I note with interest AG Barr’s 4/10 Senate testimony. “Q: Did Bob Mueller support your conclusion? A: I don’t know whether Bob Mueller supported my conclusion.” Now it appears that Mueller objected in this 3/27 letter.
https://twitter.com/RepJerryNadler/status/1123378879178133504
Major perjury because Mueller's letter was from the end of March, Barr knew "whether or not Bob Mueller supported" his conclusion (Mueller didn't).
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wrote a letter in late March complaining to Attorney General William P. Barr that a four-page memo to Congress describing the principal conclusions of the investigation into President Trump “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work, according to a copy of the letter reviewed Tuesday by The Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2019/04/30/mueller-told-the-attorney-general-that-the-depiction-of-his-findings-failed-to-capture-context-nature-and-substance-of-probe/
_________________________
Days after Barr’s announcement, Mueller wrote a previously unknown private letter to the Justice Department, which revealed a degree of dissatisfaction with the public discussion of Mueller’s work that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.
“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”
The letter made a key request: that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and made some initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials.
_________________________
_________________________
Days after Barr’s announcement, Mueller wrote a previously unknown private letter to the Justice Department, which revealed a degree of dissatisfaction with the public discussion of Mueller’s work that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.
“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”
The letter made a key request: that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and made some initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials.
_________________________
Cole Hamels vs Felix Hernandez http://www.espn.com/mlb/playbyplay?gameId=401075177
Cole Hamels vs Felix Hernandez
Chicago Cubs vs Seattle 10:10pm
http://www.espn.com/mlb/playbyplay?gameId=401075177
[Gonzales]Hamels makes his 400th career start, 5th among active pitchers. Hamels v. Felix Hernandez, making his 409th career start, fourth-most among active pitchers. Since start of 2013, Quintana (198 GS), Lester (197 GS) and Hamels (189) rank 1-2-3 in games started among active LHPs
https://twitter.com/MDGonzales/status/1123320212604870656
Chicago Cubs vs Seattle 10:10pm
http://www.espn.com/mlb/playbyplay?gameId=401075177
[Gonzales]Hamels makes his 400th career start, 5th among active pitchers. Hamels v. Felix Hernandez, making his 409th career start, fourth-most among active pitchers. Since start of 2013, Quintana (198 GS), Lester (197 GS) and Hamels (189) rank 1-2-3 in games started among active LHPs
https://twitter.com/MDGonzales/status/1123320212604870656
CC Sabathia vs Zack Greinke http://www.espn.com/mlb/playbyplay?gameId=401075167
CC Sabathia vs Zack Greinke
New York Yankees vs Arizona Diamondbacks 9:40pm
http://www.espn.com/mlb/playbyplay?gameId=401075167
New York Yankees vs Arizona Diamondbacks 9:40pm
http://www.espn.com/mlb/playbyplay?gameId=401075167
[Game 2] 4 Houston Rockets vs 1 Golden State Warriors 10:30pm
[Game 2] 4 Houston Rockets vs 1 Golden State Warriors 10:30pm
http://www.espn.com/nba/game?gameId=401129354
http://www.espn.com/nba/game?gameId=401129354
Percy Bysshe Shelley - Hellas
Percy Bysshe Shelley - Hellas
FRAGMENTS WRITTEN FOR HELLAS.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, "Relics of Shelley", 1862.]
1.
Fairest of the Destinies,
Disarray thy dazzling eyes:
Keener far thy lightnings are
Than the winged [bolts] thou bearest,
And the smile thou wearest
Wraps thee as a star
Is wrapped in light.
2.
Could Arethuse to her forsaken urn
From Alpheus and the bitter Doris run,
Or could the morning shafts of purest light
Again into the quivers of the Sun
Be gathered—could one thought from its wild flight
Return into the temple of the brain
Without a change, without a stain,—
Could aught that is, ever again
Be what it once has ceased to be,
Greece might again be free!
3.
A star has fallen upon the earth
Mid the benighted nations,
A quenchless atom of immortal light,
A living spark of Night,
A cresset shaken from the constellations.
Swifter than the thunder fell
To the heart of Earth, the well
Where its pulses flow and beat,
And unextinct in that cold source
Burns, and on … course
Guides the sphere which is its prison,
Like an angelic spirit pent
In a form of mortal birth,
Till, as a spirit half-arisen
Shatters its charnel, it has rent,
In the rapture of its mirth,
The thin and painted garment of the Earth,
Ruining its chaos—a fierce breath
Consuming all its forms of living death.
FRAGMENTS WRITTEN FOR HELLAS.
[Published by Dr. Garnett, "Relics of Shelley", 1862.]
1.
Fairest of the Destinies,
Disarray thy dazzling eyes:
Keener far thy lightnings are
Than the winged [bolts] thou bearest,
And the smile thou wearest
Wraps thee as a star
Is wrapped in light.
2.
Could Arethuse to her forsaken urn
From Alpheus and the bitter Doris run,
Or could the morning shafts of purest light
Again into the quivers of the Sun
Be gathered—could one thought from its wild flight
Return into the temple of the brain
Without a change, without a stain,—
Could aught that is, ever again
Be what it once has ceased to be,
Greece might again be free!
3.
A star has fallen upon the earth
Mid the benighted nations,
A quenchless atom of immortal light,
A living spark of Night,
A cresset shaken from the constellations.
Swifter than the thunder fell
To the heart of Earth, the well
Where its pulses flow and beat,
And unextinct in that cold source
Burns, and on … course
Guides the sphere which is its prison,
Like an angelic spirit pent
In a form of mortal birth,
Till, as a spirit half-arisen
Shatters its charnel, it has rent,
In the rapture of its mirth,
The thin and painted garment of the Earth,
Ruining its chaos—a fierce breath
Consuming all its forms of living death.
Heather Nova - Sail On
Sail On
( Together As One EP )
My life is a chain of islands
My life is a string of pearls
Every heartbeat is a new beginning
And each breath brings a whole new world
I was born at the end of an evening
The day I die will be a brand new day
If my song is one star shining
Then my symphony is the Milky Way
I know the stars by the space between them
You can't have islands without the sea
Pure thin air is what defines me
I can't be real if I can't float free
Mmm ooh
Oo-ooh ooh
I feel your touch when we're not touching
The feeling's strongest when the feeling's gone
My life is a chain of islands
Land for a moment, then sail on
Sail on
Sail on
Land and sail on
Sail on
Sail on
Land and sail on
Sail, ooh
Land and sail on
( Together As One EP )
My life is a chain of islands
My life is a string of pearls
Every heartbeat is a new beginning
And each breath brings a whole new world
I was born at the end of an evening
The day I die will be a brand new day
If my song is one star shining
Then my symphony is the Milky Way
I know the stars by the space between them
You can't have islands without the sea
Pure thin air is what defines me
I can't be real if I can't float free
Mmm ooh
Oo-ooh ooh
I feel your touch when we're not touching
The feeling's strongest when the feeling's gone
My life is a chain of islands
Land for a moment, then sail on
Sail on
Sail on
Land and sail on
Sail on
Sail on
Land and sail on
Sail, ooh
Land and sail on
YES: Come back to us Reeder. Fractured Thumb...Saddison!
https://twitter.com/King_Addison_43/status/1121541629750521856
Addison! Heal!
Addison! Heal!
Elizabeth Warren shines at Nevada candidates forum [washingtonpost]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/30/elizabeth-warren-shines-nevada-candidates-forum/
Elizabeth Warren shines at Nevada candidates forum
By Helaine Olen
April 30 at 12:36 PM
LAS VEGAS — On Saturday, the Service Employees International Union and the Center for American Progress Action Fund held a National Forum on Wages and Working People in Las Vegas, with several 2020 Democratic candidates in attendance. At the forum, Tichina Haywood, a night-shift hospital patient care technician from Chicago, stood up to tell Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) that she had recently quit her job. She was, she said, unable to continue to handle the pressure of assisting a nurse with up to 16 infectious patients for 12 hours at a time, for which she received $13.13 an hour. Her employer fought back attempts at unionization, which would have allowed Haywood and fellow employees to band together to improve their working conditions and pay. “I loved my job," Haywood said. “The thing is, my job didn’t love me.”
https://www.americanprogressaction.org/press/advisory/2019/04/24/173400/save-date-las-vegas-seiu-cap-action-convene-national-forum-wages-working-people/
A recent poll found slightly more than half of Americans say they are satisfied with their employment. But it’s also true that many if not most jobs, like Haywood’s, don’t always reciprocate our affection. Work can feel like a one-sided relationship, one in which the employee does the vast majority of the giving. Salaries, essentially stagnant for decades, barely keep pace with inflation. Job stability, especially for nonunion workers, is far from robust. The gig economy, pitched to Americans as a more flexible schedule and/or as a “side hustle,” is unsteady and unpredictable, and management can change reimbursements essentially on a whim. Many employers fight attempts at unionization with everything they’ve got.
https://www.conference-board.org/press/pressdetail.cfm?pressid=7528
SEIU and CAP jointly hosted the Saturday event as a way of bringing issues of pay and labor organization to the forefront of the 2020 presidential campaign, in the hopes that we can restore balance to this often unequal relationship. Over the course of the five-hour forum, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), former congressman Beto O’Rourke (D-Tex.), former secretary of housing and urban development Julián Castro, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) did their best to convince the audience that they had received the message. (Neither former vice president Joe Biden nor Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont attended the event.)
Nevada, it must be said, is an apt location for this conversation, and not simply because its caucus will come third on the Democratic calendar. It has one of the fastest growth rates of any state, driven by plentiful jobs. There’s a strong union presence, led by the Culinary Workers Union, where the local representing the famed Las Vegas Strip is majority-minority. But at the same time, it remains a right-to-work state, and while the state’s new Democratic governor, Steve Sisolak, is likely to sign a minimum-wage increase this year, the current minimum is still currently $7.25 an hour for employees who receive health insurance through work, and $8.25 for those who do not. The legislation would raise those figures, over several years, to $11 and $12 respectively — a far cry from the $15 many liberals have sought.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/estimates-national-state.html
https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/nevada-added-over-51k-jobs-last-year-1555665/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-las-vegas-union-that-learned-to-beat-the-house_n_5b182984e4b0734a993a56f7
Again and again on Saturday, the candidates pledged to make it easier for workers in both traditional and gig economy jobs to unionize, and said they supported an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Middle-class income stagnation, free or reduced college tuition, slowing the rise of health-care costs, paid family leave, access to child care, as well as increasing the wages and job protections for human caretaking work — these all came up repeatedly. So did plans to protect the “dreamers,” and offer up a plan to get them citizenship, as well as to revamp and humanize the immigration process.
Harris called out McDonald’s: “You can’t go around talking about the golden arches as a symbol of the best of America when you are not conducting yourself in the best way in terms of supporting the working people of America.” (Sounds tough, but it’s worth noting McDonald’s recently came out and said it no longer opposed efforts to raise the minimum wage.) Klobuchar touted a commitment to beefing up the nation’s infrastructure and taking on monopolies. (No, no one asked her about the reports that she treats her own staff poorly.) Both O’Rourke and Hickenlooper pointed out that selling the minimum wage involves convincing employers of the benefits, with the latter also promoting a minimum wage that would go higher than $15 an hour in parts of the country with a higher cost of living. Castro pointed out that the gig economy all too often involved people committing to a company all but full-time and not receiving the benefits of a full-time employee in return.
But it all felt scattershot until Warren, the final speaker of the day. The senator from Massachusetts connected all the dots to point to the both all-encompassing and systemic nature of the issues facing American workers. “There’s a lot that’s broken in America,” she said. adding that corporations can currently roll over communities, employees and customers, without anyone doing much about it. How to change it? “We need more power in the hands of employees,” she proclaimed. She then went on to tout her “structural" solutions, things that include her wealth tax that would pay for a significant student loan forgiveness and universal child care (among other things) as well as a plan to allow workers to vote on who should hold 40 percent of the seats on their company’s board of directors, something that she believes would make companies more cognizant of their employees’ pay and working conditions.
The crowd gave Warren the most passionate response, with more than one standing ovation and cheers from almost the beginning of her half-hour appearance. She received another enthusiastic reception a few hours later, when she took her pitch to a rally of about 500 people gathered in the cafeteria of Las Vegas’s Bonanza High School. In the crowd was Oklahoma native Linda Overbey, 61. She used to live in Los Angeles doing scenic design work for the film and television industry, but in the 1990s she discovered that the construction industry in Nevada offered more steady work. “I am a union painter,” she tells me proudly when I ask her what she does for a living.
Overbey says she likes Warren because “I think she does more than just describe the problem. I think she has solutions.” She also likes Biden, who historically enjoys strong union support and affection. When Biden received an endorsement from the International Association of Fire Fighters on Monday, President Trump immediately stepped forward with insults, referring to the “Dues Sucking” leadership who “rip-off their membership." But academic research shows that unions work to decrease income inequality. Not only do they ensure that their own workers are paid better than they would be if forced to negotiate their compensation on an individual basis, but they also often get their members better working conditions, too.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-picks-up-endorsement-of-firefighters-union-as-he-courts-labor/2019/04/29/9fd5a3e4-6a66-11e9-a66d-a82d3f3d96d5_story.html?utm_term=.e4f2fa7c3727
https://dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/bitstream/88435/dsp01gx41mm54w/3/620.pdf
Our second Gilded Age has been marked — almost certainly not by coincidence — by a marked falloff in union membership, from 1 in 5 workers in the early 1980s, to about 1 in 10 today. According to a new Post-ABC News poll, a majority of voters say they believe our nation’s economic and political systems operate to help those in power, not the overall population. There’s little question that stronger unions could make a difference for many people, a point the candidates made over and over again on Saturday. Overbey, for one, doesn’t need to be convinced. She tells me she’s a huge supporter of unions, in part because they ensure that workers receive a decent enough pay that women do not need to stay in abusive or unhappy relationships because they can’t afford to leave. “They don’t feel trapped," she says. Unions, in other words, work to ensure that workers receive decent wages so that they have freedom in other parts of their lives. Imagine that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/populist-economic-frustration-threatens-trumps-strongest-reelection-issue-post-abc-poll-finds/2019/04/28/44f64cbc-6a02-11e9-9d56-1c0cf2c7ac04_story.html?utm_term=.667e52e7a550
Elizabeth Warren shines at Nevada candidates forum
By Helaine Olen
April 30 at 12:36 PM
LAS VEGAS — On Saturday, the Service Employees International Union and the Center for American Progress Action Fund held a National Forum on Wages and Working People in Las Vegas, with several 2020 Democratic candidates in attendance. At the forum, Tichina Haywood, a night-shift hospital patient care technician from Chicago, stood up to tell Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) that she had recently quit her job. She was, she said, unable to continue to handle the pressure of assisting a nurse with up to 16 infectious patients for 12 hours at a time, for which she received $13.13 an hour. Her employer fought back attempts at unionization, which would have allowed Haywood and fellow employees to band together to improve their working conditions and pay. “I loved my job," Haywood said. “The thing is, my job didn’t love me.”
https://www.americanprogressaction.org/press/advisory/2019/04/24/173400/save-date-las-vegas-seiu-cap-action-convene-national-forum-wages-working-people/
A recent poll found slightly more than half of Americans say they are satisfied with their employment. But it’s also true that many if not most jobs, like Haywood’s, don’t always reciprocate our affection. Work can feel like a one-sided relationship, one in which the employee does the vast majority of the giving. Salaries, essentially stagnant for decades, barely keep pace with inflation. Job stability, especially for nonunion workers, is far from robust. The gig economy, pitched to Americans as a more flexible schedule and/or as a “side hustle,” is unsteady and unpredictable, and management can change reimbursements essentially on a whim. Many employers fight attempts at unionization with everything they’ve got.
https://www.conference-board.org/press/pressdetail.cfm?pressid=7528
SEIU and CAP jointly hosted the Saturday event as a way of bringing issues of pay and labor organization to the forefront of the 2020 presidential campaign, in the hopes that we can restore balance to this often unequal relationship. Over the course of the five-hour forum, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), former congressman Beto O’Rourke (D-Tex.), former secretary of housing and urban development Julián Castro, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) did their best to convince the audience that they had received the message. (Neither former vice president Joe Biden nor Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont attended the event.)
Nevada, it must be said, is an apt location for this conversation, and not simply because its caucus will come third on the Democratic calendar. It has one of the fastest growth rates of any state, driven by plentiful jobs. There’s a strong union presence, led by the Culinary Workers Union, where the local representing the famed Las Vegas Strip is majority-minority. But at the same time, it remains a right-to-work state, and while the state’s new Democratic governor, Steve Sisolak, is likely to sign a minimum-wage increase this year, the current minimum is still currently $7.25 an hour for employees who receive health insurance through work, and $8.25 for those who do not. The legislation would raise those figures, over several years, to $11 and $12 respectively — a far cry from the $15 many liberals have sought.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/estimates-national-state.html
https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/nevada-added-over-51k-jobs-last-year-1555665/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-las-vegas-union-that-learned-to-beat-the-house_n_5b182984e4b0734a993a56f7
Again and again on Saturday, the candidates pledged to make it easier for workers in both traditional and gig economy jobs to unionize, and said they supported an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Middle-class income stagnation, free or reduced college tuition, slowing the rise of health-care costs, paid family leave, access to child care, as well as increasing the wages and job protections for human caretaking work — these all came up repeatedly. So did plans to protect the “dreamers,” and offer up a plan to get them citizenship, as well as to revamp and humanize the immigration process.
Harris called out McDonald’s: “You can’t go around talking about the golden arches as a symbol of the best of America when you are not conducting yourself in the best way in terms of supporting the working people of America.” (Sounds tough, but it’s worth noting McDonald’s recently came out and said it no longer opposed efforts to raise the minimum wage.) Klobuchar touted a commitment to beefing up the nation’s infrastructure and taking on monopolies. (No, no one asked her about the reports that she treats her own staff poorly.) Both O’Rourke and Hickenlooper pointed out that selling the minimum wage involves convincing employers of the benefits, with the latter also promoting a minimum wage that would go higher than $15 an hour in parts of the country with a higher cost of living. Castro pointed out that the gig economy all too often involved people committing to a company all but full-time and not receiving the benefits of a full-time employee in return.
But it all felt scattershot until Warren, the final speaker of the day. The senator from Massachusetts connected all the dots to point to the both all-encompassing and systemic nature of the issues facing American workers. “There’s a lot that’s broken in America,” she said. adding that corporations can currently roll over communities, employees and customers, without anyone doing much about it. How to change it? “We need more power in the hands of employees,” she proclaimed. She then went on to tout her “structural" solutions, things that include her wealth tax that would pay for a significant student loan forgiveness and universal child care (among other things) as well as a plan to allow workers to vote on who should hold 40 percent of the seats on their company’s board of directors, something that she believes would make companies more cognizant of their employees’ pay and working conditions.
The crowd gave Warren the most passionate response, with more than one standing ovation and cheers from almost the beginning of her half-hour appearance. She received another enthusiastic reception a few hours later, when she took her pitch to a rally of about 500 people gathered in the cafeteria of Las Vegas’s Bonanza High School. In the crowd was Oklahoma native Linda Overbey, 61. She used to live in Los Angeles doing scenic design work for the film and television industry, but in the 1990s she discovered that the construction industry in Nevada offered more steady work. “I am a union painter,” she tells me proudly when I ask her what she does for a living.
Overbey says she likes Warren because “I think she does more than just describe the problem. I think she has solutions.” She also likes Biden, who historically enjoys strong union support and affection. When Biden received an endorsement from the International Association of Fire Fighters on Monday, President Trump immediately stepped forward with insults, referring to the “Dues Sucking” leadership who “rip-off their membership." But academic research shows that unions work to decrease income inequality. Not only do they ensure that their own workers are paid better than they would be if forced to negotiate their compensation on an individual basis, but they also often get their members better working conditions, too.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-picks-up-endorsement-of-firefighters-union-as-he-courts-labor/2019/04/29/9fd5a3e4-6a66-11e9-a66d-a82d3f3d96d5_story.html?utm_term=.e4f2fa7c3727
https://dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/bitstream/88435/dsp01gx41mm54w/3/620.pdf
Our second Gilded Age has been marked — almost certainly not by coincidence — by a marked falloff in union membership, from 1 in 5 workers in the early 1980s, to about 1 in 10 today. According to a new Post-ABC News poll, a majority of voters say they believe our nation’s economic and political systems operate to help those in power, not the overall population. There’s little question that stronger unions could make a difference for many people, a point the candidates made over and over again on Saturday. Overbey, for one, doesn’t need to be convinced. She tells me she’s a huge supporter of unions, in part because they ensure that workers receive a decent enough pay that women do not need to stay in abusive or unhappy relationships because they can’t afford to leave. “They don’t feel trapped," she says. Unions, in other words, work to ensure that workers receive decent wages so that they have freedom in other parts of their lives. Imagine that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/populist-economic-frustration-threatens-trumps-strongest-reelection-issue-post-abc-poll-finds/2019/04/28/44f64cbc-6a02-11e9-9d56-1c0cf2c7ac04_story.html?utm_term=.667e52e7a550
News Dump
54 lions killed in two days: Horror find at South African farm. Dead lions, some skinned and others waiting to be skinned, littered the blood-stained floor. A pile of innards and skeletons lay elsewhere inside, while discarded internal body parts were piled high in overflowing black plastic bags on a trailer outside. Photographs taken by investigators showed a squalid scene of gore. Many are too horrific to be shown. "It was shocking," Meyer said. "We couldn't believe what was happening. You could smell the blood. The lions got shot in the camp and then were all brought into this one room. The flies were terrible. "For me, a lion is a stately animal, a kingly animal. Here he is butchered for people just to make money, it's absolutely disgusting." About 200 yards from the abattoir, two lions were housed in steel transport crates that were too small for them to stand up or turn around in. Meyer said they had been left in the crates without food or water for three days. She initially thought that one of them was dead because it was not moving. "The lion was so depressed that it did not move at all. It was totally disgusting that they were kept like this. "A lion is a wild animal, it wants its freedom but now it's kept in a small cage for three days. It's absolutely deplorable." A total of 54 lions had been killed at the farm in just two days. They were first shot with tranquiliser darts before being shot dead with a .22-calibre rifle. It is understood the bullets were shot through the ear and directly into the brains because overseas buyers will not pay for damaged skulls. Some of the lions are believed to have been trucked about 400km to the farm from a "safari park" near Johannesburg. Remarkably, the workers at Wag-'n-Bietjie are allowed to kill lions. The site, owned by lion breeder Andre Steyn, is one of a series of licensed lion slaughterhouses in South Africa which supply the huge demand for lion bones from South East Asia. South Africa allows 800 captive-bred lion skeletons to be exported each year, but campaigners believe many more are illegally slaughtered to feed the disgusting, but lucrative, trade.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12226287
Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01313-4
Schiff says House will make a criminal referral of Trump ally Erik Prince for possible perjury
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/schiff-says-house-will-make-a-criminal-referral-of-trump-ally-erik-prince-for-possible-perjury/2019/04/30/fca8a4de-6b49-11e9-a66d-a82d3f3d96d5_story.html
Rep. Al Green vows to force House vote to impeach Trump as president refuses to comply with Congress
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/rep-al-green-vows-to-force-house-vote-to-impeach-trump-as-president-refuses-to-comply-with-congress/2019/04/30/a2f99092-6b53-11e9-be3a-33217240a539_story.html
Trump Campaign owes City of El Paso more than $470,000 for February rally
https://www.kvia.com/news/el-paso/trump-campaign-owes-city-of-el-paso-more-than-470-000-for-february-rally/1073664103
Trump Enters His Comfort Zone: Suing the Hell Out of Everyone | The president has now filed multiple lawsuits to prevent congressional Democrats from conducting their oversight duties. Impeachment may be the only answer
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-suing-lawsuits-impeachment-829000/
Biden says Congress will have ‘no alternative’ but to impeach Trump if he blocks its investigations
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-says-congress-will-have-no-alternative-but-to-impeach-trump-if-he-blocks-its-investigations/2019/04/30/ef46291c-6b2e-11e9-a66d-a82d3f3d96d5_story.html
Betsy DeVos' Brother, Erik Prince: Billionaire Blackwater Founder Wants His Mercenaries in Venezuela to Topple Maduro
https://www.newsweek.com/venezuela-erik-prince-blackwater-mercenaries-us-invasion-nicolas-maduro-juan-1409519
Anti-Semitic Assaults Doubled In The U.S. In 2018
https://www.axios.com/anti-semitic-assaults-rise-adl-report-finds-d5cae06b-ca95-41e8-9672-78d28b0abfff.html
Guaidó says 'final phase' of plan to oust Maduro has begun
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/30/venezuelas-guiado-says-final-phase-of-plan-to-oust-maduro-has-begun
Venezuela's opposition leader Juan Guaidó takes to streets with armed soldiers
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/venezuela-s-opposition-leader-juan-guaido-calls-military-uprising-n999966
Venezuela's opposition exchanges gunfire with regime soldiers after declaring a military coup to force out president Nicolas Maduro
https://www.businessinsider.com/venezuela-guiado-declares-military-coup-to-out-nicolas-maduro-2019-4
Vodafone Found Hidden Backdoors in Huawei EquipmentThis report has been denied by Vodafone
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-30/vodafone-found-hidden-backdoors-in-huawei-equipment-jv3fmbrc
Beto O’Rourke moves to establish himself as a climate candidate in a crowded field - Unlike the Green New Deal resolution, O’Rourke’s proposal also touts legal accountability for polluters — which could mean that companies like Exxon might face repercussions
https://thinkprogress.org/beto-orourke-2020-elizabeth-warren-green-new-deal-5b2558fd1ef4/
Scientists in Chile have found a 15,000-year-old footprint, the earliest sign of humans' presence in the Americas
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/chile-15000-year-old-footprint-trnd/index.html
Pakistani senate to vote on law to make minimum age of marriage set to 18 years old
https://www.dawn.com/news/1479198/senate-sees-off-religious-parties-opposition-to-pass-bill-against-child-marriage
1800 Workers Trapped in Platinum Mine - South Africa
https://www.fin24.com/Companies/Mining/sibanye-says-1-800-workers-trapped-underground-20190430
Toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie are caused by animal agriculture. For anyone saying vegans don’t care about humans, this is an example of animal farming directly harming humans by causing water to be unsafe to consume or shower with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwhcrpJTzGQ&feature=share
Beto O'Rourke is the only Democrat talking about the US' history with Latin America and how we need to stop ignoring our neighbors.
https://i.redd.it/7cv130bti9v21.jpg
In what researchers call a "catastrophic breeding failure," a new study says the world's second largest emperor penguin colony, at Antarctica's Halley Bay in the Weddell Sea, has seen virtually no births since 2016 and is on the brink of collapse
https://www.commondreams.org/further/2019/04/25/emperors-thin-ice
About 13m US children are living below the poverty line, rights group reveals. Children’s Defense Fund says doubling federal minimum wage and increased tax credits would cut ‘moral travesty’ of child poverty
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/apr/30/us-children-poverty-childrens-defense-fund-report
Elizabeth Warren says she warned about the financial crisis before it happened. That's True
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/apr/30/elizabeth-warren/elizabeth-warren-says-she-warned-about-financial-c/
LOL....Mike Tomlin on the departures of Antonio Brown and Le'Veon Bell: "There's been a cleansing, if you will." https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2019/04/28/mike-tomlin-refers-to-antonio-brown-leveon-bell-departures-as-a-cleansing/
In 2002, Trump’s Fed pick Stephen Moore called for banning women from March Madness. "Is there no area in life where men can take vacation from women? What's next? Women invited to bachelor parties? Women in combat? (Oh yeah, they've done that already.)"
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/22/politics/stephen-moore-federal-reserve-kfile/
DC prosecutors have subpoenaed Randy Credico to testify against Roger Stone at his trial. First sign that they consider him to be credible & helpful to their case. (Recall: Stone threatened to take Credico's dog and told him to "prepare to die")
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/30/roger-stone-randy-credico-subpoena-1294231
I'm Dying From ALS and Here's My Message: No More Half Measures. Only Medicare for All.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/04/30/im-dying-als-and-heres-my-message-no-more-half-measures-only-medicare-all
Iran designates as terrorists all U.S. troops in Middle East
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-iran-rouhani-idUSKCN1S61GB
Trump Says U.S. Has Begun Sending Migrants to Sanctuary Cities
https://ktla.com/2019/04/27/president-trump-says-u-s-has-begun-sending-migrants-to-sanctuary-cities/
House Intelligence Committee Sends Criminal Referral on Erik Prince to DOJ. Today, the House Permanent Select on Intelligence formally referred Erik Prince to the Department of Justice for consideration of a potential criminal prosecution for false testimony that Prince provided to the Committee in 2017 as part of its investigation into Russian interference in the U.S. political process. The report of the Special Counsel strongly indicates that Prince’s testimony before the Committee was materially false. The committee has identified at least six categories of materially false statements that Mr. Prince made during his testimony about his January 11, 2017 meeting in the Seychelles with Kirill Dmitriev, the chief executive officer of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, as well as a subsequent meeting about Libya that Prince never mentioned to the Committee.
https://intelligence.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=630
Judge Refuses To Toss Congressional Dems’ Emoluments Suit Against Trump
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/judge-refuses-to-toss-dems-emoluments-suit-against-trump
Trump Organization under investigation for not paying undocumented workers
https://www.axios.com/trump-organization-undocumented-workers-new-york-investigation-e26d7239-ef1b-4439-8be0-fc569524ed80.html
Military truck runs over protesters in Venezuela amid political unrest
https://globalnews.ca/news/5221102/venezuela-protest-military-truck-crowd/
The amount of anti-semitism in the UK, indeed Europe as a whole, is staggering. Jeremy Corbyn endorsed book about Jews controlling banks and the press
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/corbyn-endorsed-book-about-jews-controlling-banks-and-the-press-x6nd73jrq
Company at heart of 97,000% drug price hike bribed doctors to boost sales. Two whistleblowers at a pharmaceutical company responsible for one of the largest drug price increases in US history said the company bribed doctors and their staffs to increase sales, according to newly unsealed documents in federal court. The effort, the whistleblowers said in a lawsuit against the company, was part of an intentional "multi-tiered strategy" by Questcor Pharmaceuticals, now Mallinckrodt, to boost sales of H.P. Acthar Gel, cheating the government out of millions of dollars. The price of the drug, best known for treating a rare infant seizure disorder, has increased almost 97,000%, from $40 a vial in 2000 to nearly $39,000 today.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/health/mallinckrodt-whistleblower-lawsuit-acthar/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/29/health/acthar-mallinckrodt-questcor-price-hike-trevor-foltz/index.html
In midst of apology for one anti-Semitic cartoon, ‘New York Times’ publishes yet another
https://www.jns.org/in-midst-of-apology-for-one-anti-semitic-cartoon-new-york-times-publishes-another/
"His lawsuits aren’t doing any good" says Maxine Waters of Trump’s efforts to halt her investigation
https://www.newsweek.com/maxine-waters-trump-lawsuit-wont-stop-probe-1410032
Study draws incredible link between school bus exhaust and student test scores. The study, which was published in Economics of Education Review, compared the standardized test scores of students from a number of school districts across Georgia. The surprising data showed that school districts that had invested in retrofitting school buses with emissions-reducing systems had higher test scores than those which did not.
https://news.yahoo.com/study-draws-incredible-between-school-020520551.html
Los Angeles Launches Its Own Green New Deal
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/los-angeles-green-new-deal_n_5cc7b434e4b053791149cd46
'Stop What You’re Doing and Watch': Applause and Gratitude for Ady Barkan's Emotional Medicare for All Testimony | "I cannot think of a better person to highlight the failings of our health care system and what we must do to provide health care for all."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/30/stop-what-youre-doing-and-watch-applause-and-gratitude-ady-barkans-emotional
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12226287
Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01313-4
Schiff says House will make a criminal referral of Trump ally Erik Prince for possible perjury
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/schiff-says-house-will-make-a-criminal-referral-of-trump-ally-erik-prince-for-possible-perjury/2019/04/30/fca8a4de-6b49-11e9-a66d-a82d3f3d96d5_story.html
Rep. Al Green vows to force House vote to impeach Trump as president refuses to comply with Congress
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/rep-al-green-vows-to-force-house-vote-to-impeach-trump-as-president-refuses-to-comply-with-congress/2019/04/30/a2f99092-6b53-11e9-be3a-33217240a539_story.html
Trump Campaign owes City of El Paso more than $470,000 for February rally
https://www.kvia.com/news/el-paso/trump-campaign-owes-city-of-el-paso-more-than-470-000-for-february-rally/1073664103
Trump Enters His Comfort Zone: Suing the Hell Out of Everyone | The president has now filed multiple lawsuits to prevent congressional Democrats from conducting their oversight duties. Impeachment may be the only answer
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-suing-lawsuits-impeachment-829000/
Biden says Congress will have ‘no alternative’ but to impeach Trump if he blocks its investigations
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-says-congress-will-have-no-alternative-but-to-impeach-trump-if-he-blocks-its-investigations/2019/04/30/ef46291c-6b2e-11e9-a66d-a82d3f3d96d5_story.html
Betsy DeVos' Brother, Erik Prince: Billionaire Blackwater Founder Wants His Mercenaries in Venezuela to Topple Maduro
https://www.newsweek.com/venezuela-erik-prince-blackwater-mercenaries-us-invasion-nicolas-maduro-juan-1409519
Anti-Semitic Assaults Doubled In The U.S. In 2018
https://www.axios.com/anti-semitic-assaults-rise-adl-report-finds-d5cae06b-ca95-41e8-9672-78d28b0abfff.html
Guaidó says 'final phase' of plan to oust Maduro has begun
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/30/venezuelas-guiado-says-final-phase-of-plan-to-oust-maduro-has-begun
Venezuela's opposition leader Juan Guaidó takes to streets with armed soldiers
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/venezuela-s-opposition-leader-juan-guaido-calls-military-uprising-n999966
Venezuela's opposition exchanges gunfire with regime soldiers after declaring a military coup to force out president Nicolas Maduro
https://www.businessinsider.com/venezuela-guiado-declares-military-coup-to-out-nicolas-maduro-2019-4
Vodafone Found Hidden Backdoors in Huawei EquipmentThis report has been denied by Vodafone
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-30/vodafone-found-hidden-backdoors-in-huawei-equipment-jv3fmbrc
Beto O’Rourke moves to establish himself as a climate candidate in a crowded field - Unlike the Green New Deal resolution, O’Rourke’s proposal also touts legal accountability for polluters — which could mean that companies like Exxon might face repercussions
https://thinkprogress.org/beto-orourke-2020-elizabeth-warren-green-new-deal-5b2558fd1ef4/
Scientists in Chile have found a 15,000-year-old footprint, the earliest sign of humans' presence in the Americas
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/chile-15000-year-old-footprint-trnd/index.html
Pakistani senate to vote on law to make minimum age of marriage set to 18 years old
https://www.dawn.com/news/1479198/senate-sees-off-religious-parties-opposition-to-pass-bill-against-child-marriage
1800 Workers Trapped in Platinum Mine - South Africa
https://www.fin24.com/Companies/Mining/sibanye-says-1-800-workers-trapped-underground-20190430
Toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie are caused by animal agriculture. For anyone saying vegans don’t care about humans, this is an example of animal farming directly harming humans by causing water to be unsafe to consume or shower with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwhcrpJTzGQ&feature=share
Beto O'Rourke is the only Democrat talking about the US' history with Latin America and how we need to stop ignoring our neighbors.
https://i.redd.it/7cv130bti9v21.jpg
In what researchers call a "catastrophic breeding failure," a new study says the world's second largest emperor penguin colony, at Antarctica's Halley Bay in the Weddell Sea, has seen virtually no births since 2016 and is on the brink of collapse
https://www.commondreams.org/further/2019/04/25/emperors-thin-ice
About 13m US children are living below the poverty line, rights group reveals. Children’s Defense Fund says doubling federal minimum wage and increased tax credits would cut ‘moral travesty’ of child poverty
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/apr/30/us-children-poverty-childrens-defense-fund-report
Elizabeth Warren says she warned about the financial crisis before it happened. That's True
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/apr/30/elizabeth-warren/elizabeth-warren-says-she-warned-about-financial-c/
LOL....Mike Tomlin on the departures of Antonio Brown and Le'Veon Bell: "There's been a cleansing, if you will." https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2019/04/28/mike-tomlin-refers-to-antonio-brown-leveon-bell-departures-as-a-cleansing/
In 2002, Trump’s Fed pick Stephen Moore called for banning women from March Madness. "Is there no area in life where men can take vacation from women? What's next? Women invited to bachelor parties? Women in combat? (Oh yeah, they've done that already.)"
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/22/politics/stephen-moore-federal-reserve-kfile/
DC prosecutors have subpoenaed Randy Credico to testify against Roger Stone at his trial. First sign that they consider him to be credible & helpful to their case. (Recall: Stone threatened to take Credico's dog and told him to "prepare to die")
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/30/roger-stone-randy-credico-subpoena-1294231
I'm Dying From ALS and Here's My Message: No More Half Measures. Only Medicare for All.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/04/30/im-dying-als-and-heres-my-message-no-more-half-measures-only-medicare-all
Iran designates as terrorists all U.S. troops in Middle East
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-iran-rouhani-idUSKCN1S61GB
Trump Says U.S. Has Begun Sending Migrants to Sanctuary Cities
https://ktla.com/2019/04/27/president-trump-says-u-s-has-begun-sending-migrants-to-sanctuary-cities/
House Intelligence Committee Sends Criminal Referral on Erik Prince to DOJ. Today, the House Permanent Select on Intelligence formally referred Erik Prince to the Department of Justice for consideration of a potential criminal prosecution for false testimony that Prince provided to the Committee in 2017 as part of its investigation into Russian interference in the U.S. political process. The report of the Special Counsel strongly indicates that Prince’s testimony before the Committee was materially false. The committee has identified at least six categories of materially false statements that Mr. Prince made during his testimony about his January 11, 2017 meeting in the Seychelles with Kirill Dmitriev, the chief executive officer of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, as well as a subsequent meeting about Libya that Prince never mentioned to the Committee.
https://intelligence.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=630
Judge Refuses To Toss Congressional Dems’ Emoluments Suit Against Trump
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/judge-refuses-to-toss-dems-emoluments-suit-against-trump
Trump Organization under investigation for not paying undocumented workers
https://www.axios.com/trump-organization-undocumented-workers-new-york-investigation-e26d7239-ef1b-4439-8be0-fc569524ed80.html
Military truck runs over protesters in Venezuela amid political unrest
https://globalnews.ca/news/5221102/venezuela-protest-military-truck-crowd/
The amount of anti-semitism in the UK, indeed Europe as a whole, is staggering. Jeremy Corbyn endorsed book about Jews controlling banks and the press
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/corbyn-endorsed-book-about-jews-controlling-banks-and-the-press-x6nd73jrq
Company at heart of 97,000% drug price hike bribed doctors to boost sales. Two whistleblowers at a pharmaceutical company responsible for one of the largest drug price increases in US history said the company bribed doctors and their staffs to increase sales, according to newly unsealed documents in federal court. The effort, the whistleblowers said in a lawsuit against the company, was part of an intentional "multi-tiered strategy" by Questcor Pharmaceuticals, now Mallinckrodt, to boost sales of H.P. Acthar Gel, cheating the government out of millions of dollars. The price of the drug, best known for treating a rare infant seizure disorder, has increased almost 97,000%, from $40 a vial in 2000 to nearly $39,000 today.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/health/mallinckrodt-whistleblower-lawsuit-acthar/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/29/health/acthar-mallinckrodt-questcor-price-hike-trevor-foltz/index.html
In midst of apology for one anti-Semitic cartoon, ‘New York Times’ publishes yet another
https://www.jns.org/in-midst-of-apology-for-one-anti-semitic-cartoon-new-york-times-publishes-another/
"His lawsuits aren’t doing any good" says Maxine Waters of Trump’s efforts to halt her investigation
https://www.newsweek.com/maxine-waters-trump-lawsuit-wont-stop-probe-1410032
Study draws incredible link between school bus exhaust and student test scores. The study, which was published in Economics of Education Review, compared the standardized test scores of students from a number of school districts across Georgia. The surprising data showed that school districts that had invested in retrofitting school buses with emissions-reducing systems had higher test scores than those which did not.
https://news.yahoo.com/study-draws-incredible-between-school-020520551.html
Los Angeles Launches Its Own Green New Deal
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/los-angeles-green-new-deal_n_5cc7b434e4b053791149cd46
'Stop What You’re Doing and Watch': Applause and Gratitude for Ady Barkan's Emotional Medicare for All Testimony | "I cannot think of a better person to highlight the failings of our health care system and what we must do to provide health care for all."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/30/stop-what-youre-doing-and-watch-applause-and-gratitude-ady-barkans-emotional
Compare tofu with flour if someone tells you how bad tofu tastes.
Because that is exactly what tofu is the equivalent of.
Very Light News Dump
Robert Reich: Congress Should Be Ready to Arrest Attorney General William Barr If He Defies Subpoena
https://www.newsweek.com/robert-reich-arrest-william-barr-attorney-general-supboena-congress-1408786
Pete Buttigieg was falsely accused of sexual assault in a stunt concocted by conspiracy theorist Jacob Wohl
https://www.businessinsider.com/pete-buttigieg-falsely-accused-of-sexual-assault-jacob-wohl-stunt-2019-4
The Right Blames Everything But Right-Wing Extremism for Poway Synagogue Attack
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-right-blames-everything-but-right-wing-extremism-for-poway-synagogue-attack/
Rod Rosenstein, MAGA Punching Bag And Mueller Defender, Kisses Trump’s Ass On His Way Out The Door
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/rod-rosenstein-resigns-kisses-trump-ass-on-his-way-out-the-door
Democrat MJ Hegar challenges U.S. Sen. John Cornyn
https://www.chron.com/news/politics/texas/article/Democrat-MJ-Hegar-announces-run-for-US-Senate-13787969.php
https://www.newsweek.com/robert-reich-arrest-william-barr-attorney-general-supboena-congress-1408786
Pete Buttigieg was falsely accused of sexual assault in a stunt concocted by conspiracy theorist Jacob Wohl
https://www.businessinsider.com/pete-buttigieg-falsely-accused-of-sexual-assault-jacob-wohl-stunt-2019-4
The Right Blames Everything But Right-Wing Extremism for Poway Synagogue Attack
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-right-blames-everything-but-right-wing-extremism-for-poway-synagogue-attack/
Rod Rosenstein, MAGA Punching Bag And Mueller Defender, Kisses Trump’s Ass On His Way Out The Door
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/rod-rosenstein-resigns-kisses-trump-ass-on-his-way-out-the-door
Democrat MJ Hegar challenges U.S. Sen. John Cornyn
https://www.chron.com/news/politics/texas/article/Democrat-MJ-Hegar-announces-run-for-US-Senate-13787969.php
Trump Organization and Trump family sue Deutsche Bank to prevent it from complying with congressional subpoenas
Trump Organization and Trump family sue Deutsche Bank to prevent it from complying with congressional subpoenas
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-organization-family-sues-deutsche-bank-capital-one-2019-4
Trump Sues Banks to Stop Them From Complying With House Subpoenas
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/us/politics/trump-lawsuit-deutsche-bank.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-organization-family-sues-deutsche-bank-capital-one-2019-4
Trump Sues Banks to Stop Them From Complying With House Subpoenas
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/us/politics/trump-lawsuit-deutsche-bank.html
Outstanding Performance By Jimmy Butler & 76ers. Congrats on tying the series.
Sixers bench: 26 points
Raptors bench: 5 points
However Kawhi Leonard single-handledly brought the Raptors back from behind and almost led the team to win. His teammates crashed and burned last night.
Also Congrats Denver Nuggets, Jamal Murray torched Portland
Raptors bench: 5 points
However Kawhi Leonard single-handledly brought the Raptors back from behind and almost led the team to win. His teammates crashed and burned last night.
Also Congrats Denver Nuggets, Jamal Murray torched Portland
Monday, April 29, 2019
[Game 2] 3 Philadelphia 76ers vs 2 Toronto Raptors 8:00pm | [Game 1] 3 Portland Trail Blazers vs 2 Denver Nuggets 10:30pm
Monday 29th April
[Game 2] 3 Philadelphia 76ers vs 2 Toronto Raptors 8:00pm
http://www.espn.com/nba/game?gameId=401129100
[Game 1] 3 Portland Trail Blazers vs 2 Denver Nuggets 10:30pm
http://www.espn.com/nba/game?gameId=401129360
[Game 2] 3 Philadelphia 76ers vs 2 Toronto Raptors 8:00pm
http://www.espn.com/nba/game?gameId=401129100
[Game 1] 3 Portland Trail Blazers vs 2 Denver Nuggets 10:30pm
http://www.espn.com/nba/game?gameId=401129360
Light News Dump
Thousands of lions are being bred in brutal ‘farms’ to be shot by hunters and used for Chinese medicine
https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/animals/thousands-of-lions-are-being-bred-in-brutal-farms-to-be-shot-by-hunters-are-slaughtered-for-chinese-medicine/news-story/23719ccc98b38f0858b25b65cfb7ab80
'Biodegradable' plastic bags survive three years in soil and sea
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/29/biodegradable-plastic-bags-survive-three-years-in-soil-and-sea
Mueller wins again with appeals court ruling against Stone associate
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/29/robert-mueller-roger-stone-associate-court-ruling-1292498
Beto O'Rourke has learned first-hand about floods in Iowa, drought in Nevada, and the fight over offshore drilling in South Carolina — directly linking the plan’s development to O’Rourke’s early campaigning.
https://i.redd.it/6h8pnlv43av21.jpg
Touring the agriculture department at Modesto Junior College and learning about the one of a kind Irrigation Technology Program that is providing innovative solutions to fighting the impacts of climate change. - Beto
https://i.redd.it/s3zj3fkl1av21.jpg
75% oppose Bernie Sanders plan to let all inmates, prisoners vote
https://www.businessinsider.com/majority-oppose-bernie-sanders-inmate-prisoner-voting-plan-insider-poll-2019-4
Reminder: Rod Rosenstein blamed Obama and his administration for not doing more when information regarding Russian interference first came to light, which is a line that Trump likes to parrot. Since it was leading up to the election, the administration sought to have Congress release a bipartisan statement calling out Russia's interference, but McConnell refused:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/us/politics/rod-rosenstein-speech.html
Rod Rosenstein to resign effective May 11. Praises Trump. Pretends Elections Are More Secure Then They've Ever Been. Finish With MAGA. Republicans Gonna Republican.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/rod-rosenstein-to-resign-effective-may-11/2019/04/29/1092851c-6ac5-11e9-8f44-e8d8bb1df986_story.html
Bernie lumps Trump and Democrats together on his newly-published Enemies List
https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1122656750744801281
Coverage of Trump’s latest rally shows how major media outlets normalize his worst excesses
https://www.vox.com/2019/4/29/18522340/trump-green-bay-rally-media-coverage-revived-an-inaccurate-refrain
Poor bear the brunt as global justice system fails 5.1 billion people – study - Flawed legal systems mean two-thirds of the world’s population are deprived of justice
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/apr/29/global-justice-system-fails-5-billion-people-study
To large applause in San Francisco, Beto O’Rourke calls for a ban on all new oil and gas leasing on federal lands and an end to fossil fuel dependence, return US to Paris Climate Agreement.
https://i.redd.it/14f1ex5iq6v21.jpg
Glad to see @BetoORourke's outline of a climate plan with a focus on justice for the communities most affected. - Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club
https://i.redd.it/8ua9meper8v21.jpg
League of Conservation Voters commends Beto O'Rourke's Ambitious and Detailed Climate Plan that would start on day one of his presidency
https://i.redd.it/bha8plcg08v21.jpg
Don’t bother waiting for conservatives to come around on climate change. A new report examines the climate right. It doesn’t find much. With a few exceptions Republicans have opposed all substantial climate and clean energy policy for decades.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/4/26/18512213/climate-change-republicans-conservatives
3,000 kg of garbage collected from Mt. Everest, as Nepal’s clean-up campaign gathers momentum
https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/3000-kg-garbage-collected-from-mt-everest-as-nepals-clean-up-campaign-gathers-momentum/article26979992.ece
CDC officials say measles cases have broken a 25-year-old record
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/04/29/us-officials-say-measles-cases-hit-year-record/
Measles Cases Surpass 700 as Outbreak Continues Unabated
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/health/measles-outbreak-cdc.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
$13.6B record-breaking solar park rises from Dubai desert
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/24/middleeast/mbr-solar-park-dubai-intl/index.html
Cuomo responds to Trump criticism: New York will remember NRA 'in our thoughts and prayers'
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/441171-cuomo-responds-to-trump-criticism-new-york-will-remember-nra-in-our
A California man was arrested on terrorism-related charges after he was caught plotting to kill Los Angeles police officers, NBC News has learned. The man — described as a former member of the U.S. military — had also discussed setting off explosives at the Santa Monica pier and on area freeways, according to multiple law enforcement sources. The suspect, who allegedly voiced support for ISIS, was under surveillance for weeks after he posted online messages lamenting the killing of Muslims at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/california-man-busted-domestic-terror-plot-wanted-kill-lapd-officers-n999696
U.S. farmer income plummets $11.8 billion as Trump trade war drags on
https://www.axios.com/trump-trade-war-us-farmer-income-448861e6-5935-46be-b964-c43f940d89e4.html
https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/animals/thousands-of-lions-are-being-bred-in-brutal-farms-to-be-shot-by-hunters-are-slaughtered-for-chinese-medicine/news-story/23719ccc98b38f0858b25b65cfb7ab80
'Biodegradable' plastic bags survive three years in soil and sea
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/29/biodegradable-plastic-bags-survive-three-years-in-soil-and-sea
Mueller wins again with appeals court ruling against Stone associate
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/29/robert-mueller-roger-stone-associate-court-ruling-1292498
Beto O'Rourke has learned first-hand about floods in Iowa, drought in Nevada, and the fight over offshore drilling in South Carolina — directly linking the plan’s development to O’Rourke’s early campaigning.
https://i.redd.it/6h8pnlv43av21.jpg
Touring the agriculture department at Modesto Junior College and learning about the one of a kind Irrigation Technology Program that is providing innovative solutions to fighting the impacts of climate change. - Beto
https://i.redd.it/s3zj3fkl1av21.jpg
75% oppose Bernie Sanders plan to let all inmates, prisoners vote
https://www.businessinsider.com/majority-oppose-bernie-sanders-inmate-prisoner-voting-plan-insider-poll-2019-4
Reminder: Rod Rosenstein blamed Obama and his administration for not doing more when information regarding Russian interference first came to light, which is a line that Trump likes to parrot. Since it was leading up to the election, the administration sought to have Congress release a bipartisan statement calling out Russia's interference, but McConnell refused:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/us/politics/rod-rosenstein-speech.html
Rod Rosenstein to resign effective May 11. Praises Trump. Pretends Elections Are More Secure Then They've Ever Been. Finish With MAGA. Republicans Gonna Republican.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/rod-rosenstein-to-resign-effective-may-11/2019/04/29/1092851c-6ac5-11e9-8f44-e8d8bb1df986_story.html
Bernie lumps Trump and Democrats together on his newly-published Enemies List
https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1122656750744801281
Coverage of Trump’s latest rally shows how major media outlets normalize his worst excesses
https://www.vox.com/2019/4/29/18522340/trump-green-bay-rally-media-coverage-revived-an-inaccurate-refrain
Poor bear the brunt as global justice system fails 5.1 billion people – study - Flawed legal systems mean two-thirds of the world’s population are deprived of justice
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/apr/29/global-justice-system-fails-5-billion-people-study
To large applause in San Francisco, Beto O’Rourke calls for a ban on all new oil and gas leasing on federal lands and an end to fossil fuel dependence, return US to Paris Climate Agreement.
https://i.redd.it/14f1ex5iq6v21.jpg
Glad to see @BetoORourke's outline of a climate plan with a focus on justice for the communities most affected. - Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club
https://i.redd.it/8ua9meper8v21.jpg
League of Conservation Voters commends Beto O'Rourke's Ambitious and Detailed Climate Plan that would start on day one of his presidency
https://i.redd.it/bha8plcg08v21.jpg
Don’t bother waiting for conservatives to come around on climate change. A new report examines the climate right. It doesn’t find much. With a few exceptions Republicans have opposed all substantial climate and clean energy policy for decades.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/4/26/18512213/climate-change-republicans-conservatives
3,000 kg of garbage collected from Mt. Everest, as Nepal’s clean-up campaign gathers momentum
https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/3000-kg-garbage-collected-from-mt-everest-as-nepals-clean-up-campaign-gathers-momentum/article26979992.ece
CDC officials say measles cases have broken a 25-year-old record
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/04/29/us-officials-say-measles-cases-hit-year-record/
Measles Cases Surpass 700 as Outbreak Continues Unabated
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/health/measles-outbreak-cdc.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
$13.6B record-breaking solar park rises from Dubai desert
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/24/middleeast/mbr-solar-park-dubai-intl/index.html
Cuomo responds to Trump criticism: New York will remember NRA 'in our thoughts and prayers'
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/441171-cuomo-responds-to-trump-criticism-new-york-will-remember-nra-in-our
A California man was arrested on terrorism-related charges after he was caught plotting to kill Los Angeles police officers, NBC News has learned. The man — described as a former member of the U.S. military — had also discussed setting off explosives at the Santa Monica pier and on area freeways, according to multiple law enforcement sources. The suspect, who allegedly voiced support for ISIS, was under surveillance for weeks after he posted online messages lamenting the killing of Muslims at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/california-man-busted-domestic-terror-plot-wanted-kill-lapd-officers-n999696
U.S. farmer income plummets $11.8 billion as Trump trade war drags on
https://www.axios.com/trump-trade-war-us-farmer-income-448861e6-5935-46be-b964-c43f940d89e4.html
Beto O'Rourke - Taking On Our Greatest Threat: Climate Change
https://betoorourke.com/climate-change/
Taking On Our Greatest Threat
Climate Change
A four-part framework to mobilize a historic $5 trillion over ten years, require net-zero emissions by 2050, and address the greatest threat we face
Climate change is the greatest threat we face — one which will test our country, our democracy, and every single one of us. The stakes are clear: We are living in a transformed reality, where our longstanding inaction has not only impacted our climate but led to a growing emergency that has already started to sap our economic prosperity and public health — worsening inequality and threatening our safety and security.
- Escalating Harm and Economic Imperative
The costs of climate change will measure in the tens of trillions of dollars, in lives lost, and livelihoods devastated and destroyed. We are the first generation to feel the climate crisis, and the last generation with the ability to avert its worst impacts.
- Threatening the Health of our Children and Communities
60 million Americans live in a place where the water they drink is unsafe. 140 million Americans live where the air they breathe is unsafe. Our aging infrastructure and unchecked climate change will only make these unacceptable facts far worse.
- Exacerbating Structural Inequality
Climate change has a distressingly disproportionate impact on poor and minority communities across the United States and around the world. Race is the number one indicator for where toxic and polluting facilities are today.
- Threatening Our National Security
Climate change is exacerbating global conflicts, reversing social and economic progress, and driving families to migrate in order to escape disasters. The U.S. military has gone so far as to call climate change a threat multiplier, posing new and severe risks to troops and bases.
That is why, in California's Central Valley, where climate change is already impacting lives and livelihoods and residents are literally growing the solutions to fight back, Beto announced his four-part framework to fight climate change with the full force of our democracy — all of us, together, to face down this existential threat.
These steps are only the beginning. On each and every day of his presidency that follows, Beto will be relentless about doing more and going faster. That is why over the course of this campaign, Beto is talking to all Americans, seeking their input and ideas about how to fight climate change in a way that marshals the full force of our democracy — with all of us working together — to protect our communities and grow our economy. Through his grassroots approach, making the presidency more accessible and accountable to the American people, Beto will draw on those ideas to detail additional elements supporting his framework to fight climate change.
"The greatest threat we face — which will test our country, our democracy, every single one of us — is climate change. We have one last chance to unleash the ingenuity and political will of hundreds of millions of Americans to meet this moment before it's too late."
Beto O'Rourke
April 29, 2019
Part 1
Start Cutting Pollution on Day One and Taking Executive Actions to Lead on Climate
Beto's four-part framework starts with a forceful day-one agenda because he knows that delay is tantamount to denial — to misunderstanding the severity and scale of this growing crisis. We will cut pollution on day one, improving the quality of our air, our water, and our public health right away. At the same time, we will create jobs, support communities, and strengthen our economy — not just to compete, but to lead the world in addressing this crisis.
As President, Beto will use his executive authority not only to reverse the problematic decisions made by the current administration, but also to go beyond the climate actions under previous presidents:
- Re-enter the Paris Agreement and lead the negotiations for an even more ambitious global plan for 2030 and beyond;
- Reduce methane leakage from existing sources in the oil and natural gas industry for the first time and rapidly phase-out hydrofluorocarbons, the super-polluting greenhouse gas that is up to 9,000 times worse for climate change than carbon dioxide;
- Strengthen the clean air and hazardous waste limits for power plants and fuel economy standards that save consumers money and improve public health, while setting a trajectory to rapidly accelerate the adoption of zero-emission vehicles;
- Increase consumer savings through new, modernized, and ambitious appliance- and building-efficiency standards;
- Create unprecedented access to the technologies and markets that allow farmers and ranchers to profit from the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions they secure;
- Leverage $500 billion in annual government procurement to decarbonize across all sectors for the first time, including a new "buy clean" program for steel, glass, and cement;
- Require any federal permitting decision to fully account for climate costs and community impacts;
- Set a first-ever, net-zero emissions by 2030 carbon budget for federal lands, stopping new fossil fuel leases, changing royalties to reflect climate costs, and accelerating renewables development and forestation; and
- Protect our most wild, beautiful, and biodiverse places for generations to come — including more of the Arctic and of our sensitive landscapes and seascapes than ever before — and establish National Parks and Monuments that more fully tell our American story.
Part 2
Mobilize a historic $5 Trillion for Climate Change with Investment in Infrastructure, Innovation, and Our People and Communities
Given the gravity of the work that lies ahead, this fight will require much more than a president signing executive orders. We will need a full mobilization of our democracy and economy. That is why, in the very first bill he sends to Congress, Beto will launch a 10-year mobilization of $5 trillion directly leveraged by a fully paid-for $1.5 trillion investment — the world's largest-ever climate change investment in infrastructure, innovation, and in our people and communities. The bill will be funded with the revenues generated by structural changes to the tax code that ensure corporations and the wealthiest among us pay their fair share and that we finally end the tens of billions of dollars of tax breaks currently given to fossil fuel companies. This investment will drive economic growth and shared prosperity — spurring job creation and adding to our GDP, reducing energy costs, improving public health, and boosting our overall economic, energy, and climate security.
Together, we will invest in the poor and minority communities that so often bear the brunt — both those on the front-lines of a changing climate and those disrupted by the forces of an economy in transition. Not only will those communities be the focus of our investment, they will also be the source of our inspiration and leadership. After all, we cannot, and will not be able to address this challenge without organized labor, farmers and ranchers, communities of color, businesses, or the young people who have the most to lose and the most to contribute.
As President, Beto will spur investment in:
- Infrastructure necessary to cut pollution across all sectors, meet his net-zero ambition without delay, and boost economic opportunity and growth with $300 billion in direct resources through tax credits and another $300 billion in direct resources through additional investments that will, together, mobilize at least $4 trillion in capital:
-- More than $1 trillion through limited-duration, performance-focused climate change tax incentives that accelerate the scale up of nascent technologies enabling reductions in greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors, through efficiency and alternatives; and
-- More than $3 trillion through proven existing financing institutions, like the Rural Utility Service, and a new dedicated finance authority, which will have on its board not only the brightest minds in finance but also members of the unions that would help build this infrastructure.
- Innovation that will lead to pioneering solutions in energy, water, agriculture, industry, and mobility and to scientific discovery that makes us more safe and secure. $250 billion in direct resources that will catalyze follow-on private investment, creation of new businesses, and discovery of new science:
-- More than $250 billion through research and development across disciplines and domains including national labs, public, private, and land-grant colleges and universities, incubators and accelerators — all supporting regional hubs of expertise, spurring economic growth, and unlocking technological breakthroughs;
--- 80 percent of this total investment — an amount equal to what we invested in our nation's journey to the Moon — will go to research with the most promise to dramatically and rapidly achieve net-zero emissions while growing our economy. This will include funding for a new constellation of DARPA-style efforts into agriculture, industry, mobility, and water; catalyzing partnerships with private and philanthropic capital; and seeding a new, diverse generation of STEM leaders;
--- 20 percent of the total investment will go to the climate science needed to understand the changes to our oceans and our atmosphere; avoid preventable losses and catastrophic outcomes; and protect public safety and national security.
- Our People and Communities, especially those on the front-lines of a changing climate and those disrupted by the forces of an economy in transition, to whom we look for our inspiration and leadership. $650 billion in direct resources that will mobilize at least $1.2 trillion in capital:
-- More than $1.2 trillion through grants and other similar investments in our people and communities, including:
--- Housing grants that help close the gap of affordable housing in America in a way that promotes improvements in both sustainability and quality of life;
--- Transportation grants that cut commutes, crashes, and carbon pollution — all while reducing the costs paid by people and communities and boosting access to public transit;
-- Public health grants that both address the immediate crises of communities facing unacceptably poor air or water quality and the long-term crisis of climate change;
--- Small business and start-up grants that boost the diversity of the leaders whose businesses form the supply chain for climate change solutions;
--- National service grants to mobilize a new AmeriCorps generation to deploy clean energy, plant trees on marginal lands, and build more resilience to fires, floods, droughts, and hurricanes;
--- Paid-training grants through partnership with unions, community colleges, and employers that deliver the skills to earn a job in this growing economy;
--- Farming and ranching grants to create a new revenue stream for the climate benefits secured through practices like better soil management and deployment of digesters; and
--- Economic diversification and development grants for communities that have been and are being impacted by changes in energy and the economy.
This investment will support the pensions and health care benefits that are owed to the workers, including those in the coal industry, who have built our economy over the last century by risking their lives and investing their labor. At the same time, it will also invest in the workers who will build our economy over the next century to support an America with cleaner air, cleaner water, and a more resilient and fair economy that can compete and lead around the world.
"The actions we're announcing today will help us get there — by wasting no time cutting pollution, making historic investments in infrastructure, innovation, and in our communities, setting bold emissions targets, and defending those most at risk from the dangers and destruction of climate change."
Beto O'Rourke
April 29, 2019
Part 3
Guarantee our Net-Zero Emissions Ambition by 2050
To have any chance at limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 °C and preventing the worst effects of climate change, the latest science demands net-zero emissions by 2050. By investing in infrastructure, innovation, and in our people and communities, we can achieve this ambition, which is in line with the 2050 emissions goal of the Green New Deal, in a way that grows our economy and shrinks our inequality.
We cannot afford to delay any longer. That is why our ambition must be backed up by a legally enforceable standard that holds us accountable to future generations. We need a guarantee that we will, in fact, achieve net zero emissions by 2050 and get halfway there by 2030. For this reason, Beto will work with Congress to enact a legally enforceable standard — within his first 100 days. This standard will send a clear price signal to the market while putting in place a mechanism that will ensure the environmental integrity of this endeavor — providing us with the confidence that we are moving at least as quickly as we need in order to meet a 2050 deadline.
In all of these significant actions, we will harness the power of the market, but also recognize that the market needs rules in order to function equitably and efficiently — not just incentives, but accountability too. That is why Beto's net-zero guarantee is such a critical component of his — and any — credible framework to fight climate change. Having set that legally enforceable standard, Beto will be relentless about doing more and going faster each remaining day he is in office — including accelerating action by:
- Partnering with any city or county, state or tribal nation, business or NGO, any individual pursuing greater ambition;
- Rigorously measuring our progress, scaling what works and scrapping what does not;
- Enforcing our laws to hold polluters accountable, including for their historical actions or crimes;
- Advancing consumer choice and market competition in electricity and transportation;
- Supporting ecosystems, conservation, and biodiversity; and
- Requiring public companies to measure and disclose climate risks and the greenhouse gas emissions in their operations and supply chains.
Part 4
Defend our Communities That Are Preparing for and Fighting Against Extreme Weather
As President, Beto will never shrink from defending our communities — across states, territories, and tribal nations — that are preparing for and fighting against fires, floods, droughts, and hurricanes. And as Commander in Chief, he will support our military in adapting to the risks posed by climate change to our bases and missions. This includes:
- Increasing by ten-fold the spending on pre-disaster mitigation grants that save $6 for every $1 invested;
- Changing the law to make sure that we build back stronger after every disaster, rather than spend recovery dollars in ways that leave communities vulnerable to the next fire, flood, drought or hurricane;
- Supporting efforts to incentivize private-sector investment in evidence-based, risk reduction measures;
- Recognizing the value of well-managed ecosystems to reduce and defend against climate-related risks;
- Expanding our federal crop insurance program to cover additional risks and offer more comprehensive solutions to support farmers and ranchers;
- Investing in the climate readiness and resilience of our first responders; and
- Bolstering the security of our military bases, both at home and around the world, and supporting our soldiers with technologies that reduce the need to rely on high-risk energy and water supply.
Taking On Our Greatest Threat
Climate Change
A four-part framework to mobilize a historic $5 trillion over ten years, require net-zero emissions by 2050, and address the greatest threat we face
Climate change is the greatest threat we face — one which will test our country, our democracy, and every single one of us. The stakes are clear: We are living in a transformed reality, where our longstanding inaction has not only impacted our climate but led to a growing emergency that has already started to sap our economic prosperity and public health — worsening inequality and threatening our safety and security.
- Escalating Harm and Economic Imperative
The costs of climate change will measure in the tens of trillions of dollars, in lives lost, and livelihoods devastated and destroyed. We are the first generation to feel the climate crisis, and the last generation with the ability to avert its worst impacts.
- Threatening the Health of our Children and Communities
60 million Americans live in a place where the water they drink is unsafe. 140 million Americans live where the air they breathe is unsafe. Our aging infrastructure and unchecked climate change will only make these unacceptable facts far worse.
- Exacerbating Structural Inequality
Climate change has a distressingly disproportionate impact on poor and minority communities across the United States and around the world. Race is the number one indicator for where toxic and polluting facilities are today.
- Threatening Our National Security
Climate change is exacerbating global conflicts, reversing social and economic progress, and driving families to migrate in order to escape disasters. The U.S. military has gone so far as to call climate change a threat multiplier, posing new and severe risks to troops and bases.
That is why, in California's Central Valley, where climate change is already impacting lives and livelihoods and residents are literally growing the solutions to fight back, Beto announced his four-part framework to fight climate change with the full force of our democracy — all of us, together, to face down this existential threat.
These steps are only the beginning. On each and every day of his presidency that follows, Beto will be relentless about doing more and going faster. That is why over the course of this campaign, Beto is talking to all Americans, seeking their input and ideas about how to fight climate change in a way that marshals the full force of our democracy — with all of us working together — to protect our communities and grow our economy. Through his grassroots approach, making the presidency more accessible and accountable to the American people, Beto will draw on those ideas to detail additional elements supporting his framework to fight climate change.
"The greatest threat we face — which will test our country, our democracy, every single one of us — is climate change. We have one last chance to unleash the ingenuity and political will of hundreds of millions of Americans to meet this moment before it's too late."
Beto O'Rourke
April 29, 2019
Part 1
Start Cutting Pollution on Day One and Taking Executive Actions to Lead on Climate
Beto's four-part framework starts with a forceful day-one agenda because he knows that delay is tantamount to denial — to misunderstanding the severity and scale of this growing crisis. We will cut pollution on day one, improving the quality of our air, our water, and our public health right away. At the same time, we will create jobs, support communities, and strengthen our economy — not just to compete, but to lead the world in addressing this crisis.
As President, Beto will use his executive authority not only to reverse the problematic decisions made by the current administration, but also to go beyond the climate actions under previous presidents:
- Re-enter the Paris Agreement and lead the negotiations for an even more ambitious global plan for 2030 and beyond;
- Reduce methane leakage from existing sources in the oil and natural gas industry for the first time and rapidly phase-out hydrofluorocarbons, the super-polluting greenhouse gas that is up to 9,000 times worse for climate change than carbon dioxide;
- Strengthen the clean air and hazardous waste limits for power plants and fuel economy standards that save consumers money and improve public health, while setting a trajectory to rapidly accelerate the adoption of zero-emission vehicles;
- Increase consumer savings through new, modernized, and ambitious appliance- and building-efficiency standards;
- Create unprecedented access to the technologies and markets that allow farmers and ranchers to profit from the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions they secure;
- Leverage $500 billion in annual government procurement to decarbonize across all sectors for the first time, including a new "buy clean" program for steel, glass, and cement;
- Require any federal permitting decision to fully account for climate costs and community impacts;
- Set a first-ever, net-zero emissions by 2030 carbon budget for federal lands, stopping new fossil fuel leases, changing royalties to reflect climate costs, and accelerating renewables development and forestation; and
- Protect our most wild, beautiful, and biodiverse places for generations to come — including more of the Arctic and of our sensitive landscapes and seascapes than ever before — and establish National Parks and Monuments that more fully tell our American story.
Part 2
Mobilize a historic $5 Trillion for Climate Change with Investment in Infrastructure, Innovation, and Our People and Communities
Given the gravity of the work that lies ahead, this fight will require much more than a president signing executive orders. We will need a full mobilization of our democracy and economy. That is why, in the very first bill he sends to Congress, Beto will launch a 10-year mobilization of $5 trillion directly leveraged by a fully paid-for $1.5 trillion investment — the world's largest-ever climate change investment in infrastructure, innovation, and in our people and communities. The bill will be funded with the revenues generated by structural changes to the tax code that ensure corporations and the wealthiest among us pay their fair share and that we finally end the tens of billions of dollars of tax breaks currently given to fossil fuel companies. This investment will drive economic growth and shared prosperity — spurring job creation and adding to our GDP, reducing energy costs, improving public health, and boosting our overall economic, energy, and climate security.
Together, we will invest in the poor and minority communities that so often bear the brunt — both those on the front-lines of a changing climate and those disrupted by the forces of an economy in transition. Not only will those communities be the focus of our investment, they will also be the source of our inspiration and leadership. After all, we cannot, and will not be able to address this challenge without organized labor, farmers and ranchers, communities of color, businesses, or the young people who have the most to lose and the most to contribute.
As President, Beto will spur investment in:
- Infrastructure necessary to cut pollution across all sectors, meet his net-zero ambition without delay, and boost economic opportunity and growth with $300 billion in direct resources through tax credits and another $300 billion in direct resources through additional investments that will, together, mobilize at least $4 trillion in capital:
-- More than $1 trillion through limited-duration, performance-focused climate change tax incentives that accelerate the scale up of nascent technologies enabling reductions in greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors, through efficiency and alternatives; and
-- More than $3 trillion through proven existing financing institutions, like the Rural Utility Service, and a new dedicated finance authority, which will have on its board not only the brightest minds in finance but also members of the unions that would help build this infrastructure.
- Innovation that will lead to pioneering solutions in energy, water, agriculture, industry, and mobility and to scientific discovery that makes us more safe and secure. $250 billion in direct resources that will catalyze follow-on private investment, creation of new businesses, and discovery of new science:
-- More than $250 billion through research and development across disciplines and domains including national labs, public, private, and land-grant colleges and universities, incubators and accelerators — all supporting regional hubs of expertise, spurring economic growth, and unlocking technological breakthroughs;
--- 80 percent of this total investment — an amount equal to what we invested in our nation's journey to the Moon — will go to research with the most promise to dramatically and rapidly achieve net-zero emissions while growing our economy. This will include funding for a new constellation of DARPA-style efforts into agriculture, industry, mobility, and water; catalyzing partnerships with private and philanthropic capital; and seeding a new, diverse generation of STEM leaders;
--- 20 percent of the total investment will go to the climate science needed to understand the changes to our oceans and our atmosphere; avoid preventable losses and catastrophic outcomes; and protect public safety and national security.
- Our People and Communities, especially those on the front-lines of a changing climate and those disrupted by the forces of an economy in transition, to whom we look for our inspiration and leadership. $650 billion in direct resources that will mobilize at least $1.2 trillion in capital:
-- More than $1.2 trillion through grants and other similar investments in our people and communities, including:
--- Housing grants that help close the gap of affordable housing in America in a way that promotes improvements in both sustainability and quality of life;
--- Transportation grants that cut commutes, crashes, and carbon pollution — all while reducing the costs paid by people and communities and boosting access to public transit;
-- Public health grants that both address the immediate crises of communities facing unacceptably poor air or water quality and the long-term crisis of climate change;
--- Small business and start-up grants that boost the diversity of the leaders whose businesses form the supply chain for climate change solutions;
--- National service grants to mobilize a new AmeriCorps generation to deploy clean energy, plant trees on marginal lands, and build more resilience to fires, floods, droughts, and hurricanes;
--- Paid-training grants through partnership with unions, community colleges, and employers that deliver the skills to earn a job in this growing economy;
--- Farming and ranching grants to create a new revenue stream for the climate benefits secured through practices like better soil management and deployment of digesters; and
--- Economic diversification and development grants for communities that have been and are being impacted by changes in energy and the economy.
This investment will support the pensions and health care benefits that are owed to the workers, including those in the coal industry, who have built our economy over the last century by risking their lives and investing their labor. At the same time, it will also invest in the workers who will build our economy over the next century to support an America with cleaner air, cleaner water, and a more resilient and fair economy that can compete and lead around the world.
"The actions we're announcing today will help us get there — by wasting no time cutting pollution, making historic investments in infrastructure, innovation, and in our communities, setting bold emissions targets, and defending those most at risk from the dangers and destruction of climate change."
Beto O'Rourke
April 29, 2019
Part 3
Guarantee our Net-Zero Emissions Ambition by 2050
To have any chance at limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 °C and preventing the worst effects of climate change, the latest science demands net-zero emissions by 2050. By investing in infrastructure, innovation, and in our people and communities, we can achieve this ambition, which is in line with the 2050 emissions goal of the Green New Deal, in a way that grows our economy and shrinks our inequality.
We cannot afford to delay any longer. That is why our ambition must be backed up by a legally enforceable standard that holds us accountable to future generations. We need a guarantee that we will, in fact, achieve net zero emissions by 2050 and get halfway there by 2030. For this reason, Beto will work with Congress to enact a legally enforceable standard — within his first 100 days. This standard will send a clear price signal to the market while putting in place a mechanism that will ensure the environmental integrity of this endeavor — providing us with the confidence that we are moving at least as quickly as we need in order to meet a 2050 deadline.
In all of these significant actions, we will harness the power of the market, but also recognize that the market needs rules in order to function equitably and efficiently — not just incentives, but accountability too. That is why Beto's net-zero guarantee is such a critical component of his — and any — credible framework to fight climate change. Having set that legally enforceable standard, Beto will be relentless about doing more and going faster each remaining day he is in office — including accelerating action by:
- Partnering with any city or county, state or tribal nation, business or NGO, any individual pursuing greater ambition;
- Rigorously measuring our progress, scaling what works and scrapping what does not;
- Enforcing our laws to hold polluters accountable, including for their historical actions or crimes;
- Advancing consumer choice and market competition in electricity and transportation;
- Supporting ecosystems, conservation, and biodiversity; and
- Requiring public companies to measure and disclose climate risks and the greenhouse gas emissions in their operations and supply chains.
Part 4
Defend our Communities That Are Preparing for and Fighting Against Extreme Weather
As President, Beto will never shrink from defending our communities — across states, territories, and tribal nations — that are preparing for and fighting against fires, floods, droughts, and hurricanes. And as Commander in Chief, he will support our military in adapting to the risks posed by climate change to our bases and missions. This includes:
- Increasing by ten-fold the spending on pre-disaster mitigation grants that save $6 for every $1 invested;
- Changing the law to make sure that we build back stronger after every disaster, rather than spend recovery dollars in ways that leave communities vulnerable to the next fire, flood, drought or hurricane;
- Supporting efforts to incentivize private-sector investment in evidence-based, risk reduction measures;
- Recognizing the value of well-managed ecosystems to reduce and defend against climate-related risks;
- Expanding our federal crop insurance program to cover additional risks and offer more comprehensive solutions to support farmers and ranchers;
- Investing in the climate readiness and resilience of our first responders; and
- Bolstering the security of our military bases, both at home and around the world, and supporting our soldiers with technologies that reduce the need to rely on high-risk energy and water supply.
Brian Windhorst: "CP3 makes an incredible play to get the offensive rebound, the crowd gasps and he looks to throw the ball to one of the best 3 point shooters in the nba, the reigning MVP, but he cant and you want to know why? Its because he is laying on the floor because he flopped"
http://www.espn.com/espnradio/play?id=26634158
The Golden Breakdown: How Steph Curry's Defense Helped The Warriors Secure Game 1 Against The Rockets
https://www.goldenstateofmind.com/2019/4/29/18521828/nba-2019-playoffs-golden-state-warriors-game-1-houston-rockets-steph-curry-defense-video-breakdown
The Golden Breakdown: How Steph Curry's Defense Helped The Warriors Secure Game 1 Against The Rockets
Curry made some crucial defensive plays down the stretch, but his defense was on point for most of the game despite getting into foul trouble.
By Joe Viray@JoeViray90 Apr 29, 2019, 5:00am PDT
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/63690051/usa_today_12608357.0.jpg)
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tdm7fuGCNn4MWxHQ1a1qH6c8qpk=/0x0:3478x2319/1220x813/filters:focal(1466x749:2022x1305)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/63690051/usa_today_12608357.0.jpg
With around a minute and a half left to go in a crucial Game 1 between eternal Western Conference adversaries, Stephen Curry — playing with 5 fouls and also playing with wildfire by continuing to make body contact on defense, continuing to poke and reach in, and just overall giving Warriors fans a series of neverending heart attacks — played perhaps the best defensive sequence of his career.
The weakest link in the Hamptons 5, a lineup replete with elite defensive players, shone brightest on the defensive end. This sequence displays the epitome of Curry's defensive effort in Game 1.
As Harden brings the ball past the half court line, Curry jumps out and hedges, forcing Harden to pick up his dribble. Curry recovers in time to his man, while great off-ball denial puts even more pressure on Harden. Finally, he gives the ball to Tucker, receives it back, and gets switched onto Curry, who stays put like a rock and doesn't allow Harden to get past him. Curry's pressure forces Harden to step on the line, and the Rockets turn the ball over.
Steph forces Harden turnover
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5qYj5z51s0
Curry is often a natural target for opposing offenses, simply due to the fact that he's relatively the worst defensive player on the floor for the Warriors. That's not to say that he is overall a terrible defender — he's not as bad on defense as some people make him out to be — but he's certainly not an elite defender nor a consistent lock-down perimeter stopper.
So it is natural that an offense that predicates itself on isolation, spreading the floor, and targeting the weakest defensive links through forcing switches targets the one player on the floor who is perceived as the most vulnerable on defense. The Rockets did this plenty of times last year during the regular season as well as the Western Conference Finals.
Houston Rockets Targeting Stephen Curry's Defense
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2n_jdQAKFo
While it is unavoidable that Curry will have to deal with a one-on-one situation against Harden, the Warriors have developed several counters to the Rockets' switch-hunting tendencies.
GSoM's very own Apricot previously detailed how the Warriors countered the Cleveland Cavaliers' strategy of trying to switch Curry onto LeBron James. They had Curry "tag" James on the pick-and-roll, which is a variant of the show/hedge tactic that was displayed in the first clip above. This prevents a mismatch, while pressuring the ball-handler enough to not give the ball up to the man left open by Curry's tag. After the the initial show/hedge, Curry recovers quickly to his man, and the switch is successfully prevented.
https://www.goldenstateofmind.com/2017/5/30/15716160/nba-2017-playoffs-analysis-the-new-way-stephen-curry-defends-lebron-james
Curry employs the same defensive tactic whenever the Rockets try to force him to switch onto Harden, which has been proven effective at blowing up their plans of trying to exploit Curry's perceived deficiencies as a defender.
Here is one instance of Curry's "tagging" during Game 1.
Steph show and recover
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWKxDTba4HU
He doesn't tag Harden here per se, nor is he as aggressive on the show, but the principle is still the same: Momentarily switch onto Harden, then find an opportunity to recover back to your man, as Curry does above.
Compare this with a traditional switch onto Harden, which Curry and the Warriors will have to deal with at times, especially if the screen setter is someone who is a deadly three-point shooter such as Eric Gordon. The Warriors can't afford to leave Gordon open for a significant amount of time, so they opt to switch this possession straight up. Harden ends up missing the shot anyway.
Steph switched onto Harden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ljN413VdEs
Curry may also be forced into matchups against Harden due to having to pick him up in transition. The name of the game in transition is to always pick up the ball-handler and stop an easy transition bucket, and this is what Curry does by picking up Harden. Naturally, Harden sees that he has a favorable matchup and elects to take Curry on in isolation, but his stepback jumper misses over a decent contest by Curry.
Steph picks up Harden in transition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ9lZcbSlxg
Not every switch is a successful stop, even if Curry isn't directly responsible for letting the Rockets score. Here is another possession in which the Warriors live with Curry defending Harden. When Curry allows Harden to get the step on him, it forces Draymond Green to rotate off of his man to help on the drive. With Green's man left alone, this forces Andre Iguodala to leave his man in the corner alone to rotate onto Green's man. Harden recognizes this and kicks out to the corner for the open three.
Steph switch allows corner three
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c26iklBQwNg
Anyone can say whatever they want of Curry's defense, but no one can knock him for his effort on that end. Despite being at a physical disadvantage for most of the time, and despite the fact that he can be a strong magnet for fouls, Curry tries his absolute best on defense. When he gets switched onto Harden again, Curry is aware that the shot clock is winding down, and that crowding Harden's personal space would put more pressure on him to get up a shot. But Harden doesn't seem to be aware of the precarious situation he's in — a last-minute reach and poke assures that Harden doesn't get into shooting position, and a 24-second violation is forced.
Steph forces 24 sec violation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydm_UOfeFgY
In this sequence, Curry goes back to tagging Harden then going back to his original assignment. This blows up the switch and takes precious time off of the shot clock. The Rockets use Curry's man to re-screen, and this time the switch is successful. But with the shot clock winding down, Durant comes over to double Harden in order to prevent a shot from going up. Harden opts to pass, and the Warriors force another 24-second violation.
Steph tag forces a 24-sec violation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2n61yySfRo
Curry tags Harden again in this possession, but when he goes back to recover to his man, he bumps into Iguodala, which leaves his man alone on the wing. Curry's hesitation — whether to stick to Harden or to go back to his man — gives Harden enough time to pass to the right wing for an open three-point look, but the Warriors escape with a missed shot.
Steph tag and botched recovery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTv0vR8BJog
Here is another Curry tag on Harden to prevent a switch. Notice Curry's man, Iman Shumpert, set the screen then pop out toward the weak side wing. Curry doesn't make an effort to recover back to Shumpert after the tag, which is virtually daring him to take an open jumper after getting the pass. This is with good reason though — Shumpert has been terrible from three-point range, with a 29.6 percent success rate on threes during the regular season. The Warriors will most certainly live with him taking those shots.
Steph tag and Shumpert miss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVze36HYFr0
When Curry tries to tag again in this possession, Harden adjusts by splitting and driving his way toward the rim. Kevon Looney steps up to discourage Harden, who promptly passes out and resets with Looney on him. It should be common knowledge by now that Looney is an exceptional Harden defender despite his perceived lack of mobility, which is made up for by his extreme discipline and solid defensive fundamentals. When Harden goes up for the three, Looney contests while making sure to avoid contact by jumping to his right. It bothers Harden enough to force an airball.
Steph tag, Looney contest on Harden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPJf3JVH_pQ
With Curry being placed in the precarious position of having to play with 5 fouls, the Rockets try to target him again with switches. Watch the Rockets try to force a switch twice on Curry, both of which are unsuccessful due to Curry tagging and running back to his man. The Warriors temporarily put a wrench into those plans, but Klay Thompson fouls Chris Paul to send him to the line.
Steph tags prevent switches
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPFVU6iOiZM
The Rockets try to hunt for Curry again, with Curry's man setting another screen for Harden. Curry shows and tags Harden with his body, then promptly recovers back to his man. Harden is left with no choice but to deal with Iguodala, who is more equipped to defend him.
Steph tag, Andre contest on Harden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuKMMIQ5lOA&
The one defensive possession that probably caused many Warriors' fans hearts to skip multiple beats came in this sequence. Gordon tries to isolate on Curry, who sticks to him and even navigates around a Clint Capela screen to put pressure on his man. Without reaching, Curry superglues himself to Gordon, who has a difficult time trying to get past his dogged defender. The pressure from Curry eventually gets the better of Gordon, whose pass to Capela is quickly turned into a fastbreak dunk from Iguodala on the other end.
Remember, Curry had 5 fouls during this sequence, but he manages to stop himself from reaching, stays in front of Gordon, and completely locks him down.
Steph locks down Eric Gordon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1gg2L1aTZg
While Curry certainly held his own defensively, it wasn't all rainbows and butterflies for him. His trend of getting himself into severe foul trouble continued — and while some of those calls are questionable, Curry also has to know when to take risks on defense and when to hold back and play it safe. Reaching and trying to poke or strip the ball away while having 4 fouls isn't the most prudent course of action, and it'll only give the officials further reason to blow their whistles at him.
"On the play where he picked up his fourth foul, I asked him, 'Steph, where's your mom?'," Steve Kerr jokingly mused after the game. "He pointed out about 10 rows behind the bench. I looked up and made eye contact with Sonya, I said, 'Tell him not to foul anymore.' If his mom can't get through him I'm definitely not gonna get through to him."
https://twitter.com/MarkG_Medina/status/1122631607062368256
While Kerr may have been saying that in jest, it is true that perhaps no one can really solve Curry's foul problem just by telling him not to do it. It may be up to him and only him to create a mindset of being disciplined, being patient, and being aware of his importance to the team. He is far too valuable to spend extended periods of time on the bench because he couldn't keep his hands to himself.
Fouls also affect his rhythm on offense — he finished the night with 18 points on 5-of-12 shooting overall (41.7 percent), with a 3-of-10 clip from beyond the arc (30 percent). While he was able to bury the dagger shot that provided the Warriors with enough cushion to eke out a win, he largely struggled to find a consistent rhythm on offense all night long.
Curry will have plenty of time to make personal adjustments, as does the team, who played a highly-flawed game, with the most notable flaw being their 20 turnovers that the Rockets were able to turn into 20 turnover points. An argument could've been made that if not for those giveaways, the Warriors would've won by a more comfortable margin.
Furthermore, while the Warriors played great defense against the Rockets — posting a defensive rating of 102.0 and holding them to 41.9 percent shooting from the field and 29.8 percent on threes — the Rockets also missed plenty of wide-open shots they normally would make. If the law of averages is to be followed, then the Rockets are going to start hitting more of those in the following games — and the Warriors should be cognizant of that.
With that said, the Warriors not only gained a one-game advantage over their fiercest rivals, but they also garnered an important mental edge. With barely a day's worth of preparation and rest, and with players still nursing injuries, the Warriors rendered the Rockets' advantages moot. They planted seeds of frustration within their opponents, who resorted to crying wolf to the media about the lack of impartiality when it comes to officiating.
https://twitter.com/espn_macmahon/status/1122635000975888384
And while the Rockets are spending their time focusing on how to navigate their way around the perceived persecution they are receiving from the officials, the Warriors are keeping their focus locked in on their opponents.
For their own sake, the Rockets should do the same.
Five wins down, 11 more to go.
Stay Golden, Dub Nation.
The Golden Breakdown: How Steph Curry's Defense Helped The Warriors Secure Game 1 Against The Rockets
Curry made some crucial defensive plays down the stretch, but his defense was on point for most of the game despite getting into foul trouble.
By Joe Viray@JoeViray90 Apr 29, 2019, 5:00am PDT
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tdm7fuGCNn4MWxHQ1a1qH6c8qpk=/0x0:3478x2319/1220x813/filters:focal(1466x749:2022x1305)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/63690051/usa_today_12608357.0.jpg
With around a minute and a half left to go in a crucial Game 1 between eternal Western Conference adversaries, Stephen Curry — playing with 5 fouls and also playing with wildfire by continuing to make body contact on defense, continuing to poke and reach in, and just overall giving Warriors fans a series of neverending heart attacks — played perhaps the best defensive sequence of his career.
The weakest link in the Hamptons 5, a lineup replete with elite defensive players, shone brightest on the defensive end. This sequence displays the epitome of Curry's defensive effort in Game 1.
As Harden brings the ball past the half court line, Curry jumps out and hedges, forcing Harden to pick up his dribble. Curry recovers in time to his man, while great off-ball denial puts even more pressure on Harden. Finally, he gives the ball to Tucker, receives it back, and gets switched onto Curry, who stays put like a rock and doesn't allow Harden to get past him. Curry's pressure forces Harden to step on the line, and the Rockets turn the ball over.
Steph forces Harden turnover
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5qYj5z51s0
Curry is often a natural target for opposing offenses, simply due to the fact that he's relatively the worst defensive player on the floor for the Warriors. That's not to say that he is overall a terrible defender — he's not as bad on defense as some people make him out to be — but he's certainly not an elite defender nor a consistent lock-down perimeter stopper.
So it is natural that an offense that predicates itself on isolation, spreading the floor, and targeting the weakest defensive links through forcing switches targets the one player on the floor who is perceived as the most vulnerable on defense. The Rockets did this plenty of times last year during the regular season as well as the Western Conference Finals.
Houston Rockets Targeting Stephen Curry's Defense
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2n_jdQAKFo
While it is unavoidable that Curry will have to deal with a one-on-one situation against Harden, the Warriors have developed several counters to the Rockets' switch-hunting tendencies.
GSoM's very own Apricot previously detailed how the Warriors countered the Cleveland Cavaliers' strategy of trying to switch Curry onto LeBron James. They had Curry "tag" James on the pick-and-roll, which is a variant of the show/hedge tactic that was displayed in the first clip above. This prevents a mismatch, while pressuring the ball-handler enough to not give the ball up to the man left open by Curry's tag. After the the initial show/hedge, Curry recovers quickly to his man, and the switch is successfully prevented.
https://www.goldenstateofmind.com/2017/5/30/15716160/nba-2017-playoffs-analysis-the-new-way-stephen-curry-defends-lebron-james
Curry employs the same defensive tactic whenever the Rockets try to force him to switch onto Harden, which has been proven effective at blowing up their plans of trying to exploit Curry's perceived deficiencies as a defender.
Here is one instance of Curry's "tagging" during Game 1.
Steph show and recover
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWKxDTba4HU
He doesn't tag Harden here per se, nor is he as aggressive on the show, but the principle is still the same: Momentarily switch onto Harden, then find an opportunity to recover back to your man, as Curry does above.
Compare this with a traditional switch onto Harden, which Curry and the Warriors will have to deal with at times, especially if the screen setter is someone who is a deadly three-point shooter such as Eric Gordon. The Warriors can't afford to leave Gordon open for a significant amount of time, so they opt to switch this possession straight up. Harden ends up missing the shot anyway.
Steph switched onto Harden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ljN413VdEs
Curry may also be forced into matchups against Harden due to having to pick him up in transition. The name of the game in transition is to always pick up the ball-handler and stop an easy transition bucket, and this is what Curry does by picking up Harden. Naturally, Harden sees that he has a favorable matchup and elects to take Curry on in isolation, but his stepback jumper misses over a decent contest by Curry.
Steph picks up Harden in transition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ9lZcbSlxg
Not every switch is a successful stop, even if Curry isn't directly responsible for letting the Rockets score. Here is another possession in which the Warriors live with Curry defending Harden. When Curry allows Harden to get the step on him, it forces Draymond Green to rotate off of his man to help on the drive. With Green's man left alone, this forces Andre Iguodala to leave his man in the corner alone to rotate onto Green's man. Harden recognizes this and kicks out to the corner for the open three.
Steph switch allows corner three
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c26iklBQwNg
Anyone can say whatever they want of Curry's defense, but no one can knock him for his effort on that end. Despite being at a physical disadvantage for most of the time, and despite the fact that he can be a strong magnet for fouls, Curry tries his absolute best on defense. When he gets switched onto Harden again, Curry is aware that the shot clock is winding down, and that crowding Harden's personal space would put more pressure on him to get up a shot. But Harden doesn't seem to be aware of the precarious situation he's in — a last-minute reach and poke assures that Harden doesn't get into shooting position, and a 24-second violation is forced.
Steph forces 24 sec violation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydm_UOfeFgY
In this sequence, Curry goes back to tagging Harden then going back to his original assignment. This blows up the switch and takes precious time off of the shot clock. The Rockets use Curry's man to re-screen, and this time the switch is successful. But with the shot clock winding down, Durant comes over to double Harden in order to prevent a shot from going up. Harden opts to pass, and the Warriors force another 24-second violation.
Steph tag forces a 24-sec violation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2n61yySfRo
Curry tags Harden again in this possession, but when he goes back to recover to his man, he bumps into Iguodala, which leaves his man alone on the wing. Curry's hesitation — whether to stick to Harden or to go back to his man — gives Harden enough time to pass to the right wing for an open three-point look, but the Warriors escape with a missed shot.
Steph tag and botched recovery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTv0vR8BJog
Here is another Curry tag on Harden to prevent a switch. Notice Curry's man, Iman Shumpert, set the screen then pop out toward the weak side wing. Curry doesn't make an effort to recover back to Shumpert after the tag, which is virtually daring him to take an open jumper after getting the pass. This is with good reason though — Shumpert has been terrible from three-point range, with a 29.6 percent success rate on threes during the regular season. The Warriors will most certainly live with him taking those shots.
Steph tag and Shumpert miss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVze36HYFr0
When Curry tries to tag again in this possession, Harden adjusts by splitting and driving his way toward the rim. Kevon Looney steps up to discourage Harden, who promptly passes out and resets with Looney on him. It should be common knowledge by now that Looney is an exceptional Harden defender despite his perceived lack of mobility, which is made up for by his extreme discipline and solid defensive fundamentals. When Harden goes up for the three, Looney contests while making sure to avoid contact by jumping to his right. It bothers Harden enough to force an airball.
Steph tag, Looney contest on Harden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPJf3JVH_pQ
With Curry being placed in the precarious position of having to play with 5 fouls, the Rockets try to target him again with switches. Watch the Rockets try to force a switch twice on Curry, both of which are unsuccessful due to Curry tagging and running back to his man. The Warriors temporarily put a wrench into those plans, but Klay Thompson fouls Chris Paul to send him to the line.
Steph tags prevent switches
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPFVU6iOiZM
The Rockets try to hunt for Curry again, with Curry's man setting another screen for Harden. Curry shows and tags Harden with his body, then promptly recovers back to his man. Harden is left with no choice but to deal with Iguodala, who is more equipped to defend him.
Steph tag, Andre contest on Harden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuKMMIQ5lOA&
The one defensive possession that probably caused many Warriors' fans hearts to skip multiple beats came in this sequence. Gordon tries to isolate on Curry, who sticks to him and even navigates around a Clint Capela screen to put pressure on his man. Without reaching, Curry superglues himself to Gordon, who has a difficult time trying to get past his dogged defender. The pressure from Curry eventually gets the better of Gordon, whose pass to Capela is quickly turned into a fastbreak dunk from Iguodala on the other end.
Remember, Curry had 5 fouls during this sequence, but he manages to stop himself from reaching, stays in front of Gordon, and completely locks him down.
Steph locks down Eric Gordon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1gg2L1aTZg
While Curry certainly held his own defensively, it wasn't all rainbows and butterflies for him. His trend of getting himself into severe foul trouble continued — and while some of those calls are questionable, Curry also has to know when to take risks on defense and when to hold back and play it safe. Reaching and trying to poke or strip the ball away while having 4 fouls isn't the most prudent course of action, and it'll only give the officials further reason to blow their whistles at him.
"On the play where he picked up his fourth foul, I asked him, 'Steph, where's your mom?'," Steve Kerr jokingly mused after the game. "He pointed out about 10 rows behind the bench. I looked up and made eye contact with Sonya, I said, 'Tell him not to foul anymore.' If his mom can't get through him I'm definitely not gonna get through to him."
https://twitter.com/MarkG_Medina/status/1122631607062368256
While Kerr may have been saying that in jest, it is true that perhaps no one can really solve Curry's foul problem just by telling him not to do it. It may be up to him and only him to create a mindset of being disciplined, being patient, and being aware of his importance to the team. He is far too valuable to spend extended periods of time on the bench because he couldn't keep his hands to himself.
Fouls also affect his rhythm on offense — he finished the night with 18 points on 5-of-12 shooting overall (41.7 percent), with a 3-of-10 clip from beyond the arc (30 percent). While he was able to bury the dagger shot that provided the Warriors with enough cushion to eke out a win, he largely struggled to find a consistent rhythm on offense all night long.
Curry will have plenty of time to make personal adjustments, as does the team, who played a highly-flawed game, with the most notable flaw being their 20 turnovers that the Rockets were able to turn into 20 turnover points. An argument could've been made that if not for those giveaways, the Warriors would've won by a more comfortable margin.
Furthermore, while the Warriors played great defense against the Rockets — posting a defensive rating of 102.0 and holding them to 41.9 percent shooting from the field and 29.8 percent on threes — the Rockets also missed plenty of wide-open shots they normally would make. If the law of averages is to be followed, then the Rockets are going to start hitting more of those in the following games — and the Warriors should be cognizant of that.
With that said, the Warriors not only gained a one-game advantage over their fiercest rivals, but they also garnered an important mental edge. With barely a day's worth of preparation and rest, and with players still nursing injuries, the Warriors rendered the Rockets' advantages moot. They planted seeds of frustration within their opponents, who resorted to crying wolf to the media about the lack of impartiality when it comes to officiating.
https://twitter.com/espn_macmahon/status/1122635000975888384
And while the Rockets are spending their time focusing on how to navigate their way around the perceived persecution they are receiving from the officials, the Warriors are keeping their focus locked in on their opponents.
For their own sake, the Rockets should do the same.
Five wins down, 11 more to go.
Stay Golden, Dub Nation.
Why Vermont’s single-payer effort failed and what Democrats can learn from it [washington]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/why-vermonts-single-payer-effort-failed-and-what-democrats-can-learn-from-it/2019/04/29/c9789018-3ab8-11e9-a2cd-307b06d0257b_story.html
Why Vermont’s single-payer effort failed and what Democrats can learn from it
By Amy Goldstein
April 29 at 10:09 AM
Three and a half years after Vermont’s then-Gov. Peter Shumlin signed into law a vision for the nation’s first single-payer health system, his small team was still struggling to find a way to pay for it. With a deadline bearing down, they worked through a frozen, mid-December weekend, trying one computer model Friday night, another Saturday night, yet another Sunday morning.
If they kept going, the governor asked his exhausted team on Monday, could they arrive at a tax plan that would be politically palatable? No, they told him. They could not.
Two days later, on Dec. 17, 2014, Shumlin, who had swept into office promising a health care system that left no one uninsured, announced he was giving up, lamenting the decision as “the greatest disappointment of my political life so far.”
The trajectory of Green Mountain Care, as Vermont’s health system was to be known — from the euphoric spring of 2011 to its crash landing in late 2014 — offers sobering lessons for the current crop of Democrats running for president, including Vermont’s own Sen. Bernie Sanders (I), most of whom embrace Medicare-for-all or other aspirations for universal insurance coverage.
Vermont’s foray into publicly financed health care — in a state that in many ways offered the optimal conditions — demonstrates the extraordinary difficulty of trying to convert progressives’ dream of a more just, efficient health system into reality.
Then as now, many of the advocates shared “a belief that borders on the theological” that such a system would save money, as one analyst put it — even though no one knew what it would cost when it passed in Vermont.
That belief would prove naive. The choices Shumlin favored would essentially have doubled Vermont’s budget, raising state income taxes by up to 9.5 percent and placing an 11.5 percent payroll tax on all employers — a burden Shumlin said would pose “a risk of economic shock” — even though Vermonters would no longer pay for private health plans.
The dozens of decisions the governor’s team made in designing the system — what benefits to include, who to cover and the amount of out-of-pocket costs — required trade-offs with big winners and losers.
Other things got in the way, too, according to nearly a dozen and a half actors and observers in the fight for Green Mountain Care interviewed for this story. Vermont’s leaders were too optimistic about the financial help they could lure from Washington. They were late in writing the financing plan, losing political momentum in the process.
Far and away the biggest hurdles, though, were untamed health-care costs, which were growing faster than the U.S. economy and making care increasingly unaffordable no matter how it was paid for.
“What I learned the hard way,” said Shumlin, “is it isn’t just about reforming the broken payment system. Public financing will not work until you get costs under control.”
Many of those same dilemmas would confront those building a national single-payer model. But as the 2020 campaigns get underway, few Democrats show signs of acknowledging, let alone wrestling with, the gritty complexities. Even Sanders, eager as he was for Vermont to become the first single-payer state, seldom mentions that it did not come to pass.
“I see no evidence from the Medicare-for-all advocacy community of a serious effort to understand and learn from the lessons from Vermont’s failure,” said John McDonough, a senior aide to the late senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and now a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Those who ignore history are cursed to repeat it.”
***
If any state offered fertile terrain to create a single-payer version of universal health care, Vermont was it.
It has some of the nation’s healthiest residents, with some of the lowest uninsured rates. It is small and homogeneous. It shares a border with Canada, putting an existing single-payer system within sight. And it has just one main insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont, a nonprofit repeatedly ranked the most efficient Blue Cross Blue Shield plan in the nation.
In a bastion of liberal politics, state lawmakers had flirted with single-payer plans as early as the 1990s. But the grass-roots crusade really took off on May Day of 2009, when more than 1,000 people, toting red signs saying “Healthcare is a Human Right,” gathered at the gold-domed statehouse for the largest weekday rally at the capitol in Vermont history.
In a state with two-year governor terms, 2010 was an election year, and Shumlin, then state Senate leader, was running in a crowded Democratic primary field.
“His first TV ad was for single-payer,” recalled James Haslam, then-executive director of the Vermont Workers’ Center, which organized rallies.
After Shumlin won the governorship, he laid out a bill for Green Mountain Care on the first day of the next legislative session, quickly followed by a Harvard consultant’s estimates, commissioned a year earlier, that such a plan would lower total health spending, eliminate health-care fraud and abuse, and cover more people. The consultant “was doing a 36,000-foot view, not ‘we are landing the plane,’ ” Shumlin recalled. “No one in their right mind was relying on those numbers.”
As progressives still contend, Shumlin said the newly enacted Affordable Care Act signed by Barack Obama “wouldn’t take us far enough,” recalled a former legislative leader, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid a professional conflict.
Early that May, the legislation called Act 48 passed the state Senate, 21 to 9. Two days later, it passed the state House, 94 to 49.
Under a brilliant spring sky later that month, Shumlin signed the bill at a wooden table on the statehouse steps, surrounded by cheering legislators and activists. People wept, recalled Peter Sterling, a leading advocate at the time. “You couldn’t believe the day had come.”
A few noted the idea would be divisive.
“We all have to be ready to fight the fight that surely will be coming,” John Campbell, who succeeded Shumlin as the Senate’s president pro tem, told the crowd.
Still, the governor sounded resolute. The law was “an opportunity and an obligation,” he said. “We will get this done in Vermont.”
***
As with any attempt to dismantle one American health care system and replace it with another, Green Mountain Care was always going to be a long game. For starters, it would not be until 2017 that any state could get federal permission to change the way it used insurance subsidies created under the ACA.
Shumlin and a top aide traveled to Washington to cajole the Treasury Department and the Department of Health and Human Services to allow Vermont to start sooner. They argued the state should be able to take the tax advantages available to employers that offer health benefits and count that money toward public financing.
The requests were rejected because they were premature or not allowed under what the federal health-care law and tax law permitted, recalled Jason Levitis, a Treasury official at the time specializing in the ACA.
Act 48 was 141 pages — far more specific than any plans of Democrats now running for president or Senate legislation Sanders recently reintroduced. Still, it left scores of knotty decisions for Shumlin’s administration.
“It’s easy to write a bill saying we are going to cover everybody,” said a member of his staff who worked on the plan and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid a professional conflict. “It’s much harder to figure out . . . what exactly your benefit coverage will be [and] are you going to have co-payments?”
On the fifth floor of the Pavilion, the governor’s office building, the small team of Shumlin’s staff divided the tasks. Under the law, the deadline to present a financing plan to state lawmakers was January 2013 — just as the state was creating the machinery for its ACA insurance marketplace.
“Its political timing couldn’t be worse,” Shumlin recalled. Like a number of states that created their own insurance exchanges, Vermont’s online marketplace malfunctioned. “Voters were saying, ‘If this guy can’t get an exchange running, how could we trust him to revamp our entire health-care system?’ ” Shumlin said.
It was nearly two years after he had signed the bill when Shumlin assigned a tax specialist to begin developing Green Mountain Care’s financing.
By then, the governor had been under intense pressure on other decisions. Single-payer advocates and unions pressed hard for generous benefits. In a state with workers coming in from Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New York, some employers argued that their out-of-staters needed to be included.
In the end, Shumlin agreed that businesses should not need to exclude part of their workforce from the system and that it would be unfair to offer benefits less than public employees already had. The plan would have covered, on average, 94 percent of Vermonters’ health-care costs.
Meanwhile, small businesses that did not offer health benefits, such as Vermont’s “creemee stands” selling soft-serve ice cream, feared the specter of higher taxes, recalled Bram Kleppner, chief executive of a pewter company who supports single-payer and was on a business advisory council to Shumlin. “We never figured out the creemee stand — the notion we were going to put all these beloved little businesses run by our cousins and our neighbors out of business by imposing a payroll tax.”
And big companies that were self-insured, such as IBM, resented the prospect of being taxed more to help other Vermonters get coverage.
Consultants had said that the amount that Vermonters and their employers were paying in insurance premiums and patients’ out-of-pocket costs was more than what would be needed in additional tax revenue. But the prediction that Vermont’s overall health spending would decrease, while more people got coverage, was unproven — and, in any case, was a hard sell in the face of big new taxes.
Shumlin’s team developed 14 alternative financing concepts, according to the governor’s former staffer. “The pressure on us was to see if we could get the payroll tax under double digits, which we couldn’t figure out how to do without making the income tax” on individuals too high, that staffer said.
The governor promised to announce the financing soon after the 2014 elections. With progressives fearing he was losing political will to launch Green Mountain Care, amid other controversies, Shumlin won a third term over a GOP political neophyte in a contest so close it ended up being decided by the legislature.
By then, the computer runs kept showing that the only way to set taxes at rates as low as they were striving for was to provide skimpier coverage than most insured Vermonters already had.
“As we completed the financing modeling,” Shumlin said at a news conference at which he abandoned his quest, “it became clear that the risk of economic shock is too high at this time to offer a plan I can responsibly support for passage in the legislature.”
Green Mountain Care would have cost $4.3 billion in its first year, with less funding than the state wanted from the federal government and $2.6 billion in new state tax revenue. By 2020, Shumlin’s team estimated, the cost would have swollen to $5 billion.
“We were pretty shocked at the tax rates we were going to have to charge,” he recalled.
Health-care activists delivered a platter of burned toast to his office, saying it symbolized his political future. At Shumlin’s inauguration the next month, 29 single-payer demonstrators were arrested in the House chamber, and he was escorted out a back door for his safety. Months later, he said he would not run for a fourth term.
***
The day Shumlin announced that Green Mountain Care was dead, Vermont’s junior senator, Sanders, was in Iowa, testing progressives’ receptivity as he considered a first run for president. The day before, he had talked up single-payer in two appearances, news accounts show. But that day, he did not mention its demise in his own state, according to the accounts and people interviewed for this story.
When Congress adopted the ACA in 2010, Sanders had fought to build in flexibility for states to try experiments, so that Vermont could become the first with a single-payer system. Later, it was two other Senate Democrats, not Sanders, who introduced an unsuccessful bill to allow such experiments sooner than 2017.
Shumlin recalled that when he made trips to federal agencies to advance his plan, “Sanders was the one who got in the car and came with me to those meetings.” Back in Vermont, though, the senator was hands-off, neither helping on the technical work, nor pressing state lawmakers to support the taxes that would be needed.
Haslam, one of the leading health-care activists, said, “I’m not sure any senator would play that role in their statehouse. We were just hoping, because he’s such a champion.”
Sanders declined to be interviewed for this story. The policy director for his 2020 campaign, Josh Orton, said the senator “has focused tirelessly on health-care policy at the federal level. . . . If we are going to pass Medicare-for-all, we will need a national grass-roots movement.”
To some who still bear the battle scars of Green Mountain Care, the state’s unrealized vision is a neon warning for Sanders and other disciples of single-payer health care.
“If you can’t do it in Vermont, with one private health plan and low uninsured rates, then the amount of disruption you would have nationally with winners and losers would be enormous,” said Kenneth Thorpe, an Emory University health-policy researcher who worked as a consultant to Vermont.
Advocates, however, are undeterred.
“Health care is not free,” acknowledged Deb Richter, a family physician who moved to Vermont three decades ago to crusade for single-payer. “There is no Santa Claus.” But, she argues, “there is more than enough money already floating on health care” — it just needs to be removed from the control of private insurance companies.”
Shumlin, who has returned to private business, has come to believe it is not that simple. In his last two years in office, he zealously pursued innovations to drive down health care spending, including an experiment approved by the Obama administration.
After reflecting on what he tried and failed to do, he sometimes thinks a national single-payer effort might be easier to pull off. But when he listens to the 2020 candidates, their health-care pitches strike him as shallow.
“I kind of know why,” he said. “Their job is to try to build support for an idea. I did the same thing when I ran. Listen, changing health-care systems is wonky work.”
Still, he said, “If I were running for president of the United States, I would have a team working on a plan so I don’t sell an idea to Americans that you can’t achieve. That’s the mistake I made.”
Why Vermont’s single-payer effort failed and what Democrats can learn from it
By Amy Goldstein
April 29 at 10:09 AM
Three and a half years after Vermont’s then-Gov. Peter Shumlin signed into law a vision for the nation’s first single-payer health system, his small team was still struggling to find a way to pay for it. With a deadline bearing down, they worked through a frozen, mid-December weekend, trying one computer model Friday night, another Saturday night, yet another Sunday morning.
If they kept going, the governor asked his exhausted team on Monday, could they arrive at a tax plan that would be politically palatable? No, they told him. They could not.
Two days later, on Dec. 17, 2014, Shumlin, who had swept into office promising a health care system that left no one uninsured, announced he was giving up, lamenting the decision as “the greatest disappointment of my political life so far.”
The trajectory of Green Mountain Care, as Vermont’s health system was to be known — from the euphoric spring of 2011 to its crash landing in late 2014 — offers sobering lessons for the current crop of Democrats running for president, including Vermont’s own Sen. Bernie Sanders (I), most of whom embrace Medicare-for-all or other aspirations for universal insurance coverage.
Vermont’s foray into publicly financed health care — in a state that in many ways offered the optimal conditions — demonstrates the extraordinary difficulty of trying to convert progressives’ dream of a more just, efficient health system into reality.
Then as now, many of the advocates shared “a belief that borders on the theological” that such a system would save money, as one analyst put it — even though no one knew what it would cost when it passed in Vermont.
That belief would prove naive. The choices Shumlin favored would essentially have doubled Vermont’s budget, raising state income taxes by up to 9.5 percent and placing an 11.5 percent payroll tax on all employers — a burden Shumlin said would pose “a risk of economic shock” — even though Vermonters would no longer pay for private health plans.
The dozens of decisions the governor’s team made in designing the system — what benefits to include, who to cover and the amount of out-of-pocket costs — required trade-offs with big winners and losers.
Other things got in the way, too, according to nearly a dozen and a half actors and observers in the fight for Green Mountain Care interviewed for this story. Vermont’s leaders were too optimistic about the financial help they could lure from Washington. They were late in writing the financing plan, losing political momentum in the process.
Far and away the biggest hurdles, though, were untamed health-care costs, which were growing faster than the U.S. economy and making care increasingly unaffordable no matter how it was paid for.
“What I learned the hard way,” said Shumlin, “is it isn’t just about reforming the broken payment system. Public financing will not work until you get costs under control.”
Many of those same dilemmas would confront those building a national single-payer model. But as the 2020 campaigns get underway, few Democrats show signs of acknowledging, let alone wrestling with, the gritty complexities. Even Sanders, eager as he was for Vermont to become the first single-payer state, seldom mentions that it did not come to pass.
“I see no evidence from the Medicare-for-all advocacy community of a serious effort to understand and learn from the lessons from Vermont’s failure,” said John McDonough, a senior aide to the late senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and now a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Those who ignore history are cursed to repeat it.”
***
If any state offered fertile terrain to create a single-payer version of universal health care, Vermont was it.
It has some of the nation’s healthiest residents, with some of the lowest uninsured rates. It is small and homogeneous. It shares a border with Canada, putting an existing single-payer system within sight. And it has just one main insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont, a nonprofit repeatedly ranked the most efficient Blue Cross Blue Shield plan in the nation.
In a bastion of liberal politics, state lawmakers had flirted with single-payer plans as early as the 1990s. But the grass-roots crusade really took off on May Day of 2009, when more than 1,000 people, toting red signs saying “Healthcare is a Human Right,” gathered at the gold-domed statehouse for the largest weekday rally at the capitol in Vermont history.
In a state with two-year governor terms, 2010 was an election year, and Shumlin, then state Senate leader, was running in a crowded Democratic primary field.
“His first TV ad was for single-payer,” recalled James Haslam, then-executive director of the Vermont Workers’ Center, which organized rallies.
After Shumlin won the governorship, he laid out a bill for Green Mountain Care on the first day of the next legislative session, quickly followed by a Harvard consultant’s estimates, commissioned a year earlier, that such a plan would lower total health spending, eliminate health-care fraud and abuse, and cover more people. The consultant “was doing a 36,000-foot view, not ‘we are landing the plane,’ ” Shumlin recalled. “No one in their right mind was relying on those numbers.”
As progressives still contend, Shumlin said the newly enacted Affordable Care Act signed by Barack Obama “wouldn’t take us far enough,” recalled a former legislative leader, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid a professional conflict.
Early that May, the legislation called Act 48 passed the state Senate, 21 to 9. Two days later, it passed the state House, 94 to 49.
Under a brilliant spring sky later that month, Shumlin signed the bill at a wooden table on the statehouse steps, surrounded by cheering legislators and activists. People wept, recalled Peter Sterling, a leading advocate at the time. “You couldn’t believe the day had come.”
A few noted the idea would be divisive.
“We all have to be ready to fight the fight that surely will be coming,” John Campbell, who succeeded Shumlin as the Senate’s president pro tem, told the crowd.
Still, the governor sounded resolute. The law was “an opportunity and an obligation,” he said. “We will get this done in Vermont.”
***
As with any attempt to dismantle one American health care system and replace it with another, Green Mountain Care was always going to be a long game. For starters, it would not be until 2017 that any state could get federal permission to change the way it used insurance subsidies created under the ACA.
Shumlin and a top aide traveled to Washington to cajole the Treasury Department and the Department of Health and Human Services to allow Vermont to start sooner. They argued the state should be able to take the tax advantages available to employers that offer health benefits and count that money toward public financing.
The requests were rejected because they were premature or not allowed under what the federal health-care law and tax law permitted, recalled Jason Levitis, a Treasury official at the time specializing in the ACA.
Act 48 was 141 pages — far more specific than any plans of Democrats now running for president or Senate legislation Sanders recently reintroduced. Still, it left scores of knotty decisions for Shumlin’s administration.
“It’s easy to write a bill saying we are going to cover everybody,” said a member of his staff who worked on the plan and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid a professional conflict. “It’s much harder to figure out . . . what exactly your benefit coverage will be [and] are you going to have co-payments?”
On the fifth floor of the Pavilion, the governor’s office building, the small team of Shumlin’s staff divided the tasks. Under the law, the deadline to present a financing plan to state lawmakers was January 2013 — just as the state was creating the machinery for its ACA insurance marketplace.
“Its political timing couldn’t be worse,” Shumlin recalled. Like a number of states that created their own insurance exchanges, Vermont’s online marketplace malfunctioned. “Voters were saying, ‘If this guy can’t get an exchange running, how could we trust him to revamp our entire health-care system?’ ” Shumlin said.
It was nearly two years after he had signed the bill when Shumlin assigned a tax specialist to begin developing Green Mountain Care’s financing.
By then, the governor had been under intense pressure on other decisions. Single-payer advocates and unions pressed hard for generous benefits. In a state with workers coming in from Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New York, some employers argued that their out-of-staters needed to be included.
In the end, Shumlin agreed that businesses should not need to exclude part of their workforce from the system and that it would be unfair to offer benefits less than public employees already had. The plan would have covered, on average, 94 percent of Vermonters’ health-care costs.
Meanwhile, small businesses that did not offer health benefits, such as Vermont’s “creemee stands” selling soft-serve ice cream, feared the specter of higher taxes, recalled Bram Kleppner, chief executive of a pewter company who supports single-payer and was on a business advisory council to Shumlin. “We never figured out the creemee stand — the notion we were going to put all these beloved little businesses run by our cousins and our neighbors out of business by imposing a payroll tax.”
And big companies that were self-insured, such as IBM, resented the prospect of being taxed more to help other Vermonters get coverage.
Consultants had said that the amount that Vermonters and their employers were paying in insurance premiums and patients’ out-of-pocket costs was more than what would be needed in additional tax revenue. But the prediction that Vermont’s overall health spending would decrease, while more people got coverage, was unproven — and, in any case, was a hard sell in the face of big new taxes.
Shumlin’s team developed 14 alternative financing concepts, according to the governor’s former staffer. “The pressure on us was to see if we could get the payroll tax under double digits, which we couldn’t figure out how to do without making the income tax” on individuals too high, that staffer said.
The governor promised to announce the financing soon after the 2014 elections. With progressives fearing he was losing political will to launch Green Mountain Care, amid other controversies, Shumlin won a third term over a GOP political neophyte in a contest so close it ended up being decided by the legislature.
By then, the computer runs kept showing that the only way to set taxes at rates as low as they were striving for was to provide skimpier coverage than most insured Vermonters already had.
“As we completed the financing modeling,” Shumlin said at a news conference at which he abandoned his quest, “it became clear that the risk of economic shock is too high at this time to offer a plan I can responsibly support for passage in the legislature.”
Green Mountain Care would have cost $4.3 billion in its first year, with less funding than the state wanted from the federal government and $2.6 billion in new state tax revenue. By 2020, Shumlin’s team estimated, the cost would have swollen to $5 billion.
“We were pretty shocked at the tax rates we were going to have to charge,” he recalled.
Health-care activists delivered a platter of burned toast to his office, saying it symbolized his political future. At Shumlin’s inauguration the next month, 29 single-payer demonstrators were arrested in the House chamber, and he was escorted out a back door for his safety. Months later, he said he would not run for a fourth term.
***
The day Shumlin announced that Green Mountain Care was dead, Vermont’s junior senator, Sanders, was in Iowa, testing progressives’ receptivity as he considered a first run for president. The day before, he had talked up single-payer in two appearances, news accounts show. But that day, he did not mention its demise in his own state, according to the accounts and people interviewed for this story.
When Congress adopted the ACA in 2010, Sanders had fought to build in flexibility for states to try experiments, so that Vermont could become the first with a single-payer system. Later, it was two other Senate Democrats, not Sanders, who introduced an unsuccessful bill to allow such experiments sooner than 2017.
Shumlin recalled that when he made trips to federal agencies to advance his plan, “Sanders was the one who got in the car and came with me to those meetings.” Back in Vermont, though, the senator was hands-off, neither helping on the technical work, nor pressing state lawmakers to support the taxes that would be needed.
Haslam, one of the leading health-care activists, said, “I’m not sure any senator would play that role in their statehouse. We were just hoping, because he’s such a champion.”
Sanders declined to be interviewed for this story. The policy director for his 2020 campaign, Josh Orton, said the senator “has focused tirelessly on health-care policy at the federal level. . . . If we are going to pass Medicare-for-all, we will need a national grass-roots movement.”
To some who still bear the battle scars of Green Mountain Care, the state’s unrealized vision is a neon warning for Sanders and other disciples of single-payer health care.
“If you can’t do it in Vermont, with one private health plan and low uninsured rates, then the amount of disruption you would have nationally with winners and losers would be enormous,” said Kenneth Thorpe, an Emory University health-policy researcher who worked as a consultant to Vermont.
Advocates, however, are undeterred.
“Health care is not free,” acknowledged Deb Richter, a family physician who moved to Vermont three decades ago to crusade for single-payer. “There is no Santa Claus.” But, she argues, “there is more than enough money already floating on health care” — it just needs to be removed from the control of private insurance companies.”
Shumlin, who has returned to private business, has come to believe it is not that simple. In his last two years in office, he zealously pursued innovations to drive down health care spending, including an experiment approved by the Obama administration.
After reflecting on what he tried and failed to do, he sometimes thinks a national single-payer effort might be easier to pull off. But when he listens to the 2020 candidates, their health-care pitches strike him as shallow.
“I kind of know why,” he said. “Their job is to try to build support for an idea. I did the same thing when I ran. Listen, changing health-care systems is wonky work.”
Still, he said, “If I were running for president of the United States, I would have a team working on a plan so I don’t sell an idea to Americans that you can’t achieve. That’s the mistake I made.”
Wall Street Democrats Are Absolutely Freaking Out About Their 2020 Candidates [nymag]
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/wall-street-democrats-2020-candidates.html
Wall Street Democrats Are Absolutely Freaking Out About Their 2020 Candidates
By Gabriel Debenedetti
One night in early April, roughly 20 of the Democratic Party’s highest-profile donors from the financial industry sat down over dinner to discuss how exactly they were feeling about the 2020 presidential race. For the most part, it wasn’t great.
Convened by two veterans of liberal fund-raising — investors Steven Rattner and Blair Effron — the group had no hard-and-fast agenda except to share notes on the overflowing field of candidates. The crowd of Democratic heavyweights, including Clinton-administration Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs and Citi alum Robert Rubin, former ambassador to France Jane Hartley, and venture capitalist Deven Parekh, knew most of the contenders well. But coming to some kind of consensus, picking a plausible candidate they felt they could all live with and throw their considerable money behind — that was a far-fetched proposition.
“There’s tremendous fear,” said one banker who was there. The candidates who had long cultivated relationships with Wall Street — such as Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand — were struggling to gain traction and had grown more hostile to finance as their party had, too. Joe Biden, leading in early polls, had a comforting history in the Obama White House and a reputation as an Establishment Democrat but had never, until a few months ago, maintained any meaningful relationship with Wall Street, hadn’t even announced his candidacy yet, and struck many bankers as a dubious bet to beat Donald Trump. Nearly everyone else in the field, the financiers felt, was being pulled leftward by Bernie Sanders (the preposterously well-funded contender they considered too crazy to even imagine in the White House) and Elizabeth Warren (less crazy, Democrats on Wall Street think, and way more competent). “She would torture them,” one banker told me. “Warren strikes fear in their hearts,” explained a New York executive close to banking leaders from both parties — so much fear that such investors often speak of the U.S. senator from Massachusetts, a former law professor and consumer advocate, as a co-front-runner with Sanders. “How do we come up with an alternative?” asked one person at the dinner.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/progressive-2020-hopefuls-are-courting-wall-street-cash.html
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/09/cory-booker-president-2020-election.html
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/a-long-talk-with-new-york-senator-kirsten-gillibrand.html
http://nymag.com/thecut/2019/04/joe-biden-officially-enters-2020-president-race.html
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/how-electable-is-bernie-sanders-in-2020.html
http://nymag.com/thecut/2019/04/elizabeth-warren-policies-2020-presidential-campaign.html
There were a few options, none perfect. Beto O’Rourke had recently launched his campaign, and his congressional record was essentially a centrist-shaped blank slate. Pete Buttigieg was a McKinsey alum who came from the Rust Belt but talked like a Silicon Valley exec or an Obama Treasury official, but no one, yet, took him seriously.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/can-beto-orourke-win-the-presidential-nomination-in-2020.html
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/pete-buttigieg-2020-presidential-campaign.html
Kamala Harris was a favorite of many in the room. The U.S. senator from California now describes herself as a populist and highlighted a past confrontation with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon over foreclosures in her pre-campaign book, but in 2012, as California’s attorney general, she passed on prosecuting OneWest and its CEO, Steven Mnuchin. In this cycle, she has been the Democrat perhaps most active in seeking Wall Street money (Citi vice-chairman Ray McGuire and Pine Street partner Brian Mathis are helping with her Wall Street outreach, and she recently headlined a fund-raiser hosted by LionTree CEO Aryeh Bourkoff) and occasionally its advice (BlackRock’s Michael Pyle, an Obama-administration alum, is advising her on economics). “People are generally in search of a candidate who has the right set of views, has the right character, but also can win,” Rattner told me later. “Right now, it is very hard to see who checks all three boxes.”
http://nymag.com/thecut/2019/04/kamala-harris-2020-presidential-campaign-fundraising.html
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/california-a-golden-opportunity-for-kamala-harris-in-2020.html
There was no agreement. By evening’s end, multiple donors walked away planning to write checks to three or four or five candidates — hoping they stay relatively moderate — rather than going all in on any one. Among the committed Democrats on Wall Street, this wait-and-see, as-long-as-it’s-not-Bernie-or-Elizabeth posture has become the norm. “This is like venture investing. You really don’t know who’s going to break out, but your hope is you have a good portfolio and that one of these investments breaks out,” Bruce Heyman, a former Goldman managing director and ambassador to Canada, told me.
Of course, these longtime donors are more committed to the Democrats than the average guy on Wall Street. Two years ago, Trump seemed noxious enough that Democrats (reasonably) hoped to continue growing their considerable advantage over Republicans in the New York finance set. But one GOP-driven tax cut and one leftward shift in the Democratic Party later, a worried handful of bankers is considering turning that story on its head. “They’re too far left! They’re too far left!” said Alex Sanchez, CEO of the Florida Bankers Association. “I mean, honestly, if it’s Bernie versus Trump, I have no fucking idea what I’m going to do,” one Democratic hedge funder told me. “Maybe I won’t vote.”
Democratic donors aren’t especially worried about policy; few have sussed out where candidates stand on Dodd-Frank or the carried-interest tax loophole, and few believe that, aside from Sanders or Warren, any contenders are likely to make an aggressive new push for regulation as president. What agitates them instead is — in a replay of the alienation they felt during the Obama presidency thanks to a few stray “fat cats” comments — how Democratic rhetoric threatens their sense of status. No moment crystallized the new reality more than when former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper — a centrist candidate who was a prominent business owner in Denver before entering politics — refused to even call himself a capitalist in a Morning Joe interview in March.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/john-hickenlooper-2020.html
Before Trump won, Hillary Clinton had outraised him by a margin of more than four to one among the financial crowd, which had long regarded him as a pariah because of his shady record and bankruptcies. Now? “The anti-corporate, anti–Wall Street direction of the Democratic Party is driving Democrats into the Trump camp, which is, in most cases, the last place they want to be,” said Kathryn Wylde, CEO of the Partnership for New York City, the business group that counts among its members all of the city’s major financial institutions. “The fact that he’s raised as much money as he has is a reflection of how many Democrats are holding their nose and supporting him because they feel demonized by the Democrats.” In mid-April, Trump’s team revealed it had raised over $30 million in the first quarter of 2019, slightly more than the top two Democratic candidates combined. If you add up all the Democrats’ dollars, the challengers are way ahead — but among donors, and indeed among the candidates themselves, the perception remains that the president is accumulating a real edge. Meanwhile, Goldman released its 2020 outlook: Trump, the firm concluded, now has a “narrow advantage.” Even Paul Singer, the GOP hedge-fund magnate who backed efforts to defeat Trump in 2016 — and who funds the Washington Free Beacon, which first paid for the anti-Trump research that later became “the dossier” — stopped by a small Trump fund-raising roundtable in New York late last year. “Well, we must be doing well now that Paul’s here,” Trump said.
“Wall Street for Trump is the reverse Bradley effect,” said hedge-fund manager Anthony Scaramucci, the Republican fund-raiser who (very) briefly served as Trump’s White House communications director, referring to the theory that voters overstate their support for nonwhite candidates in polls. “They all secretly love him, but because of their clients and the polarity, they don’t want to say it out loud.”
Over coffee recently in midtown, an investment pro with a long history in Democratic politics described the struggle to resist the unexpected pull of Trump. “What matters more?” he asked, looking up at me. “My social values or my paycheck?”
It would appear from the outside to be happy days on Wall Street. Banks smashed previous profit records in 2018, taxes were down, stocks were up, and few people in power in Washington were talking about tightening regulations. But the arrival of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was seen on Wall Street as a tremor portending a broader earthquake on the left. Indeed, there has been no greater mobilizer of wealthy centrists than her primary win in June. In July, a few hundred gathered in Columbus, Ohio, to find a policy platform that would defeat both Trump and Sanders. Another group of investors figured if the parties were now poisoned, they’d just have to draft an independent presidential candidate themselves. It was no secret that John Kasich and Howard Schultz were considering it, and Mike Bloomberg, too. But another option held promise: moderate Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, who’d twice before considered running. The senator agreed to meet last summer and listened as they promised funding and presented a plan to get his name on the ballot in all 50 states. Then Warner, assessing the probability of a successful third-party run, told them, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
Meanwhile, parts of the Democratic field were doing the same, with most candidates focused on building Sanders-style small-dollar, email-driven fund-raising machines. (Sanders raised $10 million that way in just his first week as a candidate.) “It’s kind of stunning how a bunch of these people running for president haven’t gotten ahold of [a list of top past contributors] and said, ‘What can I do to get this person?’ ” fumed a hedge-fund honcho out of the loop for the first time in two decades. “It’s sort of basic political IQ.”
“Everyone wants to seem relevant,” one prominent investor told me. But for the first time he or any of his friends could remember, “we’re just not fucking relevant. We’re not that big of a deal anymore. None of us!”
“A lot of the donor community is worried about losing their presidential perks and ambassadorial gigs to baristas,” said veteran New York Democratic fund-raiser Robert Zimmerman. “It’s long overdue.”
Those candidates still reaching out to Wall Street have mostly done so underground, visiting the homes and offices of wealthy donors while adamantly demanding secrecy — at least seven candidates privately auditioned for a group of 16 leading Obama donors in D.C. in February. The memory of Sanders supporters derisively showering Clinton’s motorcade with dollar bills as it drove into George Clooney’s home for an expensive 2016 fund-raiser remained particularly searing. Morgan Stanley managing director Tom Nides, a deputy secretary of State under Clinton (and a friend of Minnesota senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar’s since they interned for Walter Mondale together), last year hosted a handful of likely candidates for a series of private dinners with potential supporters. But no bank has set up any meet-and-greets like the ones then-Senator Obama lit up in 2006. For the first time, campaigns have started sending out invitations to formal private fund-raising events without either the hosts’ names or the entry price printed on them, just in case they leaked. “They don’t want to get Bernied,” said a former bank executive.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/watch-amy-klobuchars-please-clap-moment.html
Not everyone is playing the same game. When he left the vice-presidency, Biden — historically a lousy fund-raiser, with threadbare finance ties beyond Delaware’s credit-card industry — established a network of post–White House organizations and took care to stack them not just with longtime aides and friends but with Wall Street’s Democratic heavy hitters. Last spring, he installed a policy advisory board for the new Biden Institute at the University of Delaware, including JPMorgan’s Peter Scher, KeyBank’s Don Graves, former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, and onetime Goldman investor Eric Mindich. Now, said one top party fund-raiser in New York, “there’s a lot of praying for Joe Biden.”
But some high-flying former Obama fund-raisers who witnessed Biden at the former president’s side worry about his prospects against Trump. For them, there was Beto. In considering a run, O’Rourke consulted with former top political aides to Obama, such as David Plouffe, but as his own decision deadline neared, he started picking the brains of a handful of Obama’s top-tier donors and bundlers. One, private-equity exec Mark Gallogly, became convinced O’Rourke was the young inspirer needed to lead the anti-Trump movement and flew to meet with the congressman and his family. Investment banker and former ambassador to the U.K. Louis Susman, meanwhile, also jumped onboard, making calls across Wall Street to construct a fund-raising operation for him. “He will probably raise more money than any candidate in the history of our presidential politics, and he will do so not just with large donors but with more money [from donations of] under $500 than anyone in our history of presidential politics,” predicted Gilbert Garcia, a Houston investor. “A lot of senior people are going to get involved. You had a lot of senior people get involved for Obama. You’re going to see that effect.”
Nearing launch day, O’Rourke reciprocated. In calls with potential supporters, he asked for advice, and hours before making his campaign official, he rang Robert Wolf, the former UBS chair. He had no specific ask, he said — he’d just heard Wolf was a good person to know for the road ahead. When he did announce, on a Thursday morning in March, Biden’s top lieutenants, led by right-hand man Steve Ricchetti, made a round of calls to top potential supporters that afternoon to head off the threat.
Now Biden has his team, O’Rourke his, and Harris hers — with power bases in California and New York. If you were one of the 100 campaign bundlers who’d attended Harris’s private New York City finance kickoff earlier this year, her team presented you with an ask: to commit to raise $27,000 each in the first quarter of the year. But when the quarter ended, you also saw the team’s publicly shared numbers; of the $12 million she raised, more than half came from online sources, where her average contribution was $28. Those figures reinforce the lesson of Sanders’s kickoff and O’Rourke’s $6.1 million day one: Big in-person fund-raising events have, in many cases, gone out of style, and many big-money donors are still playing wait-and-see. Others have pushed Michael Bennet, the senator from Colorado, and Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, to enter the race. Earlier this year, 105 of the party’s most in-demand donors convened in south Florida for a private retreat to consider their next investments. Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville addressed the group over dinner and asked who among them had committed to a presidential candidate. Just four hands went up.
But on a recent morning in Manhattan, a handful of Wall Street’s Democratic power brokers got to chatting after a breakfast fund-raiser for a congressman. The topic was unavoidable: In recent weeks, a new name had entered the fold. Now, as the donors spoke, more news trickled out. A growing array of influential bundlers in the finance world had made their choice to support the new entrant, even though many had planned to stay neutral far longer. Hedge-fund manager Orin Kramer, for one, was onboard after meeting the candidate in person a few weeks earlier. David Jacobson, the onetime ambassador to Canada who is now a BMO vice-chairman — and who helped organize the auditions in February — was too. And Steve Elmendorf, a D.C. lobbyist who has worked closely with Wall Street leaders for years, made his choice. He even changed the background of his Facebook page to match the moment: It’s now a wide shot of a large crowd looking up at a stage with a massive PETE 2020 sign staring back.
*This article appears in the April 29, 2019, issue of New York Magazine.
Wall Street Democrats Are Absolutely Freaking Out About Their 2020 Candidates
By Gabriel Debenedetti
One night in early April, roughly 20 of the Democratic Party’s highest-profile donors from the financial industry sat down over dinner to discuss how exactly they were feeling about the 2020 presidential race. For the most part, it wasn’t great.
Convened by two veterans of liberal fund-raising — investors Steven Rattner and Blair Effron — the group had no hard-and-fast agenda except to share notes on the overflowing field of candidates. The crowd of Democratic heavyweights, including Clinton-administration Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs and Citi alum Robert Rubin, former ambassador to France Jane Hartley, and venture capitalist Deven Parekh, knew most of the contenders well. But coming to some kind of consensus, picking a plausible candidate they felt they could all live with and throw their considerable money behind — that was a far-fetched proposition.
“There’s tremendous fear,” said one banker who was there. The candidates who had long cultivated relationships with Wall Street — such as Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand — were struggling to gain traction and had grown more hostile to finance as their party had, too. Joe Biden, leading in early polls, had a comforting history in the Obama White House and a reputation as an Establishment Democrat but had never, until a few months ago, maintained any meaningful relationship with Wall Street, hadn’t even announced his candidacy yet, and struck many bankers as a dubious bet to beat Donald Trump. Nearly everyone else in the field, the financiers felt, was being pulled leftward by Bernie Sanders (the preposterously well-funded contender they considered too crazy to even imagine in the White House) and Elizabeth Warren (less crazy, Democrats on Wall Street think, and way more competent). “She would torture them,” one banker told me. “Warren strikes fear in their hearts,” explained a New York executive close to banking leaders from both parties — so much fear that such investors often speak of the U.S. senator from Massachusetts, a former law professor and consumer advocate, as a co-front-runner with Sanders. “How do we come up with an alternative?” asked one person at the dinner.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/progressive-2020-hopefuls-are-courting-wall-street-cash.html
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/09/cory-booker-president-2020-election.html
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/a-long-talk-with-new-york-senator-kirsten-gillibrand.html
http://nymag.com/thecut/2019/04/joe-biden-officially-enters-2020-president-race.html
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/how-electable-is-bernie-sanders-in-2020.html
http://nymag.com/thecut/2019/04/elizabeth-warren-policies-2020-presidential-campaign.html
There were a few options, none perfect. Beto O’Rourke had recently launched his campaign, and his congressional record was essentially a centrist-shaped blank slate. Pete Buttigieg was a McKinsey alum who came from the Rust Belt but talked like a Silicon Valley exec or an Obama Treasury official, but no one, yet, took him seriously.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/can-beto-orourke-win-the-presidential-nomination-in-2020.html
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/pete-buttigieg-2020-presidential-campaign.html
Kamala Harris was a favorite of many in the room. The U.S. senator from California now describes herself as a populist and highlighted a past confrontation with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon over foreclosures in her pre-campaign book, but in 2012, as California’s attorney general, she passed on prosecuting OneWest and its CEO, Steven Mnuchin. In this cycle, she has been the Democrat perhaps most active in seeking Wall Street money (Citi vice-chairman Ray McGuire and Pine Street partner Brian Mathis are helping with her Wall Street outreach, and she recently headlined a fund-raiser hosted by LionTree CEO Aryeh Bourkoff) and occasionally its advice (BlackRock’s Michael Pyle, an Obama-administration alum, is advising her on economics). “People are generally in search of a candidate who has the right set of views, has the right character, but also can win,” Rattner told me later. “Right now, it is very hard to see who checks all three boxes.”
http://nymag.com/thecut/2019/04/kamala-harris-2020-presidential-campaign-fundraising.html
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/california-a-golden-opportunity-for-kamala-harris-in-2020.html
There was no agreement. By evening’s end, multiple donors walked away planning to write checks to three or four or five candidates — hoping they stay relatively moderate — rather than going all in on any one. Among the committed Democrats on Wall Street, this wait-and-see, as-long-as-it’s-not-Bernie-or-Elizabeth posture has become the norm. “This is like venture investing. You really don’t know who’s going to break out, but your hope is you have a good portfolio and that one of these investments breaks out,” Bruce Heyman, a former Goldman managing director and ambassador to Canada, told me.
Of course, these longtime donors are more committed to the Democrats than the average guy on Wall Street. Two years ago, Trump seemed noxious enough that Democrats (reasonably) hoped to continue growing their considerable advantage over Republicans in the New York finance set. But one GOP-driven tax cut and one leftward shift in the Democratic Party later, a worried handful of bankers is considering turning that story on its head. “They’re too far left! They’re too far left!” said Alex Sanchez, CEO of the Florida Bankers Association. “I mean, honestly, if it’s Bernie versus Trump, I have no fucking idea what I’m going to do,” one Democratic hedge funder told me. “Maybe I won’t vote.”
Democratic donors aren’t especially worried about policy; few have sussed out where candidates stand on Dodd-Frank or the carried-interest tax loophole, and few believe that, aside from Sanders or Warren, any contenders are likely to make an aggressive new push for regulation as president. What agitates them instead is — in a replay of the alienation they felt during the Obama presidency thanks to a few stray “fat cats” comments — how Democratic rhetoric threatens their sense of status. No moment crystallized the new reality more than when former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper — a centrist candidate who was a prominent business owner in Denver before entering politics — refused to even call himself a capitalist in a Morning Joe interview in March.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/john-hickenlooper-2020.html
Before Trump won, Hillary Clinton had outraised him by a margin of more than four to one among the financial crowd, which had long regarded him as a pariah because of his shady record and bankruptcies. Now? “The anti-corporate, anti–Wall Street direction of the Democratic Party is driving Democrats into the Trump camp, which is, in most cases, the last place they want to be,” said Kathryn Wylde, CEO of the Partnership for New York City, the business group that counts among its members all of the city’s major financial institutions. “The fact that he’s raised as much money as he has is a reflection of how many Democrats are holding their nose and supporting him because they feel demonized by the Democrats.” In mid-April, Trump’s team revealed it had raised over $30 million in the first quarter of 2019, slightly more than the top two Democratic candidates combined. If you add up all the Democrats’ dollars, the challengers are way ahead — but among donors, and indeed among the candidates themselves, the perception remains that the president is accumulating a real edge. Meanwhile, Goldman released its 2020 outlook: Trump, the firm concluded, now has a “narrow advantage.” Even Paul Singer, the GOP hedge-fund magnate who backed efforts to defeat Trump in 2016 — and who funds the Washington Free Beacon, which first paid for the anti-Trump research that later became “the dossier” — stopped by a small Trump fund-raising roundtable in New York late last year. “Well, we must be doing well now that Paul’s here,” Trump said.
“Wall Street for Trump is the reverse Bradley effect,” said hedge-fund manager Anthony Scaramucci, the Republican fund-raiser who (very) briefly served as Trump’s White House communications director, referring to the theory that voters overstate their support for nonwhite candidates in polls. “They all secretly love him, but because of their clients and the polarity, they don’t want to say it out loud.”
Over coffee recently in midtown, an investment pro with a long history in Democratic politics described the struggle to resist the unexpected pull of Trump. “What matters more?” he asked, looking up at me. “My social values or my paycheck?”
It would appear from the outside to be happy days on Wall Street. Banks smashed previous profit records in 2018, taxes were down, stocks were up, and few people in power in Washington were talking about tightening regulations. But the arrival of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was seen on Wall Street as a tremor portending a broader earthquake on the left. Indeed, there has been no greater mobilizer of wealthy centrists than her primary win in June. In July, a few hundred gathered in Columbus, Ohio, to find a policy platform that would defeat both Trump and Sanders. Another group of investors figured if the parties were now poisoned, they’d just have to draft an independent presidential candidate themselves. It was no secret that John Kasich and Howard Schultz were considering it, and Mike Bloomberg, too. But another option held promise: moderate Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, who’d twice before considered running. The senator agreed to meet last summer and listened as they promised funding and presented a plan to get his name on the ballot in all 50 states. Then Warner, assessing the probability of a successful third-party run, told them, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
Meanwhile, parts of the Democratic field were doing the same, with most candidates focused on building Sanders-style small-dollar, email-driven fund-raising machines. (Sanders raised $10 million that way in just his first week as a candidate.) “It’s kind of stunning how a bunch of these people running for president haven’t gotten ahold of [a list of top past contributors] and said, ‘What can I do to get this person?’ ” fumed a hedge-fund honcho out of the loop for the first time in two decades. “It’s sort of basic political IQ.”
“Everyone wants to seem relevant,” one prominent investor told me. But for the first time he or any of his friends could remember, “we’re just not fucking relevant. We’re not that big of a deal anymore. None of us!”
“A lot of the donor community is worried about losing their presidential perks and ambassadorial gigs to baristas,” said veteran New York Democratic fund-raiser Robert Zimmerman. “It’s long overdue.”
Those candidates still reaching out to Wall Street have mostly done so underground, visiting the homes and offices of wealthy donors while adamantly demanding secrecy — at least seven candidates privately auditioned for a group of 16 leading Obama donors in D.C. in February. The memory of Sanders supporters derisively showering Clinton’s motorcade with dollar bills as it drove into George Clooney’s home for an expensive 2016 fund-raiser remained particularly searing. Morgan Stanley managing director Tom Nides, a deputy secretary of State under Clinton (and a friend of Minnesota senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar’s since they interned for Walter Mondale together), last year hosted a handful of likely candidates for a series of private dinners with potential supporters. But no bank has set up any meet-and-greets like the ones then-Senator Obama lit up in 2006. For the first time, campaigns have started sending out invitations to formal private fund-raising events without either the hosts’ names or the entry price printed on them, just in case they leaked. “They don’t want to get Bernied,” said a former bank executive.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/watch-amy-klobuchars-please-clap-moment.html
Not everyone is playing the same game. When he left the vice-presidency, Biden — historically a lousy fund-raiser, with threadbare finance ties beyond Delaware’s credit-card industry — established a network of post–White House organizations and took care to stack them not just with longtime aides and friends but with Wall Street’s Democratic heavy hitters. Last spring, he installed a policy advisory board for the new Biden Institute at the University of Delaware, including JPMorgan’s Peter Scher, KeyBank’s Don Graves, former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, and onetime Goldman investor Eric Mindich. Now, said one top party fund-raiser in New York, “there’s a lot of praying for Joe Biden.”
But some high-flying former Obama fund-raisers who witnessed Biden at the former president’s side worry about his prospects against Trump. For them, there was Beto. In considering a run, O’Rourke consulted with former top political aides to Obama, such as David Plouffe, but as his own decision deadline neared, he started picking the brains of a handful of Obama’s top-tier donors and bundlers. One, private-equity exec Mark Gallogly, became convinced O’Rourke was the young inspirer needed to lead the anti-Trump movement and flew to meet with the congressman and his family. Investment banker and former ambassador to the U.K. Louis Susman, meanwhile, also jumped onboard, making calls across Wall Street to construct a fund-raising operation for him. “He will probably raise more money than any candidate in the history of our presidential politics, and he will do so not just with large donors but with more money [from donations of] under $500 than anyone in our history of presidential politics,” predicted Gilbert Garcia, a Houston investor. “A lot of senior people are going to get involved. You had a lot of senior people get involved for Obama. You’re going to see that effect.”
Nearing launch day, O’Rourke reciprocated. In calls with potential supporters, he asked for advice, and hours before making his campaign official, he rang Robert Wolf, the former UBS chair. He had no specific ask, he said — he’d just heard Wolf was a good person to know for the road ahead. When he did announce, on a Thursday morning in March, Biden’s top lieutenants, led by right-hand man Steve Ricchetti, made a round of calls to top potential supporters that afternoon to head off the threat.
Now Biden has his team, O’Rourke his, and Harris hers — with power bases in California and New York. If you were one of the 100 campaign bundlers who’d attended Harris’s private New York City finance kickoff earlier this year, her team presented you with an ask: to commit to raise $27,000 each in the first quarter of the year. But when the quarter ended, you also saw the team’s publicly shared numbers; of the $12 million she raised, more than half came from online sources, where her average contribution was $28. Those figures reinforce the lesson of Sanders’s kickoff and O’Rourke’s $6.1 million day one: Big in-person fund-raising events have, in many cases, gone out of style, and many big-money donors are still playing wait-and-see. Others have pushed Michael Bennet, the senator from Colorado, and Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, to enter the race. Earlier this year, 105 of the party’s most in-demand donors convened in south Florida for a private retreat to consider their next investments. Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville addressed the group over dinner and asked who among them had committed to a presidential candidate. Just four hands went up.
But on a recent morning in Manhattan, a handful of Wall Street’s Democratic power brokers got to chatting after a breakfast fund-raiser for a congressman. The topic was unavoidable: In recent weeks, a new name had entered the fold. Now, as the donors spoke, more news trickled out. A growing array of influential bundlers in the finance world had made their choice to support the new entrant, even though many had planned to stay neutral far longer. Hedge-fund manager Orin Kramer, for one, was onboard after meeting the candidate in person a few weeks earlier. David Jacobson, the onetime ambassador to Canada who is now a BMO vice-chairman — and who helped organize the auditions in February — was too. And Steve Elmendorf, a D.C. lobbyist who has worked closely with Wall Street leaders for years, made his choice. He even changed the background of his Facebook page to match the moment: It’s now a wide shot of a large crowd looking up at a stage with a massive PETE 2020 sign staring back.
*This article appears in the April 29, 2019, issue of New York Magazine.
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