DL Open Thread: Thursday, September 8, 2022
Steve Bannon: A Case Study In Conservative Grift:
The outsize role of grift in American conservatism is a story that goes back at least a half century. But Trump glommed on to those tendencies while also exacerbating them in his own ugly ways, and the Bannon saga is a particularly grotesque example of that.
Bannon and a group of associatesallegedly raised $25 million from hundreds of thousands of donors for something called “We Build the Wall.” In 2020, federal prosecutors charged that Bannon had lied when he said he wouldn’t take any compensation, instead raking in $1 million for himself and a co-conspirator through a nonprofit group.
The promise of the wall was itself largely grift. The role of a wall in keeping out migrants is negligible: Many migrants that Trump targeted had the legal right to apply for asylum and get a hearing in the United States,which wouldn’t be undone by any wall. Trump slashed migrant flows by restricting that legal right, even as his wall mostly wasn’t built. That latter failure was largely irrelevant.
The bigger story here is that Trumpism itself presents numerous ripe opportunities for grifting. The Trumpist grift is outlasting the Trump presidency: The Jan. 6 House select committee has shown that Trump and his allies used the lie of a stolen election to raise as much as $250 million from right-leaning voters.
‘Queen Elizabeth II Under Medical Supervision As Health Concerns Grow’. From whom?
Virginians Transition From Mining Jobs To Green Jobs. Sure, I’m drawn to apocalyptic stories, but there is some cause for optimism:
In the past decade or so, unemployment and poverty have forced many to leave south-west Virginia as the coal industry’s decline ricocheted across central Appalachia. It’s torn many families apart and any talk of renewable energy was considered anti-coal, but attitudes are starting to change.
The region’s long-awaited energy and economic transition will be substantially boosted by America’s first climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
It’s far from a panacea, but Joe Biden’s legislation provides $369bn for the transition to electric vehicles and renewable energy – a historic investment that scientists estimate will reduce greenhouse gases by 40% below 2005 levels by 2030 and create an estimated 1.5m new jobs.
The IRA provides ring-fenced money for training, innovation and manufacturing, as well as an array of tax breaks and other financial incentives to help consumers and businesses transition away from fossil fuels. And Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat senator from West Virginia played a pivotal role in watering down – and then reviving – the legislation, directing billions of dollars to the economic revival of depressed coal towns.
Electricity Industry Peddled Climate Denialism Too:
Electric utilities might be some of the most powerful and least understood companies in America. They count almost every American as a customer, and they bring in more revenue combined each year than Apple does. Yet utilities are so complicated—and, truth be told, so straight-up boring—that they escape public scrutiny. There are investor-owned utilities, publicly owned utilities, and utilities that are somewhere in between. Some utilities are regulated monopolies, generating their own electricity and selling it to captive customers, while others work as middlemen in a deregulated electricity market.
But all stripes of utilities fought climate policy aggressively and enduringly, the study finds.
Electricity companies saw themselves as part of a coalition that included their biggest suppliers—namely coal and natural-gas firms—and their biggest customers—steel companies and heavy manufacturers. Freight railroads, which move coal around the country, joined the coalition as well. Because climate policy posed an existential danger to coal and other fossil fuels, utilities saw it as a threat to their own business. (But of course electricity can be generated in cleaner ways too.)
This is the first peer-reviewed publication to survey the industry’s messaging specifically, Dave Anderson, an author of the Energy and Policy Institute report, told me. “This is a very important study,” says Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard science historian who has researched on the fossil-fuel industry’s climate denial, and was not involved in the study. “It reminds us that climate disinformation has not been the domain of just one, or even a handful, of fossil-fuel companies, but has been perpetuated by a network of cronyistic industries that support and depend on fossil fuels,” she told me.
Wilmington And Eminent Domain. Betcha that Nnamdi isn’t happy to see this story surfacing 5 days before the primary.
What do you want to talk about?
The ongoing conservative self-grift, self-owning, continuous sheering of the flock has to fall under its own absurd weight at some point. Doesn’t it?
I mean how many times can Lindsey Graham go on TV and say “We’re going to impeach Biden because Hunter Biden got a billion $ from China and Iran! Send me money.”
Having typed that last part, I rescind the first part. There is no bottom to the ongoing conservative self-grift, self-owning, continuous sheering of the flock.
Bannon is charged with two counts of money laundering, three counts of conspiracy, and one count of scheming to defraud – Reuters News
Let the self grift continue unabated. Cautionary tales serve a valuable role in life for those who use them to guide themselves in other directions.
Bannon gets a perp walk and for a moment all is right with the world.
I hope they don’t have the Jeffrey Epstein prison guards on duty.
Meaning, they’ve already knotted the sheets for him?