AROUND NEW HAMPSHIRE
1. Upcoming Event
[Please note that the entire cost of the ticket is going to the Plymouth Area Democrats. This is not a fundraiser for the Clinton campaign. ]
Dear Plymouth Area Dems: If you plan to attend our 10th Anniversary Event, please print out this email, fill in the bottom, cut it off at the dotted line and mail it with your check to Barbara Fahey
2. Jobs, Opportunities, and Protecting the Environment
Clean Power Plan can drive innovation
by Julia Fox Gorte, nhbr.com, September 4, 2015
We’re likely to hear a lot more in the near future about the economic peril presented by the Clean Power Plan. Much of it will be nonsense.
Tackling climate change has been an economic driver for businesses and investors throughout New England. The final version of the Clean Power Plan, released in August by the Environmental Protection Agency, is a groundbreaking approach to limit carbon pollution from existing power plants, the single largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the United States.
The Clean Power Plan provides an opportunity for New Hampshire businesses and investors to continue to innovate and build a clean energy economy that creates jobs and economic growth.
As members of the investment community, we see the trend toward a clean economy as an investment opportunity. That is why Pax World Management LLC has joined nearly 50 investors managing $800 billion in assets in supporting the creation of these proposed regulations and calling on states like New Hampshire to continue to work with the EPA to reduce carbon emissions.
By tackling climate change, we are addressing a major risk to the economy and to the investments of individuals and institutions around the country. Increased frequency of severe storms, sea level rise, floods and warmer temperatures are just some of the changes that will affect all aspects of the supply chain. Moreover, we are avoiding the cost of inaction, which will likely be in the trillions of dollars by the end of the century in a business-as-usual scenario.
The plan is not just about reducing risks. It is also about creating economic opportunities. Proposed carbon pollution standards will help states scale up solutions we already know work to lower emissions, and that helps the economy and creates jobs. Already, there are twice as many workers in solar power as there are coal miners.
Each state will tailor its plan to the policies, industries and practices unique to it. New Hampshire is already on target to tackle climate change and invest in renewable energy. In 2007, the state passed the Renewable Portfolio Standard, and in 2005 New Hampshire joined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the first market-based regulatory program in the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
RGGI and the RPS have helped to create jobs, spur innovation and attract investments. With the increased development of solar, wind and biomass energy, we are on the path toward reaching the goal of 24.8 percent of all energy produced from renewable sources by 2025.
New Hampshire businesses like Stonyfield, Timberland, SustainX and Worthen Industries are addressing climate change, while increasing revenues.
The Carbon Disclosure project reports that an index of companies considered leaders in addressing climate risks and opportunities outperformed the Bloomberg World Index between 2010 and 2014. These businesses show investors and policymakers that we can grow the economy and reduce emissions.
The EPA has crafted a flexible means for states to reduce emissions from power plants, including through existing energy efficiency and renewable energy measures. The significant carbon emission reductions that have already taken place in New Hampshire and the other states that are part of the RGGI program will form the basis for meeting the additional carbon reduction targets moving forward.
The Clean Power Plan provides an opportunity for New Hampshire to control its own energy destiny while meeting the challenge of climate change by developing an innovative plan to maximize carbon emissions reductions through a range of clean energy solutions. The investments we make in our future will create jobs and investment opportunities, while protecting human health and the environment.
AND NATIONALLY
3. Off-Kilter
What Happened to the Moral Center of American Capitalism?
by Robert Reich, robertreich.org, September 4, 2015
An economy depends fundamentally on public morality; some shared standards about what sorts of activities are impermissible because they so fundamentally violate trust that they threaten to undermine the social fabric.
It is ironic that at a time the Republican presidential candidates and state legislators are furiously focusing on private morality – what people do in their bedrooms, contraception, abortion, gay marriage – we are experiencing a far more significant crisis in public morality.
We’ve witnessed over the last two decades in the United States a steady decline in the willingness of people in leading positions in the private sector – on Wall Street and in large corporations especially – to maintain minimum standards of public morality. They seek the highest profits and highest compensation for themselves regardless of social consequences.
CEOs of large corporations now earn 300 times the wages of average workers. Wall Street moguls take home hundreds of millions, or more. Both groups have rigged the economic game to their benefit while pushing downward the wages of average working people.
By contrast, in the first three decades after World War II – partly because America went through that terrible war and, before that, the Great Depression – there was a sense in the business community and on Wall Street of some degree of accountability to the nation.
It wasn’t talked about as social responsibility, because it was assumed to be a bedrock of how people with great economic power should behave.
CEOs did not earn more than 40 times what the typical worker earned. Profitable firms did not lay off large numbers of workers. Consumers, workers, and the community were all considered stakeholders of almost equal entitlement. The marginal income tax on the highest income earners in the 1950s was 91%. Even the effective rate, after all deductions and tax credits, was still well above 50%.
Around about the late 1970s and early 1980s, all of this changed dramatically. The change began on Wall Street. Wall Street convinced the Reagan administration, and subsequent administrations and congresses, to repeal regulations that were put in place after the crash of 1929 – particularly during the Roosevelt administration – to prevent a repeat of the excesses of the 1920s.
As a result of that move towards deregulation, we saw a steady decline in standards – a race to the bottom – on Wall Street and then in executive suites. In the 1980s we had junk bond scandals combined with insider trading. In the 1990s we had the beginnings of a speculative binge culminating in the dotcom bubble. Sad to say, under the Clinton administration the Glass-Steagall Act – that had been part of the banking act of 1933, separating investment banking from commercial banking – was repealed.
In 2001 and 2002 we had Enron and the corporate looting scandals. Not only did this reveal the dark side of executive behaviour among some of the most admired companies in America – Enron had been listed among the nation’s most respected companies before that time – but also the complicity of Wall Street. Wall Street traders were actively involved in the Enron travesty. And then, of course, we had all of the excesses leading up to the crash of 2008.
II
Where has the moral center of American capitalism disappeared? Wall Street is back to its same old tricks. Greg Smith, a vice-president of Goldman Sachs, has accused the firm of putting profits before clients. Almost every other Wall Street firm is doing precisely the same thing and they’ve been doing it for years.
The Dodd-Frank bill was an attempt to rein in Wall Street, but Wall Street lobbyists have almost eviscerated that act and have been mercilessly attacking the regulations issued. Republicans have not even appropriated sufficient money to enforce the shards of the act that remain.
The Glass-Steagall Act must be resurrected. There has to be a limit on the size of big banks. The current big banks have to be broken up using anti-trust laws, as we broke up the oil cartels in the early years of the 20th century.
We’ve got to put limits on executive pay and have a much more progressive income tax so that people who are earning tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year are paying at a rate that they paid before 1981, which is at least 70% at the highest marginal level.
We also need to get big money out of politics.
These changes can’t come about unless we have campaign finance reform that provides public financing in general elections and a constitutional amendment that reverses the grotesque decision of the Supreme Court at the start of 2010, in a case called “Citizens United versus the Federal Election Commission.”
None of this is possible without an upsurge in the public at large – a movement that rescues our democracy and takes back our economy. One can’t be done without the other. Our economy and democracy are intertwined. Much the same challenge exists in Europe and Japan and elsewhere around the world, where systems profess to combine capitalism and democracy.
Massive inequality is incompatible with robust democracy. Today, in the United States, the top 1% is taking home more than 20% of total income and owns at least 38% of total wealth. The richest 400 people in America have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans put together.
As we’ve already seen in this Republican primary election, a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people can virtually control the election result – not entirely, but have a huge impact. That’s not a democracy. As the great American jurist and Supreme Court associate justice Louis Brandeis once said: “We can have huge wealth in the hands of a relatively few people or we can have a democracy. But we can’t have both.”
4. A Bad Year at the Next Supreme Court Term?
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The Coming Liberal Disaster at the Supreme Court
by Jeffrey Toobin, newyorker.com, September 1, 2015
The beleaguered liberals on the Supreme Court had a great deal to celebrate in the term that ended in June. Two epic cases, and even some lesser ones, went their way. In Obergefell v. Hodges, the Justices ruled, five to four, that all fifty states must recognize same-sex marriages. And in King v. Burwell, the Court, by a vote of six to three, dismissed a challenge to the Affordable Care Act that might have, as a practical matter, destroyed the law. A surprising victory in a housing-discrimination case and another where the Court allowed limits on judges’ soliciting campaign contributions completed a major run of progressive victories.
Don’t expect the streak to last. The liberals’ big victories last term arose from a very particular set of circumstances. Justice Anthony Kennedy has displayed a consistent respect for the rights of gay people, which made his alliance with the four liberals (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan) on same-sex marriage almost a foregone conclusion. In King v. Burwell, a group of conservative legal activists pushed such a transparently fraudulent claim about the text of the Obamacare law that Chief Justice John Roberts and Kennedy (who are no fans of the law) had to reject the claim.
But the conservatives on the Court are poised for a comeback, and the subjects before the Justices appear well suited for liberal defeats. Consider:
Affirmative action. The Chief Justice has been primed to get rid of any kind of racial preferences since he took office, a decade ago. In 2013, in Fisher v. University of Texas, the Justices essentially kicked the issue of affirmative action in college admissions down the road. Lower courts upheld the Texas plan, which allows an extremely limited use of racial diversity in admissions. Now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case a second time—an unusual step in itself. It’s hard to imagine that the Justices reached out for this case again simply to preserve the status quo. A decision limiting—or eliminating—racial preferences in admissions seems highly likely.
Abortion. After the Republican landslides in the 2010 midterm elections, more than a dozen states tightened their restrictions on abortion. No state banned abortion altogether, but several came close. Some have banned abortion after the twentieth week of pregnancy, and others have imposed requirements on clinics that make them virtually impossible to operate. (For example, the laws require that doctors who provide abortions must have admitting privileges at local hospitals; they also impose on clinics the building standards of ambulatory surgical centers.) In Texas, the new rules would require all but nine abortion providers in the state to close their doors. It’s true that, in June, five Justices (the liberals plus Kennedy) issued a stay, preventing the law from going into effect; but Kennedy has favored limits on abortion in recent years, and there is every reason to believe he will support these new ones, too.
Public-employee unions. At the end of June, the Justices agreed to decideFriedrichs v. California; it could sharply limit the power of public-employee unions, which have been bulwarks of support for Democratic office-holders. In states like California, public employees who choose not to join a union must still pay the equivalent of dues (“fair share” fees) when the union negotiates their contracts. If the challengers win this case, the unions may lose millions of dollars in revenue, with a consequent loss of power. Since public-employee unions have done so much better than private-sector unions in recent years, that would hurt the union movement as a whole in an especially vulnerable place. The campaign against fair-share fees has been a special crusade for Justice Samuel Alito, and he may kill them off for good this time.
There is not yet a major campaign-finance case before the Justices, but in an election year it would be no surprise to see one surface. The conservative majority, led in this case by Kennedy, has shown no sign of backing away from its Citizens United decision, from 2010, which said that campaign contributions are a form of free speech. On the rights of criminal suspects, especially those sentenced to death, the Court remains deeply conservative as well. It only underscores the magnitude of the liberal victories in 2015 to recognize that they may seem deeply aberrational in 2016.
5. Trending: 14 Months Out
Moody's Election Model Sees Blue Wave Forming
by J.P. Green, thedemocraticstrategist.org, September 1, 2015
All of the usual caveats about it being too early to discern meaningful political trends for the 2016 general election notwithstanding, Moody's Election Model has some very good news for Democrats. From Ryan Sweet's "Democrats to Win in a Landslide in 2016, According to Moody's Election Model" at The Street.com:
Our Moody's Analytics election model now predicts a Democratic electoral landslide in the 2016 presidential vote. A small change in the forecast data in August has swung the outcome from the statistical tie predicted in July, to a razor-edge ballot outcome that nevertheless gives the incumbent party 326 electoral votes to the Republican challenger's 212....It takes 270 electoral votes to win a U.S. presidential election. Our July forecast predicted a Democratic win with 270 electoral votes, to 268 for the Republican, regardless of who wins either party's nomination.
"Democratic landslide" --- an appealing concept, that. Not a bad mantra for some creative visualization, looking toward 2016. But the why of it is interesting and maybe a little worrisome, according to Sweet:
The primary factor driving the results further to the incumbent party in August is lower gasoline prices. Plummeting prices and changing dynamics in global energy markets from Chinese weakness and the Iranian nuclear deal have caused us to significantly lower our gasoline price forecast for the next several years. This variable is very significant to voter sentiment in the model, with lower prices favoring incumbents.
Good to know that. There's also the converse to worry about, as when soaring gas prices helped defeat Jimmy Carter in 1976. Sweet also points out that the model does not predict what would happen if the election was held today; it is rooted in what is known about economic, demographic and political realities coming in 2016, which is more than a little dicey.
Another cautionary note from Sweet:
Just three states account for the change in margin, with Ohio, Florida and Colorado swinging from leaning Republican to leaning Democrat. The margin of victory in each of these important swing states is still solidly within the margin of error though, and will likely swing back and forth in Moody's monthly updates ahead, underlining the closeness of the election to come. Furthermore, three of the candidates for the Republican nomination enjoy favorite-son status in Ohio or Florida, potentially making the outcome of those important states even more unpredictable.
Still the model has an impressive track record, as Sweet notes: "The model successfully predicts every election back to 1980, including a perfect electoral vote prediction in the 2012 election."
For Democrats worried about the Trump card, Rob Garver and Eric Pianin, reporting on a newQuinnipiac Poll, also have some good news at The Fiscal Times. Despite Trump's antics dominating the GOP field,
In a hypothetical matchup with Vice President Joseph Biden, Trump loses 48 percent to 40 percent in the new poll. He does little better against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the current Democratic frontrunner, losing 45 percent to 41 percent. Even in a matchup with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the Democratic socialist, Trump comes up short, 44 percent to 41 percent.
The upbeat reports in this post could have a very short shelf life, as with pretty much anything you read about politics at this early stage the 2016 campaign. But it's not just Republicans screwing up. Neither the Moody's study or the Quinnipiac poll would be so encouraging if Democrats weren't doing a pretty good job of maintaining civility, keeping focused on the issues and generally behaving as adults, in stark contrast to the GOP. We can hope that is worth something to an increasing percentage of voters who would prefer to live in a country run by grown-ups.
FINALLY
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