Wednesday, March 31, 2021
Large consumers blame renewables (largely due to fossil messaging) for 2020 declines in C&I power reliability | Utility Dive
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Tuesday, March 30, 2021
Fwd: March 30, 2021 report
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From: Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>
Date: Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 12:35 AM
Subject: March 30, 2021
To: <mbannerman@tnag.net>
It feels like the banking under the Republican Party from the Trump years is starting to erode. The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, sparked a nationwide fight over police brutality against Black people, with Trump supporters coalescing around the reactionary "Blue Lives Matter" flag. But today's trial of former law enforcement officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd produced damning evidence from six witnesses, who said they were traumatized by what they saw as Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck until he died. Today a federal judge ruled that the non-disclosure agreement the former president required employees to sign is so broad and vague it is unenforceable. There has always been a question of whether public employees can be forced to swear to a vow of secrecy, but Trump's Department of Justice was willing to try to enforce his NDAs. While Trump's lawyers say they disagree with the new ruling and are considering an appeal, this ruling opens the door to more tell-all books about what happened inside the White House during the previous administration. Also today, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that a defamation lawsuit against the former president by former "Apprentice" contestant Summer Zervos could go forward. The suit had been on hold because Trump's lawyers argued that a sitting president could not face legal action. While two previous courts ruled against him, today's decision is from the highest court in New York. It opens up the possibility that Trump will face a deposition in which he could be asked, under oath, about sexual assault accusations. On Friday, former president Trump told the Fox News Channel that his supporters were "hugging and kissing" the law enforcement officers at the Capitol on January 6, but now two U.S. Capitol Police officers have sued the former president for inflaming the insurrectionists on January 6, nearly leading to their deaths. James Blassingame, who has been on the force for 17 years, and Sidney Hemby, who has served for 11 years, blame Trump for the injuries they suffered defending the Capitol. They note his December 19, 2020, tweet in which he told supporters: "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there. Will be wild!" News broke today that Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a major Trump supporter, is being investigated by the Department of Justice for traveling with a 17-year-old girl he paid to accompany him. The probe began during the last administration under Attorney General William Barr, and is linked to a political ally of Gaetz's, Joel Greenberg, a former tax collector in Seminole County, Florida, who last summer was indicted on sex trafficking charges. Greenberg was associated with Trump ally Roger Stone. Gaetz has seemed to flounder since this story broke. He gave an interview on personality Tucker Carlson's show on the Fox News Channel that Carlson himself called "one of the weirdest interviews I've ever conducted." Gaetz's denial of the story seemed quite carefully worded. Then he suggested that he and his family were victims of an extortion scheme from someone associated with the Department of Justice. He insists the investigation is happening because he is a "well-known outspoken conservative," but the probe began under the previous president. Earlier today, Axios broke the story that Gaetz is considering leaving Congress to take a job at Newsmax, the right-wing news outlet. These stories are enough to spell a bad day indeed for supporters of the former president, but there is an even bigger story, broken yesterday by the incomparable Jane Mayer at the New Yorker. While Republicans insist that the For the People Act voting rights act, H.R. 1, is a partisan plan, in fact, a leaked conference call from January 8 between a policy advisor to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and leaders of a number of conservative groups showed the participants' concern that H.R. 1 is quite popular even with Republicans. Across the political spectrum, ordinary Americans especially like its provision to limit the dark money that has flowed into our elections since the 2010 Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission Supreme Court decision, permitting billionaires to buy an election's outcome. In the 2020 federal election cycle, dark-money groups spent more than a billion dollars. More than 654 million came from just fifteen groups, the top of which is connected to McConnell. In February, a Data for Progress poll showed that 68% of likely voters, including 57% of Republicans, like the bill that would staunch the flow of this money. To kill the measure, a research director for an advocacy group run by the Koch brothers said that Senate Republicans would have to use "under-the-dome-type strategies." That is, they would have to leverage congressional rules, like the filibuster, to make sure the bill doesn't pass. —- Notes: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/gaetz-implodes-in-surreal-tucker-carlson-appearance https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/us/politics/matt-gaetz-sex-trafficking-investigation.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/26/politics/donald-trump-january-6-rioters-arrests/index.html https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/30/trump-campaign-non-disclosure-agreement-478648 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/nyregion/trump-defamation-summer-zervos.html
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Washington Post: National Weather Service Internet systems are crumbling as key platforms are taxed and failing
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/03/30/nws-internet-infrastructure-outages/
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Sunday, March 28, 2021
Fwd: March 28, 2021- A history still real and present
From: Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>
Date: Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 12:13 AM
Subject: March 28, 2021
To: <mbannerman@tnag.net>
Since the Civil War, voter suppression in America has had a unique cast. The Civil War brought two great innovations to the United States that would mix together to shape our politics from 1865 onward: First, the Republicans under Abraham Lincoln created our first national system of taxation, including the income tax. For the first time in our history, having a say in society meant having a say in how other people's money was spent. Second, the Republicans gave Black Americans a say in society. They added the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing human enslavement except as punishment for crime and, when white southerners refused to rebuild the southern states with their free Black neighbors, in March 1867 passed the Military Reconstruction Act. This landmark law permitted Black men in the South to vote for delegates to write new state constitutions. The new constitutions confirmed the right of Black men to vote. Most former Confederates wanted no part of this new system. They tried to stop voters from ratifying the new constitutions by dressing up in white sheets as the ghosts of dead southern soldiers, terrorizing Black voters and the white men who were willing to rebuild the South on these new terms to keep them from the polls. They organized as the Ku Klux Klan, saying they were "an institution of chivalry, humanity, mercy, and patriotism" intended "to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States… [and] to aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws." But by this they meant the Constitution before the war and the Thirteenth Amendment: candidates for admission to the Ku Klux Klan had to oppose "Negro equality both social and political" and favor "a white man's government." The bloody attempts of the Ku Klux Klan to suppress voting didn't work. The new constitutions went into effect, and in 1868 the former Confederate states were readmitted to the Union with Black male suffrage. In that year's election, Georgia voters put 33 Black Georgians into the state's general assembly, only to have the white legislators expel them on the grounds that the Georgia state constitution did not explicitly permit Black men to hold office. The Republican Congress refused to seat Georgia's representatives that year—that's the "remanded to military occupation" you sometimes hear about-- and wrote the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution protecting the right of formerly enslaved people to vote and, by extension, to hold office. The amendment prohibits a state from denying the right of citizens to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." So white southerners determined to prevent Black participation in society turned to a new tactic. Rather than opposing Black voting on racial grounds—although they certainly did oppose Black rights on these grounds-- they complained that the new Black voters, fresh from their impoverished lives as slaves, were using their votes to redistribute wealth. To illustrate their point, they turned to South Carolina, where between 1867 and 1876, a majority of South Carolina's elected officials were African American. To rebuild the shattered state, the legislature levied new taxes on land, although before the war taxes had mostly fallen on the personal property owned by professionals, bankers, and merchants. The legislature then used state funds to build schools, hospitals, and other public services, and bought land for resale to settlers—usually freedpeople—at low prices. White South Carolinians complained that members of the legislature, most of whom were professionals with property who had usually been free before the war, were lazy, ignorant field hands using public services to redistribute wealth. Fears of workers destroying society grew potent in early 1871, when American newspaper headlines blasted the story of the Paris Commune. From March through May, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, French Communards took control of Paris. Americans read stories of a workers' government that seemed to attack civilization itself: burning buildings, killing politicians, corrupting women, and confiscating property. Americans worried that workers at home might have similar ideas: in italics, Scribner's Monthly warned readers that "the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society." Building on this fear, in May 1871, a so-called taxpayers' convention met in Columbia, South Carolina. A reporter claimed that South Carolina was "a typical Southern state" victimized by lazy "semi-barbarian" Black voters who were electing leaders to redistribute wealth. "Upon these people not only political rights have been conferred, but they have absolute political supremacy," he said. The New York Daily Tribune, which had previously championed Black rights, wrote "the most intelligent, the influential, the educated, the really useful men of the South, deprived of all political power,… [are] taxed and swindled… by the ignorant class, which only yesterday hoed the fields and served in the kitchen." The South Carolina Taxpayers' Convention uncovered no misuse of state funds and disbanded with only a call for frugality in government, but it had embedded into politics the idea that Black voters were using the government to redistribute wealth. The South was "prostrate" under "Black rule," reporters claimed. In the election of 1876, southern Democrats set out to "redeem" the South from this economic misrule by keeping Black Americans from the polls. Over the next decades, white southerners worked to silence the voices of Black Americans in politics, and in 1890, fourteen southern congressmen wrote a book to explain to their northern colleagues why Democrats had to control the South. Why the Solid South? or Reconstruction and its Results insisted that Black voters who had supported the Republicans after the Civil War had used their votes to pervert the government by using it to give themselves services paid for with white tax dollars. Later that year, a new constitution in Mississippi started the process of making sure Black people could not vote by requiring educational tests, poll taxes, or a grandfather who had voted, effectively getting rid of Black voting. Eight years later, there was still enough Black voting in North Carolina and enough class solidarity with poor whites that voters in Wilmington elected a coalition government of Black Republicans and white Populists. White Democrats agreed that the coalition had won fairly, but about 2000 of them nonetheless armed themselves to "reform" the city government. They issued a "White Declaration of Independence" and said they would "never again be ruled, by men of African origin." It was time, they said, "for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95% of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by Negroes." As they forced the elected officials out of office and took their places, the new Democratic mayor claimed "there was no intimidation used," but as many as 300 African Americans died in the Wilmington coup. The Civil War began the process of linking the political power of people of color to a redistribution of wealth, and this rhetoric has haunted us ever since. When Ronald Reagan talked about the "Welfare Queen (a Black woman who stole tax dollars through social services fraud), when tea partiers called our first Black president a "socialist," when Trump voters claimed to be reacting to "economic anxiety," they were calling on a long history. Today, Republicans talk about "election integrity," but their end game is the same as that of the former Confederates after the war: to keep Black and Brown Americans away from the polls to make sure the government does not spend tax dollars on public services. —- Notes: I don't link to my own books usually, but if anyone is interested, the argument and quotations here are from my second book, "The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North," (Harvard University Press, 2001).
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Giant Vessel Is Now Afloat, Inchcape Says: Suez Update - 450 giant boats backed up
Saturday, March 27, 2021
The Washington Post: Biden administration fires most Homeland Security Advisory Council members
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/homeland-security-advisory-council-fired/2021/03/26/bbbf6a28-8e3f-11eb-9423-04079921c915_story.html
Friday, March 26, 2021
CNN: The 11 most important lines from Liz Cheney's Fox News interview
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/08/politics/liz-cheney-fox-news-sunday-donald-trump/index.html
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
FERC open to revisiting MOPR, as grid operators, utilities mull future of wholesale markets | Utility Dive - spineless weasels on FERC board willing to about-face
Sunday, March 21, 2021
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Saturday, March 20, 2021
NBC News: Miami Beach declares state of emergency over spring break crowds
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/miami-beach-declares-state-emergency-over-spring-break-crowds-n1261673
Wednesday, March 17, 2021
Yahoo Finance: Ford to Let 30,000 Employees Remain at Home Post-Pandemic
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ford-let-30-000-employees-141820262.html
Phys.org: NASA's Juno reveals dark origins of one of Jupiter's grand light shows
https://phys.org/news/2021-03-nasa-juno-reveals-dark-jupiter.html
Tuesday, March 16, 2021
Sunday, March 14, 2021
The New York Times: Tiny Town, Big Decision: What Are We Willing to Pay to Fight the Rising Sea?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/14/climate/outer-banks-tax-climate-change.html
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Saturday, March 13, 2021
Fwd: March 13, 2021 - the situ at the border
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From: Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>
Date: Sun, Mar 14, 2021, 12:02 AM
Subject: March 13, 2021
To: <mbannerman@tnag.net>
Republican pundits and lawmakers are, once again, warning of an immigration crisis at our southern border. Texas governor Greg Abbott says that if coronavirus spreads further in his state, it will not be because of his order to get rid of masks and business restrictions, but because President Biden is admitting undocumented immigrants who carry the virus. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is also talking up the immigration issue, suggesting (falsely) that the American Rescue Plan would send $1400 of taxpayer money "to every illegal alien in America." Right-wing media is also running with stories of a wave of immigrants at the border, but what is really happening needs some untangling. When Trump launched his run for the presidency with attacks on Mexican immigrants, and later tweeted that Democrats "don't care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country," he was tangling up our long history of Mexican immigration with a recent, startling trend of refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras (and blaming Democrats for both). That tendency to mash all immigrants and refugees together and put them on our southern border badly misrepresents what's really going on. Mexican immigration is nothing new; our western agribusinesses were built on migrant labor of Mexicans, Japanese, and poor whites, among others. From the time the current border was set in 1848 until the 1930s, people moved back and forth across it without restrictions. But in 1965, Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act, putting a cap on Latin American immigration for the first time. The cap was low: just 20,000, although 50,000 workers were coming annually. After 1965, workers continued to come as they always had, and to be employed, as always. But now their presence was illegal. In 1986, Congress tried to fix the problem by offering amnesty to 2.3 million Mexicans who were living in the U.S. and by cracking down on employers who hired undocumented workers. But rather than ending the problem of undocumented workers, the new law exacerbated it by beginning the process of guarding and militarizing the border. Until then, migrants into the United States had been offset by an equal number leaving at the end of the season. Once the border became heavily guarded, Mexican migrants refused to take the chance of leaving. Since 1986, politicians have refused to deal with this disconnect, which grew in the 1990s when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) flooded Mexico with U.S. corn and drove Mexican farmers to find work, largely in the American Southeast. But this "problem" is neither new nor catastrophic. While about 6 million undocumented Mexicans currently live in the United States, most of them--78%-- are long-term residents, here more than ten years. Only 7% have lived here less than five years. (This ratio is much more stable than that for undocumented immigrants from any other country, and indeed, about twice as many undocumented immigrants come legally and overstay their visas than come illegally across the southern border.) Since 2007, the number of undocumented Mexicans living in the United States has declined by more than a million. Lately, more Mexicans are leaving America than are coming. What is happening right now at America's southern border is not really about Mexican migrant workers. Beginning around 2014, people began to flee "warlike levels of violence" in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, coming to the U.S. for asylum. This is legal, although most come illegally, taking their chances with smugglers who collect fees to protect migrants on the Mexican side of the border and to get them into the U.S. The Obama administration tried to deter migrants by expanding the detention of families, and made significant investments in Central America in an attempt to stabilize the region by expanding economic development and promoting security. The Trump administration emphasized deterrence. It cut off support to Central American countries, worked with authoritarians to try to stop regional gangs, drastically limited the number of refugees the U.S. would admit, and—infamously—deliberately separated children from their parents to deter would-be asylum seekers. The number of migrants to the U.S. began to drop in 2000 and continued to drop throughout Trump's years in office. Now, with a new administration, the dislocation of the pandemic, and two catastrophic storms in Central America in addition to the violence, people are again surging to the border to try to get into the U.S. In the last month, the Border Patrol encountered more than 100,000 people. They are encouraged by smugglers, who falsely tell them the border is now open. Numbers released on Wednesday show that the number of children and families coming to the border doubled between January and February. The Biden administration is warning them not to come—yet. The Trump administration gutted immigration staff and facilities, while the pandemic has further cut available beds. Most of those trying to cross the border are single adults, and the Biden administration is turning all of them back under a pandemic public health order. (It is possible that the 100,000 number is inflated as people are making repeated attempts.) At the same time, border officials are temporarily holding families to evaluate their claims to asylum, and are also evaluating the cases of about 65,000 asylum seekers forced by the Trump administration to stay in dangerous conditions in Mexico—this backlog is swelling the new numbers. Once the migrants are tested for coronavirus and then processed, they are either deported or released until their asylum hearing. This has apparently led to a number of families being released in communities in Arizona and Texas without adequate clothing or money. In normal times, churches and shelters would step in to help, but the pandemic has shut that aid down to a trickle. Residents are afraid the numbers of migrants will climb, and that they will bring Covid-19. Biden offered federal help to Texas Governor Abbott to test migrants for the coronavirus, but Abbott has refused to take responsibility for testing. (Migrants in Brownsville tested positive at a lower rate than Texas residents.) There is yet another issue: the administration is having a hard time handling the numbers of unaccompanied minors arriving. Their numbers have tripled recently, overwhelming the system, especially in Texas where the state is still digging out from the deep freeze. The children are supposed to spend no more than 72 hours in processing with Border Patrol before they are transferred to facilities overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services while agents search for family members to take the children. But at least in some cases, the kids have been with Border Patrol for as much as 77 hours. Last week, there were more than 3,700 unaccompanied children in Border Patrol facilities and about 8,800 unaccompanied children in HHS custody. The Biden administration is considering addressing this surge by looking for emergency shelters for minors crossing the border, activating the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or placing more HHS staff at the border. It has asked for $4 billion over four years to try to restore stability to the Central American countries hardest hit by violence. Yesterday, the administration announced that HHS would not use immigration status against those coming forward to claim children, out of concern that the previous Trump-era policy made people unwilling to come forward. The Senate has not yet confirmed Biden's nominee to head HHS, Xavier Becerra, who is the son of Mexican immigrants. It is expected to do so next week at the earliest. When he finally takes office, he will have his work cut out for him. —- Notes: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/10/migrants-surge-us-mexico-border-biden https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-asylum-idUSKBN2B419F https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/12/politics/biden-rescinds-trump-immigration-migrants-minors/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/12/politics/biden-rescinds-trump-immigration-migrants-minors/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/11/politics/children-border-patrol-surpasses-3700/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/11/politics/children-border-patrol-surpasses-3700/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/10/us/border-numbers/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/11/politics/children-border-patrol-surpasses-3700/index.html https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2015/11/19/more-mexicans-leaving-than-coming-to-the-u-s/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/us/undocumented-population-study-mexicans.html
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