Congress is in recess and the firehose of public positioning we’ve experienced over the last several weeks will slow to a trickle during these next few days. But important work is still being done on the reconciliation package … or, so we hope.
Kate Riga will have an evening briefing, giving you the latest at the end of each day — at least until senators return to DC. Check out the first installment here.
TPM has been covering the way in which the pandemic and the public health measures necessary to tamp it down have resulted in periodic eruptions of anger, often egged on by opportunistic, MAGA-aligned politicians. It’s become a theme for us: the specter of violence in politics that’s simmered for the last few years, predating the pandemic but inflamed by it.
But of course, the current level of public outrage is not limited to the political sphere of life. Anecdotal reporting — and, increasingly, data — suggest there might be an economic corollary to this trend as well.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Are Workers Getting Fed Up With COVID-Era Aggression?”While Congress is in recess this week, we’ll be watching negotiations on the infrastructure bill and presenting them to you in an evening briefing. Check in here to find out how the sausage-making is shaping up.
Continue reading “The Sausage Making: Progressives Jockey To Keep Their Beloved Programs Off The Chopping Block”Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) on Monday said that he regrets asking former special counsel Robert Mueller to testify before the House Judiciary Committee in 2019 following Mueller’s final report on the Russia probe.
Continue reading “Details On Why Schiff Regrets Asking Mueller To Testify On Russia Probe”House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is girding her caucus for decisions few of them want to make: cuts to the reconciliation package to pare it down from $3.5 trillion to whatever Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) will accept.
“I’m very disappointed that we are not going with the original $3.5 trillion, which was very transformative,” she said as she opened her Tuesday press conference.
It’s an admission of the reality galling the vast majority of the caucus across both chambers: Manchin and presumably Sinema, though she’s never shared her red lines publicly, will force the package’s price tag down, likely into the neighborhood of $2 trillion.
“We’re still talking about a couple trillion dollars — but it’s much less,” Pelosi said. “Mostly we would be cutting back on years and something like that.”
She seemed to be embracing the idea of shortening the duration of programs within the reconciliation package rather than chopping them out wholesale to bring down the overall price tag, a notion that’s been gaining steam in the Senate.
It’s a seemingly different tack than she took Sunday in a letter to the caucus, when she shared the feedback she’d been getting from members.
“Overwhelmingly, the guidance I am receiving from Members is to do fewer things well so that we can still have a transformative impact on families in the workplace and responsibly address the climate crisis: a Build Back Better agenda for jobs and the planet For The Children!” she wrote.
Democrats are still in the early days of negotiating cuts, as the specific topline Manchin would accept only became widely known among the caucus two weeks ago. It’s a period of public and private jockeying, as Democrats try to keep their favored programs well-funded.
A group of New York City-area Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), published a letter Tuesday they’d written to congressional leadership, asking that their priorities be saved from the chopping block.
“As you work to finalize the package, we urge you to maintain the level of funding for public and affordable housing, immigration reform and accessible transportation in low-income communities,” they wrote.
After a quick vote Tuesday to pass the Senate’s debt limit extension, the House is out again until next week when the Senate returns. With the debt ceiling deadline kicked down the road, Democrats will have about a month and a half to craft a package that satisfies everyone enough to pass. That’ll mean nose-holding and likely factional fights, as the majority of the caucus plays tug-of-war with Manchin and Sinema over what stays in the bill, and what’s doomed to languish as a draft for the foreseeable future.
“The fact is that if there are fewer dollars to spend, there are choices to be made,” Pelosi said.
Last week in a risible fit of pearl-clutching Senate Republicans expressed that they were aghast that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took a swipe at them just as they were extending the hand of bipartisan fellowship to bring the nation together. Washington’s worthies seemed to agree. It was that worst of offenses. It was uncalled for. Welcome to the DC black hole, where titanic gravity bends people’s minds, even the good people.
As Matt Cooper points out here, the real outrage – echoed by all the press worthies – is that Schumer told the truth: Senate Republicans again took the nation’s “full faith and credit” hostage in a reckless and dishonest effort to sow chaos at the expense of the safety of the Republic. For once they were outmaneuvered and had to beat a retreat. They blinked. Indeed, their caucus is so addicted to anti-constitutional hi-jinx and legislative junkie behavior that it required a herculean effort to execute the cave – Republicans struggling to break their own filibuster to head off reform of the filibuster. Good times, as they say. Schumer said McConnell blinked, that Republicans should be ashamed of themselves and that it’s a good thing Democrats held tough to force them to cave. This is all accurate.
Continue reading “The Trash Talk of the Righteous”House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who also serves on the House Jan. 6 Select Committee, made it clear on Tuesday that ex-White House senior adviser Steve Bannon is facing a whole new ball game as he attempts to defy the select committee’s subpoenas.
Continue reading “Schiff Warns Bannon That He’s In A ‘Completely Different Situation Now’ Without Trump In Charge”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared at The Conversation.
In his 2021 letter to CEOs, Larry Fink, the CEO and chairman of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment manager, wrote: “No issue ranks higher than climate change on our clients’ lists of priorities.”
His comment reflected a growing unease with how the climate crisis is already disrupting businesses.
Companies’ concerns about climate change have typically been focused on their operational, financial and reputational risks, the latter associated with the growing importance of the issue among young people. Now, climate change is calling into question the traditional paradigm of corporate sustainability and how companies address their impacts on society and the planet overall.
As a professor working in strategic design, innovation, business models and sustainability, I’ve been tracking how climate change is transforming the meaning of “sustainability” in business, and I’m starting to see early signs of change.
Over the past few decades, many companies came to embrace sustainability. It became the corporate norm to seek ways to reduce a company’s negative impacts on society and the planet and operate more responsibly.
Sustainability reporting is probably the clearest evidence of this trend. In 2020, 96% of the world’s largest companies by revenue, known as the G250, released details about their sustainability efforts. But that rise in sustainability reporting was not accompanied by actual improvement in key environmental and social issues. Global greenhouse gas emissions continued to grow, as did the pay gap between CEOs and employees, for example.
As I suggest in my new book, “Rethinking Corporate Sustainability in the Era of Climate Crisis – A Strategic Design Approach,” this gap between companies’ growing attention to sustainability and the minimal change produced is driven by their approach, which I call “sustainability-as-usual.”
Sustainability-as-usual is the slow and voluntary adoption of sustainability in business, where companies commit to changes they feel comfortable making. It’s not necessarily the same as what science shows is needed to slow climate change, or what the United Nations recommends for an equitable society. Businesses’ response to both will be drawing global attention in November when world leaders gather for the annual U.N. climate conference.
Companies have taken this incremental approach because while they have paid more attention to social and environmental issues, their first priority has remained maximizing profit for their shareholders.
Take, for example, companies’ focus on improving the recyclability of single-use products instead of considering new business models that could have greater positive impact, such as shifting to reusable packaging or eliminating it altogether.
One notable example is Heinz. The ketchup maker announced a cap for its ketchup bottle that is 100% recyclable. It was the outcome of $1.2 million invested and 185,000 hours of work over eight years, according to the company.
While companies appear to grasp the magnitude of the climate crisis, they have been trying to address it mainly in a sustainability-as-usual fashion – one ketchup bottle cap at a time.
Consider emissions reductions. Companies have been slow to commit to reducing their emissions to zero no later than mid-century, a target that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change considers necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius – roughly 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit – and avoid the worst effects of climate change. Only about one-fifth of the major companies have 2030 goals that are in line with reaching net-zero goals by 2050 at the latest.
The companies that do set net-zero targets often do so in ways that lack the necessary robustness and allow them to continue emitting greenhouse gases, as recent reports point out. One concern, for example, is their dependence on carbon offsets, which allow them to pay for potential carbon reductions elsewhere without making any real changes in their own value chain.
Companies have tried to rebrand their efforts in ways that sound more sophisticated, moving from terms like “corporate social responsibility (CSR)” to “environmental, social and governance (ESG),” “purposeful companies” and “carbon-neutral products.”
But when companies don’t put actions with their words, they increasingly meet resistance from activists, investors and governmental and regulatory bodies. One example is the growing scrutiny of companies that promote themselves as climate leaders but at the same time donate money to politicians opposing climate policies. Public relations and advertising employees called out their own industry in a report exposing 90 agencies working with fossil fuel companies.
Business is at a strategic inflection point, which Andy Grove, the former CEO of computer chip-maker Intel, described as “a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change.”
This transformation could evolve in different ways, but as I suggest in my book, fighting climate change effectively requires a new mindset that shifts the relationships between profit maximization and sustainability to prioritize sustainability over profit.
There are early signs of evolution, both within companies and from the forces that shape the environment in which companies operate.
One example is how other industries are reassessing their relationship with fossil fuel companies. Some newspapers, including The Guardian, have banned advertising from fossil fuel companies. A growing number of insurance companies and banks have stopped financing coal projects. The French bank Crédit Mutuel said it saw the impact of climate change on its customers and was willing to lose money “in the short term” to respond to the risk.
Another example is changes in companies’ relationships with suppliers – for example, the business software company Salesforce added a sustainability clause to its contracts requiring suppliers to set carbon reduction goals.
And investors are moving for the first time from just urging companies to take bolder action on climate change to using sticks. Fidelity announced that it would vote against corporate directors whose companies don’t disclose their emissions or have a policy on climate change.
Add to these bright spots changes in regulation and policy worldwide that aim to put in place key sustainability principles and push to cut emissions at a faster pace, plus the changing expectations of young job seekers when it comes to environmental and social issues, such as inclusion and diversity, and you can start to see how the end of sustainability-as-usual may be closer than many people think. Due to climate change, the question is more “when” than “if” it will happen.
Raz Godelnik is an assistant professor of Strategic Design & Management at The New School.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
This article was originally published in ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
An elections administrator in North Texas submitted her resignation Friday, following a monthslong effort by residents and officials loyal to former President Donald Trump to force her out of office.
Continue reading “Trump Won The County In A Landslide. His Supporters Still Hounded The Elections Administrator Until She Resigned.”The FBI raided the home of 37-year-old Aaron Whallon-Wolkind, the vice president of the far-right group Proud Boys’ chapter in Philadelphia, last week, according to a new court filing in the criminal case of Philadelphia Proud Boys president Zach Rehl.
Continue reading “Feds Raid Philly Proud Boys Leader’s Home In Capitol Attack Probe”
