him being able to pull this off,” said Eileen Shea, a climate science and policy consultant who previously led NOAA’s climate services division.
Myron Ebell, a climate change skeptic at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who is close to the administration, called Legates “an excellent scientist” and said he’d make a successful executive director of the office that produces the assessment.
Legates has a long record of criticizing fundamental findings of climate science studies. He has been affiliated with the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank that hosts an annual conference bringing together climate change doubters. More recently, he has also questioned the accuracy of models projecting the severity of the coronavirus pandemic, arguing in an April essay that models of potential covid-19 deaths could lead to unsound government policies and economic shutdowns.
The same piece then cast similar doubt on existing climate change models, despite studies showing model projections have largely matched temperature changes to date.
In 2017, Legates co-wrote a separate essay praising Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accords — a decision that made the United States the only nation to leave the international compact formed to combat global warming. President-elect Biden has said he will reenter the pact on taking office.
The piece criticized states and local officials who had vowed to forge ahead and try to reach the emissions-reduction targets of the Paris agreement, saying such decisions would impose unnecessary and burdensome costs on society. It also questioned the broad scientific consensus that the world is warming at an alarming rate. “Climate has always changed and weather is always variable, due to complex, powerful natural forces,” Legates and his co-author wrote.
Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado who has studied the research program, said the White House’s ability to remove and appoint whomever it likes to lead the program is a design flaw. “It’s a problem regardless of who is in the White House,” Pielke wrote in a Twitter message. He said an independent advisory committee should choose the program’s leader.
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