Let's roll: it's the turn of big banks!

Bill McKibben reminds me of an Old Testament prophet. His decades of arguing and campaigning for action to prevent and mitigate human-caused climate change have often been an unheeded voice in a wilderness of noise.

Except that McKibben, though just as dedicated as those angry ancients, is more forgiving of human foibles. And, as he sees even Joe Manchin forced to take up a bit of the climate struggle (if the current Congressional deal  survives), he wants to make sure credit is distributed where it belongs for what is being described as the best climate bill in thirty years.

Zeitgeist matters ... most of all it was, I think, the widespread public scorn. Somehow it began to break through to Manchin that the only thing history would ever remember about him is that he blocked action on the worst crisis humans have ever faced.

There’s no longer a real public doubt about climate change. Yes, for partisan Republicans it remains fun to pretend it’s a hoax, but after thirty years of science, fifteen years of movement building, and an ever-increasing cascade of fires, floods, heatwaves and droughts, the public mood is finally strong enough to at least begin to match the political power of the fossil fuel industry.

You could feel it building when Bernie made it a key campaign issue in 2016; by 2020, every Democratic candidate was on board, because primary polling showed it was one of the top two issues for voters. The political force most responsible for this victory was the Sunrise Movement; those young people built that wave and then rode it with immense skill.

But this is a win engineered by everyone who ever wrote a letter to the editor, carried a sign at a march, went to jail blocking a pipeline, voted to divest a university endowment, sent ten dollars to a climate group, made their book club read a climate book. It’s for the climate justice activists who brought this fight into whole new terrain, the scientists who’ve protested, the policy wonks who wonked, and the people whose particular fights may have been sacrificed by the terms of this deal. (Them in particular—if Manchin had to deal because a pipeline he wanted was going down in flames, well, the people who made that possible are heroes).

And when this climate package becomes law, McKibben has another direction in which climate activists need to turn our energies:

... the movement now needs to shift more of its attention and vigor from Politics to the other player big enough to matter, Finance. There’s been lots of wonderful work on banks and asset managers, but it’s never had the undivided attention given to politics (in part because it doesn’t have the regularly scheduled elections to drive that focus, though shareholder season in the spring gets a little more notice each year). Taking on the big banks is key (join our Banking on the Future pledge at Third Act if you haven’t already); if you had any doubts, note that it’s the strategy the fossil fuel industry is busily adopting. West Virginia, Texas, et al are trying to intimidate banks to keep lending to Big Carbon; we need the treasurers of blue cities and states (where most of the money lives) to match their game. ...

... I ... thought of the hundreds of thousands of people who have played roles large or small in those divestment campaigns around the world. There’s lots more we can do; we’ve got momentum now, and the best use of momentum is to roll over the opposition.

Listen to Mr. McKibben. He's been a faithful prophet.

Climate catastrophe coming anyone?

We may be in an oven here in Reno, with canvassers out 6 hours a day in 100 degree heat. But at least we're not also in a flood. This was the strip and casinoland in Las Vegas last evening.

Turn your volume up for the full effect.

Las Vegas is under water!  Severe thunderstorms moved through Las Vegas Thursday night causing major flooding in several areas.

Warming makes weather just so much more radical. Monsoon rains in the desert ...

Friday cat blogging

Janeway has had to learn that, at reform school and summer camp, you only get to eat at meal times. She's gotten the hang of it -- and checks out the dishes belonging to her larger comrades when she gets a chance.

A conundrum

Click to enlarge.

Okay naturalists, help me out. What kind of animal is eating or clawing this tree? There's no evidence that it's a animal human -- no sign of ax or saw marks. The tree grows (it's large) on the edge of the duck pond pictured in the blog header. It's one of the largest; none of the others show these marks? And ideas?

What it is really like to work on a campaign: fleeing bed bugs

This was indeed a sunset. And this hotel proved more than the committed, hard-working folks who are UniteHERE union canvassers could bear. They know how a hotel should be run; how cleanliness and customer service matter; how guests should be treated. And this joint failed the hotel worker test, big time. And yes, some people complained of bed bugs.

So, although this interrupts the flow of the campaign, we're all moving nearby. The move may very likely interrupt this blog for a day or so ... but hey, that's what you need to know about campaigns: you should be ready to flex with the flow, whether material or in the political atmosphere. 

Hey, I know something about this. I was working a campaign during the San Francisco earthquake of 1989. A whole city lost its equilibrium for days and there we were with a campaign to win. (We didn't.) But that's another story.

Picture of the new digs -- also temporary and a big step up -- for at least the next two weeks.

Women's work

Perhaps not in history yet to be written, but certainly in this moment, it's the women who are deep-sixing the Donald. Not women I can identify with. Too many thought they could get something by going along with this misogynist, patriarchal boor -- until they couldn't stomach his selfishness and moral cowardice any longer. 

If they are like most women, they had long been willing to give guys they like a little slack about some patriarchal habits -- we live in a society which doesn't make it easy for even good men to be good.

One might have thought Donald Trump exceeded the allowance women make for men a long time ago, but these women determined to follow their own agendas -- until Trump violated not only their own dignity, but the patriotic Constitutionalism in which they found a different loyalty.

Exhibit A is Liz Cheney. That's challenging for anyone who has been paying attention. Her wily political operator dad Dick was the central figure in making the United States a country that tortures its perceived enemies. If that's not a betrayal of any positive vision for this country, I don't know what is.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, Liz Cheney was willing to diss her own sister's lesbian family to stay in tune with the homophobic Republican voters who elect her. Only a year ago, she loudly recanted her past position on NPR:

Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., expressed regret over her earlier opposition to same-sex marriage, a position she took eight years ago that led to a public falling out with her sister, Mary, who is gay and married with children. 

"I was wrong. I was wrong. I love my sister very much. I love her family very much," the lawmaker said in an interview on CBS' 60 Minutes.

I have to wonder: did that moral realization perhaps prepare Cheney to recognize that in the case of the Donald, the only way forward was to do the thing she knows is right. And that she has a lot of women with her.

Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman report:

In the course of exposing Mr. Trump’s elaborate effort to overturn the 2020 election, the House committee has relied on the accounts of several women who came forward to publicly tell their stories. Their statements, and the attacks that ensued, laid bare how women often still pay a higher price than men for speaking up. ...

 The result has been that as the committee unfurls the story of the Jan. 6 attack — playing footage of a mostly male crowd laying waste to the Capitol in Mr. Trump’s name, with the president looking on supportively from the West Wing — many of the witnesses who have emerged most prominently have been women, with Ms. Cheney as their defender. ... Yet while male witnesses have received some criticism from the right — in Mr. Cipollone’s case, Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted that he should “grow a spine & go on record” — the attacks have not been at the same volume or intensity, or of the same degree of personal nastiness, as those against Ms. Hutchinson in particular.

Laura Miller comments with insight at Slate:

Cheney isn’t mad. She’s disappointed. Her demeanor is exactly that of a mom who has been called out of her office in the middle of a work day because her teenage kid is in the principal’s office for pulling some idiotic, illegal, and dangerous prank. She knows that he knows exactly how badly he’s fucked up, that the consequences will be serious and they are inevitable. She will entertain no excuses or evasions or any other form of trifling objection. She mostly wants him to acknowledge what he’s have done, and promise not to do it again. 

But you can only be disappointed in someone who’s capable of better behavior, and that gives Cheney’s reproaches a sting that’s been missing in the often much louder denunciations from Democrats who routinely dismiss Republicans as hopeless deplorables.

I'll give a last word on Cheney (for now) to Marcy Wheeler, never someone who is conned by the ethical shenanigans of opportunists and politicians:

... minutes after saluting the bravery of women like Cassidy Hutchinson, Cheney pivoted to the historical moment of women’s suffrage. 

"In this room, in 1918, the committee on women’s suffrage convened, to discuss and debate whether women should be granted the right to vote. This room is full of history and we on this committee know we have a solemn obligation not to idly squander what so many Americans have fought and died for. ..." 

... as Cheney attempts to convince Republicans that Donald Trump made them betray their patriotism, she is pitching the alternative in distinctly female form. 

Just before she goes home to lose her primary, badly, this woman is committing to coming back in September to continue the work of trying to persuade her fellow conservatives to believe in the truth again.

If I were a Wyoming voter with my convictions, would I switch parties briefly to vote for Liz? Not sure I would. A Cheney is a Cheney. But if I were a person who lived in Wyoming, I might be a Democrat who would make the temporary switch.

What Georgians are seeing

Whoever makes Senator Rafael Warnock's election ads has a wonderful sense of humor -- and smart tactical sense.

Last cycle, Warnock proclaimed how much he loves puppies.

This time around he has to run against Georgia's beloved football hero, Hershel Walker. For fans of the Georgia Bulldogs, the Heisman-winning running back is close to a demi-god. But the Trump-endorsed GOP pick has NO qualifications to be a U.S. Senator. He's a serial domestic abuser whose ex-wife has charged he choked her. He has struggled with a mental health diagnosis of multiple personality disorder. Speaking about gun violence, he's downright incoherent. 

Warnock goes straight at Walker's strength in this ad, bravely making fun of himself on Walker's athletic turf. Warnock insists he is the Senator the people of the state need, one who is representing Georgians. 

It's a strong ad and Warnock is a fine comedic performer.

Graciousness abounds

People I've never seen before and most likely will never see again have been doing me unlooked for kindnesses lately.

One day I dropped my phone while clambering into the car. A guy who works down the street picked it up and left me a note, saving my vital tool and much of my sanity.

Here in Reno, I walk briskly around what we call "the duck pond" in the cool of the morning. See the blog header for a glimpse of this lovely place. Because the path runs right next to townhouses, I figured as a courtesy to reduce clicking noises, I'd put rubber tips on the trekking poles I use to get velocity.

But the path also runs over several wooden bridges and I quickly lost the new tips to the cracks. A day or so later, another walker stopped to ask me: "did you lose some tips from your canes?"

"I sure did." He reached in his pocket and handed over the tips which he must have found at two different ends of the pond. He'd pocketed them hoping to meet the walker. It was a lovely moment.

The skies of this desert place put me in mind of the kindness and glory of the Creator almost every day. (The motel below, our temporary home, is not such a pleasure, but it grounds the photo and the hard pressed staff do their best, despite a shortage of people to do the work.)

 

The splendor of the daytime skies equals the drama of the sunsets.

Such splendor all around, as we labor on this campaign to keep Nevada blue.

What it's really like to work on a campaign: mastering the tech

Talking with voters -- persuading them that your candidates are the right ones -- is a very high skill. Nothing less than thousands of real conversations works. Training and practice help.

But nowadays, in any big operation, some amount of computer fluency is also a big part of campaigning.

• Voter databases, ultimately derived from each state's voter rolls, usually enhanced by various criteria including  voting history and political party registration, make it possible to target people who need the extra shove of a human interaction from a canvasser. Maintaining and distributing those databases is the mysterious and wonderful work of campaign "data nerds."

• The canvassers using this data to guide their steps to the voters encounter the information in dedicated data applications on tablets or, in a pinch, on their smart phones. Voter list applications have gotten better and better. Still, canvassers are confronted by an unfamiliar interface of varying clarity. First they need to get into the current app; access is sometimes the initial hurdle depending on app, equipment, and canvasser ingenuity. 

Then they have to understand how they are supposed to mark the various options presented by the scripts which the app presents. Simple questions present themselves: "How am I supposed to mark it if there is nobody home?" "What if the house has been condemned?" "What if she said she'd vote for one of our candidates but hates another?" The possibilities are legion and never entirely resolved. Canvassers learn over time to be more fluent at using the app to convey to the data nerds the valuable information their conversations yield.

• And using the canvassing app is not the only computer skill demanded of contemporary canvassers. We still have to worry about COVID, so canvassers have to sign into a Google form every day and report whether they have any symptoms. We don't want to be pandemic spreaders.

• And team leaders need to stay in touch with their canvassers. Text messages and meeting place announcements fly about all day!

Our folks come in all kinds. Most work in the hotel and restaurant industries that their union UniteHERE/Culinary Workers organizes. Others are ordinary individuals glad to take on a hard job to defeat Republicans. Some are happy, ingenious geeks, taking to the tech delightedly. Some find the technology daunting: they may be highly sophisticated chefs in a banquet hall kitchen or casino, but this computer stuff is new and confusing. 

Everybody learns a lot, the digitally comfortable trying to help their comrades and the digitally anxious living on the internet for the first time. That's what working on a campaign is like.

This campaign still has paid places available. Anyone looking for meaningful work struggling against the Right from now to November should check out this link and apply to join the campaign!

Friday cat blogging

 

Isn't she just the queen of all she surveys? Her beauty carries her far. And excuses a lot of feline terrorism. Janeway is taking to her sojourn at summer camp.

And to her new friend Rich who seems to enjoy this new boarder in his many-critter household.

The world heats up -- and the US is AWOL

The fire in our time burns all around Europe. Not so much in northern California yet this year, where we've become somewhat used to seasons of flame. But we all know fire is coming. Meanwhile, across "old Europe," this.

Scene from Spain

In a Berlin international confab, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres spoke the obvious truth:

“Half of humanity is in the danger zone from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction,” Guterres said in a video message to the assembled leaders on Monday. 

“What troubles me most is that, in facing this global crisis, we are failing to work together as a multilateral community. Nations continue to play the blame game instead of taking responsibility for our collective future. We cannot continue this way,” Guterres said. 

“We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”

Yet here in the United States, the Biden climate agenda is stalled, unlikely to be resurrected against unanimous Republican obstruction and a political class captured by fossil fuel kleptocrats. We're not getting done what must be done. The United States acts as an impediment to what the peoples of the world need.

It is worth putting our failure in a global context as well as a domestic one. Here's what that wise economic historian Adam Tooze has to say about the inability of Congress to move on climate:

Reading the commentary ... you would be forgiven for thinking that it implied a death warrant for the world. But such exaggerations reflect the shock of the moment rather than clear-headed analysis of America’s actual influence on world affairs in 2022. 

There may once have been a moment, in the 1990s perhaps, where global climate politics really did revolve around the battles in Washington DC. But today that is a deeply anachronistic view. America’s share of global emissions is less than 14 percent, half that of China, and its share is falling year by year. 

Of course, a world with a cooperative, United States committed to the energy transition would be a better world. Trump showed how the US can anchor an anti climate coalition. 

But even with an obstructive United States, the energy transition in Europe and large parts of Asia has a momentum that will carry it forward regardless. ...

As far as the world is concerned it merely confirms the fact that the US is an unreliable partner in the energy transition and has an in-built and profound structural bias towards fossil fuels. 

The collapse of Build Back Better is bad news, above all, for America itself. ...

It's not as if large majorities of people in this country don't understand a roasting planet will hurt us all and should be avoided as much as we are able. But the other emergencies of our lives -- rising prices, inadequate wages, scarcity of affordable housing, assaults on women's freedom -- crowd out our ability to focus on making politicians do what needs to be done. 

We aren't getting answers from the political class. I guess we have to be the political class; we must engage with every lever left in this flawed democracy to force the system to serve us all.

One of my heroines

 

Well, I'be darned. My (courtesy) niece took the cause of women and girls who have lost their constitutional right to abortions to Congress yesterday. You go, girl!

Check out the organization she founded and leads:

We Testify is an organization dedicated to the leadership and representation of people who have abortions, increasing the spectrum of abortion storytellers in the public sphere, and shifting the way the media understands the context and complexity of accessing abortion care. We Testify invests in abortion storytellers to elevate their voices and expertise, particularly those of color, those from rural and conservative communities, those who are queer-identified, those with varying abilities and citizenship statuses, and those who needed support when navigating barriers while accessing abortion care.

We Testify unapologetically believes that people who have abortions are our future. We believe that everyone who has abortions deserves unconditional love and support. We believe that people who have abortions deserve to be in every space where decisions are being made. To borrow from the disability justice movement, there should be nothing about us without us. We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.

We who love her are so proud! And ready to carry on the fight!

As in Texas, so throughout the country

 

These women aren't going to let a bunch of old, white Republican dudes steal our hope for a just, improving country. 

This is one everyone needs to see.

"The Drug War is back on in San Francisco."

In the midst of the Trump presidency, Adam Server summed that regime up: "The cruelty is the point." 

San Francisco may have hated Trump, but the yawning gap between our rich high flyers and our increasingly hard-pressed poor and working class residents has made us ripe for our own adoption of urban cruelty. In this post-pandemic time (is the pandemic really over?), we're suckers for apparent "solutions" to squalor on the streets -- "solutions" that aim to sweep away people and pain we don't want to see. This is what we are getting in our angry frustration.

A lightly edited thread from Peter Calloway (@petercalloway), a San Francisco public defender, reports what he is seeing.

The Drug War is officially back on in San Francisco. For the first time in years, people are being prosecuted for simply using drugs or possessing paraphernalia. It’s hard to fully comprehend the harm this will cause. I’ll try to lay it out below. 

First, a bit of background. For a long time, San Francisco has generally declined to use armed government agents to enforce restrictions on what ppl can put in their bodies or hold in their hands. 

That’s because prosecuting drug users (and dealers, for that matter) goes against all available science and evidence on how to reduce drug use. You cannot arrest and imprison your way out of it. That’s been tried before—repeatedly, across the country, for decades. Does not work. 

As a nation, we’ve spend hundreds of billions of $$ over decades trying this approach. What do we have to show for it? More people in prison and jail than any other country in the history of the world. Entire communities devastated. Generational trauma. Incalculable suffering. 

The new DA, Brooke Jenkins, posed as a progressive while she was jockeying to be appointed to the office once the former DA, Chesa Boudin, was recalled with her help. It didn’t take long for her to show her true colors. 

In the first week, she essentially disbanded units in the office responsible for things like undoing wrongful convictions, prosecuting cops for murder and excessive force, and sharing with the public all the data on who the office prosecutes, for what, and what outcome. 

Now, she’s started charging people for possessing substances the government says it’s a crime to have, and for having paraphernalia. This will dramatically increase the number of arrests in San Francisco and likely cause the jail population to explode. 

Many people will remain in jail while they await trial because they can’t afford to pay money bail to be released (Jenkins announced she would again use money bail in this way). 

When the Drug War is on, even the best-intentioned wellness check can lead to violence.

People will be beaten by the police. Some may be killed. These outcomes are inevitable when increasing # of police contacts. 

Families will be separated. Undocumented immigrants will be deported, where they may face violence in their home country after prolonged detention in horrific immigration facilities. Many, many more people will experience the trauma of being shackled and caged. 

And consistent with SFPD’s well-documented track record, this will happen disproportionately to people of color, and exclusively to poor people. 

But never fear, Jenkins has hired an all-female management team. Supporters will point to this, and to the fact that she is a Black and Latina woman, to justify, excuse, or ignore the harm she will directly cause to Black and Latinx and poor people. That’s like saying we should support Clarence Thomas because he is Black, or Amy Coney Barrett because she’s a woman. ... 

... And watch, Jenkins and her office will couch their cruel and failed Drug War offensive in the language of compassion. They’ll say they want drug users to get help. That is false. What they are doing is utterly inconsistent with helping anyone. 

Are they going to house people? Address trauma and poverty? Of course not. Remember, this is about wanting to hide from public view the consequences of enforcing their extractive utopia. Mayor Breed made that clear in what should have been a scandal here. ... 

... San Francisco was far from perfect. Like anywhere, people suffer every day here because they are poor. The racial disparities in our criminal legal system are among the worst. But we have regressed immensely in just a matter of days. Things will almost certainly get worse.

Is this the city we San Franciscans want? I know we're tired and angry. But the city of St. Francis can do better.

A tale of two terrorists

Jessica Reznicek is doing long prison time.

In 2021 she was sentenced to 8 years in prison with a domestic terrorism enhancement. ... Under normal conditions Jess would have been sentenced to 37 months, but the terrorism enhancement resulted in a sentence of 96 months.

The Des Moines Register unsympathetically describes her offense. Along with another woman, she

... repeatedly vandalized construction sites connected to the 1,172-mile [oil] pipeline in 2016 and 2017, setting a bulldozer on fire and using oxy-acetylene torches to damage pipeline valves across Iowa. The total cost of the damage is not known, but in one incident in Buena Vista County alone it was estimated at $2.5 million.

Nobody was hurt. Her protest damaged a corporation's bottom line and delayed the Dakota Access Pipeline much less than she, or many of us, would wish.

This tar sands oil pipeline could pollute the water supply of much of the Mississippi River Basin.

And more enhancements to the oil supply is the last thing any of us need in the era of climate change. 

Reznicek did not try to hide from the feds when they came after her. This was classic civil disobedience.

But to a federal judge thinks she's a "terrorist" and sentenced her accordingly.

• • •

Meanwhile Heather Cox Richardson reports that in Washington, D.C., the courts are confronted by an offender who sure seems to me a better fit for the "terrorist" label.

... the Department of Justice requested that the first defendant from the January 6 insurrection to be convicted at trial, Guy Reffitt, be sentenced to 15 years in prison. This is an upward adjustment of sentencing guidelines because the department is asking the judge to consider Reffitt’s actions as terrorism, since the offense for which he was convicted “was calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct.”  

Reffitt was a leader of the Texas Three Percenters militia gang, which calls for “rebellion” against the federal government. He came to Washington, D.C., for January 6. He attacked U.S. Capitol Police officers and encouraged others to do so before entering the Capitol armed with a handgun, where he targeted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).  

A camera on his helmet recorded Reffitt’s words that day. “I’m taking the Capitol with everybody f*cking else,” Reffitt told the people around him. “We’re all going to drag them m*therf*ckers out kicking and screaming. I don’t give a sh*t. I just want to see Pelosi’s head hit every f*cking stair on the way out. (Inaudible) F*ck yeah. And Mitch McConnell too. F*ck ‘em all. They f*cked us too many g*dd*mn years for too f*cking long. It’s time to take our country back. I think everybody’s on the same d*mn wavelength. And I think we have the numbers to make it happen…. [W]e’ve got a f*cking president. We don’t need much more. We just get rid of them m*therf*ckers and start over.” 

Afterward, he boasted, “We took the Capital [sic] of the United States of America and we will do it again.”

Now that's one scary guy. Prison is no good for anyone, But there are sure a lot of us who don't want him near by.

What it is really like to work on a campaign: training

A winning political campaign is not a crowd of people running around hollering about their candidates. It's meticulous work to identify and talk with potential supporters and record their responses, so we will know who we must encourage to vote in November.

And having those conversations isn't a kind of magic. It's a learned skill. A very high skill indeed, in my opinion. So door knockers practice and then practice some more, refining their raps. 

And then canvassers need to learn how to record the information on tablet computers. This should be simple, but as we all know, with electronic gadgets, there is a learning curve.

So this is the work we're learning to do here in the middle of July in Las Vegas and Reno. Nobody does a better job of training for campaigns as a kind of organizing than UniteHERE/Culinary workers. It's a pleasure to see this done well.

Anyone looking for meaningful, hard, paid work from now to November should check out this link and sign up to join us! This is a special learning experience. You can do this and help save the country from greedy Republican bosses.

Friday cat blogging

Las Vegas, where I've been being trained for the last couple of days, is too darn hot (112° F) to be out midday -- though our election canvassers will be. They are brave and determined.

But as dusk fell, this beauty stretched out on a tiny patch of green stuff ...

Four California U.S. Congress seats that might be up for grabs

While I was getting my hair cut the other day to prepare for roasting in Nevada, another customer began talking about the upcoming midterm elections. (Okay, I prompted a bit.) A transplant from Phoenix, Arizona to San Francisco, she allowed as how there's nothing to work on around here. Now that's not quite true, but I could see how moving in from a battleground state might leave her feeling out of the fight politically. 

And that reminded me that I want to post, courtesy of Dan Walters at CalMatters, a little about the few U.S. Congressional contests in California that could be highly significant.  Walters' words with my commentary in italics:

—Republican Mike Garcia, a former fighter pilot, defeated Christy Smith, a Democratic assemblywoman, in a special election for a congressional seat in Los Angeles’ northern suburbs in 2020. He then eked out a 333-vote win over Smith for a full term later that year, despite a 7.5% Democratic voter registration edge. Garcia hopes his third matchup with Smith this year will also be a charm, but the new 27th Congressional District has a 12%-plus Democratic voter margin, making him decidedly more vulnerable. What a marathon battle those two have had! The new district could be a very necessary Democratic pick up. 

—Katie Porter, a Democratic congresswoman from Orange County who has acquired a high national political profile, won her Irvine-centered district despite its slight Republican voter registration margin and her new district (CD 47) now has a slight Democratic edge, which should make re-election easier. However, Republican challenger Scott Baugh, a former assemblyman and current Orange County GOP chairman, is a formidable fundraiser whose hopes ride on Biden’s unpopularity. We need to keep Porter's white board out there. She's a hell of an asset, an Elizabeth Warren in the making, on the younger side of the necessary generational transition in our politics. 

—Hanford Republican David Valadao has been elected and re-elected by San Joaquin Valley voters despite a lopsided Democratic voter registration advantage. His newly redrawn, three-county district (CD 22) favors Democrats by more than 17 percentage points but Valadao hopes that his independent image — he was one of 10 Republican House members who voted to impeach Trump — will save him again. Having overcome stiff primary challenges from two other GOP candidates, Valadao now faces Rudy Salas, a Democratic assemblyman from Kern County, who counts on a high turnout of Latino voters to flip the seat. Dems keep coming up short against David Valadao. He's enjoyed districts where Democrats just don't bother to vote except in presidential years. Yet they have the registration numbers to win the seat -- again, a very necessary Democratic pick up for the next Congress. 

—Democrat Mike Levin has won two terms in Congress from a coastal region — northern San Diego County and southern Orange County — that was long a Republican stronghold, but the very slight Democratic voter registration edge of his redrawn district (CD 49) fuels Republican hopes of a win if national trends invade the turf. Former San Juan Capistrano Mayor Brian Maryott beat four other Republican hopefuls for the right to take on Levin. This one could be tough to hold. This is a rematch from the 2020 election in which Levin defeated Maryott with 53 percent of the vote.

My new friend at the hair salon isn't likely to throw herself into helping in any of these California contests. But as we talked, she mentioned that she'd been talking to her son just the other day; he seemed so disillusioned with politics. He did the voting thing the last time and what did it get him? She realized she did have something she can do: she can make sure her son and every one of his friends DO turnout in November.

That's how winning midterms will come about: thousands of conversations that help voters move beyond discouragement.

Inflation blues ...

Inflation is scary. When prices go up, we all wonder, "will I be able to afford gas? should I buy hot dogs instead of hamburger?" To most of us, inflation means mostly the higher prices we pay every day. But to a small business, inflation means a major disruption in the ecosystem in which they strive to survive.  

Here's how a wonderful, small, creative business run by women with which I've had past dealings describes what inflation looks like to them. It's one of the clearer descriptions of an economic phenomenon I've ever read. Give it a read.

• Small business miseries

Our world has been on a very wild ride since the start of 2020. Our latest woe is inflation. 

Here at [our little business], we are also struggling with inflation. 

Inflation is a two-sided coin for a good business. We must keep our employee's wages up to combat their struggle with purchasing. ... we are doing our best to ensure our employee's economic welfare. 

The other side of the coin is a business's need to purchase goods and services to run said business. Those costs are figured into the prices of a product. When expenses go up, the cost of a product goes up.   

If every business raises the cost of their products, there is a cascade effect on the entire economy. It's a crazy cycle that can drive the economy into a tailspin. 

Our raw materials are more expensive. The services we use, especially shipping, are more expensive. And our wages are through the roof. Yet for the next six months, we are going to hold the prices of our quilts where they are. 

We are willing to forgo profits and break even for the next six months to see what happens to the overall economy. 

We hope we don't need a huge price increase in January. But the inflation rate is over 8% right now. 

[Finally, here's the pitch:] If you are considering having a Too Cool T-shirt quilt, this is the time!

Yes, I'm reproducing their ad here, because they deserve the publicity for the lucidity with which they explain what can feel like a mysterious, evil force of nature. 

• • •

• People protecting themselves

And here's one of my favorite economic writers, Adam Tooze, offering some home truths about what inflation and economic policy responses means to workers and our societies. Like the small business owners, he too is realistic.

The BIS [Bank for International Settlements] may be of the view that on welfare and social justice grounds, low-inflation regimes dominate higher inflation regimes. But it nowhere spells out that argument. If that assumption does not hold, then favoring a low-inflation regime implies a distributional and a political choice. 

And, more fundamentally, to view social and economic power, strictly from the point of view of price and wage setting is reductive. Indeed, it is reductive to view those institutions simply from the point of view of distribution. 

Institutions of collective bargaining are not merely mechanisms for wage and price setting. One may value collective bargaining institutions in their own right, as complex articulations of social reality and as places where solidarity finds organized expression. One may value them as expressions of alternative visions of social balance. Up to the 1980s, organized labour was the backbone of social democratic politics and a partner of liberalism in the fashioning of democracy in capitalist societies. 

Trade unions and structures of collective bargaining at all levels mattered not only because they counterbalanced elite power, but also because they gave intelligent and articulate expression to working-class grievances. They framed inequality in terms of social realities rather than imaginary enemies. Historically they did so in direct opposition to other forms of popular political mobilization - like fascism, for example. In recent decades it is not implausible to suggests that the rise of working-class support for nationalist populism is directly related to the decay of those collective institutions of labour organization. ...

Yes -- strong unions should help workers navigate turbulent economic seas with some hope of stability and safety. This is a moment in which unions making a comeback -- looking at you Amazon and Starbucks workers -- can breathe new energy into our struggling democracy.

On climate, thinking local

It's all too easy to feel hopeless about curbing carbon emissions. The Supreme Court seems to be suggesting it won't let the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) do its job of reducing the amount of carbon we're pushing into the atmosphere. But even if the feds can't do much, states and cities can do a lot.

And Nevada is no slouch at adopting measures to mitigate climate change. Here's an argument from The Nevada Independent by Frank Fritz, a professor at the law school at UNLV, for local sustainability measures.

Clark County [Las Vegas] — and Nevada’s other urban areas — can take a big step forward by adopting a new and extremely promising kind of local law, called building performance standards. Clark County and other urban areas should start developing these laws now and adopt them as soon as possible. We should urge our local representatives (county commissioners, city council) to do so. 

Buildings produce the most greenhouse gas in Clark County (42 percent of the total) and Reno (66 percent of the total). State and local laws usually govern buildings; federal laws usually don’t.  

Building performance standards can help us save water, energy and money; reduce greenhouse gas emissions; avoid the worst consequences of climate change; and help businesses thrive. Reno adopted an early version of building performance standards in 2019....

The idea behind these standards fits well with Nevada's libertarian streak. In this model, cities establish standards and timelines -- it's up to builders and owners to figure out how to meet them.

 

And building performance standards needn't only be about reducing carbon emissions; such plans can also save water, the state's pressing emergency.