Tom Roche

Behind the News, 4/21/16 - guests: Bruce Dixon, Alfredo Saad Filho - Doug Henwood

One hundred years after the Irish Easter Rising, author Colm Toibin recounts the slow movements for independence that peaked in the rebellion in Dublin in 1916.

Is growing inequality a price worth paying for London’s continued economic success? As London’s economy continues to outpace the rest of the UK, so does the inequality gap. Is such inequality an inevitable by-product of the city’s growth, rewarding those who risk their capital to create employment, for example? Or, will it eventually derail the city’s upward progression, and push out those whom London relies on to keep it moving? Panel includes Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography, University of Oxford; Mark Littlewood, Director General, Institute of Economic Affairs; Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice, London Business School and Faiza Shaheen, director, Centre for Labour and Social Studies (Class).

Can banks ever be made accountable?

In this episode, Cathy Legg talks about why Charles Sanders Peirce thought that existing was only one of three ways of being.

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Author (Photo: Craddock wrote of Little Egypt, the belly dancer, at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, 1893.) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman by Leigh Eric Schmidt. Ann Taves, Professor of Religious Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara “Leigh Schmidt offers us a compulsively readable account of the tragic, fantastic, and utterly idiosyncratic life of Ira Craddock, self-taught scholar, mystic, sex reformer, and psychoanalytic subject. Sympathetic toward Craddock, yet even-handed in his treatment of both her admirers and her vehemently critical detractors, Schmidt opens a window on the fierce ideological cross-currents at the intersection of sexuality, psychology, and religion at the turn of the last century. This is serious scholarship in a form that everyone can enjoy.” Kathi Kern, author of Mrs. Stanton’s Bible “With a novelist’s grace, Leigh Schmidt tells the absorbing, astonishing, and long-forgotten story of Ida C. Craddock, religious seeker and sex radical. Through Craddock’s life, Schmidt restores the spiritual pulse to the sexual revolution of the early twentieth-century. Heaven’s Bride is a masterful contribution to the entwined history of religion, sexuality and American reform.” Richard Fox, Professor of History, University of Southern California, and author of Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession “No other scholar of American culture ranges as widely and deeply across so many thematic frontiers as Leigh Eric Schmidt. In this gripping tale of Ida C. Craddock’s edgy frontier crossings he shows his mastery of the borderlands between science and religion, secularity and faith. Readers will blink in wonder at the worldly inventiveness and mystical vision of this long forgotten American original.” Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies, Rice University, and author of Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred “The life and work of Ida C. Craddock show all the signs of a genuine erotic mysticism, as profound as any in the history of religions. Her attempts to express the full measure of this love—from secularism and religious liberalism, through psychical research, British occultism, and Indian Tantra, to marriage reform, sexology, and women’s rights—were as diverse and as passionate as the censorship campaigns, familial condemnations, criminal prosecutions, and mental pathologizing that finally silenced her. Leigh Eric Schmidt, with his trademark erudition, balance, and humor, has effectively resurrected Ida for us from all of this cruelty. She speaks again. This is historical scholarship at its most liberating and most redeeming.” Nancy F. Cott, Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University “The mix of madness and method in Ida Craddock’s extraordinary life makes for a rollicking read, amplified by exactingly researched context. Was she a century ahead of her time? You decide. http://www.amazon.com/Heavens-Bride-Unprintable-Craddock-Sexologist/dp/0465002986/ref=la_B001H6W8J2_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1460342263&sr=1-3

He was one of the most influential writers of our time. His name was Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell. Who was the man who gave us 'big brother', 'thoughtcrime', 'doublethink', whose name looms so large in this era of mass surveillance?

David Cameron is feeling the heat as he comes under pressure over his father's Panama based trust.

In this edition: a greyish sticky dough called fufu from the Democratic Republic of Congo; pesto Genovese from Italy, made as it used to be, with a pestle and mortar; there's a dish of smoked puffin from Iceland and some of the finest cannabis lollipops in the American west. All this culinary exotica comes as part of this weekly insight, analysis, colour and description served up by reporters covering some of the week’s big news stories around the world

04-08-2016 (Photo: ‪Fire Base Bell‬) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow America Returns to the Romance of Empire. Michael Vlahos, Johns Hopkins. @JHUWorldCrisis. Iraqi officials claimed the operation came to a halt when they determined they needed reinforcements to hold onto the villages they took. Iraqi Army Maj. Gen. Najm Abdullah al-Jubbouri said ISIS fighters had dug a network of tunnels and had suicide bombers and truck bombs waiting for them. U.S. Army Maj. Jon-Paul Depreo, operations officer for the international coalition fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria, said some of the Iraqi army troops were unfamiliar with the territory, contributing to the decision to temporarily freeze the campaign. “These [Iraqi army] forces aren’t from that area necessarily, so they’re learning the area,” Depreo told reporters in Baghdad. In a dramatic announcement last month, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said "Operation Conquest" was Phase I of the retaking of Mosul and would involve capturing areas around Mosul to use as staging areas for future operations. The towns and villages targeted were all roughly 50 miles outside of Mosul. http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/04/07/mosul-siege-stalled-as-iraqi-army-once-again-flees-when-bullets-fly-say-sources.html http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2016/04/07/US-may-open-fire-bases-to-help-Iraqi-troops-retake-Mosul/9341460029404/

Does terrorism work?

No sitting U.S. president has visited Cuba in nearly 90 years, but this month President Obama will do just that. This historic visit could signal a new chapter in U.S.-Cuban relations. In this episode, Peter, Ed and Brian consider dramatic moments in U.S.-Cuba relations that reflect Cuba’s outsized influence throughout American history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

AS HILLARY CLINTON questions rival Bernie Sanders over the depth of his financial reform ideas this week, a group of former government officials — once tasked with regulating Wall Street and now working in the financial industry or as Wall Street lobbyists — are participating in a fundraiser for her in the nation’s capital.

The invitation for the April 6 fundraiser, obtained by Sunlight Foundation’s Political Party Time, describes a “conversation” with the Clinton campaign’s chief financial officer, Gary Gensler, and Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Carl Levin, D-Mich.

The host: Julie Chon, a former Senate Banking Committee staffer who today is a managing director at the New York hedge fund Perry Capital.

Finance chair Gensler is a former Goldman Sachs staffer who later joined the Obama administration as a financial regulator.

Several members of the organizing committee are now either advocating for corporate clients or advising them how to best work with and around the regulations they once enforced.

One member of the committee is Raj Date. Date was the deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, tasked with reining in Wall Street abuses. In January 2013, he left the bureau and by April started a new lending firm, Fenway Summer. He then became an adviser to Promontory Financial Group, which pitches Date as advising its “clients on complying with consumer protection regulation and managing complex risks.”

Another member of the organizing committee is Bob Heckart. Heckart is a former Senate staffer who, according to his bio, worked on the “implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act and the Volker Rule, tax reform legislation, abuse of corporate tax loopholes, securities markets regulation, and other financial policy issues” for Sen. Levin. Prior to that, he was senior adviser for economic and financial policy for then-Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and served as “her liaison with Wall Street.” Today, he is a senior counsel at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, the same major Wall Street law firm he worked for before getting hired by Gillibrand. His practice focuses on hedge funds, capital markets, credit, and real estate.

Tyler Gellasch, another organizer of the fundraiser, also worked for Levin. His biography describes him as having been “intimately involved in drafting several high-profile pieces of legislation, including the Volcker Rule provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, the crowdfunding provisions of the JOBS Act, and the securities law provisions of the STOCK Act.” Gellasch today works for the Healthy Markets Association, a group that advocates for its members, which include various financial firms.

Organizer Dan M. Berkovitz was the general counsel of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2009 to 2013. Today, he is a partner at WilmerHale LLP, which says his “clients, both domestic and international, include entities in ongoing U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) investigations, multi-national swap dealers, managed funds, a major U.S. manufacturer, and industry trade and advocacy associations.”

Organizer Shawn Maher worked for the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee during the height of the financial crisis years, between 2007 and 2009. Since 2011, he has been a lobbyist for both RBC Capital Markets and the Royal Bank of Canada.

Related:

• Hillary Clinton Now Says She’ll Only Release Big-Bank Speeches if the Republicans Do
• Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks Than Most of Us Earn in a Lifetime

The post Hillary Clinton Fundraiser Hosted by All-Star Cast of Financial Regulators Who Joined Wall Street  appeared first on The Intercept.

A GREENPEACE ACTIVIST confronted Hillary Clinton during a campaign stop Thursday: “Thank you for tackling climate change. Will you act on your words and reject fossil fuel money in the future from your campaign?”

Clinton replied angrily: “I have money from people who have worked for fossil fuel companies. I have never … I am so sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me. I am sick of it.”

The Clinton camp later issued an explanatory statement, concluding that the “simple truth is that this campaign has not taken a dollar from oil and gas industry PACs or corporations.”

The Bernie Sanders campaign countered by pointing to a Greenpeace tally that says she has collected “$1,259,280 in bundled and direct donations from lobbyists currently registered as lobbying for the fossil fuel industry.”

Additionally, Greenpeace found “$3,250,000 in donations from large donors connected to the fossil fuel industry to Priorities Action USA,” the main Super PAC backing Clinton’s campaign.

Sanders, by contrast, has signed a pledge to reject fossil fuel dollars.

It’s important to distinguish here between the different ways the candidates (their affiliated Super PACs aside) can accept money from fossil fuel interests, however.

• Neither campaign accepts money directly from fossil fuel companies (that wouldn’t be legal).
• Neither campaign takes money from fossil fuel-affiliated SuperPACs funded by individuals in the industry.
• At the same time, neither campaign rejects contributions from workers in the fossil fuel industry.
• And neither campaign rejects money from lobbyists who represent the industry.

The central dispute between the two camps, then, appears to be about the volume of money Clinton gets from or through fossil fuel lobbyists.

But Sanders, too, is apparently accepting money from the fossil fuel lobby. According to an Intercept examination of online records of lobbyist disclosure of political contributions, the Sanders campaign took in $24 from Nathen Causman, a lobbyist for the LNE Group, whose clients include American Municipal Power Inc.

The Sanders campaign had no comment.

“I’m entitled to have personal beliefs as well as career I think, right?” Causman said in an interview with The Intercept on Friday. “I don’t directly work with [American Municipal Power] at all. I’m sure that they’re with our company so I’m registered with them just in case, if so, I could be helpful if I needed to be.”

He added: “I think that my personal political campaign donations are completely separate from anything that my company does. That’s in no way a statement of support from the company I work for or the clients that we represent.”

Why give to Sanders? “I personally trust his character,” Causman said. “I think he’s been on the right side of history throughout his political career, and I generally align with all of his policy proposals. And I have aligned with them ever since I started paying attention to politics in the first place. The firm that I work for is nonpartisan so we don’t particularly take any side.”

There’s a difference in scale between the amount that individuals who work in the energy sector have contributed to each candidate, as well. People in the fossil fuel industry have contributed $930,983 to Clinton’s campaign, compared to $203,885 to Sanders’s campaign, according to OpenSecrets.org.

Clinton has repeatedly argued that money from corporate interests does not influence her policymaking. “You will not find that I ever changed a view or a vote because of any donation that I ever received,” she said during a February Democratic debate.

But she has yet to offer a concrete plan to control carbon emissions, the main cause of man-made global warming. Her campaign touts neither the cap-and-trade model favored by the Obama administration nor the carbon tax favored by Sanders. When asked about fracking at a recent debate, Clinton hedged, talking about vague regulations. Her opponent, Sanders, answered that he was flatly against it.

Related:

• Hillary Clinton Wants to Regulate Fracking, but Still Accepts a Lot of Fracking Money
• Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks Than Most of Us Earn in a Lifetime

The post Bernie Sanders Took Money From the Fossil Fuel Lobby, Too — Just Not Much appeared first on The Intercept.

After Rolling Stone magazine bypassed the youth vote and endorsed Hillary Clinton, one of their writers hit back.

PRESIDENT OBAMA on Monday endorsed Debbie Wasserman Schultz, his handpicked Democratic National Committee chair, in her congressional race. What’s stunning about that is that Obama felt the need to endorse a six-term congresswoman running in a heavily Democratic district at all.

Tim Canova, a law professor and Federal Reserve expert, jumped into the Democratic primary in January, challenging Wasserman Schultz from the left. At that time, my Intercept colleague Glenn Greenwald interviewed Canova, revealing multiple contrasts between his opposition to bank bailouts, corporate-written free trade agreements, and the Patriot Act and Wasserman Schultz’s support of those policies.

Populist primaries of entrenched incumbents don’t usually get the attention of the White House, because success for the challenger is so remote. Obama very rarely involves himself in House primaries. That he felt the need to endorse Wasserman Schultz suggests that Canova’s message is gaining traction in her district.

The endorsement comes fully five months before the primary — and days before the end-of-the-quarter deadline for Federal Election Commission reporting. While Wasserman Schultz has never needed help soliciting campaign contributions from wealthy donors, the presidential endorsement has the appearance of a vote of confidence to ensure the continued flow of money.

“Debbie has been a strong, progressive leader in Congress and a hardworking, committed chair of our national party since I proudly nominated her to the role in 2011,” Obama said in his endorsement statement. “She always stands up and fights for what is right for her district while passionately supporting middle-class families.”

But Wasserman Schultz is more than anything a creature of the pro-corporate Democratic Party establishment. She has been accused of using her position as DNC chair to favor Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary, including by scheduling low-profile debates on weekend nights. Her opposition to a medical marijuana initiative in Florida and sponsorship of a failed internet censorship bill in Congress have angered progressives, as have her ties to corporate money.

More recently, Wasserman Schultz sponsored a bill that would severely hamper the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposed regulations for payday lenders. The bill would pre-empt the CFPB rule in favor of state laws like Florida’s, an industry-backed model that permits borrowers to take out an average of nine payday loans a year at an interest rate of 278 percent.

Payday lenders have cost Floridians $2.5 billion in fees over the last decade, according to a recent report, which has fallen disproportionately on African-Americans and Latinos. Wasserman Schultz also voted for a bill that would have gutted CFPB rules prohibiting racial discrimination by auto lenders.

Activist groups in Florida have run ads against Wasserman Schultz over her support for payday lenders. Canova has made the payday lending legislation a key talking point of his campaign, noting that Wasserman Schultz has taken over $68,000 in contributions from the industry.

The Florida Democratic Party initially denied Canova access to the party’s voter information file, but after pressure from the state’s progressive caucus, it reversed course, allowing Canova to use the data. The situation was reminiscent of Wasserman Schultz’s DNC temporarily denying voter-file access to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign after Sanders staffers improperly accessed Clinton campaign data.

Canova, who recently announced support from the National Nurses United union, reacted to Obama endorsing his opponent on Twitter, saying, “Our grassroots movement is undeterred and this is our best fundraising day yet. Thank you @DWStweets,” referring to Wasserman Schultz’s Twitter handle.

Top Photo: DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., introduces President Barack Obama during the DNC’s Women’s Leadership Forum in September 2014.

The post This Obama Endorsement Is a Sign Pro-Corporate Democrats Are Getting Nervous appeared first on The Intercept.

According to Adam Hochschild, about 2,800 Americans fought in the Spanish Civil War, and some were bombed by Nazis years before the U.S. entered World War II. His new book is 'Spain in Our Hearts.' John Powers reviews the French film 'My Golden Days.'

How a pink flower defeated the world's sole superpower

Have you wondered why politicians aren't what they used to be, why governments seem unable to solve real problems? Economist Yanis Varoufakis, the former Minister of Finance for Greece, says that it's because you can be in politics today but not be in power -- because real power now belongs to those who control the economy. He believes that the mega-rich and corporations are cannibalizing the political sphere, causing financial crisis. In this talk, hear his dream for a world in which capital and labor no longer struggle against each other, "one that is simultaneously libertarian, Marxist and Keynesian."

MP3 Link

This week on CounterSpin: Wherever they come down on it, many Americans think of surveillance technology—like facial recognition—as spurring a more or less Platonic argument about the relationship between the individual and the state and/or corporations. That’s a rich enough subject for debate.

But in 2016 America, the conversation can suffer from not being grounded in an understanding of how surveillance technology is actually being used right now. Whether we are being watched by private companies or by law enforcement and the state, our guest says, not everyone is watched equally.

Alvaro Bedoya is the founding executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law. He was chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. He’ll join us to talk about those issues and the “color of surveillance.”

MP3 Link

And first, as usual, we’ll take a quick look back at the week’s press, including the killing of Berta Caceres, International Women’s Day, and rebranding discrimination as free speech.

MP3 Link

SOURCE LINKS:

• “Why I Walked Out of Facial Recognition Negotiations,” by Alvaro M. Bedoya (Slate, 6/30/15)
• “The Color of Surveillance,” by Alvaro M. Bedoya (Slate, 1/18/16)

Sick of all that parenting advice? Comedian Bryan Hatt shares the do's and don't of uncle-ing, and Matt O'Brien accepts whispers from strangers!

At Wednesday night’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders for praising Fidel Castro in the 1980s, as well as for standing with Central American governments and rebel groups targeted by Ronald Reagan’s brutal covert wars. “You know,” said the former secretary of state, “if the values are that you oppress people, you disappear people, imprison people or even kill people for expressing their opinions, for expressing freedom of speech, that is not the kind of revolution of values that I ever want to see anywhere.”

To defend her remarks, Clinton’s faithful Good Democratic supporters began instantly spouting rhetoric that sounded like a right-wing, red-baiting Cold War cartoon; in other words, these Clinton-defending Democrats sounded very much like this:

Democrats trust a guy who praises Castro & honeymooned in USSR more than Clinton. Says a lot about Clinton & current Dem party #DemDebate

— Reince Priebus (@Reince) March 10, 2016

Vehement opposition to Reagan’s covert wars in Central America, as well as to the sadistic and senseless embargo of Cuba, were once standard liberal positions. As my colleague Jeremy Scahill, observing the reaction of Clinton supporters during the debate, put it in a series of tweets: “The U.S. sponsored deaths squads that massacred countless central and Latin Americans, murdered nuns and priests, assassinated an Archbishop. I bet commie Sanders was even against Reagan’s humanitarian mining of Nicaraguan waters & supported subsequent war crimes judgment vs. U.S. Have any of these Hillarybots heard of the Contra death squads? Or is it just that whatever Hillary says must be defended at all costs? The Hillarybots attacking Sanders over Nicaragua should be ashamed of themselves.”

Let’s pretend for the sake of argument that the horror expressed by Clinton and her supporters over Sanders’s 1980s positions on Latin America was all driven by some sort of authentic outrage over praising tyrants and human rights abusers rather than a cynical, craven tactic to undermine Sanders using long-standing right-wing, red-baiting smears. Is Hillary Clinton a credible voice for condemning support for despots and human rights abusers? To answer that, let’s review much more recent evidence than the 1980s:

Egyptian despot Hosni Mubarak:

Clinton in 2009:

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad:

Clinton on Face the Nation, 2011, arguing that Qaddafi is worse than Assad:

There’s a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer. … There’s a difference between calling out aircraft and indiscriminately strafing and bombing and strafing your own cities, than police actions which frankly have exceeded the use of force that any of us would want to see.

As PolitiFact noted, Clinton phrased the “reformer” comment as something “members of Congress” believe, but it was cited by her in order to favorably compare Assad to Qaddafi: “Clinton’s choice to talk about those members’ opinions of Assad without knocking them down suggests she may have found them credible.”

The Saudi regime:

Clinton in 2011:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

Clinton in 2015:

The right-wing coup government in Honduras

Clinton in 2009:

Gulf tyrannies

Clinton over the last decade:

Clinton as secretary of state:

As International Business Times reported last year, the Clinton-led State Department approved arms sales and transfers to a slew of human-rights-abusing regimes, which also just so happened to have donated large amounts of money to the Clinton Foundation:

The Saudi deal was one of dozens of arms sales approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that placed weapons in the hands of governments that had also donated money to the Clinton family philanthropic empire. … The State Department formally approved these arms sales even as many of the deals enhanced the military power of countries ruled by authoritarian regimes whose human rights abuses had been criticized by the department. Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar all donated to the Clinton Foundation and also gained State Department clearance to buy caches of American-made weapons even as the department singled them out for a range of alleged ills, from corruption to restrictions on civil liberties to violent crackdowns against political opponents.

War criminal and dictator-supporter Henry Kissinger:

Clinton since 2009:

It seems that, overnight, Clinton and her supporters have decided that Sanders’s opposition to Reagan-era wars against Latin American governments and rebel groups — a common liberal position at the time — is actually terribly wrong and something worthy of demonization rather than admiration, because those governments and groups abused human rights. Whatever else one might say about this mimicking of right-wing agitprop, Hillary Clinton for years has been one of the world’s most stalwart friends of some of the world’s worst despots and war criminals, making her and her campaign a very odd vessel for demonizing others for their links to and admiration of human-rights abusers.

Top photo: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton walks with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal upon her arrival to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Feb. 15, 2010.

The post Hillary Clinton, Stalwart Friend of World’s Worst Despots, Attacks Sanders’s Latin American Activism appeared first on The Intercept.

03-12-2016 (Photo: ‪Veterans Occupy D.C. 1932‬) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules Twitter: @BatchelorShow The Bonus Army: An American Epic. by Paul Dickson & Thomas B. Allen. “As Dickson and Allen show throughout this empathetic and well-researched volume, the [Bonus Expeditionary Force] meant different things to a number of groups vying for power in the tumultuous political climate of the early '30s. Communist organizers saw the veterans as the shock troops of the emerging 'American Soviet Government'; the Hoover administration viewed them as mostly 'ex-convicts, persons with criminal records, radicals, and non-servicemen' trying to strong-arm the government; and corporate America saw them as competition for dwindling government aid money. To most Americans, however, they were underdogs fighting the government and the corporate corruption that, in their minds, was responsible for the Depression. The book moves beyond these broad generalizations to find the personal stories of the march, fleshing out both minor and major players surrounding the BEF. And in describing the use of tanks, bayonets and tear gas to expel the unarmed vets and their families from Washington--as well as the deadly mistreatment of BEF members in government work camps after the march--Dickson and Allen highlight the sacrifices these women and men made on our own soil to win fair treatment for veterans of future wars. Their important and moving work will appeal to both professional historians and casual readers interested in the history of America's changing attitudes towards its soldiers.” ―Publishers Weekly http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802777384?ie=UTF8&isInIframe=1&n=283155&redirect=true&ref_=dp_proddesc_0&s=books&showDetailProductDesc=1#iframe-wrapper

After being ignored by presidential debate moderators throughout the entire campaign thus far, climate change finally got some attention at Wednesday night’s Democratic debate. And the topic provoked a surprisingly controversial remark — one accidentally inspired by yours truly.

Hillary Clinton’s response to a climate question included this claim: “The Clean Power Plan is something that Sen. Sanders has said he would delay implementing.”

On its face, that looks to be just plain wrong. Digging deeper, it turns out to be a misleading interpretation of a very different Sanders proposal — one first reported by me.

Remember: Sanders is a strong supporter of climate action, one of the Senate’s most vocal leaders on the issue. He has unveiled a detailed and ambitious climate action platform. And he has praised the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan (CPP), designed to limit carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, and voted against congressional efforts to delay or block it.

After the debate, Politifact, the fact-checking arm of the Tampa Bay Times, asked the Clinton campaign what her source was for the allegation. Much to my surprise, their answer pointed to an article that I wrote. Last month, I reported on steps Sanders would consider taking to limit fracking through executive action. Sanders has called for a ban on fracking, but that would require action by a Congress likely to be controlled at least partly by Republicans, so I asked what he would do if he didn’t have congressional cooperation. Two examples the Sanders campaign staff gave me, among the six that made it into my piece, pertained to the Clean Power Plan: extending the duration of a program under the CPP that gives states emissions credits for renewable energy generation, and regulating methane as well as carbon through the CPP.

The Clinton campaign argues that the latter of those two amounts to a proposal to delay the CPP because it would require revoking the current rule. “Rewriting the Clean Power Plan in the way Sen. Sanders has proposed after the plan has already been finalized would necessarily require a significant delay,” Clinton spokesperson Jesse Ferguson wrote to me in an email. “The inevitable and unfortunate outcome of this proposal from Sen. Sanders as described in your article would be to delay the Clean Power Plan and that is what Hillary Clinton was referencing.”

They are not alone in seeing it this way. After my article came out, some legal scholars wrote blog posts criticizing Sanders on those same grounds. Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at UCLA, finds Sanders’ proposal to be a risky gambit that would not only mean stopping the CPP in its tracks but potentially losing a friendly panel on the D.C. Circuit Court that is currently slated to hear the big legal challenge to the CPP. Carlson writes:

Revising the Clean Power Plan would cause significant delay in its implementation simply because of the procedural requirements of notice and comment (ignoring for a moment the increased controversy it would ignite against an already controversial plan). And delay in reducing greenhouse gas emissions is problematic on at least two fronts: the longer we delay implementation, the more expensive reductions become, and delay makes it more difficult to achieve our Paris commitment to achieve 26 to 28 percent reductions in our emissions by 2025. Sanders would sacrifice these practicalities to get greater reductions in emissions over the long run. He would also probably lose the D.C. Circuit panel of judges currently hearing legal challenges to the CPP, a panel that includes at least two judges likely to accord the administration significant deference in its choice about how to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

This is a valid point. Every major new regulatory requirement EPA imposes requires a public comment period. Carlson also rightly notes that expanding the CPP to cover methane leakage outside the walls of a power plant would exacerbate the plan’s greatest legal liability, which is the way that it regulates the emissions from a state’s whole electricity system rather than just emissions from each individual plant.

But Carlson, Clinton, and other critics are treating Sanders’ proposal as if it were an ironclad promise, rather than one option among many. Sanders’ first-order position is that he will lead a “political revolution” that will change the makeup of Congress and make it possible to pass legislation to rein in fracking and carbon emissions. That would moot the need for the tweaks to the CPP that his campaign mentioned to me. His campaign only came up with the proposal for a CPP expansion in response to my query about what he would do without help from Congress. (Both Carlson and Politifact write, incorrectly, that I interviewed Sanders. I did not and my article contains no quotes from Sanders. Rather, I talked to members of his campaign staff.)

In light of this kerfuffle, I asked the Sanders campaign to respond to the assertion that their idea for CPP expansion amounts to a proposal to delay the plan entirely. They say that, in light of Sanders’ record, it’s silly to interpret his proposed CPP revisions as an automatic delay. If Sanders assumed office and couldn’t get his bill to curtail fracking through Congress, he would look at a broad palette of potential executive actions and weigh their respective costs and benefits. If a Sanders administration determined that expanding the CPP to cover methane would require significantly delaying the rule or threatening its viability, then it just wouldn’t do it.

“Our thinking was to get as much out of the Clean Power Plan as possible, not to impede its progress,” says Karthik Ganapathy, a Sanders campaign spokesman.

The way Clinton phrased her comment at the debate was especially disingenuous. Rather than saying that Sanders has proposed changes to the CPP that would require delaying its implementation — which would be technically defensible — she accused him of simply proposing to delay it, as if that were the whole point. Politifact ultimately found the Clinton campaign’s explanation unpersuasive and rated her statement “False.”

A real policy difference between Clinton and Sanders

Nonetheless, there is more to this story than just the Clinton campaign trying to mislead Democratic primary voters into thinking she is to Sanders’ left on climate change. There is also a real policy disagreement between the candidates. On Wednesday, immediately after claiming Sanders wants to delay the CPP, Clinton said, “We need to implement all of the president’s executive actions and quickly move to make a bridge from coal to natural gas to clean energy.”

Whereas Sanders thinks the current CPP’s implicit promotion of natural gas is a bug, Clinton sees it as a feature. Clinton simply doesn’t agree with Sanders that ramping up natural gas use is something best avoided. Clinton reasons that gas is better than coal: when burned, it emits half as much carbon as coal, and dramatically less conventional pollution.

But environmentalists have been moving away from this view over the last few years as the air and water quality risks of fracking have come to light, as well as the high rate of methane leakage that happens before natural gas gets to power plants. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide in the near term.

Jamie Henn, a spokesperson for 350.org, issued a statement after the debate calling the natural-gas-as-bridge-fuel idea “a concept that even natural gas’ strongest supporters in the environmental community have all but abandoned.” He continued, “I cringed when I heard her mention natural gas as a bridge fuel. Scientists are now clear that natural gas is a bridge to nowhere and that we must move directly and swiftly to 100% renewable energy.”

Clinton would counter that she endorses tight regulation of methane leakage, and that under those and other conditions she would impose, fracking would be very limited. Clinton sees Sanders’ opposition to natural gas as letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Much like her contention that we shouldn’t delay the CPP to strengthen it, Clinton would argue that we need to get off coal right away and renewables aren’t ready to fully take its place, so gas is a fine interim solution.

Climate activists, who mostly lean toward Sanders, increasingly believe that without an economy-wide price on carbon pollution, the only answer is restrict the production of fossil fuels, which will drive up their costs. If renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, the thinking goes, the market will make sure there’s enough clean energy.

Perhaps the most telling thing about Clinton’s comment on Wednesday isn’t about her climate policies at all. It’s that Sanders has her sufficiently nervous and defensive that her campaign is drawing on a little-known writer’s article on an environmental news website to concoct an attack on Sanders that pretends to come from the left. Climate hawks could see this as an ironically good sign. Clinton clearly feels the need to neutralize the threat from Sanders on climate, which means the issue has some salience — at least among Democrats.

Filed under: Climate & Energy, Politics