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Superdelegates Were Designed To Stop a Candidate Like Bernie

Many moments in Wednesday’s Democratic debate have already deservedly made headlines: Elizabeth Warren’s evisceration of Mike Bloomberg, the ongoing feud between Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, and Bernie Sanders’ defense of socialism, to name a few. Perhaps the most important came at the very end.

Asked whether the candidate who ends the primary season having won the most delegates should also win the nomination, all the candidates bar Sanders—who now looks poised to win Nevada and the states beyond—demurred, insisting that the party follow the “rules” and “the process” set up.

Sanders was the sole outlier. “Well, the process includes 500 superdelegates on the second ballot,” he responded. “So I think that the will of the people should prevail, yes.” Sanders was referring to the current nominating rules, which stipulate that if no single candidate wins a majority of pledged delegates on the first ballot, the choice goes to a second ballot where all delegates are free to vote however they like—including those hundreds of party bigwigs known as the superdelegates.

What that means is that four years after inflaming progressive rage in 2016, and only two years after having their power weakened, superdelegates may well help decide another Democratic nomination. And if so, they will work exactly as designed: to allow the party establishment to kneecap an outsider candidate if the democratic process goes in a direction unfavorable to party elites.

“Peer review”

As outlined in my 2016 In These Timesinvestigation, superdelegates were created in 1982 by the Hunt Commission over frustration with the nominating reforms of 1970, which party leaders blamed for allowing the nomination of an unruly outsider like Jimmy Carter, and thus his 1980 drubbing at the hands of Ronald Reagan. As Elaine Kamarck, a Hunt Commission member and superdelegate, explained to In These Times in 2016, the party came off that loss looking to protect itself from future “outlier candidates.”

The transcripts of the commission’s seven-month-long discussions from July 1981 to February 1982, obtained from the National Archives, make painfully clear how sharply the creation of the superdelegates was tied to anxiety over the loss of influence for party elites. As Xandra Kayden, a member of the Center for Democratic Policy (now Center for National Policy), explained in August 1981, the advent of the primary system was “the principal reason we lost control of the nomination at the presidential level,” and Democratic officials and top-ranked party members had to “regain control of the nomination.”

“There are those who feel on the one hand that the fate of the Party has been what it has been because of the reforms” of those years, said Walter Fauntroy, a civil rights activist and the District of Columbia’s non-voting delegate to Congress. He added during the discussions that “had the party regulars and the party structure remained in control of nominations and in control of resources and the like, that our fate would have been much better.”

Those involved had deep doubts about the wisdom of opening up the nominating process to control by voters.

“Whether you have 100,000 or 10,000 or 10 million people participate has no bearing whatsoever on the quality of the outcome,” Minneapolis Mayor Don Fraser said at the time. This was after Fraser had opened the proceedings by joking that the party could simply decide to ignore the results of the primaries entirely, receiving “general laughter” from the room.

“We are the only democratic country in the world in which political parties pick their candidates in this manner,” Austin Ranney, an election expert and alum of the 1968 Hubert Humphrey campaign, complained at the time. “In every other democratic country in the world, you name it, this is the case, the candidate is picked by a relatively small group of party people in which the party’s elected public representatives, people who have faced the test of getting themselves elected to public office, play a prominent role.”

Central to this was the idea of party elites’ superior wisdom—the “certain political acumen, a certain political antenna” they brought to proceedings, as Connecticut State Sen. Dick Schneller put it at the time.

Ranney complained that the old system, one where party elites alone decided, meant there was a process of “peer review.” Picking a winning candidate through such means wasn’t guaranteed, he said, but the odds were much higher.

“There is nobody who can better tell a candidate how to win the state of California than a senator or a governor of California who has in fact won that state several times,” said Kamarck. It echoed the view of future vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro, who told participants that party elites “can positively bring to the convention the views of the grassroots who are their constituents.”

Combating “special interests”

At the heart of all this was the party’s trauma from the 1980 landslide loss, which officials viewed as a product of choosing unrepresentative candidates who catered only to the party’s base.

“We have fair reflection of those voters and caucus participants who vote or participate in the caucuses, but what about the majority of Democrats who vote in November but not in the primaries?” political scientist Thomas Mann asked at the time.

 “Sometimes I think that the Democratic Party in its present version comes across to a great many people as not so much a single party working for a common goal as a bunch of its single interest groups, special interests groups itself,” griped Ranney. “There is the Women’s Lobby and there is the—I mean Caucus, and there is the Black Caucus, and there is the Right to Life Caucus, and there is this caucus and there is that caucus.”

This kind of rhetoric was common for the era, perhaps best embodied by none other than former vice president and current Democratic contender Joe Biden. As outlined in my forthcoming political biography of Biden, the then-Delaware senator spent the 1980s touring with the corporate-backed Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) lecturing the Democratic Party to change.

Biden would later complain in 1993 about the “idiotic groups out there” like the “XYZ Group for American Values” and the “QSY Group to Save All the Women in the World.” He made repeatedly clear throughout the decade that these “interest groups” or “special interests” he and other Democrats were complaining about weren’t, as they used to be, big business and its lobbyists; they were the various minority and activist groups that formed the party’s base.

In 1978, as he pivoted sharply rightward for a re-election campaign held in the shadow of that year’s taxpayers rebellion, he blamed the growth of the federal budget on constituent interest groups’ reluctance to cut programs that specifically benefited them. Or as he told the NAACP convention more bluntly in 1986 when taking aim at Jesse Jackson’s campaign, “You can’t try to pit the Rainbow Coalition, blacks, Hispanics, poor whites, gays, against the middle class.”

This mindset was reflected in the Hunt Commission, whose namesake, North Carolina Gov. James Hunt—name-checked by Alvin From, then-head of the DLC, as a leader with an admirable record—suggested something similar in the commission’s opening. “There are some people in this party that maybe still feel a little left out, and maybe some of them are the sort of middle-income Americans,” he said. “I hope we can figure out some ways to get them more involved. I think we can do that.”

In other words, at the same time that Biden and other neoliberal Democrats were castigating the party for listening to “special interests”—meaning its diverse voting base—over what they viewed as mainstream Democratic voters, this mindset found its way into the Hunt Commission deliberations. Participants worried about the party becoming viewed as merely a collection of “interest groups,” and hoped that giving a bigger voice to party elites would ensure “middle income Americans” and other groups they viewed as alienated from the party thanks to its earlier rule changes were represented.

These rationales were put to the test in 1984. Contrary to the popular adage that superdelegates have never decided an election, by party members’ own admission at the time, superdelegates were integral in giving establishment-favorite candidate Walter Mondale an early and sustained edge over his closest rivals that year: the young, charismatic and neoliberal Gary Hart, and the progressive populist Jesse Jackson. The superdelegates then helped defeat or weaken several platform planks put forward by both, including reining in the use of nuclear weapons and military force in general and watering down an affirmative action program.

The election result didn’t bode well for the supposedly superior acumen of party elites: Mondale, who made cutting the deficit the center of his campaign, suffered an even worse defeat than Carter, winning only his home state of Minnesota and Washington, D.C. In some ways, it presaged the outcome of 2016, when superdelegates put their thumb on the scale for another establishment candidate who suffered another (albeit vastly narrower) electoral disaster at the hands of a radical right-wing Republican.

The Democrats might be hoping the superdelegates can still save them from Bernie Sanders. But there are grave reasons to question whether they’ll save them from Donald Trump.

World's Biggest Fossil Fuel Funder Notes Climate Change Could End 'Human Life as We Know it'
https://earther.gizmodo.com/worlds-biggest-fossil-fuel-funder-notes-climate-change-1841835204 #climatechange #climatecrisis

The Fate of the Planet Rests on Dethroning the IMF and World Bank

Last September, 6 million people joined youth-led climate protests all around the world, from New Zealand to Indonesia, from Brazil to the United States. Fed up with years of international inaction on the greatest threat to our civilization, young people and their allies are again planning to rally in massive numbers this coming April, on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Unwilling to accept anything but unprecedented, massive action on a planetary scale, many of these activists are calling for a Green New Deal to save our planet and our future: a systemic overhaul of the global economy so that it works for all, not just the wealthy few.

This sort of international solidarity action hearkens back to the anti-globalization movement of 20 years ago, when unions, environmentalists and social movements came together to call attention to the devastating effects of globalization and “free trade” imposed by multilateral institutions like World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The turn of the century protests in Seattle and elsewhere put a spotlight on what is now often referred to as the “Washington Consensus”—a decades-long, coordinated drive to impose market-centered economic and political strategies upon countries everywhere.

The transformative power of the anti-globalization movement lay in its demonstration of the interconnections of social, labor and environmental struggles across borders, and ability to unite people in high-income countries and low- and middle-income countries against a common enemy. However, much of this energy was subsequently diverted to opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, surviving the 2008 financial crisis, and confronting white supremacy and fascism in the age of Donald Trump. Activist scrutiny of the multinational institutions that govern the global economy has waned. But now, as the global climate crisis escalates and calls for a Green New Deal grow stronger, there is an opportunity to revitalize this spirit of international solidarity to develop a new international economic consensus—and new multilateral institutions—based on ecological sustainability, reparative justice, and the common good.

Investing in disaster

In 1944, during the penultimate year of World War II, representatives from 44 countries met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to discuss how to establish global peace and security through international economic cooperation. Out of this meeting, the IMF and World Bank were created, and the seeds of what was to become the WTO system sown. But with leadership and control in the hands of the United States and its close allies, these institutions soon became tools in the larger geopolitical struggles of the Cold War. Moreover, with the emergence of the Washington Consensus in the 1980s, they became weapons in an ideologically driven effort to install free market economic policies around the world: spreading economic liberalization, opening massive new markets for Western goods, shifting public assets and services into private hands, and delivering previously unattainable natural resources into the hands of large multinational corporations. As Nobel Prize-winning economist and former Chief Economist of the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz said in 2002, institutions like the IMF had been thoroughly “overrun” by “market fundamentalism.”

One of the key methods deployed by the World Bank and IMF in particular were the infamous “Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAPs). These programs conditioned international economic assistance on deep structural changes to a client country’s political and economic system—specifically deregulation, privatization and cuts in public spending. All too often the economic development and growth promised by the institutions failed to materialize, leaving many countries impoverished, embittered and indebted to Western interests.

A centerpiece of these structural adjustment programs was the privatization of publicly owned assets and infrastructure. According to author Sharon Beder, loans conditioned on privatization jumped from 13% in the 1980s to 70% in 2000. This was especially true in the energy and utility sectors, which constitute core public goods and integral points of intervention to tackle the climate crisis. For instance, during the 1990s both the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (a regional multilateral development bank) promoted energy sector privatization. Between 1998 and 2005, over half of the 115 so-called “developing” countries had either privatized or corporatized their state-owned utility, and more than a third had opened up markets to independent power producers.

The implications for the environment and the climate have been profound. Bolivia is a cautionary example. During the 1980s and 1990s, the World Bank, IMF and Inter-American Development Bank played a prominent role in sponsoring economic restructuring and liberalization of the country’s energy sector. This included partial privatization of the Bolivian state-owned oil company—shares of which were bought by international energy corporations, including Shell and Enron—as well as legal, regulatory, and administrative shifts that enabled massive foreign direct investment into the country’s energy and utility sector.

This resulted in the significant growth of oil and gas exploration and extraction operations, and the construction and renovation of numerous hydrocarbon export pipelines—all of which devastated local communities and regional environments, like the Chiquitano forest. As researcher Derrick Hindery wrote in 2004, “contrary to neoliberal rhetoric that these would boost the economy and deepen democracy ... economic and political restructuring led to a reduction in state revenues, massive social unrest, and eased [multinational corporations’] access to natural resources.” Resistance to structural adjustment, including mass protests against the World Bank-directed attempt to privatize the city of Cochabamba’s water utility, was one of the causes of Evo Morales’ landslide presidential election victory in 2005.

Morales decisively broke with the IMF and the World Bank, reasserted public control over key economic sectors and decisions, including its energy utilities, and presided over an unprecedented period of economic growth, inequality reduction and improved living standards. However, the Bolivian economy largely remained reliant on the extraction and exploitation of oil, gas and minerals. Last year, Morales was overthrown by a right-wing coup, raising the prospect of a return to market fundamentalism and corporate control over strategic resources that could catalyze further environmental destruction. This is especially concerning given that Bolivia holds some of the world’s largest reserves of lithium, instrumental to building the batteries needed for electric cars and electricity storage—an industry Morales had plans to develop for the benefit of Bolivians, as opposed to Western corporations.

The World Bank and IMF’s actions have led to significant social unrest in many other countries. In 2000, the government of Ecuador agreed to privatize 18 distribution utilities in exchange for IMF funding, but public outcry successfully stopped the privatizations. Similarly, in Guatemala, the privatization of electric utilities in the 1990s has led to poor service, high prices, and repeated bouts of protests. In India and Indonesia, corruption in new private power markets formed in the 1990s has also sparked widespread unrest. And in Costa Rica, an IMF supported attempt to privatize the country’s popular electric and telecoms utility was defeated in 2000 due to major protests and upheaval. Today, Costa Rica’s publicly-owned electric system—a network that includes a national public utility working in coordination with local, cooperative and municipal utilities—is the only one in the world to run an entire country on virtually 100 percent renewable energy. What’s more, any revenue from Costa Rica’s national utility is used to support other social services.

In recent years, the World Bank IMF and WTO have ostensibly begun to change their tune. They are increasingly professing concern about climate change, as well as economic and social inequality. For instance, the World Bank claims to have implemented an “institution-wide effort to mainstream climate considerations into all development projects.” Sensing the changing political and economic winds post financial crisis—and stung by criticisms from the anti-globalization movement and their own manifest failures—these organizations are eager to claim that the Washington Consensus era is firmly in the past.

However, as many observers have noted, the actions of these institutions fall far short of their rhetoric. Despite expressing concern over climate change, the WTO has done almost nothing to challenge fossil fuel subsidies on unfair trade grounds, despite being asked to do so by twelve member nations in 2017. In fact, recent research has found that while several cases of subsidies for renewable energy development had been challenged at the WTO level in the past decade, no fossil fuel subsidies have. The World Bank’s fossil fuel exclusion policy has already fallen far behind those of its peers, such as the European Investment Bank, which has excluded nearly all fossil fuel finance.

More generally, the climate crisis is inseparable from the free-market economic policies and history of imperialism that continue to underpin the World Bank and IMF’s outlook on international development. President Barack Obama’s “Power Africa” program (which the World Bank helped fund) is an instructive example. Nominally intended to expand energy access in sub-Saharan Africa, it ultimately operated as a way for U.S. companies like General Electric to capture the African energy market by selling gas turbines and grid infrastructure. These companies heavily lobbied the U.S. government and multilateral development banks to shy away from renewable technologies and direct close to $7 billion of financing to American corporations. Not only does such behavior greatly expand stranded fossil fuel assets in the Global South which must be retired before the end of their intended lives, but the revenues from the billions invested are largely retained by multinational corporations, not the countries the program was supposed to benefit. 

Furthermore, a recent survey of loans made to 26 countries in 2016-2017 found that the IMF continues to condition borrowing on fiscal consolidation (cutting spending and or raising taxes) and the privatization of public goods or services. In 2018, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, blasted both the IMF and World Bank for continuing to aggressively promote privatization despite ample evidence that it “involves the systematic elimination of human rights protections and further marginalization of the interests of low-income earners and those living in poverty.”      

A New Bretton Woods

Just as with World War II, today we face a global crisis—the “moral equivalent of war.” Without rapid and transformative changes to our energy, transportation and agricultural systems (among others), the world is on track to eclipse warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) within the decade, blowing past collectively agreed climate targets. At the current pace, estimates suggest as much as 6 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by 2100. Simply put, this level of warming would be catastrophic for human civilization and the planet.

In the United States and Europe, plans for a “Green New Deal” are the subject of increasing political discussion. While national and regional action is extremely important, climate change is a global threat, and what is ultimately needed is an effective global response—one that existing international institutions, agreements and approaches have demonstrated themselves woefully incapable of delivering. What is needed is a Global Green New Deal based on genuine international solidarity and climate reparations. Western-imposed free market solutions must be replaced with respect for local and Indigenous strategies; wholesale privatization ditched in favor of democratic forms of public and community ownership; Western-led extraction exchanged for reparative payback for damages to the Global South and open access to technologies; and “leadership” by those responsible for the crisis supplanted with control and power exercised by those most affected by it.

To address rising inequality and begin to rectify decades of destructive neoliberalism, the Global Green New Deal must be not only effective, but also equitable. It must recognize the outsized role Global North countries played in causing the climate crisis, both in their own actions and in imposing socially and ecologically destructive market fundamentalism around the world. A major tenet of this Global Green New Deal needs to be the creation of a new international economic paradigm—underpinned by a new or substantially transformed multilateral architecture with the capacity and will to truly deliver. This means either dramatically overhauling institutions like the IMF, World Bank and WTO, or designing new institutions to take their place. As Richard Kozul-Wright and Kevin Gallagher have recently stated, “to make a global Green New Deal work, many of the multilateral programs that have accumulated over decades will have to be culled, and a new generation of smarter institutions will have to be established.”

In other words, the Global Green New Deal can be our generation’s Bretton Woods. It is a moment with tremendous potential to construct new—or radically reformed—international institutions that provide support, aid and investment on the basis of fundamentally different values and “conditions” than before. As calls for such a “New Bretton Woods” get louder—including most recently from former UN official Rachel Kyte—it is imperative the movement for a Green New Deal does not simply seek to tinker at the edges of a fundamentally broken economic and imperialist model. It is a chance to create real international economic and environmental cooperation rooted in local experience, culture, ownership, and control.

The Washington Consensus is dead, and should now be buried once and for all. In its place, a new form of global solidarity and new multilateral institutions must rise to confront the intersecting crises we now face—and to build a lasting internationalism and an economics focused on nurturing people and planet, not on extractive exploitation by the global elite. There is a world to win, or to lose. The stakes could hardly be higher.

The Ambivalence of a Nice Day in February

2019-2020 appears to be likely to become another non-winter winter with little snow and high temperatures. But good weather comes at an awful price.

The Secret History of Superdelegates

Since its launch, a specter has haunted Bernie Sanders’ run for the Democratic nomination. It’s not his age, though at 74 he would be the oldest president in American history. And it’s not that he’s an avowed socialist, the label that a mere eight years ago was used to smear Barack Obama as a sinister, alien threat to the American way of life. Rather, it has been the so-called superdelegates—the 712 Democratic Party insiders who are free to vote at the nominating convention for the candidate of their choosing.

The corporate media’s early inclusion of the superdelegates in the delegate count created the impression of an inevitable Clinton nomination. Seventy-three percent of superdelegates—520 of the 712—have pledged their support to the former secretary of state, but superdelegates are free to change their minds any time before the Democratic National Convention in July.

By February 20, when only three states had held nominating contests, such reporting had conferred on the Clinton campaign an aura of insurmountability, leading some voters to question whether their votes truly mattered. Even as Sanders won a string of contests at the end of March to narrow Clinton’s lead, superdelegates in those states stubbornly clung to Clinton. Despite the second-biggest victory ever in a contested New Hampshire Democratic primary, Sanders was credited with the same number of total delegates as Clinton, thanks to superdelegates.

This has rubbed many the wrong way. There have been widespread calls to abolish the superdelegate system—and not all from the Sanders camp. Even Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, called the system “unfair.”

The attitude of Democratic Party bigwigs hasn’t helped. When a Sanders supporter criticized superdelegate Howard Dean for sticking with Clinton despite Sanders’ landslide victory in Vermont, Dean tweeted back: “Superdelegates don’t ‘represent the people’…I’ll do what I think is right for the country.”

In an added twist, the Sanders campaign suggested in April that if neither candidate reaches the 2,383-delegate threshold for victory from pledged delegates, it will attempt to win the nomination by flipping superdelegates with the argument that Sanders is more electable. Critics have called the strategy hypocritical, given Sanders’ invocation of democratic revolution and his earlier criticism of superdelegates.

The Democratic Party’s bizarrely undemocratic process raises an obvious question: Why did it choose to institute such a system? To answer that, you need to go back to the Hunt Commission, which in 1982, invented the superdelegate.

The proceedings of that Commission were never published, so In These Times went to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., to study the transcripts of the seven-month-long discussions. The records paint a picture of a party eager to win and convinced that, in order to do so, it must return control of the nominating process to top officials. It’s a strategy that reflects a shift in the party since the 1970s, away from the grassroots—a shift that has led to tensions within the party that are boiling to the surface with Bernie Sanders’ campaign.

A TALE OF TWO COMMISSIONS

In many ways, the Hunt Commission was formed as a rebuke to a commission convened by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) a decade earlier, also to overhaul the nominating process: the 1969-1970 McGovern-Fraser Commission.

Prior to 1970, the nominating process had been anything but democratic. Primaries, introduced at the turn of the century, were few and non-binding. Party members had carte blanche to select the candidate at the convention. At the 1968 Democratic convention, the pro-Vietnam War candidate Hubert Humphrey won the nomination over antiwar Sen. Eugene McCarthy by courting party honchos, having not run in a single primary—meanwhile, McCarthy had won more primaries than any other candidate.

Humphrey’s win outraged McCarthy supporters and exacerbated the split between pro- and antiwar camps. Fistfights broke out on the convention floor while police clubbed and tear-gassed protesters outside.

The melee prompted the formation of the McGovern-Fraser Commission, which rewrote the rules governing party nominations. Charging that voter participation in the 1968 election had been “illusory,” the commission’s 1970 rules shifted the balance of power from party leaders to the rank and file, mandating that delegates be chosen in forums open to all party members. These rules would lead to an explosion in the number of primaries. They more than doubled from 17 in 1968 to 35 in 1980. While only 13 million Americans participated in the 1968 nominating process, 32 million did in 1980. Previously pivotal, the Democratic National Convention became more symbolic.

Over the course of the next three elections, however, the party suffered two landslide losses. First, in 1972, liberal antiwar Sen. George McGovern (S.D.) suffered an unprecedented 49-state defeat to Richard Nixon. Then, in 1980, President Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan by a resounding 10 percent of the popular vote.

Party higher-ups concluded that the 10-year experiment with democratization had been a failure. “The news for Democrats is not good,” read a 1981 report commissioned by the DNC. Not only were Democrats losing elections, but party membership was precipitously dropping. According to University of Michigan polling cited in the report, 41 percent of the electorate called themselves Democrats in May 1980; a year later, only 31 percent did, while those identifying themselves as Independents had shot up 8 points to 42 percent. More alarming, the proportion calling themselves Republicans increased from 23 percent to 27 percent. The Democrats were concerned their donkey was headed toward extinction.

There are many explanations for this decline—voter apathy, disillusionment with politics, the rise of more candidate-centered campaigns—but the DNC seized upon one that lay within its control: the McGovern-Frasier Commission reforms.

“By bringing the process ‘to the people,’ the Democratic Party has lost its leadership, collective vision and ties to its past,” stated a white paper produced by California’s 43rd and 44th Assembly District Democratic Councils in May 1981.

Enter the Hunt Commission. Winning elections was its goal. DNC Chair Charles Manatt told commission members at the first session, “Improving the nominating process will bring us victory in 1984, and by God...that’s what we’re all about.”

COVERT ORIGINS

From August 1981 to February 1982, the 70-member commission met in some of Washington, D.C.’s most storied hotels. From the Capitol Hilton to the Mayflower—a mecca for the capital’s rich and powerful, where Franklin Roosevelt’s right-hand man first penned the line “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”—a group of labor leaders, high-ranking party functionaries, senators, representatives, governors and mayors hammered out the nitty-gritty details of reform.

The gathering got off on a light note when Minneapolis Mayor Don Fraser joked that the party could simply announce it wouldn’t nominate anyone selected through the primaries. This, the transcript notes, elicited “general laughter.”

The very democracy of the primary process appears to have made the Commission members nervous. They felt they had to give party elites—elected officials and high-ranking party members—a greater hand in choosing candidates, or as Xandra Kayden, a member of the Center for Democratic Policy (now Center for National Policy), put it, the power to “to regain control of the nomination.”

This was partly couched in a belief in elites’ superior judgment. “They bring to the convention a certain political acumen, a certain political antenna,” explained Connecticut state Sen. Dick Schneller, a liberal member of the party.

The inspiration for these words was likely Jimmy Carter, whose presidency cast a long shadow over the proceedings. The Georgia governor had won the nomination running as an outsider against “the political bosses.” Carter often bragged in his stump speech: “I’ve never worked in Washington. I’m not a senator or congressman. I’ve never met a Democratic president.”

As president, he passed over party insiders for appointments in favor of his close-knit team of Georgia unknowns. His strained relationship with his party was exacerbated by his reluctance to compromise on pork-barrel spending, which congressmen relied on to shore up support in their districts.

“[Carter’s] nomination at least would not have been possible under the old rules,” said Austin Ranney, an expert on elections who had worked on the 1968 Humphrey campaign and served on the McGovern-Fraser Commission.

Though his name was not invoked as often as Carter’s, these reforms were also a rebuke of George McGovern’s disastrous 1972 campaign. McGovern had won the nomination on the back of the grassroots-focused reforms he himself had helped institute in 1970. “The [Hunt] Commission doesn’t want a system that lends itself to a McGovern or Carter,” Rick Stearns, a member of the Commission’s advisory committee, would later tell the press in explaining the rationale for superdelegates.

Another fear was that the 1970 reforms led to nominees out of step with the party’s ever-shifting center—whether to its left, or, in the case of Carter, to its right. “Liberal-reformers realized that the same rules which made it easier for a liberal-insurgent like George McGovern to get nominated could be used successfully by a Southern-conservative-insurgent, which is how they perceived Carter,” wrote Commission member and Maryland Democratic Committeeman Lanny Davis not long after.

A concern was that primaries, with their lower turnout rates than general elections, could give undue power to single-issue “factions.” This was a standard complaint at the time (and since): that the Democratic Party was coming under the sway of groups devoted to narrowly focused causes, from gun control and environmentalism to feminism and civil rights.

“Our decisions will make the convention more representative of the mainstream of the party,” the Commission’s chair, North Carolina Gov. James Hunt, told the press shortly before the Commission finished. “We lost a lot of people in the last few years. Our actions should make mainstream Democrats feel better.”

“Mainstream” may have been code for the working-class voters who were fleeing the Democratic Party. The 1981 DNC report had noted significant differences between primary and general election voters; primary voters tended to be better-educated and middle-class.

While the loss of working-class support was a problem that would dog the party for decades, Commission members saw no illogic in addressing this disaffection by reinstating top-down control. Many seemed to truly believe that superdelegates could represent the will of the people more faithfully than the votes of the people could.

“They can positively bring to the convention the views of the grassroots who are their constituents,” explained New York Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, who would become the first woman vice-presidential candidate on a major-party ticket when she was tapped by Walter Mondale three years later. “No one is better able to represent them at the convention than a member of Congress.”

DISSENT IN THE RANKS

Not everyone was on board with these changes. Some Commission members questioned whether the focus on reforming rules ignored the broader factors behind the Democratic Party’s woes. “The other team was using the same system and the same process” when they won the 1980 election, noted Sen. Dick Schneller: “What was the difference?”

One difference, of course, was that the late 1960s and 1970s had occasioned an extraordinary conservative revival that helped sweep Richard Nixon and, later, Ronald Reagan into power. An interlocking network of grassroots campaigners, intellectuals, media, think tanks and advocacy groups formed what came to be known as the New Right, helping set the stage for four decades of conservative ascendancy.

Dissenting Commission members also foresaw pitfalls in the creation of superdelegates. New York state Democratic Committeewoman Barbara Fife pointed out that superdelegates would be mostly white and male, undermining the Democrats’ commitment to equal representation. That proved true: In 2008, about half of Democratic superdelegates were white men.

Oklahoma state Rep. Cleta Deatherage worried—presciently, it turns out—that creating different “castes” of delegates would create “dissensus” within the party, and wondered what would happen if superdelegates “begin to move against what is perceived to be a popular choice?”

It would be easy to caricature the Hunt Commission as a cabal of party bosses scheming in some smoke-filled room. But the record suggests that the participants were genuinely interested in doing the right thing. Throughout the hearings, they affirmed the importance of ensuring equal representation for women and minorities in the party. They believed the creation of superdelegates and the rolling back of primaries would better serve the party, its voters and the country. As the Commission’s final report pointed out, primaries had created a longer, more expensive and divisive nomination process, and the “frontloading” of states early in the process threatened to sew up the nomination prematurely.

Yet the Commission’s work was based on questionable assumptions. Commission advisor Rick Stearns’ cagey defense of superdelegates in 1982 illustrates this best: “It’s like Reagan’s economic policy. If you accept the premise, it’s good.” The premise, in this case, was that politics was the domain of those at the top, those most qualified and best placed to help achieve political victories.

The Hunt Commission ultimately approved a smattering of new rules that subtly rolled back earlier democratization, but the pièce de résistance was what came to be known as superdelegates. They would make up just over 14 percent of national convention delegates and include two-thirds of the Democratic members of Congress, as well as state and local party officials, state party chairs and vice chairs.

Whether the creation of superdelegates succeeded in its idealistic objectives is another question. For all the Commission’s envy of the GOP and its handwringing over party unity, Ronald Reagan became the Republican nominee over the efforts of his own party’s establishment, who loathed the former California governor. The Hunt Commission rules make it less likely that Democrats will elect the progressive equivalent of a Reagan, far off the center and hated by the party establishment, but a transformative president who secured his party’s ascendancy.

The Democrats’ new rules were put to the test during the 1984 election, when Mondale, the superdelegates’ overwhelming choice, received the worst drubbing in the history of the Democratic Party. If the Commission’s most important criterion for success was winning, the superdelegate strategy had failed.

THE SUPERDELEGATES’ KRYPTONITE

In recent months, momentum has been building on the Left to overhaul the Democratic Party nomination system, including superdelegates—part of the larger “battle for the soul of the Democratic Party” that has emerged in and around Sanders’ campaign.

“The superdelegates are an acid test for whether you think the Democratic Party should be democratic,” says Ben Wikler, MoveOn’s Washington director.

MoveOn petitions in 48 states urging superdelegates to support primary and caucus winners have drawn a collective 380,000 signatures and swayed a number of superdelegates. One is Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, who recanted his early commitment to Clinton and promised to vote for whomever wins the most pledged delegates.

Superdelegate and Florida Rep. Alan Grayson took a novel approach, holding an online election to determine his vote, which attracted nearly 400,000 people and saw Sanders win 84-16.

And on April 4, a Sanders fan created a “superdelegate hit list” (since rechristened a “superdelegate list”) with the contact information of superdelegates, allowing voters to get in touch and persuade them to switch their votes.

Some are going a step further and trying to remove superdelegates from the Democratic nominating process altogether. It's the core demand of the March on the DNC, a convention protest organized by the Philadelphia-based Equality Coalition for Bernie Sanders.

The Sanders camp—which includes Grayson, campaign advisor Larry Cohen and Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva—and groups like MoveOn are also discussing plans to push for the abolition of superdelegates at the convention.

Both Grayson and Cohen point out that the Democratic superdelegates are uniquely undemocratic in the American party system. The Republican equivalent—168 party members who are guaranteed a vote at the convention—must vote in line with their respective states and only comprise 7 percent of the total delegates, compared to the DNC superdelegates’ 15 percent.

The Sanders campaign’s new superdelegate-courting strategy, however, raises questions about its ability to call for the abolition of superdelegates come July. Following Sanders’ April 19 defeat in New York, campaign manager Jeff Weaver confirmed that if Sanders trails Clinton in pledged delegates going into the convention, the campaign will attempt to win the nomination by appealing to superdelegates. “It’s going to be an election determined by the superdelegates,” he told MSNBC. “They’re going to want to win in November.” Asked about this, Cohen told In These Times the “campaign strategy is evolving.”

Some argue that superdelegates would never dare overturn the popular will. They point out that superdelegates have never supported a candidate who didn’t win in pledged delegates, as in 2008, when they began flocking to Obama once he started amassing primary victories. Reformers shoot back: Then what’s the point of having them at all?

Cohen also notes the “false momentum” created by superdelegates who support a candidate early—ironically, a problem created by primaries that the Hunt Commission created superdelegates to combat.

R.T. Rybak, DNC vice chair and a superdelegate himself, says there’s no backroom dealing behind superdelegates’ early support for Clinton. “That reflects in large part elected officials with constituencies who are going largely for Clinton,” he says.

Of course, influence is rarely as simple as quid pro quo. Clinton has been a central figure and fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee for two decades, and is actively raising money for the party now via her joint fundraising committee with the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund. Many superdelegates are Democratic officials who are in her debt.

Rybak points to the GOP’s current Trump woes as an example of superdelegates’ necessity. “There are times where strictly who voted in that year’s primaries is not completely representative,” he says.

Whatever happens, it’s clear the Hunt Commission’s vision is falling out of favor with many of today’s rank-and-file Democrats. But this current battle is nothing new. Party activists have battled against the party’s drift toward the right and away from the grassroots since the 1970s.

“The Republicans adopted a populist appeal at the same moment Democrats walked away from populism,” says Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

Did the Republican Party’s cultivation of its grassroots give it the edge over the Democratic Party?

“That is the big question of our time,” Frank says.

Whether or not the Hunt Commission reforms hurt the Democrats electorally, it’s clear that the party’s focus on winning gave it tunnel vision. The Commission discussions were peppered with hopeful declarations that if only the party could win back the enthusiasm of its elected officials by giving them more of a stake, victory would be assured. But there was no discussion of doing the same for the base.

For those seeking reform, the superdelegate issue, like so much else in the Democratic Party, comes down to democracy. “Either we have a populist-based Democratic Party, or we have a party of the elite,” says Cohen. “It can’t be both.”

Reddit tests forcing users to login or use the app to read content
https://reclaimthenet.org/this-community-is-available-in-the-app/

#Beavers cut #flooding and #pollution and boost #wildlife populations | #Environment | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/17/beavers-cut-flooding-and-pollution-and-boost-wildlife-populations

#Devon #England #UK #Nature

Bloomberg Unleashes Warren’s Rage—At Last

For supporters of Elizabeth Warren, the last several months have been tough: frustrating and often painful. The pro-Warren momentum that had been gathering steam through the summer and early fall came to a halt, and her poll numbers fell as she was dogged by attacks on her Medicare for All plan and the controversy over whether Bernie Sanders had or had not told her, in a private meeting, that a woman couldn’t beat Trump. She managed to claw her way to a respectable third place finish in Iowa, but in New Hampshire she couldn’t even crack double digits and placed a distant fourth. New Hampshire voters preferred even the empty suit mediocrities Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar over Warren, and that hurt. Ominously, he media began treating her as an also-ran, frequently erasing her from campaign coverage. In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released earlier this week, she was statistically tied for second place, yet blatantly excluded from questions about head-to-head matches between the Democratic candidates and Trump.

What was maddening to so many of Warren’s supporters is that her core strengths as a candidate were not coming through. Her answers in debates were always intelligent and well-formulated, but her presence seemed subdued. Long stretches of time would go by without Warren being called on, but she didn’t proactively try to insert herself back into the conversation. Her campaign had adopted a not especially compelling “unity” message and she seemed reluctant to criticize or even draw sharp contrasts between herself and the other candidates. The persona that came across was that of a nice but ineffectual, overly idealistic professor lady. Increasingly, pundits and voters were expressing fears that Warren could not beat Trump.

Warren supporters began asking one another: where was the Warren we came to know and love from viral videos of Congressional hearings where she savaged dirtbag CEOs, chiseling bankers and slimy government officials, turning them into quivering bowls of jello?

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If Warren has a superpower, it is her anger, a righteous, coruscating fury that beautifully clarifies the moral stakes of a rigged economy that enables the rich to suck up vast resources of money and power at the expense of everyone else. But of course, coming from a woman, a rage that powerful can frighten people, and it’s likely that the staff in charge of Warren’s debate prep advised her to keep it under wraps.

But a Warren without her rage is like a boxing champion with one hand tied behind her back. All women running for office face a delicate balance of trying to defuse sexism by appearing pleasant and unthreatening on the one hand, while also having to present themselves as tough and powerful enough to lead on the other. Up to this point in her campaign, Warren mostly refrained from attacking other candidates. But it’s interesting to note that the one time the abortive campaign of Kamala Harris showed any life was her masterful takedown of Joe Biden in an early debate. Similarly, Amy Klobuchar got a significant boost from her attacks on Peter Buttigieg in the New Hampshire debate, which buoyed her to a surprise third place finish in that state.

It was clear that the neutered version of Warren wasn’t working for her. She is not running for Miss Effing Congeniality, she is running for President of the United States—and specifically, as the warrior queen who will take down the monstrous Donald Trump. She needed to prove to voters that she can do that. She needed to bring the steel and the fire, and she needed to aggressively insert herself into the conversation instead of politely waiting for the moderators to call on her.

Last night was a high-stakes moment for Warren, an event that had the potential to become the turning point of her campaign. Her back was against the wall and especially in light of the virtual media blackout of Warren of late, she badly needed a breakout moment. The Nevada debate might prove to be her last chance to create one. Luckily, fate provided her with the perfect foil: the racist, misogynist, former Republican billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the living embodiment of the corruption and capitalist excesses that Warren has been railing against for her entire career. It marked the first debate appearance for Bloomberg, a late entry into the race.

Bloomberg, who in so many ways is eerily similar to Trump (the racism! the sexism! the bullying and arrogance! the refusal, so far, to release his tax returns!), was effectively a stand-in for Trump in the debate. And if the debate was an audition for the role of the candidate who has what takes to bring down Trump, Warren was the hands-down winner. She owned that stage like a boss. I can’t remember any other debate where one candidate dominated as much as Warren did. Her confrontations with Bloomberg were brutal, fearless and unsparing.

Here’s a sample:

On Bloomberg’s stop and frisk policy: “No, this isn't about how it turned out. This is about what it was designed to do to begin with. ... You need a different apology here, Mr. Mayor.”

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On the numerous allegations of sexual harassment that have been made against Bloomberg personally and the company he’s in charge of: “So, Mr. Mayor, are you willing to release all of those women from those nondisclosure agreements, so we can hear their side of the story? ... We are not going to beat Donald Trump with a man who has who knows how many nondisclosure agreements and the drip, drip, drip of stories of women saying they have been harassed and discriminated against.”

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Bloomberg ... did not respond well. When Warren spoke, his eyes were full of cold fury and his lips were pursed as if he were sucking on a lemon. When Warren talked about the sexual harassment lawsuits against his company, he literally rolled his eyes.

Two things Warren accomplished in the debate are especially notable. First, she insistently included a racial analysis even in questions that didn’t ask directly about race, such as the discussion about globalization. She also performed a brilliant jujitsu by bringing up the electability question, which has often been used against her, to turn it on Bloomberg instead: “Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women and of supporting racist polls like redlining and stop and frisk.”

Will Warren’s debate performance help her regain momentum and her foothold as a top contender in the race? That is not clear. It might not have much of an impact on the outcome in Saturday’s Nevada caucus, since thousands of people have already participated in early voting.

And for a female candidate, a performance as fierce as Warren’s was has the potential to backfire. Like clockwork, centrist media scolds took her to task for being “mean and angry.” But while it’s likely that such a combative performance would have been poorly received if she were leading in the polls, it plays differently now that she’s an underdog candidate. Even Warren critics like MSNBC’s Chris Matthews declared her the winner of the debate. Matthews said that “Democrats have to find someone who can coalesce the left and center left. Elizabeth Warren can do that.” The debate earned her an outpouring of social media love, and anecdotally a number of voters on my Twitter feed who had previously said they’d been undecided declared that they would be voting for Warren. Perhaps most significantly of all, Warren’s campaign announced that yesterday was their “best debate day of the entire campaign, raising more than $2.8 million.”

But in the end, Warren had no choice but to come out swinging. If she’d given another subdued performance she would have run the risk of being completely disappeared by the media. And also? It was clearly the right thing to do. Elizabeth Warren is a fighter, and fighters fight. At best, it will help her turn the tide of the race and create the kind of momentum that will result in victory. At worst, she performed a major public service by taking down a despicable billionaire with horrendous politics who is trying to subvert democracy by buying his way into the White House. What’s not to like?

Scientists develop open-source software to analyze economics of biofuels, bioproducts

Perennial grasses can be converted into everything from ethanol to bioplastics, but it's unclear which bioproducts hold the greatest potential. BioSTEAM, a new open-source simulation software package in Python gives scientists, engineers, biotechnology companies, and funding agencies a fast, flexible tool to analyze the economics of producing different biofuels and bioproducts -- in a matter of seconds.

Methane emitted by humans vastly underestimated

Researchers measured methane levels in ancient air samples and found that scientists have been vastly underestimating the amount of methane humans are emitting into the atmosphere via fossil fuels. The researchers indicate that reducing fossil fuel use is a key target in curbing climate change.

"Rankin warned that tech giants were now "redefining the word "privacy" in their own marketing." While they may claim to protect it, what they really want is to protect privacy from their competitors, he added. "They add security measures to their software and services so only they can capture, view and sell all of your data and others can't.""

https://www.dw.com/en/smartphone-startups-take-on-google-apple-and-put-privacy-first/a-52369255

Think all BPA-free products are safe? Not so fast, scientists warn

Using 'BPA-free' plastic products could be as harmful to human health -- including a developing brain -- as those products that contain the controversial chemical, suggest scientists.

'Wood' you like to recycle concrete?

Scientists studied a method for recycling unused concrete with wood fibers. They found the conditions that produce new building materials with bending strength even greater than the original concrete. This work may help reduce the CO2 emissions associated with manufacturing new concrete.

Seattle, WA: PSPS Statement on Recent FBI Activity https://itsgoingdown.org/seattle-statement-on-recent-fbi-visit/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Jersey of truth?

Where the Ongoing Mass Protests Against Neoliberalism in Chile Came From

In recent months, common people in Chile have taken to the streets not to pursue an ideological project or concrete cause—but as the result of the fragility and insecurity of everyday life, and the injustice of the political system. We have seen this with the Occupy Wall Street movement, in the context of the Arab Spring and the Indignados Movement in Spain. Although more than two months of social mobilizations forced the right-wing billionaire Sebastian Piñera government to implement policies it has previously opposed such as the reform of the constitution and the increase in public social spending, none of the major political forces were able to channel the movement giving rise to questions about the durability of these mobilizations in the long term. The political debates have increasingly focused on questions of institutional reforms and transparency, which although important for framing future political struggles, tend to mask more urgent economic reforms such as greater taxation of wealth and universal access to social services. Such policy changes are indispensable for the reduction of Chile’s exorbitant inequalities.

The explosion

The social explosion started in Santiago on October 18 following clashes between the armed police and students who were evading raised metro fares. Mobilizations quickly spread throughout the country demanding justice and change of the highly unequal economic model, bringing together a range of qualms that are typically discussed in isolation: low pensions, highly unequal healthcare, underfinanced education, political corruption and frequent cases of economic collusion between producers to raise consumer prices. The mobilizations boasted unprecedented social support: surveys conducted at the end of October demonstrated that close to 85% of the public supported the protests and after two months of mobilizations, support for them still stood at around 77%.

Pinochet’s legacy

Chile’s current economic model was established during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1989) by a group of Chilean economists educated at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman. The country’s economy is widely considered to be the first attempt in the world at the introduction of a thorough program of neoliberal restructuring—many of the reforms established by Ronald Reagan in the United States and by Margaret Thatcher in the UK were first “tested” in Chile during the second half of the 1970s. The reforms included unprecedented liberalization of trade, the establishment of a new labor code which practically prohibited collective bargaining, financial liberalization, privatization of public companies, diminished per capita social spending, regressive tax reform and privatization of pensions. When it came to education and healthcare, reforms led to the creation of dual public and private systems, making access to education and healthcare the responsibility of individuals through their participation in the market.

The reforms carried out during the dictatorship (as well as the 1982 economic crisis) contributed to increased inequalities and a ballooning poverty rate (in 1987 close to 45% of the population lived under the poverty line), a greater concentration of wealth, a fall in real wages and an increase in unemployment.

Continuity and change

During much of the post-dictatorship period Chile was governed by center-left coalitions (between 1990 and 2009 and then 2014 and 2017, with the first right-wing Sebastian Piñera government in the interim), which focused on addressing extreme poverty and Chile’s rampant inequalities, but within the framework of the economic model inherited from the dictatorship.

Members of the coalitions have frequently pointed to the 1980 Constitution—written by Pinochet’s advisers and approved in a fraudulent plebiscite—as a structural limitation on any major reforms to the economic model. The constitution limits the state’s absolute ability to provide social services such as health, education and pensions, virtually prohibits strikes of public sector employees, obliges workers to join private pension funds, gives the president substantial control over Congress and makes it extremely difficult to reform the armed forces and the police, as well as the electoral and educational systems, because of extremely high quorum required for the approval of the reforms.

The governments of center-left coalitions did manage to decrease poverty and income inequalities. However, access to quality social services remains highly unequal and the relative poverty rate is very high. Chile’s tax system also features regressive characteristics while public social expenditure is tiny, translating into low quality public social services. In addition, the job market is highly segmented and a high share of the population works with temporary contracts or is self-employed in low skilled jobs, meaning their access to social services is also limited.

What’s next?

The recent mobilizations practically paralyzed the Chilean economy, which helped force the right-wing government of billionaire Sebastian Piñera to make concessions, such as paving the way toward the replacement of the 1980 Constitution (a plebiscite on whether a new constitution should be drafted is scheduled for April), scrapping plans to lower corporate taxes and increasing cash transfers to the poorest including modest cash subsidies to employees earning the minimum wage and those receiving the basic pension. The government also announced projects to increase sentences and fines for corporate collusion and fraud.

Social mobilizations have shaken the political system and demonstrated that the injustice of the neoliberal economic order is felt across Chilean society. But it is so far uncertain how the solutions to this broader issue will be achieved—and who will implement them. After the social explosion, the political Left has emerged highly divided and unable to channel social demands. According to a recent poll, although the president has record low approval rates (only 11%), the most popular political figures are associated with the political right and support has dropped for young left-wing politicians who have won elections by promising to transform Chile’s economic model.

Protesters have continued flowing to the streets but their dissociation from political parties and unions makes their calls increasingly appear as individual demands which can be satisfied through occasional cash transfers and reforms. Without a broader political movement, however, these reforms may simply consecrate the unequal status quo.

Bloomberg Wants To Take Your Student Loan Payments Directly Out of Your Paycheck

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg launched his campaign for president by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advertisements to boost his poll numbers. Yesterday, he released a policy proposal to address the cost of higher education. 

Unsurprisingly, Bloomberg would not cancel student debt or make all public colleges free (as Bernie Sanders proposes). Instead, he would place all student debtors in an income-driven repayment plan so that payments are taken directly from borrowers’ paychecks. 

This plan is a neoliberal technocrat’s wet dream. It would treat student debtors as isolated individuals who must make payments tailored to their specific situations and according to means-tested formulas. 

Bloomberg’s education payment plan would also eliminate the possibility of student debt strikes. This is an outcome that I am particularly concerned about. 

In 2015 I helped organize the first student debt strike in U.S. history as part of the Debt Collective, an organization for debtors that I co-founded. That strike helped win more than $1 billion in debt relief for people who had attended predatory for-profit colleges. 

What does it mean to go on a student debt strike and why is now the time for millions of student debtors across the United States to join together to refuse to pay their loans?

First, it’s important to understand how deep the crisis has become. Today, there are 45 million people are carrying $1.6 trillion in loans. What’s worse, student debt has a disproportionate impact on people of color and women, precisely those groups for whom education was supposed to provide a path to a better life. It turns out that a college degree alone can’t address racial, gender or economic inequality, particularly when education has been turned into a consumer product instead of what it ought to be: a public good. 

While everyone knows that servicers like Navient make a bundle collecting on student loans, what a lot of people don’t realize is that millions of us are already not making payments. The Department of Education reported that, as of March 2019, 20% of student debts were in default, meaning borrowers have not made a payment in 270 days. This trend shows no sign of slowing down. According to the Center for American Progress, about a million new borrowers go into default every year. As the number of people who are forced to debt finance their college degrees has risen, so has the number of those who can’t—or won’t—pay.

But defaults are only part of the story. The federal government has reported that only 36% of people with student debt are making progress repaying their loans. Millions are not even making payments because we are enrolled in deferral, forbearance or in one of the “income driven repayment” plans that allow many low-income people to pay nothing. 

It is time that we call this massive non-repayment what it is: a debt strike. Indeed, that is exactly what the Debt Collective aims to do. Debtors who are not making payments, whether they are in default, forbearance or $0 income-based repayment, can join the campaign as bona-fide debt strikers. By joining together with others in their situation, student debtors can send a message to the federal government, lenders, collectors and especially to those running for president that they have had enough.

Why is now the time for a national student debt strike? First, collective action by debtors brings people together. With an election in full swing and many people divided over the right way forward, one thing is certain: More of us need to get involved. The fact that millions are struggling with educational debt can unite us across our differences and give us a reason to get involved in the political process. I saw this type of shared struggle firsthand five years ago during the strike that I helped to launch with former for-profit college students. People from all walks of life including Democrats, Republicans and those who don’t identify with either party came together to demand justice from the federal government—and they won! Now is the time for student debtors to rise up with one voice.

What do student debtors want? The Debt Collective has long been demanding a student debt jubilee and free public college. A decade ago, such proposals were considered totally outside the mainstream. Today, thanks in part to the Debt Collective’s work, top presidential candidates have signed on to both policies. First, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) proposed cancelling a portion of student debt. Then, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), along with Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Mich.), introduced bills that would cancel all student debt, both federal as well as private loans, and make public college free. 

Such proposals represent a stunning shift in public policy, and they were made possible by ordinary people rising up and refusing to pay. In fact, the Debt Collective has already identified the mechanism by which federal student loans can be cancelled. One of our founders co-wrote a legal brief on the Higher Education Act of 1965, which gives the Department of Education the authority to decide not to collect federal student debt, without going through Congress. 

We are closer than ever to liberating tens of millions from the burden of student loans and to assuring that future generations have a right to a quality education without going into debt.   

The Debt Collective has helped to normalize the idea that student debt can be cancelled. We also showed that it can be done. Indeed, for thousands of former for-profit college students who have been freed from their debt, joining a debt strike had a profoundly positive impact on their lives. 

I attended a public university. But I have much in common with former for-profit college students who believe education is a right and a public good. Regardless of where we went to school—whether it was a private college, a public university, or a predatory for-profit—the fight for debt cancellation, free education, as well as for public goods more broadly, must include all of us. That’s why, this time, in addition to helping to organize the strike, I’ve joined it. I believe it’s time to follow the example of those who already refused to pay and won. More and more people are recognizing the power of collective action by debtors. This is precisely the kind of collective action that Bloomberg’s higher education plan intends to stop in its tracks. And that is why he must—and will—be stopped. 

DMV’s sell your data to insurance companies, data brokers, private investigators, and bulk marketers—“a serious intrusion on the privacy of the public” that needs to stop, EFF Senior Staff Attorney @Adam_D_Schwartz tells @jocefromthenews. https://wjla.com/news/spotlight-on-america/depending-on-where-you-live-your-dmv-may-be-selling-your-personal-information