Weekly Digest – November 23, 2014

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Must Watch/Read

Of the 4,493 board members and CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations, more than four out of five contributed (many of the non-contributors were foreign nationals who were prohibited from giving).  All this money has flowed to Democrats as well as Republicans.  In fact, Democrats have increasingly relied on it. In the 2012 election cycle, the top .01 percent’s donations to Democrats were more than four times larger than all labor union donations to Democrats put together.  The richest .01 percent haven’t been donating out of the goodness of their hearts. They’ve donated out of goodness to their wallets.  Their political investments have paid off in the form of lower taxes on themselves and their businesses, subsidies for their corporations, government bailouts, federal prosecutions that end in settlements where companies don’t affirm or deny the facts and where executives don’t go to jail, watered-down regulations, and non-enforcement of antitrust laws.

Should Read:  Obamacare Edition

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MA Medicaid waiver

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From Rep. Mike Capuano’s newsletter last week:

On Halloween evening, October 31st, the Patrick Administration announced it had reached an agreement with the federal government on a five year Medicaid waiver [link added]. This is funding that will go to certain Massachusetts hospitals providing health care to the state’s most vulnerable patients. Two of the so-called “safety net hospitals” are in the 7th Congressional district [link added]. While the agreement should suffice for the first three years, it does not include funding for years four and five, putting the entire Massachusetts health insurance program in jeopardy starting in 2018. The amount agreed upon is almost half a billion dollars less than previous funding agreements. I applaud the efforts of Massachusetts Secretary of Health and Human Services Polanowicz but I am truly disappointed that the Obama Administration would jeopardize the first-in-the-nation health care system upon which the President based his legacy legislative accomplishment. I am especially disappointed because the Administration funded longer term waivers in other states, including Texas, whose governor, state legislature, and majority of members of Congress continue to be opposed to the Affordable Care Act. I find such disparate treatment incomprehensible and troubling. The current agreement leaves our Commonwealth at the mercy of the next President and the next Governor, and could result in increased cost to ratepayers. I hope my concern proves to be unfounded but I will pay close attention to the implementation of the agreement, particularly with respect to its last two years.

Related links:

Elizabeth Farnsworth, Is “New Conservation” Still Conservation?

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  1. Become a member of the New England Wild Flower Society.  (If for no other reason then because it’s free admission for you and your kids or guest at Garden in the Woods.)
  2. The Society puts out a magazine, Native Plant News.  It’s good – one of the few magazines I usually read cover-to-cover.

An excerpt from Elizabeth Farnsworth’s essay, Is “New Conservation” Still Conservation?, in the Fall/Winter 2014 issue of Native Plant News:

Adherents of “New Conservation,” which is also called Environmental Modernism, understand that simply creating ecological preserves is not sufficient to protect biodiversity on this planet. Proponents acknowledge that with a global population exceeding seven billion people, humans have altered and continue to affect, in some way, almost every location on the globe.  They recognize that humans have a need for natural resources. But they also see the natural world as highly resilient, able to withstand all manner of alterations and extinctions. therefore, they pursue conservation strategies that establish partnerships with large corporations and sanction natural resource extraction. Although this seems on the face of it like a reasonable position, New Conservation has stirred considerable controversy among the field’s leading conservation biologists. touched off in 2012 by an article authored by Peter Kareiva (chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy) and colleagues, titled “Conservation in the Anthropocene: Beyond Solitude and Fragility,” a lively debate continues to rage in the scientific and popular literature. [Ed.: Link added.]

New Conservation erects a straw man by portraying conservation scientists as naïvely focusing on protecting “pristine” wilderness and ignoring the need to work with many stakeholders to demonstrate the economic value of conservation.  Adherents of this doctrine quote selectively from early texts by Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorn, Carson, Muir, and Abbey that plaintively decry the destruction of wilderness, and then claim that we continue to cling to unrealistic, idealistic concepts of nature. But although those eloquent writings spurred the nascent environmental movement, they are no longer the primary arguments used by today’s conservationists to justify land and species protection.  Conservation scientists on the ground grapple daily with the hard realpolitik of a burgeoning human population, political destabilization, and economic inequality, and struggle to balance human needs and limitations with the fundamental imperative to protect and sustain biodiversity and ecosystem function.

New Conservationists posit that current conservation strategies have failed at protecting biodiversity because they disregard two facts: 1) nature is highly resilient, not fragile; and 2) appealing to human interests is central to ensuring enduring land and species protection. in fact, these ideas are not new. Conservation organizations have long realized both that humans are an essential part of nature and the conservation equation, and that, given world enough and time to recover from anthropogenic stress (and with some help from restoration efforts), degraded landscapes can provide functional habitats and supply important ecosystem services to humans and other organisms….

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Former Sen. Jim Webb forms Presidential Exploratory Committee

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From Sen. Webb’s statement on the Committee’s website:

Americans are a complicated and unique people. For nearly 250 years, we have been a beacon of hope throughout the world…. Our Constitution established a government not to protect the dominance of an aristocratic elite, but under the principle that there should be no permanent aristocracy, that every single American should have equal protection under the law, and a fair opportunity to achieve at the very highest levels. Throughout the world, our insistence on individual freedom and opportunity has been at the bottom of what people think when they hear the very word “American.”

We haven’t been perfect and from time to time, as with today, we have drifted to the fringes of allowing the very inequalities that our Constitution was supposed to prevent. Walk into some of our inner cities if you dare, and see the stagnation, poverty, crime, and lack of opportunity that still affects so many African Americans. Or travel to the Appalachian Mountains, where my own ancestors settled and whose cultural values I still share, and view the poorest counties in America – who happen to be more than 90 percent White, and who live in the reality that “if you’re poor and White you’re out of sight.”

The Democratic Party used to be the place where people like these could come not for a handout but for an honest handshake, good full-time jobs, quality education, health care they can afford, and the vital, overriding belief that we’re all in this together and the system is not rigged.

We can get there again.

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Weekly Digest – November 16, 2014

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Must Read

Should Read

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Robert Kuttner essay in Harper’s Magazine, Obama’s Obama: The Contradictions of Cass Sunstein

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Bob Kuttner has an excellent essay in this month’s Harper’s Magazine, Obama’s Obama:  The contradictions of Cass Sunstein.  I’ll try to capture enough of the essence of it to motivate you to pick up a copy of this month’s Harper’s.

For those not familiar with him, Sunstein is a legal scholar (formerly at U. of Chicago, now at Harvard) and was Pres. Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) from 2009-2012.  As OIRA isn’t well-known, I’ll quote Kuttner’s summary

OIRA was created late in the Carter Administration, but it was Ronald Reagan who first put it to political use. In 1981, Reagan directed all executive branch agencies to submit proposed regulations to OIRA for review by cost-benefit analysis. No agency rule could become final until cleared. Not surprisingly, the office quickly became a favorite end run for industry; OIRA could be counted on to delay, weaken, or simply veto proposed rules. The head of OIRA thus became the administration’s top anti-regulatory official.

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