Infrastructure

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SEE BBB

merri ok

belated, promote primary 7/21 on exxon lobby bribery, plus out last shot at AGW

see hypocrisy 2 face on BBB

famously the last stand of bi-partisan cooperation

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Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN) was served a “reality check” by U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg on Friday, after the pro-Trump election-denying Republican repeatedly took credit this week for a massive infrastructure project in his home state, funded by President Joe Biden’s legislation the Minnesota Congressman voted against.

“Reality check: I approved this because it’s a deserving project, consistent with President Biden’s priorities. This is happening because the Biden infrastructure package passed, despite your ‘no’ vote,” wrote Secretary Buttigieg on social media, in response to Rep. Staubert’s video providing what he claimed was a “fact check.”

At issue is President Joe Biden’s signature Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which he signed into law in November of 2021. Although bipartisan, just 13 Republicans in the House and just 19 in the Senate voted for it.

“I was recently proud to announce that both Duluth, Minnesota and superior Wisconsin received over $1 billion in federal funding to help replace the Blatnik Bridge,” Congressman Stauber, a three-term backbench Republican, proudly declared in his social media video (below). “The Blatnik Bridge has helped drive our Twin Ports economy for the past six decades, and it needs repair and replacing. Securing the money to help replace this bridge has long been a priority of mine. And I am proud to help deliver over $1 billion in federal funds to the north.”

He also berated President Joe Biden and Democratic Governor Tim Walz. President Biden was a U.S. Senator for more than 35 years, and Governor Waltz was a U.S. Congressman for a dozen years.

“Now I know it’s been a while since the President and the governor worked in Congress. So maybe they need a little refresher on the legislative process, just because the infrastructure bill passed Congress and was signed into law that did not magically guarantee federal money for the Blatnik Bridge.”

Sec. Buttigieg’s “reality check” also came after Rep. Stauber earlier in the week posted on social media, “I’m proud to announce that Duluth, MN and Superior, WI have received over 1 billion in federal funding to help replace the Blatnik Bridge. This is a HUGE win for #MN08 and I was proud to advocate for these funds!”

That post earned a “Readers’ note” correction says: “Pete Stauber voted against the bill that is funding this project.”

The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party blasted Stauber: “FACT CHECK: you said the law that’s funding the Blatnik Bridge replacement was a path to socialism and voted against it. Give it up.”

Minnesota author Eric Chandler also berated Congressman Stauber: “Shorter: I will vote against infrastructure. But when money is approved by others who realize infrastructure costs money, I will put out my hand for some.”

Jake Schwitzer, the executive director of Minnesota’s North Star Policy Action added, “It’s extremely funny that this guy thinks that Biden wasn’t going to fund this bridge, but then he was presented with a letter with Stauber’s name way down the list of signatures and was like HANG ON GIVE IT A BILLION DOLLARS. Just vote for the bill if you want credit man.”

See the social media posts below or at this link.

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[[2 22 heated still on cmd bd

alludes to trump infra advisor pvt all roads = navarro?

https://slate.com/business/2016/11/donald-trumps-plan-to-privatize-america-s-roads-and-bridges.html

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https://www.newsweek.com/2017/09/15/donald-trump-infrastructure-plan-mike-pence-privatization-658403.html

Those two road deals are precisely the kind of arrangements Trump's infrastructure plan hopes to replicate across the nation, led by a team with ties to the privatization in Indiana. Along with Pence, White House officials Gary Cohn and D.J. Gribbin are spearheading the White House proposal to let private firms invest in, operate and purchase public assets. Cohn and Gribbin worked for two companies—Goldman Sachs and Macquarie, respectively—that helped privatize the Indiana Toll Road. Meanwhile, federal records reviewed by Newsweek show the same foreign company Pence approved to run Indiana's toll road has hired the same Pence-connected lobbying firm to lobby the vice president on federal infrastructure policy. If Trump has his way, all of America's roads might be said to run through Indiana.

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https://truenorthresearch.org/reports/]]

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this is bi-part: Some of the Republican Party's top donors are not pleased with the number of Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, backing President Joe Biden's infrastructure package.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), who chairs the donor-funded National Republican Senatorial Committee, told Senate colleagues of donors' reactions to the vote during a closed door Senate luncheon on Tuesday, two sources told Axios.

According to Scott, the organization's donors are not pleased with the 19 Senate Republicans and 13 House Republicans who voted to pass the legislation.

Axios reports that given the scrutiny McConnell faced for supporting Biden's agenda, donors believe its essentially a form of political suicide to advance the opposing side's agenda.

READ: Evangelical warns Christians have 'erected a graven image' of Trump and let it corrupt the faith]

Scott, according to Axios, said "some donors had also been paying attention to Trump's statements, one of the sources said, which have included the former president calling the Republicans 'RINOs' who 'should be ashamed of themselves.'"

As a second source noted, most of the Republicans who attended the luncheon actually voted in favor of the infrastructure package. In fact, some even helped author the bill.

On Monday, just one day before the luncheon, eight of the Republican lawmakers— including Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah), as well as Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.) — attended the White House signing ceremony.

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omg

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/clear-and-present-danger-majority-of-trump-voters-believe-its-time-to-split-the-country-in-two/

no lnx table

'Clear and present danger': Majority of Trump voters believe it’s 'time to split the country' in two

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement September 30, 2021

The highly-respected University of Virginia's nonpartisan Center for Politics has released a new study that finds a majority of Trump voters believe it's time to split the country into two, with "red states" and "blue states" seceding from the Union.

:{:{}:

The organization, headed by Larry Sabato of "Sabato's Crystal Ball," reports that four in ten Biden voters agree.

"The divide between Trump and Biden voters is deep, wide, and dangerous. The scope is unprecedented, and it will not be easily fixed," said UVA Center for Politics Director Larry J. Sabato.

"In order to figure out ways to bridge these divides, we need to understand not just the divides themselves, but also understand the ways in which we can, together, move forward to reach common ground. This project helps us do both," said Larry Schack of Project Home Fire, a new initiative partnering with the UVA Center for Politics.

The report top-line revelations include: "Trump and Biden voters are at crisis stage"; there is tremendous "fear and distrust among Biden and Trump voters"; and "Many Trump and Biden voters believe the deck is stacked against them, and their commitment to democracy is wavering."

Crystal Ball's managing editor, Kyle Kondik, tweeted out some charts (below) from the project. Among the disturbing but unsurprising revelations:

Eight in 10 Biden and Trump voters say elected officials from the opposition party present a "clear and present danger" to democracy. Almost eight in 10 Biden and Trump voters say Americans who support the opposite party have also become a "clear and present danger" to the American way of life.

The report also finds strong areas of common ground, including on the need for improvements to the electric grid, water supply, roads, rail, and bridges, and raising taxes on the wealthy.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/dark-money/

The dark money group No Labels recently praised Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) for her efforts to block President Joe Biden's infrastructure bill; a pushback that goes against what her own political party is fighting for.

According to The Intercept, a leaked email from Margaret White details the group's continued optimism regarding lawmakers' ability to separate the bipartisan infrastructure bill from the reconciliation package which includes a large portion of Biden's political agenda. In fact, they are even optimistic that the bill could still be killed in its entirety.

"It is now clear that the reconciliation package will be delinked in time from the infrastructure bill and will be less than $3.5 trillion (if it passes at all), in theory making support from House Republicans for the infrastructure bill more likely," the email reads.

White continued with praise of Sinema for her efforts to fight the passing of the bill on their behalf. However, she did note that her group had not accumulated enough votes to pass the piece of legislation on Monday. The delay is due to progressives who have made it clear that they will not support the effort until the reconciliation bill is in Biden's hands.

“The biggest warning sign is on the left, where the Progressive Caucus leadership continues to object to the delinkage and claims they have the votes to kill the infrastructure bill, leading them to suggest Speaker Pelosi should cancel the vote or risk embarrassment," White wrote. “In the post-Brexit, post-Trump, free-agent, populist era in which we live now, don't assume that Speaker Pelosi and President Biden can definitely deliver the votes on the left."

In the wake of their opposition to the bill, some Democratic lawmakers have pushed back against the dark money group. "This only reinforces that No Labels is not only No Values but now also No Clue," said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.).

Despite the ongoing bipartisan pushback, Biden and the majority of Democratic lawmakers agree the bill is a necessity. On Wednesday, September 22, multiple Democratic groups visited the White House to meet with the president. Pocan, who also attended the meetings, weighed in and urged Democrats to back the bill.

“The best way to help the American people is by passing the President's Build Back Better Agenda, which includes the Build Back Better Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure agreement," said Pocan.

He added, “The President agreed and reiterated his position that we need to pass both to move America forward. The debates we're having are not about progressives versus moderates, but it's a fight between the special interests who don't want to pay their fair share and making sure we build back better for the American people."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/35-trillion-bill/

robt r

Right now, Democrats are working to pass a $3.5 trillion package that will provide long overdue help for working Americans.

The final bill hasn't yet been determined, so we don't know the exact dollar amounts for all its policies. We'll probably find that out in late September or early October. For now, the Democrats' budget resolution frames what's in the bill.

First, on families:

The bill would make permanent key benefits for working families, including the expanded child tax credit in the pandemic relief plan that sends families up to $300 per child each month but is now set to expire in December, and is estimated to cut child poverty by half.

It would also establish universal child care, for which low- and middle-income households would pay no more than 7 percent of their incomes.

And provide a national program of paid leave — worth up to $4,000 a month — for workers who take time off because they are ill or caring for a relative.

Next, on education:

The bill would reduce educational inequality by establishing universal pre-K for all 3- and 4-year-olds, benefiting an estimated 5 million children, and providing tuition-free community college – essentially expanding free public education from 12 years to 16 years.

It will also invest in historically Black colleges and universities and increase the maximum amount of Pell grants for students from lower-income families.

On health care:

The bill expands Medicare to include dental, vision, and hearing benefits and lowers the eligibility age. It also expands Medicaid to cover people living in the 12 states that have not yet expanded Medicaid, and makes critical investments to improve healthcare for people of color.

The big question is how far it will go to reduce prescription drug prices by, for example, allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies. That could reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending, and free up more money for other parts of the bill. But Big Pharma is dead-set against this.

Big corporations and the rich picking up the tab:

In another step toward fairness, all of these are to be financed by higher taxes on the rich and big corporations.

The bill would also increase the Internal Revenue Service's funding so the agency can properly audit wealthy tax cheats, who fail to report about a fifth of their income every year, thereby costing the government $105 billion annually.

:{:{In addition, the bill tackles the climate crisis, which also especially burdens lower-income Americans:}:

There are a range of solutions – subsidizing the use of solar, wind, nuclear and other forms of clean energy while financially penalizing the use of dirty energy like coal; helping families pay for electric cars and energy-efficient homes.

The bill might include something known as a**carbon border adjustment tax— a tax on imports whose production was carbon-intensive, like many from China.

The bill would also establish a Civilian Climate Corps, and invest in communities that bear the brunt of the climate crisis.

And the bill helps American workers:

It will hopefully contain much of the PRO Act, the toughest labor law reform in a generation.

Finally, the bill includes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

This is all about making America fairer.

Remember: we won't know the exact details of the bill for at least a month, but these are the main areas that it will focus on. The big challenge will be ensuring Senate Democrats remain united to get it passed. All of us will need to fight like hell.

Don't listen to spending hawks who claim it's too expensive or too radical. For far too long, our government has ignored the needs of everyday Americans, catering instead to the demands of corporations and the super-rich. No more.

It's time to get this landmark bill passed and build a fairer America.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/wake-hurricane-ida-fox-doubling-down-climate-denial-order-attack-bidens-infrastructure

Fox News is using Hurricane Ida to downplay the seriousness of climate change and attack President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, including the infrastructure bill which contains measures to make us more resilient in the face of extreme weather.

The fingerprints of climate change on the recent Hurricane Ida, which caused extensive damage from the Southeast to the Northeast U.S., were clear. One was its rapid intensification over very warm Gulf waters before pummeling Louisiana. Another was the amount of heavy rainfall that the storm brought in the Northeast that broke records in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, and caused major flash flooding. Beyond clearly showing that climate change is happening now,Ida’s devastating impacts, particularly in the Northeast, exposed how ill-prepared we are for it. And much of the coverage of Hurricane Ida was permeated with the theme that “the infrastructure in place today was built for a climate that no longer exists.”

In fact, with increased media coverage of events such as Ida, the public is beginning to increasingly understand the dangers of climate change and the need for actions that not only reduce climate-causing emissions, but make our communities less vulnerable to the climate impacts that are already happening. But as the public and more media outlets are starting to connect extreme weather to the need for climate action, Fox News coverage seeks to break those links.

Fox networks downplayed climate change and accused Biden of politicizing Hurricane Ida to push a climate agenda

Since September 2, the day after Ida’s remnants ravaged the Northeast, Fox News and Fox Business have aired at least a dozen segments, combined, that claimed that the Democrats are using Ida as a pretext to implement a massive climate agenda including through the infrastructure bill [W/ CORP Tax increase]. These attacks, coupled with instances of climate denial, show the network’s ultimate goal is to stop the implementation of Biden’s climate agenda by all means necessary.

Fox’s favorite new climate contrarian Michael Shellenberger appeared on two Fox programs to downplay climate’s impact on Ida and to argue that the climate crisis is actually overblown, first on the September 2 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, and later on the September 7 edition of The Ingraham Angle. In both segments, Shellenberger accused Democrats of using climate change only as a cover to make the economy more dependent on renewable energy sources like solar power, which he has a history of attacking. (Shellenberger is useful for Fox News because he doesn’t outright deny that climate change is happening; he only -- and falsely -- suggests that it’s not a major problem. In this sense, he provides the perfect cover for the fossil fuel industry to keep polluting the planet.)

Perhaps one of the more egregious examples came during a discussion of Biden’s response to Hurricane Ida during the September 3 edition of Fox Business’ Mornings With Maria. Guest Patrice Lee Onwuka of the Koch-funded Independent Women's Forum accused Biden of using the “fallacy” of climate change to get his agenda passed:

[vid]

paTRICE LEE ONWUKA (INDEPENDENT WOMEN’S FORUM): I think President Biden is absolutely looking out for what kind of a legacy he wants to leave behind, and he will try his best to get his agenda passed, using whatever fallacy that he can find. I mean, it’s remarkable that we're talking about, you know, a hurricane, and people who’ve lost livelihoods, some who’ve lost their lives, and we’re still pivoting to this idea that it’sall driven by climate change, when frankly, the facts dispute that. So it is unfortunate that the American people are subjected to this every single day, but this is going to continue.

There is no “fallacy” here and she is wrong on the facts -- climate scientists know that climate change has an impact on hurricanes, from things like rainfall to intensity level to how slow they move, and these impacts will only get worse in the future unless carbon emissions are rapidly cut.

There were many other examples that attacked Democrats for politicizing extreme weather events and threw cold water on the infrastructure bill. On the September 3 edition of Fox News’ Your World With Neil Cavuto, correspondent Chad Pergam began a segment on the infrastructure bill by stating, “Democrats are using the storm to justify their push for the infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion bill. It's loaded with environmental provisions.”[which are obviously inherently bad?!]

During the September 4 edition of Bongino Unfiltered, host Dan Bongino began a segment on Ida by also claiming, “Democrats wasted no time demanding action against climate change.” The segment which displayed chyrons like “Democrats’ Climate Power Play” and “Dems Push Climate Alarmism After Deadly Storms” also featured a Democratic strategist squaring off against longtime climate denier Marc Morano. Morano used his time to argue that the climate crisis is overblown. Although climate “both-sides” debates should be a relic of the past as they were promoted solely by polluting interests wanting to advance the narrative that climate change is “debatable,” Fox had no qualms in reviving it here despite overwhelming evidence of climate’s impact on Ida.

In addition, Fox invited climate-denying meteorologist Joe Bastardi on the September 8 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight.The segment began with guest host Brian Kilmeadeclaiming that Joe Biden is “using these disasters for political purposes” in order to pass the infrastructure bill. Bastardi then backed up Kilmeade’s claim by dismissing the climate impacts of Ida, simply noting that other bad storms have happened in the past. He also falsely claimed, “The sun, the oceans, the events, the very design of the system, always try to fight back, and at the very least you can't tell what CO2 is doing.”

During an interview withU.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) on the September 4 edition of Fox News Live, co-anchor Anita Vogel referenced Biden’s and Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) comments on Ida and climate change, and asked Malliotakis if “it's appropriate to blame this on climate change. … Should he be bringing politics into this when people are suffering?” Malliotakis responded, “We all need to do our part to be more environmentally friendly and reduce our footprint, but at the end of the day, you know, they're using this to push their radical-left agenda to try to pass a $3.5 trillion socialist wish list.”

Some Fox hosts also made similar comments in the wake of Ida. On the September 2 edition of Fox News’ Hannity, host Sean Hannity began a segment that ultimately downplayed the climate impacts of Ida by stating, “The left is blaming climate change for the heavy rainfall, severe weather and using it as another pretext to push their Green New Deal socialist agenda.” On the September 5 edition of Fox News’ The Next Revolution With Steve Hilton, hostSteve Hiltondid a short segment on Democrats using Ida to implement the Green New Deal.

Although the infrastructure bill is not the Green New Deal, that hasn’t stopped congressional Republicans, Fox News, and other right-wing media outlets from trying to compare the two. Fox is utterly obsessed with theGreen New Dea**l and is using it to undermine basically every climate action that is proposed, however modest.This time, it’s the infrastructure bill the costs of which would pale in comparison to what unchecked climate change would do to the global economy.

Ida hit the U.S. against the backdrop of the recent report from U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that conclusively linked climate change “to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes since pre-industrial times.” It also followed a summer of harrowing extreme weather events that also had climate fingerprints all over them, including Western U.S. wildfires and drought, and a brutal Pacific Northwest heat wave. The fact that, despite all these events, Fox continued to diminish climate’s impact on Ida and argued for continued delayed action on climate change shows how much of a dangerous threat the network is to the discourse on climate change.

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an ah 921

In order to fund his "human infrastructure" proposals, President Joe Biden has recommended increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans — including inheritance taxes. Republicans and corporate lobbyists are claiming that doing so would punish blue-collar businesses.But liberal Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent, this week in his column, notes that this claim is also being promoted by a centrist Democrat: former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, now a lobbyist.

"Of all the insulting lies we've heard about Democratic proposals to tax the rich," Sargent writes, "perhaps the worst is the idea that they would devastate owners and operators of family farms…. As president, Donald Trump embellished this further, adding the idea that estate taxes threaten salt-of-the-earth family-owned trucking businesses. Now, a new version of this line is back — only this time, it's being pushed by a Democrat who's advocating against a key tax provision in President Biden's $3.5 trillion 'human infrastructure' plan."

Sargent continues, "A swarm of lobbyists is gearing up against Democratic efforts to tax corporations and the wealthy to fund major investments in our people and in preserving the future home of human civilization. One thing the lobbyists want to protect is a loophole allowing untold inherited wealth to escape taxation."

The New York Times recently reported that Democratic proponents of Biden's inheritance tax proposals are saying that rural swing voters would not be affected by them. But Heitkamp, according to Sargent, is "pushing the argument that taxation at death is bad politics."

Sargent argues that the lobbying against Biden's tax proposals isn't motivated by a desire to protect family farms and blue-collar businesses, but to shield the ultra-wealthy from the taxes they are dodging.

"As it is, wealth and investment income are not taxed as labor income is," Sargent explains. "So, those amassing large fortunes often already receive privileged tax treatment. But in addition, when estates are passed down to heirs, for tax purposes, assets are assigned the value they have at that point of transfer. If assets are then sold later, they're taxed based on their appreciation in value from that point, effectively allowing all the appreciation before then to permanently escape taxation. This is one way billionaires can get away with paying so little in income taxes relative to their wealth, whereas most Americans have income taxes taken from each paycheck."

Sargent adds, "Biden's plan would combat this. It would tax those assets based on their appreciation from the original point of acquisition, thus taxing all that unrealized value. That's what lobbyists want to prevent. One of them is Heidi Heitkamp, the former Democratic senator from North Dakota."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/companies-lobbying-against-infrastructure-tax-hikes-have-dodged-millions-in-taxes-report/

President Joe Biden's American Jobs Plan proposal would raise the United States' corporate tax rate to 28% in order to pay for infrastructure projects. Some large corporations, journalist Akela Lacy stresses in an article published by The Intercept on September 6, have been aggressively lobbying against that proposal — and they include everything from pharmaceutical companies to financial firms, some of which dodged a fortune in taxes.

"Companies that…. lobbied earlier this year on issues related to tax rates in Biden's American Jobs Plan include Walmart, Oracle, Accenture, Bristol Myers Squibb, Shell and Walgreens, according to an analysis by Accountable.US, a nonpartisan watchdog group focused on public corruption," Lacy explains. "Executives at companies that have historically avoided paying taxes, like Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, FedEx, and DuPont, have spoken out publicly against Biden's proposed tax increases."

Lacy continues, "Shell and Walgreens lobbied earlier this year on corporate tax issues in the American Jobs Plan. Walmart hired a lobbying firm tasked with 'monitoring of tax proposals related to infrastructure' in the plan and proposed legislative efforts related to Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts. Accenture hired another firm to 'monitor the American Jobs Plan as it relates to corporate taxes.' Oracle and Bristol Myers Squibb, a multinational pharmaceutical company, used the same firm hired by Accenture to monitor and lobby on similar issues in the proposal."

Lacy goes on to note how successful some of these mega-corporations have been when it comes to dodging taxes — and not only in the United States.

"A Reuters report last year found that from 2018 to 2019, Shell reported $2.7 billion through offshore tax havens and avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes," Lacy writes. "In 2019, Australia charged Shell $755 million for six years' worth of taxes the company did not pay. The company reported that after getting tax refunds related to the closure of oil platforms, it paid no corporate income tax in the U.K. in 2018 on $731 million in profits."

Lacy points to Walgreens as another company that knows how to dodge taxes.

"Between 2008 and 2014," Lacy explains, "Walmart held more than $23.3 billion in offshore accounts and avoided paying more than $4.59 billion in U.S. taxes, according to a 2016 Oxfam report. In an arrangement internally known as Project Flex, the company routed money through an allegedly fictitious Chinese subsidiary, Quartz reported, which allowed it to avoid paying $2.6 billion in U.S. taxes between 2014 and 2017. The 2016 report from the U.S. PIRG, CTJ, and ITEP also found that Walmart reported zero tax haven subsidiaries despite having as many as 75."

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mcconn prays for

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/manchin-sinema-2654865778/

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921

infra twin bill

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/lobbying-congress/

New report details a 'massive lobbying blitz' against Biden's agenda — but Sanders has a warning for them

an 921

...no lnx

...the Post, which published Sanders' remarks on Tuesday, offered a detailed look at the "massive lobbying blitz" that corporate America has launched in recent days in a bid to water down—or kill entirely—the reconciliation package, a centerpiece of President Joe Biden's economic and climate agenda.

The range of big-name corporations involved in the campaign—from the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to the fossil fuel behemoth ExxonMobil—reflects the potentially far-reaching scope of the nascent reconciliation bill, which could allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, reverse former President Donald Trump's corporate tax cut, institute paid family and medical leave, strengthen workers' rights, and establish a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants.

"The emerging opposition appears to be vast, spanning drug manufacturers, big banks, tech titans, major retailers, and oil-and-gas giants," the Post's Tony Romm reported. "In recent weeks, top Washington organizations representing these and other industries have started strategizing behind the scenes, seeking to battle back key elements in Democrats proposed overhaul to federal healthcare, education, and safety net programs."

One of the organizations that has been "most active" in the effort to prevent passage of the reconciliation bill, according to the Post, is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobbying organization in the country. Romm reported that the Chamber is "in the early stages of putting together an economywide coalition to coordinate the fight against the still-forming economic package, including its significant price tag, policy scope, and potential for tax increases."

"The Chamber-organized effort could encompass traditional lobbying on Capitol Hill as well as advertising campaigns targeting Democratic lawmakers," Romm noted. "The group has been in talks with potential allies such as the National Association of Manufacturers, whose board includes executives from firms such as Dow Inc., Exxon, Caterpillar, and Johnson & Johnson... Other opponents include the Business Roundtable, whose board counts the chief executives from Apple and Walmart."

As Democrats move further along in the process of translating their newly approved $3.5 trillion budget blueprint into legislative text—a process lawmakers hope to complete by next month—the lobbying push is likely to intensify. The Hill reported Monday that corporate influence-peddlers are growing "increasingly optimistic" that they will succeed in keeping major tax hikes, Medicare expansion, and other critical measures out of the final package...

"The business community has made progress with certain Democrats on legitimate policy concerns with some of these proposals and their implications on the economy and international competitiveness," an unnamed lobbyist with ties to Senate Democrats told The Hill. "A lot of those arguments are landing."

While The Hill does not name the "certain Democrats" who have been receptive to lobbyists' arguments, the outlet noted that "business interests have Democratic allies in Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and the group of House moderates led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (N.J.)"—all of whom have voiced opposition to the $3.5 trillion price tag.

But Sanders—who has characterized the reconciliation bill as potentially the most consequential legislation since the New Deal—said in an interview last week that $3.5 trillion is "the minimum of what we should be spending."...

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last week, President Biden signed an Executive Order encouraging U.S. leadership in the clean car sector with a goal of half of all new car sales in the U.S. being zero-emission by 2030. It took them a few days, but deniers seem to have assembled their response by cobbling together a mix of old lies, new misrepresentations, and bizarre logical fallacies.

:{:{}:

For example, a response that in any sane outlet might be praise for Biden’s plan was published in the Koch-funded RealClearEnergy as an attack: President Biden’s Electric Car Future is Union Made. Bruce Yandle, a fellow at the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University, is upset that Biden invited three major U.S. car companies to attend the announcement because they were the largest employers of workers in the United Auto Workers union, and didn’t invite non-American companies with non-union workers to his event promoting good American jobs.}:

By Climate Denier Roundup

Obviously, it’s no surprise that a Koch crony is anti-union and anti-EV, unless you confuse organized labor with organized denial.

Speaking of organized denial, while the once-Koch-funded Daily Caller has since basically given up on regular climate denial reporting, and its IPCC story was a straightforward rip-off of the AP’s “code red” coverage (sans any Koch-network denial quote, because no-pay, no-play, we assume). The Caller still occasionally publishes guest opinion pieces and ran one from Charlotte Whelan of the (pro-Covid) Independent Women’s Forum andSteamboat Institute (which is hosting Marc Morano and a slate of other rightwing pseudostars at an upcoming festival).

Whelan is also upset the White House invited union workers to its pro-union-jobs event, and adds (with a deliberately misleading citation) the claim that “it could take more than 15 years to recoup the upfront extra costs in fuel savings. The average American certainly can’t wait that long to ‘make back’ the additional upfront cost” But the work cited (an NRDC post based on a peer-reviewed study) doesn’t even measure how long it would take to recoup the upfront cost of an EV with cheaper charging and a more efficient propulsion system. The study did, however, use 15 years as the unit of measurement for a car’s life. So the calculations show that over an average 15-year lifespan of ownership, it can be almost $15,000 cheaper to go with an electric car.

Over at theKoch-funded Heritage foundation’s media arm, their policy analyst Katie Tubb makes a similar claim about EVs being for rich people, which we’ve addressed before as part of their propaganda campaigns, as well as the old racist dog whistle about China.

Finally, we get to a new name to us, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who wrote that Biden’s move was “costly and counterproductive” in the industry-funded Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

After a column defending the auto industry from 5G in January, and another in March with the phrase “nothing beats personal vehicles for social distancing.” Furchtgott-Roth makes similar points to the other professional disinformers in her most recent City Journal piece, but she also a:{dds a particularly baffling claim that because “the United States has achieved energy security by becoming a net exporter of oil and natural gas,” then “mandating sales of electric vehicles would weaken that security.”}:

But if exporting oil makes us stronger (by her logic) then wouldn’t having more of it to export because our own cars are using less of it be a good thing, that would make us stronger?

Why would someone write something so inane and illogical, despite a byline that includes “former deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at the U.S. Department of Transportation” and “adjunct professor of economics at George Washington University?” Those are both legitimate organizations, not industry-funded disinformation operations!

Well it turns out that the DOT appointment was made by notoriously-bad-hiring-manager Donald Trump, and prior to that, Furchtgott-Roth was an economist for the American Petroleum Institute, proving once again that when someone says something stupid about EVs, it’s probably on purpose.

(Originally appeared at DailyKos.)

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omfg

msnbc? calls it romney exxon bill, not the bipart infra

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/senior-exxonmobil-lobbyist/

raw story

Channel 4 in the U.K. published a startling expose on ExxonMobil's lobbyists who revealed the top most important U.S. Senators who are the ones behind any legislation that might hurt the oil industry.

While many oil companies are diversifying with natural gas, it appears ExxonMobil is going all-in battling to keep "big oil" alive and well.

"Keith McCoy is a senior ExxonMobil lobbyist on Capitol Hill and has represented the company in its liaison with the U.S. Congress for the last eight years," explained the report.

"Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science? Absolutely not," said McCoy on camera. "Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that's true. But there's nothing, there's nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders."

McCoy compared his work with elected officials to fishing with ExxonMobil who supplies the "bait" before it "reels in" the official on issues like a carbon tax, electric cars, taxation and infrastructure.

"When you have an opportunity to talk to a member of Congress, I liken it to fishing, right? You know you have bait, you throw that bait out. And they say: 'Oh, you want to talk about infrastructure, yeah,'" McCoy continued. "And then you start to reel them in and you start to have these conversations about federal leasing programs, you start to have these conversations about a carbon tax.You know, it's all these opportunities that you use and to use the fishing analogy again just to kind of reel them in."

"I make sure I get them the right information that they need so they look good. And then they help me out. They're a captive audience. They know they need you. And I need them," McCoy also said.

He went on to explain that lobbyists aim to have close relationships with officials.

"You want to be able to go to the chief… and say we need congressman so and so to be able to either introduce this bill, we need him to make a floor statement, we need him to send a letter. You name it, we've asked for everything," he said.

But it was the shocking revelation that hehas 11 U.S. Senators on the hook.

"Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Senator Joe Manchin, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Senator Jon Tester, Senator Maggie Hassan, Senator John Barrasso, Senator John Cornyn, Senator Steve Daines, Senator Chris Coons, Senator Mark Kelly and Senator Marco Rubio," were all cited.

He went on to explain that the last thing they want is to appear in a public hearing before Congress where the American people can see.

"We don't want it to be us, to have these conversations, especially in a hearing. It's getting our associations to step in and have those conversations and answer those tough questions and be for, the lack of a better term, the whipping boy for some of these members of congress," McCoy confessed.

"There was something we were working on earlier this week where we, where our CEO was invited to a hearing from a member of congress who we know is just going to rip him to shreds when he goes there. So, we look at it and we say: well, why us?" he asked.

See the video below and read the full story at Channel 4:

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pvtize?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/infrastructure-2653467276/

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aha diff metaphors = just roads, mebbe airport, to biden child and elder care, also strict vs nurt?

infra pipes and houses

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/kristi-noem-mocked-on-twitter-after-admitting-she-is-shocked-bidens-infrastructure-plan-includes-infrastructure/

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resign he lies ppl die

polar vortex AGW

wind blamed (by abbott?] ~ AOC GND

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/texas-green-energy/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/gov-abbott/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/texas-power-grid

by Kate Galbraith, The Texas Tribune Feb. 8, 2011

"Texplainer: Why does Texas have its own power grid?" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Why does Texas have its own electric grid?

Texas' secessionist inclinations have at least one modern outlet: the electric grid. There are three grids in the Lower 48 states: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection — and Texas.

The Texas grid is called ERCOT, and it is run by an agency of the same name — the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. ERCOT does not actually cover all of Texas. El Paso is on another grid, as is the upper Panhandle and a chunk of East Texas. This presumably has to do with the history of various utilities' service territories and the remoteness of the non-ERCOT locations (for example the Panhandle is closer to Kansas than to Dallas, notes Kenneth Starcher of the Alternative Energy Institute in Canyon), but Texplainer is still figuring out the particulars on this.

The separation of the Texas grid from the rest of the country has its origins in the evolution of electric utilities early last century. In the decades after Thomas Edison turned on the country's first power plant in Manhattan in 1882, small generating plants sprouted across Texas, bringing electric light to cities.

Later, particularly during the first world war, utilities began to link themselves together. These ties, and the accompanying transmission network, grew further during the second world war, when several Texas utilities joined together to form the Texas Interconnected System, which allowed them to link to the big dams along Texas rivers and also send extra electricity to support the ramped-up factories aiding the war effort.

The Texas Interconnected System — which for a long time was actually operated by two discrete entities, one for northern Texas and one for southern Texas — had another priority: staying out of the reach of federal regulators. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Federal Power Act, which charged the Federal Power Commission with overseeing interstate electricity sales. By not crossing state lines, Texas utilities avoided being subjected to federal rules. "Freedom from federal regulation was a cherished goal — more so because Texas had no regulation until the 1970s," writes Richard D. Cudahy in a 1995 article, "The Second Battle of the Alamo: The Midnight Connection." (Self-reliance was also made easier in Texas, especially in the early days, because the state has substantial coal, natural gas and oil resources of its own to fuel power plants.)

ERCOT was formed in 1970, in the wake of a major blackout in the Northeast in November 1965, and it was tasked with managing grid reliability in accordance with national standards. The agency assumed additional responsibilities following electric deregulation in Texas a decade ago. The ERCOT grid remains beyond the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which succeeded the Federal Power Commission and regulates interstate electric transmission....

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an 520

why new Infrastructure is a national imperative

Tom Conway / Independent Media InstituteMay 29, 2020

Rich Carmona spent decades upgrading his 1970s ranch home in Midland, Michigan. He lovingly installed new flooring and doors and remodeled the bathrooms. After finishing the kitchen 18 months ago,…

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/republican-corruption-and-carelessness-led-to-devastation-in-michigan-does-trump-even-care

Trump spent another week feuding with a Democratic governor, this time as Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer dealt with historic levels of rainfall which led to the collapse of a pair of privately-owned dams in the state. Instead of momentarily pausing his politics of petty revenge, Trump made matters worse, as is his wont.

The president diverted already strained resources for a campaign stop in Michigan that doubled as a political stunt, advertising his personal refusal to wear a mask, even in settings where everyone else is required to. Trump’s antagonistic rhetoric towards a state that is facing multiple life-or-death crises at the same time was widely criticized. But what he did more quietly did this week reveals just how vulnerable his deregulatory actions have left America.

In a move strikingly reminiscent of the Ukraine scandal, Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday to threaten to withhold federal funding from Michigan, even as floodwaters from the two breached dams forced thousands of residents of the city of Midland to flee their homes. Trump apparent goal was to coerce Michigan officials not to send vote-by-mail applications to the state’s 7.7 million registered voters vote-by-mail. As usual, the president was unclear about exactly what funding he had in mind. Hours later he sent another tweet claiming that his administration had already activated military and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) response teams but said Gov. Whitmer “must now ‘set you free’ to help.” Whitmer said at a news briefing on Tuesday that she had already contacted federal officials for help and activated the National Guard. Once again, nobody really knows what Trump was talking about.

Nevertheless, the salient point here is that the president of the United States, after witnessing the flooding of an entire region amid a major public health crisis rages on was to suggest, in public, that the government and people of Michigan owed him something in exchange for federal aid. Trump then traveled to a Ford plant in Michigan on Thursday and offered this explanation for the failure of the privately-owned dams: “Perhaps there was a mistake."

like many disasters, the beginnings of the Michigan dam failures are far removed in time from the actual even, but this event can hardly be described as a mistake. All indications are that this week’s historic flooding was caused by years of neglect and mismanagement of a public good that was co-opted for private profit. It doesn’t help that the headquarters of **Dow Chemical, including a Superfund site with known cancer-causing chemicals, is directly downstream of all this floodwater.

The owner of the breached dams, Lee Mueller, who heads a company called Boyce Hydro, has been cited numerous times in recent years. State regulators had even revoked one of the company’s four dam operating license in 2018 over an inability to handle a major flood. At least two of Boyce Hydro’s dams were identified as being “high hazard,” meaning that according to the National Dam Safety Program and FEMA, loss of life would likely result if they failed or were incorrectly operated.

The potential failure of the Edenville Dam, wrote federal regulators, “would pose a very substantial risk to life and property, and Boyce has repeatedly failed to comply with the orders of the Regional Engineer and other Commission staff or to work with Commission staff to resolve these instances of noncompliance, notwithstanding being given many opportunities to do so.” The dam was flagged as unable to handle heavy rainfall as long ago as the 1990s. But Mueller, a Trump supporter who publicly backed the president against impeachment in a Reuters article last year, didn’t want to pay to repair them. After years of delay, Boyce Hydro finally agreed to sell the dams to a task force of residents from four neighboring counties who hoped to implement overdue repairs. This is yet another example of the wealthy privatizing their profits and socializing the losses.

The Army Corps of Engineers says more than half of the nation’s 91,458 dams are privately owned, and according to E&E News, a majority of them are more than 50 years old. Jokes about Trump’s always-impending and never-arriving “Infrastructure Week”have long gone stale, but it’s worth remembering that increased infrastructure spending, like the kind needed to upgrade the nation’s aging water infrastructure, was one of Trump’s biggest campaign promises.

“We have a great plan and we are going to rebuild our infrastructure,”Trump _{said}_on Fox Business Network in an August 2016 appearance. He further claimed that the numbers Hillary Clinton was proposing ($275 billion) was “a fraction of what we’re talking about, we need much more money than that to rebuild our infrastructure. Well, I would say at least double her numbers and you’re going to really need more than that. We have bridges that are falling down.”

After taking office with Republican control of both chambers of Congress, Trump increased his theoretical ask to $1 billion. While Trump did sign a 2018 water infrastructure bill, that legislation, which passed the Senate 99-1, was a bipartisan reauthorization of $6 billion in federal funding for state-level projects and must be renewed every two years. In contrast, Trump signed an executive order rolling back Obama-era environmental standards that required the federal government to account for climate change in infrastructure projects, and also directed agencies to loosen water regulations in California.

Like Trump, the owner of Boyce Hydro tried to blame environmental regulations as the cause of his negligence. The company complained that the state had threatened it with litigation because lower water levels were killing freshwater mussels. “The state agencies clearly care more about mussels living in the impoundment than they do about the people living downstream of the dams,” Mueller said in a statement.

But even as some Republicans are reportedly lobbying for Trump to revisit his pledge to invest in infrastructure — pandemic relief funding provides “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give a facelift to the country,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told CNN — the president awarded the largest federal building contract of his entire term in office this week. It was for his border wall. The Washington Post reports that the $1.3 billion deal to build just 42 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border was awarded to a company that has only one other border contract, and is currently under investigation by the Defense Department inspector general:

The company that won the contract, Fisher Sand and Gravel, has been repeatedly lauded by the president in White House meetings with border officials and military commanders, the result of a long and personalized marketing pitch to Trump and ardent supporters of his barrier project.

After its initial bids for border contracts were passed over, the company and its CEO, Tommy Fisher, cut a direct path to the president by praising him on cable news, donating to his Republican allies and cultivating ties to former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, GOP Senate candidate Kris Kobach and other conservative figures in Trump’s orbit.

This is what happens when conservatives decide to utilize an infrastructure budget to subsidize profitable businesses. It rained a lot in Michigan this week, but the private corporation in charge of the dam let this devastating flood happen as a direct result of its neglect and cost-cutting. And that’s without considering the downstream effects of the Dow Chemical plant, which is likely to make the danger and death from this flood much worse. Republicans, of course, will pretend to be mystified.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-national-plot-against-american-global-leadership/

no lnx wa mo

nat'l plot against American global leadership

Written by Washington Monthly September 30, 2019

America is looking inward, resembling a sullen, sometimes confused navel-gazing couch-potato. It’s tired of going outside and bored with the world.

The president of the United States went to the United Nations last week to let foreign leaders know we were picking up our marbles and going home. He just told the entire world that globalism is dead. Long-live insular, parochial patriotism!

National pride, defense, and attention to domestic issues are keenly important, of course. But America’s two wide oceans and friendly neighbors do not divorce us from the rest of the world’s trade, economy, or politics, even if our national “Netflix and Chill ” attitude makes foreigners seem distant and irrelevant.

As America sits in darkness, twiddles its thumbs and fiddles with its video-game controller, our country is also desperately trying to figure out how to reckon with our failed overseas adventures. How do we extract ourselves from our foolish foreign wars. Recent steps forward seem instead to take us down a notch. We’re still trying to reconcile how we spent such unjustifiable amounts of our nation’s blood and treasure in places we bombed and occupied, uninvited, after 9/11.

During this expensive 18-year distraction and our current global withdrawal, the rest of the world has taken advantage of our insecurity and division, recognizing that this is the moment for our adversaries to grow their influence and stretch their borders—a chance to build their global futures.

China is busy constructing islands to expand its territory, Russia is building bridges to physically tether its illegally occupied neighbor to the motherland. America’s strategic power competitors are actively developing, squatting or usurping land to grow their power and presence beyond their current boundaries. They are sparing no expense to buy and bully their way further onto the world stage.

What about the United States? Under the current leadership, it’s still trying to get Mexico to sign an IOU to build a border wall with a “big beautiful door.” Instead of bridges, America is building walls.

America’s new foreign policy lens is a monocle focused on China’s meteoric growth and insatiable ambition. Our policymakers should instead be wearing bifocals. Better yet, progressives should see the whole picture, becauseas America actively tries to ground a high-flying China, it has lost sight of a Russia quietly spreading its wings.

Russia’s recent 12-mile, $4 billion dollar bridge to its occupied and annexed Crimean peninsula is the most obvious of connectors to an expanded future. Less visible are Moscow’s growing military and economic ties to various nations around the world.

In Ukraine and Georgia, Russia’s presence is increasingly permanent. From Syria to Egypt, Turkey, and Iran, Moscow’s strategic and regional interests are an exercise in thuggish petro-politics. Its unstated “Energy First” security policy is driving its aggressive meddling in Venezuela. Most concerning, the Kremlin’s relationship with Beijing is warming up.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping now are besties who conduct joint military exercises and form a U.N. Security Council veto bloc. With Russia economically sanctioned and China in the U.S. penalty box, these two nations are accommodating each other’s needs and finding common cause. They are witnessing a fracturing, anti-globalist and increasingly insular West ready to forsake the world entirely. New Russian relationships may seem like ephemeral convenient alliances, but Putin wants to make them enduring and permanent, beyond just friends with benefits.

President Trump may think his personal touch, Russian outreach, and Putin praising is going to entice Moscow to help contain Beijing, but this scenario is a policy fantasy. Russia pursues its raw economic and security interests in a cynical zero-sum game. It supports authoritarians and ignores abuses of human rights, press freedom, and democratic norms. This suits many world leaders perfectly.

Erdogan, Orban, Sisi, Assad, Xi—a rogues’ gallery of authoritarians and assassins make up Moscow’s expanding universe. These nations together seek to challenge the previously stable Western-dominated world order and are maneuvering to limit Washington’s influence.

The Trump administration favors bilateral agreements over multilateral institutions and alliances, hoping for weaker partners and better deals by dumping allies to pursue an America First folly. This practice allows Russia both to build bridges and destroy American inroads. It helps give Xi a boost when America threatens his economy. It keeps Nicolás Maduro in power—despite Vice President Mike Pence forcefully telling Caracas he must go.

China and Russia are going for broke in this great game by building ports, dams, roads, railways, pipelines, communications infrastructure, and political partnerships around the world—and, eventually, all the way up to America’s borders. They may be making an expensively bad geopolitical bet. Or not.

Trump doesn’t really care. Instead of countering or matching our adversaries’ expansionist global strategy, America’s developer-in-chief wants to build only one permanent thing: a solid, reliable, and exclusively nativist political movement at home.

Markos Kounalakis, Ph.D. is a foreign affairs columnist for McClatchy News, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and President and Publisher emeritus of the Washington Monthly.

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reboot as possible bi-part issue after midterms

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Rigzone

$287B Transportation Bill Would Subsidize AltFuel Stations

Tom Carper (D-Del.), Shelley ... In a letter addressed to EPW Chairman Barrasso, AEA President Thomas Pyle argues the grant program would:.

3 weeks ago

july 2019

Monday a bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced the America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act of 2019 (ATIA), which authorizes $287 billion in transportation funding over five years and includes $1 billion to provide grants for electric, natural gas and hydrogen fueling stations.

The legislation – introduced by U.S. Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Tom Carper (D-Del.), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.) – is the largest highway legislation in history, according to a written statement from the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW).

Among its “Climate Change” provisions in this section-by-section breakdown of the legislation, ATIA would create a competitive grant program to support deploying alternative fuel vehicle charging and fueling infrastructure for drivers of electric, hydrogen and natural gas vehicles. It would allocate the following amounts each fiscal year from the federal Highway Trust Fund, which is financed by federal fuel taxes and related excise taxes:

Fiscal 2021: $100 million
Fiscal 2022: $100 million
Fiscal 2023: $200 million
Fiscal 2024: $300 million
Fiscal 2025: $300 million

“America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act will move our country toward a safer, more connected, efficient and climate-friendly transportation system, one that can endure the test of time and keep up with the demands of a 21st century global economy,” stated Carper.

According to Ben Kellison, Wood Mackenzie research director, electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure represents the strongest need within the alternative fuels segment.

“With over 1.75 million electric vehicles in North America at the end of 2018, a nearly 60-percent increase from 2017, the need for expanded EV charging infrastructure is greater than that of the other two fuels,” Kellison said in a WoodMac statement emailed to Rigzone.

Adding that private owners and operators will still build most publicly available EV chargers in the United States, Kellison contends the case for spending public funds on “certain foundational infrastructure” is being made in a convincing fashion at the state level. For instance, he said the $250 million EV initiative by the New York Power Authority (NYPA) provides a glimpse of how the ATIA program might work.

“The program includes an effort to deploy direct current (DC) fast charging stations at key locations along major highways throughout the state,” Kellison explained. “These stations are meant to combat range anxiety among current and prospective EV buyers leery of traveling between major city hubs with limited or no access to fast charging. Funding provided by ATIA could alleviate the financing difficulties of erecting and operating DC fast charging infrastructure in a market that is rapidly growing but has yet to reach the critical mass to offer profitability to the majority of potential fast charging locations.”

Dan Gage, president of NGVAmerica, told Rigzone that including natural gas, electric and hydrogen in the legislative package will help fleet vehicle owners determine the best alternative fuel option for their respective applications and needs.

"As public and private fleets work to transition to cleaner, lower carbon-fueled vehicles, investments in publicly accessible refueling facilities is vital to expand adoption of natural gas trucks and buses," Gage said. "No freight shipper or carrier buys trucks he or she can't readily refuel quickly and affordably."

The American Energy Alliance (AEA), the public policy advocacy arm of the Institute for Energy Research, went on record against what it calls a “new federal program for EV infrastructure” and a “bloated $1 billion handout to special interests.” In a letter addressed to EPW Chairman Barrasso, AEA President Thomas Pyle argues the grant program would:

Divert highway funds to non-highway spending
Give an extra economic advantage to upper-income individuals at the expense of their middle- and lower-income peers by creating more federal support for EVs
Redirect tax dollars from roads in states with few EVs to subsidize EV owners in states such as California and New York with heavier EV market penetration.

In his letter, Pyle called the proposal a “regressive, unnecessary, and duplicative giveaway program to wealthy, mostly coastal electric vehicle owners.”

The website EVAdoption presents statistics on EV charging stations by state.

On Tuesday, the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) and the Society of Independent Gasoline Marketers of America (SIGMA) expressed concern that the grants could entice electric utilities to seek “double subsidies” for charging infrastructure and discourage private-sector expansion. The groups argued that the program might be interpreted to allow utilities to bill all of their customers more to finance EV charging infrastructure and then take taxpayer-funded grants to subsidize those projects.

“This double-dipping by electric utilities would make it extremely unlikely that the private sector would invest in charging infrastructure given the unfair playing field it would create,” noted Paige Anderson, NACS’ government relations director. “The private sector is investing in electric charging infrastructure and wants to do more of that, but if double-dipping by utilities were allowed, private sector investment would dry up.”

NACS and SIGMA also contend that current fueling locations – such as the more than 153,000 U.S. convenience stores – represent the “most logical option” for locating alternative fuel infrastructure.

“We’re pleased the alternative fuel grants look to spur private sector investment, but we want to be sure that it doesn’t allow abuses by electric utilities,” concluded Doug Kantor, attorney for NACS and SIGMA with the law firm Steptoe and Johnson.

trms partially explain constant reboot/dangle, chao owns lots of stock in biggest paving corp, told to sell, claims she did, but stock bump w/ every announcment.

https://www.alternet.org/economy/chinas-belt-and-road-initiative-marshall-plan-reverse

At the end of World War II, much of Europe was in shambles and the continent was faced with the prospect of famine and years of future economic blight. Fortunately, the region’s prospects were transformed by the Economic Recovery Program (better known as the “Marshall Plan”), which injected billions into Western Europe, providing shipments of food, staples, a reconstruction of infrastructure, and the concomitant revival of civilian industrial production. As well as a program designed to induce political stability and economic recovery in Europe, the Marshall Plan also entrenched the economic and political structures through which the U.S. hegemony was consolidated in the post-WWII period.

Is China’s much-vaunted “Belt and Road” initiative (BRI), a multibillion-dollar infrastructure program spread across the developing countries of Africa and Asia, a “modern-day... Marshall Plan,” as a recent New York Times article suggests?

No.

It’s the opposite. Rather than spawning growth, BRI is foisting debt on poor countries ill-equipped to service it, harming their development prospects, and precluding their ability to buy Chinese exports (which was one of the aims of the original Marshall Plan). And Beijing has been funding this initiative via debt-laden Chinese companies, at a time when the country is facing mounting economic challenges both internally and externally. Far from creating a new growth hub with China as its apex,BRI risks creating a new “Axis of Economic Instability” for Beijing and a precipitating cause for a currency collapse in China itself: a project dependent on an endless provision of RMB funding boosts domestic inflation (if it triggers capital flight and therefore erodes the value of the currency), rapidly depletes foreign exchange reserves (as the monetary authorities use those reserves to arrest the currency’s decline), and consequently creates a potential new locus of financial instability for the global economy.

At a time of mounting U.S. protectionism (which has limited China’s ability to offset its considerable industrial overcapacity via exports), the much-touted Belt and Road initiative was hyped as a massive investment program featuring Beijing-financed infrastructure projects across the globe, a modern-day Silk Road designed to expand China’s economic growth and geopolitical ties across the globe. In reality, BRI offers nothing of the sort. The “beneficiary” countries instead have become strewn with Chinese style white elephant projects of marginal economic utility, anything from, as a New York Times article explains, a Thai theater “rigged with hydraulic seats [that] will give moviegoers the sensation of flight, [or] in Australia, an indoor ski slope… going up near the beaches of the Gold Coast.” Even when these projects align more closely to the stated infrastructure goals of the BRI, they often hemorrhage cash, such as Sri Lanka’s Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport, or the multibillion-dollar Gwadar port in Pakistan.

Furthermore, what Professor Brahma Chellaney describes as “debt-trap diplomacy” has ensured that:

“The projects that China is supporting are often intended not to support the local economy, but to facilitate Chinese access to natural resources, or to open the market for its low-cost and shoddy export goods. In many cases, China even sends its own construction workers, minimizing the number of local jobs that are created. …

“China is taking steps to ensure that countries will not be able to escape their debts. In exchange for rescheduling repayment, China is requiring countries to award it contracts for additional projects, thereby making their debt crises interminable. Last October, China canceled $90 million of Cambodia’s debt, only to secure major new contracts.”

Debt-trap diplomacy, then, has precluded the beneficiaries from becoming viable new markets for China’s exports, as the recipient economies are crushed by debt and their local manufacturing is effectively displaced by China’s own imported workforce, which ultimately detracts from their growth potential.

Even though the initiation of the projects results in a short-term boost for China’s companies (and their imported workforces), there will eventually be a toll taken on China. This is because BRI has placed Beijing in the invidious position of bailing out the Chinese companies responsible for building up many of these white elephants in the first place. As Kenya’s East African reported, “China Export and Credit Insurance Corporation, known as Sinosure… has already incurred losses of more than $1 billion on the Ethiopian-Djibouti railway alone.” True, there is nothing stopping Beijing from upping the fiscal ante to keep everything operational, as it can always issue more currency to meet the future funding requirements. But doing so leaves the country’s policymakers with a whole host of unappealing options in the aftermath, as it deals with the consequences of effectively replicating its own homegrown capital investment bubble with a new one abroad in Eurasia—not the least of which is the potential for a collapse in China’s renminbi.

...

September 2016, the Liberty Bridge in Pittsburgh caught on fire. Originally built in 1928 and last renovated in 1982, the bridge carries more than 50,000 vehicles a day and serves as a main commuter link between the city’s central business district and its populous southern suburbs. Long in a state of questionable repair, it had been an object of particular concern after the spectacular and deadly collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis in 2007. Pennsylvania had—and still has—one of the highest percentages of “structurally deficient” bridges in the nation, and the prospect of a failure of the Liberty Bridge, whose main span is nearly 45 feet above the Monongahela River, was terrifying to contemplate.

Nevertheless, it took six years after the I-35W disaster for Pennsylvania’s perennially Republican state legislature to pass a transportation spending bill to free up repair funds. In the interim, increasingly drastic weight restrictions had been imposed in order to prevent, or at least mitigate against, a Liberty Bridge failure or collapse.

Even after legislative approval, funding delays pushed the start of the project to 2015, and it was expected to last 30 months. The blaze that engulfed the bridge burned so hot it buckled one of the main support beams, and an investigation determined that the contractor had failed to follow proper fire safety protocols. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined it several thousand dollars. It faced a more substantial penalty of $3 million from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, but then the PennDOT decided to simply waive the fine.

There’s a verbal tic particular to a certain kind of response to a certain kind of story about the thinness and desperation of American society; about the person who died of preventable illness or the Kickstarter campaign to help another who can’t afford cancer treatment even with “good” insurance; about the plight of the homeless or the lack of resources for the rural poor; about underpaid teachers spending thousands of dollars of their own money for the most basic classroom supplies; about train derailments, the ruination of the New York subway system and the decrepit states of our airports and ports of entry.

“I can’t believe in the richest country in the world. …”

This is the expression of incredulity and dismay that precedes some story about the fundamental impoverishment of American life, the fact that the lived, built geography of existence here is so frequently wanting, that the most basic social amenities are at once grossly overpriced and terribly underwhelming, that normal people (most especially the poor and working class) must navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy for the simplest public services, about our extraordinary social and political paralysis in the face of problems whose solutions seem to any reasonable person self-evident and relatively straightforward.

It is true that, as measured by GDP, or by the size of the credit and equity markets, or even just by the gaudy presence of our Googles, Amazons and Apples, the United States is the greatest machine for the production of money in the modern history of the world.

But this wealth is largely an abstraction, a trick of the broad and largely meaningless aggregations of numbers that makes up most of what the business pages call “economics.” The American commonwealth is shockingly impoverished. Ask anyone who’s compared the nine-plus-hour train ride from Pittsburgh to New York with the barely two-hour journey from Paris to Bordeaux, an equidistant journey, or who’s watched the orderly, accurate exit polls from a German election and compared them with the fizzling, overheating voting machines in Florida.

Now, it is true that bridges collapse in Europe, too, although this past summer’s tragedy was in Italy, whose famously ungovernable corruption may be the closest continental analogue to our own United States. American liberals and leftists tend to over-valorize the Western European model, but there is no doubt that the wealthy countries at the core of the EU have far more successfully mitigated the most extreme social inequalities and built systems for health and transportation that far outstrip anything in the U.S. Even in their poor urban suburbs or, say, the disinvested industrial north of France, you will find nothing like the squalor that we still permit—that we accept as ordinary—in the USA. Meanwhile, in our ever-declining adversary-of-convenience, the Moscow subway runs on time.

The social wealth of a society is better measured by the quality of its common lived environment than by a consolidated statistical approximation like GDP, or even an attempt at weighted comparisons like so-called purchasing power parity. There is a reason why our great American cities, for all of our supposed wealth, often feel and look so shabby. The money goes elsewhere. Seville, a pretty, modest city of less than a million people in the south of Spain, built 80 kilometers of bike lanes for $40 million in less than two years, and eliminated a lot of ugly, on-street parking in the process. Imagine a commensurate effort in New York City, a far wealthier place on paper. Well, its supposedly liberal mayor is going to give Amazon $1.5 billion in tax breaks instead.

To be fair, New York City and state, mired in graft and corruption, cannot build a single mile of subway for less than $2 billion.

Elsewhere, the con artists running America’s military-industrial complex are worried that the hundreds of billions we sink every year into planes that cannot fly in the rain and ships that cannot steer have left the United States virtually unable to win any wars. The United States spends perhaps a trillion dollars every year on its military and wars.

Poverty—both individual and social—is a policy, not an accident, and not some kind of natural law. These are deliberate choices about the allocation of resources. They are eminently undoable by modest exercises of political power, although if the state- and city-level Democratic leaders of New York and northern Virginia are the national mold, then our nominally left-wing party is utterly, hopelessly beholden to the upward transfer of social wealth to an extremely narrow cadre of already extremely rich men and women.

I voted last week, an exercise that now feels like mouthing polite prayers at someone else’s church. The line snaked out the door of the tiny, hot basement room and into the cold rain. There were only three voting machines. One was broken, and one seemed to be working only intermittently. A young woman with a baby in a stroller was in line in front of me. After we’d waited for 10 minutes without moving, she looked at me and rolled her eyes. “Can you believe this is how we do this?” she said. “In 2018.”

I smiled. I shrugged. I waved at her cute kid. I did not say, “Yes. I can believe it.”

AN perhaps the biggest surprise in the midterm elections was that, unlike 2016, there wasn’t one. Polls and pundits expected Democrats would take control of the House and Republicans would keep the Senate, and that’s exactly what we’re getting.

The likely result: two years of congressional gridlock on economic policy, which requires both houses of Congress to agree on the same legislation. So, we can expect that the status quo on economic policy will mostly prevail.

There are, however, two economic issues on which the election outcome will make a meaningful difference: trade and infrastructure.

NAFTA lives

One of the first items of business in January after the new Congress gets sworn in will be the United States-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement.

The deal is intended to replace NAFTA, which President Donald Trump has threatened to withdraw from for several years. In reality, the new deal is little more than a slightly modified version of its would-be predecessor.

But before it can become the law of the land, Congress must ratify it, either by a majority vote by both houses or two-thirds of the Senate.

The USMCA’s chances were already far from assured before the Democrats took the House. Now its failure is very likely.

So what happens next?

The simple answer is not much. NAFTA remains in force. Ultimately I believe that’s a good thing for the U.S. economy because the new deal would likely shift auto industry jobs to Mexico.

With any luck, the USMCA defeat also convinces Trump to have second thoughts about his costly trade war.

But what if he tries to follow through on his threat to withdraw from NAFTA? Fortunately, most constitutional scholars say he can’t do so unilaterally. Were he able to, however, the consequences for the U.S. economy would be severe.

Roads, bridges and bipartisanship

Infrastructure, on the other hand, offers a rare opportunity for House Democrats and Trump to find common ground.

The signs of a crisis in America’s infrastructure are unmistakable: derailing and delayed trains, crumbling roadways, collapsing bridges, undrinkable tap water and a wastewater system that is a menace to public health.

The American Society of Civilian Engineers estimated that America’s “D+” infrastructure costs an average household US$3,400 annually. It also cost lives, as it did when a Minnesota bridge collapsed in 2007, killing 13.

In February, Trump proposed a fund to spend $1.5 trillion to fix the infrastructure mess, with the government putting up $200 billion and the private sector kicking in the rest.

While Democrats support infrastructure spending, the stumbling block in the Trump plan was the provision that the private sector would effectively own the roads and bridges that it builds.

While House Democrats may not support this plan, they would likely be willing to support something that mainly relies on just federal spending. And Republicans have a reason to go along as well: Infrastructure spending would boost economic growth, which is forecast to slow in 2019 – just before the 2020 elections.

While a few hundred billion dollars in spending won’t solve the U.S. infrastructure problem, it would be a good start. It would stimulate the economy and also make everyone’s lives more pleasant and less expensive – and may even end a little gridlock (pun intended).

Steven Pressman, Professor of Economics, Colorado State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

https://www.alternet.org/economy/do-you-want-pay-toll-private-investors-when-you-ride-trumps-federal-highways-thats-his

http://www.alternet.org/economy/even-trumps-infrastructure-plan-thinly-veiled-neo-fascist-scheme

Infrastructure investment: it’s that economic policy sweet spot that everyone loves to love.

Fixing bridges, building roads, modernizing airports, improving mass transportation, keeping lead out of our water: nearly everyone can relate to the need for it and can imagine how much better their lives would be with more of it. For years, most people have faced crazy-making delays in traffic, long lines at airports, and have seen pictures of bridges collapsing. And the experts agree. Economists and engineers have warned us about the problem for decades. The most recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the U.S. a D+ on its infrastructure building and maintenance, which means that, overall, our infrastructure is in critical condition. These civil engineers estimate that over the next 10 years, the U.S. will have about a $1.2 trillion in infrastructure financing shortfall unless something dramatic is done. Studies have confirmed that, properly done, infrastructure investment can generate millions of jobs, create big time saving efficiencies, and keep people safer. These infrastructure shortfalls, fed by years of Republican austerity initiatives at the Federal and State levels, too often aided and abetted by Democratic bankers and other Democratic “deficit hawks,” are much in the everyday texture of American life.

On the campaign trail, then-candidate Trump jumped on the bandwagon, decrying America’s “Third World” infrastructure and touting his ability to fix it in short order—as “demonstrated” by his “building prowess “in New York City and “around the world.” Trump promised to quickly fix the country’s decaying infrastructure and generate millions of good paying job with a $1 trillion program that will “Make America Great Again.”

That Trump had hit a political “sweet spot” was made clear early on by the number of prominent Democrats and labor leaders who announced not only an interest but real enthusiasm for cooperating with Trump on making a $ 1 trillion building-spree a reality. How could they resist? A true, well designed, well-implemented $1 Trillion government investment in infrastructure is a plan many Democrats, progressive economists and labor leaders had been promoting for years. As Richard Trumpka, President of the AFL-CIO explained: “During my January meeting with President Trump, we identified a few important areas where compromise seemed possible. On manufacturing, infrastructure and especially trade, we were generally in agreement. Mr. Trump spoke of $1 trillion to rebuild our schools, roads and bridges. He challenged companies to keep jobs in the United States. He promoted ‘Buy America.’ He promised to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.”

Of course, many Democrats and some economists understood that that Trump’s infrastructure “sketch” (he has never come out with a true plan) was quite different from a genuine government-financed $1 trillion plan. From the beginning, Trump’s team had made it clear that this was going to be a private-public partnership in which the government would put in significantly less than a trillion dollars—perhaps $200 or $400 billion of corporate tax subsidies over 10 years—as a way to help facilitate a privatization of public assets. Think: turning public roads into privately owned toll roads and public tunnels into privately owned toll tunnels. This type of privatization, critics argued, would end up as a typical crony capitalist gold mine, giving away public assets to well-connected and politically pliant capitalists and maybe, just maybe, getting some improved but very expensive infrastructure and a few jobs in the process. But some Democrats and labor leaders were, perhaps understandably, desperate to engage in wishful thinking and tentative support—given the apparent political pressure from their constituencies.

Still, some observers warned that the dangers of this infrastructure sweet spot were even greater than might at first appear. In an article in Challenge Magazine, “Trumponomics: Should We Just Say No?” I argued that not only is the so-called “infrastructure” program mostly a thinly disguised privatization scam; it was also a sinister gambit to broaden the political support and therefore the power of Trump and Trumpism, a proto-fascist regime and movement, whose goal is to undermine democracy, enrich those wealthy capitalists willing to play along, and divide and conquer the domestic population by sowing racial, gender, religious and national hatred and intolerance.

:{On August 15, this “infrastructure of fascism” came into clear focus in a bizarre and tragic way. }:{. He had key members of his economic team in tow—most notably, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, head of Trump’s National Economic Council—both former Goldman Sachs bankers—and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, former Bank of America and Citicorp banker. This announcement of Trump’s “infrastructure plan,” which took only a few minutes, presented even less of a true infrastructure plan than he had floated during the election campaign.}::{ This was simply yet another de-regulation plan dressed up as a plan for infrastructure investment. Effectively, this “executive order” served-up a wish list that would have been compiled by any real estate mogul who doesn’t want any government agency or public group to come between him, his building, and his bottom line. In the name of building more useful infrastructure and generating more jobs, Trump’s executive order is designed to let developers skirt environmental regulations, and most likely, labor, health, and safety regulations as well. The Executive Order will make it a lot easier to build more Trump towers in flood plains, but do little or nothing for the country’s true infrastructure needs.}:

But this roll-out of a fake infrastructure plan was not the most interesting or surprising thing about this event. It was the press conference Trump held afterwards. and the creation of infrastructure and jobs as his bait, Trump took the occasion to assure his neo-fascist, white supremacist and nationalist base that, yes, he was still their man. The reporters at hand, having little interest in infrastructure, wanted to hear a clear statement from Trump decrying the violent and deadly acts committed over the weekend by Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va. But instead Trump used his infrastructure plan and his promise of “millions of jobs” to rally his base supporters, all the while demonizing the counter-protestors (calling them violent members of “the alt-left” who were “at least” as responsible for the violence and mayhem as those on the right).

This event, then, tied, in a sinister but clear way, Trump’s infrastructure plan with the racist, anti-Semitic, and neo-fascist members of Trump’s base movement and linked them, in turn, to the bankers and policy makers like Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin who have so much to gain from the tax subsidies and privatization that are the essence of these plans. Gary Cohn was reportedly “furious” about what Trump said and did. But according to reporters, Cohn, like so many Republicans in Congress, will most likely remain quiet, and soldier on, presumably in the hope of getting a big payoff down the road. (Cohn reportedly wants to succeed Janet Yellen as Chair of the Federal Reserve; and his friends have millions to gain from the privatization schemes.)

Trump’s response to the Charlottesville violence led numerous members of his two business councils to resign. In resigning from Trump’s “Manufacturing Council,” AFL-CIO President Rich Trumpka explained in the New York Times: “Unfortunately, with each passing day, it has become clear that President Trump has no intention of following through on his commitments to working people. More worrisome, his actions and rhetoric threaten to leave America worse off and more divided. It is for these reasons that I resigned yesterday from the president’s manufacturing council, which the president disbanded today after a string of resignations. To be clear, the council never lived up to its potential for delivering policies that lift up working families.”

Let this be a warning to economists, labor leaders, Democratic officials and all progressives fighting for economic and social justice: “progressive-appearing” economic proposals from Trump are likely to be thinly veiled attempts to suck in unsuspecting allies in support of a neo-fascist, authoritarian movement that is increasingly showing its true colors. They are designed, quite clearly, to build support for Trump and his business allies. Don’t be fooled, don’t be bought off, and be vigilant.

Trade policy and re-negotiating NAFTA are up next. As Robert Kuttner, Editor of The American Prospect told us after his astonishing telephone call from Steve Bannon, Bannon is looking for a “right-left” alliance on trade. We can be sure that, like Trump’s “infrastructure plan,” this trade alliance will all be in the service of Trump and Trumpism.

Gerald Epstein is an economist at U-Mass Amherst

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http://www.alternet.org/environment/smart-city-20-transforming-cities-self-learning-self-modulating-organisms

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