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Showing posts with label NEWSOM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NEWSOM. Show all posts
Monday, August 11, 2025
Top News | UN Action Demanded After Israel Massacres Gaza Journalists
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Monday, July 25, 2022
RSN | DeSantis Protects Solar Power in Florida While Newsom Fails It in California and Supports Nukes
24 July 22
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But “progressive” Governor Gavin Newsom is standing by as pro-utility regulators embrace new taxes and metering restrictions set to devastate California’s solar industry.
Newsom is also supporting prolonged operations at the high-cost Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, which is surrounded by active earthquake faults near San Luis Obispo.
DeSantis and Newsom could face off in the 2024 race for the White House.
DeSantis is an extreme pro-corporate social conservative known nationwide for his bigoted “Don’t Say Gay” pubic school mandate. He’s primarily identified by his MAGA-style attacks on human rights, voter access, democracy, abortion rights, social justice and more.
In most mainstream polls, DeSantis now runs a strong second to Donald Trump for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination. He’s already raised tens of millions of dollars and built a high national media profile.
In late April, DeSantis became a green hero of sorts by killing a utility-sponsored bill meant to raise taxes on rooftop solar panel installations. “We are thrilled and encouraged and heartened and ecstatic and validated,” said Vote Solar director Katie Chiles Ottenweller. “This has been a long, bitter fight to protect solar rights in Florida.”
Polls show more than 80% of Floridians in opposition to the anti-solar legislation, with less than 5% support. Some 11,000 Floridians work for more than 400 solar companies in the Sunshine State.
DeSantis has also won green kudos by supporting measures to save the Everglades. Florida’s treasured “River of Grass” has been ravaged for decades by sugar and other agricultural and real estate interests.
For now, the extremely well-funded incumbent is in a challenging re-election fight with the popular former Governor Charlie Crist. Once a Republican, the moderate Crist comes with notable pro-solar and pro-Everglades credibility, a factor DeSantis must account for in the fall election.
Should he beat Crist and establish his own green credentials to balance his otherwise reactionary policies, DeSantis could become a uniquely effective national candidate, especially as Newsom moves in the opposite direction.
Meanwhile, more than 70,000 Californians work in wind and solar. More than a million rooftop installations help power the campaign against climate change in the world’s sixth-largest economy.
But utility-sponsored demands for anti-solar taxes and regulations like those DeSantis vetoed are being used to slam California’s green industries. Newsom’s refusal to shut them down has infuriated the green community, including tens of thousands of solar workers involved with billions of dollars worth of stalled projects.
Newsom is also supporting attempts to extend operations at Diablo Canyon’s dangerously decrepit reactors.
A broad coalition involving labor unions, local citizens, state regulators, environmental groups and then-Governor Jerry Brown finalized in September, 2018, a landmark deal to phase out Units One and Two in 2024 and 2025.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has rated Unit One among the most dangerously embrittled of all remaining 92 US nukes. NRC site inspector Dr. Michael Peck warned the Diablo reactors can’t withstand a credible earthquake from the dozen nearby fault lines, or from the San Andreas, a mere 45 miles away.
Between its reactors and spent fuel polls, an explosion at Diablo could send apocalyptic radioactive clouds far worse than Chernobyl’s pouring into Los Angeles, the Central Valley and/or the Bay Area, none of which could be effectively evacuated. Tens of millions of lives would be threatened, destroying the state’s ecology and economy.
As Newsom stands by while regulators decimate cheap rooftop solar, Diablo’s juice costs $3.5 million/day above market prices. Shutting it would save ratepayers more than $1 billion/year, freeing more than enough resources to fully replace the reactors’ capacity with solar, wind, batteries and efficiency.
The California Governor’s anti-green stances have deeply alienated a significant core of his progressive supporters, polluting his newborn campaign for the White House as he undermines both the planet and his image.
That he’d betray the global ecology while Ron DeSantis appears to support it could spark a backlash from which his presidential aspirations—-and Earth itself—-might not recover.
Harvey Wasserman’s PEOPLE’S SPIRAL OF US HISTORY is at www.solartopia.org and on line. Most Mondays he co-convenes the Green Grassroots Emergency Election Protection zoom via electionprotection2024.org.
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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Thursday, February 18, 2021
RSN: Norman Solomon | Cuomo and Newsom Symbolize the Rot of Corporate Democrats - and the Dire Need for Progressive Populism
17 February 21
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RSN: Norman Solomon | Cuomo and Newsom Symbolize the Rot of Corporate Democrats - and the Dire Need for Progressive Populism
Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
Solomon writes: "The governors of New York and California - the most populous states led by Democrats - now symbolize how slick liberal images are no substitute for genuinely progressive priorities."
After 10 years as New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo is facing an uproar over revelations that his administration intentionally and drastically undercounted the deaths from COVID in nursing homes. Meanwhile, in California, the once-bright political glow of Gavin Newsom has dimmed, in large part because of personally hypocritical elitism and a zig-zag “middle ground” approach to public-health safeguards during the pandemic, unduly deferring to business interests.
The political circumstances differ: Cuomo has been in conflict with New York progressives for many years over key policy matters, whereas Newsom was somewhat of a golden boy for Golden State progressives – if they didn’t look too closely at his corporate-friendly policies. But some underlying patterns are similar.
Both Cuomo and Newsom know how to talk progressive, but they’re corporate Democrats to the core. On many issues in the state legislature, Cuomo has ended up aligning himself with Republican lawmakers to thwart progressive initiatives. In California, where a right-wing petition drive is likely to force Newsom into a recall election, the governor’s moderate record is hardly cause for the state’s huge number of left-leaning voters to be enthusiastic about him.
Anyone who thinks that the current Cuomo scandal about nursing-home deaths is a recent one-off problem, rather than reflecting a deep-seated corporate orientation, should take a look at investigative reporting by David Sirota that appeared nine months ago under the headline “Cuomo Gave Immunity to Nursing Home Execs After Big Donations – Now People Are Dying.” Sirota wrote:
“As Gov. Andrew Cuomo faced a spirited challenge in his bid to win New York’s 2018 Democratic primary, his political apparatus got a last-minute boost: a powerful health care industry group suddenly poured more than $1 million into a Democratic committee backing his campaign. Less than two years after that flood of cash from the Greater New York Hospital Association, Cuomo signed legislation last month quietly shielding hospital and nursing-home executives from the threat of lawsuits stemming from the coronavirus outbreak. The provision, inserted into an annual budget bill by Cuomo’s aides, created one of the nation’s most explicit immunity protections for health care industry officials, according to legal experts.”
On the other side of the continent, Newsom is second to none in sounding the alarm about climate change and the need to move away from fossil fuels. But Newsweek reports that during his first two years as governor, Newsom’s administration “approved more than 8,000 oil and gas permits on state lands.” He continues to issue many fracking permits. (As The Wall Street Journal noted days ago, fracking is now “the source of most oil and gas produced in the U.S.”)
Gov. Newsom’s immediate predecessor, Jerry Brown, became fond of crowing that he governed the way a person would steer a canoe, paddling sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right. The metaphor did not answer the question of where the boat was headed.
It may be relevant that Cuomo and Newsom grew up in the nurturing shadow of extraordinary privilege, making them ill-positioned to see much beyond the comfortable bubbles surrounding them.
Andrew Cuomo’s father, Mario, was New York’s governor for three terms. At age 35, the younger Cuomo was appointed to be assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development by President Clinton, who promoted him to HUD secretary four years later. Such powerful backers propelled him toward the governor’s mansion in Albany.
From the outset, Newsom has been enmeshed with power. As longtime Californiajournalist Dan Walters recently pointed out, “ Gov. Gavin Newsom wasn’t born to wealth and privilege but as a youngster he was enveloped in it as the surrogate son of billionaire Gordon Getty. Later, Getty’s personal trust fund – managed by Newsom’s father – provided initial financing for business ventures that made Newsom wealthy enough to segue into a political career as a protégé of San Francisco’s fabled political mastermind, Willie Brown.”
It’s possible to transcend such pampered upbringings – Franklin Delano Roosevelt certainly did – but failures to show credible concern for the working class and serve their interests have put both Cuomo and Newsom in today’s political pickles.
Like all politicians, Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom are expendable as far as the corporate system is concerned. If their individual brands lose appeal, plenty of other corporate-power servants are eagerly available.
When elected officials like Cuomo and Newsom fade, the solution is not to find like-minded replacements with unsullied images. The problem isn’t the brand, it’s the quality of the political product.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. And some trends are encouraging.
Genuine progressive populism – insisting that government should strive to meet widespread social needs rather than serve the special interests of the wealthy and corporate elites – is threatening to disrupt the complacency of mainline Democratic leaders who have long coasted on merely being better than Republicans.
More than ever, many entrenched Democrats are worried about primary challenges from the left. Such fears are all to the good. Progressive activism and shifts in public opinion have strengthened movements that are recruiting, supporting and sometimes electing candidates who offer far better alternatives.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
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.
Wednesday, February 10, 2021
POLITICO NIGHTLY: Trump’s impeachment trial in 180 seconds
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Top News | 'He’s Not Going to Run Unopposed': Sanders Rejects Schumer for Majority Leader
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