Your Congress at Work

The Congressional GOP is running the show in Washington, and clearly feeling its oats.  They aren’t even embarrassed about moving quickly to pollute the environment and remove rules intended to protect Americans from a variety of threats, physical and financial.

As Vox reports,

With everything that Republicans want to do — repeal Obamacare, overhaul the tax code — it might seem odd that one of Congress’ very first acts would be to kill an obscure Obama-era regulation that restricts coal companies from dumping mining waste into streams and waterways.

But that is indeed what’s going on. On Thursday, the Senate voted 54-45 to repeal the so-called “stream protection rule” — using a regulation-killing tool known as the Congressional Review Act. The House took a similar vote yesterday, and if President Trump agrees, the stream protection rule will be dead. Coal companies will now have a freer hand in dumping mining debris in streams.

NPR has more not-good news:

On Thursday the GOP-controlled House voted to overturn an Obama administration rule designed to keep firearms out of the hands of some people deemed mentally ill.

The action was the latest move by congressional Republicans to undo several of President Obama’s regulations on issues such as gun control and the environment through an arcane law called the Congressional Review Act..The National Rifle Association had pushed for the repeal, and Republicans argued it infringed upon Second Amendment rights by denying due process.

Evidently, the GOP’s allegiance to the NRA trumps (pardon the phrase) its pious concern for “right to life” –at least when that right is asserted by those of us who are already born..

Meanwhile, Investment News explains Trump’s assault on fiduciary responsibility and Dodd-Frank.

President Donald J. Trump today will halt a Labor Department regulation that requires advisers on retirement accounts to work in the best interests of their clients. Mr. Trump’s order will give the new administration time to review the change, known as the fiduciary rule.

He will also order a sweeping review of the Dodd-Frank Act rules enacted in response to the 2008 financial crisis, a White House official said, signing an executive action designed to significantly scale back the regulatory system put in place in 2010.

Taken together, the actions are designed to lay down the Trump administration’s approach to financial markets, with an emphasis on removing regulatory burdens and opening up investor options, said the White House official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity.

The orders are the most aggressive steps yet by Mr. Trump to loosen regulations in the financial services industry and come after he has sought to stock his administration with veterans of the industry in key positions.

I’m sure that all those Trump voters who claim that they weren’t voting for his bigotry, his misogyny or his xenophobia, but because they believed his promise to “drain the swamp,” will be so pleased….

At least we can all see clearly now just who the Trump/GOP’s real constituents are.

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What Comes After Darkness

Yesterday, my wonderful daughter-in-law sent me this You Tube speech by a young woman, an American Sikh lawyer, that–as she predicted–blew me away.

It appears to have been taped at a “Moral Monday” gathering, and it is eloquent and obviously heartfelt.

It’s short–under six minutes–and I urge you to watch it all the way to the end.

The message–the “takeaway”–is profound: darkness can be terrifying. It can signal death, the end of something, a descent into chaos and despair. Or it can be, as she points out, the darkness of the womb, the darkness that precedes a birth and a new beginning.

And as she points out, and every woman who has ever given birth knows, when you are giving birth you do two things: you breathe, and you push.

This lovely young woman reminds us that it’s up to all of us to breathe and push–to use this very dark period America is experiencing as a prelude to birthing a renewal of community, of civic participation and courage, of human connection and commitment to leaving a better, brighter world to our children.

Or we can shrug our collective shoulders and cede control to the looters and influence-peddlers who are currently (and shamelessly) treating American government as their piggy-bank and the rest of us their obedient stooges.

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With a Little Help From Their Friends…

I know it’s hard to take our eyes off the mounting disasters in D.C., but let’s take a moment to talk about Indiana. Specifically, let’s talk about Senate Bill 309, sponsored by Senator Brandt Hershman. (It’s always wise to look carefully–and skeptically– at anything Hershman sponsors.)

Senate Bill 309 is about “distributed energy generation.” (If your eyes already glazed over, that was the intent.) What it is really about is the protection of electric monopolies at the expense of consumers.

Let’s say you have rooftop solar, and you currently have “net metering.” Net metering is a term that refers to a billing arrangement between you and the electric utility; when your rooftop panels are generating more energy than you are using, the excess goes back into the grid, and the utility credits you for that excess at the same rate that you pay them when you aren’t generating enough to cover your needs and you buy the rest of what you need from them.

Even if it is an even swap, you still pay the utility an amount sufficient to cover its overhead costs–billing, meter reading, etc. Fair enough.

Most studies of this growing practice have concluded that net metering benefits the grid and other customers, as well as the environment. As Citizens Action Coalition explains,

The multiple benefits of net metering include: avoided costs of purchasing energy and building new power plants, avoided capital investments, increased grid resiliency and security, reduced carbon emissions, and reduced toxic air emissions.

But what are those benefits when weighed against diminished profits for electric monopolies? In Senator Hershman’s calculus, not much.

If Senate Bill 309 passes, you will no longer be able to use the electricity from your rooftop solar panels and sell any excess back to the utility. Instead, you would be forced to sell all the electricity you generate to the utility at a much lower price than the utility charges you, and then buy back what you need at their substantially higher “retail” price. (The utilities will have to pay you at something called the “avoided cost” rate–which is somewhere between 2.5 and 4.5 cents per kilowatt hour.–You’ll have to buy it back at retail rates between 11 and 16 cents per kilowatt hour.)

Nice work if you can get it!

If SB 309 passes, it will price rooftop solar and small-scale wind generation out of the market.

During just the last five years, over a million Americans have installed solar, and the costs of both solar and wind generated energy have dropped dramatically. That’s good for the environment, and good for consumers’ pocketbooks, but it has cut into the profit margins of the big electrical utilities.

Fortunately for them, those big monopolies have good friends like Senator Hershman in the Indiana General Assembly.

Consumers, unfortunately, do not.

Update: for information about who to call, go here.

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While We Were Sleeping…

Tuesday night, Donald Trump announced his nominee for the Supreme Court seat that has been vacant since the death of Antonin Scalia. When I went to my computer yesterday morning, I found the predictable emails claiming that Judge Gorsuch is an unacceptable, far-right threat to the Republic and must be stopped (and oh, send money).

I agree that this nomination should be rejected (although I doubt it will be), but not because the Judge himself is outside the legal mainstream. He isn’t. He is certainly more conservative than I would like, and I disagree strongly with his particular approach to originalism. But accusations that he is an unacceptable ideologue are intellectually dishonest.

The real reason his nomination should be rejected is that placing him on the Supreme Court would reward an unprecedented assault on the rule of law–the refusal of the Senate to even consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland.

They blocked that nomination for entirely specious reasons, simply because they could.

I don’t think most Americans understand the implications of that action–implications that  go well beyond the makeup of the Supreme Court. In fact, the sheer effrontery of that power play requires us to consider the possibility–really, the likelihood– that we are no longer either a democracy or a republic; that during the past several years, while most Americans were comfortably detached from political activism and participation, a far-right faction of the Republican party managed to pull off a bloodless coup.

In plain sight.

Thanks to strategic gerrymandering, voters no longer choose their representatives–the representatives choose their voters. Together with successful vote suppression tactics (aided and abetted by voter apathy and citizen disengagement), the result is that this country is now run by people chosen by barely a quarter of those entitled to vote.

Thanks to manipulation of the filibuster, majority rule is no longer sufficient to pass legislation in the Senate. A minority of that body can block anything.

We are now governed by people who sneer at the rules of a constitutional system intended to constrain precisely the sort of power they now wield.

In the past, America has prided itself on adherence to the rule of law. A fundamental tenet of the rule of law is that no one is above the law–that the rules apply to everyone, governors and governed alike. Senator McConnell’s willingness to place raw power above that principle–and to gloat about it– was evidence that these radical usurpers no longer feel it necessary to give even lip service to that foundational principle.

It was the ultimate “fuck you, America. We have seized power and can do what we want.”

If Gorsuch is confirmed, so is the coup. It has nothing at all to do with his  judicial philosophy or bona fides.

I’m very much afraid that while Americans were sleeping through the warning signs, we lost our country.

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Activism Engine is Live!

I don’t usually clog your inboxes with “extra” posts, but I’m making an exception.

As many of you recall, I posted a few weeks ago about a tool my son was creating to make activism simpler. He is a web developer, and his goal was to help people who wanted to make a difference but were neither “tech savvy” nor previously politically involved.

If you missed those posts, they are here and here.

Just to remind you, on the site you can search for issues of concern at either the state or national level, in one of three ways: you can look for pending legislation, you can see what sorts of direct actions–meetings, rallies, petitions, marches, etc.–are upcoming, and you can find a list of organizations working on those issues. You can then take action on items–you can call your lawmakers, you can send emails, join or contribute to an organization, attend events…the list goes on.

And you can track all of your activity and impact on a myActivism dashboard.

What is really cool is that you can call up a current list of every elected official who represents you– from the President on down to City Councillor– with clickable phone numbers and email links to directly contact them.

And it’s all really intuitive and SIMPLE to use. Visit and see!

For the next couple of weeks, my son will be “beta testing” the site in Indiana–people who have signed up (nearly 300 so far) will use the site and let him know if they encounter bugs or problems. When he’s confident the site is working as intended, it will be rolled out nationally.

If we are going to resist what I am beginning to call the “Trump coup,” we need involvement by every good citizen who is disheartened and/or terrified by what is happening in and to our country. This tool makes that involvement much simpler and easier.

I hope you will use it, and share it widely! And if you are politically or civically engaged, I hope you will sign up to provide information about pending bills and actions. Without that “on the ground” information, the site won’t do what it is designed to do.

Activism Engine is live!

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